The DAC

I’ve been working out at the Downtown Athletic Club this week on a free pass. The DAC is a rich man’s club, and I had misgivings about going there. I was raised very strongly to believe that, on the one hand, there were rich people and, on the other hand, there was everyone else; and that what was on the first hand was better. My parents taught me this without beating around the bush about it, but I also got it at school where everyone—teachers included—deferred to the rich kids.

I thought about this when I got that free pass, and I worried that I would stand out poorly (I guess that was almost a pun). But one truth was that I had used up my free pass to the poor man’s gym (Oakway), and another truth was that I quite enjoy Jacuzzis, saunas, steam rooms, and swimming pools; especially when they’re free.

My father—and probably my mother—would not have known what a sauna or a Jacuzzi was. They might have heard the words at some point, but the words would have meant nothing to them. I even get them mixed up a little because some people call a Jacuzzi a spa or else a hot tub. I’ve settled on calling it a Jacuzzi, so I won’t have to think about which word to use.

I was quite curious what the DAC would be like, i.e. what does the rich man’s gym have that the poor man’s gym lacks. Well, it has a lot, so much in fact that it would take me a while to list it all. Their website (www.downtownac.com) lists a lot of it, but doesn’t really do the place justice. Mostly, I was curious about how I would get on with all the rich people since I haven’t known a lot of rich people and haven’t liked the ones I did know. My father’s boss was rich, and I hated that man because he was a deacon at the First Baptist Church, but he didn’t extend his Christian principals to his employees. Like a lot of Southern Baptists, he considered tithing as a ticket to heaven that excused greed in other areas. But the worst rich people I’ve known were the ones who inherited their money because they grew up thinking they were entitled to it, and that having it made them better than everyone else.

You might say I went to the DAC with a bad attitude, but I also went with a curious attitude. Right off, I learned a lot that I didn’t know about rich people. Some of it I would have known had I thought about it, but I actually spend almost no time thinking about rich people. To begin with, rich men and poor men look remarkably alike when they’re naked. Rich or poor, the young ones look like gods, and the old ones look like dried figs.

Upon making this observation, I started trying to think of a way to tell naked rich people from naked poor people, and I thought that maybe I could do it by listening to what they talked about. What I discovered is that the people at the DAC aren’t as friendly as the people at Oakway, so they don’t talk as much. I can’t say for sure that this is true of all of them, but I can say that it is generally true. Yet, some of them do talk, and I do listen. So far, they’ve mostly kvetched. For example, a couple of them were bummed about hearing cell phones going off in the locker room; and others complained about how slick the drive is from the South Hills, the part of town where the rich people live. I agreed with them about the cell phones, but I thought the other was an odd complaint because the streets coming out of the South Hills are at a thirty degree angle, and that part of town gets a lot of ice—things they would have known when they moved there.

The first person who I spoke to at the DAC who didn’t work there was Peter DeFazio. I didn’t know at first that he was Peter DeFazio because he was looking the other way. What happened was that my woman tour guide had told me that there was a way to get from the men’s locker room to the pool without having to go through the main hallway. She couldn’t very well take me into the men’s locker room to show me where the door was, so once I changed into my swimsuit, I started looking for it. The locker room is huge, and I walked around it twice without finding the door, so I asked this fellow who was getting dressed to point me in the direction of the pool. He turned around, and damned if it wasn’t United States Congressman, Peter DeFazio.

DeFazio campaigns on being a man of the people. He refuses pay raises, dresses ordinary, and drives a 1963 Dodge Dart. As soon as I saw him in the DAC, I felt like I’d been had. Like maybe the Dodge is just a prop, and maybe he turns down pay raises because he’s so stinking rich that the extra money wouldn’t mean anything. I mean here’s a man who is in D.C. much of the year, yet he has a membership at the DAC! Well, maybe someone gave it to him for all I know, but seeing him there made me wonder what he is really like, and it reminded me that no one can be taken at face value. All these years, I wondered when I would see DeFazio riding around town in his Dodge, and now I doubt that I will. I had really believed in him, you might say, and now I’m reminded that even I—with all my cynicism—can be taken.

But back to what I’ve learned about rich people…. Another interesting aspect of rich people is that they lose their keys a lot. I know this because I lose my keys a lot, so when I went to the desk to ask if anyone had seen the key to my padlock, the woman pulled out a box and started going through it while I described my key as best I could remember it. I couldn’t see the box because of a counter that was in the way, so I kept talking, and she kept looking, and I thought that, golly, this is taking a lot of time—what is wrong with this picture? Right away I knew, so I leaned way over so I could see what was in the box, and it was LOADED with keys, and there was my old rusty padlock key right on top. As I walked away, I wondered why she hadn’t put the box up where we could both go through it. All I could think was that rich people don’t like looking for their keys—they had rather pay someone to do it even if it takes longer.

The people who work at the DAC are all very nice. I get greeted coming, and I receive warm wishes going. There are also a lot of employees. There has to be because rich people use as many towels in a day as most of the people in Ecuador use in a year. They need two for the steam room, two more for the sauna, one for the pool, one for the shower, one for the Jacuzzi, one when they shave, and so forth. I really have a hard time making myself use more than two towels, and I only use that many so I will have one to sit on and one to lean back on when I am in the sauna or the steam room.

