Requiem for a Rec Council President

Janine Porterfield, president of the Riverside Recreation Council, didn't want to hear it. Her state might be in phase three of the Covid crises, allowing businesses to reopen, including gyms, but the Riverside Barbell Club, along with other indoor Riverside Rec facilities, would remain closed until further notice.

Riverside Barbell was unique among gyms in that it was located in the basement of Colby Middle School, and had been since a Colby teacher started it way back, around the time of the Nixon-Kennedy presidential race. The kids used it during gym class. Then, when school let out, from three in the afternoon to nine at night, the room was open to adult Riverside members who paid a nominal yearly fee to join. Riverside was also one of the few gyms in the region equipped with a lifting platform. Olympic lifters flocked there to train, as well as power lifters, bodybuilders and others who trained to keep strong and healthy.

All that changed in 2016 when the entire school received a renovation. The school stayed open but the gym closed. All the equipment was hauled out and put in storage, while the space was turned into two temporary classrooms during the two-year construction. The gym, its space renovated as well, reopened in 2018. However, it had few members willing to come back because during the closing, they had joined other gyms they liked better. By the time Covid-19 hit, only three long-time members wanted to train there—two former Riverside rec leaders and a teacher at the school; all three possessed keys.

Colby Middle, along with other state schools, closed in March. By fall 2020, the schools remained closed, though businesses, including gyms, had reopened in June. Yet because Riverside Barbell fell under the bureaucratic umbrella of Riverside Rec, the gym remained closed.

Well, officially, that is. Surreptitiously, the three key-holding members, during the state's shelter in place order, kept coming in. The teacher and one of the former rec leaders trained there during the early morning, did their workout, then locked up and left. The other former rec leader, along with his wife, trained after five in the afternoon. They made sure they weren't there between the hours of ten and three to avoid getting caught by Riverside Rec staff, whose offices were located just a few steps down the hall from the gym. This clandestine "operation" lasted until one day in early October, when Dave Baker, one of the staffers, decided to stay late and caught Jeff Marasco and his blond wife Cindy just as they entered the gym around five o'clock.

"You guys aren't supposed to be in here," he said. "The room is closed."

Jeff, a strong, barrel-chested truck driver in his early fifties, took his measure of the thin, out of shape, forty-something Dave Baker. "The governor opened all the gyms," he argued. "We're in phase three. And there's only a few people who now come down here anyway. What the fuck?"

Dave blinked his baby-blue eyes. "What the fuck? Gyms open and close at their own discretion, and this gym is under Riverside Rec. That's what the fuck." Dave could see Jeff clench his prominent jaw and the fire shooting out of his dark brown eyes. "Look, I'll let you slide today, complete your workout. But then you can't come back until Riverside opens its other indoor facilities." When he asked if anyone else was coming down there, Jeff dropped the names of Mark Melbourne and Dan Cheever, the teacher. "Well, my advice is to alert them. Not to be a prick, but if I catch anyone of you guys in here again, I'll have no choice but to take your keys away."

Jeff did his workout, then called Mark and Dan. Mark called it "bureaucratic BS." Dan, defiant, said he'd come to the gym at six in the morning if necessary. Mark, who had talked to Janine Porterfield back in April about the situation, gave Jeff her phone number. "I doubt it will help, she's pretty adamant that the gym stays closed," he said. "But it can't hurt. Good luck."

It was a very short phone call, with Janine holding to the party line. "The gym's closed until the board deems it safe to reopen," she barked into the phone. She then clicked off before Jeff could say another word. He tried calling her back. No answer.

If Mark wanted to keep his strength and sharp muscularity, he knew he'd be forced to cough up close to three-hundred dollars for a year's membership at Fitness Forever, one of the cheaper commercial gyms around, and where he had trained during the two-year construction. Because he had been a rec leader, Riverside cost him nothing. Jeff had a lifetime membership at La Fitness, but hated wearing a mask per their Covid-19 policy. Dan, who lived within walking distance, made good on his vow to keep training. He climbed out of bed before sunup and rolled into the gym by six-thirty. The janitor, who knew him from his years of teaching at the school, kept his mouth shut.

