Yesterday I sat with someone who asked questions about my past. Vague questions, searching, I assume, for some root cause or instigator of both good and bad changes.
“You’ve worked a lot of jobs,” she said, recalling an earlier conversation some months ago. “What was your favorite?”
Easy.
When I was twenty-four years old, I managed a health club in central Massachusetts. It was a great job, and I started before the building was even built, signing up members in a trailer next to the site. When it opened, it smelled new. The grey carpet, the red and grey paint on the walls, and the wallpaper glue in the nursery.
We had two studios, the one up front being larger, both soundproof—kind of—and beyond the studios down the hallway were about ten Lifecycles, the nursery and two locker rooms, though only the women’s locker room could be considered such, the men’s might as well have been a closet with a shower since out of about four thousand members, the overwhelming majority of them—I’d be safe to call it one hundred and ninety nine out of two hundred—were women.
The workout lasted an hour, and we worked every muscle in the body from the neck down. We did aerobics as part of the program, of course, but also lengthy isometrics, abdominal work, thigh and butt work, everything. We also did motivational talks during the warm-up and cool-down. We were trained for this for eight weeks, eight hours a day, five days a week. We were trained in muscle work, exercise, breathing, health concerns, CPR, nutrition, and, of course, motivation.
The music would seep out of the studio windows and drift down the short hallway to my office. Music like Wham’s “Wake me Up before you GO Go,” which, while I despise that stupid song, ignites something in me that makes me feel strong enough to run uphill all out for hours whenever I hear it. “We are the World” had just happened, so there was that, and Springsteen’s “Born in the USA.” Madonna, Mariah, Michael, Seegar (Bob not Pete), and more. What a life it was then. I went to work managing this place, making a ton of money wearing a sweatsuit, listening to music surrounded by a sea of women, and I lived in a cool house on a reservoir.
Oh, we had no problem signing up members. In Central Massachusetts in the winter there are only two things to do: ski at Mt. Wachusett just up the road from my one-hundred-year-old yellow house, or nothing at all. So they built the club and people flocked in. They came to this particular club for a very good reason. You see, a good number of the members needed to lose weight, many of them more than a hundred pounds, and while I taught advanced classes that included the Holy Cross and Boston College football teams, I also taught women who on a daily basis did not move; they were an entire other human being overweight, and many could and did eat a box of ice cream by lunch. We needed to show these souls that they did not directly have a weight problem, they had a depression problem—bad marriage, bad finances, no education—whatever, and the depression emerged from their psyche as hunger. They were not going to lose weight unless they lost the depression, so we had to work on both. Some took much longer than others to understand this; myself in particular.
This was before Yoga hit the mainstream, so we had our share of twenty-something thin beautiful women who wanted to workout right in front of the mirror. Still, we had four thousand members and only two studios, each which held 40 to 70 people. We used to joke that one day everyone was going to show up at the same time. But studies showed ninety percent of members will never return after signing up. Well, that was still four hundred people, so we stayed busy. But the main reason people came to our club was not the weather or inability to ski—it was the name that went up on the marquee six weeks before opening: “Richard Simmons Anatomy Asylum.”
Richard himself owned it, came to the club, called on a regular basis, and checked in both on the phone or in person. This was during the height of his popularity, and no one ever, ever could change the life of a depressed, overweight woman like Richard. A master.
Of the piddling of men at the club, one came to my advanced class then spent an hour on the lifecycle: John. John was sixty-three. I remember because I thought how disturbingly old he was, four years older than my own dad at the time, and he bounced in and outpaced the BC running backs. This guy was good. Tall, thin, grey curly hair, a club sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off. Way too cool for Central Massachusetts I thought.
When you’re twenty-four years old, someone sixty-three is almost dead.
I’d wander about the club talking to members, making sure they were doing okay. I’d observe classes, sit on the floor in the back taking notes, listening to my favorite music, laughing with everyone as the instructor joked. In my office I filled out forms for everyone. One of the questions we always asked was “What are you goals?” Some were straight forward: Get in shape; lose one-hundred-fifty pounds; get out of the house; daycare; an hour of him not yelling at me; an hour of peace and quiet—and really loud music.
John said to me after staring at me with a Sam Elliot smile, “I’m not going to tell you. They’re my goals. I hope that’s alright.”
There was something about his increased time in the studio, on the bike, his quicker step, his friendlier attitude toward other members, that somewhere inside he was satisfied he had been reaching his goals, whatever they were.
Damn, it was a great job. I’d sign up people or work with members who requested nutritional counseling. I’d take lunch at Papa Ginos a few buildings away or Christo’s Italian Restaurant across the road. I’d joke with Andrea, the other manager, with Melissa, the clerk, and the fourteen instructors ranging from overweight to transparent. I was the only guy. In fact, except for two guys in LA and Dan the regional manager, I was the only guy working for Richard in the entire Asylum network.
I couldn’t wait to go to work. At home I was walking all the time, quick hikes to the summit of Mt. Wachusett, runs around the reservoir. My typewriter was on my kitchen table, and I would write while I cooked, after I ran, before I hiked. Energy is right, but something else; something even chemical maybe. Everything clicked.
Then I left. Different story. Life happened until about five years ago when I left a job I held for thirty years. Not long later I was prescribed medicine with a primary side effect of weight gain and depression—and by the way, I nailed both of them. Went through some traumatic experiences, slept more or not at all, fumbled through some editing, started and quit a dozen projects, until last night when I had shrimp for dinner. That brings me to today.
Except for one thing.
About three weeks ago I was sitting down near the river. It was hot, and I had been at the store so instead of driving up to the house, I parked at the river and sat on the rocks watching the river run by.
There are moments you remember all your life. If we were even conscious enough to know what was happening, we’d anticipate them, but we’re not; we tend to careen into them. I sat on the rocks and realized everything has to change. All of it. It was like a valve opened up in my brain, or a switch I had accidently tapped off clicked back on.
And for some bizarre reason I thought of John. I suppose I had been thinking about the past and when I was in the best shape of my life, which made me think of John; John, the sixty-three-year-old dude from the club, He popped into my mind for the first time in thirty-nine years.
Thirty-nine years.
Yes, I did the math right there on the rocks: that would make him one-hundred-two years old if he were alive, which, I suppose, is possible for the shape he was in. That time then, those days at Richard’s, don’t seem so long ago to me, they really don’t. I can recall events like they happened Tuesday, and please don’t even look at me if Wham comes on the radio. Seriously, I know life goes by fast, but those days were right there, just over the edge of time, like those days are just up the beach a bit.
The thing is, I’m the same age now as John was then. The distance from my days then to now is the same time frame as now to when I’m one-hundred-two years old.
It truly stopped me in my tracks at the river. Even the heron looked at me like, “You okay?”
Everything. Diet, movement, prescriptions, work ethic, the time I spend on myself, the time I spend volunteering to help others; the time I spend. How I spend the time.
That moment at the river was fifteen pounds and six-miles-a-day ago. But it’s not enough. I know this because I know inside what my goals are, and I’m headed that way for the same reason people came into the club to change their lives to begin with: they just decided to.
Yeah, I have goals. But I’m not going to tell you what they are. They’re my goals. I hope that’s alright.
a view from this wilderness 