It was a night very much like this one, 11 years ago, when young Donny Trump first came upon the locker room. Everyone had warned him away from the haunted old place, of course — it was rumored to have been the site of a fatal towel-snapping incident in the '70s, around when the town elders had boarded up the locker room. And though folks who lived nearby swore that on windless nights, they could hear the phantom sound of showers running and the voices of young men shrieking gay-bashing slurs over the strains of Deep Purple's "Smoke On The Water," no one had actually entered the room since that tragic day.
But Donny was rambunctious — you know how 60-year-old boys are. He insisted on going, even though the other kids down at the town swimming hole told him that the place was haunted by vicious man-eating skeletons, and that if it got him, there would be no one around to promote Trump: The Game or make sure that Miss Universe felt awful about her body. But Donny, he didn't listen; he went to that old locker room all by himself. And though none of the kids in town knew what happened to him there, they knew he had found something there besides moldy towels and expired jock itch cream.
In the years since, no one else was foolish enough to go to old locker room, until a feminist blogger came in from the big city. "I'll find out what's really inside that spooky locker room! It'll be the scoop of the century!" she had told her editor. "I think Trump was referring to a metaphorical 'locker room' when he used the phrase 'locker room talk' to excuse his comments" her editor told her. "He was claiming that the act of men saying misogynist things when women aren't around is normal and expected — it's just an excuse for grotesque sexism; I don't think there's an actual locker room in this story." But the blogger was actually checking Twitter the whole time her boss was talking, and did not heed her warning.
Once she was there, pushing against the creaky old locker room door on a moonless night, the blogger got nervous. What if the legends were true? Could this locker room really be home to blood-thirsty skeletons who loved classic rock and demeaning speech towards marginalized groups? But she had gone too far to turn back; she went on, stumbling into cobwebs and just piles upon piles of expired tubes of jock itch cream. And then, as she entered the shower area, the moon suddenly came out from behind the clouds, illuminating the room through the skylight, and she saw something that made her jaw drop.
In the moonlight, the pale wraiths of 1970s high school football players cavorted before her eyes. Though they were not made of flesh, the hairs of their muttonchop sideburns and carefully maintained mullets moved in an unseen breeze. They high-fived and grunted and pushed a smaller ghost's head in the toilet. "Brewski!" their voices intoned in an unholy harmony. "[String of unprintable slurs regarding women and gay men]!"
The blogger, terrified, stumbled over a pile of rusted old jock straps. The ghosts, startled out of their nightly ceremony, looked towards her. The blogger held her breath.
"Awww, shit," yelled one of the ghosts. "Who let the [unprintable slur regarding women's genitals] in here?"
The blogger, emboldened by her distress about being referred to that way, asked the ghosts who they were. And they told her: they were a group of white high schoolers who, in 1972, had died in a group hazing ritual that required them each to consume 15 tubes of expired jock itch cream while staring at a copy of Hustler and meditating on how women were not really allowed to have their own credit cards.
But as time passed and the world changed, their spirits were unable to rest. How could they enjoy the peace of the grave when women were expecting equal pay, when the importance of sexual consent is an issue of international discussion, when sexual harassment was now recognized as a workplace crime, instead of a fun way to spend a Friday afternoon? The forward march of society had rendered them uneasy.
"This is our place," one ghost told her, "where we can be honest about how we don't respect anyone except other heterosexual men. You know, the way all guys do."
"Do you genuinely think all guys do that?" said the blogger.
"Well, all guys who are the ghosts of misogynist teenagers from the 1970s, which I think we can all agree are the only guys who count," said the ghost.
"What happened when Trump came here?" the blogger asked.
"Oh, we had a blast," said another ghost. "Donny did keg stands with us all night and told us about all the hot trim he sees up in New York City. We tried to get him to eat some of the jock itch cream so he could stay and party with us forever, but he said something about having to go back to where he was from, so he could grab more hooters."
"Did he say anything else?" asked the blogger.
"Only that this was the only locker room he'd ever been in in his life," said the ghost. "He asked if all locker rooms were all this cool, and I said, probably. Seemed like a good enough answer for him."
"He said he never felt as understood as he did in here," said another ghost, "and that he'd come back and party with us if those ball-busting bitches in the media didn't stop him...but he never did." At this revelation, the ghosts began to waver, their forms beginning to grow less clear.
"Wait!" yelled the blogger. "Even in your less-enlightened era, did all men talk about women this way?"
"No way," called out the ghost, softly. "Even back then, lots of guys didn't think that women were just sexual playthings without souls...there have always been wusses, fair blogger."
And with that, a bolt of lightning flashed, and the ghosts faded from view.
"No!" the blogger cried. "I had so much more to ask!" But there was no reply, save a lonely, mournful ghost-fart that wailed like a banshee in the distance. The blogger tried to grab a hold of herself. Had that all really happened? Or had she simply imagined it?
She was ready to write the entire thing off as a hallucination, owing to the extremely heavy fumes emanating from these tubes of expired jock itch cream, when her shoe touched something on the floor. She crouched down, and discovered that it was a 1972 school year book. Inscribed in the front cover, it said "Bros! I had the time of my life here tonight! And I stand by the solemn promise I made to you — I will build a world in this locker room's image. When I am in charge, anyone who is not a sexist, racist, xenophobic white heterosexual man will feel exactly as comfortable in my world as they would in this locker room. Stay crazy and have a great summer! Donny T."
Images: Pixabay
