Actually am keeping the headache at bay. Went out in the evening and bought some enteric-coated Bayer at Duane-Reade. I knew there would be a severe headache coming on because my dinner consisted of the bottom half of the Ben & Jerry’s pint and a half-pint or more of vodka. Smirnoff vodka, as Shirley’s has been out of Svedka pints. It’s like someone went in and bought out her entire stock.

I can’t believe I finished that pint. And the pint of the other stuff. I remember the absolute worst hangover-headache I got was from a couple of chocolate vodka martinis at Maxwell’s, circa 2000. They had coffee beans floating on top. In those days I couldn’t treat headaches with just aspirin. I had to have codeine and probably pseudephedrine.

One night in September 2001 I worked late and took a black car to Hoboken, went to Maxwell’s, had two beers and a bowl of chili. They had good chili. Next morning I felt and looked very puffy. Had trouble getting dressed, felt bulgy all over. Bus down Washington Street, at PATH station you could see smoke coming out of the World Trade towers. At that point only one had been hit. The second one got hit while I was underground. We sat in the PATH train under Tower 2 for ten minutes, then they backed it out and let us out at Exchange Place, from whence I wended my way back to Hoboken, pausing at the JC waterfront to sketch the burning towers, even drawing the implosions when they came down.

I was booked to fly to London the next day, September 12, on Virgin Atlantic, but of course I didn’t. Flew a month later. That was the time I met Tim Lees, staying in Northmoor with Steve and Alma. We took the bus into Oxford and met Tony Smith at Magdalen College. He gave us a tour, pointed out Edward Gibbons’s old rooms (from the outside), said the college had been very busy a day or two before because Chelsea Clinton had just arrived. Tony is still alive now, I believe, though no longer president. I gather he’s pretty far gone. I tried to get in touch with him a year or two ago but no response.

Those black-car limos we always took when working late. After 9/11 they cracked down on that, we had to have prior approval on a voucher. I think the department was cutting back, under new management. Since it was too much trouble to go to Hoboken most of the time, I stopped spending time there. (The PATH station at the World Trade Center was knocked out for months, and the the whole area was barricaded. To get home I’d have to take a subway to West 4th St, walk to the West 9th St PATH station, wait for the train, then either do a long walk home to 928 Hudson or share one of the rattletrap taxicabs.) I kept paying my $600 per month for the share with Marian, but I often wouldn’t show up for weeks. Moki was out of his bad moods of 1999-2000, so it was easy to go home to him. A short walk to the subway from 388 Greenwich, change from the A to F at West 4th St, emerge at 57th and Sixth, walk upstairs. From 2002 through 2005, I probably didn’t spend more than 20 days at the Hoboken flat.

Asshole not burning much anymore. It was still flaring at 4pm when I was walking down Sixth on my way to St. Patrick’s to continue the novena. St. Patrick’s and St. Paul the Apostle are about equidistant from home, but I usually tend toward the latter because it doesn’t have crowds, it’s set up better for contemplative prayer, and I can browse at the Time Warner Center on the way to and back. Three long blocks across town, two or three short blocks around Columbus Circle. Bobo and Hope live nearby on 60th; I never see them on the street. Bobo I once ran into waiting for the A train though.

Coming back from St P’s, crossed west on 54th, across from University Club. South side of street is all boarded up. Construction site? Went to Chase, took out $20 on the USAA account, then to Klein’s for an avocado and bottle of bleach—because I’d used up the bleach, wasted it, in the laundry room when the big Wascomat washer didn’t run. Moved my laundry over to two small washers. Everything’s a dingy yellow now, including the NYAC Fitness Month 2000 shirt. Anyway, with avocado and bleach bottle in plastic bag from Klein’s I headed over to Shirley.

Bleach is hard to come by these days. No bleach at all in the Duane-Reades, not for months. Klein’s has it, both Clorox and the Brand X I bought.

Moki next to me in bed after 6 am, mumbling about how Biden hasn’t fucked up in his three years. Asks me to make him a drink, but I’m pretty sure there isn’t any more v. (Actually I’ve now made him a light one, using the dregs from the dozen pint bottles collecting out there.)

Today, Thursday, must write something for somebody. Review the Philby series, which was about as bad a waste of a brilliant story as you can get. Later, roundup on Joe Kennedy. Shall we do something on the Truth Seeker, perhaps as P. J. Collins?

In the laundry room yesterday, a tenant, female, possibly Jewish, was carrying on over her mobile, complaining that Jeffries Morris was sending in commercial window-washers who’d made a mess last August. She has two apartments there, she repeated several times. She wants to have the windows cleaned again in time for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade. Was slightly apologetic to me for carrying on like that.

