We'd like to announce he is dead

I was working as the manager of a fitness center but most of my coworkers, clients, and a few members knew my aspirations of being a writer.

When I started this blog, the most interesting piece of personal writing I'd completed was the Operation Shutdown story. I decided to post that first. When people at the gym asked to read my work, I directed them to the blog. They all loved Shutdown and every reader remarked that I was 'probably writing down everything that happened at the gym and will eventually post it once I left the job.' They said I would probably retell stories about them and the inside dirt about members of the gym.

I assured them that everything that happened remained confidential and that nothing interesting happened on the job so there was very little to blog about.

I lied.

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September 13th, 2006

The emergence of the coat rack from storage marks the official end of summer.

“Oh Christ, is that thing back?” Jerry remarked, pointing to the still-dusty metal contraption with forty-five plastic hangers dangling like earrings. “Now I am just pissed.”

Jerry is in a sour mood because at 11 a.m. he is attending the funeral of a former client and friend. I asked around as to the cause of death. 'Some type of cancer' was the most common answer. I wasn't sure which so I changed it up every time someone asked me how he died. I liked saying 'bone' the best. It just fun to say but probably because it's the same word I used when discussing sex.

All anyone could tell me was that he looked terrible at the end. Pale, thin, almost a walking corpse. Everyone knew it was just a matter of time. I am not sure if he knew when that matter of time would be but if he felt it was soon he sure wasted several of his final days on Earth. He was dead in his apartment for two days before relatives finally went to check on him. If he was that close to the end, shouldn't they have kept better track?

He was well known in the gym because of his paintings that hung in several of the rooms. They have gotten more attention in the last few days after his death than in all the time I've been working here. I don't know much about art but I can say this with certainty. The paintings are terrible. My least favorite is 'school buses' which looked more like pieces of burnt rye bread on wheels heading towards a wall of mud.

"Chris how does this sound" Emma asked, snapping my gaze away from the toast procession. "The Body Barn would like to announce with great sadness the passing of one of its members."

Having worked with Emma for less than a few months, and knowing she took criticism like a cat to a bath, I tried to be as gentle as possible in my critique of her work.

"That is not what we want to say" I answered, realizing immediately it sounded much worse in the conversation than it did in my head.

English was Emma's fourth language. She was born in Italy, spent much of her life in Canada speaking French, and must have done at least two cross country trips in a tractor trailer to perfect three thousand different ways to incorporate the word 'fuck' into a disagreement.

"Well," she began angrily "I asked several people, including Deidre, and they said it was wonderful." She made sure to add extra emphasis, with an Italian/French overbite, to the name Deidre. Deidre was the wife of Dean. They owned the Body Barn.

I tried to explain that Body Barn would not 'like to announce' that someone died. We would 'like' to do nothing of the kind. We can sadly announce it but we wouldn't 'like' to announce it. For business purposes we would 'like' all of our members to remain alive and well.

"I even checked online and found obituaries written like this" she said defensively.

Obituaries are written by grieving widowers, widows, or family members on the day after the death of their loved one. They are then submitted to a newspaper where they are edited by absolutely no one and sent to print. They can say anything the family wants them to say in any grammatical fashion they chose. It's probably the worst example of correct grammar in print form.

I decided that this battle could soon turn into a war, a war I had no interest in fighting, so I raised a white towel and used it to clean off one of the flat benches on the opposite side of the gym.

Every business has cost cutting secrets. Our secret was tap water. We would take the empty water jug into the back room and refill it with plain tap water. Some members knew but most were oblivious. So long as it was cold that was all that mattered.

The water was sometimes a light shade of green. It was brown once after the river flooded so we had to wait a few days before refilling. We told members the water delivery service missed us this week. After a few days it went back to it's normal green tint.

Just as long as it's cold.

As I cleaned the same unused stationary bike for the tenth time that afternoon, Dean called me into the back room to help move some equipment into the empty massage room.

Tony is gone. Not dead, like the toast master, but Dean wished he were. The night prior, Tony had used his spare key to enter the gym, take all his personal belongings including a massage table, oils, candles and a floor fan. He left a brief 'Dear Dean' explaining that he was moving on and exploring other opportunities in life. No warning. No thank you for the past few years. Just a two line letter with the spare key on the front desk taped to the bottom. The Body Barn was now down a masseuse and one of the bigger selling points of the gym.

In one of the few conversations I had with him, Tony told me the story of how he ended up in town. He began hitch-hiking when he was sixteen. He never stayed in one place for very long, jumping from town to town and job to job. He'd lived in San Francisco, Colorado, New York and a slew of other locations before settling on New Jersey. I guess he got the itch again and decided it was time to move on. I imagined his apartment as empty as the back room, nothing left but dust and the smell of massage oils and incense. I admired him for his ability to just up and leave friends and a good job behind and start fresh in a new town. I remarked to coworkers and members that, as much as I felt it was a terrible way to leave the gym, without a masseuse and in the middle of the night, we shouldn't hold it against him because it was just his nature. He never stopped being himself. I imagined him hitching across the Jersey coast and I thought 'be well Anthony, and God speed.'

A week later we found out that he had left Body Barn to take a job at a new gym across town owned by Dean's old manager.

Now I wished he was dead.