Chrissy Does Chelsea

I couldn’t resist. It was Sunday and I hadn’t swum in two days. The public pools didn’t have lap swimming till 11 am. I’d exposed my naked body to public view the night before. I had to swim, if only to convince myself that I was still making an effort.

So I dropped the 50 bucks for a day pass at Chelsea Piers. I figured: I’d saved 40 dollars the night before because D. and I, having opted for audience participation (see previous entry), hadn’t had to pay the $20-per-person ticket price to see Leaves of Grass. So really I was only paying $10 to use the Chelsea Piers athletic facility.

The plan was to arrive at 8, when the place opened, but any plan I make involving New York City public transportation usually goes awry at some point, and this one was no exception. And the path to the pool, if you approach on foot instead of driving in through the parking lot – who drives anywhere in Manhattan? – isn’t well-marked, so I had to wander around the building a bit before figuring out where I was supposed to go.

First I walked past the yachts. Big yachts. On one of them, a trim young blonde guy with Harvard crew good looks, in navy-blue slacks and a tapered bone-white sweater, was standing on deck. He smiled and waved at me as I passed by. I waved back, wondering if he was just being friendly or had something more in mind, but deciding not to embarrass myself, and mindful of the fact that I was on a mission, I kept walking.

At the front desk, I handed over my credit card, to which the attendant graciously posted a $50 charge, and was issued a robe. A lightweight, cotton, terry-cloth robe. So I guess the $50 buys you something. The robe had two advantages, I discovered. First, it kept me covered up on the roughly quarter-mile hike from the men’s locker room to the pool deck, along the second-floor elevated walkway (with Hudson River views) that runs above the first-floor sea of treadmills, elliptical trainers and rowing machines. Second, the robe had pockets, so it gave me someplace to put the key to my lock; I didn’t have to tie it onto the string of my bathing suit.

Locker 69 was available. I took that as a good omen.

The pool was everything about.com had promised, and more. Six lanes, each a familiar 25 yards long, each able to accommodate two swimmers before anyone had to start swimming in circles. Overcrowding was not an issue at 8:30 am on a Sunday morning in Chelsea. And the view was even more spectacular than I imagined it would be. The facility is on a pier, and the pool is at the far end, jutting out into the water, so the view isn’t just at one end, it’s on three sides.

I ended up in the lane all the way over on the river side of the pool, which was great for scenery, but did have one slight problem. Ladders stick out into the lane, so when you do the fly, if you pay more attention to your swimming than to the ladders, you occasionally smash your hand into one of them. But that’s what ice packs are for.

Still, I achieved two new post-surgical milestones: 200 yards of continuous freestyle and 75 yards of continuous fly. The freestyle was fine. I could have kept going past 200, but I wanted to focus on the fly. I did some 25s, a couple of 50s, with lots of resting in between, and then the 75. I was dead at the end. Pleasantly dead, but dead. And I had hit the half-hour mark, which for now I have defined as a sufficiently long workout to claim victory. It’s still only 10 weeks since my back surgery, so I’m giving myself lots of breaks. (Or making lots of excuses. Both perspectives are valid.)

Now I’m on my way to D.C. for a family visit. I’m writing this on the train. I grew up in the D.C. suburbs and my sister still lives there. I haven’t figured out yet how I’m going to swim while I’m there. But I still have my lock, from the CVS on 23^rd and 1^st, so I’m ready for whatever fate throws at me.

Except that my left foot, which was cramping a bit yesterday while I was swimming, is now killing me whenever I put weight on it. It feels like I’ve got a hairline fracture. I can’t think of any reason why I would have a hairline fracture. It was my hand I smashed into the ladder at the $50-a-day pool, not my foot, and my hand feels fine. Current plan: ice it when I get to my sister’s house; if that doesn’t work, massage it; if it still hurts, ignore it and hope the pain goes away by itself.

Getting old stinks.

Singing the Body Electric

Last night, D. and I went to see “Leaves of Grass” at the cell, an off-off-Broadway theater space in Chelsea. This may seem irrelevant to the process of getting ready for the Gay Games, but bear with me.

