Sweaty gyms
Posh gyms have extractor fans, air purifiers, odour neutralising chemicals and professional cleaning staff. Working-class gyms stink. The more close-to-the-financial-edge these gyms, the funkier the smell. A friend asked me to pick him up from a boxing gym. It was old-school and had been open for eighty years. I smelt the ghosts of Gene Tunney, Jack Johnson and Rocky Marciano wandering around, looking for bodies to inhabit.
The uninitiated might reel upon entering such premises: boxers working up a sweat — skipping, sparring, punching bags, throwing medicine balls. The sweat drips to the floor, and rises as steam into the rafters, penetrates the plasterboard, the paint and brickwork, the canvas, the floor. It’s stamped and pounded into the fabric year after year; and as the components of sweat decay and recombine, they create the Frankenstein of sweat that is the working-class boxing gym. I’m at home in that funk. It is a dose of honesty: it proclaims, here are ordinary human beings exerting themselves and stinking up the place while doing so — there is nothing that needs hiding or masking here. Just honest sweat.
