Communion

This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.

Raleigh McCool | Longreads | September 5, 2024 | 3,082 words (11 minutes)

It’s my first day of spin class, and I am in the darkest corner of the room. My feet are crammed into shoes I rent from the front desk—little black Velcro things with cleats on the bottoms. The feet of other riders are strapped into sleek Nikes splashed in bright reds and volt blues and glow-in-the-dark neons. Dangling from my perch upon the bike’s seat, my feet strain at the pedals as I attempt to jam the cleats until they fit. I flail around for a second, until finally, a satisfying snap. I’m connected.

To the bike, I mean. Outside of class, I’m terribly lonely. That’s how I’ve ended up here.

There’s a tweet I wish I’d written about how the real miracle was Jesus having a dozen friends in his 30s, and as someone who has now outlived Jesus, I can testify to the divine work it takes to have friends. With few exceptions, all my friends are married, having kids, and buying houses in the ’burbs. Achieving domestic bliss has really started to cut into my friends’ hangout time.

In the bike room my feet are tethered to the pedals and I begin to spin my legs around in warm-up. I stand, pedal like I’m riding down Ridgewood Road to my friend Ross’s house—he lived down the street, and in the summer I’d bike over and we’d hole up in his attic, playing video games and the dice baseball game we invented. Riding my bike as a kid, my bowl cut whooshed in the hot Tennessee air. Here it’s pulled back with a headband, and the room is dark and cool, and the instructor announces we’ll start in a couple minutes. She comes up to me, introduces herself, thanks me for being there. Her name’s Karson. She makes sure my cleats are clipped in and that I have water, tugging on the handlebars to ensure everything is in place.

When class starts, the lights go out. “We ride to the beat of the music,” Karson says. The music is a pop remix I don’t recognize, and it’s playing at a volume that could raise the dead. She helps us find the cadence, “Right, left, right; right, left, right.” Karson announces that when the beat drops, we’ll rise up out of our seats, and we’ll ride, and we’ll, like, drop our elbows, or . . . something? And then, it happens. The music wobble-wobbles, and the lights flash on. Every last one of the 40 or so bikers is on their feet and bouncing up and down, their hands clutching the handlebars as they perform synchronized push-ups, even as their feet maintain the pulsing beat. I do my best to match, but I’m off, my legs too fast and my body too slow. Or maybe it’s the other way around. All around the room, everyone has got it, and it’s not just that their legs are pumping synchronously or that their push-ups are perfectly timed—it’s some ineffable flair, an extra zhuzh of swag that my bike neighbors are adding. I sort of want to pause and be like, “Well look at you go!” but the lights go dim again, and I am positively gasping. I use the dark to snatch at my towel, slug my water, and sit.

We are halfway through the first song.

In a last-ditch effort to make friends at my gym, I recently plucked out my headphones and stepped up to the squat rack in silence. The only sounds were the clang of weights, the hum of the AC, and my grunty breaths. The idea was to signal to the people around me that I was open for connection, conversation, or a spot. I’d been going to that gym for the past year, and I’d never talked to a soul—each of us with our headphones on, in our own little worlds of isolation.

The no-headphones thing didn’t really work. A couple guys asked for a bench press spot, but providing a spot for these men strangely did not lead to close personal friendship, which put it in good company alongside organizing a wiffle ball game, throwing a birthday party, working at a restaurant, drinking alone at bars, and scrolling mindlessly on my phone, none of which had led to friendships either.

My 30s have been weird: isolating and demoralizing, a depressing gnarl in my stomach. A bone-deep, soul-swamped loneliness I can’t seem to text or swipe my way out of. Days alone in a crowded gym, nights alone on my couch, scrolling and hoping for connection and washing down hope with a handful of IPAs instead. I’m ashamed to be lonely, ashamed to ask for friends in the first place. Needing someone? How embarrassing.

I’ve read and listened to all the articles and podcasts: the friendship recession is upon us. I’m not alone in being alone, which knowledge does not help. I follow the results of my Google search on “how to make friends” to a T: I cohost a bowling night, join a flag football team. The bowling turnout is abysmal, and our flag football team is so bad we’ve all turned against each other. One day I search for group fitness classes near me, and a spin studio pops up: Full Ride Cycling is just down the street.

The next time the beat drops, Karson adds another move to the dance, a little twist, and then a lean, and there’s a moment when she instructs us to “tap (y)our ass back” while riding, which seems simple enough when she does it and yet, my attempts to pump my legs and tighten my core and hurl my ass backward to the beat prove too much for my body altogether. I sit my ass down, and it stays there for the rest of class.

Somewhere in the latter half of my first spin class, I burst into tears. The room has gone completely dark. “This bike room is not about competition,” Karson says. “It’s not about getting it right, or how it looks.” There are two candles lit, the light fluttering up like she’s telling a ghost story; Karson blows them out. “It’s about showing up,” she says. “It’s about trying.” There’s no choreography or beat to keep, and in the utter darkness I slump my shoulders, looking up at the ceiling I can’t see. “You belong here,” she says, somewhere out there in the dark. “Every one of you. You are welcome.” The song’s too loud to hear my sniffles. I sit and slowly pedal.

