Father's Day by Philip Galanes

Author:Philip Galanes [Galanes, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307425881
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIVE

A Threadbare Towel

THE CABBY GETS ME to the Downtown Club at last. I pay him handsomely for the ride, with a hefty tip to assuage my guilt for snapping at him earlier, when he sat like a lump at the green lights, going nowhere. The overtipping doesn’t make me feel much better though, and I don’t hear even a hint of gratitude when he counts out my change for me.

I close the car door and run across the street to a small brick building on the other side. Jog up a flight of stairs, quick as a bunny. It’s right here on the second floor, the very spot where the Ginger Mann Studio used to be—the original aerobics studio in New York City, the granddaddy of them all. Turns out I’ve been coming to the Downtown Club for years. Fifteen at least, long before it was the Downtown Club.

I dash into the foyer where I once paid for the privilege of high kicking to Evelyn “Champagne” King. Eight dollars, I think it cost back then, and worth every penny too. The foyer looks just the same now—windowless and dark—except for the little booth, fronted in Plexiglas—that’s new.

A cashier sitting inside.

I pay almost twice as much now for high kicks of an entirely different nature here. Fifteen dollars, evenings and weekends. I don’t like to think about the people who come here during the day. It’s still worth every penny though, and the soundtrack’s just about the same.

There’s no line tonight too. That’s lucky!

When there’s a line here—on a Saturday night, say, when hordes of men stand waiting to be let in—there’s time to think about what you’re doing. Time enough—as you snake through a line weaving this way and that—for you to realize you’re the sort of person who’ll have sex with a stranger in a cubby no bigger than a fitting room at Bergdorf Good-man. It’s not just flying up Sixth Avenue then and roaring up a flight of stairs, not just slipping inside either, all in a flash, as if you’d been propelled by steam somehow other than your own. No, on a Saturday night, after you’ve waited and waited, you’re the one who got you here.

But there’s no line tonight. I’ll be inside in a jiffy.

When the Ginger Mann Studio closed, the wide-open aerobics room—an ocean of glossy wooden floor—was reconfigured into a warren of tiny cubbies. A series of a hundred little tombs, all with chipboard walls from floor to ceiling and doors that locked up tight, all lined up one after another in a labyrinth of dead-end paths. Every tiny cubby with its own small mattress. Every mattress covered over with a cheap, fitted sheet. A hard, foam pillow like a cherry on top. The sunny white walls of Ginger Mann were all painted dark, dark brown. The corridors black as night now, even the windows painted out. Overhead lights turned down low, as low as you can go and still call it light. The cubbies, the passageways, the darkness—et voilà! Aerobics studio as bathhouse.

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