National Review, June 26 1995

Manners at the Gym:

Pumping Iron—Politely

Richard Brookhiser

Mr. Brookhiser is a senior editor at NR.

A while ago I decided I needed to exercise, and so I joined a gym. Now I belong to two. The first is part of a chain, and is patronized by people much like myself: middle-to upper-middle-class professionals, almost all white. I once found a publisher I knew sitting on the next exercycle. There is a sauna, a steam room, a health-food bar. The gym offers a variety of services, from aerobics classes to baby-sitting. There is water pressure in the showers, and purple carpet on the floors. The oak lockers are minded by an old Rumanian attendant. The music on the sound system is bad rock.

My other gym is in a converted loft. The walls are battleship grey, and there is no carpet. The shower stalls look like decommissioned Port-o-Sans, and the only service offered is buzzing you in from the street at night (the gym is open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year). A sign in the locker room—which has no attendant—warns that any locks left on overnight will be sawed off. Few of the patrons work in publishing. It's hard to imagine what work they could do, except train one another, although debt collection is another possibility. I am 6a4², but I am not big. I will never be as big as they are, unless I go on an all-steroid diet. If I met any of these men—or many of these women—in an unfamiliar subway station at night, I would curse myself for not calling a car. Half the patrons are white, and half are black. The music is bad rock, at a volume that should carry a surgeon general's warning.

There are many other differences between the two gyms, but the most striking is the difference in moral atmosphere. In one you haggle over equipment. You are harassed by people who want to use the machine you're on, or you find yourself harassing others when they've been on the leg press for half an hour. You put up with narcissists flaunting their bods and flirting with their trainers. This gym has all the wear and fret of New York life, plus lactic acid in your muscles, and sweat. It is the middle-class gym. The polite gym—where everyone respects your space and no one ever carries on, the last bastion of "please" and "thank you"—is the gym of the Hulks.

There are shadings in the picture. Many of the people in the middle-class gym are quite nice, though they don't set the tone. There has also been a trickle of immigrants to the second gym (me, for instance), though in that environment we behave ourselves. Why the difference? One reason, surely, is fear. To step out of line at the second gym would be to risk serious bodily harm. I would be torn limb from limb. If two hulks ever came to blows, there would not be sudden destruction—rather something like the Cold War, or one of those sword fights in the Morte d'Arthur that last for four hours. Either way, it's simpler to be nice. Another reason is the inverse relation between size and irritability. Among dogs, the yappers are always Yorkies, the things that fit in purses and make you think of calling pest control. The St. Bernards and the Great Danes sit calmly under their vine and fig tree. The same is true of people. I imagine William Howard Taft was a very genial man. We know what Ross Perot is like.

But the most important reason for the difference is the difference in focus. Some of the people who go to the first gym do not want to work hard at all, and few of them want to work very hard. Most of them want to keep in shape, and to improve their looks somewhat. There is nothing wrong with such modest goals, but it means that they see their workouts as something they do in passing, and the momentum of where they have come from and the anticipation of where they are going runs through their time at the gym like radio waves through the ether. In a manic, exhibitionist environment like Manhattan, that means the first gym will reflect the outside world's mania and display. The first gym is the outside world, in T-shirts.

For the leaders of society in the second gym, a workout is a destination. They know what they want, and they know what they have to do to get it. They want to get huge, and that takes time and concentration. We who do not want to get so huge, in the Rome of Muscle, do as the Romans. Flirting is a distraction. There can be a certain amount of boisterous sexual joshing in Gym #2, of a kind that would call down the politeness police if it were done in a law firm, or in print, but here it isn't taken, or meant to be taken, seriously. "I could not love thee, dear, so much, loved I not free weights more" is the attitude. Another distraction is the bellows of exertion, frequently heard in Gym #1, which notify the next county that you are working really hard. But since the next county's knowledge of the level of your efforts won't make you one quarter-inch larger, such cries are forgone by the patrons of Gym #2, who do their work in silence.

Body sculpture as a project is endless. Once you become huge, then you must become differentiated, like a chart from Gray's Anatomy. Consider the fate of Arnold Schwarzenegger. He is still held in honor in the world of iron. Like Newt, he needs no last name. One trainer, who worked in Gym #1 but who belonged spiritually in Gym #2, once told me that his Austrian girlfriend—another body-builder—was from a town near a town where Arnold once lived. This was important. But the winners of competitions whose pictures fill the body-building magazines have carried the science of fine-tooling flesh beyond the point where Arnold left it when he left the gym for Hollywood, and hanging out with Republicans. Mind you, he would still look awesome if he showed up at Gym #2 to do a few supersets. But the envelope has been pushed outward, luring the body-builders on after it.

It does not lure me. My goals are humble: not dying of a heart attack when I've pressed an elevator button 15 times and the elevator is still on the sixth floor; not looking like a brittle-boned ibis when I retire. But I do more, and I dislike it a lot less, when I work out in the company of the specially dedicated.