Two years ago, in the National Physique Committee’s Ultimate Grand Prix bodybuilding competition, Steven Curcio placed sixth out of 16 contestants. 

 

Curcio is Herculean, built like a soldier, with a body comprising 9 percent fat and 91 percent muscle, all packed underneath coffee-colored, half-Filipino skin. Calling him physically fit fails to accurately describe his 215-pound, 6-foot-flat frame. He can bench 365 pounds, squat 450 and deadlift 600.

 

His body serves as a testament to the unforgiving fitness regimen Curcio has been tailoring since he first visited his local YMCA at age 13. 

 

 “Six to seven days a week. No resting,” said Curcio, now 24. “Once I started dieting and nutrition, I started starving myself. It used to be obsessive.”

 

Obsessive makes a fitting description for his teenage fixation on exercise. These trips to the gym were alarming in both frequency and intent: in pursuit of a healthy future, Curcio ran from a traumatic past.

 

“To combat my insecurities and fears, I worked out,” he said. “I did it because of what I went through. I thought being stronger would help me get through all that.”

 

Steven was born, the day after Christmas, 1994, into two tempests. One was the harsh nor’easter borne over Curcio’s home state of Florida and continued north before dissipating near the Canadian border. The second storm was his biological parents, Steven Collins and Lila Puangco.

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The two had met in high school and quickly bonded over shared interests: first, in each other and, later, cocaine. Collins and Puangco’s relationship was turbulent and their pregnancy was an accident. Steven’s biological father abandoned Lila and Steven within the year. 

 

 “[My mother] just continued [the party life] after he left,” Curcio said. “We bounced from apartment to apartment, townhouse to townhouse. I rarely went to school because she would come home late at nights and forget to take me to school the next day.”

 

When Curcio wasn’t raising concern with his excessive truancy, he did so with neglected hygiene, worrying his teachers with his long nails and a tangle of greasy, unwashed hair. One concerned instructor eventually contacted the Department of Youth and Family Services and, after a brief stint on the run, Steven found himself separated from Lila.

 

For the next two years, Curcio was passed around the Sunshine State like a mislabeled parcel as the courts decided just who, exactly, would take care of this 8-year-old boy. He shortly lived with Lila’s parents before they sent him to his Uncle Marco and Aunt Heather, who attempted to treat Curcio’s frequent bedwetting and nightmares with beltings.

 

“They punished me at every turn,” Curcio said. “I was afraid to even drink water.”

 

Curcio suspects that his aunt and uncle resented Steven for things out of his control—for not only self-destructive Lila, but also the contrast Curcio provided to their severely autistic son. Marco and Heather’s ambivalence was evident in their response to the court’s decision to return Steven to Lila. They refused to return him to an incompetent mother. They refused to care for Steven themselves. So, they compromised, discarding him into the maw of the foster care system.

 

He spent two months at the home of an elderly couple with two other foster children, a teenage boy and girl. The couple were inattentive, the teenage girl was troubled—“like the rest of us”— and the boy abused Steven. During the day, he would hit him. At night, he lured the 7-year-old boy into his bed to molest him. Following the encounters, Steven often returned to his own bed, a baby crib.

 

“I felt unloved and unwanted,” said Steven. “I prayed every night for a new family.”

 

Maria Puangco, Steven’s aunt, answered that prayer.

 

The older sister of Lila and Marco had moved in 1989 to a hamlet named Farmingville in Long Island for a diabetic sales job. She occasionally returned to Jacksonville to reunite with her family, who never ventured beyond state borders. 

 

One day, nearly one thousand miles north of Jacksonville, Florida, Maria received a phone call from her parents informing her of her nephew’s current situation. Maria immediately began the adoption process, and shortly after, Steven was speeding up Interstate 95 toward a new life.

 

Steven experienced much from the various households of his childhood. The carelessness of his blood parents. The cruelty of his aunt and uncle. The harrowing abuse at an older boy’s hands, and two foster parents too oblivious or apathetic to address it.

 

But Maria, her husband Dean Curcio and Dean’s daughter Candace gave what Steven had never known: the love of a supportive and stable family. The family became official in 2016 when he legally took Dean’s surname (the Latin root of which, ironically, can mean “broken” or “incomplete”).

 

He calls them Mom and Dad. They, Steven reluctantly admits, call him “Boopie.” Together, they embarked on New England hikes, binged “Lord of the Rings” and “Star Wars” and participated in family game nights. Frequent bicycling with Dean and trips to the YMCA with Maria that sowed in Steven the seed of fitness, the newfound parental encouragement that pushed him to pursue higher education.

 

A May 3 post on Steven’s Instagram profile shows him towering above his adoptive parents in Florida State University graduation regalia, his arms wrapped around them. The caption read, “We did it, not me … If it wasn’t for all of them, I would have never had graduated.”

 

Steven shares a trajectory intriguingly congruent to the storm battering the East Coast on the day of his birth. Both began life in Florida, both traveled north and both found in New York a peaceful end to the tumult.

But he draws a greater parallel in his passion for weightlifting and crunches, which he does now, in healthy doses, to better himself rather than fight his demons. 

 

“[Working out] is a metaphor for something greater,” he said. “It shows you discipline. It shows you patience. When things get hard, when things get heavy, when it sucks, you have to push through. Even when you don’t want to do it.” 

 

Like the way physical exertion and intervals of rest work in tandem to shape the body, Curcio realizes both his Floridian tribulations and Long Island triumphs were crucial in sculpting his character.

 

“If I did not go through those things, I would’ve been a brat,” Steven said. “If I stayed in those things, I would’ve been a delinquent. God called me out of that. Even though I have scars—mentally, emotionally, spiritually—I believe those scars make me beautiful.”

 

But Steven doesn’t dwell on those scars, either. He doesn’t think about his biological parents, who he hasn’t seen in decades. Instead, he focuses on the future, preparing for the family he hopes to have himself. He intends on learning from the mistakes of his biological parents and his new parents’ examples.

 

“I can’t wait to build a family,” he said. “I want to show my kids how a mom and dad are supposed to be.”