One of the city’s last independent music venues, Bottom of the Hill has survived waves of gentrification, COVID closures, and more throughout its 35 years. Now, owners say it’s last call — on their own terms.
You must provide your own shower shoes, and woe betide you if you forget them. That’s the uniform.
You must provide your own shower shoes, and woe betide you if you forget them. That’s the uniform.
Had you asked me in the last eight years whether I would have liked to visit a gay bathhouse, I would probably have said “Yes, at some point, when I’m ready,” where “ready” meant someone friendly and attractive (but not so attractive he becomes intimidating) approached me cold on the street to say, “We were all just talking about how you look really good and normal. You should come to a bathhouse. Don’t worry, you’ll never have to be responsible for managing your own relationship to desire and the possibility of rejection,” or, failing that, by waking up with abs by accident one day.
If you can believe it, neither of these things happened to me, no matter how little responsibility I took for the direction of my own life, and at a certain point the idea that I would not end up at a bathhouse unless I chose to go there caused me to sit up and take notice. I decided that in that case I had better go. I went because I thought I might like it there, and I didn’t like the idea of missing out on either a good or a bad time that either way might belong to me. After all, I’d like to get a hold of everything that might belong to me, sooner or later. There are worse things to do on a Saturday night than walk around and pay attention to who might be looking at you, and think about who you might like to look at. Worse things to do on a Wednesday night, for that matter.
But that first visit did happen to fall on a Saturday night and there was a line of men down the block waiting to get in the door. More specifically, it was a line composed of trans men and the cis men who particularly wish them well. Some bathhouses have special nights for various denominations of transgender people and the men who appreciate them. It’s not forbidden to go on other nights or anything, but I happen to appreciate the clarity, since I dislike offering elaborate explanations vis-a-vis transsexuality and wasting everyone’s time: “You’ll have heard of me. There was a poster about it and everything.”
Ordinarily I dislike standing in line. You might as well advertise that here’s something you need but don’t have yet. I will do almost anything to avoid it. You can easily see how unpleasant and narcissistic this sort of self-conscious discomfort with acknowledging desire can become. Never in my life have I walked past a person waiting in line and thought twice about it, but I cannot bring myself to believe that anyone could ignore the sight of me waiting in line.
I liked this line. I don’t mean everyone in it felt like my spiritual brother or anything. I’m sure there were individual members of the line who didn’t appeal to me, although in my memory of the line no one person really stands out as either especially good or especially bad. I liked the line itself. It was a little nervy and a little subdued and didn’t offer many clues in terms of how to conduct myself once I got inside the doors. The more often I went back, the more relaxed I felt about my own nerviness; no longer being nervy at all might have been preferable but one can’t have everything.
They do lock up your phone before you go inside. Everybody is mad at their phone these days, which makes me slightly inclined to try to defend them. I have a lot of fun looking at my phone sometimes, but I’m prepared to admit that I enjoyed the break. I think the important thing is that everyone agrees what to do with their phones at the same time. The hardest part is not knowing when someone else is going to look at theirs.
The bathhouse provides you with a towel, which you may choose to either wear or carry. But you had better hang onto it because there is nothing to visually distinguish your towel from anybody else’s. So even if you think “I’m sure I’ll remember which towel is mine. I’m standing right next to the towel rack,” you’d better be sure you have a bulletproof memory, because five minutes later you will have no idea which one of them is yours. You must provide your own shower shoes, and woe betide you if you forget them. That’s the uniform.
Every once in a while you’ll see someone add a hat to the ensemble, but I do not consider this to be advisable. It brings nothing to the table. There is no rule against wearing hats, at least not that I could see, but between the darkness and the humidity there is no reason to wear one.
The locker room is the friendliest part of the building. This is not true of locker rooms as a general rule, and is one of the many things I like about the bathhouse. If you would like to have a convivial, sociable little chat with your neighbor, one that is designed to go nowhere and lead to nothing, now is the time to get it out of your system.
Elsewhere – in the steam rooms, the showers, the private rooms, the hallways, the alcoves, the weight room – you may be as sociable or as withdrawn as you like. I took real pleasure in wandering around trying to discern how others behaved, in order to pattern my own behavior after theirs. Walking around and around and around, puzzling, sometimes looking and sometimes looking away, making a graceful retreat when an exit was suddenly blocked by a clot of strangers, gauging smiles in the dark, contemplating a brief touch against the back of the wrist; how splendid to think about so many people, all at once, and know that you are being thought about at the same time, even if only as an impediment towards getting somewhere else. There are very few other places in life which unite careful concentration and shower shoes.
The shower shoes you must not forget, because no one is going to make up for their absence, and nothing good will happen to you without them.
