LEFT FOR DEAD: A Hollywood Story of how Anton Troy transcended his own ghost and hit the gym!

May 4th, 2018 is a day I cannot remember and one I will never forget. We all have moments in our lives that become etched into the roots of our very being, stamped onto our souls. This was the day I’d walk a tightrope between the realms of the living and the dead. The last year my life had been spent solely working on a film I had created, and as an actor I wore my heart on my sleeve, carrying all my dreams firmly within my hands.

Entertainment was in my blood from the very start as I was raised by my single mother who was a mime and children’s entertainer who alongside my grandmother always told tales of the legendary acts of my late grandfather, a well-known movie stuntman back in the era of the westerns. This made pursuing my creative ambitions not merely a passion but the only viable career path for me at least within my own mind. I had so many goals for that year as the film that I had created was winning awards, and I was very eagerly looking forward to traveling to Europe at the end of the summer for a film festival that I was already booked for. Investing your all into yourself and your dreams can be costly so after a year of putting my entire being into these endeavors I started to run out of money. Frankly, I was broke. So like most folks, my only option was to find a job to get by. Retail wasn’t my first choice, but I needed the money now and selling sunglasses at a store on the beach sounded like a fun and practical summer gig. The streets were blazing that Friday night in Venice Beach California right down the block from the world-famous Gold’s Gym. The Mecca with many out and about jump starting their weekends in preparation for Cinco de Mayo. I personally remember contemplating what my own plans would be for the weekend. Maybe catch a movie, go on a date, or perhaps be festive and find the perfect margarita. After peddling sunglasses on the boardwalk all day, I wrapped up and started the trek back to my car, carrying the remnants of my lunch in a brown paper bag and a small copy of Shakespeare’s Hamlet pressed neatly into the back pocket of my jeans. During my journey along the busy streets, I encountered a stranger… one I cannot now remember but who left reminders of an altered fate on my flesh. Let’s just refer to them as a threshold guardian, who in the Hero’s Journey of any great movie is an obstacle blocking the hero’s path that they must overcome to achieve the life that they want. And this encounter was about to bring everything in my life to a standstill. Being stabbed is not something anyone ever thinks would happen to them, let alone five times. In fact, I considered myself fairly “street smart” with my own natural machismo so even coming to the realization that this did indeed happen to me remains an unbelievable shock. A vicious encounter with someone whom I could not even rationalize to myself their reasoning for committing this grave offense nor their intentions. Perhaps I reminded them of someone, or they were simply insane? I will never know. I was stabbed in my right lung / liver, had my face slashed open down the left side, my neck slit along the carotid artery, and for the cherry on top of this dessert, their blade plunged in front of my left ear which penetrated my skull into my brain three and a half inches!

But just as quick as this threshold guardian appeared, they fled their crime, leaving me incapacitated to bleed out from their inflicted wounds on the streets of Venice Beach. To my great fortune, though, I was found by three teenage girls who heroically rushed to my side before I completely bled out on the sidewalk in white pants. They applied pressure to my neck while summoning the ambulance, effectively saving my life. Dealing with a TBI (‘Traumatic Brain Injury’) was something completely new for me and hell, in all honesty something I had never even heard of before. I was a young healthy guy, so why would I? But now I was a “patient”, something completely new for me! Five months in the hospital as an in-patient and afterwards rehabs, never ending rehabs for six years. For the first couple of years, I had to sleep, all of the time because my brain was literally “re-wiring” itself. My vocal cords were fried, and I could barely even talk after being intubated and having my neck slit. I sounded like a chipmunk, and my left eye was completely shut for over five months and when it did open it was all the way off to the left! Before, I would generally be the boastful guy folks told to pipe it down to, but now it was hard to hear me. Even producing a little sound felt like a strenuous workout. I mean, how would I ever even act again when I could barely force two lines out of my mouth at a whisper without burning out? I felt like I had been drop kicked into an alternate reality. Stranded on a desert island somewhere and in many ways this was true. What I can share with you right off the bat is when something this jarring happens to you in your life, there is no “how-to” book on how to handle it or what to do next. Amid the confusion, much of it simply is just showing up for yourself or honestly having someone push you face first into the fire while all of you figure it out and Lord knows I needed a lot of that in the beginning! Stagnation is not your buddy nor someone you should pal around with and should only be leaned on when you need to rest which for me was a ton. I had probably about four strong hours a day where I could be mobile in the early days without completely shutting down. The moral is, always be moving even when you do not yet have any idea what the hell the target is or even if those initial steps are incredibly small. Just keep moving! The opposite of stagnation is momentum and momentum is created by movement which then can create a rhythm and rhythm creates music, yes? I mean ideally, we all want our lives to be a song, our song, but that takes consistent notes! But you’re not going to get to any goal by wishful thinking and what I have learned as a student of Buddhism is that you have to “Turn poison into medicine” which means take action, but even after the realization strikes you (if you’re lucky) you have to start moving and I would go on to say move anyways. I’ve been labeled a “miracle”, but miracles are rarely magic, require follow up and often take hard work!

