The Temple: Working Out, and Up, and Across

I exercise hard at a gym in Culver City, California, a bright, clean, pretentious place with lots of chicks in skimpy leotards and guys in monochromatic sweats and baseball caps. There's hip-hop aerobics classes that I myself never attend, Tae-Bo for the trend-conscious, and a big swimming pool for those with one condition or another. Personal trainers in jade green shirts stand around with pencils and clipboards, leaning on the machines, hoping to get hired, if only for the hour. For the most part, folks here are considerate of other members, friendly even. From a distance we smile, greet each other, chat about hair, wink.

For me, this gym is a kind of holy place that's all the time flooded in sunlight, a temple where one goes to pay tribute to the muscle. It is the muscle, you see, that turns me on, that gives me power. I can curl 40 pounds, with one hand. And, over the 10 years I have been lifting weights, I have watched my body change from that of a girlie-girl to that of a girlie-woman. I like it. So do the boys.

This Tuesday evening I slam the locker closed, snap the lock, plug in my earphones, turn on Buju Banton, throw a white towel around my neck and head upstairs toward the Lifecycle, where I will pedal hills on level 6 for 24 minutes, burn a couple hundred calories and sweat so much so that I will be drenched. I celebrate this wet; it is a kind of anointing.

Sometimes I close my eyes and pedal so fast that I imagine myself taking off, like a rocket. The dancehall sends me to that high, and I hardly feel my body as it works. It is the rhythm, only the rhythm. I can't talk, can't reason, can’t stop my legs. My heart races to the reggae beat of Yellow Man. I am a million miles away from my nasty boss and my sad mother and my all-too-daring kid, a million miles from the slow traffic and the home invasion killings and corrupt cops and ugly architecture and poor LA schools where kids pull guns on each other. I wipe the sweat from my neck with a towel, pat my cheeks, chin and forehead, then throw it over the computerized handlebars on which the spent calories flash 135 ... 137...139. A black man with tiny dreads and sculpted biceps sits down on the bike next to me. He puts his water bottle in the plastic holder at the side of the handlebars. His blue-suede covered feet begin to pedal. An actor, I'd guess, since a lot of others sculpt their bodies here. He examines me in that fiery way men in big city gyms examine women, blatantly. He flashes a hey-baby smile. I'd turn and acknowledge him, thank him, if I weren't still half a million miles out. After all, it’s what I huff and puff for, isn’t it? ... 145 ... 147.

A fiftyish woman with big silver earrings and purple striped tights sits down on the bike to the other side of me. She is blonde, but not tonight. A purple turban just about covers her bald head, and this grounds me ... 161. "Shave your head?" I ask her ... 165. Beverly is her name, a dentist, hangs out with a built black guy who wears gold wire glasses and a sweatband around his head. As a mixed couple the two have always fascinated me. She clings to him; he ignores her. It seems to work. She could shave her head -- she's bold enough, funky enough, I think.

The hill I am about to climb is a tough one, and I've lost the rhythm...169. I wrap the towel around my neck, tight.

Beverly pedals slowly, unconvincingly. And her man isn't beside her, as he usually is. Her partner, she calls him. "No," she tells me. "Chemotherapy."

I run my hand through my wet hair. The chill makes me shiver. "What kind of cancer," I ask as I pedal, still effortlessly.

"Breast," she answers. "A nasty cell-type. I had a lumpectomy, and after the chemo, I will go through radiation," she says, pedaling, with effort, slo-mo. Tears fill her blue eyes, make them look even bluer. Black eyeliner turns her lids a kind of Sophia Loren dark and dramatic. Beautiful, she is. She can barely move. "It takes all my strength just keep up my practice, then to come here ..."