Who Poisoned the Saxophone Section

I’m in full-on mind versus body combat: Legs, lungs, heart all begging for a break, as every pore of my sweat-suited body oozes the fluids I spent all morning sip-hydrating. Yet even this self-made pain is not enough to prevent my consciousness from straying into the full-length of the gym array of sixty-inch-flickering-flat-screen portals into human turmoil.

CNN hosts, with a-stick-up-their-arse anguished eyes, a year into their we-lost-but-I’m-still-paid-a-shitload cycle, dutifully frown as ICE shoot … and shoot … and shoot a prone Alexi Pretti; Fox hosts, with sex-toys-inserted twinkling eyes, a year into their we-won-and-so-I’m-paid-more cycle, flash their trademark no-critical-thinking-here smug smiles in front of a Charlie Kirk photo; On the Food Network a pair of saggy-white forearms spoon five thousand calories into a cake pan; Drake Maye throws touchdown…touchdown…touchdown, the brown ball spiraling oh-so comfortingly into Patriots’ baby-cradling arms; Out of nowhere Estêvão Willian Almeida de Oliveira Gonçalves, or simply Estêvão to soccer fans, Chelsea’s $60M Brazilian player, covers seventy-five yards in the time it takes Wolf Blitzer to form a smile, then blasts the ball past Crystal Palace’s €15M keeper from a seemingly impossible angle. As Estêvão’s teammates clamber upon his bony, eighteen-year-old shoulders, the five thousand calories have browned and risen to deliciousness; “AFFORDABILITY?” flashes in white letters on a royal-blue background; Alex Pretti gets killed… killed … killed.

Trying to avoid new-normal turmoil, I cast my glance beyond the flickering wall of human-insanity and see a small group of men in my own image: Sixtyish, fit but double-chinned, baggy sweatpants, faded tee shirts advertising old Boston teams’ “World Championships” and 10K’s they’ll never again run. They strut around between the black vinyl weight benches and racks of grey dumbbells, casting an occasional secret peek at their bulging-but-sagging biceps, frowning at the reality of turning old and irrelevant.

In the middle of this group moves an old-old guy, maybe as much as eighty-something, his craggy, greyish-white face framed between an arms-sawed-off, black sweatshirt and a raging-red MAGA hat. Though he limp-struts a little slower, frowns a little harder, the energy radiating from his eyes belies these slow-movements, as does the four-inch-wide black lifting belt handwritten across which, in shaky Whiteout is “INTENSITY”. 

Lugging a gallon water bottle filled with a cloudy liquid, he lurches his thick, muscular body over and back between a chest-and-arms-machine and a lifting bench straddled by two fifty-pound dumbbells.

Forcing my eyes down to the black rubber floor, I try to retreat from this instance of humanity; arms and legs push-pulling on the elliptical’s metal limbs, pores oozing sweat as I wrangle my consciousness down the skinny earphone wires into the podcast The Way Out Is In.

“Even Buddhist monks get overwhelmed,” Brother Phap Huu says in the polyglot accent of one who, aged three, moved Vietnam for Canada to join his refugee father, then as a thirteen-year-old moved to France to become a Buddhist monk.

“After all,” he laughs. “Buddhist monks are still human!”

Phap Huu is the Abbot of Plum Village in France, the Buddhist monastery and retreat center established by Thich Nhat Hanh, a monk and peace activist who left war torn Vietnam in 1966 to come to the US to protest the “American war” in his homeland. In the US he met anti-war leaders, including Martin Luther King, and then was denied re-entry to Vietnam for four decades; first by the US-puppet-regime and then by the communists.

Remember the communists?

They were big way-way back, before we had to climb on elliptical machines in sweatsuits “to de-stress,” and when most homes had a foot-and-a half-thick, cathode-ray tube TV, inside of which something hummed a little or a lot depending on the size of your father’s paycheck. 

Communists – whom we were taught to hate and thus labels as commies, reds, pinkos – were big when tube TVs showed News programs that were nonpartisan except when it came to communists. The News sneeringly showed up the “commies” laughable efforts at playing government with their military parades, ridiculous titles, not-so-secret-police kicking in doors, dragging off “counter revolutionaries” in handcuffs, many of whom never survived the detention camps long enough for their stage-managed trial. Yet somehow the communists had vastly superior spy networks. As it turns out beliefs, even perhaps unfounded beliefs, trump money.

Today Phap Huu’s banter with his smug-but-knows-it-and-fights-it, British cohost are having a tough time holding my wandering mind. My eyes glance out the gym’s tall windows to the opening act of a cross-country blizzard that’s forcing this gym to close at 11:00AM, thus compressing into a four-hour window, twelve hours’ worth of high-wear-and-tear de-stressing.

Outside on the busy street, the extremely low temperature makes the snow swirl in particles so tiny that it acts like a frozen fog, obscuring traffic, that nevertheless still whizzes past.

“You have to recognize where different energies come from,” Phap Huu says switching from his forty-something-yet-still-youthful voice to the earnestness of a teacher. “That’s very important, or else you could break!”

Puncturing my consciousness, a cortisol-summoning angry yell forces me to look up.

My eyes dance around and catch jagged human movements next to the chest-and-arms machine: The old-old guy in the INTENSITY belt tries to force his way past a sixtyish, goateed baldy who forms a muscular wall of more-in-control-of-emotions between this yelling octogenarian and a crew-cut, forty-something rippling-with-muscles guy in a black and yellow Bruins tee shirt.   

A few ellipticals over, a heavyset, light-skinned African American woman, slows her machine to a halt; pops out an earbud; furrows her brow; anxiously eyes the trouble.

