Totalitarianism Must Be Throttled in Its Crib! So I Am Starting a New Gym!

The fight for freedom begins in the squat rack.

Dear Fellow Mannyheads,

Today I discontinued my membership with Manny’s Fitness. This is not a decision made lightly or in haste. For over six years, Manny’s has been my home away from home, a place that offered solace in times of sadness and fellowship in times of joy. It is no exaggeration to say that my relationship with the dedicated staff, the local toughs with whom I shared a locker room, and the other “Mannyheads” who grudgingly allowed me to “work in” on the fly machine have been the most rewarding in my life. I joined Manny’s for the gains, but I gained something I never expected: friendship.

2020 has been a challenge for me, as it has been for many of you. Who among us has gone untouched? As the coronavirus ravaged the country and the world, I clung to whatever shreds of normalcy remained, including my daily trips to Manny’s. Hand sanitizer grew scarce and toilet paper disappeared from the store shelves, forcing some of us to become creative in the realm of bathroom hygiene. Neighbors who once tolerated my friendly chit-chat and gadflyish remarks about the goings-on about the apartment building shunned me for health reasons. Through it all, there was Manny’s.

So when I woke up on March 27 to an email from Assistant Manager Josh alerting all Manny’s members that the gym would be shutting down by order of the city, I was crushed, as I imagine many of you were. Up to that point, I had been able to convince myself that all of this was a temporary setback, that we would return to normal in a matter of weeks. But the email from “Assistant Mannyger” Josh (as I often called him to his face) shattered this illusion.

You might be surprised to learn that fitness was the furthest thing from my mind that day. How would I keep my abs taut and lean? Would the hillocks of my shoulders maintain their shape through the crisis, or would they shrivel like yesterday’s birthday balloons? Could I get in a rigorous legs day using only household objects as weights? I was not troubled by these questions. Rather, I worried about the decay of the little social world that was Manny’s, the sweat-fueled demimonde I had come to think of as my home down the street from home. I thought of Carla, the wry, tattooed cardio enthusiast. Over the years we had developed a little inside joke where she pretended not be able to hear me through her headphones. I’d scream “HEY CARLA LOOKING GOOD SWEAT IT OUT GIIIIIIIIIIRL!” and she wouldn’t react at all. I would laugh as I walked past her to go chop it up with the Boys at the squat racks, knowing that she was waiting until I was out of sight to chuckle at our “bit.” The Boys would rib me, telling me that I “really need to leave Carla alone, it’s not cool,” and I would wink at them. Male camaraderie!

The Boys and I had our little jokes too, like how they “wouldn’t spot me,” no matter how desperately I called out for help. Even as I sank to the ground, unable to support the weight of the bar balanced precariously on my shoulders, even as I struggled to keep my legs underneath me and the bar began to roll forward, threatening to put hundreds of pounds of pressure on the back of my neck and send me face first into the floor, the Boys stood looking stoically on. But I always managed, using my last ounce of strength, to buck the weights forward, sending them crashing and clattering as the whole gym turned to see me, once again, splayed out on the ground, my legs and back burning with exertion and my chest heaving. As the Boys exchanged mock-disgusted glances with each other, I would weakly raise my arm and give them a thumbs-up. They knew what I didn’t know: I didn’t need help. I just needed to dig deeper, to find that extra gear. They had faith in me, and that gave me faith in myself.

So was my dedication to Manny’s about fitness? Not at all. It was about the relationships.

As the months of lockdown wore on, I suffered for lack of those relationships. Granted, I was lucky enough to avoid the virus. But there were times, dark times, when I actually wished for infection. At least then, I thought, I would be hospitalized. In the serene white light of the hospital, I could count on the ministrations of the heroic doctors and nurses who would tend to my fever, inquire about my hacking cough, and shepherd me through horrifying paranoid hallucinations. And what is a hospital but a fitness center by another name? What is a nurse but an assistant manager of the body?

I contemplated barging into an old folks home, which I had learned were sites of massive outbreaks of the virus. Once inside, I would rip off my mask and implore the elderly residents, one by one, to cough directly into my mouth. Surely they would be happy to see a young, vital (though mildly atrophied) young person in their midst. They could at least let me sit in their midst as I huffed up the clouds of their (with any luck) coronavirus-infested exhalations. It seemed like a foolproof plan, and I got to the point of searching for facilities near my home until I found one that seemed like it had lax security. But as I approached the front door of the anonymous brick building, something held me back. What I really wanted wasn’t a trip to the hospital. It was my Mannyheads.

