There comes a time in every man’s week when he needs to shower.

I stepped into the local Family YMCA, a little musty and heavy of breath, having finished my Thursday with a 12 mile bike ride to my old apartment and back. (I’m still receiving mail there, so I try to go back once or twice a week to collect the good postal news.) Upon walking into the Y, I was greeted by a friendly desk clerk in a red polo shirt. I presented my trial pass and slid through the entrance turnstile. The clerk hadn’t offered me a tour–she looked properly engaged in conversation with a male coworker–so I made my way through the maze-like hallway towards what I believed to be the locker room.

This particular YMCA is situated in a painfully outdated facility. Having worked at a Y when I was younger, I was well-aware of the budgetary constraints of an international non-profit centrally operated by folks with little contact with their satellite centers. This branch was an example of a crew trying to make the best out of a less-than-ideal space. The weight room was in a converted executive office. Elliptical machines were squeezed diagonally into a hallway overlooking the racquetball courts. And the locker room was a collection of nooks and crannies, patrons walking through the hot tub area into the showers. Like most family Y’s, the median age hovered somewhere in the Rogaine range. Nearly everyone was stark naked, and loving it.

Here is an excerpt of a conversation I overheard between two naked older men convening at the entrance to one shower room:

Naked Guy 1: Someone’s looking tan today!

Naked Guy 2: Yeah, I just got back from vacation. Lots of sun out there, Ed.

Ed: (still naked) Oh, Hawaii right? Yeah you were gone for a while. We missed ya here, Georgie.

Georgie: (sans pants) Don’t I know it. If you haven’t had a Pineapple Iced Tea in Maui, you haven’t lived.

Ed: Oh, I’ve lived Georgie!

(both erupt in laughter)

I’m confident that this went on for minutes. Fascinating as it was, though, I wanted to get moving. I locked up my belongings and headed for the awkward cardio hallway. There’s nothing quite so refreshing as getting the blood flowing on a stationary machine in between two retirees, with a bird’s eye view of three Asian men in sweatbands smacking a rubber ball against a wall and the concurrent opportunity at inhaling the distinct scent of every passerby. It’s all part of the Y’s Core Values: Respect, Honesty, and Unadulterated Geriatric Awkwardness. You have to embrace it.

When it came time to shower, I realized I had left my toiletries at the office. No soap, no shampoo, no little loofah to scrub my body in non-existent lather.* So here I was, caked in sweat, malodorous as a stray dog, surrounded by bare elderly buttocks, and without a solution for how to come out of it safely. I took a deep breath, grabbed my towel, and headed for the showers, hoping the solution would present itself on the way.

Much like the rest of the facility, the showers at this Y were scattered throughout the locker room and difficult to locate. I would enter one area of open, cattle-call showers, thinking I had found the last of them, only to turn a corner into another room. At least, I thought, there were soap dispensers conveniently located on each tiled wall. There were three of these larger shower rooms in all, and upon reaching the third I resigned myself to standing naked in a large room with other naked men, all my senior, all comfortably swabbing themselves with loofahs they had not forgotten in their homes (or offices).

I’ve never been big on communal bathing. Unlike my friend Hitchcock (affectionately nicknamed “The Cock” by our high school football teammates), who seemed to revel in the neighborly atmosphere of the locker room shower, I preferred the closed stall. Cleansing, for me, is a highly personal ritual, a time when I can drift away in almost meditative thought, purging the mind of negative ruminations, allowing the worst of my spirits to cascade down my skin and away into the drain with the grime and sweat of the day. I solve problems in the shower. Recover energy. Conceive ideas. The notion of office living, believe it or not, was first debated under the steady drizzle of a chrome-plated Kohler K-10282 Classic. If my skin didn’t wrinkle so quickly, I’d give Thomas Edison a run for his money.

So naturally I was disappointed when I found I’d be losing that privacy for the coming week. Instead of cultivating new ideas, I’d be parading my bare balls around with the VFW club in the big room. As I looked around for the most private corner I could find, I noticed an almost hidden hallway I must have missed on my initial reconnaissance. And in the hallway, which led directly into the sauna area and back to the locker room, were two narrow shower cubby-holes, separated from each other by a thin slab of plexiglass.

Three-sided privacy. It was glorious.

The feeling of hot water against my skin was transcendent. I immediately slipped into my subconscious, floating from one gracious thought to the next, delighting in my good fortune and relishing the triumph of a stubborn will. I turned my back to the surging spray and exhaled a sigh of relief. Everything was A-Okay.

The thing about slipping into meditative thought is that you surrender an awareness of your surroundings. Static environment blends into the background of thought, eyelids lazied into lower relief, the pupils’ focus morphing into the abstract, all of this blending into tranquil unconsciousness. It’s when something breaks that static background that problems arise. Something like a moving body. A moving, naked male body.

It was a cross between a full-body twitch and a catapult that my nervous system instinctively triggered when the man came into view, a 50-something Nordic-American male with a bottle of Suave in his hand. I barely had time to yelp in terror before he passed, wholly apathetic to my being. I’m sure I could not have gotten the man to look at me if I was bathing in $50 bills, shrieking about my penis being a danver carrot. He could not possibly have cared less. But that wasn’t the point. I was vulnerable, naked and unguarded, and here was this strange man invading my personal space. It was unsettling.

I toweled off and went to my locker to change, feeling fortunate to get out of the place alive.

If this was what the next month was set to look like, I was going to be in for a rough ride.
*I had to look up “loofah”. They’re super popular in Asia. Whatever.