Hot Wet Locker Room
Nonfiction by Foster Gareau
The Shower Bath by George Bellows, Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington
I am always surprised by how ancient the locker room feels, as if steam can bend time. I tugged my swim shorts down, negotiating them past the predictable morning flagpole, and followed the slow, waddling folds of a stranger’s buttocks into the showers. Sun-stained men slapped and scrubbed their meaty flanks in a communal mist; a kind of accidental bacchanalia made of soap and skin. I was outnumbered by cock and confidence. This feels prehistoric, I thought and mentally filed it under Things to Write About Later, after I had toweled off and rebuilt the parts of myself I tend to leave in humid places. I wondered longingly where that one guy went.
It wasn’t the vapors that made me misty-eyed. I’ve always been a little watery by nature—wistful, sappy, and forlorn. In cinema studies at uni, I fell in love with the dramatization of life; the idea that it could be edited into meaning, scored into emotion, framed into beauty. It may be the only reason I ever became a poet, or part of it at least. In my love life, however, my preoccupation with camera-ready romance has only ever been a hindrance. What lover could possibly match what you have stored in your imagination? Or the storyboard you’ve polished for years? I have this tendency to fall in love with the idea of someone I don’t know how to meet and hold them hostage in my stupid human heart.
I left the wet room for the dry, stepping into fluorescent clarity. Like a shy lover, I turned pale when I spotted my gym crush noticing me from across the tiled aisle. Crap. I had wanted more time to adore him in secret. I felt my skin blanch like an exposed photograph. I pretended to be lost in thought while arranging my body into a posture meant to communicate thoughtful, chill, available, which is a complicated ask for a man wearing only a damp towel.
A few minutes later he cranked the dial on his combo padlock and meandered towards me. He’s either going to ask me for coffee or stick a knife between my ribs. I discovered, in a too-late phone-screen mirror check, a crusted shaving-cream semicircle on the side of my neck near a mangy patch of stubble. My heart sank further as I realized that I had forgotten to put on my clean pair of briefs. Maybe he’s wearing dirty underwear too. He walked past me and left, taking with him an entire imaginary universe. This can’t happen to me, all this non-happening, I thought. I had a hot tan body, but it didn’t seem to matter. Four pillows on my bed, but it didn’t matter. Perfume on my neck, but it didn’t matter. Maybe the scent of need was louder.
Outside I forensically scoured his social media feed for evidence of his inability to see clearly what’s right in front of him. He just doesn’t know what he wants, I decided. I walked on, stapling myself to this theory by looking up research on homosexual cluelessness. After finding exactly what I wanted, I tucked my phone away and tried to ground myself. I took one deliberate prolonged inhale and began to consider gravity, how it’s a force that pushes down on me from space to keep me trapped on this planet. I considered for a second that I might have been wrong in my thinking, but there was no one around to correct me, and so the thought drifted off unchallenged, like steam thinning in the locker room air.
Foster Gareau is a queer sentimentalist poet and recovering alcoholic, formerly unhoused and frequently displaced. He studies Creative Writing at Concordia University in Montreal. In 2025 his work has appeared or is forthcoming in the International Human Rights Art Movement, PRISM international, Frozen Sea, Periodicities, carte blanche, Yolk Literary, & Change and others. His poetry chapbook Folded Oceans was shortlisted for the 2025 Vallum Chapbook Award and will be published by Cactus Press in 2026. @feigns_