I have no problem being naked. I am actually quite happy with my body. Yea, it’s sometimes pale and the belly got what the boobs should have, but then again, I wasn’t auditioning for Baywatch anyways.
This all changes around other dudes. I have an acute case of old-man-saggy-ass-ophobia. Besides the fact that old men in the locker room always seem to have to have conversations with each other while propping one leg high up on a bench, I think we’ve all seen enough Lifetime movies for our Spidey-senses to go off when that nice, white-haired, old timer at 24 Hour tells you, “I’m a boy’s basketball coach.”
But this would all change, I told myself, once it was time to take a soak in Budapest’s famous mineral baths. When in Hungary do as the Hungarians do. I would be joining a two thousand year old unbroken tradition: from the Roman overlords who first exploited the natural hot springs of Budapest, followed by the Turkish conquerors of the 1500s, whose Islamic prudishness fell away when rubbing bosoms with the same sex, and continued by Hungarians up to the present day. I wanted the experience, and I was going to conquer my fear. After all, they had long since done away with the old-style baths where dudes used to massage each other with oil. Dudes who quite probably, though naked, always had their natural sweater on. Excuse me while I puke in my mouth a little bit.
Just gotta figure out the Metro…and figure out WHY McDonald’s sponsors it?!
First of all, I had to choose which baths to go to. Having studied the Ottoman Empire and being a proponent of visiting old stuff, I decided on Rudas Baths, the Turkish baths from that period old enough to still have only men’s and only women’s nights. AKA people is getting nekkid.
Rudas Baths
I crossed the Danube River on one of Budapest’s many bridges to the older, hillier side of the city. Rudas is built straight into the hillside, probably because that’s where all the hot mineral water comes from.
One of the many bridges across the Danube. And the coolest.
I walked in to pay and on to the changing room. Passing the turnstile, I contemplated briefly. I was traveling alone, and nobody was checking up on me. Would I possibly think twice to enter a dark, steamy bathhouse chock full of a bunch of random dudes with no supervision?
Ahhh, fuck it. If there is one thing more certain than death and taxes, it’s my poverty. This was the cheapest place to go, so I would just have to bite the bullet, and get the most bang for my buck.
For you non-students of history, the Ottoman Empire was once so backward and destitute that it was nicknamed “the sick man of Europe”. Hence why I expected the building to be the architectural equivalent of a wheezing old geezer on oxygen, squeezing out his last gasps through emphysema-riddled lungs. Actually, the changing room was pretty modern. Rows of telephone booth-like cabin stalls lined the middle area. Cool! At least if my junk was minutes away from waving around all over the place, I would be spared the awkward experience of some guy watching me undress.
So I changed. I noticed that the man at the front desk had given me something along with my towel. It looked like the pillowcase from the little pillows they give you on airplanes. At least the fabric was the same. That shitty, linty one-ply crap that feels like a dehydrated Swiffer sweeper. I pulled it out, and held it up.
It was a little apron….a dick apron! Usually those words would probably cause some consternation, or at least some confusion, but my emotional response was pure joy! Yea, my butt would be out, but this apron was like that Twinkie you find during a zombie apocalypse….nothing special, but it felt like normalcy was restored. A little. I put it on, looked behind me checking myself out, and with a relieved smile, I decided everything was gonna be OK. I took one deep breath before my life was about to change, and stepped out of the wooden phone booth changy-thingy.
Came out swaggerin’. I was so sure of myself, I was damn near pimp walking it down the aisle. Then I noticed it, near the ground around the corner. A foot….a hairy foot. The beginnings of a nasty, sweaty old man that was about to get a full-frontal view of me and my dick apron.
I lost it. I ran faster than I ever have in my life back to the cabin to cower in private and put my swim trunks on. Not gonna happen, man.
I walked out again, relieved to have my junk tucked away. All this hemming and hawing had taken at least half an hour out of my day. That wasted time brought me back to the hours whiled away at middle school dances trying to get up the nerve to ask my crush to dance, only to have her stolen away by someone else, and I still hadn’t learned my lesson: building up courage takes forever and it’s usually for nought anyways.
The main room of the baths
Luckily the sun was still up, and its liquid rays trickled through the holes in the roof like God was rinsing the heavens and using the dome as a giant sieve over the main bath. The thick, billowing steam rising up from the water was sliced through seductively by thin sunlight daggers, a sadomasochistic light show of colorful knife-play sneaking through the the hexagonal perforations in the ceiling, which were covered in various pastel-colored blown glass. The scene was sultry and romantic , like every Orientalist fantasy imagined.
Except for in my reality, someone was holding a male La Maze class for pregnant-bellied, liver-spotted, white-haired Hungarians underneath it all. Bubble = burst.
At least, I was gonna conquer one fear. I was gonna sit in the hot ass pool. 42 degrees Celsius. If my calculations are correct, in Fahrenheit that comes out to….hot as fuck. As to not singe my testicles and avoid hearing my mom cry when I learn years from now that I’m incapable of having her grandchildren, I decided to sit in the other, cooler pools and gradually work my way up. Things got hotter, but not bad. Interestingly enough, I sat in each one alone, fortuitously avoiding the weird stares I expected when the other guys noticed I was trying to be non-conformist by covering up my privates.
Now it was time to do the damn thang. I was ready. I walked over to the 42 degree pool, and put my foot in. I could feel the leg hairs around my ankle combusting slowly, like a cigarette someone lit and just left sitting in an ashtray. Ever so minutely, I lowered my dainty ass into the pool. I suffered in silence, my rear on fire like sitting on the toilet the day after you eat that burrito from the taco truck slathered in habanero sauce, telling yourself it will all be over in twenty minutes.
When I come to, after having feverish visions of leafing furiously through a Hungarian dictionary, desperately trying to find the words for “anus” and “3rd degree burn” after I inevitably end up in the hospital, I look up. There they are, two dudes, talking to each other juuuust like the old men in the gyms in America. So it’s a worldwide phenomenon. At least they have the decency to stay waist-deep in the water.
But a sudden fluttering catches my eye, the way it would at the beach, fearing some as-yet undiscovered species of cephalopod had come to nibble on my toes. My eyes start to focus, and what else do I see but the dick aprons floating at waist height, fruit bowls on display like some fucking Renaissance still-life painting that Leonardo da Vinci spent extra time on.
That was my cue to leave, so I ran around the corner to find a huge bucket full of ice cold water attached to a rope and dumped it on myself. Because I was hot as hell…..temperature wise, dammit! It took less than a minute for me to be fully clothed and back out in the still, open air, high-tailing it back to my hostel to drink large quantities and never speak of that day again.
The bucket
Lesson learned: By all means, go for the “experience” while traveling. But don’t be surprised if conquering your fears is as hard as you feared.
-Tyler (NEW YORK!), 20, frequenting bathhouses in Budapest, Hungary