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STEROIDS DON'T MAKE YOU STAB-PROOF

Anabolic steroids will make you big, ravage your liver, shrink your balls, and, god forbid, help you grow a magnificent set of bitch tits. They won’t, however, make you stab proof. My buddy Julian learned this the hard way.

Anabolic steroids will make you big, ravage your liver, shrink your balls, and, god forbid, help you grow a magnificent set of bitch tits. They won't, however, make you stab proof. My buddy Julian learned this the hard way.

Julian was walking through the Halifax common park with several friends when they were confronted by four kids with skateboards. At six-foot-two, weighing a juice-induced 287 pounds, he was singled out as the biggest threat and had a knife slipped between his ribs and into his lung. This random attack was part of a larger wave of violence that rocked Halifax that summer. This included a cabbie stabbed in the neck, several bodies pulled from the commons' bushes, and an elderly woman beaten severely by young girls wielding metal table legs. Halifax is a rough place. Not "get shot for your Air Jordans" rough but more of "my friends and I are going to kick the shit out of you because we're bored and we know we'll get away with it."

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Julian has adopted a "size matters" philosophy to keep life simple and confrontation free. Ironically, it was his size that got him shanked. I spoke with Julian to see what it was like to gain 100 pounds in a year and get stabbed by maritime teenage baby daddy skater thugs.

**Vice: How old were you when you decided you wanted to be giant? *Julian:* Well, I've always been big, but I was really skinny. When I first got to the city I got bigger. I started dieting for a while. I was around 225 and I lost about 20 pounds. But then I thought, I feel like a fuckn' tiny person. I want to gain more weight. I eventually got a hold of Anavar. That was the name of the first one. And then I got N1-T for a long time, which put on about ten pounds of muscle in two weeks. They're all oral pills that you take. I eventually gained something like 100 pounds--pretty close to that--about 80 pounds in eight months. So I had gotten a lot bigger. Everyone was like, "Holy shit, what happened to you? Oh, that."**

How did you decide that you didn't want to just eat to gain weight and that you wanted to juice? Well I ate also, I had to do both, but I just knew some guys that had that shit. They go to the gym and I figured I should get a hold of some of that myself. It's not cheap but it's not all that expensive either so… You know, it's a slippery slope--you start out with the oral ones that are used for metabolism boost or whatever else. Eventually you get a hold of testosterone. Different kinds of it and injecting that.

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How long did it take for you to move from oral to injection? Quite a long time, I've only been injecting for about a year now. I mean it would have taken probably almost two years, two and a half years, before I moved on to something like that. The pills are, from what I've read, more dangerous, and do more damage to your body. With the injections it just goes straight into your bloodstream. There is no breaking it down.

Did you do a lot of blow while juicing? At first, but not now. You'd be hard-pressed to name one fucking meathead that doesn't do blow as well as steroids.

What is your goal? I don't know. Right now I'm losing weight again. I'm down to 287 from 310. I'll get bigger, [but] there isn't really much reason anymore. I'm not really involved in anything where I need to be [huge].

Let's talk about getting stabbed. I've got the incident report here. Have you read it? Yeah. [laughs] It's a little bit off.

Tell me what you remember. I was just walking through the commons, loaded walking home, and heard some people yelling down to us 'cause we were being pretty loud to begin with. And then we started yelling back. We met up with this group of about four people and there was probably, I don't know, three or four of us, and a couple of women with us. Buddy pulled a knife and we didn't see it. He had it down by his left hip, or I guess it would have been his right hip. I had my hands up to punch him and Ricky yelled, "He's got a knife!" I looked down and said, "Shit." Then I tried to pin buddy's arms to his side, which I did for a bit, but he was too short and he got underneath me. Buddy dropped his shoulder underneath my arm, and stabbed me in the back--into my lung. Then I yelled for Ricky to help me. He ran over and kicked him I think. I threw Buddy down to the ground and then Ricky came over and kicked him. Buddy got up and ran off, I chased him for a bit but then I collapsed.

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How many of them were there? Four, all guys with skateboards.

I've never been stabbed, what did it feel like? Did you realize what had happened? No, I didn't realize that I had… I didn't realize until I felt the blood coming out. It was sort of cold I guess. It didn't really feel like much. I guess that might have been part of the pain-killing effect of alcohol.

How much had you had to drink? I thought I had a pint and a half of rum, but Lucy told me that my quart bottle was empty when the cops searched her bags in the hospital. So at least a quart, I suspect.

How did you get to the hospital? It wasn't very far, we called an ambulance, or, called 911. Lucy called them. I kept yelling at her, "Just tell them to send a fucking ambulance," but they wouldn't without getting a description, they kept saying that. Then I just said, "Well go fuck them then, I'll just walk across the street." My shirt was off and [my friend Ricky] put pressure onto the wound that was bleeding so it wouldn't bleed more. And then I said, "It hurts a lot, don't put so much pressure on." As soon as he let go of it, I felt blood rushing out of it so I said, "Jesus fuck, I don't give a fuck how much it hurts. Push on it harder!" [laughs] And then I was slowly, well not so slowly, hopping towards the hospital. Which is maybe, you know, five minutes away.

Do you remember their reaction when you walked in? There is a little more premise to set up here. It was the Halifax Yearly Zombie Walk. We were all dressed up in blood anyway. So everyone, seven people, were covered in blood and various other scabs, stuff, and whatever. Seven people walk into the emergency room [like this] and everyone is looking, wondering, What the fuck just happened?

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"One of us got stabbed."

"Is this real blood?"

I say, "No, it's back here."

They put me on a gurney, jacked me up with some morphine, and thats the end of what I remember.

So how many times were you stabbed? I've got one, the one that punctured my lung. I don't know which number of stab it was, but he was trying to stab me a bunch of times. I had his arm pinned, there was one that actually got through. There's a few superficial ones, a long scratch on my arm, one below my wrist. There isn't much of a scar.

Are you still using steroids?

Yeah. I've cut back on most of the shit I take, but I'm sticking to it. You think about quitting all the time but you're never actually going to.

Photos by Heather McGuire