He drops his towel to the floor and follows it down until he’s kneeling. Outside these walls, most people - including his wife of 18 years - would consider him macho. John is more than six feet tall, with thick fists and hard eyes. When they make eye contact, John holds his breath. He has prayed, over and over, not to be gay. John has fought these desires his entire life. After 10 minutes, such a figure - thickly built, with cabled working-man forearms and a tough, stubbled face - sluices through the dark into view. He glances around, looking for a man like those he grew up with. If the man doesn’t look away, a bargain has been struck - a silent pact to have sex. The men are discernible now, so he begins the ritual of the bathhouse: If he sees a man who appeals to him, he’ll attempt to catch and hold his gaze. He tosses his things on a narrow wooden platform that holds a thin rubber mattress, quickly strips naked, wraps his towel tightly around his waist, and steps back into the hall. Its cheap wooden walls don’t even reach the ceiling. Finding and unlocking the door to his room, he quickly switches on the light, illuminating a space no larger than a prison cell.
The bathhouse is a big place, a maze with large tiled areas reminiscent of a spa and a series of hallways with private “rooms” - really just stalls - lining either side. He checks the room number on his key chain and starts down the hall, feeling like the last to arrive at a party, all eyes appraising his plain looks and middle-aged gut. This sensation caught hold of him the moment he decided to come here, and it’s only when he attains this state of consciousness - in which he has no more sentience than a robot - that he can come here at all. By now he’s so wired, so shot through with the electric current of his desire, that it’s almost as if he has stepped outside of himself. Their faces are obscured, but their presence registers in the tremors of blood pounding through John’s veins.
They pad along in bare feet, flitting through the shadows like figures in a barely remembered dream. He can make out the forms of men loitering in the halls, naked to the waist, clad only in snug bath towels. Gathering them in his hands, he darts quickly out of the light of the front entrance, into the dim corridors of the bathhouse. The process at the front desk fills him with a kind of primal fear: the first glance from the man who takes his money and looks at his ID, the waiting for change, the presentation of a towel, room key and condom. He’s fought the urge for a few weeks now. His head feels like it’s on fire, swirling with a toxic brew of guilt and longing. Inside he’ll find other men, preferably other married men, with whom to have sex. At Chancellor, he turns abruptly and - ascending a couple of stairs - pulls open the door to Club Body Center, one of Philadelphia’s two bathhouses.