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Steroids made me a star

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I’m not a sports fan, but I do read.

Juiced, baseball star Jose Canseco’s confessional about his years in the majors riddled by steroid use, hits a personal nerve.

There’s broad enough proof that steroids improve athletic performance. Olympic athletes have pled guilty to “stickin’ the gas in their ass,” and pro wrestlers have come clean about habitually “injecting their little bit of marketability.”

Here is my confession: steroids helped me break into the world of TV and film.

It began in my previous incarnation as a bodybuilder. I was regularly juicing then, using a mad cocktail of Winstrol, Dianabol, Primobolan, Lasix and Clenbuterol to prepare for my first-ever competition. I won my weight class. I’d never had such a feeling of elation. I took my trophy home and vowed to get the feeling again.

For a couple more years, I developed my physique with the help of mass-enhancing drugs, and then began to clean up. After two years off the juice I was still feeling good. I never thought I could be funny as a bulky chunk of man, so I began to buy clothes to conceal my muscle when I started to do stand-up comedy at Yuk Yuk’s amateur night and various open-mic venues.

I was ashamed of my drug-enhanced past and wanted to keep it a secret. I preferred to do Michael Jackson jokes, the stuff comics make a career out of, rather than talk about my real life.

The audience wants people it can identify with, so I gave myself that sloppy-beer-drinker image. I was auditioning for commercials and finally landed one for Coors. I was told that this was my entree into showbiz, that I wouldn’t have to work for years due to American residuals. My agent was a lying charlatan, the commercial was dropped, and she was fired.

It was then that I knew that even if I failed, it would have to be on my own terms. I began to show the body (not running around nude, but wearing tight T-shirts), and with a new agent I got seen for a film called Detroit Rock City. I played Dicky the bartender. I was shirtless… and funny.

After that, I got a one-liner in The Ladies Man, a Saturday Night Live production. (I was fired after a day for asking about Chris Farley, causing everyone, including Tiffani-Amber Thiessen from Saved By The Bell, to break into tears. They said I need not come back due to continuity.) Since then, I’ve landed small topless or nude roles in pilots and on established series for ABC, Showtime and CTV.

The juiced body was getting me parts.

But all those years of chemicals left me with mood swings, and this affected my ability to audition. I’d call casting directors “talentless failed actors,” and the work started to dry up.

But mood swings made me right at home in the carnival of stand-up comedy. Stand-up is to showbiz what San Francisco is to the U.S. – a home to the transient and the confused, with a beautiful view of the rest of the world. Stand-up gave me a channel for my ‘roid rage.

No matter what I was angry about, I could channel it into something funny. It’s been said that the best comedy is the equivalent of therapy. This therapeutic angle, coupled with anger, makes for great laughs. I’d avoided relationships for years (I had no intimacy except for the occasional hooker), yet that seemed to have paid off because I was learning a craft.

But there were other side effects. One of the worst was that I became a stripper/escort to support my habit. This was turned into a positive when I used the whole experience to create my one-man show, The Underbelly Diaries.

As in baseball, the question is whether I could have performed as well without steroids. What would my booking rate be? Would I be more commercially viable without the juice?

I believe that without my steroid- riddled physique I would have been a funny fat guy and a star in L.A. by now. However, it’s the insecurities in my life that have enabled me to examine why I am who I am. Maybe being the next funny guy next door in a sitcom wasn’t my calling.

In his book, Canseco talks about the bonding that comes from shooting juice with fellow baseballer Mark McGwire in a bathroom stall, the joy of getting acne 15 years after puberty, and visiting Madonna’s apartment and telling her why he slept with hundreds of women, much to her amusement.

My past steroids use has made it possible for me to have a life on the road doing what I love.

news@nowtoronto.com

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