Why the British Gym Is a Uniquely Hellish Place

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

My name is John Doran and I write about music. The young bucks who run VICE's website thought it would be amusing to employ a 44-year-old who used to own a home computer that operated with 5k of memory and whose "games" were loaded from cassettes.

In case you were wondering or simply too lazy to use Urban Dictionary, "meff" is Scouse/Woollyback slang for tramp (meff = meths = methylated spirits). It also means someone who looks odd; someone who doesn't fit in.

MEFF 2: DESIGNED AND DIRECTED BY HIS RED RIGHT HAND

Why can't she see it? It's right there on the middle of my chest.

Maria stands in the bedroom doorway. It's no longer pitch black but not yet light. There is a low, clotted cream light in the room.

"Don't forget you're taking the squirrel to school this morning. Bye bye. See you this evening."

She disappears, leaving me staring at the unreasonably large spider squatting on my sternum. Its fat, fleshy legs span at least seven inches. It doesn't move but it swells and falls with a breathing motion. Why is there a huge flesh-colored tarantula on my chest? Why the fuck is there a huge, hand-shaped, flesh-colored tarantula on my chest?

I'm just about to scream when I realize the hand-shaped arachnid is actually just my hand. Every night my sluggish blood retreats as far into my body as it will go, meaning I wake up as a writhing head on a torso in a bed strewn with useless, heavy limbs.

As well as the dead hand on my chest, my other hand is behind my head; I can barely feel it. I reach over and pick the hand up off my chest so I can take a closer look at it. I scratch myself on the back of the head. I manage two seconds contemplating the fact that I've woken up with three arms before letting out a panicked shout.

My son darts into the room like a grinning velociraptor holding a stuffed Bagpuss: "Dad?"

And then, suddenly, I'm wide awake. My game face snaps into place. I jump out of bed and ruffle his hair with the correct number of hands: "Let's get you some fruit!"

Ever since the run in with the street-drinking sandwich man I've been avoiding thinking about my promise to myself. I've been ignoring the fact that I said I'm going to get Fight Club fit by my next birthday. And now two weeks have shot by and I've done nothing other than feel anxious and eat too much fried chicken. As of today, there are only eight months until I turn 45.

I drop my son off at school and walk home chiding myself: "Look at yourself. A grown man. Afraid of his own wanking spanners."

It's time to stop procrastinating and get down to the gym.

Despite what I may have said in the past, it's not like I haven't been to the gym before. In fact, I've tried it on for size at several points previously. Probably my most successful run was 20 years ago when I was working late shifts in a bonded alcohol warehouse in Welwyn Garden City. My local gym was a miserable, magnolia-painted room with a couple of exercise bikes, a broken rowing machine, crash mats, and some free weights. It was an afterthought, tucked away at the back of the corporation swimming pool and squash courts. It was nearly always empty, which meant I never had any fear when removing the front of the wooden box that the stereo was kept in using the screwdriver head on my Swiss Army knife. I did this so I could replace their only CD—This Is Trance: Disc 2—with one of my own, Public Enemy's Fear of a Black Planet. I used to find that if I cycled really hard for the duration of that album, no matter how hungover I was beforehand, I would always feel much better afterwards.

One day I was near to the end of my routine ("B-Side Wins Again") when a work colleague walked into the room. He stopped at the doorway, threw his head back, and sniffed the air suspiciously. He walked into the center of the room and repeated the process. He ambled over to where I was cycling furiously, sniffing like a bloodhound.

He stood there staring at me incredulously until I had to stop cycling: "What do you want?" I snapped at him.

"Doran… it smells just like sherry in here," he said suspiciously. There was a tedious pause until the penny dropped. He started chortling: "Have you come in here to cycle off a bottle of sherry?"

"No!" I said indignantly. "It's actually more like three bottles."

He sized me up as if actually seeing me for the first time: "Do you come in here every day to sweat off sherry?"