I like to look out through the windows when I am in those rooms. I watch naked guys use the urinals, which isn’t really all that interesting except maybe to a gay man, but when there’s nothing else to look at, I look at whatever is moving. I also watch loads of towels being wheeled away, and tall stacks of neatly folded towels being put in their place. I suspect that there are employees at the DAC who do nothing but stock towels.

I would join the DAC if it didn’t cost so much. For my purposes the poor man’s gym would serve as well, and it is a lot friendlier; but the DAC is closer to home. It is no more than fifteen blocks away, whereas the Oakway is too far away to count all the blocks. I would have to bike clean across the Willamette to get there, and while I can make the trip in about fifteen minutes, it is farther than I enjoy biking in the dark and the rain, and alongside one of Eugene’s busiest and noisiest streets at that.

Tonight, as I sat all alone in the sauna, I thought about how I could offset the cost of joining the DAC, and all I could come up with was stealing towels and reselling them, or else breaking into lockers. I wouldn’t really do either of these things, but my mind runs to crime quite readily when I am looking for a solution to a problem. This trait is so strong in me that I have trouble believing that everyone isn’t this way, although I know that Peggy isn’t, and that she is sorry I am.

But to return yet again to things I’ve learned about rich people…rich people are damn good swimmers. I had never paid much attention to people swimming, but when I was in the Jacuzzi yesterday, some young men were in the pool, and as I watched their powerful and confident strokes, I thought to myself that here is beauty. Rich women are good swimmers too, but women swimmers are like women in a lot of sports in that they can be good, even great, but they can never develop the raw power of a man. Women look their best walking or standing (or lying). Men look their best when they are engaged in athletics. I say this even though I suspect that women probably make better distance swimmers than men because women float better.

I’m afraid that my own swimming is not up to DAC standards because the only stroke I’m confident in is the dog paddle, and no one but me does it. I figure I’m as good as a lot of dogs at dog paddling (my hands and feet being broader than their paws), but my breaststroke is bastardized and inefficient, and I worry that my sidestroke is a tad off too. As for that other stroke, the one that people first picture when they think about swimming—the crawl, I think it is—I don’t even attempt that because it wears me out, and I splash so much that someone might try to rescue me.

The pools (yes, there are two) are in the basement, and people on the upper levels can look down at me, and people on the sidewalk can look in. If I worried all that much about how I look swimming, I wouldn’t swim at all, but I don’t worry, so I swim a lot. I’ll start out with ten minutes in the Jacuzzi, ten minutes in the pool, ten minutes in the steam room, ten more minutes in the pool, and then ten minutes in the sauna. After all this, I feel like I’ve been kicked in the head, but in a good way. It’s amazing how much difference even a little bit of the right activities can make. I leave the DAC as mellow as if I had gotten a massage.

I mentioned to Peggy that one of the things I don’t like about gyms is that I come into such close contact with other people’s bodies, partly because a lot of nude people take turns sitting on the same surfaces (sometimes on towels, sometimes not). She was greatly surprised that men use the sauna and steam room—and walk around the locker room—naked. She thought they wrapped towels around themselves. “That’s just in the movies,” I told her, “and it’s no more real than women in the movies who step out of the shower with towels wrapped around themselves.” At least it has been my experience that men who go to gyms are not men who are shy about their bodies. Maybe women are different. Rich or poor, I’ve never heard men talk about their issues with their bodies. They might not like the way they look, but they don’t obsess about it.

Rich teenagers who come to the DAC often look like sullen street people. They pull the look off so well that I would think they were sullen street people if I saw them on the street. I wouldn’t be surprised but what they spend hundreds of dollars for pants with holes in the knees; and it strikes me as a very degrading, disgusting, degenerate, and dissolute situation when rich people go around faking poverty. They get away with it in this country because the standard of living is high, but if I were some Third World guy who was barely able to keep clothes on my back, and one of these DAC people got off the plane looking like me, I’d want to kill him. He would be worse than men who have never ridden a horse but dress like cowboys. Frigging be what you look like. At least have that much integrity. I hate affect. It’s impossible for most of us to avoid engaging in it from time to time, but I still hate it.

I feel a little of that kind of fakeness just going to the DAC. I suspect that a lot of DAC members actually have less real money than I do, and I know that if I got it into my head that I wanted to join, I could do so without the expense being a hardship. Joining the DAC would simply mean that I had less money to put into savings each month—it would not mean that I couldn’t afford something else, or that I was sliding deeper into credit card debt. But I wouldn’t fit. I would be a pretender. I’ve heard guys at Oakway Gym grouse about how the cost has gone up to $35 a month. The DAC costs something like five times that much plus $750 just to join.

Joining the DAC is not just a matter of money but of lifestyle. It’s real slate on the floor, real ceramic tile in the bathrooms, and real cherry on the walls. There’s nothing wrong with these things if you’re willing to pay for them, but I’m a pine, formica, and linoleum guy. That’s what I’m used to, and that’s what I’m happy with.

I’ve been tongue-in-cheek in a lot of what I’ve said about the DAC—sort of a taking a position of reverse snobbery—but I don’t really have anything against it. In fact, if I valued having money less, I really would join because it’s the closest gym to where I live, and it’s also the least crowded. I might even make friends there if I went enough.