The Unanswerable Phone

I don't much like this Henry Crown.

Normally I work at the Ratner gym, which is all new-fangled and makes me feel disproportionately rich when I work out there, because every treadmill has a nice flat-screen TV, and the whole facility is just new and shiny.

But today I was recruited to work at ye olde Henry Crown, the U of C's first gym, which was built.. well, I don't know when it was built. But I just researched it on the athletic facilities page and got this--"Henry Crown looks like most of campus -- a castle. However, it also smells like a castle and is about as old as a castle." So there you go. (Also, the caption for the picture is "Ye Olde Field House", which just shows how apt my powers as a descriptive journalist are.)

Now then. HC does not exude an aura of fun and excitement. It has concrete floors and white-painted brick walls and exposed piping and red iron fence-like barriors everywhere. A white-painted metal staircase leads around one side of the building, with an iron yellow-painted railing. A built-in iron ladder crawls up one wall, starting spontaneously in the middle of it, apparently leading up to the ceiling.

Everything is painted white, red, or yellow (or is naturally gray); everything is made out of iron or something harder. Loud, indistinct buzzing, like two air conditioners and three fans at once, is surrounding me on all sides. Things are dusty; there is a rip in my chair.

Henry Crown may sound like a castle, Mysterious Euphemism Writer, but on the inside it looks and sounds like a sewage treatment facility. Which can be creepy, when you walk in and the women in charge says "That's there," and promptly leaves me all alone.

Many women want to be celebrities. Or millionaire socialites, or--if you're respectable--Mother Theresa or Jane Addams. I am the gatekeeper of the sewage facility.

Finally, there is a phone that keeps going off. I feel obligated to answer it, but it's located inside an utterly caged-off room that is locked from every side (and I'm in the closed-off area, myself.) I can see the phone ring behind its red iron jail cell--for what feels like forever. Long, guilt-inspiring minutes, and the phone just three feet away is silent. What is it? Fire? Murder..? (That wouldn't be surprising, around here.) Cat in a tree? Did someone drown in the Ratner pool? What sort of emergency warrants 7AM incessant calls to an unavailable, or invisible, or nonexistent person caged up in a gym?

This place is weird.