Private tales in a public sweat box

Ihadn’t set foot in a sauna for years and entered the public sweat box feeling cold and shy. It was packed. I stood on the threshold and was about to turn tail, when someone grudgingly moved their backside along the bench to accommodate another bod.

I perched two levels up where it was hottest, imagining this is what it must feel like to be a battery hen. As the heat penetrated my body, I almost expected a barn attendant to fling open the door and administer antibiotics and hormone injections to the frozen chooks.

Unfamiliar with sauna etiquette, I modestly averted my gaze from my sauna wha¯ nau, but couldn’t help but notice the antics of elderly gents engaged in exercise.

Trying to work within the limits of confined space, I had adopted Rodin’s statue of Descartes in a pensive ‘‘I think therefore I am’’ pose. It was tight in there and the old geezers were touching their toes. What was one supposed to do? Clap?

My reaction was surplus to requirements. As the invisible older bint, I was just soggy wallpaper, a spy who had come in from the cold to listen to the men compare notes on their back surgeons and the success of their various operations.

The more they talked, they more they stretched as I heard how a hunter had removed ducks from his freezer and delivered them with grateful thanks to his miracle-performing sawbones.

I graduated to the steam room where a fitness freak with hand weights was teaching his female friend how to use them and breathe in and out properly. I bummed a ride on his instruction and joined in. Again I was amazed at how people were doing extras and taking props into a space I previously thought was a quiet zen zone in a hot, chilled-out kind of a way.

The sauna is a great leveller. Men and women who have spent a lifetime being addicted to nothing but a work ethic, and whose aches and pains are a constant companion, can work up a community bead together, bonding across the sweaty divide.

The next time I entered the sauna, a man covered in what my grandfather called ‘‘poor man’s embroidery’’ was fielding questions on the provenance of his tattoos. A woman with one lone tatt was marvelling at the epic pain the young man must have endured covering his body in his inky story. Even though he was running out of room, he hadn’t finished yet and was going to laser over an inferior patch to start again.

Foolishly I piped up that I would never get a tattoo out of fear that if the world went tits up and I was being hunted down, I didn’t want any identifiable distinguishing marks. And, I added, I wouldn’t get one out of respect for the Jews tattooed in the concentration camps.

The room fell silent. The tattooed young gent must have thought I judged him to be stupid, that I equated tattoos with low IQ. He told me about his friends, clever professionals at the top of their game, who housed, underneath their corporate clobber, whole sleeves and suits of tattoos.

I couldn’t stand the heat another second and exited, showing a retreating body tattooed with wrinkles, scars, cellulite, sags and lumps, my personal story that no-one would ever want to read, or ask about the pain I had endured acquiring it.

Perhaps if I squiggled over the wreckage with codified idiosyncratic symbols of my own dull journey, I too could bore others with the telling of it.