It was a mechanical job, something you could do without thinking, so imagine the surprise that day when there it was! The Fantasy Truck! I recognized it when I came on duty to relieve Bootleg, the old man who worked the booth with me. The Fantasy truck from the afternoon television show, “Fantasy.” It went around the country fulfilling people’s fantasies. It was parked on the striped asphalt sixty feet from the ticket booth. 

Usually, I started hallucinating from the heat and fumes at the end of my shift, not the beginning. I did a double take and it was still there. Of all places in the United States and Canada to show up! There it was next to the parking lot where I worked while I was between a real job that paid decent. 

It was too wide to drive through and get a ticket to park, so it was still out on the street. Two guys buzzed around the truck. One of them had just come back from the bank building. The Barnett Bank occupied the entire bottom floor of the twelve story building. 

They went inside the trailer for several minutes. That’s when I heard the banging and rumbling.  When they finally emerged, they had a big box, five foot square in shape but less than one foot thick. Together they lowered it onto the nearby stretch of grass next to the sidewalk that bordered the parking lot. Both of the guys had walkie-talkies strapped to their belts. There was nobody trying to bust into or out of the parking lot so I strolled over to them.

“So are you guys from the television show?”

“Yeah,” said the taller of the two men.

They both had mustaches. This guy had sandy colored hair. His shorter and broader companion had black hair. 

“I watch the show sometimes when I’m not sweating my ass off here.”

“Good. We need all the viewers we can get.”

They opened the large box. It reminded me of an egg hatching, piece by piece being popped off, but instead of a small bird, chick, turtle, or a new species emerging from the confines, a folded-up ping pong table appeared. It had metal rollers and supports in the box too. 

They pulled the ping pong table out of the box. The shorter guy took off, and the other, dressed in blue jeans and a Fantasy T-shirt, fumbled around with the ping pong table on the sidewalk. He had long hair that flipped out in different directions. In the front it looked like small wings or maybe there were horns underneath his sandy colored hair that made it turn the way it did. His arms were colorful like cereal boxes and covered with tattoos. 

“You need some tools. I got some in the back of my car,” I offered.

“No. I have all the tools I need,” he said showing the palms of his hands that had calluses as large as peanut shells.

He monkeyed around with the metal rollers for twenty minutes. I returned to the ticket booth and opened the gate at least ten times, glancing over to check on his progress that slowed when he stopped for a late morning can of beer. Business people walked by to gander at the freakish looking guy with a large cardboard box, disassembled ping pong table, metal rollers and supports blocking the sidewalk, sprawled in front of a freight truck with spicy colors and “Fantasy” written on the sides and back.

He messed around with the table for a few more minutes, then, obviously frustrated, he got on his walkie-talkie. Five minutes later a white station wagon pulled in front of the truck. An older man, also with a walkie-talkie, got out. He had on a blue work shirt and an NBC baseball hat. He looked like a handyman and had an array of tools in his leather belt. 

It took them about an hour to assemble the ping-pong table. The mechanical gate had gone up fifteen, maybe twenty times. I lose count after a time with the heat and the fumes. The blue suits from Globe Capital Investments Inc. rolled through in their black Mercedes. They pulled up to the gate without taking a ticket or looking at me unless the gate didn’t go up fast enough.

The Fantasy guys folded the table in half and it rested vertically in the metal supports which had rollers on the bottom. I still wondered who was getting their fantasy to come true, and whose fantasy was it anyway to get a fucking ping pong table? I mean, come on. What kind of a fantasy is that? 

A loan officer from the bank walked past the ticket booth. He was dressed in a pin striped suit. The middle of his head was bald as a baby’s ass. 

“That’s the real Fantasy truck,” I said motioning to the street.

“The Fantasy truck?” 

“They’re here to give away the ping pong table to someone in the building. Do you know who they’re giving it to?”

“No,” the loan officer said, “but they can give it to me. I could use a ping pong table. Did you listen to that radio station when they gave away ten thousand dollars the other night?”

I had the radio blasting in the ticket booth. 

“Yeah. I’m listening to it now.”

“I was trying to win that ten thousand dollar “Hey Jude” contest. I was by the telephone all day. I sure could have used that ten thousand dollars,” he said. “Some lady won it. I was at a restaurant when she called in. I waited all day in my office to phone in.”

I listened off and on. Sometimes I got busy in the booth. There was no telling when those bastards at the radio station would play “Hey Jude.”

“You going out with your wife for lunch?”

He shook his head.

“Waiting for a friend,’ he said.

“Make sure he doesn’t pull in and get a parking ticket, or he’s got to pay for the first half hour.”