"No," I replied. "Sometimes it's whisky. Look, I'm nearly done, do you fancy tagging along to the Ludwick? There's time for five or six schooners before work if we crack on."

The only thing that links my current gym in Hackney to the one in Hertfordshire is the default music. Trance. Except now it has become gym trance; the kind of EDM you will hear in no club, no bar, no home and on no radio station. You will never hear this music anywhere except in a modern gym. And this time round I cannot locate the box where the stereo is kept. I have a suspicion that the actual music is played from a laptop stored off site, out of town, possibly in an entirely different country, protected by men wearing mirror shades carrying handguns.

Because the entertainment on offer in the modern gym is serious fucking business and not to be taken lightly.

The gym—my gym, your gym, anyone's gym—is neither real nor a dream. It is hyperreal. You know how some people think life is essentially a very complex computer simulation; a bit like The Matrix but with better clothes and music? Well, I don't think that at all. Until I'm in a gym, that is, and then I think, Actually, now that you come to mention it…

The gym is the most hyperreal zone that most people are able to enter on a daily basis. To get into my gym I have to wait outside on the pavement until a sensor detects my presence and then circular glass panels slide back automatically allowing me to step inside a kind of round, airlock-shaped space. When the doors slide shut behind me—and only when the doors slide shut behind me—the second set of doors in front of me slide open, allowing me access to the foyer. At the desk I have to scan my membership card before being handed a brightly colored wristband (different colors are used at random during the week, so there is no way of telling which color will be used on any given day). Once I am wearing the wristband I then have to scan my card again to get through a turnstile which allows me access to the changing rooms. After depositing my bag in a locker, I secure it with a key which is attached to a bracelet. I have to wear this on my wrist as well as the brightly colored wristband.

Then, and only then, can I enter the gym, where occasionally there will be a member of staff looking out for wristbands at the door. (Sometimes there will even be a sweep of the rooms by staff to make sure there are no interlopers.)

And it is just as difficult to leave. When you want to exit the gym, there are wristbands and bracelets to take off and turnstiles and airlocks to walk back out through.

In my experience it is actually easier to get into France via the Eurostar than it is to get into my local gym. What are they afraid will happen? Are they scared that suddenly the complex will be overwhelmed by throngs of unruly school children, all desperate to pile in and start lifting weights? Is there a genuine threat of an entire chapter of Hell's Angels barging in to do jazzercise without paying?

There is no logical reason for it to be so difficult to get in, and yet there is an important reason for it. This is actually what an illusionist would call a misdirection. All of this palaver is designed to distract you from the fact that you're passing through a permeable membrane into a different zone of reality; an altered state. You should not be aware of how objectionable the place you are entering truly is.

Imagine you are in my gym with me now.

There are designated spaces where the fighters and boxers train. There is a large room full of free weights and machines for the bodybuilders. There are a few studios for the various dance and spin classes. But I am in the room with all the cardio machines, where all the other fucked and bewildered people go. There are 14 running mills, four rowing machines, eight step machines, 10 cross trainers, and 16 exercise bikes of various types all facing one long wall in a rectangular shaped room. Along this wall there are four widescreen televisions tuned into different channels. They are always switched on and always in your line of sight, no matter where you stand.

The first screen always shows rolling news from the BBC. Since I joined this gym over two years ago, I have seen nothing but horror on this channel. Beheadings in Syria. Stabbings in Tel Aviv. Dead children in Gaza. Popular grandfathers in Essex shanked to death in road rage attacks. Entire villages coming to terms with their loss. There is always a crowd—they could be in any city, any country—and they are always under attack from riot police. Constant terrorist explosions in France. Constant refugee death by drowning. Constant earthquake; no one saw it coming. Constant Iain Duncan Smith's face. Constant George Osbourne's face.

Constant school massacre. Constant school massacre. Constant school massacre.

(And you think to yourself, Should I phone the school? I mean, I know he's fine… but should I phone the school anyway?)

The crappy auto-captioning makes a mockery of this already debasing conveyor belt of human misery. All the information you are given is stripped of even the most cursory notion of dignity, as if these words are being composed on the trot by Allo Allo's two British Airmen.

