Warren Murphy: American Obsession

With profound relief, Sternovsky watched the blood drain from the motionless body. He didn't open the cage door until he was certain that the beast was dead and his own hands had stopped shaking. Dragging the corpse from the cage, he quickly shaved and sawed open the skull, then used the power tool to make a Y-shaped incision below the powder-blackened entry wound. Working quickly, he took minute samples of various organs and tissues for later analysis.

The lab seemed eerily quiet as he emptied the refrigerator, transferring small racks of glass vials of wolverine hormones-extracted for certain targeted neuropeptides-and the chimp-tissue sampler into a six-pack cooler marked Biological Specimens. After packing the cooler with dry ice, he sealed the lid with duct tape and affixed the necessary prestamped export documentation from the U.S. Department of the Interior.

After stuffing his backpack with a six-inch-thick stack of floppy disks that held all his experimental data and research notes, he began erasing his laboratory computer's hard drive. While the autodestruct program was running, he stripped down to his jockey shorts in front of the sink and, using a gallon of tomato juice, scrubbed himself raw. Washing with tomato juice supposedly countered the stench of musk spray. Because he couldn't tell if it had worked or not, he doused himself liberally with Old Spice before putting on baggy tan corduroy pants, a rumpled brown cord sports jacket, a blue polyester dress shirt and a skinny red knit tie. Before Sternovsky left the trailer, to make extrasure that no one at Purblind could recover his research data, he reloaded the bangstick and blasted the drive tower into a thousand pieces.

His Toyota was the only car in Parking Lot ZZ.

Rust spots on hood, roof and fenders bled through the silver blue paint of the 1978 Celica two-door, which had replaced the three-year-old Saturn he'd sold in order to fund his primate study. Opening the driver's door, he leaned in and put the cooler and backpack on the rear bench seat, beside a small canvas suitcase. As he carefully folded himself into the blue-faux-furcovered bucket seat, the top of his skull brushed the headliner, disarranging his thready comb-over. The Celica was a tight fit for him--even with the front seat as far back as it would go, his knees bracketed the steering wheel. The windshield resembled the view slit of a World War II artillery bunker.

After an uncomfortable forty-minute drive, Sternovsky arrived at the Philadelphia airport. He parked the Toyota by the curb, in the passenger-unloading tow-away zone. As he entered the terminal, he dropped the car keys into a trash can. Once inside, Sternovsky followed the overhead signs to the Pan Asian Airlines ticket counter. There was no one ahead of him in the roped-off queue.

On the other side of the service counter a button-cute Oriental female in a blue blazer chirped a sneeze into a Kleenex before asking for his travel documents. She displayed efficient two-handed work at the computer keyboard, cheerily confirming his seat assignment and checking through his small suitcase. Sternovsky, the smell-leper, was not used to such cordial treatment from strangers. It made him feel a bit giddy.

The ticket clerk handed him his passport, export papers and boarding pass. Despite her heavy head cold, she smiled brightly and said, "Enjoy your visit to Taiwan."

Chapter 1

Naked but for a gargantuan jockstrap, Bradley "the Fighting Vehicle" Boorntower stood in front of his spanking-new locker. Its hooks and shelves held the tools of his trade: shoulder pads, knee pads, elbow pads, a selection of size-18 cleated athletic shoes, a pumpkin orange helmet and matching uniform shirt with the number 96, front and back, and ninja black uniform pants.

The garish team colors, also evident in the locker room's paint and carpet, were no mere accident of bad taste. The owners of the L.A. Riots, professional football's most recent expansion franchise, had shelled out big bucks in order to develop an organizational image that was marketable right out of the box. The Halloween theme was further underscored by the team's official motto, Trick Or Treat.

With two hours until kickoff, Boomtower's fellow Riots were obsessively focused on "Trick." As harried trainers taped up their ankles, wrists and hands, they bellowed dire threats against the opposing players. This while Boomtower drifted, alone and oarless, in "Treat." On the floor at his feet lay a pile of crumpled plastic wrappers and a litter of green-and-white waxed-paper boxes. The sides of the boxes read Manteca, a Spanish word that sounded much classier, and more dietetically correct, than the English equivalent. Boomtower's eyes slitted with pleasure as he sucked at the nub end of what had once been a one-pound block of white lard.

Between muttered mantras and reciprocal helmet-to-helmet head-bangs, the other Riots stole furtive looks at Number 96. Over the course of a week, Bradley Boomtower had undergone a most startling physical transformation. The six-foot-five-inch, 370-pound nose tackle, whose midsection-circling, jiggling mass of blubber had been a personal trademark since his college days, had gained more than a hundred pounds. Strange, yes.

Unheard-of, yes.

But stranger still was the fact that in just seven days his more than thirty percent body fat had all but disappeared. With his skin suddenly shrink-wrapped over layers of bulging muscles, Boomtower had acquired the "cut" look of a world-champion bodybuilder. Only he was bigger. Hugely bigger.

Beyond Mr. Universe. Beyond Animal.

During the week's final practice, there had been no stopping his pass rush. It didn't matter if he was triple- or even quadruple-teamed. Like a man playing with small boys, he mowed down the offensive line. He did it so many times that the head coach had to yank him from the scrimmage for fear someone might be seriously hurt. Since then, for the very same reason, the L.A. Riots had given their nose tackle an extrawide berth.

As gametime approached, only Boomtower's locker neighbor, a high-draft-pick, rookie running back, had the nerve-or lack of good sense-to directly address the changed man. Unable to restrain his curiosity about all the green-and-white boxes, Regional Parks said, "Hey, F.V., what's that nastylooking stuff you're eating?"

By way of answer, Boomtower toed one of the empty cartons toward the running back. Parks picked it up. When he read the label, his jaw dropped.

"Man, have you lost your mind?" the star running back exclaimed. "This crap is nothing but sweepings. It's the hog fat that falls on the butcher-shop floor."

"What's your point?" Boomtower said as he inside-outed the plastic wrapper so he could lick it clean.

"Jeez, everybody knows it's artery-clogging poison. It's heart-attack city."

"Nah, it's energy food."

Number 96 mopped his grease-ringed mouth with an orange-and-black towel, then pulled his L.A. Riots jersey over his head. Since high school, his XXXL uniform shirt had always been stretched as tight as a sausage casing. It still was, only now it conformed to a different shape. Instead of hanging like a halfinflated truck tire around his waist, the main mass of his torso had taken a two-and-a-half-foot jump to his chest and shoulders. Under the tortured Lycra-blend orange fabric, the topography of monstrous lats, delts, abs and pecs was clearly visible.

With the ice broken by the rookie, other players in various stages of battle dress began to gather around the nose tackle's locker, admiration and awe on their faces. At five hundred pounds-stripped weight-Bradley Boomtower was easily the heaviest man ever to play professional football. And in football, heavy was good, if not God. The more you weighed, the harder you were to move or deflect-by the fourth quarter of a game, a ten percent weight advantage could reduce opponents to quivering lumps of jelly.