The production is a choreographed choral reading of several poems from Whitman’s epic, including “Song of Myself,” and “I Sing the Body Electric,” in which the author celebrates the joy of the physical senses and the beauty of the human body. Appropriately, throughout most of the production, the performers, five men and four women, are nude. They occasionally wear underwear, or wrap themselves in gauzy material for effect, or, as in one scene in which a woman mimes sunning herself outdoors, sport sunglasses. But mostly, they’re naked.

The online advertisement for the performance offered free tickets to audience members who volunteered to participate in the piece. Also nude.

“We have to.” (me)

“No, we don’t.” (D.)

“Okay, fine, I’ll do it. You can watch.”

“You really want to do this?”

“Yes.”

So we did.

Our role consisted of sitting in a particular spot in the audience, clothed, listening for the line, “For ever and ever,” which appeared near the end of the show, then standing up and waiting for further instructions. After a few seconds, Kesh, one of the performers, appeared, moving toward us, his arm outstretched in a beckoning gesture. D., who was closer, took Kesh’s hand. Since there weren’t any other hands readily available, I stood frozen, looking confused. Kesh nodded to me, inclusively, to get with the program, so I took hold of D’s hand. Kesh led us offstage and down a flight of darkened stairs.

“We’ll circle around the stage two times,” he said when we arrived in the basement, encouraging us to disrobe quickly so we didn’t miss our entrance. “There’s a line if you want to say it. ‘I am large. I contain multitudes.’” D. and I nodded, repeating the line to commit it to memory.

I had barely finished stuffing my socks into my shoes before we were being whisked back upstairs, arms once again linked and raised high in the air. The stairs seemed even darker on the way back up. I could barely see where I was going, and unlike during my descent, when my hands had been free, now I couldn’t cling to the banister for support. On the plus side, I was so focused on not tripping I didn’t have to time to think about the fact that I was about to walk out on a New York off-off-Broadway stage, in front of a room full of strangers, naked. Me, the guy who can barely get himself to look in a mirror.

I had figured the stage would be dim, as it had been through much of the production. Wrong. This was the finale. The climax of the corporeal celebration. Full, bright white light. No subtlety. No shadows to hide in.

As promised, we circled the stage two times, D. holding Kesh’s hand; I holding D.’s; someone else, I didn’t see who, holding my other hand. I didn’t make eye contact with anyone, neither cast member nor audience member. Instead, I watched Kesh’s feet, trying to match my gait to his, to avoid either bumping into D. or lagging behind and breaking the flow of the action.

Suddenly, we stopped. I realized people were saying the line Kesh had told us about. I managed to chime in on “large,” half-mumbling the word. But then I found my voice and, projecting out into the world, I proclaimed, in unison with the cast, “I contain multitudes.” And it was over. Kesh led us offstage and back downstairs, where he gave us a high-five and told us to dress, quickly, for the curtain call. Various other cast members wandered down the stairs, congratulating and thanking us as they passed by on their way to their own piles of limp clothing.

So what does all this have to do with training for the Gay Games?

Two things. First, it’s never easy to get up on the starting block at a swimming competition. It is difficult to explain how deeply damaging it is to grow up as a sissy in a world in which boys are expected to act like guys and are bullied mercilessly when they fail at it, continuously. For me, climbing up on the starting block at a meet, in a Speedo, is equivalent to standing on a soapbox, nude, and announcing: Yes, I’m a sissy, but my body is strong enough perform this feat of athletic prowess; I may not have the physique of some of these 20-year-olds; I may take twice as long to complete the event as they do; but I’m doing it; I’m here and I’m doing it.

So walking out on the cell’s stage, nude, was a form of vaccination. It will make standing up on the starting block in Cologne a tiny bit easier. And getting up on the starting block will be more difficult by far than swimming the 200 fly. Swimming the fly just takes good form and endurance.

The second thing is the connection to The Living Theater. Almost exactly 40 years ago, as a freshman at the University of Chicago, I went to see a performance of The Living Theater’s “Paradise Now.” I don’t remember much of the show, only that it ended in a writhing group grope that included both cast members and any audience members who cared to participate. I don’t remember whether the cast at that point was clothed or not. At any rate, dozens of students swarmed up onto the stage. This was March 1969, nestled somewhere within that long, pregnant year that stretched between the Summer of Love and the Stonewall rebellion.

