Author: Merritt K

What is a hunk? Must a hunk be handsome and well-groomed? Or might he simply be, as the term suggests, an enormous, unwieldy slab of beef?

For too long, a restrictive understanding of hunkdom has stifled inquiry into the subject. On the occasion of this Hunk Week, I submit that we move towards a more expansive definition. And so I present to you an article that I probably could have written at any time over the past two years of my tenure at this website, but decided to try and shoehorn into this celebration of studly meat monsters purely to trouble the category of hunks.

Maybe I’m just yearning to trouble some categories because it’s been years since I left grad school. Or maybe it’s because following trends is for fucking cookie cutters. Yes, it’s finally time to talk about the man, the myth, the misfit maniac himself: Big Lenny.

I have been obsessed with Big Lenny for over half a decade now. He first came to my attention as well as that of the broader community of online lunatics through his association with an amateur bodybuilder named Jason Genova. In the 2010s, Genova acquired the particular sort of internet antifandom that blossomed in the dark corners of forums and social media as a result of his boastful YouTube videos and his odd behavioral and verbal quirks. He had a habit of coining terms like “pissening,” a combination of “sickening” and “piss” that, much like “bimonthly” can mean twice a month or every two months, can refer to something kicking ass or sucking shit.

The Genovaism par excellence is “enjoy the ments,” a phrase derived from his stuttering pronunciation of the text on a motivational poster of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Commenters soon became addicted to the “ments” generated by Genova’s antics. He was precisely the kind of attention-seeking, dim-witted, self-aggrandizing maniac that the internet loves to hate. And as he became aware of his “fans,” he attempted to mobilize them into a personal army of pisstroopers, directing them against companies who declined to sponsor him, other bodybuilders, and eventually just about anybody who annoyed him in a practice he dubbed “Order 66.” Yes, that’s from Star Wars. Yes, he called himself the Dark Lord of the Sith. Yes, he tried to have a hip-hop career under the name J Cream where he rapped about having vanilla flavor and being on disability.

Through Genova, the internet was introduced to a colorful cast of characters who came to be known as the Delray Misfits, named after the World Gym in Delray Beach. Of these men, one in particular stood out. I mean, fucking look at him.

Big Lenny, aka Leonard Persin, aka Fat Fucking Lenny, aka the Tom Platz of Abs, aka Mr. 18 Forever was a sight to behold. He was an enormous, bald man with yellowing eyes and skin darkened with the drug Melanotan to the point that he confounded the average white American’s keenly honed race-sense. His physique fluctuated depending on whether or not he was gearing up to compete, but even at peak performance he exhibited a huge, muscle-bound stomach as a result of steroid use, a condition known as Palumboism.

Big Lenny was, in other words, a freak of the human physical form. He pivoted to bodybuilding after failure to achieve success as a football player — his father’s dream for him — and subsequently being kicked out of the air force. Certainly, Lenny attained a unique look as a result of his training regimen. But if that were all there was to him, he never would have developed the cult following that he did. See, Big Lenny embraced the identity of the freak. It was a key part of his philosophy, which he frequently expounded upon, mouth and nostrils twitching, in the early Delray Misfits videos and later on his own YouTube channel, The Big Lenny Show.

In Lennyism, a freak is an individual. A misfit. A maniac. Opposing the freak is the “cookie cutter,” someone who wants to be like everybody else. Someone who fears and avoids pain. Who lacks discipline. Who is addicted to porn. Who uses drugs. Who has a lot of tattoos. Who is a vegetarian, maybe, or a communist? It’s not always clear.

Lennyism is a chameleonic belief structure which requires years of study to even begin to understand. For instance, is banging transgender women, or “tantentens” in Lenny’s dialect — referring to a tanned babe who looks like a ten and has, ideally, ten inches — an enjoyable pastime or a sin? Is America the land of opportunity or was it, as Lenny once suggested, a mistake to declare independence from the white-run British Empire? You may as well ask if a dog has Buddha nature. Mu.

Anyway, we’re not here to talk about Lenny’s confusing and oftentimes objectionable philosophy. Judge not a man by his words, but by his deeds.

Deed the first of Big Lenny: furtively gobbling an entire raw egg. Please, watch the entire video. It’s twenty seconds long. It will be the best twenty seconds you spend today and on each subsequent day of your life.

It’s a perfect piece of film. First, there’s the exaggerated crunch as Lenny pops that egg into his maw. He turns to walk away, before the cameraman Andrew asks him “what the fuck was that?” The question causes him to swivel towards the camera, his expression that of a dog caught in the act. We push in on Lenny’s face, remnants of the egg visible between his still-chewing teeth as he insists that he doesn’t have anything in his mouth, eyes darting back and forth wildly. “Is that a raw egg?” Andrew asks. Lenny knows he’s busted. No use denying it. “Don’t let the viewers see this,” he pleads. Too late. We’ve seen it. We’ve seen it all.

There’s something that troubles me about this video, and it’s not the obvious thing. See, egg shells contain perfectly good calcium. No sense in wasting it — unless you’re a cookie cutter. No, that’s not what bothers me here. Having viewed this footage thousands of times, what perplexes me is why Lenny should feel any shame or insecurity about his actions. Isn’t caring what other people think of you the mark of a cookie cutter? Should not a freak be proud of his freakishness? What is the sound of one hand clapping? If you taser Big Lenny, will he fall down?

That last one wasn’t rhetorical. This is deed the second of Lenny: weathering the storm.

“It’s not if I’m ready or I want to do it, I have to do it,” Lenny says before exiting the World Gym one morning, nostrils flaring in anticipation. He pulls his shirt off and stands on a grassy patch of land by the parking lot, explaining that he is afraid of needles. The camera pans to the right, revealing a boy who can’t be older than eight or nine years old. By volume, he is approximately one eighth of a Lenny. The boy raises a Taser as Lenny flexes, saying “this is for you, Christina!”

