Five Quarts_ A Personal and Natural History of Blood - Bill Hayes [48]
WHEN I GOT WORD OF THE CLOSING OF THE LEGENDARY SAN FRANCISCO gym Muscle System on Hayes Street early last year, it was like learning an old friend had died and wondering, Is it too late to pay my respects? I hadn’t worked out there in five years, not since I’d deserted it for a shiny new club that had opened near my home, but I regretted not having been around for the gym’s final days. After getting the news, Steve and I made a trip down to Hayes Street to view its remains.
A café that shared the building remained open, so it was possible to stand inside the foyer and peer into the vacant space. It looked as though a tsunami had hit, flooding the gym and sweeping away all the weights. Left behind were the scattered skeletons of a few broken weight machines and tanning beds. The jade-green carpeting had been torn out (the very idea of a tastefully carpeted gym suddenly seemed like the epitome of gayness), exposing the raw concrete beneath. Prevented from going farther in by a wooden gate, Steve and I stepped up to the railing that overlooked the lower level and leaned over, as if on the prow of a ghost ship. All we could see in the shadows below were garbage cans where the stationary bikes used to be parked. One thing before us, though, remained unbroken and unchanged: the enormous wood-framed mirrors—covering every wall, floor to ceiling. Straight ahead, we could see our reflections in the wall opposite. Steve said, “We look farther away than we actually are.”
I had joined Muscle System right after arriving in the city, even before I’d found a job and despite living nowhere nearby. At the time, it was the place to work out. It had such a mystique that Armistead Maupin wrote about it in his Tales of the City series. Every beautiful man in San Francisco had a membership to this gym, it was said. Luckily, I later met one there: Steve, who’d moved here from Illinois in 1987. Muscle System functioned as the heart of the community, even though it was located a good mile from the Castro district.
Monday evenings, after work, was Muscle System at its crazy best—150 guys, popping out of muscle T’s, pumped. Within the human form, blood, it’s been said, moves in figure-eights—from heart to body to heart to lungs; to heart to body to heart to lungs—circulating oxygen, nutrients, and heat, in endless loops. Exercise, of course, revs the cycle. By seven o’clock on a cold winter night, the furnace of bodies would raise the gym’s temperature at least ten degrees. The street-front windows would steam over, and the place throbbed with endorphins and testosterone. At times, working out at Muscle System was more like being at a club: The towel boys behind the front desk danced as they fed the sound system; the floor teemed with all kinds of men—pups and bears and daddies; and guys fresh from the tanning beds vogued along the runway overhead. But moments like these, which seemed to recapture something we knew we’d lost, the innocence of pre-AIDS San Francisco, lasted about as long as one good song.
The impact of AIDS on the larger community could be seen in microcosm at Muscle System, where night after night we all came together, the grizzled veterans and the fresh-faced arrivals to the city. At the front desk, notes taped to the counter announced memorial services for fellow gym members and employees who had died. The notes often appeared before the obituaries were published in the local gay weekly, the Bay Area Reporter. I remember one for Mark, a congenial thirty-two-year-old southerner who, nearly every night for years, made a grand entrance after work. Although I never knew him well, I noticed when Mark was there, and his absence if he wasn’t. Always arriving impeccably dressed in a suit, tie, and full-length camel-hair coat, with briefcase and gym bag in hand, he would throw a towel across his shoulder and sail to the locker room, waving “Halloo,