It was my friend Ciccio who got me to go there, and the fact that I was even there was crazy."There's a great gym in my neighborhood. You wanna go?"I had been lifting weights in the playroom of my Brooklyn home since I was 9 years old; by age 16, after multiple viewings of the recently released springboard for Arnold Schwarzenegger, Pumping Iron, it had occurred to me that if I was ever going to make my bodybuilding dreams come true, I'd have to make them come true in a place built for it.