I was one of the dozens. So was my friend Michael. We kept our clothes on, but we ended up near each other on the stage, touching each other’s fingers at first, then holding hands, then hugging, and finally, once the show ended, going home to his apartment, and touching, kissing, stroking, massaging, purring, holding on to one another, breathing in each other’s scent, for hours. I was 18. It was the first time I had made love to another man.

Michael, by the way, died young, 33 years ago. He was 27. Not AIDS. He was spared that nightmare, not living long enough either to die from the disease or to survive and watch his friends disappear back into the earth, one bitter funeral at a time. Michael was run over by a car, riding home from work on his bicycle. Seeing his face or hearing his voice used to brighten my day. His death left a hole inside me that has never been filled. I suspect it never will be. I'm always glad to have an excuse to think about him, even though it usually means I end up crying.

Back downstairs at the cell, after the curtain call, I noticed that Kesh was wearing a Living Theater t-shirt. (Previously I had only seen him nude.) I told him the story of my experience 40 years earlier. “It all connects,” he said, smiling. We got so wrapped up in our conversation we missed the second curtain call. Sorry, Kesh.

So walking out onto the cell’s stage nude was also a way to mark one of my first important steps toward coming out, to honor a memory, to sing the body electric. And that has everything in the world to do with getting ready for the Gay Games.

Asser Levy Numerology

The Asser Levy Rec Center, at E 23^rd and FDR Drive, has a 3-lane outdoor pool that opens for lap swimming at 7 in the morning. It is reachable via the M23 crosstown bus. As the bus heads east, the number of people on the bus in hospital greens increases steadily. They all get off at 1^st Avenue, and head in to work at the VA hospital. It’s another 1-avenue walk to the rec center.

I arrived at 7:10. There are 2 entrances, 1 marked “Women,” the other marked “Men.” From 23^rd Street, you see the women’s entrance first, but I walked past it, figuring there was a reason for the gender distinction – maybe the doors led directly to the locker rooms. The men’s entrance, however, was blocked off. Turns out everyone is supposed to go in through the women’s door. I didn’t ask.

“It’s my first time here,” I said to the guy at the front desk. “Where do I need to go?”

“Do you have a lock?”

“No.” The gym where I swim at home has loaner locks. I hadn’t thought about it. The $50-a-day Chelsea Piers facility may have loaner locks, but I wouldn’t know. I haven’t stopped by to check out the view yet. On second thought, maybe they don’t have loaner locks. Maybe they just sell locks at a steep markup.

“There’s a CVS on 1^st Avenue.” Where I had just come from, pretty much right there at the bus stop where I had gotten off the M23. “Get one with a key,” the front-desk guy said. “Don’t get a combination.”

I walked back, bought the only lock in the store with a key (which, inexplicably was to be found in the stationery section, at the end of a long row of Hallmark cards that managed to look cheerful even at 7 am, before coffee, under the disturbing green glow of fluorescent lighting). The lock cost $9.73, with tax. By the time I returned to the rec center, it was closer to 7:30.

When I’m in an unfamiliar locker room, I usually pick locker 69. It’s easy to remember. But 69 was already taken, so I chose number 153 instead. It was by a window, which is also easy to remember, but not quite as easy as 69, because triggering the by-a-window memory requires you to use a different, less-frequently accessed part of your brain. I live in fear of some day stashing my clothes, my ID, my keys, and my iPhone in a strange locker and spending hours wandering around, essentially naked, wearing nothing but a wet towel wrapped around my waist, trying to find my stuff, occasionally being tricked into passing a mirror and having to confront what my body looks like from the outside. It’s not quite at the level of a recurring nightmare.

I changed, showered, and headed downstairs to the pool, the key to my locker tied onto the string of my bathing suit, which, having been designed for racing, didn't have a pocket. I hadn’t had any reason before to notice my suit’s lack of key-storage space. The lock I use at the gym where I normally swim is a combination lock.

The Asser Levy pool isn’t rectangular; it’s diagonal at one end. Different lanes are different lengths. I picked the long lane, which, I later found out, is 40 yards long. Usually lanes are 25 or 50 yards, or 25 or 50 meters. Swimming in a 40-yard lane felt odd; I never knew when to expect the wall to appear. I also kept running into the side of the pool. I can’t explain this, it just happened.