When I was little, we passed communion around on little trays—matzos wafers to crack apart, tiny plastic shot glasses of grape juice jiggling on a saucer. I loved church. All the people, our voices harmonizing together, the buzzy electrical currents of love, the huge beautiful mystery of God. 

I was a good kid. I obeyed God, followed all the rules—I memorized the verses and respected my elders, didn’t lust or use the Lord’s name in vain. No one yelled it or painted it blood-red on a sign, but they told us: to disobey was sin. And sinners went to hell.

It didn’t hit me until decades later, how afraid I’d been. Fire. Eternal separation. How the flames singed the corners of everything, a childhood charred by fear. The story of Jesus still yanks at me—God on earth, grabbing hold of the lost, insisting they belong—but I don’t really go to church anymore. The fear is still near, hot to the touch. 

Sometimes, though, I miss it. The harmonies, the kind smiles, the whole messy lot of us together. When I miss it enough, I rise early and go to an Episcopal church down the street. When it’s time for communion, I file in line with strangers, and at the altar, the reverend hands me a hunk of torn-off bread and a goblet of wine. “This is the body of Christ broken for you,” she says, looking deeply into my eyes. “This is the blood of Christ shed for you,” she says, handing me the cup. When she finally unlocks her gaze, I close my eyes, let the bread and wine melt on my tongue.

I go back to spin the week after, and the week after that. After a few classes, I feel like I’m becoming an expert at some of the moves, such as clipping into the pedals, adjusting the seat height, and unclipping from the pedals.

Beyond a few warm smiles and hellos, I don’t say much for the first few weeks. Sure, I’m lonely, but I don’t mind flying under the radar in spin class. I’m hopelessly novice, awkward and sweaty and limbs all a-floppy—I am thankful for the room’s dark. Also, as it turns out, there are a lot of women in spin class. Throngs of women in monochrome Lululemon astride the bikes. It feels like the inverse of the weight room, where meaty men roam the floor. In here, I’m the meaty man. I’m conscious of my place and try to keep a low profile. The femininity of the space feels almost sacred—huge smiles leap from women’s faces, encouraging claps spring from their hands. Their between-song Woo!s are like my church deacon father booming Amen! from the pews. I think that to speak up, I might puncture all that womanly holiness with my big boorish manness. Instead I sit back in my seat, try to breathe, one little boat lifted by the rising tide of female togetherness all around me.

The instructor today is Meg, and I can tell right away she doesn’t play. Something about the way her ponytail is pulled tight behind her head, the way it bobs, itself keeping the frantic beat. Meg bounds around the room, ponytail a whip, praising all the better riders. I see you, Jess! She claps and shouts. Keep those hips back, Lane! I plod along in the back corner, safe in being unknown, unseen. Then, from across the room: Go, Raleigh, go! My heart catches as my body roils: I didn’t know she—or anyone—knew my name. Briefly, I beam in the pulsing dark. The bright sensation in my heart is replaced soon after with a burning in my chest, however, as Meg exhorts us to pedal at cartoonish Roadrunner speeds, pleading for us to tap our asses back like a demanding director on the set of an early-2000s rap music video. 

During the break, I bring the towel to my face like a man who’s never eaten before, or a desperate sinner prostrate before God. All around me women clap, Woo!s raining in chorus, and when hands reach out in the dark to touch my handlebars, they seem to say Hi, and Good job, and You’re welcome here. I extend an offering in return, my voice barely audible over the music. “Way to go,” I say, but what I mean is, And also with you.

Outside the bike room, life’s terrain is wildly shifting: I struggle up lonely haggard hills and coast down, face whipped by the wind, on the other side. I quit my job, get a new place, stop drinking. There are bright spots—a game night here, a storytelling night there, a dinner party on my birthday—but making friendships remains impossibly hard.

I keep showing up to class. My growth curve is steep, but I gain elevation quick—soon I find that I can crush the handlebar push-ups, and I begin to find the beat, to match the pace, if only for a moment. I spend great chunks of Meg’s classes trying not to die, at which I keep barely succeeding. One day after class, maybe my tenth or so, she tells me it usually takes people 40 or 50 classes to really start to get it. It’s a daunting yet somehow hopeful number. I think of friendship, the loving daily trudge of showing up, all the coffees and walks and lingering conversations by our cars that build over time into closeness, connection. I think of how I’m just getting started at that, too.

Kenzie introduces herself before class. Shawna remembers my name from last week. Ely gives me a full-on sweaty high five. The distinct femininity of the place is changing me: it carves out huge swaths of real estate inside me—vast, arid, and untilled soil in my heart, places where love and even the great rainfalls of sweat have not yet reached. The eager welcome, the taps of encouragement, the group claps.