Jeff and Cindy explored the idea of contacting Riverside's district congress person for help. Mark wasn't sure what to do. He thought about filing a law suit, an idea he quickly dismissed, knowing the stress and pitfalls that would no doubt await them by going down that rabbit hole. As the cliché went, only the lawyers emerged the true winners.

He figured he'd have better luck working on Janine. He'd known her for at least six years, knew her from the once-a-month rec meetings held at the middle school and the yearly spring social that brought together Riverside's program rec leaders (besides the barbell club, there was boys' and girls' soccer and lacrosse, baseball, football, basketball, yoga and golf). He found the meetings boring, but looked forward to the socials, held at a genteel local country club that served a surf and turf feast of steak and crab cakes, baked potato and asparagus, with chocolate syrup poured over vanilla ice cream for dessert. A schmooze hour in front of an open bar preceded the meal.

The socials gave rec leaders, all volunteers, a chance to talk about things other than rec business, and it was there that Mark got to know Janine in a way he couldn't at the meetings. For the first couple years, Janine showed up with Brad, her attorney husband. But for the last few years, she'd been alone because she and Brad had divorced, an amiable divorce, Janine had told Mark, and one that included joint custody of their two young children. She was a career teacher at a local grade school and since Covid-19, she'd been conducting classes through virtual learning. Knowing that Janine and Brad were no longer together, Mark thought about asking her out. He saw the forty-something Janine as what he liked to call "average-cute." She stood a couple inches below his five-foot-nine, with shoulder-length brown hair and green eyes. She had a pleasant face: her features, including her prominent cheek bones, fit together nicely. But it was not a face that drew many doubletakes. Plain, average faces normally don't. She did have nice legs and a cute butt, at least from what he saw of them when she wore tight jeans. She held rec meetings wearing glasses that Mark found sexy. In his eyes, she exuded the image of the sexy librarian/intellectual/professor. Her nice skin and manner of speaking sweetened the package, her elocution and precise diction—traits he found alluring, traits that turned him on more than big boobs alone ever could. He thought she had a sweet disposition as well. That is, until she got crappy with Jeff, then hung up on him. Why had she done that? It seemed out of character, at least from what he knew about her. Would she do that to him also?

He called in the evening on her landline phone, listed on the Riverside Recreation web site. This was mid-October, six months after they last spoke.

"Hi Janine, Mark Melbourne."

"Hi Mark. I guess you're calling about the gym being closed."

He felt relieved she didn't hang up. "Right. Look, I know you're concerned about people getting infected. But there's only three or four of us interested in training there, and then at different times." Mark wasn't a squealer. Like the school's janitor, Mark kept to himself what Dan Cheever was doing.

"Mark, I couldn't make an exception with the barbell club without opening up Riverside's other indoor facilities. Our basketball courts, for example."

"The basketball players would be a lot more vulnerable than us," he argued. "And anyway, we're isolated to the point where nobody in those other programs would even know."

"Can't do it, Mark. You know what's going on, the virus is into a resurgence."

"Come on, Janine. Your lacrosse and soccer players have a better chance of getting infected than we do, even if they are outdoors." He heard her sigh. "Can we at least talk about it?"

"We are talking about it."

"Over a meal or a drink, I mean. A place where we can sit outdoors, of course."

"Are you asking me out on a date?" She giggled.

"Um, no, not really. I mean—″

"You'll do anything to get that room open, won't you?"

Technically, he knew she was right. "Janine, call it what you will. I just think it's absurd to keep the weight room closed for no reason. It's not like in the old days, when during certain hours, there were lines waiting to use some of the equipment. Far from it. It's just me, Dan, Jeff and Cindy, Jeff's wife."

"Jeff, the guy I hung up on?"

"Yes. Why did you do that, anyway? It seems so out of character for you."

"I don't know Jeff from Adam, number one. And number two, I wasn't in the mood to argue."

"But you're arguing with me."

"No, I think it's you that's doing the arguing, Mark. And my answer is still no. However, I will take you up on this meeting you've proposed. If nothing else, it will give us time to catch up on the books we've read."

Janine knew that Mark was a reader, because he'd always get to the rec meetings about fifteen minutes early, take a seat at the long cafeteria table, and begin reading whatever book he had brought along. When Janine came in, she always took the time to ask about the book. The socials gave them more time to discuss their reading lists. But that was in the past. Mark hadn't been an active rec leader since Colby Middle was renovated back in 2016, four years and over one-hundred books ago. When he wasn't reading or lifting weights, the also divorced, semi-retired, fifty-something Mark Melbourne wondered when he might once again become involved with another woman. Janine came to mind, though his goal now was simply to get her to relent and give the okay for the gym to reopen.