Fortunately I have a lot of Preparation H on hand. Laura always used Anusol. I think she was brought up on Anusol. I never had burning rectum until I became habituated to codeine (habituated in those periods when I could get it easily, usually as Solpadeine or Nurofen Plus, when I was living in or frequently passing through England…though I bought codeine in Paris and Sydney as well). The drugs dried out the rectum. A very different etiology from the pain I felt this afternoon as I finished the laundry.

This spate of burning came about because I made a fabulous pot of slow-cooker chili the other day and ate most of it over the next 24 hours. Finished it up this morning. Yesterday I stopped at the hot sauce shop at 7th Ave and 56th, and bought a little bottle of some righteous habañero sauce. They have like 50 or 60 hot sauce varieties there. And today I put it on my chili. Also, last night I bought some Ben & Jerry’s chocolate ice cream, my first ice cream in many months, ate a bowl or so, and I’m sure that helped give me the runs.

I bought the ice cream because for the past two months Moki has been lying abed, refusing to eat, and drinking mostly vodka and a very little water. Sometimes he asks me to make him tea, but he never drinks it. I encourage him to eat a little yoghurt. He won’t anymore. I asked if he’d like some ice cream, and he seemed interested. Didn’t touch it.

Last week I bought some coffee at the Starbucks downstairs (I was experimenting with their app and automatic payment; you punch it in, and your cardboard cup is waiting for you on on the rack when you get down there). I think that brought on a massive shit that he did, right there in the bed, which he was totally oblivious to. I still haven’t changed the mattress cover on that side, though I bought a new one at Target. I cannot move him out of bed.

Until early September, when as I recall he ate most of a hot dog I cooked, his lying abed was something of a joke. For months beforehand he would stagger out to buy a liter of vodka, and often come back home calling me from the apartment door. He had barely made it back. Handing me the sack with the bottle, he’d go: “Can you please make me a drink?” So I’d make us both a drink. In early September we talked about going to Gallagher’s for my birthday, and perhaps for our anniversary (the 6th and 25th). We never made it over to Gallagher’s. He started to fall out of bed at night, and pull down the metal shelving by his bathroom when he went to pee. Often he lay on the floor, unable to get back into bed. A few weeks ago I bought him a couple of those male plastic urinal bottles used in hospitals. Once or twice he’s shat into a deep yellow cleaning tray. It’s really disgusting. I need to send him to the VA hospital, but how do we get him down there? His birthday is in three days. Will he survive till then? What do I do with the corpse? I call 911?

Was thinking again about Petrie K*dz*s the other day. She died in January, after a year of galloping ALS, but left a Facebook page up under her Petrie Qu*gl*y account. She had several names, those two, and Petr* Z**linsk* and then an old deadname that comes up on people searches like Spokeo. Somewhat surprising, as it indicates she still used the old identity well into the 1990s. I remember when April Ashley first introduced us (this is through phone and email), P. had a password form on her website: you had to name the surgeon in Neenah. This was in 2000, so the visit to Schrang was in recent years. She had two brothers and many nieces, nephews, cousins. I noticed that when her father passed on 13 years ago, the obituary mentions them, but not her. Presumably her mother, or whoever, was being discreet about certain subjects. I found pictures of her in her old self at her public high school and her postgrad year at Andover where she was on the swim team, and have collected these. Also there’s a selfie that she took of herself with J. Boylan and Deedee at the 2016 GLAAD Gala, and emailed to me, or maybe it was Facebook personal messaging. I found it odd that she would want to go to such things, but she was a habitué of the wild side going back to her late teens. A big part of her life. One thing I’ve learned about such situations is that if you tend to sit in judgment, for Lord’s sake keep it to yourself.

Jenny looks like she just came back from a Botox party. Deedee looks good. Saw them both at the Time Warner Center back around February. Bundle-up weather. They were trying to figure out how to find the subway to get way the hell back uptown. Not Columbus Circle regulars.

14 May 2016, Petrie at right

I must go off to church. I started another novena to St. Jude yesterday. This time for Moki.

A “trial” and work for Colin Flaherty and Tom Ashley, readying myself for Paris Marathon, and making fun of the Sausage Lady.

March 8, 2005. I walked over to 54th Street with a growing sense of dread. It was a beautiful day, always a bad sign. I found my friend KP outside the Community Court, a few minutes before 9 am. He was smoking a cigarette. He’d been there for a half-hour. Yes, indeed, I was on the calendar. They wouldn’t let him sit down inside; not enough room, they said. So my case hadn’t been dismissed. I read the NYTBR and tried to work myself into a state of calm. Since I found myself rereading the same sentence seven times over without making any sense of it, I wasn’t doing very well. Finally, around a quarter-after, Ita showed up, in a black fake-fur hat. She looked bright and cheerful. We entered and went through the metal detectors—just Ita and I, because KP refuses to apply for an attorney ID which would allow him to sit in on any proceeding. He stood and waited outside by the steps, clutching his vinyl document wallet.

