Never thought I’d get inside a gym. Watching girls —and boys—on their way to the fitness center, with their high-gear suits and designer knapsacks it’s like watching cutouts from Slick magazine, if there’s such a porn mag as that, or maybe, Sex in the City minus Carrie Bradshaw. They may be black belters, can lift tons, are scouring the reefs scaling cliffs and mountain borders or the moon on weekends, but they’re not my heroes. Training in self-defense under the studio lights of some state-of-the-art fitness spa is one thing; growing spine and muscles out of the daily perils of living in the rough tracks and subways is another thing. Listen to those boxing champs, ask them where they first grew their instincts for the kill: if not on the streets it’s right in their backyards, which could be the entire stretch of Boulevard or Bankerohan Underpass. Doesn’t mean got no respect for women who do away with their hairdressers and pick weights instead; where househelps can lift everything up for you, from your comb to your pee pan, and where it’s so much easier to be a cog in the machine than to rage against it, that requires some grit and will power.
Months back, a 58-year old dyke asked me, aghast, that what, dear, you didn’t know any self-defense??? My already brittle sense of self was dashed into pieces. Around that time, I had been mostly in a vegetative state: poor memory, poor body coordinates, poor chemical balance. It was ages since I last went to swim, clambered up a tree, or hiked mountains; in fact, all I counted on was the growing flab in my middle. I suppose I got depressed with the idea that my menstruation stopped rather too early and if I said to a friend I think I'm menopausal, they’d tell me to see an obgyne, might be tumor, remember you’re over 40; and if I told them I think I needed a cancer check, they’d say, it’s just menopause, remember you’re over 40. It was demoralizing, the idea that one’s being 40s is being taken against you every which way, and by Gods, please, I’m not like anyone else okay? I don’t think of aging as an inevitable confrontation with God or reality, I grew up believing that one gets better and better as one gets older, my pitched battles are yet to be fought, shame is to be the young arrival, and now you see me falling face down and getting a black eye just for heaving two bundles of groceries across some rusty stupid gate?
Then Evir G. told me about this gym he frequents for thirty pesos per session down Jacinto Street, ground floor of Dover Lanes.
“Thirty pesos an hour?”
“Thirty pesos per session, my dear, you can live there if you like.”
Well, it isn’t your classy gym steamy with hot legs and men’s mag cover types. In fact it’s so lower-income group, so working class, or maybe just working-hard class, across the board and across borders, that diverse crop whose common denominator is they feel shy or sneer at the idea of going with the yuppies in the fitness clubs uptown at Marco Polo or Torres Street, maybe akin to that section in the sex spas a gay friend in California calls the urinal where the fat unattractive faggots like him are dumped to help themselves to each other or unto themselves, except that in this case, you know that the people who are with you are way over the urinals and are down there mostly for themselves, for the one body they are left with and have to love for the rest of their lives. The equipments are a little run-down with not a timer still working, the locker room not so tidy, the comfort room not so aseptic clean, but about everything you need for your legs, arms, abs, is there.
And it was a gym crowd I could perfectly belong with I almost expected to bump into Amy B there. There’s this fat woman about my age who perfectly fitted into every contraption, could lift tons and knew how to strike the right poses; there’s this 65-year old doing stretches who must have been a yogist or a karate kid in her time, didn’t even deign return my smile, maybe because thanks to the northern light I looked young and stupid by her or I was not doing the arms and the abs right. There’s this other forty something with great long legs and well-muscled arms who spends amounts of time on the bikes and her biceps; then there are young awkward girls, older versions of me, I’d like to think, doing aerobics, trying to learn how to dance or maybe just working some more on their waistline.
My favorite? The little tykes six- and eight-year-old, at the rear of the taekwon-do class, and this young girl in early 20s, a newer version of me, I’d like to think, the lone female in a ring of five not-so-good-looking boys trying to learn kickboxing.
