Bathhouse Quilts: Confessions of a Towel Hag

It started in a cage.  That’s what we called it, “the cage,” the hub of my workplace, The Barracks, a very old-school denim and leather bathhouse that stood at 56 Widmer St. until 2005.  I was fortunate to work there in the late 1990s – fortunate, like it’s fortunate we have chemotherapy.  Like chemotherapy, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

The repetitiveness of being a bathhouse attendant (or “towel hag” as my dear friend Robert so lovingly named us) was soul-destroying.  I had legs like Catherine Zeta-Jones from running up and down those ancient stairs and the lungs of a Cape Breton coal miner from the cigarette smoke and various other toxic inhalants that hung in the air.  As they checked in, each regular customer – and believe me, they were almost all regulars – would ask for a specific room.  If it was occupied they would then begin a countdown of favourite rooms.  By the time they would get to the seventh or eighth option I’d be ready to reach through the bars of the cage and throttle them.

The Bum Washer. Swampy. Lacey With the Golden Smile. Thing One and Thing Two. Where’s Waldo?  We had names for all the regulars.  Some came twice a day.  Their patterns became so predictable.  It was like working on an assembly line, only you could smoke… oh, and have sex with the customers on occasion (discreetly, of course).  Hey, the manager’s office didn’t have a queen-size bed in it because he worked late.

The 12-hour shifts seemed endless, every one a life sentence.  So to pass the time I made paper cutouts.  Dozens and dozens of them.  Customers kept asking me if I’d gone starkers.  “Packet of lube please.  What’s that?  Paper dolls, eh?  Ha, ha, this place has finally got to you, eh?  Ha, ha.”  Or, “Someone’s shit in the sauna.  Oh, paper dolls I see.  Finally lost it, eh?  Ha, ha."