Balls

When I first started going to the gym, I was under the age minimum so I did my best to keep a low profile. I kept my eyes to the floor, and I did not talk to any of the patrons. One old man, however, went out of his way to talk to me. He was a regular at the gym, known among the patrons for wearing shorts so short that he exposed his balls while stretching.

The first time he spoke to me, I was sitting on a bench in the locker room, bending over to tie my shoes. A pair of feet suddenly entered the top of my vision, and a voice began to ask me a question. As I raised my head to mumble a reply, I almost swallowed my tongue. The old man was standing in front of me, completely naked. And since I was sitting down his wad of balls and dick were at eye level, about two feet from my face. I do not recall the contents of our conversation; I only remember keeping my head permanently inclined in order to avoid contact with his meat eye.

Since I was relatively new to the world of locker rooms, I tried to take the incident in stride. Maybe that’s just how it is, I thought. However, eleven years of subsequent locker room experience indicate that normal men do not approach 14 year old boys in the locker room while naked and offer their junk as an olive branch.

Of course, that is just my own interpretation of locker room etiquette. Others might disagree. Such as one of my undergraduate professors. He and I arrived at the gym at approximately the same time and happened to select side-by-side lockers. We struck up a conversation during which he began to change his clothes. This would be completely unremarkable but for the fact that he never completed the task. He just stood there naked for the entirety of our conversation, which seemed to last an infinite number of minutes.

Other examples abound. Like the fat guy at my gym in Urbana who would practice his golf swing in the nude while staring at himself in the mirror. Or the people that lie on the locker room tiles and stretch while naked. Or the two or three guys that I have seen engaging in meticulous, open-forum crotch-scaping. A man’s face is the only thing that he should shave in public.

Unfortunately, I am not without guilt in the keep-yourself-to-yourself department. One day about two years ago, I was at the gym, bent over at the waist in front of a treadmill with my legs about shoulder width apart, trying to stretch before I went running. I was standing in front of a mirror, so I wound up staring absently at my own ass. I slowly began to realize that something was not right. There was a weird pink splotch on the back of my pants. At first I thought that I had spilled bleach on my clothes. Then a horrifying realization washed over me. I could not remember the last time I had cleaned my apartment, much less used bleach on anything. This was not a stain. This was my balls. My shorts and my underwear each had gaping holes which apparently lined up perfectly when I bent over. My insistence on wearing my clothes until they disintegrated had finally caught up with me.