Episode Details

Narrated by Eunice Wong

Text Originally posted January 21, 2023

Cell Damage - by Mr. Fish

There is very little to recommend my old gym, other than the low monthly fee, where I worked out nearly every day from 2007 until the pandemic shut it down. The locker rooms were grimy with moldering carpets. There were brown rings around the basins and a thin blackish layer of slime, composed, I suspect, of dead skin, urine, hair, dust, dirt and assorted bacteria on the floor of the shower stalls. To step into the slime without flip flops was to take home athlete’s foot and toenail fungus, at the very least. The sauna in the locker room was reportedly listed on a gay pick-up app and attracted pairs of men looking for anonymous sexual encounters in clouds of steam. The gym management first tried to combat these liaisons by posting a sign on the door that read: “IT IS FORBIDDEN TO HAVE SEX IN THE SAUNA.” When this failed to slow the traffic in and out of the sauna, the door was removed and the sauna shut down. Robberies occurred in the early afternoon when the gym was nearly empty. One man would stand by the entrance of the locker room as a lookout while another quickly pried the hinges off the flimsy lockers and pocketed the wallets. The management was unsympathetic. They had posted signs not to leave valuables in the lockers. Theft was our problem.

The treadmills, stationary bikes and ellipticals would break down and be blocked off for weeks with a chain and sign that read: “Out of Service.” The weight room, located in the windowless basement, is where I spent most of my time. And this is where the only redeeming feature of the gym could be found — the community of regulars who, month after month, year after year, embedded themselves into my life. It’s true that none of us wanted to pay the exorbitant fees to join the fancy gyms, but we also found comfort in the familiarity of each other’s company. We were united not by politics, class, status, education or profession but by working out. I lifted with two men my age: John, who had played in the NFL for the Jets and the Colts, and Marc, who had played college basketball. As former competitive athletes, we accepted that our workouts at this stage were managed decay, but there was something reassuring about this dogged determination not to resign ourselves to decrepitude. Besides, when uttered by John or Marc in the weight room, the most banal advice and information became a revealed truth, frustrating my wife Eunice, who had often said the same thing months — or years — earlier.

Among our small band of regulars was Robert, a hairstylist who kept in shape, he said, because his boyfriend was older, and he was “the trophy wife.” Robert showed off his 30-inch waist and sleek, toned physique. One Halloween, he and his boyfriend went on a gay cruise where his costume was a thong and a feathered Native American war bonnet. “I looked fabulous,” he informed us. There was also a professional wrestler who was on the circuit in smaller cities like Wilmington and whose stage name was “The Mighty Vesuvius”; a deeply traumatized Iraq war vet whom we all kept at a distance and who once threatened a trainer who subsequently walked out of the gym and never returned; a police officer; a former Wall Street commodities trader who supported the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC); Camillo, who had been a professional heavyweight boxer in Italy and who owned the restaurant next door to the gym; and my friend Boris who had once been homeless on the streets of Trenton, read Fyodor Dostoevsky in the original Russian and, while he held down a job, was attending Rutgers University part time to become a social worker. One afternoon, Camillo and I decided we would rekindle the glories of our boxing days by hammering the heavy bag without wearing the cott