For five minutes every two hours, light relief is provided by a story on astrophysics. This usually concerns some new anomaly they have discovered in the deepest, oldest, furthest away recesses of the Hubble Deep Field at the edge of the known universe. Yes. Thanks for that light relief. I feel so much better now.

(I can tell you exactly which week I did my induction into this gym. It was the week of May 22, 2013. And I know this because all I looked at for my first hour on the treadmill—and most of my trips back to the gym over the following seven days—was the bloody hand of the cretinous and cowardly Michael Adebolajo, captured seconds after he'd attacked Lee Rigby. And all the time a strident voice over a psychotically EQ'd trance beat urged me to, "Work it! Work it!" before informing me: "We're all in the club!" Except we weren't in a club. We were trapped in a little bubble of Hell which had risen all the way up to the surface.)

The second screen is usually MTV or another non-stop pop video channel. I'm pretty sure that only two videos exist in 2015. Megan Traynor's "All About the Bass" and Charlie XCX (with Rita Ora)'s "Doing It." At all other times this screen is just full of a random assortment of pumped, ripped, waxed, oiled and buffed hard bodies in shorts or bikinis grinding mercilessly away.

The third screen is always a cookery show. An everlasting montage of courgettes being diced—the knife a blur of steel; the purple haze of flambé as a wok throws off a mushroom shaped burst of flame; gaping mouths shoveling in forkfuls of cake, masticating all the way into a fat-faced forever.

The final screen—perhaps the most abject of the bunch—always features a confused-looking middle-aged couple as part of a reality TV show, trying to get a foot onto the property ladder. Cameras follow them as they are dragged from one decrepit property to another on rough-looking housing estates by some sadist with bright white teeth dressed in pastel-colored clothes. It is clear that they will never be able to afford to buy one of these houses, and even if they could it would cripple them financially forever. So what is this fucking program all about?

Come on. Meet me halfway. Don't make me spell out how fucked up this is and don't insult your own intelligence (or mine) by claiming this is all somehow coincidence.

My friend Philly Kev ran an idea past me recently. I don't really watch much TV, but the few TV shows I like, I'm obsessed with. For example, I've watched each and every episode of The Walking Dead probably three times over. But Kev said he couldn't get down with that show and gave me a reason which chilled me as much as watching some biter get its head cleaved open by a lump hammer. He floated the notion that there is a time of great violence coming and that perhaps shows like The Walking Dead were a tool in helping prep us for dark days ahead; days when it would be beneficial for us to be able to view our former friends, family members, neighbors, and co-workers as less than human. Beneficial for us to regard the idea of killing them brutally with whatever is at hand as completely normal.

Kevin has a lot of interesting ideas—I'm not sure to what extent he actually believes in this one; you'd have to ask him yourself if you wanted to know for sure. Personally, even if it were true, I'm not sure that The Walking Dead has the kind of reach which would make it an effective social programming tool anyway. If you want to change the way large numbers of working class and middle class people behave or think, you could do worse than starting in a gym. And better still, make going to the gym a costly but aspirational necessity, so that folk will pay a lot for the privilege. How else are you going to get ready for that marathon? Strap them into machines and pump them full of anxiety about Islam, lung cancer, pedophilia, bikini bodies, Jeremy Corbyn, rising house prices/the imminent housing crash, bulimia, migrants, muscle tone, earthquakes, and—dear fucking Christ—the start of the very universe itself.

Get them in. Sign them up. Tenderize them.

And of course every fiber in your body is screaming: "Go home. It's safe there. You don't need to deal with all this shit." But that is not the answer. The answer is to get fit enough to progress to the weightlifting room where there are no television screens, just brick walls and machinery.

John Doran's MENK column for VICE was reworked into the acclaimed memoir, Jolly Lad, which was published this year by Strange Attractor.

Previously – MEFF 1: What Were the Skies Like When You Were Young?