“I can stamp him if I have to.”

In a few minutes his friend pulled up in a bright red Peugeot. The loan officer got in. They both stared for a few seconds at the large truck as they drove around it.

The ping pong table was still on the sidewalk. The two guys had set up a Foosball table and played Foosball on the tail end of the truck trailer. The back door was half way up. They laughed and stomped their feet as they twirled and slammed the handles on the game. I wondered if that was part of the fantasy and they were just trying it out, but that would make it sort of a used fantasy, wouldn’t it?

Customers lined up in the exit lane. They handed me their tickets and I raised the gate. That was my job in a nutshell so no matter what I was damn happy the truck showed up with the lousy ping pong table. It got my mind off the exhaust fumes I was sucking down, even though it was the best I could do at the moment. 

Some of the people coming and going got caught up in the excitement too. They glanced at the truck and the ping pong table. Others were oblivious to everything including me.

The two guys finally jumped off the back and rolled the ping pong table towards the truck. I panicked. I wanted them to stay as long as possible. It didn’t look promising though if they were packing up to leave.  

No one was trying to leave the parking lot so I walked over to them.

“You’re loading that back on? You need some help?”

“No. This thing? We can load it ourselves,” said the tall guy.

I couldn’t figure out why they were doing it after spending so much time putting it together. They lifted it straight up in the air instead of laying it flat. They held it by the rollers and it started to lean towards the tall guy.

“Hold it. Hold it. Son of a bitch!”

“I can’t. What’s wrong here?”

The ping pong table banged the tall guy in the head and then crashed into the road. I looked over and burst out laughing. They were imbeciles! Didn’t they know how to load anything? I had spent the last six months in that ticket booth, but I could still think. They should have laid it flat. 

The tall guy looked dazed. The other guy examined the ping pong table and decided the scratch on it wasn’t that bad. I went back to the ticket booth to let out some tenants, the Middle Eastern guys who bought oil drilling equipment in this country. They were always tear-assing in and out of the parking lot. They gave us huge tips at Christmas for raising and lowering the gates. I raised the gate for them and sat down on the four-legged stool. 

The two guys stood the ping pong table up again.

“Let me know if you need some help with it,” I yelled over. 

Why not be helpful? That’s the way things happen, isn’t it? These guys were idiots. Who knows though, they might take a liking to me and voila! Give me a job and the next thing you know I’m riding around the country on the Fantasy truck giving stuff away to people. I’d have some explaining to do to my wife, Brenda, who was pregnant with our first, but I could always send her money from out on the road somewhere.

That’s when I saw another fantasy. Meredith McCrae, the hostess and emcee of the Fantasy show walked out of the bank building. Wow! She had long blonde hair with dark roots, white make-up on her face and bright red lipstick lined her most kissable lips. She had on a long flowing dress that accented her figure and gripped her hips. The dress was dark, but it had glittery, silver sparkles all over it, which caught the light. 

She strolled past the ticket booth. She must have seen me even though I was behind the dark Plexiglas that was supposed to keep out the sun, but didn’t. I had my guitar with me to practice. There wasn’t much to do early on, after I picked up the trash in the parking lot. Styrofoam cups, newspapers and the like. The traffic went in spurts, so why not? I started strumming when she walked by. I could do chords progressions in the keys of C, F, and G. This wasn’t Hollywood, but you never know. Someday people could be talking. “Eddie Bayliss was discovered strumming his guitar in a ticket booth. Meredith McRae discovered him. She knows music. Her Dad is Gordon McRae, the famous singer.” Things like that happen.

She kept walking though. She was all business and didn’t even look up when I threw an A minor into the chords I was playing to show some versatility. She went back to the truck to confer with the two guys playing Foosball. I kept playing even though she walked back to the building oblivious to my attempt to serenade her. 

Another television crew from the local network affiliate pulled in and parked across from Globe Capital Investments and the fountain where all the bums, transients, and ne’er-do-wells lathered up before sunrise. 

This time of day, the bathers and launderers had all cleared out for the daytime world they avoided and shunned, the world they had fallen out of. It looked like the presentation of the ping pong table would occur right there where they skinny-dipped with the moon. The fountain was the backdrop. A large, yellow boom attached to the television truck covered the top like the comb on a sleeping bird. I kept waiting for the beautiful Meredith McRae to come out the glass doors leading into the bank building.

“Hey, can you give us a hand?”

It was the guy from the Fantasy truck. He was standing in the incoming lane next to the ticket booth. I guess they decided to give it another whirl and raise the ping-pong table up again into the back of the truck. 

“Sure,” I answered.

I followed him over to the ping pong table.

