I Guess It Was Beautiful

For the past week, my life has more or less revolved around trips to the gym. This is not because I have undergone a radical personality shift and become a thick, veiny musclehead. It’s much more a case of external factors. You see, last October it was my birthday, and I received a very exciting and creative gift: a weeklong pass to Equinox, a very elite, fancy, expensive New York health clubs. Now, months later, I’ve finally gotten around to using it. With only a scant week to explore this bizarre Heaven on Earth, I made it my mission to go every day.

I can’t even count the differences between this gym and the local, 30-bucks-a-month, overheated one-room joint right up the street (my whole apartment patronizes this place, and it has a certain rough charm all it’s own, but even the happiest pauper dreams of a day as King). Just to compare: the neighborhood gym doesn’t have any free hand towels. Equinox has a mini-fridge of chilled, Eucalyptus-scented towels next to the treadmills, solely to refresh yourself directly after your run. Other Equinox perks include the most intense steam room I’e ever encountered, and two studios with all kinds of crazy classes (during my week I managed to take a class called “gentle healing yoga” that made me feel generally more tense, and something called Feldenkrais that involved lying flat on the ground for an hour and very slowly rotating my pelvis). It’s also spacious and well-ventilated, both of which I now consider a luxury in my gym-going life.

But really, the difference is something much deeper, a sort of gut feeling that’s difficult to translate. Walking around this grand club, feeling every bit like I own the whole damn place (as I’m sure every single other member feels, subconsciously or otherwise), it becomes an escape, a sort of concrete oasis. During this past week, an uber-honeymoon period if there ever was one,I never really felt like I was going to this gym to work out (an activity I normally despise). I was going there to be a member of the elite, to take an invigorating tour of my proudest possession and then relax with a long steam, basking in the thick, wet lap of luxury, dehydration and discomfort a footnote in the foreground.

The one uncouth thing about these week-long gym trials (and let me tell you, this is not my first) is that they always require a preliminary meeting with some membership person. During these meetings I have to act as though I am actively considering joining the gym. My actual plans, of course, are to never set foot in each place again, and to steal as many towels as I can in the process. When I pulled a similar con at the brightly-colored, granola-scented CRUNCH earlier this year, I had no real qualms lying through my teeth to the guy there, an aggressive fella with one of those smiles that look like it’s being held tight with a system of pulleys. But, in a piece of bitter irony, my Equinox advisor was a very charming. I felt bad lying to her, letting her show me around the gym when I knew that it was all in vain. Still, I did it.

It’s very easy to lie nowadays. Granted, I’ve never lived in any other time period (as far as I know), but this strikes me as a moment in history where casual lying has been fully embraced by the mainstream. Honestly, can you think of a time when lying was so accepted, so easy, and occupied such a moral gray area (rather than the more severe black area that lying finds itself in every now and then).

I think a big part of this is the sheer amount of control people are able to exert over their own image. Whether we like it or not (and trust me, I don’t like it), a great deal of social interaction nowadays happens online. And with the sheer prevalence of venues – Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, blogs, Myspace or Friendster for the coolest guys in the room – people are able to manipulate and mold their online entity to their liking, crafting an unreal, idealized version of themselves. It’s almost like everyone I know is constantly performing a live, improvisatory solo show about their day-to-day lives, as they live them. In case it’s not obvious, I don’t exclude myself from all this. I mean, for God’s sake, I’m at this very instant writing a blog (I don’t like that word) that I will present for public consumption on the internet (and, given the brand new location, I will likely advertise this re-launch all over my other online identities).

And of course, the unspoken truth in these public forums is just how easy it is to lie. As we move into the future, I believe firmly that it will become easier and easier for everyone on the planet to communicate and interact with one another, and I believe just as firmly that, as this happens, our capabilities as human beings to really know one another will slowly dissipate into thin air. Obviously this is a pretty vast, dystopian generalization, and there will always be certain people, close friends and family, that know each other deeply. But for the vast majority, those swarms of thumbnails smiling at me several times a day, do I really know any of them? By sitting there, reading these words, do you really know me?

