As a Person With Overweight (PWO), one corner-cutting trick I use is taking frequent shvitzes at the sauna that my gym has. If you stay in there for an unsafe amount of time, you can lose a few pounds in water weight. I used this shortcut before my last (and first!) modeling gig, in 2005. (To lose enough weight to just look “fat” and not “obese” when I modeled for my company’s in-store magazine and posters. Of course I couldn’t drink any water all day at the shoot in order to stay dry-thin, and I passed out a couple of times, but that’s the sacrifice you make for art.)
So on the wall outside my gym’s men’s sauna they have this weird and long-winded sign prohibiting “inappropriate conduct” in the sauna. The sign says it won’t be tolerated, and this “inappropriate conduct” could lead to membership cancellation or even criminal prosecution. They spout all this quasi-legalese, but they are not specific about what constitutes inappropriateness. It’s mysterious.
But I think I know what conduct they’re talking about. They’re talking about the crazy people who talk to you in the sauna.
Like with buses or train cars, there are two kinds of saunas: Quiet ones and talky ones. Serious saunaists do not talk, myself included. It is so infernally hot in there, you have to concentrate on not passing out; there is no mindspace left for gabbing, even about the superboring shit men want to talk about, such as sports, work or weather. You can’t concentrate on not passing out from boredom AND not passing out from extreme dry heat at the same time.
The other day I’m in there shvitzing silently alone when I am joined by a man who sits on the lower level of the wood slatted benches. That’s gross, that’s where serious saunaists put their feet because we sit on the upper bench because heat rises and we want to sweat, dammit, and feet are gross, why would you put your bare butt on the foot surface? What is wrong with him?
The silence with another person makes him uncomfortable. After about 5 hot minutes he clears his throat and says, in this 1950s radio-reporter-type voice, “EXCUSE ME. Um, excuse me? Is it true saunas are beneficial to your health, or not? What’s the point of a sauna?” He chortles nervously and waits for my answer. I take my time answering him.
“I don’t know, but they say talking in saunas can cause cardiac arrest. You’re supposed to keep your mouth closed at all times and breath shallow.”
I make a zipping motion with my hand across my mouth, and give him a schoolmarmish nod, like, Get it?
“You can definitely die if you talk,” I say to drive the point home once more. Then I quickly, exaggeratedly smack my marionette mouth shut, point at my shallow-breathing chest, shrug—and enjoy the renewed silence. After a few, I take a big swig of my epsom-salts-infused water. It helps speed the water loss, because it’s a diuretic.
Then another guy comes in, a normal saunaist (like me) with a newspaper, and he sits over on the other side. I don’t even give him a cursory nod as he enters, and he doesn’t give me one either, because we’re serious men, not chatty little jerks like EXCUSE ME guy over here, who by the way is now focused on his shallow breathing.
But then our temporary idyll is spoiled, as they always are in the sauna, by the entrance of a circus freak.
I had noticed him out by the showers: Shaved bald, lots of piercings and tattoos, a doughy caucasian. But the real disturbance was his nails. All ten of his nails—on his fingers and toes—had black paint outlines around them, suggesting he had recently had black nail polish on his fingernails AND toenails.
I knew he was going to be an inappropriate-conduct person from the second he walked in, because he gestured questioningly at a big open space on the bench, asking permission with his body language to sit there. No one has to ask permission to sit down in the sauna. Not even crazy/smelly inappropriate ones. If they are too offensive, everyone just gets up and leaves them in humiliated aloneness to contemplate their shame and how it feels to be a pariah. But no one’s ever, in front of me, denied anyone access to the sauna. So right away this guy doesn’t know the rules to obey. Danger.
He’s seated to my right, EXCUSE ME is seated below me and to the left, and newspaper normal guy is across from the three of us. Circus freak looks around a lot, trying to make eye contact with someone, anyone. Strike two! I’m actually counting down as I wait for the inevitable:
Circus freak says, too loudly, “Hey, have any of you guys heard of Business International Corporation?”
I fudge a lot of details in my stories, to protect the innocent, mostly, so it bears pointing out: Those were the real words he used. Even though it sounds fake.
I sigh really, really loudly. There is a pause. Of course EXCUSE ME is too afraid of dying to open his mouth, and I even give him a look of warning to remind him to keep it zipped. So it falls on normal newspaper guy to lance this boil of uncomfortableness, and hopefully to punish this breach of all sauna etiquette.
“Um, no. What is it?” he asks politely.
Circus freak is visibly excited to begin the masturbatory monologue he has transparently come in here to get off his chest. His fat, pasty, nipple-pierced chest.
“Well, funny you should ask! A lot of people haven’t heard of it, but it’s about time they did, because it just so happens to be the first place Barack Obama worked after he graduated from law school. Didn’t know that, did you? It is an offshoot of the CIA, and it funds the training of assassins, right-wing assassins, offshore, using our taxpayer money. But most of the presidents have worked at some time another for or with BI, it’s…”
“Wait, where did you hear all this?” interrupts normal newspaper guy.
“I heard about it in the news media,” responds circus freak with a pat air of of-courseness that doesn’t match the weird abstractness of his supposed source. As though this were a real, day-to-day conversation among earthlings and not a tedious exercise in black-toenailed circus freak mumbo-jumbo.
“Like, can you be more specific?”
“I read about it in the ANTI Press.” A small, local free paper.
“OK, well, I’m sure you’re aware that the ANTI Press is, um, well I’ve found they tend toward paranoid conspiracy theories.”
Normal newspaper guy was now my hero for calmly and deftly shutting down, or trying to, circus conspiracy freak.
EXCUSE ME cannot stand sitting this nonsense out anymore, and also does not appreciate the slandering of our first black president (EXCUSE ME happens to be black). “Now hold up, you’re trying to say Barack Obama trains assassins in a school?”
“No,” says circus freak with the studied calm manner of an insane conspiracy theorist trying to talk some sense into non-believers. “I’m saying he works with the assassination schools, and that’s part of why he hasn’t been assassinated yet himself, because he’s in league with Business International Corporation and the CIA.”
Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It is two sanes against one non-sane now (since I am abstaining), and I have had enough. Circus conspiracy says, “I mean, Obama is really just a, he’s a… like a porch monkey for the CIA!”
I stand up and stomp out the wooden door to avoid the inevitable outcry that CC will face for his use of the ill-advised term “porch monkey”… and I quickly shower, dress, and proceed directly to the front desk of the health club.
“Hi,” I say briskly to the desk attendant, giving her my most indignant glare. “I’m not sure how to tell you this, but there is some inappropriate conduct going on in the men’s sauna right now, and it made me so upset I had to leave. I hope you will do something about it, pronto, or I may be forced to cancel my membership.”
The woman looks stunned, and begins apologizing intently and with real, distressed emotion. As I turn to leave her face is frozen on “horrified” and she has the manager on the phone and I can hear her saying something about trouble in the men’s sauna. I shake my head hard and keep giving her the indignant look. She scurries back to talk face-to-face with the manager.
Good.
I say prosecute the insane sauna talkers to the fullest extent of the law. This is not a game. It is time to crack down on inappropriate behavior in our saunas before someone dies.
Tags: Barack Obama, Conspiracy Theories, Saunas