About eight rows of pews with an off-center aisle, so the pews on the left were half the size of the ones on the right. The court was due to start at 9:30 but the judge, one Eileen Koretz, didn’t show till after 10. I was first on the docket. When I saw my name up on the telescreen, my pulse jumped to 120. I know because I timed it.

After a minute or two, Judge Koretz called us up. I kept my mouth shut while the repartee went on. Ita introduced herself as the counsel, and the judge asked if the defendant were willing to accept an ACD with the ‘quality of life’ session. ‘Actually,’ said Ita, ‘I was going to request a dismissal.’ She reeled off several reasons: the factual allegations were based on hearsay, the cop wasn’t present, precedents in NY County have been thus and such. The judge agreed, adding, ‘And the officer should have taken a depositon of the theater manager. So the case is dismissed.’

I wasn’t exactly on Cloud Nine for the rest of the day; I got too keyed up to enjoy a real sense of relief. It was more like a reprieve. But I joked nervously with Ita, as she and I and KP walked to the subway, that I hoped to have something more substantive for her next time. She laughed. ‘Don’t forget me.’

March 21st, 8:45 am. Day off. I sit up in bed with Pismo Number One on my lap. Outside it is grey and wet. Last night with KP at Eight Mile Creek. I started to feel queasy on one glass of sickly-sweet cab-shiraz, so forwent further wine and had one beer with dinner. Kangaroo skewers and mudbugs. The roo was delicious but I awoke at 4 am with pain in my gums. A chunk had got stuck in the usual slot (betwixt two crowns) and I hadn’t flossed before bed. Fortunately I always keep plenty of floss around. Three years ago I had monstrous gum pain after eating a jambon salad at that awful Montparnasse place (La Coupole?) with Alma and Tessa, and found I was completely without dental floss, and struggled to make do with thread and pen nibs. In fact, I wasn’t able to buy any for another day and a half, when I picked some up at Boots in Swiss Cottage. That was May 5, 2002, I believe: the day Pim Fortuyn was assassinated. Another overcast day.
I have much on my plate.
Ashley wants storyboards redone and lots else.
Need to do a cartoon or two for Colin.
Take a serious look at TT for the first time in two weeks: hammer out that whole transition period, chap 22-25, where everything happens. Hanging around too long.
Should work on the Equity Research drawings because I am behind. But first things first.
Run. Gym.
Laundry.

March 26, 2005. I have done bupkis (is that yiddish or turkish?) in getting ready for Paris, unless you count the purchase of a second-hand iPod, which I have not yet gotten around to using. Furthermore, my freelance accounts (see above), are expecting great things out of me shortly. Last night C phoned in from the road (from the ROAD! I-15 near Fallbrook). We’d been tagging it for a day or two, and now, when I was feeling ill and anyway having to hit the hay early for the 5k this morning, C finally reaches me. He says he’ll send a check even if I can’t fax the invoice in. He’s working on the Escondido business plan. Mick P. will be funding the newspaper, but the other party (who already owns throwaway weeklies in the Inland Empire), may be difficult to persuade of the need to raise this revamped paper to the level of a quality publication. Briefly I mentioned noticing the new quasi-memoir by an old acquaintance of ours, the Sausage Lady. We call her this because she once wrote an article about watching sausage being made—she was fond of dense subjective feature articles that winged off some inverted cliche—and the piece began more or less with the words, “Oh how I love to eat sausage, rolling the little bits of fat over my tongue.” When I saw her book mentioned in the NYT I wondered if this were our very same harridan, so I did a quick net search and found an unmistakably bilious self-commentary.

Most fat women didn’t write the truth about fat. They didn’t write about fat fat fat fat thighs and how tender flesh on the inside of fat thighs rubs and rubs. The skin on one thigh rubs the skin on the other thigh down to raw blister. Every step you take, this raw blistered skin hurts. You can’t tell anybody “I have blisters” and “I hurt” because first off, you don’t want to talk even in whispers about anything that goes on in the gloom between your thighs. No way. You are disgusting and what goes on between your thighs is disgusting, so you don’t tell. Besides, anybody you told would know you got the blisters because you’re fat. They’d cluck-cluck-cluck that you were fat because in one sitting you poked in your snout and gobbled, with warm garlic French bread: an entire four-serving bowl of the perfect Cobb salad (Romaine and Bibb lettuces, Haas avocado whose soft ripe flesh turns an immeasurably buttery green, watercress, tomato loosed tenderly from its tight skin, cold chicken breast and ham cut into batons, hard-boiled egg, chives, crumbled Maytag Blue cheese, bacon fried and broken up, and for dressing, a heavy sluice of whatever you like).

