Last Night at the Gym

My name is Perry Brooks, I am fifty-one years old, and last Friday night I did something at the gym that I had never done in five years of working there, which was lock the front door behind the last member and then stay on the wrong side of it, alone, with the whole building to myself. Cody Marten, who owns the place and has been my friend since we were in our thirties and joined the same volleyball league, handed me the keys at the desk an hour earlier and said, "One last hour, Perry, lock up when you're done," and he grinned in a way I should have paid more attention to.

I had put in my two weeks at the end of the month because I was fifty-one and I had spent five years of nights watching other people come and go and lift and sweat and live while I sat at the desk with a paperback and a radio, and I decided I did not want to retire from a life I had only ever watched. So I quit, and Cody said good for you, and then he gave me the keys, and I thought that was just a nice gesture about trust, which shows you how slow I can be.

The last member was a big guy named Terrell who does leg presses at eleven on Fridays and grunts like a man moving furniture, and I let him out at a quarter past midnight and turned the deadbolt behind him, and then the silence came down over the whole building like a lid. I had heard that silence a thousand times from the other side of the desk, the hum of the vending machines and the tick of the treadmill cooling somewhere, but hearing it from inside the floor instead of behind the glass was different, the way your own house sounds different when you come home from a long trip.

I walked the floor out of habit, checking the rack and the machines and the bathrooms, and that was when I saw that one of the lockers in the men's room was hanging open, which it should not have been, and inside it, sitting on the shelf like it was waiting for me, was a small silicone plug, purple, with a flared base, the kind of thing I had seen in ads on the side of websites and scrolled past for twenty years, and next to it a little bottle of water-based lube, mostly full. Somebody had left them behind, and by the rules I was supposed to bag it and put it in lost and found, and I stood there with my flashlight on it for a good minute doing the math on how embarrassing it would be to touch it.

Well, I picked it up. I held it in my hand and turned it over, and it was lighter than I expected and softer, and it had been there since Wednesday at the earliest, because I had inventoried that locker Wednesday night and it was empty then, so somebody had used that locker since, cleared out their things, missed this, and either did not care or did not want to ask the security guard about their plug, and I understood that feeling completely. I am a grown man and I have been married and divorced and alone a long time, and I have been cautious my whole life, cautious about money and health and opinions, and holding that little purple thing in my hand I felt something in my chest that I had not felt since I was in my twenties, which was the urge to do something just because I wanted to.

So I did. I am not going to build it up into more than it was, it was a man alone in an empty gym with a toy and an hour to kill on his last night, but for me it was a first, because in fifty-one years I had never put anything up my ass, and I had thought about it more times than I would say out loud.

I took the plug out to the main floor, because the men's room had a camera in the hallway and I wanted no part of explaining that footage, and I found the darkest corner of the weight room, the one by the storage wall where the overheads have been burned out since spring because I never got around to filing the work order. There was a lone yoga mat rolled up against the wall, left behind from a class days ago, and I unrolled it on the rubber floor and stood over it in the half dark with the plug in one hand and my heart going faster than it had any right to.

First things first, I went back to the break room and washed the plug with hot water and soap, because I am not an animal, and dried it, and then I read the label on the little bottle, because I had read somewhere that silicone wants water-based and nothing else, and it was, and I was relieved not to be driving to the drugstore at one in the morning to buy lube from a cashier I might know. I carried both back in my cupped hands the way a child carries a frog. I remember thinking that this was the strangest thing I had ever done and then immediately thinking that it was not even in the top ten strangest things I had done this year, which is its own sad commentary.

I stripped off my uniform pants right there in the dark corner, clumsy hands on the belt and the button and the zipper, and my shirt I pulled off over my head and dropped on the stack of foam rollers, and then I was standing on a yoga mat in a gym I had guarded for five years wearing nothing but my socks and my watch, and I will tell you it felt less like freedom and more like being a new hire on his first day.

Getting the plug in took longer than I want to admit. I used plenty of the lube and I still did not know what I was doing, so I got down on my knees on the mat with my chest low and worked the tip against myself slow, and the first sensation was just pressure, foreign and sharp, my body flatly refusing the idea, and I breathed and eased off and tried again the