I didn’t know the lane was 40 yards long till after I finished swimming and asked the pool attendant, who sits at a table at the non-diagonal end of the pool and checks people in. (The pool is free, but you have to register and be issued a green card – really, a green City of New York Parks & Recreation Adult-lap Swim Program Admission Card Season Pass, credit-card-sized, with a coated surface so it won’t disintegrate when it gets wet. You print and sign your name on in. In the upper-right-hand corner, the pool attendant has hand-written a number that uniquely identifies you. I’m number 647.)

“Do you know how long the pool is?” I asked, reclaiming my green card from the attendant after finishing my swim.

“No, but I know that 44 lengths is a mile.”

“44? Really? The long lane?”

“44.”

I decided to wait till I got back to my hotel room to calculate the actual length of the lane. 44, I could readily see, was divisible by 11. No way that 5,280, a sequence of digits burned into my brain since 2^nd or 3^rd grade as the number of feet in a mile, was going to be evenly divisible by 11. The lane length, I was quite certain, was going to stretch to infinity in some bizarre pattern of repeating decimals.

I was wrong. 5,280 is evenly divisible by 44, exactly 40 times. No decimals. Who knew there was a factor 11 lurking in there?

So I can now tell you that, although I didn’t swim any 50s or 100s, I did swim a couple of 80-yard laps of freestyle, and a couple of 40-yard lengths of butterfly. That was close enough to feel like I hadn't backslid too badly since my previous swim, a few days earlier.

Oh, and here’s one more number: 30. Which is 10 less than 40. 30, a friend informed me after reading about my recent trip to WeightWatchers, is the actual number of pounds I have almost lost since my first weigh-in 4 years ago. Not 40. 30.

40 is the length, in yards, of the long lane at the Asser Levy Rec Center pool.

Also: 647 is not evenly divisible by 11.

Craving Chlorinated Water

Before I left San Francisco, I thought I'd probably have to live without swimming for a couple of weeks while I was traveling. But I’ve been in New York for less than 24 hours and already I’m jonesing for a pool. A Google search for “public swimming pools new york city” turns up two within a reasonable distance of where I’m staying in Chelsea.

There’s the Chelsea Piers Sports Center, which about.com describes as “a six-lane pool with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Hudson River.” Cool. No, fabulous. And I can walk there. I keep reading.

Day passes, the website says, are $50. Must be a typo. I call. “Is it really $50 a day just to use the pool?” “Yes, but you get access to the entire facility for the whole day.” “There isn’t a cheaper option if all I want to do is swim for half an hour?” “I’m afraid not.”

Okay, scratch Chelsea Piers. Maybe I’ll stop by later and ask if I can just check out the view. For free.

Then there’s the Asser Levy Rec Center at E. 23^rd and Avenue C. The outdoor pool, open during the summer, is free. And it’s a four-block walk and one bus ride – the 23 St Crosstown – from where I’m staying. I don’t think I’ve ever taken a bus in Manhattan. But how hard could it be. It’s probably just like taking a bus in San Francisco, right? Do you think they’ll let me use my MUNI Fast Pass? Are New York and San Francisco sister cities? Maybe I can rent a bike. Is there someplace to rent bikes in Chelsea?

Well, all this goes on tomorrow’s agenda. It’s too late to go swimming today. It’s almost 9:00 am and I’ve been up for three and a half hours. Swimming is what you do at dawn. The rest of the day is for walking and taking the subway. Now if only D. and Sarah would wake up…

Registration, or What to Wear

It’s official now. I’ve registered for the Gay Games. I’m entered in the 50 fly and the 200 fly events. The 200 fly is the real deal, the reason I’m going, the ultimate challenge. The 50 is just to see if, after I’ve jumped off the starting block, and dolphin-kicked underwater as far as as possible without passing out, I can manage to complete a few strokes quickly enough to rack up a time worth mentioning.

Registering was deceptively simple. All I had to do was fill in a few bits of information – name, address, phone number, and my favorite: transgender? (M-->F; F-->M; no) - and fork over 165 euros. I don’t even want to know how much that is in US dollars. I’ll find out when the credit card bill arrives. Actually, it was more than 165 euros; I paid an extra 125 euros so my partner, D., could march by my side in the opening and closing ceremonies.