“Here, you take this side in the middle and we’ll grab the ends. Lift straight up and then we’ll slide it onto the truck.”

“Okay, I’ve got the middle,” I said, although I was apprehensive about the procedure.  

It was a carbon copy of the previous attempt except that an extra man was involved. I didn’t want to get my head bashed in either. 

“Up we go,” grunted the tall guy.

The ping pong table began to tip over again.

“Hold it. Let’s go down to ground with it,” the other guy ordered.

We gently lowered it to the asphalt.

“The supports throw it off balance. Leave the fucking thing here for now,” he said.

I returned to the booth. The ping pong table stood there where we left it. The two guys got back up in the truck, laughing and drinking more beer. Maybe they weren’t imbeciles after all. I was the one stuck in the Plexiglas palace. 

The wind was breezy that day, and it got gustier. Instead of finding a sail to fill out, the wind found the ping pong table and knocked it over so hard the ping-pong table did one and a half flips and a loud crash before it came to rest on the asphalt. A piece of wood under the table snapped into jagged sections. What remained attached to the ping pong table stuck out. 

The two guys jumped down. I wandered over too. They looked unconcerned. The tall guy pulled out his walkie-talkie.  People walking by sidestepped the table as they crossed the street. They gawked at the man on a walkie-talkie standing over the wrecked ping pong table.

Another car pulled up. A man with an NBC hat and the colorful peacock logo on it walked over to the table. 

“Hey, can you give us a hand?” he called over to me in the booth.

“Yeah sure. No problem.”

Here was another chance to prove my mettle. All four of us, one at each corner, lifted the table. We hoisted into the back of the truck. 

“We don’t give ’em to the people like this,” said the tall guy with tattoos on his arms. “We’ll give ’em a new one. This one’ll be just for show.”

It wasn’t much of a fantasy to begin with anyway if you ask me, so getting it all torn up was even worse.  

The production truck inside the parking lot moved closer to the fountain where the beautiful Meredith McRae appeared by herself.  They videotaped her in front of the fountain as she did a lead-in for the story about the ping pong table she was about to present to some unsuspecting person in the building. The only thing I could think about with her standing there was a knapsack I had found behind the fountain a week before. The knapsack had a map inside it. 

It wasn’t unusual to find tiny bars of used soap, wash clothes with rusty brown streaks, toothbrushes, shaving paraphernalia, and clothing left to dry along the tile surrounding the fountain. I found the knapsack in the shrubbery that encircled the fountain. Whoever it belonged to had left it. Maybe they were coming back for it. I didn’t know, but I was curious, so I opened it. Besides the dirty clothing, toiletries, and tins of sardines and kipper herring, there was a folded up map as detailed as the one I remembered in Treasure Island, a book I had read as a kid. The inside of the knapsack reeked. There was a heavy black line on the map starting in Minnesota, continuing through the Midwest, then veering southeast towards Florida. Red X’s dotted various places on the map next to the thick black line. The fountain outside the front doors of Globe Capital Investments was where the line ended. 

They finished taping by the fountain. With everything packed up, the production truck with the beautiful and slinky Meredith McRae inside it approached the ticket booth. The driver handed me his parking ticket. I punched it on the clock.

“That’s two dollars and fifty cents,” I said. 

One of the guys from the Fantasy truck came up.

“I’ll pay for his parking,” he said.

“Don’t worry about it,” I replied. 

Bootleg would have kicked my ass for giving them a freebie, but I didn’t care. I was thinking about a future away from the fumes and the booth. 

“So you guys travel all over the country?”

“Yeah.”

“Must be nice. That’s my fantasy,” I said, thinking about the guy doing about the same thing, with a knapsack full of dirty laundry, tins of sardines and kipper herring, and a map marked with red X’s.

“As long as we don’t get canceled,” said the guy who had banged his head on the table. 

“So who won the ping-pong table?”

“Some guy on the tenth floor who stares at a computer screen all day for the phone company,” he replied. 

The driver of the Fantasy truck inched towards the gate. Meredith was whispering something in his ear. I was hoping she was saying something about how well I did the ticket booth and played guitar progressions and maybe they could use me on the road. I was caught up in all the excitement and glamour of it, and Bootleg would surely kick my ass because I forgot to push the button to raise the wooden gate, and it snapped off like a chicken bone before they drove off to their next fantasy. 

