We stopped going to our old gym when the pandemic descended and it shut down. When we were ready to return, we shopped around and found a new place.
Karen likes the kickboxing and yoga classes and imagines I miss basketball, but I'm smart enough not to risk that. I'm all about cardio these days. I like rowing machines and treadmills that incline, where I can prop my iPad up and watch something I need to watch, to make the evening safe for purely recreational viewing, while I burn 1,000 calories or so.
It's better than the garage, which was a sufficient bridge gym (though if we'd holed up much longer we would have needed to get a rowing machine; I did some online window shopping). I have perhaps belonged to better gyms, but they were far more expensive than the present one. This one goes for about the price of a couple of lunches a month. Maybe the business model works because a lot of people who sign up only come once in a while. I don't mind because they're subsidizing me.
My first gym wasn't a gym at all but an open square of asphalt, with yellow and white lines painted to denote the boundaries of various courts. There were pull-up bars of different heights; if you could do 10 Coach McAllister would call you a "stud," and if you could do 15 you could probably get an embroidered patch from the President's Council on Sports, Fitness and Nutrition.
There were a couple of makeshift weight benches, thinly padded planks over which cheap grained plastic was stretched and--where it overlapped the edges--stapled into the underside. On their upstretched arms rested barbells of a sort. There were small ones, constructed of two coffee cans filled with cement and connected by a section of orange-painted pipe. The big ones were identical except they might have used gallon paint cans.
We were 11 and 12 years old, and Coach Mac was interested in our physical development. He wanted to turn us into football players, so one day after we ran wind sprints and did monkey rolls on the grass and trotted four laps around the field (he wouldn't let any of us sip water until the last would-be lineman had finished the route), he had us gather around as he demonstrated proper bench press technique.
"Smooth and long," he said as he effortlessly pumped one of the larger barbells up and down. "You breathe out as you press up and you lock your arms out. Don't bounce the bar off your chest--it will bruise."
The next gym was a converted hangar; it stood along what they called the "flight line," a great paved expanse where B-52s and KC-135s taxied and stood for maintenance. Inside there were two basketball courts. The full-sized one was where young airmen from the Bronx and Philly and Chicago dunked and launched what would have been three-pointers had anyone bothered to paint the lines.
The other court was smaller, the domain of fathers and sons and pickup "21" games among the players waiting their turn on the big court. By custom it was divided into two half-courts, the better to accommodate overflow from the main game. It was so short that running the floor wasn't much of a challenge; even a kid could make a reasonable shot attempt from beyond the free throw line of the opposite end.
Beyond the small court was a large ceilingless room--it opened into the high vault of the hangar--in which sooty black free weights were arranged on rubber pads. In the corner there was an unreliable rusted contraption with pulleys and chains and slabs of numbered weights. One wall was covered by cracked mirrors, and along this wall was a rack of scratched-up chrome dumbbells.
We came, my friends and I, mainly to play ball, each of us secretly hoping to be called onto the main court to distribute the ball and run the floor with the men. We knew it was more likely we'd end up playing 21 or picking up a three-on-three game on the small court.
Sometimes, when both courts were jammed, we'd wander into the relative solitude of the weight room and poke desultorily among the equipment there. Sometimes we'd load up a bar and try to lift, but often we'd be spooked by the sight of thick sergeants with prison-yard chests smelling of Atomic Balm and sweat, their great knees swaddled in Ace bandages.
In high school, basketball players weren't allowed to use the high school weight room unless they were really football players in disguise. Coach would have us jump benches or run in ankle weights, but during the season he didn't want us tightening up with squats and military presses.
Same thing for baseball--pushups were good, but running was better, and taking grounders best. We passed through the weight room sometimes to fish some piece of gear out of the fenced-off storage room, but we hardly touched those stone-gray weights that pinned our football heroes to the ground.
In college some of us preferred the old Baton Rouge YMCA to Louisiana State University's Huey P. Long Fieldhouse, though there was a gruff old man who worked at the Y who had it in for us.
We knew the serious muscleheads, the balding guys in their 20s who grunted and speed-rapped affirmations throughout their two-hour workouts. We'd do preacher curls and punish our triceps by pulling cables, then go out to the basketball court to shoot around and miss hilariously, all our fine motor control blown by the workout.
We'd pump up and go to a smorgasbord place where we'd eat heaping plates of pasta followed by bowlfuls of sweet synthetic-tasting ice cream.
And when we hurt ourselves, we washed our shoulders in DMSO (dimethyl sulfoxide), a miracle solvent that dissolved all skepticism.
Since then there have been all sorts of gyms, each of which had a different personality.
My new gym is antiseptic and offers no judgment. No one drops weights and screams. No one, that I know of, is selling pharmaceuticals from the trunk of a car in the parking lot. It feels good to be back.
pmartin@adgnewsroom.com