Flex: Benny's nuts! Benny Podda went from being 1983 USA light-heavyweight champ to living as a cave

Benny Podda lives as a modern-day medicine man in the Cahuilla Nation in the mountains of San Bernardino National Forest, California. Benny Podda sleeps in a spirit-filled cave, using a rock as a pillow. Benny Podda attaches 220 pounds of weights to his testicles and swings them to see how much pain he can endure. Benny Podda transforms himself into animals. Benny Podda flagellates his body with a large metal stick that has 180 spokes. Benny Podda can spurt blood from his nose at will. Benny Podda has been shot three times, once while he was robbing a pharmacy--with a bow and arrow. Benny Podda travels to China to fight other martial artists on the tops of tables. Benny Podda spews a torrent of Chinese and Native American aphorisms and spiritual blather. But most disturbing of all: Benny Podda is saner than you are.

Why is that? Because Benny Podda doesn't work nine to five. He doesn't punch in his credit card number when the electronic voice orders him to. He doesn't pay $2.50 a gallon for gas or get a smog check. He doesn't order processed food at chain restaurants. He doesn't have a Palm Pilot, and he doesn't drop phone calls when he goes into the mountains. In fact, he doesn't have to do anything or be anywhere at any time. But you do.

The homeless are similarly untethered, of course, only Benny Podda won the 1983 NPC USA Championships light-heavyweight bodybuilding title, was a personal trainer sought after by everyone from Joe Montana to Chuck Norris in the late 1980s and early '90s, and today is a martial arts badass, who, at 48, could knock Mike Tyson into next week in a bar fight.

The one constant has been an intense aversion to conventional notions of success. "Whenever I start making money and getting popular and shit, right away I have to fuck it up and disappear," he says. "Get it?" Instead, he lives a strange nomadic spiritual existence that to a visitor feels like Walking Tall on mushrooms. Benny's isn't the cliched story of a man spiraling from past glory to present ignominy; it is the story of a man who has found his calling or lost his mind. Or both.

HIDE AND SEEK | Before meeting with Benny, it's a good idea to tell your loved ones where you're going so they can at least locate the remains if you somehow find yourself turned into barbecued ribs and flank steaks. When he does cook you dinner, you're relieved to learn that you're not the main course. "This lamb was alive last week," he says, the idea of recent slaughter enlivening him. The meat is tender and it tastes like lamb, but you're not so sure it isn't the photographer who came out to shoot Benny a few days before.

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 6,000 feet up into the mountains along a desolate but well-paved road. The mountains jut up through the desert floor, isolating a vast valley that is its own ecosystem. As you climb, the temperature drops 35 degrees and you're driving in dark clouds, thunder rumbling.

You pass through towns named Pine Cove and Idyllwild, and then stop at a local diner as Benny has instructed. "Are you ready to leave the United States?" Benny asks when you call for the final set of directions. You drive up a gravel road called Paradise, and there is Benny standing in front of a small home. "Welcome to the Cahuilla Nation," he says.

The house is a friend's, but this is where Benny meets people and patients. In the back, gnarled manzanitas guard Benny's herb garden, where he grows his potent potions and medicines. He tells you that the brews from this small patch of earth can heal you, kill you or reveal the secrets of every religion known to man.

A few yards beyond that is the Pacific Crest Trail. "The people you see on the trail aren't even counterculture," he says. "They're anticulture." The trail runs from Mexico to Canada, and many illegals use it to cross into the States. The Underground Railroad still exists; it's just farther west than it used to be. "I've seen dead bodies out on this trail," Benny says. "Once, I got to know a Chinese woman who lived on the trail. I traveled with her for many days and I never saw her eat or sleep. The day we parted, a rainbow like I had never seen appeared."

To get to Benny's cave, you must first go to a remote waterfall to be purified. This is especially important for first-timers. You don't want the cave to reject you--when this happens, it induces terror. "Your soul is rended from your body in a spiritual tear," Benny explains. So, you suffer the pain and indignities of purification. The water pours down on you with the shocking force of spiritual flagellation.

The cave's climate is reminiscent of Podda's Pittsburgh: hotter than hell in the summer, freezing cold in the winter. The cave has been inhabited for thousands of years, Benny says, and it leads to an outdoor amphitheater with perfect acoustics that can only be reached via the cave. "The opening is a vaginal orifice. In initiation ceremonies, the Cahuilla would pass through it one by one to be 'reborn' as warriors."

Philosophically, Benny merges German Sturm und Drang, Eastern asceticism and a lot of other really weird shit. "My physical training is based on the philosophies of Genghis Khan," Benny says. "He taught his troops the importance of exterior and interior training. His warriors learned how to turn themselves inside out so that they could project their inner power out like lightning."

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 the whole thing. It feels like your body is on fucking fire! I lift weights with that [energy] coursing through my body and my fucking testosterone a thousand times normal--'cause I just fucked myself."

Then he stops and smiles calmly. "See? That's why I can hang 220 pounds from my fuckin' nuts."

Yeah, you think. Fuckin' nuts.

PITTSBURGH HEALER | So how do you become a medicine man? Benny was born John Podda (he later adopted his father's name, Benny) in 1957 in South Fork, Pennsylvania, 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.

Her middle son gravitated to similarly dubious pursuits, from shooting dice on street corners to playing blackjack. When Benny wasn't betting on sports, he was playing them--and dominating. His genetic gift for strength was enhanced when he started trading reps with the local hoods at the downtown YMCA in McKeesport.

Soon Benny began roaming the back streets of Pittsburgh with a precociously oversized body and an attitude to match. While other kids were flipping burgers, he was hiring himself out to local wise guys as muscle or masterminding his own bizarre capers. 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. While his elementary-school classmates had been reading The Hardy Boys, Benny was devouring Faust, transfixed by Goethe's tale of a man willing to do anything for godlike wisdom and power. He had added yin to that yang by studying Eastern religious texts, such as the Bhagavad-Gita, 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.

The gym was owned by then local amateur bodybuilder Jim Manion, who is now president of the NPC and the IFBB pro division. Gym members gave Benny wide berth, and no wonder. To psych himself up for a heavy lift, he once ran straight through a wall, Wile E. Coyote-style, 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.

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BENNY PODDA'S CONTEST HISTORY 1982 NPC Junior Nationals, light heavyweight, second NPC Junior USA, middleweight, third NPC Nationals, light heavyweight, fifth 1983 NPC Nationals, light heavyweight, third NPC USA Championships, light heavyweight, winner 1985 NPC Tournament of Champions, light heavyweight, winner 1988 NPC Nationals, heavyweight, fourth NPC USA Championships, light heavyweight, fourth 1989 IFBB North American Championships, heavyweight, seventh