Method number two is to go outside and run in the street. This is cheap—if
you don't get hit by a bus—and allows you to inhale a lot of car exhaust
while dodging beer cans hurled by passing teenagers. You also get to meet and
hate the neighborhood dogs.
Method number three is to join a normal health club. These offer relatively cheap
long-term memberships because they know quite well that ninety percent of the
customers will quit after a few weeks. Those who stick it out get the benefit
of subsidized gym equipment.
I chose method number four; join your upscale yuppie/trendy health club. This
meant paying out $1500 for a membership, followed by $120 per-month dues. But
for this kind of money I got the same exercise equipment the cheap clubs have
PLUS a bar and restaurant, where I could recover with an overpriced beer and
a fat-laden pastrami sandwich, PLUS a heated Olympic-size pool where I could
get cramps from the beer and pastrami.
There
was a hot tub adjacent to the pool where I liked to lounge and lose
the key to my locker because the pocket in my swim trunks didn't
work very well. The lockers in upscale clubs have your name on them.
Well,
actually, mine said 'Mr. Steiner' and for the two years I belonged,
I wondered who Steiner was, what had happened to him, and why the
staff didn't put my name up there.
They
probably knew that I was, at best, a semi-member, not really 'of the
quality.' I always wanted two towels because I intended to do sweatier
work than calling my broker from the steam room. I never patronized
the athletic clothing shoppe full of primary-colors Spandex, prefering
cutoff jeans and tee-shirts with things like the First Amendment printed
on them. Worse, the hair spray and deodorant came up in thin tubes
from dispensers in cabinets and several times I accidentally spritzed
my underarms with the hair spray. This is a lot worse than spraying
deodorant on your hair; take it from me.
The
management didn't like my attitude any more than my moussed armpits
and English Leather hair. When I tried jogging from my house to the
club, a security guard stopped me because I looked suspicious, running
through the neighborhood like that. When I parked my Honda in the
lot between the Rolls-Royces, Bentleys, Beamers, Volvos and Mercedes,
an
attendant told me that employees park in the rear. When I used the
stairs to climb up to the lobby instead of the glass-enclosed elevator
with the view of the basketball court they declared the stairwell
a fire exit only and forbade my using it.
I was an embarrassment on the 'circuit' machinery too.
I found the stationary bicycle both ridiculous and boring,
perhaps because I didn't have a copy of The
Wall Street Journal to put into the special rack provided. An automated walking
machine hurled me off the one and only time I tried it. The idea of stair-climbing
machines in a building where the stairs themselves went unused made me laugh
too hard to climb. On all the machines with weights I had to reset them to
the smallest loads; sometimes I would pull out the pin
and just lift the chain. I
started off in barbells with the bar. After a few months I worked my way up
to the bar and the little metal gizmos that would hold
the weights on the bar, if
there had been weights on the bar.
Meantime, guys with the pectorals of mountain gorillas
would stare intently at their reflection in floor-to-ceiling
mirrors while they curled the equivalent
of a SCUBA tank in each hand. They hoisted barbells the size of diesel truck
engines while telling one another that it wasn't the weight that really mattered,
it was the number of 'reps.'
It was apparently a macho thing to drop the hand weights
and barbells, with a sonorous 'klong,' the last few inches
to the floor, shaking the building with
the impact. My barbell bar made a 'ting,' which I thought a nice counterpoint.
The Men of Muscle exercised their lips by sneering.
I didn't sneer at them, for they were at least getting
exercise. Other members would play a game of tennis and
wash it down with a martini. The pool was unusable
for lap-swimming because the kids swarmed all over it. Watching the pot-bellies
dribbling the ball on the basketball court was dizzying, with the bellies bobbling
up and down in time to the ball. And I never could understand why anyone would
want to crowd into a tiny room and rocket a handball off all the walls and
one another.
So one day I cleaned out Mr. Steiner's locker, turned in
my sweaty towels, walked out to the employee's lot, and
drove to the nearest sporting goods store. I bought
a set of adjustable hand weights, a springy thing I could squeeze with my hand,
and a pair of running shoes. I have my own stairs I can climb, even if they
don't move on their own. I can hook my toes under my desk
and do situps. And the street
is free.
— end —
Copyright,
2005, by Stephen Morrill |