Brief aside: Christina is not Lenny’s girlfriend, wife, or relative deceased in a tragic lifting accident. She is Christina Broccolini, a French-Canadian actress best known as one of the hosts of the 2000s series Mystery Hunters, which is essentially Unsolved Mysteries if you replaced Robert Stack with perky teens. It’s unclear how Lenny became aware of her, but he believed she was a kind of “spiritual healer.”

Cynics will say it was a dangerous cocktail of GHB, HGH, and exogenous testosterone which allowed Big Lenny to stay standing after the Taser prongs hit him. I believe it was his faith in Christina Broccolini. Regardless of the explanation, there are the plain facts on film: Lenny stumbles backwards, grinning and grunting, then tears the wires out of his stomach, leaving the darts embedded in his flesh before launching into a diatribe about cookie cutter drug addicts.

Both the Taser and egg incidents took place at the Delray Beach World Gym. But gradually, we got more of a picture of Lenny’s life outside of bodybuilding, and it wasn’t especially pretty. So, in 2017, the misfits put up a GoFundMe asking for $250 to hire a cleaning service to deal with Lenny’s pad. They received four times that within a span of hours. You might be thinking that a thousand dollars to clean someone’s house seems like a lot of money. Brother, it wasn’t nearly enough. Readers of a sensitive disposition and anyone currently eating may want to skip this next section.

From the jump, Lenny’s house is a nightmare. Not pictured here is the patch of ground where he says he pisses daily, next to the outdoor washing machine he once took pictures of a trans sex worker urinating atop. A lot of Lenny’s life revolves around piss, and his house smells so bad his associate Brad can’t even bear to step inside.

And it’s hard to blame him. The place is terrifying, a filthy mire of trash and unidentifiable stains.

And it probably goes without saying, but the bathroom looks like something out of a survival horror video game that also kills you in real life three days after you play it.

But the piece de resistance in Lenny’s pad is the steak pan he keeps in the freezer. It’s there for a “very good reason,” he says. The reason is that he used to just leave it out unwashed after cooking his steaks and it started to fester with maggots. That didn’t deter him, though: he just ate the maggots. Free protein!

It’s hard to say if he was joking or not, since Lenny displayed some self-awareness of his image and was keen to capitalize on his niche microcelebrity. And so, when Jason Genova retired from bodybuilding and disappeared from the internet, and the Delray Misfits scattered as the World Gym shut down, he teamed up with Robert “Robzilla” McGowan Jr. to shoot video content out in a society that was entirely unprepared for contact with him.

Around this time, Lenny also said that he was taking on personal training clients. And here I have to admit that in the darkest depths of my pandemic malaise, strung out on what at the time I thought was a lot of ketamine but which turns out to be much less than it takes to coup the United States government, I considered taking Lenny up on his offer. It was these videos of Lenny unleashed upon an unwitting world that made me reconsider.

Here, Lenny mumbles “oh my god, Marcia Brady” around a mouthful of blonde stranger toes. In another video, filmed at a Boca Raton hotel with Jay Masters, aka “The Bedroom Bully,” Lenny invades a boomer pool party, remarking to the camera “I would imagine these older women are really good at anal sex” before picking one up and swinging her around. She and the rest of the women react to Lenny’s presence as one might to a loose gorilla — with nervous acquiescence to its whims and a conspicuous effort not to show it their teeth.

Lenny follows this up by delivering the world’s worst karaoke rendition of REO Speedwagon’s “Keep On Loving You.”

In light of these episodes, I decided against traveling to Florida to get molested by a racist orange Shrek. Instead, I paid Lenny to do a Cameo for my Dark Souls character.

And as it turns out, that was the closest I would ever get to meeting Big Lenny. The life of a maniac misfit is a hard one, and a few years ago they started dropping one after another. Jay Masters passed away in July 2023. Robzilla followed him on August 14, 2023 at just 31. And in October of last year, Big Lenny died at 54 of congestive heart failure.

What is Lenny’s legacy? Some funny videos? A dedicated following of forum dwellers who probably followed his life more closely than anyone who actually knew him? A trail of rattled Floridian female gym-goers? All that, certainly, but there’s one more thing I seldom see mentioned in connection with him.

In a video where he describes the origins of the term “cookie cutter” — he learned it from a man who looked like Columbo, apparently — Lenny mentions that he’d been training at the World Gym in Delray Beach since it opened. And you know who else was working out there back then?

Yes, 9/11 hijackers Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi. It’s impossible to know for sure, but it’s entirely within the realm of possibility that during their short time at the gym, the pair were on the receiving end of a Big Lenny lecture about porn addiction. Or, the men who flew the planes into the World Trade Center might have witnessed Leonard Parsin lean over his gym bag and stuff an entire egg, shell and all, into his hungry mouth. Would such a hypothetical encounter have redoubled their resolve or, perhaps, instilled a fleeting moment of doubt in their aims? None can say.

All I can say is this: Big Lenny had weird energy. He was a man whose incoherent, deranged worldview was no doubt influenced by the prodigious amounts of Soviet chemicals, testosterone, and MDMA he routinely consumed, not to mention his abusive upbringing by an overbearing father. In many ways, he was a piece of shit. In some, he was an inspiration. He was a contradiction, a nontraditional hunk, a testament to the extremes which the human organism can attain with sufficient drive and single-minded madness.

So RIP Big Lenny. Thanks for the ments, I’m glad I never met you, and may flights of big-dicked lady angels sing thee to thy rest.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Sarcophski, a walking slab of beef who always eats the entire egg, shell and all.