Summer Will Shape Up, With or Without You: Don’t Sweat It
Summer is almost here again. And we all know what that means. It does not necessarily translate into No-Doze-inducing Dodger games at the stadium, eye-popping bike rides along the Venice Beach boardwalk or woozy, air-conditioned matinees at the Sherman Oaks Galleria.
For me, it means trips to the gym, those all-too-long sweaty evening workouts, three and sometimes four times a week, pumping my tired butt on the Lifecycle for 30 minutes at a shot, lifting weights with all the incentive and determination of a hungover garbage man at work.
My gym is a spanking new Family Fitness facility in Panorama City. And after several months of doing hard time there, I have made a few notes about the Athletic Life there that I would like to share with all of you, my friends.
First off, if you don’t already belong to my gym, please don’t join. Stay away from there. It’s already too crowded with perfectly-shaped people who have decided to arrive there just five minutes before I do, filling all the machines, bobbing up and down on the StairMasters and Lifecycles, leaving me little choice but to scarf down a few candy bars as I wait my turn.
Trips to the gym are like visits to a kindergarten classroom: There’s lots of activity but very little thought going on. People walk around as though in a trance. They pick up weights. They put them down again. They pick them up again--like bad soldiers assigned to heavy duty, moving piles of rocks aimlessly back and forth at some sadistic sergeant’s command.
Here we are, living in one of the most agreeable climates on the planet and people insist on getting their exercise in a sweaty, crowded little space with a great view of the nearby parking lot.
There are people riding bikes that don’t go anywhere, climbing stairs that have no end--all to the pounding bass of wordless music so lame that it makes you look up at the ceiling in search of the rotating disco ball.
And talk about mirrors. There are more mirrors in my gym than there were in Liberace’s dressing room. Why do people have to eyeball themselves from every conceivable angle? I mean, it’s O.K. to watch a mirror to examine your exercise style, but do you have to wink at yourself while you do it?
Then, there’s the aerobics floor, which sits behind some huge glass wall at the corner of the room.
From dawn to dusk, they have these classes where people move around as though they had to go to the bathroom. They move in this warped synchronicity, their hands flung high in the air, jumping up and down on mats thrown on the floor--all of them following the frantic movements of a woman more full of energy than any person I have ever seen outside of those college co-eds who popped those little white-crossed pills to study for final exams.
I do a lot of people-watching at my gym. That’s because few people will talk to me. You see, gyms are a lot like high schools--there is a very critically observed caste system. Nobody pays attention to people who belong to lower castes than theirs.
Of course, the top of the food chain belongs to the gym sharks, the men and women in such fantastic shape they don’t need to go to any gym. They’re followed by the teen-age girls in full-blown makeup, and angry, overweight people who look like they just want to slap you.
Myself, I am in one of the lower categories: the old and out-of-shape. If this were high school, I’d be a member of the audiovisual department. Ignored. The object of silent ridicule.
After several months, I’m tired of getting dissed at my gym like some geek or cretin to be hidden away in some closet during fraternity rush. I want to join a gym for people like me. You know a gym for people with bad posture. Or one for pot-bellied beer drinkers.
As far as I can tell, the last time somebody talked to me at my gym, it was a woman who told me to wipe my sweat off one of the machines. Sniffily, she told me she had never sweated like that. I told her she just hadn’t met the right man yet.
Not even the instructors talk to me. Once, I had the gall to interrupt one as he showed a new young gym member how to correctly spell her name. I know, I know, I shouldn’t have done it. But I had this boneheaded question about how to use a machine without killing myself. He looked me over, motioned to the other side of the room, then handed me a map of how to find it.
It’s not that I haven’t tried to talk to people at my gym. Once I asked a woman if she was “born here.” She said “No, stupid,” adding that she was born in a local hospital.
The scariest part of my gym, however, is the free-weight section. Here, men who look like recent prison parolees lift barbells the size of Buicks, scanning the room with slitted eyes like they were back in The Yard.
Once, I walked up to one of these superhuman mountains of muscle and pushed him aside.
“Hey, Lurch,” I said. “Those are my weights you’re using. Scram, before I get mad.”
All the clanking and clonking of the free weights stopped. There was dead silence as all his cronies looked on as though he were some Hells Angel and I had just knocked over his motorcycle.
“Certainly, sir,” he said, finally breaking the silence, his voice trembling. “I’m sorry sir. It won’t happen again.”
And if you believe that story, you probably go to my gym.
