The Lugano Experience

I love the gym. 

Now for those of you reading this blog for some time, you will quickly read between the lines of that last statement and see that it is oozing with sarcasm and open scorn.

For those of you who are not familiar with the blog or are joining this soiree just a teensy bit after the first hors d’oeuvres plate has been passed, first let me say “welcome to my house, the restroom is down the hall on the left.” And secondly let me rephrase my first statement:

I love the gym – like a very bad case of testicular elephantitus.

Ok, that is a bit overstated… I am sure that having 85 pound man nuggets is somewhat tolerable. 

But, being a middle-aged fart, I realize that the gym is really necessary, makes me healthier and improves my quality of life… And truth be told, once I get in the routine I actually sort of like it – certainly more than I would enjoy having to carry my scrotum around in a wheel barrow.

The gym has been an interesting place to make observations both about Swiss culture and American culture.  For starters, the Swiss really like their gym hot.  Ok, so not sure what that says about their culture, but it certainly says something about their motivation – pushing yourself to do 40 minutes on a treadmill in 87 degree heat is something altogether different from what I am used to.  Oh, and there is no water fountain in the gym.  I guess that makes those 3 dollar water bottles not seem quite so expensive.

Something else occurred to me the other day while at the gym though about American culture.  In some ways, we are a nation of prudes…  I mean, I knew this.  But somehow it really hit home at the gym last week.

So, there I was.  I had finished the whole “iron pumping” thing with the rest of the testosterone junkies (some of the guys in the gym must be on the juice… they actually have a bale of hay in the corner for munching between sets), and I leisurely go the locker room.  It was a late work out for me, and I was going to reward myself with 15 minutes in the steam room.

I am just about to “drop trou’” when along saunters in the cleaning lady.  Yes, lady.  Now, I am thinking to myself, “hmm, that is odd – there is a locker room full of naked guys and the cleaning lady is a … a lady.  As in female.   And she is cleaning.  In the locker room full of naked guys.”  Now she must have somehow read my thoughts because she sort of looks down (I had accidentally made eye contact with her and had that almost-naked-deer-in-headlights what-to-do-now look).

The guys around me continued dressing and undressing as if she were invisible.  All the while she is dry-mopping the floor and is moving up and down the aisle while little guy parts are flapping in the wind all willy-nilly about her.  My little guy part is waiting patiently inside my work out pants until the cleaning lady finishes mopping… Since she seemed in no hurry to finish, I made a great, slow and painful effort to untie my shoe lace. One.   At.    A.    Time.

At this juncture, let me point out that this is not some matronly grandmamma that is cleaning up…  This is an early twenty-something with eyebrow and nose pierced (and god knows what else), pink / blue punk hairdo that is swabbing the decks.  I guess my point is that she was not the kind of “she” that my mind could trick me into believing has “seen it all” like I might be able to do if she were, oh, say an eighty-seven year old woman that vaguely resembled Whistler’s Mother.

After a few minutes, the Punk Mopper has finished up and has moved into the other room.  So, I seize the opportunity to get naked and wrap a towel around me in the event that she decides the give the floor a second going over.  I then hustle off to the showers.

The shower room is reasonably typical – it is a long hallway with a row of ten or so shower heads against the wall each separated by dividing doors.  Unlike the women’s locker rooms there are no doors, just partitions (not that I have seen the women’s shower room – this is the report received from my better half).  

It is during this nice rinse-off that the Punk Mopper strolls through the shower room for some undisclosed reason and “saunters” past the row of naked dudes checking them out one by one as she goes along!  And while I can’t prove this, it seems that her pace slows a bit when she gets to my stall (presumably since I didn’t give any kind of a show while she was mopping earlier).

It is at this point I realize that Americans (myself included) are way to freaked out on the whole nudity thing.  Why should I care if she sees me naked?  We are outraged by a nipple on TV (Damn you Janet Jackson!), but we will show a high school cheerleader getting her head sawed open so a crazed lunatic can pick in her brains (”Heroes”).  In converse, here you can see stripteases on late night TV with a telephone number to order some “love-to-go,” but it is much harder to find people in various stages of being dismembered by some psychopathic serial killer.

And as I rinsed off the man-smell, I remembered an earlier incident in the year -  I had decided to take a swim in the apartment swimming pool… Upon returning to the locker room, I didn’t realize that the class of elderly women had also been using the men’s change room… To my agony I walked in to find a woman bent over pulling up her skirt with four foot elongated breasts dusting the ground.  Mortified, I ran back to the pool and tried to drown myself (to no avail)…  The woman, on the other hand, merely shrugged and smiled.

I still have the nightmares.

I turned off the shower completely lost in thought and derailed from hopping into a steam room.  I realized that the Punk Mopper was not the least bit interested in all the boy parts (least of which mine, I am sure) – she was merely interested in empty shower stalls to clean.

I grabbed my towel, threw it over my shoulder and basked in my flabby, furry nakedness. 

That is, until the Punk Mopper finished cleaning up her stall.  Then I quickly wrapped my towel around my waist and scurried back to the locker room lightly humming Mellencamp’s “Pink Houses.”