Slouching Towards Equinox

I joined Equinox and now I must die. I signed up in the New Year, like the kind of Gym Amateur 28-year-old gays who work in marketing and take HGH and have protein diarrhea complain about on X formerly known as Twitter, when they’re bored at their parents’ house just outside of Chicago over the holidays; on X formerly known as Twitter, these gays are either complaining about New Year’s Resolution Gym Goers, taking thirst traps in a powder room or lying. New Year’s Resolution Goers take up space in the free weight section and block the mirror. These are my people.

I’m no stranger to fitness. I swam from age four until my junior year of college. I guess I can call myself an athlete. A former athlete. I was the captain of my high school swim team. In college I had a weight lifting program designed by my coach. I was the real fucking deal. Then I quit to devote more time to smoking cigs and driving from my fag-barren college in central Pennsylvania to Philly for dick

In my adult life, I’ve had spurts of focused exercise. In New York, I ran around the garbage juice warehouses of Bushwick to try and exorcise the medieval hangover of MDMA, Cocaine and IPA out of me. It wasn’t a focused regimen. I was too poor to do Crossfit in Williamsburg or Manhattan — my bi-monthly paycheck went to drugs or Sapporo tall boys I bought at the gas station at 2 am on a weeknight — so running 2.5 miles once in a while sufficed. I didn’t have time for meals. When I did eat, it was some awful Panera soup that I ate hunched over my desk at work, or a bodega BBQ chicken sandwich that I ate on my bed. I stayed svelte through youth and pure exhaustion, by acquiring my daily nutrients via a 32 oz Lemon Lime Gatorade, by skipping dinner but buying a several bags of TGIFriday’s potato skin chips in a blackout before bed and passing out in their crumbs. I was the Snow White of East Williamsburg: comatose on a pissed-on mattress, adorned with foot-long Slim Jims that I forgot to eat.

When I got sober, I rewarded myself by eating three meals a day. My AA sponsor made me send him photographic proof that I ate breakfast every morning. I texted him a photo of a yogurt I bought at a Korean coffee place across from my office each day. I kept Sour Patch Kids on my nightstand to get my no booze sugar fix. I wasn’t smoking then. I had quit months before I dried out; I threw up after smoking my first cig post-one particularly ghastly bender. Want to quit smoking? Do meth and then don’t sleep for 72 hours.

Then I moved to LA. I excercised by walking everywhere. I didn’t have a car and walked like I still lived in New York. Only weirdos walk in LA. No one told this rule. I walked to work in Hollywood, and back to my sublet in the Russian part of West Hollywood. Uber was a luxury, so I walked, and walked, and walked. I walked to AA meetings and walked to Rite Aid and then walked home with my Rite Aid bag from my wrist like a Birkin. The Walkin’ Gay of WeHo. I was an urban legend to only myself. Friends would let me know they saw me walking, a tinge of concern in their voice. Sympathy.

Before I started getting paid regularly at work, I ate 7-Eleven hot dogs for dinner every night. I’d never learned how to cook. I didn’t have time. I was very busy!

A 7-Eleven hot dog is Satan’s food. It really isn’t food at all. It’s something between. It is undead. It gives me a thrill to eat one. It’s my link to life before sobriety. Where each day, I lived outside of time, tumbling through scalding rip tides till I got my next drink or hit. Permanent nausea, permanent starvation. Eating wasn’t for pleasure or nutrition. It was to ensure I had just enough energy to catapult my slack body into the next hour. My Years of Salt and Time Travel. That kind of living comes naturally to me. It is a warm fire on a wet night.

When I started dating my husband, I tried to hide the hot dogs from him. I would eat one quickly before seeing him. And when he’d ask if I wanted to order dinner, I told him I’d eaten already. I knew that he knew. He could smell the mustard and sour on me. One time he even told me I could eat them freely in his presence if I wanted. I never did. It was mine. My inner rat world.

Eventually, seeing enough gays in West Hollywood with abs on their necks forced me back into submission. I spent the year before COVID going to the gym every day, cruising fifty-somethings in the piss-laden locker rooms and getting buff. When I was tired of not eating, I ate well. COVID ended that. I ate dinner at 4 pm and ice cream at 2 am. When I quit smoking for three months, starting in the fall of 2020, I ate frozen grapes. I bought grapes in bulk, spending an hour a day plucking them like a tiny Italian woman. I ate plates and plates full. My face changed, like a lava lamp. My features shifting from one pole to the other. I didn’t look right. My stomach was ground up. My skin was sallow. I realized cigarettes were better for me than eat two pounds of grapes a day, so I started smoking again.

I stopped exercising all together, and then started walking everywhere again. I punished myself for eating by not eating. I talked to my therapist. I talked to my mom. I stopped going to therapy because it was too expensive. I ate more again. I stopped working out all together. I lived in peace. I lived in agony. I drank only a single smoothie till dinner. I went to the spa and pulled my towel up to my tits and tucked myself into the corner of the sauna and felt embarrassed to be seen. I weighed myself and screamed in my car.

Now I’m at Equinox. I feel like we’re supposed to be boycotting it, but I can’t remember why. Sorry for not boycotting. ll go every other day until it feels natural again. I’ll change how I eat. I’ll stop going to the gym and then start going again. I’ll waste money. I’ll see a single eye staring out of the crack of a shower door. I’ll quietly poop in the restroom stall. I’ ll drape a sopping cold towel across my face like a funeral shroud while power-walking on a treadmill and hear myself pant. The Equinox eucalyptus towel — my very own Shroud of Turin. I’ll die and come alive again and again.