But that’s just my little rant about social networking as the downfall of humanity. I do think that the issue of lying in the modern world is very muddled by any definition, and that there has been some sort of seismic shift in public perception. Or maybe it’s just the fact that I’m getting older. Back when I was in High School writing up my resume for college applications, I had it drilled into my head that if I exaggerated about a single thing, if I miswrote a single test score, the powerful nameless authorities would figure it out and make it their mission to destroy each and every one of my dreams. Then last summer, when I was once putting together my resume(s) for the job hunt, I can’t count the number of times I heard people talk about the process and say that “everybody lies.” I don’t have any blatant lies on my resume, but I certainly make one or two things I’ve done sound a bit more exciting or dynamic than they were. I’ve certainly called myself proficient in Microsoft Office applications that I barely understand. And I’ve certainly taken a moment to collect my thoughts during an interview, and then proceeded to lean forward in my chair and talk about a Great Life Experience that may or may not have ever happened. Does any of this surprise any of you?

Back when I was first moving out here I had an idea that if I couldn’t find a decent job I would create an almost entirely fictional resume filled with cooking experience, and then try and get a gig as a line cook at some restaurant. It would be a whole show: I wasn’t going to invent any kind of fake education (a theatre and writing degree seems as auspicious a start to a cooking career as any), but I would make up restaurant names, make up stories to tell at the interview, ask a friend if I could put him as a reference and tell him to pretend he’s a classically trained Executive Chef when they call. I considered this plan a couple of times (and if I lose my current job, who knows, maybe I’ll consider it again), but I never followed through. But what always stopped me was the lingering fear that my Food Network-trained slophouse cooking wouldn’t cut it in a real kitchen, and if I actually managed to get hired it would be an exhausting humiliation.  It was always fear that stopped me. The moral issue never even crossed my mind.

Lies also strike me as much more accepted. I can’t say by who, exactly, but it exists in a sort of generalized, mainstream, difficult-to-pin-down-but-definitely-real kind of way. Jobs like lawyers and politicians, the kind of illustrious careers that parents dream about for their kids, have been portrayed in entertainment and the media as deceitful and backstabbing so many times by now they’ve become worn clichés. A friend of mine who works for a surveying company recently told me that his entire job is about rewording and manipulating questions in order to find the results they want. The truth isn’t even an issue, it’s all about perception.

Thinking about myself, personally, it just strikes me as much too easy to lie about very significant things. One of the biggest events that has happened to me since I moved to New York was a production of my crazy serial killer play at a real, live NYC theater. But what’s to stop me from just telling someone that I had another production, in addition to that one? To take all the hard work and sweat that went into that show, and then multiply it in retrospect, free of charge? Audience members don’t come in to testify that they saw some show four months ago. When I visit home in a few weeks, I could easily tell people I meet that I’ve had several major productions in New York, that I do stand up comedy on the weekends at all the major clubs, that I have a new girlfriend from South America who’s a Yoga instructor. And hell, if I meet someone brand new, then all bets are off. Maybe I’m an investment banker. Maybe I’m going to med school at Columbia. Maybe my father was a close associate of John D. Rockefeller and I spend my days asleep and my nights at the hottest clubs in the city. And twenty years from now, looking back on this, how much will any of that matter? How many of the details will I even remember? It’d be very easy for me to lie about when I was six years old; I can barely remember any of it.

Again, this whole rant, it could all just be me. It could all be a feeble attempt to justify my own crumbling code of ethics (I’ve also been stealing alot lately, but it’s only ever books, so I consider that more a weird personality quirk than criminal activity).  But I dunno. I just feel like there’s something more at work.

The title of this entry, by the way, is a direct quote from a 65-year-old Dominican man whom I spoke with for awhile a couple weeks ago. We met on a Saturday night, something like 2 A.M., in a tiny, punk-rock themed dive bar in the East Village. It was a strange conversation; he was most definitely hitting on me, which I didn’t want to encourage, yet the guy was so interesting I also wanted to keep on talking with him. When he told me that he had lived in New York since the early sixties, I asked him what the city was like back then. I remember this question, because it was one of the few moments in our conversation where he took a pause and seemed to really consider what to say. “I guess it was beautiful,” he finally said, closing his eyes and thinking back to some granular moment in time that nobody else will ever know. Then, after a few seconds, he looked at me and smiled. “But who can remember?”