I walked past them to an area that seemed purgatorial, toilets on one side and sinks with mirrors on the other, lit in fluorescent. Yet I noticed as I reached the end of that area and nodded at a man with a newsboy cap on, sitting on a stool and monitoring the proceedings, that the room on the other side must be much bigger, because the sound coming from it was reverberant compared to the cramped thuds on my side. I was too far inside my head to notice until I got there that I was actually on a balcony and that a whole other floor lay before me, so the room was double the height of the others, which somehow made it feel airy despite being underground. The monitor instructed me to keep my towel on when walking to and fro, as I looked down to find more men swimming naked in a pool and lounging at a jacuzzi.

I associated locker rooms with being the short, skinny runt in a litter of men, but in that English bath, it became apparent that I, improbably, was one of the prized, as I sucked in my stomach to show off my nearly washboard abs. I quickly scanned the area to see if there was anyone promising and was disappointed to find none, though I was hopeful that they would reveal themselves as I got closer. There was a steam room by the pool, and I opened the door to clouds of smoke that revealed a clutch of men, connected and breathing heavily, which I decided was not my scene, or at least not yet.

So I, a bit theatrically, remembering my childhood status as the only blond kid in a land of dark-haired people, settled my towel on a lounge chair and stretched for a while before diving into the water. As my head bobbed up to the surface, aware that many eyes were trained on me, I realized how much I’d missed being the automatic center of attention. I hadn’t felt like that in years, since I got to the States and was one fair-skinned blond boy among many. I swam back and forth and tried to enjoy the feeling of the water, imagined myself as a slippery grouper that none of these men could catch.

I emerged from the pool and stepped into the sunken hot tub, where I sat among pink-skinned men with ordinary faces, aware that mine did stand out among them, as I inwardly admired my sharp cheekbones that made me, in the image of myself I saw in the eyes of those men, seem foreign and exotic.