*****

"Long time, no see," Janine said before she and Mark took an outdoor seat at City Café, already busy with a noontime crowd taking advantage of this warm Saturday in mid-October. Reaching out for a hug, she said, "I'm not infected, believe me."

Briefly, they embraced, and then sat at a round metal table that stood over a dozen feet from the nearest diners. Only the servers wore masks, one of whom, a college-age black male, handed them menus.

"Let's see, it's been at least three years," Mark said. "You haven't changed a bit." He wasn't just throwing out a cliché, because she looked the same to him. Her brown hair still dropped to her shoulders, worn with a part slightly right of center, with nary a gray hair in sight. She wore a light blue sweater over jeans.

"Nor have you," she said. "You must be weight training somewhere or you wouldn't still look the way you do."

Mark's green, long-sleeve pull-over revealed chest and arms thickened by decades of weight training. "I trained at Fitness Forever during the school construction and through last March until they closed down. Then, as you now know, it was back to Riverside during the shelter in place order up to the time that Jeff got caught. I've managed to scrape together a modest, bare-bones home gym in my basement. A barbell, two dumbbells and a bench. All purchased online. But without the machines we have at Riverside, it's not a full workout. Fitness Forever has great machines also. But I'd rather not pay hundreds of dollars a year if I can avoid it. Like all gyms desperate to recoup their losses, they jacked up their prices. I wouldn't have to do that if you and the board voted to keep Riverside open. Of course, that's what we're here to discuss."

"I thought we were here to trade reading lists." She grinned in a way that let him know she was only half-kidding. "Look, I know why we're here. But can we do the reverse from what is normally done, put pleasure before business?"

"Sure," he said, then began to peruse his menu. When Janine slipped on her brown-frame reading glasses, he looked up. He wouldn't describe Janine as pretty. But there was something about those glasses that went with her features, her smallish nose, prominent cheekbones and a pleasant smile. He liked her coloring also—she had one of those faces that looked perpetually tanned.

She noticed him staring and grinning. "Something on that menu amusing?"

"No, it's just that I remembered you wearing those glasses during our rec meetings. You look good in them."

She pursed her lips into a shy smile. "You wouldn't be trying to flatter me, would you?"

"If I am, it's not false flattery. You really do look good in glasses Not all women do."

She nodded. "Well, thanks. Meanwhile, I think I'll take the turkey wrap with chips."

"Looks good to me," he said.

Moments later, they gave their order, along with two Michelob Lights, and then got to the books they'd been reading.

Mark said he just read Disloyal, Michael Cohen's tell-all memoir about being chief counsel to Donald Trump. "He's the guy who said he'd take a bullet for Trump. I'm sure it was ghost-written. But it's still an engrossing read. He paints Trump as evil incarnate. Then again, he did a brief stint in jail and then was ordered to home detention. It stands to reason that he's bitter."

Janine said she's been reading classics like Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice. "Some of the books we were forced to read in school, that I didn't get much out of. But now that I'm older and choose to read them, I appreciate them a lot more."

When their order came, they paused to munch on their meal for a few minutes.

Then, after taking a swig from his bottle, Mark said, "So, back to business."

"Aw, do we have to?" she asked in a mock-whining tone, holding her turkey wrap between the fingers of both hands. "Discussing books is a lot more interesting, not to mention more pleasant." She picked up her glasses from the table. "I'll even put these back on if you'd like."

Mark belted out a hearty laugh. The woman had a sense of humor, something he had barely noticed before. "Then it would be all pleasure and no business."

"A tragedy I think we both could live with." She bit into her wrap.

Mark watched as she chewed her food. He wanted to skip "business" as much as she. Yet he also wanted permission to train at Riverside so he wouldn't be forced to pay hundreds of dollars to train in a commercial gym. "Just give the okay to open Riverside weight room," he said, "and then it's back to Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice or any of the other classic tomes you might wish to discuss."

She took another swig. "You know, Mark, my ex would envy your full head of hair. Brad is totally bald, you know."

