Tuesday Night Freakshow at Bally's Fitness
ED: This, again, appears in Barstool Sports. Because I have been sucking at life and work lately, it's been a while since the last update, and I'm trying to get more writing done.
Tuesdays are the slowest day at my office. Tuesday is just far enough into the work week for people to give up on their Sunday night mini-resolutions to get something done, and just early enough that they can't start the stretch drive for the upcoming weekend yet. The general sense of laziness around the office typically means that I can skip out around 4:00 and get to the gym.
Last Tuesday I made it out of work by 4:30. I work in a nondescript office building in Harvard Square, so I managed to walk up to Porter Exchange by a quarter to five, past the bank of terrible Italian restaurants and precious antique stores (how do those stay in business?) lining Mass. Ave. My gym, Bally's, is at the basement of the Porter mall, beneath the Japanese market. When I got down into the weight room I was pleased to find that I had apparently beat the evening rush, but before I was even done stretching the machines started to fill up. I grabbed the last available weight bench facing away from the wall, affording me a view of the rest of the gym, and started a set of military presses.
There are distinct fiefdoms inside the weight room. The squat racks are populated by the serious powerlifters and the hypercolor-pink shakes that never leave their sides. The free weights are for the other dudes, and the elliptical machines and the stationary bikes are more or less the women's room. However, these rules vary by time of day.
The crowd at Bally's can be separated into three distinct groups: morning, afternoon, and evening. The morning group is all business. From 5 AM to 8, the building fills with the people capable of forcing themselves to work out before they go to work. Young guys who haven't been beaten into the ground yet by their jobs. Type A students from Harvard and Lesley. Girls who run on the treadmill with the grim determination that comes from knowing they have 200 pages of tort law to read before their afternoon lectures. At around 9, the older women and more laid-back college students start to come in, and the free weights room starts to fill up with the afternoon crowd.
The evening group is more diverse, though. It's an ensemble of all the people who don't have the luxury of working out during the afternoon and don't have the willpower to do it before work. This means the stationary bikes are packed with chattering young couples, and the chest and shoulder press machines are surrounded by chicken-legged guidos with cartoonishly ballooned upper arms and chests. Coming from the West Coast I had never even seen guidos in person before - to me, the guido was the Northeast's answer to Jeff Spicoli, a stereotype so laughably unrealistic that nobody would ever encounter it in the flesh. But every weeknight they show up in their Ralph Lauren sleeveless shirts, smearing a mixture of sweat and hair gel into the weight benches. The elliptical machines undergo the biggest change, though. Where the afternoon theme is strictly MILF maintenance, at night the ellipticals and treadmills are taken over by a series of dead-eyed, overweight 40-year-old men preparing themselves for their weekly vain attempt at the Craigslist "casual encounters" section.
There is, despite the freakshow, a small minority of seemingly normal 20-something guys, who still outnumber the women in their age group 3 to 1. Then, in the corner by the squat racks, are the muscleheads. They deliberately camp out at machines that have clear sight lines to the mirrors, and they all know the trainers by their first names.
I finished up my set and went over to the weight rack in search of dumbbells. The last available set of 50-pounders was pinned in the corner, behind an enormous, hairless man who could best be described as "Hoganesque." He was laboring through a set of shoulder flys, and the pencil-thick veins in his arms were clearly visible all the way up through his neck. I could almost feel the seething mass of chemical reactions taking place in his torso, sucking in oxygen and pumping out heat like a bellows.
He was wearing a tight-fitting Red Sox "Closer" cap. It clung to every ridge and undulation of his skull, outlining an enormous escarpment of bone running around the crown of his head that would have made the Predator jealous. For the uninformed, this is the sort of profile that comes from years of dedicated steroid and HGH abuse, usually accompanied by an enormous lantern jaw and a "GnR Use Your Illusion Tour" T-shirt with the sleeves cut off. I watched him finish his set and then attempted to squeeze by.
His smell hit me like a Tyson cross. It was like a sudden bout of food poisoning. Typically when you eat a bad burrito the symptoms start about two hours later: nausea, headache, aching joints, fear, and finally the violent expulsion of everything you ate since 8th grade. During the two steps when I passed between the wall and the Hulkster, I went through the entire process, minus the actual barfing. I think I actually lost consciousness for a second.
Somehow I managed to get into the corner and out, and I finished my workout without incident. Unless, of course, you consider seeing naked, hairy man-ass in the locker room an "incident." PSA: They have private showers now for a reason. Use them. There is no reason to be naked for more than three seconds at a time in the locker room. Please, for the sake of those of us who don't want to go home and burn out our corneas with a laser pointer, put your pants on before you walk over to the scale.
Henry Rollins once wrote that the iron never lies to you, that friends may come and go, but two hundred pounds is always two hundred pounds. It's true, in a sense; when you're lifting it's impossible to convince yourself or anyone around you that you're stronger than you are. There is no dishonesty in the gym, and nothing makes you feel as good about yourself as an exhausting workout. You are, quite literally, building yourself a new person. The human form is as perfect a metaphor for architecture as you will find; a flawlessly proportional torso has its counterpart in the geometry of the Parthenon. Whenever I see the Hulkster and his Frank Gehry-on-crack deltoids at the gym, though, that theory is jarred loose by the realization that we are, fortunately or unfortunately, what we make ourselves. We are all structures that we put together from the ground up. Schwarzenegger in his prime was the Sydney Opera House, Amare Stoudemire: the Chrysler Building.
