Adam Frattasio - Steroid Man: Confessions of a Powerlifter from the Golden Age of Enhancement

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE

BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE

e-ISBN: 978-1-4766-2647-5

2016 Adam Frattasio. All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Front cover: The author posing in the summer of 1984; needle and pills: iStock

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640
www.mcfarlandpub.com

To my dad,
Vincent Paul Frattasio,
the only Renaissance man I ever knew

I started writing this book nearly three decades ago, a couple of years after I had stopped using and selling steroids. I dont recall exactly why I wroteI didnt necessarily envision having a book publishedbut I suppose I placed some value in documenting my experiences I thought were unique, at least with respect to the general public, who were just waking up to the use of performance enhancers in sports, especially after the Ben Johnson Olympics scandal in 1988.

Because of my personal experience within the steroid universe, I often felt like the cat that ate the canary. I had sloshed those steroids around, smelled them and tasted them, swallowed, injected and snorted them. I had them flowing through my veins and in my head morning, noon and night. I wanted to document my experience for posterity, right along with the scrapbooks I keep with my high school sports clippings.

Even while I was neck deep, I knew steroids had taken control of a significant part of my life. So often we dont notice or realize the impact of our choices when we are intimately involved with them, regardless of whether were breezing along or struggling through life. For some reason, I was pretty well aware at the time that what I was doing would eventually account, at least in part, for whatever I was to become, so I monitored and kept track, stayed aware and took note.

There is a sizeable gap, about 30 years, between the time I began writing this story and when I finished. Early on I typed out particular stories and accountsI didnt want them to fade into memory. I did my documenting and in time packed it all away, as life kept barging in and taking precedencea wife, children, the mortgage and a couple of different professions.

But a few things kept prodding me, nudging me to keep dragging those steroid stories back up to the top of my crowded list of things to dosomewhere between coaching girls softball and refinancing my house. One was an advertisement that caught my eye while attending a friends bodybuilding contest in Massachusetts in the late 1980s. A researcher, Dr. Harrison Pope, was looking for people who had taken steroids. He was paying $50 for a brief interview. Fifty bucks was about four fill-ups of gasoline for me back then, so I was all in.

I interviewed with a colleague of Popes, Scott Lucas, who had a PhD in pharmacology and toxicology. He was astounded that I could recite each name-brand steroid and its generic counterpart, how many milligrams I used, and the dates when I started and ended each cycle over a four-year period. I did it right off the top of my head with no notes. I came into the interview with three or four different steroid users, but I was the one who became Popes prized research subject. I was also featured in Lucass own 1994 book, Steroids.

Because of my involvement with the good doctor, my name got around to anybody and everybody who needed a trustworthy person who would talk, on the record, about steroids use. Whether it was an article for Time or the Boston Herald, a BBC or Japanese television production, an industrial film, 2020, Nightline, Oprah, or even a traveling interactive science museum exhibit, for a decade I fielded questions, and accepted and denied requests to serve as the steroid man in the streetyour average, All-American steroid user. All this attention kept my old steroid stories clear, fresh, and relevant.

There was also a ground-breaking book written by a guy who decided to write about his experiences using steroids. A female bodybuilder I was training bought me Samuel Wilson Fussells novel, Muscle: Confessions of an Unlikely Bodybuilder. Of course I enjoyed it. Hell, it was 1991nobody was writing steroid exposs back then, and it felt as though he was talking to me. The big difference, the hook Fussell used, was that he was an admitted nerd, a non-athlete, a bookworm, a graduate of the University of Oxford who, at the ripe age of 26, just decided to start lifting weights and take steroids. This pencil-neck geek actually ended up competing in bodybuilding contests, and looked pretty darn good.

Fussells book read exactly like it should haveas if he had left the Oxford World of braniacs and plopped down on Planet Steroid for four years (the same amount of time I used them) and then wrote about the experience. As noted, I enjoyed the story, but overall it had the taste of spaghetti sauce made in a Chinese restaurant. I could nod along with everything Fussell wrote about; I didnt need any translations or definitions, but I also knew about much more than he was presenting. I knew what was happening behind the scenes. I hadnt just teleported myself onto Planet Steroid; I had been a resident for a little while before having my steroid bar mitzvah.

Despite making an appearance on at least one national television show, Fussell didnt have much of an impact on the steroid early warning system. That was left for Jose Canseco and his high-profile 2006 book, Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant Roids, Smash Hits, and How Baseball Got Big. A famous guy, the national pastime, he named namesit was a nuclear detonation on home plate. Of course steroid outsiders didnt have the knowledgeand the guardians of the game didnt have the willingnessto realize that the book was firmly grounded in reality. And so it didnt matter who disparaged Canseco or conspired to discredit what he wrotethe truth prevailed.

There is a whole lot of truth about steroids out there now. Canseco gave many people the impetus to write books. And here I am, with my own story. I am not interested in reinventing the wheel. My narrative is sort of a hybrid of Fussells and Cansecos, for those interested in the use of anabolic steroids from the point of view of your average jock who was not a novice in the world of weights. I like to think my experiene was probably more similar to that of the average user.

I am not interested in outing anybody. Those who read my story hoping for bombshells are going to be disappointed. The well-known folks mentioned by name in this book have already been laid bare in public. Their involvement in the steroid game has already been documented. Beyond the headliners, I have changed the names of most of my friends, acquaintances, and other people I interacted with during my journey through the steroid mine field. These people have families and jobs and maybe different paths and personas in life that have taken them far from where they were 30 years ago. I havent the right to lay them bare.