by Dennis Must
Twelve shower heads, six on either side, with no separating partitions. Some men turned their backs as they bathed. I’d experienced communal bathing as a boy at the YMCA. Back then the shower room exploded with laughter and taunts, jeering at some member’s baby genitalia, quick affairs before we raced off into the gelid pool. Here there was silence, bathers lathering themselves from stationary soap dispensers, averting each other’s eyes.
We were old men.
Some stroked a mile. Others loitered in the shallow end, hanging onto the coping and kicking. Always at least two bathers huddled in the corner of the pool, engaged in whispered conversation.
To access the community center’s showers and swimming area one had to pass a barren kitchen. Daily the janitorial crew wet-mopped its terrazzo floors with a pine cleanser. Once I listened to a swimmer—a slight man whose head and shoulders bent over as if he had a sack of scrap on his back—perform a medley of Gershwin tunes on its Bettendsdorf grand. People older than he sat vacantly at collapsible tables in a dining room that overlooked the ocean, politely applauding between numbers.
But I never saw any food being served.
In the gymnasium a clerestory illuminated a brightly varnished basketball court with vermilion markings. Hawsers attached to black iron rings hung from the ceiling, yet I never heard cries of youth’s ricochet inside its walls. Perhaps on Sunday, I thought. (The center was closed on the Sabbath.)
I enjoyed the tedium of swimming back and forth only when the morning sun dappled my lane. I imagined then the water warm and embracing.
For the center wasn’t.
Until I met Red.
One Monday he entered the shower room, sampling the spray of unoccupied nozzles before settling on the nozzle, or rose, with the prickliest needles. He scrutinized our bodies before soaping his bald head, but the hair around his genitalia bristled orange-red. As he lathered, he sang. We pretended not to notice—like workers at benches, perhaps watchmakers or tailors.
Red sang Kurt Weill’s “My Ship.” Two of the swimmers, who were always first in the pool, hung back. The vocalist pretended we weren’t present as he sang his memory of loss in an inexpressibly melancholic pitch. I’d no idea what any of these men had once done to earn a living, but surely the newcomer had been a crooner. To a person, we awaited the coda’s final notes before slipping into our trunks.
On my second lap that morning, I saw Red floating face down in the shallow end—his idea of exercise. When the lifeguard blew the time’s-up whistle, the newcomer rose out of a plastic deck chair to fall in line.
I was studying piano at the time, and had just begun to acquire a modest facility with improvising. One of the devices I used to keep myself mentally occupied while taking laps was to review the chord changes of a new ballad I’d added to my repertoire. I looked forward to the tenor’s selection each morning. But instead of our five-day a week regimen, he showed up on two—rarely, three.
Always with a new tune, however. Averting our eyes, he sang “Willow Weep for Me” the second meeting. June Christy had recorded the song with the Stan Kenton Band. He’s studying vocalists, I thought, just as I was analyzing the piano phrasings of Keith Jarrett or the horn lines of Chet Baker. When I’d glance up, his eyes would be shut—the hands absently scrubbing or sponging—as if he were in another arena varying timbres. The morning I watched him cup both ears so the tune resonated inside his head, I knew he was recording.
“Red, you like diminished chords, don’t you?”
He spread his arms out to each side of the pool’s coping, his legs and genitalia bobbing to the water’s surface.
“I’m addicted to them. And the minor key, of course.”
“I used to come here for exercise,” I said. “Now I come for your tunes.”
“You sing?”
“I’m teaching myself jazz piano.”
“We’ll meet in the dining room after our swim and gig!” he exclaimed.
“Too embarrassed,” I said.
“Embarrassed? In this crypt where everybody beats the hell out of the treadmills, sweating the inevitable?”
“It is damn bleak around here . . .”
“Everybody calls me Red.”
“Give me time, Red. I’d love to accompany you.”
We began reserving the crooner’s favorite rose for him. When he didn’t appear, the men looked warily around, waiting for somebody to ask, “Where’s Red?” On those days, it was back to our ritual ablutions. A quick soaping and into the pool for the stoic routine. His plangent voice muffled the gears of perpetuity grinding inches away in the boiler room it seemed. It was his lustrous adagios we savored the remainder of the day, not the dull gray hum of the community center’s plant.
The day he sang “I’ll Remember April,” miming Frank Sinatra’s tonal shifts and phrasing, a new bather walked in at mid-chorus and took the only vacant showerhead—the one alongside Red. We’d even begun to allot the star two nozzles, in the event he was inclined to begin swinging to his tunes. Oblivious to Red’s act, the pale-bodied newcomer opened the hot water faucet, but didn’t dispense the opalescent soap liquid. Instead, he crossed both arms over his chest—palms faced inward with finger tips extended and pointing to the ceiling—as the steaming water rained over his blank face.
Like Red, he, too, kept his eyes shut.
After our allotted hour in the pool, we returned for a brief wet down. The stranger, now florid, had never moved.
In the days following, we’d find the stranger standing in the vocalist’s spot—arms crossed, palms to the chest, hot water on full force, and eyes closed as before. When Red showed, he refused to bathe alongside the man. Walking to the end wall, he settled for the stall with the least water pressure. But the second week, our entertainer chafed.
“Seems somebody is stealing our heat, men.”
The stooped piano player gestured to the totem-like bather whose body blushed under the downpour.
“If somebody don’t stop bleeding the steam,” Red shouted, “I’m gonna’ bitch to the management!” The stranger never flinched.
It was the first morning Red didn’t sing.
“Who is that character?” he asked me later in the pool. “The fucking Messiah?”
“Don’t know,” I answered.
“Goddamn, stands there bleeding our nozzles of all the hot water.”
“What’s the lifeguard say?”
