The Barking Scarecrow, The Man Who Polished His Balls, And A Political Freak Show - Diversity Goes Upscale

The gym brings out the the freakish among us, a side show of dwarves, bearded ladies, and two-headed babies.  Metaphorically speaking of course, but if you factor in where the gym is located – in this case in an upscale professional neighborhood of Washington – then it indeed had the tony equivalent of the side show of a travelling circus.

Take ‘Death’ for example, a grey, skeletal woman, who did not just run on the treadmill, but was outrunning something awful.  Her face became more drawn and ashen the more and the faster she ran.  She never sweated because her body had no sweat to give, no excess of anything, all husbanded for one last ride.  

She was as frightening as the Headless Horseman, frantic on the rubber carpet, desperation in the hollows of her face, in the strands of thin hair which trailed down her back.  No one had ever seen her get on the treadmill or get off.  She was always there, pounding away, eyes in some unknown distance, on some fearful thing waiting for her.

There was The Creep, a giant of a man and in his way as frightening as Death but in an intimidating, threatening way.  He was always dressed in black sweats and a black hoodie, said nothing, did nothing except pump the ellipticals, but implied nastiness, hurt, and chaos.  He had no friends, no easy camaraderie.  People got out of his way.  

He must be on parole, some said, or just released.  The gym had to take him as part of their tax abatement with local authorities – his private half-way house for a few hours a day before he took the bus back to the ghetto.   There was something feral and frightening about the way he strutted back and forth in front of the exercycles, bound up in rubber tubing to add tension to his walk, barbells on his shoulders, grunting like a hog, eyes rabid and distant. 

Jabba The Hut, a mammoth 400 lb. fat man with elephantine legs and a huge bariatric scar from abdomen to gullet, a reminder of his failed operation to tie off his intestines.  He spent hours in the whirlpool, the only place that gave him some comfort, relieving as it did the gravitational pull on his immense body.  

Rolls of fat shook from his neck to his feet every time he took a step, water poured over the sides of the whirlpool as he slid in.  As he sank down to the very bottom, only his surprisingly very small head showed above the water line.  With all the foam, spume, and roiled waters of the pool, no one could tell who was in it; but when he got out, no one could look away.  He shook his body like a St. Bernard and water splashed into the locker room, back into the whirlpool, and onto the low ceiling.

And then there was The Barking Scarecrow, the main attraction, the center of attention, and as batty as any inmate of St. Elizabeth’s.  She was tall, gangly, and neurasthenic.    “Not an ounce of fat”, she barked, but she was stringy, dried out, and bony.  Angular where there should have been no angles, protrusions instead of rounded flesh, scaly, corrugated shins and ankles.  

She ran miles every day, then biked tens more, came to the gym to work out, and then rode and ran home.  Halfway through her workout, she sat on one of the machines to eat her lunch of carrots, radishes, raw lima beans, and water.  And between bites she banged on about her job at the elephant house at the zoo, her work with wounded raptors, and her engagement in liberal politics.

What were they doing here, this collection of fringe elements, especially in the friendly confines of the Laurel Health Club & Spa, an upscale gym in one of Washington's wealthiest suburbs where one would expect only lawyers or real estate investors? 

Yet short of the James Fennimore Cooper rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike, the truest, purest local for diversity anywhere in the United States - everyone travels I-95 and everyone needs a rest stop - it is at the gym where everyone also drops their pants.  What is different here is that the weird diversity becomes caricature. 

The Man Who Polishes His Balls who after showering took his towel, put it between his legs, grabbed one end from the front and the other from the back, raised a leg on a locker room bench, and started whipping it back and forth as fast as a shoeshine boy at Grand Central. 

He whipped and slapped, snapped and polished, one side then the other, stopping in between to talk about Donald Trump and how he thought he was a demented fool let out of St. Elizabeth's on a pass to to his St. Vitus' dance in the public arena.  A madman, a crazed, demented boor. 

The irony of all this, a man whipping and snapping his balls until they were as red as cherries and his claims about the unhinged, wild behavior of the President, was lost on most, so unified and solid was the political cast of the gym.  

As Jabba the Hut pulled himself out of the whirlpool, displacing gallons of water, he stopped to catch his breath, turned to the men in the Jacuzzi, and reminded them of Trump's bulldogging Gestapo tactics of his praetorian guard, and his vicious hatred of the black man. 

The Barking Scarecrow was like a demented Union Square prophet, railing and flailing her arms, hysterical with hate, seething with it, and literally unable to stop ranting.  She ranted and shouted on the ellipticals, on the treadmills, and on the recliner bikes.  Again, the ironic conflation of this neurasthenic stringy ganglionic pile of sticks whacking away at the machines howling about Donald Trump could not be missed. 

Death had little of the energy of the Barking Scarecrow who, as she adjusted the incline on her treadmill, talked about her curation of the elephants at the National Zoo, 'magnificent creatures, intelligent, so majestic that I wish I were a member of their herd'.  Death was too preoccupied, too frighteningly intent on looking at something in the middle distance to yell and shout, but there was irony in this poor woman as well.  'Before I die...' she was often heard to say, then citing the canon of good works, progressive works, Utopian-grade works. 

The gym was a side show.  Not only was this assemblage of God's menagerie endlessly interesting per se, but to watch them labor away in the most ungainly, desperate way on the machines, and then to hear the cackling, hectoring, bellowing anti-Trump tirades was worth the price of admission.  

Conflation at its best - when it folds political dementia in with physical oddity and psycho-social hilarity - is a philosophical wonder.  Who could have predicted that the doors to Laurel Sport & Health Spa would open onto a side show worthy of Barnum & Bailey?  Or that the diversity that is the central core of the progressive ethos of the place could be so inverted - or rather so brutally honest?

If there was any reason to finally dismiss the cant of 'diversity, equity, inclusivity' it was the here at the health club.  Human diversity at its most defining and outrageous was on display within the unbending, absolute strictures of received political wisdom.  This diversity, backlit by the communal political group-think of the place, stood out even more.  This was real diversity - the unhinged, aberrant, unfathomably weird deviations that one saw on the floor every day.