After the incident I went to live with my acting mentor and friend Gabe Dell and his family who generously took me in becoming my caregivers. Being an unexpected addition to the family I was assigned to stay in a very tiny bed while I healed that was built into the corner of a round room in the middle of the house. It was a bit of a public space where Gabe taught his students as well as a library and study of sorts as it was lined with bookshelves. This was the favorite room of his late father Gabe Dell Sr., a Broadway star and actor who would rise to popularity as one of the boys in the hugely popular “Dead End Kids” films of the late thirties and forties alongside movie legends such as Humphrey Bogart and Mr. James Cagney. It was always very dark in there at night and felt heavy with history. This was a room that he and many of the young stars from that era like Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney would evidently enjoy a cocktail in. Gabe Sr. would even read his scripts right in the little bed I was staying in as it was evidently his favorite room in the house being an avid reader. Living in a library itself almost felt like a practical joke from the universe as well as a cheeky metaphor for my life because I was forced to slow down to a snail pace and learn how to deal with these new mental and physical challenges that faced me every day. Towards the end of the pandemic after perpetually feeling stuck in the house, having to rely on my friends for rides and emotionally eating myself out of several boxes of cookies or whatever I could get my paws on, I chose to, despite the “incident,” start going for walks alone. I mean my stuntman and rodeo cowboy Grandfather famously said, “You get bucked off the horse, you get back on!”. In the beginning these walks became a means for me to work through the unfathomable confusion I had circulating around my mind about the circumstances I had be dealt, to feel a sense of independence outside of being a “patient”. I needed this no matter how minuscule it appeared. I wanted some freedom, some privacy or control even if it were as paltry as choosing what direction that “I wanted” to head down the street. I was an adult male living what felt like the life of a teenager, and I desperately needed an outlet! The invasiveness of the head trauma also made me develop a post traumatic seizure disorder which made me ineligible to drive at the time. So not only was I staying at my mentor’s house in a library, but outside of going to the hospital and rehab appointments, I couldn’t go anywhere unless it was planned ahead of time. 