Red shrugged a gesture of defeat.
“Does anybody know who he is?” I asked.
“You ever seen him sudsing?” Red sawed his right hand back and forth across his crotch.
I shook my head.
“Nor has anybody else. First he steals my stall—then he deprives us of what little pleasure we can squeeze out of the pipes.”
The new man’s taciturn presence forced us to vacate the shower room much earlier. His ironic mien caused the bathers to give him an extra berth on either side. Some even preferred waiting in line instead of taking the spot alongside him.
The day Red reappeared after a week’s absence and witnessed the bather chanting under his nozzle in Hebrew, he lost it.
“Hey, you’re sucking the steam out of our arteries!”
The interloper didn’t even twitch.
Red stood within an inch of the man’s face, the water cascading over the pair, yelling:
“Can you hear me, Jesus? I say you’re hogging all our hot water!” But the chanter neither budged nor opened his eyes. Red reached around and shut the spigot, sauntered to the showerhead at the end-wall, turned on its hot water, and began singing “There’s No Business Like Show Business”—belting out the tune with the same ferocity as Ethel Merman once had. The swimmers laughed to themselves and soaped up.
When we returned to the ablutionary following our laps, the stranger still hadn’t moved. Nor had the faucet been turned back on.
Red stopped me in the parking lot.
“Daugherty! I pulled the plug on the Immanuel today. The character’s got panache, wouldn’t you say?”
“I don’t think it’s a show.”
“You think the prick’s going to admit defeat in front of us?”
“There’s something else going on in his head.” I pointed to a camouflage-green motorcycle leaning against the center’s chain-link fence—the model U.S.Army couriers rode in World War II movies. “It belongs to him, Red.”
“So what?”
“When he isn’t under the sprinkler each day he rides between our two towns dressed in a pair of ripped tennis shoes, laces removed, no socks, and a pair of doctor’s scrub pants.”
“What are you trying to tell me, Daugherty?”
I tapped my temple. “We’re seeing bits and pieces of the flick sprocketing in the character’s head. He’s the top banana.”
Red walked back toward his car, then swung around. “Whatever’s troubling the sonofabitch, he’s no right forcing me, you, or any of those alter kockers to bathe in ice—or suffer the Kaddish.”
The following Monday, when none of us expected him to show, Red was the first in the room, reclaiming his favorite rose. Like a muted trumpet, he broke into “Good Morning, Heartache,” evoking Lady Day’s bittersweet memory. It brought a pained expression to each of our faces. Then the stranger entered and occupied the showerhead closest to the end wall. He turned on the hot water, and resumed his totemic stance.
The crooner ceased singing. The soap still dripping off his hands and crotch, he padded over to the bather.
“Do you feel the chill, boys? Like some joker’s blowing cold air through our nozzles? Huh?” Just as Red was about to reach behind the rigid body—the stranger swivelled, twisting his hot water cock shut.
“Hey, the Messiah’s not the meshuggener we might have guessed, eh?”
Water beads glistened in the flourescent light on the man’s immobile body. From that day, even when Red didn’t show, he took the anemic rose, and resumed his pose—turning on no water, hot or cold.
“I don’t enjoy coming here like I used to,” one swimmer said.
“If the guy’s sick, he shouldn’t be coming here,” another asserted.
“What’s the management say?”
“He’s a paid up member.”
Arriving late the next day, I could hear Red singing “I Left My Heart In San Francisco.” There appeared to be newfound exuberance in his timbre. As if the spell of lament had been lifted. Inside, he was all sudsed up, his eyes closed, while several of the swimmers hummed quietly in accompaniment. It was like old times . . . except the end stall, the one nearest the swimming pool wall, had been tented off by a plastic curtain. An assemblage of household galvanized pipes hung from the ceiling on wires, forming a square from which the screen fell. It revealed only the ankles of the stranger. The floor under him was bone dry.
“I won’t be seeing you or the boys for a couple of weeks, Daugherty,” Red hailed me again in the parking lot that morning following our swim.
“No tunes?”
“Oh, you got the meshuggener to entertain you.”
“Where are you going, Red?”
“Doc’s going to recondition my ticker with a pig’s valve. I’m Kosher, as you probably observed.” His irreverence belying damp fear.
“Do you have a competent surgeon?” I asked.
“He’s no shoemaker. Says I’ll soon be able to swim with the rest of you exercise fanatics. And pipe for the ladies, too—if the pork settles in.”
“Say, I’ve a question I’ve been meaning to ask you, Red.”
“Shoot.”
“Were you a professional crooner once?”
“What do you think?”
“I think you were.”
“You’re too young to remember me, right?”
“What was your stage name?”
“You saw me in Las Vegas, right?”
“No.”
“The Catskills?”
“Don’t jive me, Red. Who are you?”
“How’s Empire Clothing.”
He’d lost me.
“Walter Mitty. That’s who the fuck Red is. Ever heard of him? A lousy rag merchant. That’s all I’ve ever been.”
“We could listen to you forever, Red.”
“Ah, you bastards just like to be serenaded in the raw.” He climbed into his car, started it, then rolled down his window.
“Daugherty, you know why Jesus got under my skin?”
I shook my head.
“You never saw him soap up, did you?”
“Huh-uh.”
“He’s the bouquet of an old tanning mill.”
Red waved goodbye.
“‘Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most’,” Daugherty. Nail its chord changes. We’ll gig for the gray men when I return.”
The following Monday I entered the ablutionary as usual. Red’s rose was unoccupied. The stranger stood behind the translucent curtain, his shower broadcasting what sounded like hailstones, steam chimneying out the top. The swimmers were going about their soaping as when I’d first entered one year earlier.
Even in March when Red didn’t show. April either.