In my experience, men don’t do group claps. We tend to shy away from on-tempo towel twirls. The weight room doesn’t break out in Woo!s when one of the fellas tries his best on the bench press. We march through the gym alone, AirPods blasting, not because the Knocked Loose song makes us stronger, but because we think our independence does. Raised in the oppressive swirl of the patriarchy, we’ve learned to disconnect, to close off, to ride alone.

For men like me, spin is hard. Not just the workout, but the vulnerability: letting go of competition and leaning into the group, a dying of self so the room can revive. It requires a purging of entire realms of my shitty male points of view, from shaming self-talk to the latent homophobia I encounter within myself when the instructor tells us to dance, to “make it cute.”

My history of exercising—my history of being a boy, a Christian, a person—has been lived under the Sauron eye of shame. My high-school basketball coach screaming at me for missing shots. Pastors barking about hell and all the ways you might get there—cussing, drinking, being a sissy. No pain, no gain. Man up. Real men don’t cry. All sorts of ways shame has molded me like clay. When the looming drill sergeants of my life enforced compliance, dishing out love or what passed for it only if you earned it, I got good at earning it.

In spin, I let go. There’s no earning it—because it’s already here. From the very first class, Karson and Meg and others snuck me in through a side door of vulnerability, built a safe little nook in which to practice being loved. You are welcome here and You belong. Belonging, whether your Apple Watch says you burned 600 calories or if you sat there and slowly pedaled in the dark. I’m a man who’s only ever earned. It’s how I learned to make people, parents, girlfriends, and God love me. To move in spin class only for the sake of moving, of the joyful challenge itself, of sweating and pushing and dancing, is cool water in my throat. To be loved, simply for showing up, is pure golden sun in my chest.

In January, the studio offers a deal on their unlimited membership for a fraction of the price. I use it to slingshot into the bike’s seat four times a week. In February, I sail past 25 rides. The studio writes a little note and sticks it on my bike: “Thanks for jumping into this community. We’re going to keep cheering you on!” To commemorate, I buy my own bright red Nike cleats with a glow-in-the-dark neon swoosh, and allow my membership to roll over at the full price. March brings 50, which I celebrate by letting Meg careen my body past its physical limits, legs whooshing around like the blades of giant windmills. After, Meg takes my photo in front of the punctuation-less sign the girls at the front desk have splayed on the wall: RALEIGHS 50TH CLASS. In the photo, my smile provides the punctuation: I beam like I’m accepting the award for Greatest and Most Beloved Cycler and Friend Who We All Love Very Much Even if He Sweats A Lot. For my birthday in April, they drape a sparkly blue sash across my bike. With the sash cloaked across my sweaty shoulders like Britney Spears’s snake, I walk out the front door after class, an extra glitter in my 37-year-old step. “Hey,” Meg stops me at the door. “Happy birthday! I . . . think we need that back.”

In a matter of months, I’ve become a regular. The women at the front desk know my name. I’ve struck up a warm kinship with some folks in the afternoon classes—Lisa and Emmie, Jimmy and Mary. There’s always a couple minutes before class when we’re sort of twirling around on our bikes, the music not yet at skull-hammering volume. We’re talking very basic pleasantries. Big weekend plans? and What brought you to Nashville? and Oh I have family in the Lansing area! I’m not sure I’m in the running to be an honorary bridesmaid at Mary’s wedding or anything. But we talk—the talk of people about to share something together. You might just call it friendship.

Life changes like clicks of a gear—it’s quick and marked, distinct. I get better. Not drinking helps. What were late nights and mornings with a fidget-spinner of anxiety lodged inside me are now clear-eyed and alive with purpose, a beat to catch in class. My challenges—yearning for more and closer friends, longing for a group, dreams of parties and game nights and road trips—still simmer. I just feel more hope that these things are coming, because 25 rides leads to 50, 50 leads to 100, and who knows who might be riding alongside me in the golden-hour road-trip glow by then.

On the way out of class the other day, I stop and hover on the outskirts of a conversation. Great playlist! and That sure was a sweaty one, huh? Somebody mentions heading to a taco spot. I’m orbiting on the fringes of the group, neither invited nor not invited. I know these people, kind of—Karson and Rileigh and Steven and Kaitlyn. We chat until the group dissolves, and I say my farewells. Halfway home, the clarity pierces me: Invite yourself. Go. I want to say I don’t know what got into me, but I do know: I want friends. Walking into the restaurant, I feel like a kid again, approaching the cool table at lunch. I’m nervous, but tenuously confident—it’s almost as if showing up and flinging my body and practicing the act of being welcomed in spin class has prepared me for this. 

From across the dining room I can see them, laughing, hands reaching for chips like communion. When I walk up, there’s an empty seat. They saved it for me. I’ve been welcome all along.

Raleigh McCool is a writer from Nashville. He’s working on a collection of essays exploring faith, pain, pop music, and other enthusiasms. You can subscribe to his Substack newsletter here.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Copy editor: Krista Steven