“Canseco showed up in every clubhouse at some point. I’m not gonna call out any specific players he helped bulk up, but you should probably start with the guys with 11-by-17-inch trading cards.”
—MLB player, identity withheld
“I guess this finally explains the Mets cap.”
—Tony Durbin, Bigfoot tracker
“Oh sure, Jose Canseco was everywhere in the old days. A lot of my teammates used steroids, but I didn’t think it was normal or healthy to treat your body that way. I was barely 16 years old, and I didn’t want to grow into some kind of 50-pound gorilla, you know?”
—Lydia Ivanova, former Soviet gymnast
“Jose was always hanging around the locker room. We just thought he was hilarious. He comes in and asks if we ever heard of steroids. I mean, seriously, you could fill a syringe with my sweat. I told him that the last guy who drank too much from our Gatorade jug had to get a second circumcision.”
—Gilbert “Masked Cannibal” Lipschitz, professional wrestler
“Jose would stop by the tai chi studio from time to time. You could always tell who was using. They’d be the ones screaming, ‘Yeah! Yeah! Get some, bitch!’ and making, like, machine-gun noises. The teacher would turn up the Kitaro music as loud as she could to drown them out, and that worked OK until one of the guys took a bite out of the CD.”
—Morgan Hathcock, martial-arts practitioner
“I heard that everyone called this guy ‘the Chemist,’ so I assumed it was because he was some brilliant scientist. This guy couldn’t figure out a juice box, let alone an organic-reaction mechanism, and he gave me this stuff that made me grow sideburns during my final exam.”
—Brenda King, MIT alumna
“Yeah, we worked with Jose Canseco in the ‘80s, early ’90s. He told us that with steroids, we could enhance our herds and make our cows produce longer-lasting milk and more of it. But it just passed on the aggressive side effects to consumers. You really can’t ignore the fact that most of those rioters a few years back were holding milkshakes.”
—Kevin Hochschild, Dairy Farmers Association of America spokesperson
“I think it’s better that I come clean on this personally before Mr. Canseco gets a chance to. Yes, given the demanding physicality of many of our sketches, steroids were abused by myself and many others. We covered this up for decades, and as a result, the drugs took their mutating toll. I guess what I’m trying to say is that there’s actually no such thing as a Muppet.”
—Aloysius Snuffleupagus, actor