Having to ask someone even to take you to the grocery store could feel like organizing an event which always made me feel like a bit of a burden. walking became my release, so I’d lace up my tennis shoes, throw on a backpack and initially just cruise over to the park but then the park led to the grocery store where I would fill that bag up and then I would walk to the movie theater and watch a few movies by myself or even scuttle over to the comic book shop. One day while walking about a mile and a half from the mentor’s place, I crossed a building that said “BUILT” on it and upon further examination realized it was a small gym. I clenched the arms on my backpack and cruised in, sparking a conversation with the gentleman at the counter. It was around this time that I was trying to go to the gym to workout but again had to rely on other people to take me there and often they’d get busy or cancel and frankly it sucked as well as made it nearly impossible to develop any kind of consistent routine. When I crossed ‘BUILT’ it felt like fate, so I joined right away knowing despite the obstacles I wouldn’t have to rely on anybody to get me there and this unforeseen opportunity felt like a cosmic step towards independence for me. The gym created a brand-new sense of freedom as well as an odd sanctuary for me to work through my feelings on the daily. Every time I saw that ‘BUILT’ sign I regarded it as an affirmation: ‘RE-BUILT’. An opportunity to rebuild the decimated and torched foundation of my life because I knew there was a young phoenix in there newly self-aware. Curious and looking to rise out of the ashes. Frank Zane was one of my all-time favorite bodybuilders, and I would follow all his social media as he would often post inspirational pieces as well as many useful tidbits. It was around this time that I saw him post something about private coaching and initially I thought it would cost a ton, but I did a little research and found a Zoom session was something that I could make work. At first, I thought ‘well Anton, you’re not exactly a conventional client given your current circumstances but hell, let’s see what happens…’ So, I decided to go ahead and send him an email telling him a little bit about myself, my medical state, history, and why I wanted to connect in the first place. Frank immediately asked me to send him some current photos, and we scheduled a time to have our first meeting where he gave me some feedback and we started to formulate a game plan to achieve my fitness goals. Walking a mile and a half to go workout, then doing a strenuous routine and having to walk back home a mile and a half when you’re in very poor shape medically and physically takes some real gravitas, but I was ready for a change. I needed something to put all this pent-up energy into that was outside the realm of the doctors, hospital visits, caregivers, and home environment that I could claim as my own. I needed a goal no matter how lofty it seemed at the time to work towards because I was stagnating in many ways, and I was processing so much that I already didn’t understand that I just needed a release somewhere and this release eventually manifested as reps in the gym. Zane has a chapter called “Right Attitude” in his Bodybuilding Manual with a segment entitled Bodhi Building by Ken O’Neill which talks about Bodybuilding not just being the activity of some schmo aimlessly flopping around weights but rather an age-old activity of training the “whole person”, and gaining an edge by focusing on the mind, body, and spirit as one mechanism. Bodhi being an ancient Indian word meaning “wisdom” – a wisdom about training and leaving no bases uncovered nor artificially basing training on the limiting fads of ideas making up common sense and going on to say that this approach is the key to unprecedented opportunities for waking up the sleeping giant within. Given my own spiritual sensibilities, having to relearn my body over again from scratch and a necessity to center myself otherwise I felt I would internally implode this made tremendous sense to me. Mr. Zane instilled in me the importance of paying attention and turning my workout reps into mindful meditations for myself with isolated focus on the movements and slower negatives. This also meant don’t chit-chat the whole time and keep your energy directed towards what you’re doing. Now I was a guy that had been in the gym a rather long time before my injuries but also had never heard these fundamentals shared this way before which became the catalyst for the change of how I viewed my workouts as a whole and how I was executing those movements from start to finish. I was no longer the guy just flopping weights around or trying to lift my ego with as many plates as possible nor given my medical history at the time could I. It changed my entire view of the process itself and given I had been run through a cheese grater already I was in the right place with a willingness to shut up and just explore the process from a completely new mind which given the TBI it definitely was that, NEW. I mean this brain being refurbished practically had the factory tags still on it! Being a particularly vain guy to begin with it was beyond hard to send those initial photos of myself posing in nothing but my underwear to one of my heroes when I was half broken and in the worst shape of my life. But intuitively I knew that I must because I felt in my heart the need to do so and at this point, I had nothing left to lose so I decided to set my own vanity and ego aside and go with my gut. Given he was once a schoolteacher my time with Mr. Zane always felt like an actual class because I was expected to have questions prepared and we would have dialogues about everything, examining the photos, questions, what I needed to work on and dedicate more focus to. This forced me to show up and having to take those photos every month as well as dialogue about them gave me an accountability partner which then pushed me to make sure I got all my workouts in every week. I have also learned the value of taking the photos themselves which initially felt mortifying to me as I really didn’t want to see what I looked like but Mr. Zane told me you take the photos so you get the “real idea of what you look like to other people” and overtime you also really start to appreciate just how far you’ve come because you can see the results yourself which the mirror often does not give you a realistic view of. It’s very easy to work a long time and not feel like much has changed, but when you have the photo evidence, you can see the transformation right in front of you. Often, it’s a shocking surprise! In the beginning I just really felt like an awkward out of shape guy doing a million seated twists, knee-ups and endless reps, but since I came from nothing, I earned every one of those damn reps! Along with Frank Zane the other person that was instrumental to my fitness journey and return to life was my now friend Jack Radford-Smith of the Bodybuilding Dieticians because as I refined my workouts, I realized I needed to refine my diet. After all, Frank was known as the “chemist,” so I knew in order to take myself to the next level that I needed to get specific on everything including nutrition to “train the whole person.” Sometimes life must happen to you to have the experience. It’s not about being selfdestructive or putting yourself in harm’s way, but it is confronting whatever happens and not letting it destroy you but allowing it to make you stronger and only you have that power. Often misfortune in our lives can become the turning point, the springboard to greatness, our greatest teachers as well as ultimately transmuted into our fortune, again turning poison into medicine, which it has for me. The lotus flower grows in a swamp and requires mud to grow. Many people just live superficial lives, their pond without mud, so they have no lotus flowers. I on the other hand got dropped into the mud and managed to blossom. Make no mistake, it is a choice, although conscious or not, to continue to move and grow. You show your salt by what you do with the circumstances after they happen. That is when you truly shine, when you’re right in the thick of it and the last thing you want to do is deal with it. You may cry at first, you may kick and scream and be angry, but at some point, you need to stop being a victim and focusing on how unfair life is in general and move forward, demanding to be victorious! The threshold guardian, according to Joseph Campbell, is what stands between the “old world” and the “new world” of personal growth. In the ancient stories, threshold guardians can be anything from the Sphinx in Oedipus to Darth Vader in Star Wars. They block the hero’s path that leads to the life that they want. In other words, it’s an obstacle that the hero needs to overcome, which I encountered in the form of a predator along those busy streets at the beginning of this journey. This ultimately put me on a path that I could have never imagined and forced me to adapt and learn new talents. My fitness journey has been the same way, but I refused to quit. We all encounter obstacles of various forms every day. What kind of confidence do you have when you know that you can turn poison into medicine, when you can defeat the dragon? It’s a quiet secure confidence that cannot be shaken because you are rooted deeply in the earth, you’ve blossomed directly out of the mud and therefore can be in the presence of anybody knowing that you have overcome the impossible which gives you a currency that money cannot buy. Nobody should ever have to endure a horrendous event like I have, but I’ve realized this tragedy isn’t the end of the journey for me. I’ve created a new lifestyle for myself that I’ll be looking to maintain for the long haul. Let this be a reminder that you can start from wherever you are right now with whatever resources you have by taking just one step at a time and you will build not only symmetry in your physique but in your life. So give your life a PUMP, do the reps and get to work! Never accept defeat. Instead, harness it as motivation and inspiration for your rise to greater heights. Shed old beliefs and whatever else no longer benefits you. Start from wherever you are, with whatever you have and just get moving! I promise you from direct experience that what you can achieve and overcome will surprise you.