Bally's on a Tuesday night: Fotomat booths, Arby's, and '70s multisport stadiums.
Tuesdays are the slowest day at my office. Tuesday is just far enough into the work week for people to give up on their Sunday night mini-resolutions to get something done, and just early enough that they can't start the stretch drive for the upcoming weekend yet. The general sense of laziness around the office typically means that I can skip out around 4:00 and get to the gym.
Last Tuesday I made it out of work by 4:30. I work in a nondescript office building in Harvard Square, so I managed to walk up to Porter Exchange by a quarter to five, past the bank of terrible Italian restaurants and precious antique stores (how do those stay in business?) lining Mass. Ave. My gym, Bally's, is at the basement of the Porter mall, beneath the Japanese market. When I got down into the weight room I was pleased to find that I had apparently beat the evening rush, but before I was even done stretching the machines started to fill up. I grabbed the last available weight bench facing away from the wall, affording me a view of the rest of the gym, and started a set of military presses.
There are distinct fiefdoms inside the weight room. The squat racks are populated by the serious powerlifters and the hypercolor-pink shakes that never leave their sides. The free weights are for the other dudes, and the elliptical machines and the stationary bikes are more or less the women's room. However, these rules vary by time of day.
The crowd at Bally's can be separated into three distinct groups: morning, afternoon, and evening. The morning group is all business. From 5 AM to 8, the building fills with the people capable of forcing themselves to work out before they go to work. Young guys who haven't been beaten into the ground yet by their jobs. Type A students from Harvard and Lesley. Girls who run on the treadmill with the grim determination that comes from knowing they have 200 pages of tort law to read before their afternoon lectures. At around 9, the older women and more laid-back college students start to come in, and the free weights room starts to fill up with the afternoon crowd.
The evening group is more diverse, though. It's an ensemble of all the people who don't have the luxury of working out during the afternoon and don't have the willpower to do it before work. This means the stationary bikes are packed with chattering young couples, and the chest and shoulder press machines are surrounded by chicken-legged guidos with cartoonishly ballooned upper arms and chests. Coming from the West Coast I had never even seen guidos in person before - to me, the guido was the Northeast's answer to Jeff Spicoli, a stereotype so laughably unrealistic that nobody would ever encounter it in the flesh. But every weeknight they show up in their Ralph Lauren sleeveless shirts, smearing a mixture of sweat and hair gel into the weight benches. The elliptical machines undergo the biggest change, though. Where the afternoon theme is strictly MILF maintenance, at night the ellipticals and treadmills are taken over by a series of dead-eyed, overweight 40-year-old men preparing themselves for their weekly vain attempt at the Craigslist "casual encounters" section.
There is, despite the freakshow, a small minority of seemingly normal 20-something guys, who still outnumber the women in their age group 3 to 1. Then, in the corner by the squat racks, are the muscleheads. They deliberately camp out at machines that have clear sight lines to the mirrors, and they all know the trainers by their first names.
I finished up my set and went over to the weight rack in search of dumbbells. The last available set of 50-pounders was pinned in the corner, behind an enormous, hairless man who could best be described as "Hoganesque." He was laboring through a set of shoulder flys, and the pencil-thick veins in his arms were clearly visible all the way up through his neck. I could almost feel the seething mass of chemical reactions taking place in his torso, sucking in oxygen and pumping out heat like a bellows.
He was wearing a tight-fitting Red Sox "Closer" cap. It clung to every ridge and undulation of his skull, outlining an enormous escarpment of bone running around the crown of his head that would have made the Predator jealous. For the uninformed, this is the sort of profile that comes from years of dedicated steroid and HGH abuse, usually accompanied by an enormous lantern jaw and a "GnR Use Your Illusion Tour" T-shirt with the sleeves cut off. I watched him finish his set and then attempted to squeeze by.
His smell hit me like a Tyson cross. It was like a sudden bout of food poisoning. Typically when you eat a bad burrito the symptoms start about two hours later: nausea, headache, aching joints, fear, and finally the violent expulsion of everything you ate since 8th grade. During the two steps when I passed between the wall and the Hulkster, I went through the entire process, minus the actual barfing. I think I actually lost consciousness for a second.
Somehow I managed to get into the corner and out, and I finished my workout without incident. Unless, of course, you consider seeing naked, hairy man-ass in the locker room an "incident." PSA: They have private showers now for a reason. Use them. There is no reason to be naked for more than three seconds at a time in the locker room. Please, for the sake of those of us who don't want to go home and burn out our corneas with a laser pointer, put your pants on before you walk over to the scale.
Henry Rollins once wrote that the iron never lies to you, that friends may come and go, but two hundred pounds is always two hundred pounds. It's true, in a sense; when you're lifting it's impossible to convince yourself or anyone around you that you're stronger than you are. There is no dishonesty in the gym, and nothing makes you feel as good about yourself as an exhausting workout. You are, quite literally, building yourself a new person. The human form is as perfect a metaphor for architecture as you will find; a flawlessly proportional torso has its counterpart in the geometry of the Parthenon. Whenever I see the Hulkster and his Frank Gehry-on-crack deltoids at the gym, though, that theory is jarred loose by the realization that we are, fortunately or unfortunately, what we make ourselves. We are all structures that we put together from the ground up. Schwarzenegger in his prime was the Sydney Opera House, Amare Stoudemire: the Chrysler Building.
Bally's on a Tuesday night: Fotomat booths, Arby's, and '70s multisport stadiums.
posted by Dan at 10:11 PM
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