Oddly enough, the thought of participating in the opening and closing ceremonies hadn’t occurred to me. At first I thought it was because I was so focused on my original motivation, the swimming (and the chance to sneak an up-close look at hot young guys from all over the world, with their shirts off), that I simply hadn’t gotten around to fantasizing about the parades.

Then I realized it was because, even though I had decided to compete in the Gay Games, I still didn’t believe I deserved to march in the opening ceremonies. That experience was reserved for real athletes. I never had been and never would be a real athlete. I was in a different category. No matter what feats of jockitude I accomplished, even if I succeeded in completing, in an international sporting competition, what is arguably the most challenging event in competitive swimming, that still wouldn’t make me an athlete. I couldn’t be an athlete: I was a sissy. Yeah, well fuck you, Brad Donaldson, captain of the football team, who made my life hell in 9^th grade. What kinda shape are you in at 60?

Still, once the question was posed during the online registration process – do you want your partner to march with you? – how could the answer be no?

But that raised a more difficult question: What does one wear while marching in the opening ceremonies of the Gay Games? Something fabulous, yes, but what screams fabulous for a 59-year-old faggot who hasn’t worn a dress in over a decade?

“You have to wear a dress,” my daughter Sarah insisted. She had already declared that, if I was going to swim in the Gay Games, it was only fair that she be brought along to watch, and I had relented. Confident that she had scored a summer trip to Germany, she had now turned to offering fashion advice.

“I don’t think so,” I said, although I do love a nice lace gown. I still have one, my favorite, hanging in my closet from my hippie queer genderfuck days. It’s an ankle-length, peach-colored number, lots of crinoline; I stole it from an antique store in Boston in 1969, as I recall; no easy feat; please don’t tell anyone; I do regret it; I know it was wrong. I used to accessorize the gown with calf-high black combat boots. I also sported a full beard. That was back when my beard was some color other than gray, thus projecting virility, to the limited extent possible while adorned in lace, rather than maturity.

“Maybe rhinestone earrings,” I said. Long, dangly ones. I have several pair, although I suspect that, all of them having been purchased for other occasions, none of them makes precisely the right statement for the opening ceremonies of the Gay Games. I also have a cute pair of pink-flamingo earrings. They could work. There is a Pink Flamingo event: think synchronized swimming on queer steroids. Pink-flamingo earrings could be a statement of solidarity. But no, on second thought, since I’m not planning to participate in the Pink Flamingo event, not this time around at least, wearing the pink-flamingo earrings might be viewed as presumptuous, an attempt at co-optation. I don’t want to step on any toes.

I’ll just have to shop.

I always tend to get hung up on the earrings, although I do realize there’s the rest of the outfit to consider. Summery and loose, off-white linen, an air of casual elegance? Or a tight-fitting hot pink cotton t-shirt, that shows off my pecs (or would, if I had pecs), and ends a couple of inches above my waist, exposing my abs (if I had abs)? Stone-washed Levis or khakis? Long pants or shorts? Cut-off and fringy or hemmed? Should I go retro and do bell-bottoms?

And footwear! Comfort first. I insist. I’m training to participate in a serious athletic event. I’m not about to go messing up my calf muscles two days before the race. Although that still leaves quite a few options. Tevas? (Do they come in pink, or lavender?) Something shiny and silver, with lots of straps, from Thrift Town? (It’s so hard to find anything in my size.) Converse All-Stars (they do come in pink, and lavender)? And if I wear something open-toed, do I get my nails done to match the earrings? Can the pedicurist successfully hide the toenail fungus?

Finally: the hat. I have to wear something, or I’ll burn to a crisp. There’s no natural protection left up there. Even SPF 70 won’t save me. I’m thinking bonnet. I know it will be mid-summer, but I’m partial to Easter bonnets, I always have been. Something that says fresh straw, with a tasteful cluster of preserved rosebuds: burgundy, and dusty pink, and mauve. Maybe I’ll get Ixia to do the arrangement. I wonder how it will travel.

And I thought training for the 200 fly would be the hard part. Silly faggot: the real challenge is going to be pulling my outfit together for the parade. Just thinking about it makes me want to pour myself a glass of Chablis and sit on the veranda all afternoon. And then take a nap. Well, I’ve got time. The opening ceremonies are still 11 months away.

What? What do you mean I can’t wear the same thing to the closing ceremonies? I don’t care if “it simply isn’t done.” How big a suitcase do you expect me to pack?