Cortisol directs my sweaty index finger to tap Phap Huu silent; slide out an earphone; and ready myself for freeze, flight, or fight.

Big-sagging-bicepped sixty-plus-year-old men flood in around the chest-and-arms-machine. The goateed baldy, in a fading navy Patriot’s Super Bowl LIII tee shirt, stands with his right shoulder aimed into INTENSITY’s chest, his head spinning over-back as he holds out his left hand to keep back a forty-something bleached-blond, long haired woman who’s both hands push back on the chest of her husband’s Bruins tee shirt.  Over the wife’s shoulder, her husband’s muscular arm angrily stabs an index finger towards INTENSITY.

The octogenarian’s arm, sagging with fish-belly-grey-white muscles, shoots out his finger, counter-stabbing the air. The bleached blond woman stumbles a half step backward as her husband lunges to counter-counter-air-stab.

The African American woman a few machines away, her face contorting with fear-disgust, pops out the other earbud, and head shaking, stalks out of the gym.

Now the pudgy, don’t-get-high-on-your-own-supply, mid-twenties white guy who greeted me at reception swoops into the scene full of hand-waving nervous energy. Trying to insert himself into the thick-muscled group made up of his parents’ generation, he stalks around the closed circle of big-bicepped arms, his mouth opening and closing a lot, but clearly failing to be heard over the finger-stab-yelling.

All around the gym exercise machines slow to a halt.

The bleached blond woman grasps her husband’s shoulders, and coaxes him, still red-faced-yelling, around. Keeping her hands on his shoulders, she push-marches him off to the other end of the gym.

“Yeah go on, git outta here!” INTENSITY yells over baldy’s thick shoulder.

The gym front desk guy scowls hard, shakes his head rapidly and stalks away – arms swinging with determination.

Slowly, suppressing smiles and shaking heads, the big-bicepped guys drift back to their dumbbells. Baldy looks around anxiously for the Bruins tee shirt to stay gone: Then nodding, wagging his finger a bunch in INTENSITY’s face, he flexes his own considerable muscles before strutting back to his lifting bench, beside which sits a seventy-five-pound dumbbell.

Sliding the earphone back into my ear, I return to Phap Huu whose podcast was recorded in a simple cabin where his lifelong teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, lived in Plum Village near Bordeaux.

“Thigh, which is what we called our teacher, but it’s spelt T…h…a…y, Thay, when he wuz with us,” Phap Huu says with more than a hint of sadness in his tone. “He pointed out that no matter where we are, we have the refuge of deep breathing.”  

Now the gym manager, a mid-thirties, fit looking Hispanic woman arrives in front of INTENSITY preloaded with a hands-on-hips-what-the-fuck! glare.

 She stops the octogenarian mid-shuffle between the weight bench he’s occupying and the chest-and-arms machine he’s also occupying.

“Draw your breath down deep into your stomach,” Phap Huu intones, “hold it for just a few seconds, … then let it go, paying attention as the air exits your body.”

INTENSITY, eyes down to the floor, tries to shuffle around the gym manager who steps into his path, reaching both arms out to stop the older man’s movement.

They remain in this standoff; INTENSITY’s eyes down to the floor; the manager talk-nodding a bunch.

“That’s my refuge when things are going or I should say not going …,” Phap Huu gives a characteristic midsentence laugh, sounding like he’s the thirteen-year-old boy who thirty years ago departed our human world of wanting-lusting-fearing turmoil by entering a Buddhist monastery, “the way I want them to go!”

Back at the chest-and-arms machine, INTENSITY bends at the knees, picks up his gallon jug of cloudy water.

Nod-nod-nodding, the gym manager rests her hand lightly between INTENSITY’s shoulder blades as the old man’s thick torso subsides into a heavy lean onto his walker’s grey metal frame.

The gym manager takes a definitive step forward but immediately has to stop for INTENSITY to fire up his internal boilers. Together they ambulate; the gym manager step-stutter-stepping, while next to her INTENSITY takes half-steps, lifting and dropping his walker. Every few walker-drops, he halts to glare around for a pitying eye.

I turn my gaze back to the flickering screens: Side-by-side smiling photos of Renee Goode and Alex Pretti; a thirty something TV evangelist, in navy dress pants and an open at-the-collar white dress shirt, waves his arms manically, a black-leather-bound bible weighting down his right hand; a steak knife slices meat off the bones of mouth-wateringly barbecued ribs; colorful, sudden-movement ads for cheap processed foods that create systemic diseases compete with soothing, you’ll-get-back-the-life-you-never-had ads for Big Pharma’s expensive cures for those same diseases.

“One of the first things you learn in the monastery is to say the five remembrances lots of times every day, not that we as kids really wanted to hear them in our heads all the time!” Phap Huu’s boyish laugh arrives down the skinny earphone wires from three thousand miles and whole different world view away.

“Thay does this for a good reason,” Phap Huu’s tone slips into teaching mode, heightening my attention.

Outside gusts of wind furiously whirl snow, almost blanching out the traffic that has finally slowed.

INTENSITY halts.

His gallon-jug-filled-hand waves, face snarling as he argues with the manager.

In front of him stands the frame of his temporarily abandoned walker.

“Even as a young man, the remembrance I found hardest,” Phap Huu’s still in teaching mode, “is the one that says: I am of a nature to grow old, … I cannot avoid growing old.”

The manager’s expressionless face absorbs INTENSITY’s outburst until it flags; then she rolls her shoulders, grits her jaw, nods a bunch, and points a finger towards the door.

“Just think about that … I cannot avoid growing old.”