C had a charming characterization of the Sausage Lady: “You know, all I knew was that she was a fat, ugly bitch without any redeeming value…but now she’s apparently a member of the Club.” The Club being the club of published popular authors. Sausage Lady has in fact published about three books, the first two being essentially vanity publications.

C’s phone gave out suddenly and I went to bed after waiting a few minutes for him to call back.

I got up at 5:30 in the morning and dressed for my run on Randall’s Island. All went well. No queasiness. My pace was better than ever.

That’s it, that’s the story.

It takes a while to face up to such realities. In my case I didn’t get it till middle-age. Certainly I never articulated it till now, in my 60s.

She was a sociopath, but that’s not something you can detect in early childhood. Surely, when I was six, I saw that her behavior was erratic, her actions quite mad.

My grandparents’ idea was that my mother’s behavior problems were due to my sister, a very unruly and headstrong child. So my sister was sent away to a boarding school far away. She had just turned eight years old.

My “Bad Seed” sister demanded of me that I’d watch her favorite TV soap operas (these varied, but primarily included The Edge of Night) and report on plot developments when I next saw her.

Soap operas were not my thing, so in last-minute desperation I tried to watch some episodes just before she returned for a long weekend sometime in October. I made up plot lines that seemed plausible from my minuscule exposure. My sister seemed happy with that.

Before my sister came back home, for her first and second holidays from school, my mother had me help her construct a huge sign of colored paper letters on pegboard: WELCOME B_____!

When my sister went back to school my mother’s mood turned very sour. She was deeply attached to my sister, didn’t care for me. I was in school much of the time (day school, a local parochial school taught by Ursuline nuns), so I saw her furor mainly in late afternoon when she’d rage at me for nothing in particular.

She was having a baby. She did not want a baby. Six months before, she’d staged a fall out of our attic which she hoped would bring on a miscarriage. But the fall was only about three feet. Nevertheless she pretended to be deathly ill. She demanded that I run to the neighbors and bring in medical help. This made no sense to me, and as I was pathologically shy, I never got beyond chatting up the 4-year-old girl across the street. I was  five years old. I remember it was a cold day in early spring.

Well, my mother found her way to bed and phoned up all her available TriDelt friends and her sister–in-law in Rowayton. It’s only in retrospect that I realize that this big gathering of relatives and friends was because my mother was telling them she was very ill from a probable miscarriage.

I’d knock on the bedroom door and my mean aunt would shoo me away. I was supposed to sit still and watch TV. Watching TV was with my sister (not yet exiled to Yorkshire) and cousin Vicki, daughter of the mean aunt. On the tube at 4 pm was Amos ‘n’ Andy, a TV retread of a negro radio comedy.

My brother was born, not miscarried, at the end of October. My sister was summoned from her convent school, and saw my mother in the hospital in Stamford. I thought I should go in as well, but they only let one child at a time, or more likely, my father didn’t want to take me and my mother didn’t want to see me.

Apparently she thought she needed to send me some kind of souvenir. So she had my sister bring me three paper pill cups, nested. I’d waited in the car for maybe an hour-and-a-half before receiving this valuable keepsake. When my mother would go down to New York with my sister on the train to have lunch at Schrafft’s and see a movie at Radio City Music Hall, sometimes she’d bring me back a sugar cube. Pill cups and sugar cubes: all I deserved.

Only when I tot up these recollections do I realize how cold and unloving my mother was. Other thoughts tumble in: she broke and threw away toys, especially ones that had been gifted by a relative or friend she was in a snit about. There was a model coronation carriage my grandparents brought from London in 1953, and a pair of huge stuffed dalmatian dogs, and a lovely teddy bear that she put in the garbage for no particular reason, and a toy seaplane I barely remember; I had it in the bath perhaps once. Years afterwards I saw her slice up my baby brother’s stuffed toys, just for the hell of it.

Up at boarding school, my sister had a friend named Josie, and Josie came to stay with us on Easter Vacation. Josie’s parents lived on the Riviera (the French Riviera, the first time I heard of such a thing) and that was too far to travel, this close to the end of the school year. My sister and Josie shared the Simmons Hide-a-Bed fold-out sofa in the living room.

Josie’s mother was a big society dame known as Kiki Reynolds who was in the Social Register and eventually divorced the guy on the French Riviera. Josie was a real thrill, always upbeat, and closer to my age than my sister’s. Unlike my parents and my sister, she wasn’t half-cracked, so was a novelty in the house. I loved Josie, so did my mother.