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“The rest of the world in which I lived was still stumbling about in search of a weapon with which to exterminate this Monster [Homosexuality] … It was thought to be Greek in origin, smaller than Socialism but more deadly, especially to children.” – Quentin Crisp, 1968

The city of Melbourne is a vain, intriguing concept for a colony of criminals, utterly ruined by the reality of people living inside of it. ‘Marvellous’ Melbourne’s pride is the honesty it brings to its inhabitants. A gust of foul wind knocks a wheelie bin on its side. A phalanx of drunken teenagers are shattered by a pram filled with groceries instead of a child. Someone in stylish overalls silently carries houseplants equal in size to themselves into the foyer of an apartment block. Above us, someone is screaming through an open window. A spotless black Tesla floats through an intersection and squashes a distracted pigeon. The obese, round bird is instantly rendered flat and deceased.

This sauna is one of two in the city of Melbourne. The other is larger and has better facilities but is more publicly a gay sauna. The inner-city location tucks itself away behind 24-hour gyms and convenience stores.

Melbourne’s fondness for poverty and prejudice always provides a short-term need for the saunas. Anyone can walk into a sauna and, for less than 30 dollars, be given a towel, a locker and somewhere to sleep. This makes saunas desirable among some homeless. Anonymity in this place is strangely sacrosanct. Despite showing ID at the front door, you can call yourself whatever you like. You can spend hours speaking to no one, but showers are communal. Rinsing off next to me is an elderly bearded man very casually whistling. He is naked but has caked his whole body in shaving cream. He looks like a very gay snowman. He could be someone’s grandfather. He could be homeless. He’s also wearing thongs and you can almost feel the athlete’s foot beneath you.

Disease is a growing contemporary issue in a venue like this. Gentrification in the late 1980s allowed inner-city police to raid gay saunas by labelling them as brothels. COVID-19 sealed these places away and has become the main reason for closing saunas down. That and the emergence of monkeypox among gay communities has given excuse to some LGBTQI+ lobby groups advocating for closing saunas. Among these groups, the gay sauna is a relic of an improper and illegal homosexuality. It should have died with the rise of AIDS and the enveloping of gay culture into the wider, western one. Stuck between graphic images of men kissing and touching of our Melbourne sauna are government and lobby-group advertisements about getting tested, using protection and staying healthy. The models in the ads look nothing like the men here. They are clean and sensible; they have had their queerness tided to be acceptable.

The maze-like structure of the venue mimics playground equipment. Ramps and corridors going nowhere. No windows, only bright electric lights. Turns left or right that loop back around to join arrow entryways, leading to lounging areas padded with pleather. It all eventually goes back to the actual sauna part of the entire complex.

This is a more conversational area. Francis is the only inhabitant of the huge jacuzzi beside myself. He’s imposing at 6 foot 4 and looks like a tattooed seal with a small, greying beard. He’s friendly and open about his hypocrisy. He swung by after work before he has to get on a train home. He has two daughters and contently married. He’s not afraid of COVID because he believes it’s a Chinese conspiracy. He’s not conservative but he doesn’t trust doctors. Then, as soon as he starts talking, he’s gone, out of the sauna and into the smoking area

Quentin believes that apps and local government will exterminate the saunas. Grindr, Scruff and other dating apps do naturally erode the population of the sauna. Those with a car or a house can more easily access casual gay sex. Rather than make the sauna less useful, instead it has become an important environment for the safety and privacy of gay men.

On TikTok and Instagram, the ‘Pride’ movement is defined by its exclusivity and commercialism. It has become a cloud cuckoo land of online advocacy. Influencers create a public and easily accessible experience that promotes a definition of normalcy for audiences. To stray outside conventional aesthetics, to not fully publicize your identity, is to not be a member of the ‘Pride Movement’.¹

While physical appearance does play a big role in a sauna where you only have a towel, at the same time you can see elderly bodies, chubby bodies, skinny bodies, scarred bodies, muscular bodies and bruised bodies. Shame becomes irrelevant when the playing field is level.

The saunas represent only one facet of a difficult gay history. As non-heterosexual relationships became more acknowledged and more accepted by conventional society, it is important for ‘Pride’ to acknowledge the history it brings with it, rather than abandon aspects of history that are unseemly to contemporary culture.

As I leave the sauna, I reflect on how unique this space is compared to everything else in Melbourne. It’s more comfortable than the National Gallery of Victoria, it has less crazy people than Federation Square, and it’s cheaper than the Docklands Stadium. But I also worry that a venue like this will be forced to close and become a museum to historical queerness so that a few commercial gays can better show their financial backers that members of ‘Pride’ can be well behaved for the majority.

Afterword: For the sake of privacy and better understanding, interview subjects for this piece have had their names and words changed.

Footnote:

1. Ami Pomerantz, Big-Girls Don’t Cry: Portrayals of the Fat Body in RuPauls Drag Race, 2017, Springer International Publishing)

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