"Yes, I remember him from the socials at the country club. You're evading our business."

"Yes, because I like you and don't want things to get nasty. Look, if one of you musclemen gets sick, I'd be liable for it."

"Given the circumstances, there's very little chance of that. But if you're that concerned, we'll each sign a waiver."

"Mark, waivers aren't worth the paper they're written on. Brad told me that years ago."

This wasn't going to be easy, Mark thought, taking another swig. He didn't want things to get nasty either. He liked Janine, wanted to stay on good terms. Business or no business, he also wouldn't mind taking her for a romp in the sack. He wondered if she might soften her position if they ever got intimate. It seemed to him that taking her to bed would be easier right now than getting her to okay his request to reopen the weight room.

"All right, Janine, I'm gonna throw all my cards on the table."

She tensed up. "Uh oh, here comes the royal flush. Either that or you've conceited the game. Go on."

"Well, other than our disagreement over the weight room, I think this date of ours has gone pretty good. Wouldn't you say?"

She nodded and dabbed a napkin on the corner of her mouth. "Okay. We're on the same page there."

"Before today, we didn't really speak at length except at the socials and then only once a year."

"Right you are again. Is there a point here?"

"I'm getting to that. Anyway, we seem to have a good rapport, like to read, like to keep in shape and, last but not least, we seem to have a mutual attraction or, pardon that over-used word, chemistry. So, I was wondering if you might be interested in a follow-up."

"A follow-up?"

"Seeing me again. Socially, I mean." He could see the skepticism in her face. "No, really."

"You want to date me?"

"Believe it or not, I've thought about it ever since you and Brad split."

"News to me. You never said anything." She took another swig.

"I wasn't sure you felt the same way."

"Oh, it crossed my mind." She flashed a flirtatious grin. "But, between teaching, raising my kids and running Riverside Rec, I don't have a whole lot of free time. Meeting you here like this is a luxury."

"Can you make more time? You've said no to allowing the weight room to reopen. I hope you won't say no to the dating thing."

"As far as the weight room and our other indoor facilities, we don't plan to leave them closed permanently. When the danger of infection passes, we'll reopen. Look, my students and my own kids are being robbed of an education because of this damn thing. Virtual learning can't compare with classroom learning and the social benefit of interacting with other kids." She blinked her eyes; her lower lip trembled. "Sorry," she said, putting her hand up. "I get emotional talking about this."

He realized that pressing his case any further today would only be counter-productive. He decided to back off. "Okay, Janine, I'll drop my case for the gym to reopen. At least for now."

She nodded, reached across the table and squeezed his arm. "I appreciate that. But I hope you won't drop the other part. About the follow-up. Because yes, I'd like to see you again."

*****

Janine Porterfield was not devoid of empathy. As Mark had pointed out during their lunch, Riverside Rec included a weight room chock full of nice equipment that wasn't being used. And the reason it wasn't being used was because she and the Riverside board felt it was best that it remained closed during the Covid-19 pandemic. How long the virus would linger, no one seemed to know. She knew it had all but killed her social life, such as it was even before Covid. Her life was basically all work and no play, at least no adult play. She could count on one hand the number of guys she'd been out with since she and Brad had split. All but one had called her back, but she hadn't been interested enough to accept. Neither of them had been what Janine was wont to call a "prospect."

Was Mark Melbourne a prospect? Maybe, just maybe. She liked him, always had. He was nice, he liked to read and yes, she found him sexy. Found him sexier than she ever dared to let on at those spring socials, even after her divorce. He never asked her out and, traditionalist that she was, she hadn't dared ask him. Besides, she felt that dating someone connected with Riverside Rec could get awkward. But he was no longer a rec leader, so she saw no reason not to follow-up, if for no other reason than she found him hot. Bald men could be attractive too, she felt. Still, there was something about middle-age men who still had all their hair that excited her. Mark had chestnut-colored hair, distinguished by a few strands of gray. He wore it layered and long, at least long by today's standards, to the middle of his earlobes. His youngish face, streaked by shallow wrinkles on his forehead and around his eyes, was clean-shaven. She admired the way he kept himself in shape, unlike Brad who was now overweight. She assumed he was financially comfortable in semi-retirement from a family real estate business that "basically ran itself," as he had told her.