But my mother didn’t love me, to restate the obvious.. She and my father came up with a scheme where I’d be sent to live with his father and stepmother near Philadelphia. Bordering their back lawn were the grounds of the Friends Central School, and in summer the Friends Central School had a day camp. So I would live with these old people in Wynnewood and go to Friends Central Day Camp in the daytime.

I was six years old. To me, it was a hell comparable similar to my sister’s time in boarding school. But as with my sister’s boarding school tales, there were some good friends and happy times. We made collages in arts and crafts. We made killing jars in nature study and went out on hikes to catch insects. We made field trips to the Franklin Institute, the Philadelphia Zoo, the Evening Bulletin plant.

But mainly—in the eyes of my parents and grandparents—I was at Friends Central Day Camp to LEARN TO SWIM. This was a specialty of my family. In their teens, my father and aunt got Red Cross Lifesaving badges. In the 1930s my aunt was actually a swimming coach at the YWCA and for the girl scouts, and somehow parlayed this into a radio career.

But I was six, terrified of water, loathing of locker rooms, and entirely unhappy with the arrangement. Not only did we have to attend a formal swimming class early in the morning, taught by a big, doughy, veiny woman named Mrs. Campbell; in mid-afternoon we were supposed to change again for the Open Swim. We wore poker chips around our necks to show our swimming proficiency. If you were a non-swimmer, like me, you got a red chip. I got embarrassed by that after a while and asked for a white chip (“intermediate”) instead. Some spoilsport spotted me in the shallow end and put me on report. I got a big lecture from the pool warden, an ancient coot with nostrils full of hay-colored hairs.

Day Camp went for six weeks but after three weeks, and this experience, I decided I’d had enough. I had a cold, or pretended to have a cold, for the last few days. My father and mother were perturbed that I did not wish to remain so I could “learn to swim.”

When I returned to my parents’ house in Stamford, I hoped for a warm welcome, maybe even a pegboard sign in the picture window. I got nothing. “So you didn’t want to Learn to Swim?” was my mother’s impassive remark. She didn’t want to have me around, even though I was quiet and reclusive and kept out of sight.

My father didn’t like me at all, always full of snorting contempt for me. But he wasn’t much in evidence, usually away “on business.” At least till the end of September, when we moved to Pennsylvania. After we moved we saw more of him, but that was no joy since he was always angry. We lived in terror for the crunching sound of his car in the driveway. Often he turned up very drunk and very brutal. My mother fled deeper into her psychoses or pretend-psychoses, till finally she was put away in insane asylums. But that’s another story for another day.

“The only sensible endgame for Chelsea Piers at this point
is just to cut its losses and shut down for a year or two”

I have decided to quit Chelsea Piers for the time being. They’ve been charging me $25 per month for a freeze fee. I don’t wish to pay that January 1st, neither do I want to resume paying the monthly $175 come Feb 1st.

I was sitting on the bubble about this until a few days ago, when I received a circular e-mail from CP. They are once again monkeying around with their COVID rules. As noted in an earlier post, they kept altering their policies….mask/no mask, vax/no vax/super vax, vax card/super vax card/special green vax badge, check out and leave at side door/no checkout needed, leave through main door…to the point where no one could follow them, apart from their regular employees, and even they had to keep consulting the most recent daily ukase.

This latest circular says that all the staff wear masks, and they are encouraging their fee-paying clientele to do the same. (See screenshot, bottom.) One wonders what “encouragement” will be implemented.

Festering in the back of my brain is the annoyance I felt in October 2020, soon after I rejoined. I got a nasty email from one Leslie Kriger at the club because I’d had a (friendly) altercation with some deminog employee who wanted me to shift my mask up, but this made my glasses fog.

The only sensible endgame for Chelsea Piers at this point is just to cut its losses and shut down for a year or two, then perhaps reopen with new staff and management, who perhaps will have their act together. I first joined in 2006 and have never seen them this confused.

After writing the earlier post about Chelsea Piers and its many petty irritations, I reflected on how many stages of civic collapse we passed through last year before I signed up with CP once again.

On March 1, 2020, I went to my local NYHRC and found that it was shuttered, except for some workmen on site. They told me it would be shut for renovations for some months, and all the members had been notified by e-mail. Well I must have missed that one.

Not too peeved, just surprised, I took the subway down to the HRC on 23rd Street. Same thing there. Like my local club, this was being transformed into a “Lifetime” club and wouldn’t be open again for six months.

NYHRC 13th St: dinky

Over the next two weeks I sometimes went to the NYHRC way over on East 45th Street near Lexington. It’s one of the strange, early, HRC’s, with odd little rooms and maze-like passages.