I tried to abide by the safety guidelines, leaving my apartment only for masked trips to the grocery store and minimal outdoor exercise, as mandated. I had agreed when friends and family members told me they could no longer see me in person for health reasons. No, not even outdoors in the park, to be extra-safe. My days were spent shuffling between bedroom, living room, and bathroom, performing whatever remote work tasks had to be done, and bingeing entertainment. I told myself I was doing this not only for myself but for the common good.

In the early days, I would swing by Manny’s on my daily jog, hoping that maybe it had received some sort of special exception from the Governor, or maybe to catch an employee going in or out on the way to or from accomplishing some maintenance task. But all I ever saw was the grimace of the metal grate pulled down over the gym’s large front window. Eventually, I adjusted my jogging route to avoid the gym rather than remind myself of the pain of Manny’s absence.

You can imagine how I felt, then, when I received the email from Assistant Manager Josh announcing that the Governor was allowing gyms to re-open at reduced capacity. You do not need to imagine it. You felt it yourselves when you read the email, I’m sure. I am not ashamed to admit that I cried. I doubt I was the only one.

As the reopening date approached, I prepared myself, ordering new lifting shoes, wrist straps, pre- and post-workout supplements, a water bottle, a self-massaging device, ankle weights, foam rollers, and, of course, a dozen new masks embroidered with inspiring slogans like “Take it to the max!” and “No pain, no gain.” As I envisioned myself again taking up my position as a pillar of the Manny’s community, I felt a long-lost sense of purpose swell and burst in my chest, as though a future I thought dead had suddenly stirred back to life.

Finally, the day arrived. I had taken off work as though obligated by some obscure religious tradition, which, in a sense, I was. It was still dark when I approached Manny’s. The metal gate was up. Soft light glowed inside the lobby, and after a minute I saw the figure of Assistant Manager Josh descending the stairs leading from the check-in desk and the gym proper to the ground level. He unlocked the door, took a few steps backward to allow for proper social distancing, and beckoned me in. He held a digital thermometer up to my forehead, muttered “Welcome back,” and then trudged back upstairs. It was Assistant Manager Josh’s way to be taciturn and withholding with me—another little joke!—and his frosty greeting gave me a tingle of nostalgia.

It hadn’t occurred to me that not many of the old crew would arrive when Manny’s opened at 5:00 AM, and so, except for Assistant Manager Josh and one or two other employees, I was there alone. When I ascended the stairs and entered the main area, I was shocked to see the arrangement of the equipment changed. It felt emptier. It was emptier. Half of the equipment was gone, and the rest was distributed around the room in little islands, so that one would ever be near another person while working out.

Almost as surprising as the new physical of the arrangement of the place was the decor. On the walls, covering over the various encouragements and exercise-related slogans were large signs that said things like “Minimum of Six Feet between Members at All Times” and “Masks MUST Be Worn at All Times” and “Members MUST Wipe Down Machines or Risk Suspension.” They were positioned such that there was no way to avoid them. No matter where you turned, there was always one in your line of sight. I walked over to a bench and began to stretch, feeling unsettled but unsure as to why. Of course, given the dangers of virus transmission, these were reasonable policies. But there was something obscene about the new order of the outside world penetrating into the hallowed ground of Manny’s.

After a few minutes, other members showed up. Even with their masks on, I recognized a few of them and walked over. I tried to wave to one, Greg, a tallish guy whose workout attire consisted almost entirely of free t-shirts from industry conventions. He was a sometime member of the Boys, and I used to razz him about not getting a full invite to the “cool kids’ table,” which he pretended not to get. I tried to smile at Greg with my eyes, but before I could even take a couple steps in his direction, he pointed at one of the social distancing signs and stared at me in a way that indicated he was taking the new directives very seriously. I waved at him and returned to my stretches.

That was the way it went for my first session at Manny’s. While some people greeted each other or chatted as they stood at their islandized workout zones, they were quite adamant that I was to maintain a more-than-safe distance from them. At some point, I decided to concentrate on my workout and put in my earbuds. After I finished my last set of planks, I packed up my gear and walked toward the exit, stopped and considered saying goodbye to Greg, but thought better of it and went home.

