The article -
Wild thing: former bodybuilding champ and pro-football trainer Benny Podda lives in a cave, runs through walls, and hangs massive weights from his testicles. But in his eyes, you might be the crazy one
Benny Podda lives as a modem-day medicine man in the mountains of the San Bernardino National Forest in Southern California. He sleeps in a spirit-filled cave, using a rock as his pillow. He flagellates his body with a large metal stick that has 180 spokes. He can spurt blood from his nose at will. He swings 220 pounds of weights from his testicles to see how much pain he can endure. And yet, unhinged though he may seem, Benny Podda is saner than you are.
Benny doesn't work nine-to-five. He isn't chained to a cell phone or Palm Pilot. He doesn't have to do anything or be anywhere at any time. But you do.
Before he went off the grid, Benny was a bodybuilding champ and a personal trainer to everyone from Joe Montana to Chuck Norris, and today is a martial-arts bad ass who. at 47, could still knock Mike Tyson into next week.
But in his restless, roller-coaster life, Benny has always felt an intense aversion to conventional notions of success. "Whenever I start making money and getting popular and shit;' he says, "right away 1 have to luck it up and disappear." As self destructive as that seems, Benny actually has a master plan: to save mankind. After years of secluding himself in a cave in the hills among the Cahuilla Nation Indians, Benny has emerged to reveal how he intends to do it.
HIDE AND SEEK
From Los Angeles, getting to Benny and his cave takes the better part of a day. A hundred miles from the coast, you leave the freeway behind and drive up 6,000 feet into the mountains along a desolate road. As you climb, the temperature drops 35 degrees and dark clouds envelop you. You drive up a gravel road called Paradise, and there is Benny standing in front of a small home. "Are you ready to leave the United States?" he asks. "Welcome to the Cahuilla Nation."
The house is a friend's, but this is where medicine man Benny meets patients and visitors. In the back, gnarled manzanita trees guard an herb garden, where he grows his potent potions and medicines. He claims that the brews he concocts from this small patch of earth can heal you, kill you, or reveal the secrets of every religion.
A few yards beyond this garden of truth is the Pacific Crest Trail. The rattlesnake-infested path runs from Mexico to Canada and is well worn by illegals who use it to cross into the States. "I've seen dead bodies out on this trail;' Benny says matter of factly.
To gain admission to Benny's cave, he insists that you first go to a remote waterfall to be purified. If the cave "rejects" you, he warns, "your soul will be rent from your body in a spiritual tear." So you suffer the pain and indignities of purification as the frigid water pours down on you with the shocking force of a spiritual flogging.
The cave's climate is reminiscent of Benny's native Pittsburgh: hotter than hell in the summer, freezing cold in the winter. It has been inhabited for thousands of years, Benny says, and it leads to an outdoor amphitheater. "The opening is a vaginal orifice," he offers. "In initiation ceremonies, they [Native Americans] would pass through it one by one to be 'reborn' as warriors."
Benny prepares dinner, and you're relieved to learn that you're not the entree. "This lamb was 'alive last week," he says, the idea of recent slaughter enlivening him.
Benny's physical training is based on the philosophy of Genghis Khan. "He taught his troops the importance of exterior and interior training," he says. "His warriors learned how to turn themselves inside out to project their inner power like lightning" Perhaps preparing himself to carry the weight of the world--which in his mind he does--Benny grabs his flagellating rod and whips himself as hard as he can a dozen times, striking the acupuncture meridians of the body. The thick muscles of his flesh thud with each strike. "You know that feeling when you're blowing your load?" he asks. "Instead of letting that go out, you reverse that whole thing. It feels like your body is on fucking FIRE! I lift weights with that [energy] coursing through my body and my ticking testosterone a thousand-times normal--'cause I just fucked myself." Then he smiles calmly. "See? That's why I can hang 220 pounds from my fuckin' nuts."
Yeah, you think. fuckin' nuts.
PITTSBURGH HEALER
Benny was born in 1957 in South Fork, Pa., a coal-mining town east of Pittsburgh. His Sicilian immigrant father, Benjamino, worked the mines; his mother, Prudence, a postal worker, came from bootlegging stock. Benny gravitated to similarly dubious pursuits, shooting dice and playing blackjack on street corners. A dominating fullback and linebacker on his high school football team, Benny was a physically gifted adolescent. But his strength exploded when he started training at the McKeesport YMCA, a hangout for hardcore hoods.
Soon Benny began roaming the back streets of Steel-town with a precociously oversized body and an attitude to match. He hired himself out as muscle to wiseguys and masterminded his own bizarre crimes. Once he even got shot while robbing a pharmacy for painkillers, armed not with a gun like a normal crook but with a bow and arrow.
When Benny wasn't causing trouble he spent hours at the Carnegie Library. He was surely the first Pittsburgh street thug to devour Faust, transfixed by German literary figure Goethe's tale of a man willing to do anything for godlike wisdom and power. He added yin to that yang by studying Eastern religious texts, such ms the Bhagavad Gita and Chinese philosophy, and was soon immersed in herbology.
Benny attended the University of Richmond in Virginia on a football scholarship, intending to study biochemistry, but preferred getting drunk. Expelled for being "insane," he says, he headed back home to become a bodybuilder. He trained at Manion's Gym, a haven for Pittsburgh roughnecks as well as stars of the hometown Steelers. There, Benny stood out from the other gym rats. Once, to psych himself up for a lift, he ran straight through a wall--emerging in the next room in a cloud of plaster and debris. Another time, Steeler lineman Steve Courson was using a pay phone when Benny charged and knocked him and the wall-mounted phone across the room--with his head.
Those were his warm-ups. Fueled by the visualization techniques of Eastern philosophies and herbal concoctions he made and drank from root-filled mayonnaise jars, Benny trained like a human wrecking ball. The gym's owner, Jim Manion, recalls Benny doing reps one day with his head wrapped in a blood-drenched towel as other lifters scattered nearby. "The cable had snapped on a long cable-row machine and the handle had hit him on the head" recalls Manion. "He had to keep replacing the towels when they got soaked with blood. I made a guy take him to the hospital, and it took 12 stitches to close the open wound."
Benny won the National Physique Committee (NPC) USA Bodybuilding's light-heavyweight championship in 1983 and placed in a string of other contests. But unlike most pro posers, Benny's heart was more into training than flexing. "I hated competition," he says. "I loved the discipline of training for it, and I loved partying after it, but I never dug the sport or considered myself a bodybuilder." But that never prevented him from going balls out at each meet.
Benny amazed audiences with the intensity and ferocity of his posing style. More tame performances might find him flexing wildly in a wolfman's mask, or shooting blood from his nose on command, a trick he learned when he was younger from playing with his "fucked up" sinuses.
But his masterpiece crone at the end of a contest in Newark, N.J. He hung himself from the rafters and dangled motionless from the noose with his eyes closed. For five minutes people watched in silence, bewildered. Suddenly, he bugged out his eyes, gave everyone the finger, and walked out the back door. "At that point I knew I could never top my condition," he explains. "I felt I had maxed out. I got a fucking standing ovation, right? So I knew my shit could lift people up." He was through with bodybuilding for good.
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