The Locker Room

When I was six years old, my family joined the local "Racquet and Swim" club. For a monthly fee, we had full use of the basketball half-court, the unlevel tennis courts, the chilly swimming pool divided into lap lanes and the urine-scented hot tub. High luxury.

But the worst moment of each visit was right before we entered the locker rooms. I waved goodbye to my sisters, hugged my mom and grimaced as my father gently placed a hand on my shoulder. I knew too well the horrifying breed that waited for me--pantless and spread-eagle--inside.

Old men who belong to a neighborhood health club such as this one, have let their bodies depreciate long before their doctors decide it's time for them to join a gym. After the mandatory aerobics classes, group tennis lessons and cool-down stretches, these men wanted nothing more than a long hot shower. In their efforts to tone-up bodies that cheeseburgers and gravity have spent decades folding over and weighing down, the first pounds they shed seemed to contain all their notions of shyness and human decency. A 70-year old bare male bottom is more startling to a young boy's eyes than any woman's breasts will ever be.

But the cruelest part was my father's guiding hand. He led me straight into that house of horrors. The knobby joints, the wrinkles, the moles, the genitalia in varying stages of contact with cold water and the hair everywhere; the slapping sounds of old men lathering their sagging chests and powdering their buttocks, it was a strange world all it's own. And daddy--trusted reader of bedtime stories and buyer of hot pretzels--led me there. He dropped his trousers, stuffed mine in a locker without telling me the combination and told me, "No son, leave your towel outside the shower room."

My theory is this: it was all a biology lesson. My father was showing (not telling) me what happens when you grow up. Your penis gets bigger. It hangs down and looks weird covered in soap foam. Your toes grow hair and your toenails turn yellow. You also may lose some hair on your head and get a knot of black curls on your chest. My dad just didn't have the cojones (pardon the pun) to explain anything to me.

He could have said, "This is what a man's naked body looks like. That over there is what an old man looks like naked. Notice the muscle degeneration and that weird thing on his shoulder." I could have said, "I see, I see. And when will I sprout armpit hair, dear father?" These are important things for a young boy to know. They stimulate the developing mind. We could have had an intellectual discussion over a glass of chocolate milk.

Instead I was stood there under the hot spray of water, barefoot, bare-bottomed and stepping over lines of soap scum on the grey tiled floor, wondering:

Will I look like that one day?

Will mine hang crooked like that?

Why are those hairs so dark when his head is all white?

Yes.

Probably.

And Dad doesn't know.