The sign at the gym has been there for a long time, but I never really looked at it before. But yesterday I was getting a drink of water and there it was, right there over the water fountain: “Dress Code.”
As I read the dress code I was surprised to see that there was a prohibition against exercising in corduroy shorts. This sounded hot and uncomfortable and I tried to remember if I had ever seen someone exercise in corduroy gym shorts. I was sure there was a story behind this, but no one at the gym seemed to know or care. And then I remembered that years ago when I managed a gym in Hollywood we had a policy prohibiting baseball caps. Boston Red Sox caps in particular.
The owner of the gym was one of those arrogant Staten Island types who had had a muscular football player build in his youth and now, in middle age, thought he was still an athlete but was really just fat. Morty considered the health club to be his own personal fiefdom and when he observed something that annoyed him he would invent a rule prohibiting it. Then it was my job to post signs announcing the new rule all over the gym.
Thankfully, since it was the early 90’s, Morty was generally so coked out that that he forgot his own rules very quickly. This was a blessing and it kept me from having to post signs like “Fat women must wear long pants” and “No tank tops for men with hairy backs” and (my personal favorite) “Speaking Spanish not permitted. Gracias.”
The first, and not coincidentally, only summer that I worked for Morty we veered from one minor manufactured crisis to another but then one day Patrick Fitzgerald came in to exercise wearing a Boston Red Sox baseball cap.
Morty was a lifelong New York Yankees fan and he took it as a personal affront that one of the members in “his” gym would dare to wear a cap from the hated Boston team. He called me into his office, as furious as I’d ever seen him. He told me, sputtering, that Patrick’s “disrespect” was undermining him in front of the other members. I wanted to tell him that that ship had already sailed, but wisely held my tongue.
Morty then began a 20 minute rant about the Red Sox, Boston in general, and, for good measure, the Kennedy’s. He veered, mystifyingly, into codfish, brown bread and baked beans and then finally started to wind down. “This has to stop!” he said, banging his desk, referring to the Boston cap.
“OK,” I said hastily, and got up to leave.
“I’m serious,” he said. ”I want signs that say ‘No Boston Red Sox caps.’”
“You got it Boss,” I said. He reached out and put his sweaty, hammy hand on my shoulder. “Really, Guy,” he said. “Make it happen.”
Well just my luck that Morty was sober that day and he did not forget his decree, so the next day I had no choice but to post signs that said “No Boston Red Sox Caps Allowed.” I added “As per Morty” to the bottom so the members would know this was not my idea.
The results were predictable. Members who did not even like baseball and had never been to Boston started wearing Red Sox caps. Because all of our memberships were on a monthly basis several diehard Boston fans, including Patrick, just left.
Confronted with widespread rebellion and loss of income, Morty crumbled; the ill-advised signs came down. And now, many years later, I wondered what would happen if I wore a pair of corduroy shorts to the gym.