Tuesday, April 14, 2009 | by nathan

You Smell Awful

When I tell people about my gym they sometimes ask why I continue to go there. The short answer is that they have a pool and cheaper membership dues than most other places. The long answer is that I joined in May 2007, and then in April 2008 the gym’s ownership changed and I had to go under another one-year contract, which is now almost up, allowing me, as of the end of this month, to quit at a moment’s notice with no penalties. I’m just not sure I can handle another commitment right now.

Also, the people at my gym are not those too-attractive intimidatrons that populate most workout spaces, the people who look they’ve been carved out of cream cheese and likely spend all day on the treadmill. They’re older doctors and state legislators, mostly, with just enough ridiculously attractive people thrown in to keep me running maybe that extra mile when I want to quit but have no excuse to.

Some of the people, though, my God. There’s Inappropriate Talking Guy. ITG, for short, is about 60 years old and creepy, one of those people who corners total strangers and tells them his whole fucked-up life story about his alcoholic, abusive parents, a story that is somehow woven throughout with a fair dose of conspiracy theory and really jag-tastic sexual commentary. People get cornered in the locker room or on the tradmill by ITG and immediately get this look on their faces like they’re being drowned in their own bathtubs. I avoid him at all costs. Mostly he chooses to catch young 20-25 year-old girls on their machines and talk their ears off, all while leering at them so hard it looks like his eyes are going to pop out of his skull. Every time he comes anywhere near me I give him a threatening look; so far I have yet to be cornered.

ITG has a new habit as of this week. He seems to have purchased a new 13" MacBook, and he brings it up to the workout floor, sets it in one of those plexiglas holders normally used for propping up magazines and books, and proceeds to surf the internet while on the elliptical machine. It’s weird, but he’s not surfing porn, and he’s not talking to people, so I’m content just to peer over his shoulder and see what sites he’s reading. It’s mostly CNN.

Then there’s Perfume Lady. PL arrives about 45 minutes after I do and always takes her place on the arc trainer next to me. Her face is buried so deeply in layers of makeup that she looks like someone iced her, like a wedding cake. Her hair is always perfectly tressed out in a style one assumes is meant to resemble Dido circa 2000. In her mid-40s, she purchases her workout clothes at Victoria’s Secret. One imagines she’s, oh, I dunno, maybe a Federal Judge or a world-renowned neurosurgeon.

Perfume Lady wouldn’t even cross my radar – at 160 beats per minute my thoughts are more or less restricted to "HOLY GOD WHEN WILL THIS BE OVER." Also I’m constantly doing math in my head, figuring out to the third decimal point exactly what percentage of my workout I have completed. It’s really, really hard to do long division in your head at 160 BPM. Perfume Lady has raised my ire because, as her name implies, she bathes in cheap Walgreens-brand perfume (one assumes that no sane person would pay more than a few quid to smell that awful). The gallons and gallons of perfume are a strategic measure aimed at hiding the fact that the woman smokes probably 3-4 packs a day, a fact that is betrayed not only by her yellowed fingertips but also by the fact that perfume cannot cover up cigarette smoke.

So, Perfume Lady walks around in a cloud of stink, and every morning she climbs up on the arc trainer next to mine – for some reason, always next to me – and sets the difficulty to 5 (default is 15; I do 40). Her eyes search the room for potential soul mates, or possibly just men who lost their senses of smell in childhood accidents. Her cloud chokes me; being on the machine next to her feels like having my windpipe pinched ever so slightly. Every day I work out next to her I have a headache the entire rest of the day.

So what do I do? How do I handle Perfume Lady without being a total douche? I could move machines, but see, there are only 3 arc trainers in the whole gym, and by the time she comes along I’ve usually been on the thing for 30-40 minutes and have got myself into a rhythm. The math problems are coming easier, Matt Lauer is on the TVs, moving is just not really that simple. Anyway, the furthest away I could get would be to put one empty machine between us, and the cloud is not small. This morning was particularly awful, and every time I closed my eyes I imagined myself reaching over and slapping her right off the machine and onto the ground, screaming "OH MY GOD DO YOU KNOW HOW BADLY YOU SMELL? YOU ARE CHOKING ME TO DEATH, LADY."

But I don’t. Not sure what to do, but it’s not that. In the meantime I’m going to take some sinus medication.

Health, It's Not Right But It's Okay

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