Sweat

I found a health club near me that offered short-term passes for use of all of the facilities. I went to sign up as I don’t plan on being here in this town for much more than a few more weeks; I don’t need a whole long-term membership but I’m really bored of bouncing on my mini trampoline in front of the TV (which is my main form of aerobic exercise), and I need another option.

For years I used to run outdoors but I realized at some point that I don’t really like running, especially around here where there are a lot of hills, so I stopped doing it. That was when I got the “rebounder” (which is how mini-tramps have been rebranded as fitness gear).

Now I am feeling like I want to get on an elliptical.

And on top of that I am craving a sauna. This club has a sauna.

I’ve been feeling a lot of stress. Maybe I can sweat it out.

I went inside to the front desk and a pleasant, muscled, ball-capped, polo-shirted young man working there greeted me hello. He looked to be in his twenties. This is a college town. I told him I wanted to buy a temporary pass and he told me there were two options: one was good for six days at the club—any six random days I wanted, any time—for sixty dollars. The other was a one-month membership—I’d be free to go any or all days of the month— for sixty-nine dollars. That latter option seemed like a good bargain: I’d be getting all those extra days for just nine dollars more, and so I said, “Okay, sure, I’ll take the whole month pass.”

He asked, “Are you seventy-two or older?”

I said, “What? No.”

“Oh, okay, then it’ll be seventy-seven dollars.”

“You just said it was sixty-nine.”

“ I was quoting you the discount for seniors.”

“Oh”, I said. And then, “Do I look seventy-two?”
He smiled and said, with no trace of embarrassment at having just faux-pas-‘ed all over a mature (but not that mature) gal, “Not really. It’s just that we’ve been getting a lot of senior citizens coming in here recently to join.”

I thought again for another moment and decided to go with the six-day sixty-dollar pass. I could save seventeen bucks. Why not? “Let’s be realistic”, I thought. “I’m not gonna use the club more than a couple of days a week.” I’m not a fitness fanatic.

Seventy-two? Did he even look at me? Was he just doing his job, reciting a memorized script they told him to use whenever he encountered anyone with a gray hair or a crow’s foot? Like those Whole Foods cashiers who seem mandated to ask for ID from absolutely EVERY PERSON who buys alcohol, even when common sense makes this practice absurd and they are carding people with all-white hair and missing teeth and dowagers’ humps and faces full of wrinkles and hands full of age spots?

I saw his eyes facing my general direction when he spoke to me but had he seen me?

I don’t think I look seventy-two. I also know that I don’t look twenty-five (I’m not delusional). Do I care if I look seventy-two? I guess I don’t, not really. The encounter was a little jarring, momentarily, that’s all.

(Also odd that he quoted that number when I was always under the impression that the official discountable senior citizen age minimum was somewhere in the sixties, not the seventies. Either way it did not apply to me, yet.)

I imagine that for some people, all other people are seen as belonging in one of two categories: young and hot (like them), or the other thing (old and not). Either viable or not worth consideration. Some of us are the schoolteacher in the Peanuts comics. But I understand. There is a biological imperative; we are compelled to mate, when we are fertile, or at least to go toward those motions. The rest is boring, blah blah blah; everything else is in our way. Also our brains aren’t fully developed until our early thirties.

When I was in my early twenties I met my friend Howe. When I learned he was thirty-three I couldn’t believe it. I remember thinking, “Wow. He’s so old. But he’s so cool!”

The guy at the front desk was probably athletic, probably a sports fan. He had the look. Baseball cap indoors, muscles. Working in a fitness environment.

I’ve known a few professional sports guys and my impression was that they were pretty simple men. Maybe uncomplicated is a better word. Or something like untroubled, or unbothered…by existential questions and arguments constantly running back and forth through their minds and hindering every potential decision and every movement, undermining their confidence and ruining every relationship.

Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not calling them stupid. In fact as I got to know one particular one of them, I was in awe of his single-minded and unquestioning focus on his duties, his calling, his situation, as a baseball player. He had clear and finite goals (to pitch strikes, for one). His steady stance (mental, constitutional) seemed so foreign and exotic to me since I spent so much time with complicated, unpredictable, addicted, mentally unbalanced, self-sabotaging creative cohorts, and with my stormy self. I envied him his relative calm and assurance.

As I spent time with him, I tried to figure him out, asked him questions that I hoped would get under the surface, get him to reveal things, in his own time; his unique insights and opinions, maybe a personal story of emotional trauma (and then redemption/healing?): perhaps he’d had a bullied childhood as a scrawny loser before he started growth-spurting and lifting weights and getting in shape and becoming a beloved star of his high school baseball team? I was dying to know about all of that inner junk, which he seemed to be hiding so well, but I could never crack that nut. Maybe he was just that strong, as strong as his throwing arm, so strong that his resolve to keep the revealing stuff to himself could never be broken.

It was as if there was no there there, when I dug. Not that I was too intrusive; I like to think I am sensitive and don’t push. But still. That nut was uncrackable. Or there was no nut to crack. Or it had been cracked, and freed, already, and this explained him.

It was fascinating! Made him seem fascinating. He became, to me, virtually unknowable, an unknowable person, which meant that there was nothing to know, which fucking blew my mind. Because—I realized then—unknowable is what we all are, ultimately (even to ourselves), and this is what life is here to show us.

My pro-sport friend had gone beyond. He was already there. ZEN. Enlightened (unknowingly?) in his contentment and acceptance of his role (as a baseball player, and as a man) in the world. So many of the people I usually hung around with (all those insecure creative people I mentioned, and the curiously creative-adjacent/-exploitive) had layers and layers of accrued toxic sedimentary garbage-slop built up in their depths, and years and years of struggling without success to fix what-all was wrong with them and to clear it out, to free what was helplessly trapped.

..

Was the kid working the front desk at the fitness club a zen master, too?

I was just hoping to sweat out some of my anxiety.

If that is even possible.

.