Twice, I think, I went to the one on East 13th Street. Very similar, but in a cheerier neighborhood. There is, or was, a Dick Blick art supply shop across the street, and it’s in the happy quarter between Union Square and Astor Place. Old, cute, dinky.

But the best of the surviving HRC’s, by far, was the Whitehall one, at the very bottom of Manhattan. About four storeys, spacious floors, peaceful atmosphere. I think this was the only one where I used the pool, which was almost always empty, or nearly so. I don’t think I’d swum in over three years. Whitehall was a pain to get to, and there were nippy March winds coming off the harbor, but I pretty much made up my mind this would be my gym for the foreseeable future.

‘Twas not to be, of course. Come Monday, March 16, I did my light cardio and swim, and then, upon leaving, learned from the bemasked attendant that the club would be closed down indefinitely. Per order of the Governor, the incompetent and bumptious Andrew Cuomo.

By this point, the smart money had fled the city. Most of the people in my neighborhood have another home or two, on the Cape or in the Berkshires, or maybe the Hamptons or Europe. When I canvassed for the Census in late summer, my work consisted mostly of leaving Notices of Visit in their mailboxes because the concierges assured me no one was home.

By April, every restaurant posted “Closed for Covid” signs on their windows. Theatres were likewise shuttered. Groceries and drugstores were open, for the most part, but you often had to stand in a “social distancing” queue that snaked down the sidewalk.

Riots erupted in May and June, with crowds of negroes breaking windows and looting on Fifth and Madison Avenues, and in the shopping district of SoHo. Mayor Bill DeBlasio pandered to them by painting BLACK LIVES MATTER in ten-foot day-glo yellow lettering on Fifth Avenue, in front of Trump Tower. Because, you know, it was all Trump’s fault.

Otherwise the city seemed mostly abandoned except for a proliferation of derelicts and beggars. Until around August, when a few restaurants reopened, serving customers in wooden huts that stood in the street. “Streeteries,” New York magazine called them.

So when I saw that Chelsea Piers was planning to reopen, I had no issue at all with the plethora of restrictions: short hours, 90-minute pre-booked sessions, mask mandate, online daily health declaration. It only bothered me later when they got gimmicky and changed their gimmicks every two months.

*   *   *

Recently I paid a visit to the old NYHRC on East 45th Street. It’s now a New York Sports Club. Same layout and equipment. The one difference I noticed was that the Concept 2 rower on the second floor is no longer oriented north-south (where you got a view of takeouts across the street) but east-west. It’s a depressing place, whichever way you’re facing. But the run-down look and feel is what we’ve come to expect from value-priced NYSC. So far as I can tell, most of the other old HRC clubs are now either defunct, or in a 2-year transition to their LIFE TIME franchise. Some locations have rebranded and opened (Astor Place, 23rd Street, Park Avenue South) but I don’t foresee much future for them, inasmuch as the new operators have set their price points at about twice the old HRC level, and, as with NYSC, haven’t added much in the way of amenities.

LIFE TIME on 23rd: just a rebranded NYHRC

My guess is that investors went on a spree about five years ago, projecting a huge demand for new “fitness” spaces, particularly on the West Side. Perhaps this tracked the Manhattan building boom, particularly in Midtown West—the colossal Hudson Yards fiasco, the 100+ storey skyscrapers around West 57th Street, the vast assemblages being emptied and excavated in the 40s and 50s. So a dozen, two dozen new commercial gyms were planned around 2017-2019, and when they were close to opening, Covid-19 hit.

Perhaps some lucky gym investors didn’t lose their shirts; they waited till the market tumbled and then leased spaces at a discount. I wonder if that’s how TMPL got their new space in the Citicorp Center at 53rd and Lexington, which has been in the retail dumps ever since Barnes & Noble closed a few years ago. (From 1977 to 1994 the B&N space was occupied by Conran’s. You might say the Citicorp mall has been on a downward trajectory for thirty years.)

I see the LIFE TIME people, who focused on taking over select HRC locations rather than expanding into new spaces, have gone public on the NYSE (LTH) and the price has remained stable for its first few days ($18-20). But I’m still bearish on them and on the gym business in general. It will take these businesses years to get out from under their Covid losses, and it’s a very competitive market for the next year or so. There will be consolidations and price wars. LIFE TIME’s $249 basic month-to-month is out of line with their product.

In which the Complainant recounts her recent history with a revived gym membership, and gives a list of Particulars about why she’s freezing her Chelsea Pier Fitness account, at least for a few months.

A bit over a year ago I rejoined the Chelsea Piers gym. Like the other gyms in the city, CP had been shuttered since mid-March (2020), but now was reopening with limited hours. I badly needed a gym, as I hadn’t had a serious workout or swim or shower bath in six months. (That’s right.)

