Making your masculinity in the gym

One day I saw a woman dressed as if for a garden party, with a slinky black dress, high heels, handbag, the whole bit. She perched daintily on a bench while a strongly muscled, fit young black man finished his workout. And then off they went together. Was this one of the rich women I heard about who divorced their banker husbands and picked up a toy boy for a couple of years? I was busting to know but I let them go unmolested.

I tired of this gym in the end. I was the only person in the place who had a head bigger than his neck.

And I was offered a freebie in the mall. Bondi Junction mall is a hideous place where the pleasant sounds of trumpet and accordion are drowned out by barking salesmen (amplified), usually three or four competing in a jumble of noise. There are marauding Mormons who craftily ask you questions to snare you into a discussion about the Book of Mormon. And so on. So when I got a free ticket to a gym, I thought I’d check the gym out.

This was Paradise Club. Its reception area was gleaming and new, complete with a gleaming attendant in matching shirt and shorts who looked as if he had stepped out of Vogue magazine.

Knowing Bondi Junction as I do, it’s quite possible that he had already been in Vogue magazine. The attendant asked me how he could help, checked my free pass, and guided me to a change area. This, like other areas, was shiny, new, and brightly lit. It was a far cry from the stinking old sweatboxes I had seen when I was a boy. Upstairs there were racks and racks of gleaming weights. But it was the people who freaked me out.

Everyone walked around in designer gear. Every single piece of their outfit matched. There were women in shades of aqua, tight little dresses and little halter tops. Their stomach muscles were so firm and neat they made me nearly gasp with amazement.

The men wore matching outfits in grey and cerise, or black and red. All the outfits were designed to show off the abs, biceps, pecs and calves of the body on display. Upstairs lithe athletic men and women leapt about while the music boomed. Everywhere there were shiny muscles and no hint of a hair on a chest or legs, in most cases.

Obviously there must be some sort of ray that went over Bondi at night time and removed all this unwanted masculine hair. It seemed to be a daytime version of all those nasty nightclubs on Oxford Street with tall black-shirted giants guarding the door, places where you can hear the music three blocks away. Presumably these people rocked and bopped all day in the light and then went and bopped and rocked all night. I don’t know when they found time for all the things I had to do in my life, like talking to my old mum, sucking up to my superiors or dragging my kids off to the opera.

I couldn’t see anyone here who was fat or skinny or a bit lumpy. In fact nobody here NEEDED to exercise. What was I doing here?

I have a Brazilian friend Marcus who told me I had missed the whole point about Paradise Club. "Peter, the important thing isn’t to GO there, it’s to be SEEN there!’ This made perfect sense to me.

Finally I found Aussie Gym one day by accident. This had a pleasant air of slight decay. There was some rusted equipment and parts of it had seen better days. I started to think this might be the gym for me. Its inhabitants took time out from their workouts to enjoy themselves.

Yani ran the gym. He put his artwork on the walls and seemed to enjoy his creativity. He didn’t seem to care if some of the depictions of the human body were anatomically incorrect, with testicles hanging from some guy’s stomach and so on. He would grab a friend and hug them and then keep on walking, chuckling as the other guy wondered what such a hug meant. Yani had been part of Striparama or some such, a team of male strippers, and the souvenir photos adorned the wall, Yani beaming from the pack.