I returned to Manny’s the next day and every day after that, and the same pattern repeated itself. Where there was once a symphony of shouts and encouragements and friends exchanging salutations, now only the clanking of weights and grunts of exertion broke up the anonymous electronic music pumping through the sound system. Wry, tattooed Carla appeared one day and hopped on a treadmill to warm up. When I blurted out my customary greeting, rather than pretending to ignore me, she glared and pointed at one of the minimum distance signs. This confused me at first, because I was well over six feet away from her. I was practically halfway across the gym. Paolo, one of the Boys, was working his triceps on a pulley machine, and I looked over at him, trying to communicate my bewilderment, but he too pointed at the sign.

Many of you will know what I’m talking about. The place has changed, and not for the better. Perhaps it was naive of me to expect any aspect of life to continue as normal while a deadly pandemic raged. But I found the changes inside Manny’s bewildering, as I imagine at least some of you did. Sure, there were always rules, but you were rarely aware of them. Most of them weren’t written down. They were the sort of social codes that emerge organically when any group of people gathers regularly. I began to suspect that all of those signs, with their stark, oppressive lettering, were affecting the character of the gym. The constant reminder of the rules began subtly to transform the Manny’s community into a bunch of mindless followers whose concern with rules outstripped the more worthwhile enterprise of building human relationships.

Let me be clear, then: I am not leaving Manny’s over any dispute with the content of the rules. Safety should always be a priority in a gym, where carelessness can result in serious injury. My dispute is with the manner of enforcement. The mandatory temperature checks seem innocuous enough, but they signal that the Manny’s community member is entering a zone where not just compliance but obedience is required. When I tried pointing this out to my fellow Mannyheads, screaming at them (from a safe distance) that this was an untenable sacrifice of liberty in the name of security, they did nothing but point at the sign and make the “shoo now” gesture with their hands.

Do I blame them? I do not. The people I encountered post-pandemic, before I broke ties with Manny’s, those people I used to call, despite their joking discomfort with the word, my “friends”? Is it there fault? It is not. Some of them (you) are almost certainly reading this email. I do not blame you for the overwhelming sense of hostility I felt when entering the gym. I do not blame you for wondering how I got access to the Manny’s members mailing list. Such things are not important. You have been bombarded with propaganda tantamount to brainwashing. It’s not your fault. It is Manny’s. The stark red Manny’s logo which was once an icon of freedom has been subverted by tyranny. Manny’s, that once stood for all that was righteous and wild and freewheeling. Manny’s, repository of my dreams and possessor of my membership deposit. Manny’s, you bastards, it was you who turned them all against me, and as I paid monthly, so will you pay a thousandfold.

TOTALITARIANISM MUST BE THROTTLED IN ITS CRIB! SO I AM STARTING A NEW GYM!

My new gym WILL be housed in the basement of my landlord Andrezj’s residential-zoned property on Box Street. And yes, I did tell him that it was for personal use, so it is imperative that if Andrezj asks you who you are or why you are there or why so many people are always coming in and out of the building, you either insist that you are a personal friend of mine (because you are) or walk briskly away and take a few turns around a neighboring block before checking if the coast is clear and entering the gym.

My new gym WILL have a masks-optional policy. It will have an everything-optional policy. In its fight against those aiding and abetting repressive state power (see above), my gym will not enforce a one-size-fits-all PPE or clothing policy. THEREFORE, while masks are recommended, they are not required. While clothing (short, sweats, t-shirts, tank tops, etc.) are recommended, to require them would be an undue burden on personal liberty. As both the owner and a member of the gym, I plan to explore many combinations (masked and fully clothed, masked and no clothes, a shirt but no mask and no shorts, etc.), and I encourage you to do the same.

My new gym WILL host a book club. Readings will be selected by ME, and they WILL leave you inspired. First up: ECKHART TOLLE.

My gym WILL be open 24/7. If you come in for a late night workout and find me sleeping on a bench, do not worry about waking me. The grunts and screams of personal exertion are like lullabies to me.

My gym WILL be open 24/7, you can seriously drop by whenever you want.

My gym WILL be open 24/7, don’t feel like you have to work out while you’re here. We can just hang out and shoot the shit.

My gym WILL be open 24/7, because liberty never sleeps.

I would ask you all to sign up for my new gym, but I have already pre-registered you, my fellow former Mannyheads. I will be in my new gym, awaiting your arrival, thinking of the better days behind us, when we communed in peace, and the better days ahead, when we can rekindle what we lost.

Yours,

Mark