CP’s monthly fee wasn’t much above what I used to pay, 2006-2014, and moreover I now had an extra $100 a month available because my other gym (NYHRC) had tanked, never to reopen: so I gladly re-upped. I’d checked out other gyms, but no sale. The Equinox at Columbus was convenient to me, with a decent pool and equipment, but its monthly fee was close to $300. This is completely unreasonable . . . unless your company is subsidizing your membership, which I gather is often the case.

I was delighted to discover that my old bar-coded Chelsea Piers ID card from 2006 still worked. All in all, it was a pleasant and longed-for homecoming.

But not perfect. The COVID-19 business had thrown commercial gyms into such a frenzy that when they gradually opened in late 2020 – early 2021, they instituted rigorous, baffling policies that seemed designed to discourage all but the most determined fitness enthusiasts. To take one example, at the New York Sports Clubs not only were the steambath and sauna closed (as at other gyms), but so were the showers, at least till mid-2021. Thereby eliminating a primary reason for joining a gym.

Thankfully at least the showers were available at Chelsea Piers. But there were so many obstacles in getting to the Piers that there were a couple of months when I went only once or twice. Getting there involved a two-subway ride plus a 3/4-mile walk. And then, in order to enter the facilities you had to fill out a daily health disclosure form (online), attesting that you weren’t sick, didn’t have Covid, hadn’t been ill in the past two weeks, etc. etc.

And then, the masking nuisance. Everybody had to wear a facemask. And maintain “social distancing,” keeping six feet away from everyone else. This meant that in a row of treadmills or elliptical machines only every other machine was available for use. You were required to tote around a bottle of green disinfectant and green towel, and wipe down your cardio machines or weights or pulley devices after you used them—or maybe even before. In the lounge, the (very good) coffee/salad/smoothie/sushi bars of yesteryear were closed.

And you were limited to 90-minute sessions, which you had to book, on an online app, before you arrived. This meant in effect that your workout, or workout and swim, or class, had to be squeezed into an hour (because presumably you’re going to be changing clothes and washing up). It also meant you weren’t supposed to hang out in the lounge for hours (as people traditionally did), checking your messages and working on your novel.

Not only did you have to check in when you entered, you had to check out when you left by the side door on the south side of the track. CP was keeping track of how many bodies were onsite. You got an e-mail alert when your 90 minutes were nearly up, and another alert when you ran over your time limit. When I knew I was going overstay by a half hour, I’d go to the red-eye checkout device and show my barcode without leaving. I don’t know of anyone being sanctioned for this kind of monkey business, but the psychological pressure was intense. You had to keep looking at the clock.

Writing this down now, I realize for the first time how awful it all was. But on the upside, these onerous restrictions meant that the Piers were never crowded. There might be only a dozen other members there when you went there early afternoon. You didn’t have to wait for a swim lane or a Concept 2 rower. And this is pretty much what the Chelsea Piers Fitness Center was like from September 2020 to May 2021: a pain in the neck to use, but big, empty, and familiar if not quite friendly.

I’m sure the outfit was running at a steep loss during this period, with only a fraction of its usual customers. So around May 2021 they attempted to liberalize their policies, but just got annoyingly tricksy, changing policies every couple of months.

There would no longer be a blanket demand that everyone wear a facemask. If you claimed to have been vaccinated, you could skip the mask and the daily online health disclosure. In theory you had to have some sort of vaxx card or certificate, but these could be easily forged and no doubt were. In an e-mail circular in May, Chelsea Piers informed us that 95% of their members were already vaccinated: a preposterously high estimate based on no data at all. At least nobody ever asked me.

A couple months later (July) they decided to tighten things up. Members had to register with something called the New York State Excelsior Pass, and display that at least once, whereupon you were emailed a green badge with a checkmark. At this point you could get an Excelsior Pass basically on your own say-so, as Excelsior wasn’t yet tied into any master database of vaxx customers and facilities.

But after some weeks that too changed, and we were required to upgrade our passes to a super-duper enhanced Excelsior Pass, which was linked to a database. I don’t know what happened to CP members who didn’t upgrade their passes, or were rejected by the database because of a technical glitch or because they’d been creative with their vaccination information. But I remember being glad I didn’t forge a vaxx card when so tempted.

This brings us up to August or September 2021. By this point the café bars were partly open and the 90-minute restriction was gone. You didn’t have check out at the red-eye scanner by the side door and walk down the red fire-escape stairs; you just left through the main entrance, the way you came in. Things were almost back to normal. People were hanging out in the lounge again, as in days of yore.