Planting a Stake

Two things of note today.

First, although it's a Saturday morning, and I don't usually swim on Saturdays, I decided to put in a little pool time because I'm leaving tomorrow morning to bring my daughter to college and I'll be gone for two weeks, with limited opportunity to swim. Accomplishments: I swam a 100-yard freestyle, and more importantly to the challenge at hand, a 50-yard fly.

Not great. But I've only been back in the pool 3 or 4 times since my surgery. Before the surgery, I couldn't swim for about a month because the pain was too intense; I couldn't find any way to make it fun. About a month after the surgery, I felt better, but I had to wait until the wound healed completely before I could swim. The doctor didn't want me to risk infection and I decided that since he was a brain surgeon I should probably listen to him.

So I've been hanging out in the "therapy" lane, swimming 25 yards at a time, focused on form, then resting, then another 25 yards. Today's accomplishments are significant because both 50 and 100 are bigger numbers than 25. Not as big as 200, but still...

Second noteworthy item of the morning. On a whim, I swung by WeightWatchers, which I joined about 4 years ago to lose weight after my mother died of complications from diabetes. It was a miserable death, complete with dementia, and I thought it might be nice to try something different. At any rate, I stepped on the scale this morning and the numbers that blinked back at me from the digital readout were 182.2. For perspective, when I weighed in at my first meeting, the blinking numbers screamed 212.0.

I did a quick calculation. "So, wow, I've lost 40 pounds since I started," I said hopefully to the woman behind the counter, waiting patiently for praise while she tucked my 12 dollars, a 5 and 7 singles, into the cash register.

"Almost," she said sympathetically, apparently not a fan of round numbers. "And thanks for the correct change. You're the second person today with correct change. You can come to my meeting any time."

I guess I should have left my wallet out of my pocket while I weighed in. It probably would have been good for at least two-tenths of a pound.

Chrissy Gets Inspired

I know you're not supposed to use a pen to write a blog, but I was sitting in a tent cabin on the shore of the American River (about half a mile a way from Sutter's mill, where gold was discovered in California) when I decided to start a blog, and I didn't have my computer with me. So it was either use a pen or type it on my daughter's computer, and that seemed, well -- just wrong. This is a transcription.

What's my blog about? I'm going to swim the 200-meter butterfly, or try at least, in the Gay Games in Cologne in July 2010. About a year ago, I set myself the goal of swimming the 200 fly in a swim meet before I turned 60. My original plan was to accomplish this in a local Masters meet, somewhere in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live. But when I saw an article on the Web about Cologne, I decided that was the place to do it.

I will turn 60 in September 2010, in 405 days to be precise, and I figure if I'm going to swim the 200 fly in a meet before then, why not in an international meet where it would be really embarrassing to fail? (Although, nobody watches the 60-year-old swimmers, anyway - they all want to see the young guys, especially at the Gay Games - so even if I run out of steam after the first 100 and have to be fished out of the pool with a hook, although it will be personally mortifying, not many people will actually notice.)

Anyway, my blog's going to be about training for Cologne, with a little back story about how I got to this point in my journey.

I wonder how far back I should start. Should I go all the way back to junior high school, and tell you about the sissy boy who was bullied, and spat on, and tripped, and had his books dumped, and was chosen last on every team, and generally hated anything to do with sports or athletic activity? Or should I start more recently, two months and three days ago, when I had surgery on my lumbar spine, because the Pilates, and the swimming, and the bike riding, and the ergonomic chair, and the neuromuscular reprogramming (a form of deep-tissue massage), and the chiropractic, and the acupuncture, and the naprapathy, and the deep breathing, and finally, the Vicodin, weren't winning the battle against sciatic pain?

Hard to decide. You'll get to hear about all of it eventually. For now, though, I should probably settle for introducing myself, because I don't have much time today. I'm going whitewater rafting in a few minutes.

My name is Chrissy the Sissy. That's not my real name, of course. I also go by Camo, which is short for Camomile de Quellequechose. But for this blog, I'm going to use Chrissy the Sissy. I'll explain later. Right now, I have to get ready to go rafting.

I hope my back does okay. It should be fine. I stretched it out at dawn this morning on this big rock by the edge of the river. And the section of the river we're doing is only Class III.