Y-M-C-A

Young man, there's a place you can go.
I said, young man, when you're short on your dough.
You can stay there, and I'm sure you will find
Many ways to have a good time.

It's fun to stay at the Y-M-C-A!
It's fun to stay at the Y-M-C-A!


I recall my first verbal exchange with Mary went something like this:

Mary: “What do you think of the Y?”
Sen: “Sketchy.”

And the Stamford YMCA certainly is. It's as if they took all the oddballs in Stamford and dumped them in one 8-storey building. The Y has odd consortium of indigent-looking 40+ folk. Then there are the random FOB Indian guys who keep popping in and out - they look like they're doing IT contract work at UBS or something. And then there are a number of people that shuffle around with bowls of ice and glazed expressions on their faces, who look like they shouldn’t be inhabiting any room without padded walls.

It's a shame that these aren't people I can exactly "chill with". So mostly I wander about eyes downcast and keep to myself.

I also wonder how it is that pay for this place? Ridiculous as it is, it costs about $1000/month to live in this joint, and I don't know how these people - most of whom look like they couldn't scrape two pennies together - get by. (Mercifully, The Firm pays for us.)

But one of the perks of living here, in addition to the housekeeping service, is the free access to all the YMCA's recreational facilities... even if the facilities are threadbare. They have a decent gym with weights and cardio equipment, a basketball court and squash courts, a swimming pool and a track.

What makes the place lively and colourful is the patronage, for it's just about the opposite of the goody-goody wipe-down-each-machine-after-every-use university crowd at the PAC. Of course there's the obligatory buffed-up brothers and the 5'6" Mexican papis, and the odd brown guys who always do a double-take when they see me.

One time I was on one of the machines, and an African guy and a Russian guy were pontificating about the fall of Soviet Union, about Reagan and Gorbachev and glasnost and how the communists had a viable system, and that its collapse was precipitated by the CIA... all in their broken English. Big conspiracy buffs both of them.

And then there's the Slavic couple. The guy looks like Putin's half-brother, the wife a slightly overweight, big-chested Eastern European woman(?), and they're always bickering in Russian or Polish or Serbian or something as they're working out. I don't understand a word they're saying, but I get a kick out of reading their facial expressions.

But the downside is the walls in the residence quarters are paper-thin, which means I can hear everything the neighbours are doing.

For a while I had a young couple on one side who I nicknamed Fight-and-Fuck, because that is exactly what they'd do: either fight and/or fuck. The girl argues with her man about how he doesn't respect her... only to be on her back moaning "Oh Donny" a half hour later. For the longest while I didn't know who they actually were (preferring to leave things to the imagination) but finally I bumped into them, put faces to the names, and I couldn't help but wonder what this Latina - likely my age - was doing with this guy who made Snoop Dogg look like Denzel. Haven't heard from them in awhile, so I assume they've moved out, and I actually kind of miss the entertainment value.

On the other side is TV Turrets. Well, he's quiet most of the time. But there's one thing that he does that really raises my ire - he has the TV on way too loud, and he never shuts the damn thing off! I've heard the TV going on into 2...3...4 in the morning. On Saturday morning I woke up to Rocky and Mr. T. Listen fool, your room ain’t that big. You’re sitting three feet from the TV. Set the volume to a reasonable level. And mothafucka, you sleep with the TV on or something? On occassion he has angry outbursts, as if he has Turrets or something. Ironically, one time my showerhead falls onto the surface, making quite the impact. And this negro next door shouts “Shuddup!!!”. The nerve of this guy!

So imagine being stuck between Fight-and-Fuck and TV Turrets for three months. This is when you wish you had some Lankans here to crack some skulls.

Sometimes I think Mary and I are the only normal people in this building. Well... no, scratch that - we're far from normal. Seeing two very youthful yuppies-in-training from the two smallest ethnic groups leave together at 8:15 8:20 every morning must be unusual in this place. And I would think my Sri Lankan-Canadian neurotic asexual Actsci ass is far from typical.

And then there's something about Mary...