Inconveniences still abounded though. Hours were still abbreviated by comparison with the old days. And the running tracks were gone. They completely removed the banked 200m track to make room for an Astroturf area where they’ll be putting the boxing ring, or something. Meanwhile they tore up the 400m Mondo track for replacement, and took over six months to lay the new one in. Very poor planning. That kind of thing should be done in two weekends.

Incidentally that 400-meter Mondo is not really a 400m track, since the only lanes available are the outer ones—mainly 7 and 8. CP has gradually eaten up the other lanes with  basketball flooring and other facilities. One lap in lane 8 is around 450 meters. Management could have shortened the track at the west turn and made it a true 400 meter track, but that would have required too much imagination.

(Explanation: A regulation athletic track has lanes a bit over 1.2 meters wide. Figure out how many meters there are betwixt Lane 1 and Lane 8, then multiply by 2. That’s your extra diameter, about 17 meters; multiply this by Pi, and see what you get [~53 meters]. Years ago I was in a CP race where I supposedly ran a mile in 7 minutes on the “400” track, only it was really more than a mile-and-an-eighth. I’m surely not trying to impress you with my speed, but this shows how easily fudged are track times when you’re not running a true 400 track.)

Dream on.

Did I mention how app-happy Chelsea Piers has become? In October 2021 they demanded we download yet another app, one that gave us a QR code for our account information, and a scheduling module for lap swims, yoga classes, whatever. We’ve already had the daily health declaration, and the scheduling app from September 2020. Both are now obsolete. I don’t know why they couldn’t just revise the old app and ask us to update.

A bigger question is, what about the folks who don’t have a late-model smartphone or any mobile device at all? It all smells of wrongheaded advice from an outside vendor who’s mainly interested in developing pretty little apps, and has no practical sense or awareness of the end users’ convenience.

I’ve never used the new app except to book swim times. On my last few visits to CP, I just showed the red-eye scanner my barcoded photo ID from 2006. And it works perfectly well. Same account number, same member database. Fuck your QR codes.

To recap, Chelsea Piers Fitness Center has acted like a beloved but neurotic relative ever since reopening in September 2020. They change policies the way some people change their socks. Other gyms reopened with a blanket mask policy, then revised that to a vaxx policy—and left it at that. No more rule changes, no more hassle, no propeller-head toy-phone app with QR code. But Aunt Chelsea is out of control. She just cain’t he’p herse’f.

So I’m freezing my CP membership for a while, to save money and contemplate my gym future. I’ve joined another gym, one that’s within walking distance and costs half of what I’ve been paying CP. It doesn’t have quite the gloss of Chelsea Piers, or such amenities as bathrobes or high-power hair dryers, and its 25m pool doesn’t have quite as many lanes as Chelsea’s. But it’s an intriguing change and attractive facility. It’s dark and neon-ish, like a 1981 dance club or 1991 rave. Lest we doubt this was intentional, they’ve got a pop-art mural of giant red lips with a drug capsule held between. Eccentric, edgy, beguiling.

Sam C. phones around 12:30 today, a talk we’d scheduled for the Adam P. bio. We really didn’t accomplish anything. After Adam died in 2018 Sam got in touch with me and I gave him extensive data-dumps in notes and memoirs and possible contacts and even a phone chat or two. My Adam-mine is pretty exhausted.

The central topic this time concerned a fellow named James Downer (?) who bylined one of the conspiratological essays in Apocalypse Culture. As I recall, this posited a Freemasonic angle to the JFK assassination. 33º North Latitude, thirty-three degrees of Masonry, whatever else. Sam suspects that the author was actually Adam himself. This is because he can’t find any information on Downer anywhere.

This prompts me now to i-srsch him, and I find the name is actually James Shelby Downard, and he’s all over the conspiro-net, linked in a Wiki article to Bill Grimstad. Part of the Apocalypse Culture article, now long out of print because it was dropped from the second edition of the book, is here.

So I was not very helpful to Sam in this. The one thing that occurred to me was that Whatsisname in Colorado might know. “You know, the one who that the album, Martinis and Misanthropy and whatever…?” I was groggy from Trazodone and vodka, and the old memory not up to its steel-spring traditions. But we came up with the name, Boyd Rice. I forget whether Sam said he’d asked him.

Otherwise, Sam talked about how the bio project is in a logjam right now, because Adam’s sister Jessica has taken over the publishing house and is making it very PC, and doesn’t want to be reminded that Adam built his career on consorting with neo-nazis, satanists, and other mongers of the outré and occult. Bit of a surprise here: I didn’t know Adam had a sister (two, actually) though I once met his brother on a trip to the desert. Anyway I told Sam to just plow ahead, because Adam was at least a semi-public figure, and his story needs to be told, warts and all.

I wonder if he has a publisher or agent at all? Possibly not. This book began as Adam’s own memoir, then turned into an oral history.