Five steps through a door chocked open with a dumbbell plucked straight out of a Popeye cartoon. It's palpably hotter inside than the humid mid-July soup you left behind in the street. A guttural yell from the far corner like a man being disemboweled. Two guys named Tony and Vin barking: Come on! Get it! Then a sound like someone dropping a safe full of quarters onto the deck of an aircraft carrier—from a passing aircraft: Joey-O completes a set of deadlifts with 380 pounds. He got that fifth rep.

Jesus the air is still in here. In a few places it's being moved around by giant, floor-mounted fans, their steel cages shagged with crypt-quality dust. Over the hiss of those feeble propellers you hear with satisfaction the next song on the radio. They've got WPLJ on:

Rosanna's daddy had a car she loved to drive —
Stole the keys one night and took me for a ride,
Turned up the music just as loud as it could go,
Blew out the speakers in her daddy's radio!
She was shakin'….

Long Island? Strong Island! That's your boy Eddie Money ruling the airwaves, the Irish kid formerly known as Eddie Mahoney, pride of Levittown. Since no one was at the front desk, you won't have to pay. You're squat-deep in the summer of 1986 and today it's chest, bi's, tri's, and abs.

Welcome to Rab's.

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Rab's was a gym—a real gym, not these emasculated, antiseptic, cookie-cutter morgues run by accountants for accountants where rows of the zombified masses dully stare at flat-screen TVs or look down every 30 seconds at their dumbphones (and why hasn't someone had the good sense to harness all that potential electricity from those hamsters laboring away on their dark satanic treadmills?) No, Rab's was a place where men—and a few engeniussed teenagers aspiring to that title—went to lift serious weights. To pump iron. To sweat. No one was offended by grunts or yells—you'd be grunting and yelling soon enough. It was hot in the summer and cold in the winter and you dealt with it. There wasn't a piece of "cardio equipment" in the whole place. I take that back: I recall a few primitive AMF stationary bikes gathering layers of their own dust.

Rab's took up a chunk of a block on Franklin Avenue in Lynbrook, New York. That's on Long Island—Nassau County—and right next to the town of Valley Stream where me and my friends lived.  (Lynbrook got its name back in 1894 from an influx of new residents from what was then the City of Brooklyn—they cleverly flipped around the syllables of their old address.)

Nowhere near as cavernous as today's franchised industrial labor factories, Rab's still seemed vast to us after several years of working out in the confines of our basements amidst washing machines, dryers, water heaters, and furnaces. It had a rectangular layout with mirrors along both long walls. On one of those walls there was also a large hand-painted mural with depictions of a football player running with the ball, a powerlifter mid-snatch, and a male gymnast frozen on the rings in an iron cross.

Most of the apparatus centered on body or free-weight exercises: squatting cages; pull-up bars; sit-up planks; benches—conventional horizontal ones, as well as incline and decline; and racks and racks of barbells and dumbbells. There were a few "universals"—the cable, pulley, and weight cluster—which we eschewed except for one devilish exercise we did for abdominals where the supplicant kneels while holding a knotted rope handle behind the base of his neck and then crunches forward bringing his forehead down to his knees—the only prayer I've ever seen that did anyone any good.

One of my favorite objects in the gym was the chalk station, a little altar with a massive round of white chalk atop it. What a satisfying ritual to walk over to that thing, rub one's palms on it, and then give a cloud-emitting clap just before you settled under the bar for a brutal set.

Along with yells from giants heaving a quarter-ton of steel a few feet contra-gravity, sharp screams and group shouts sometimes punctuated our classic Rock when classes were in session in the dojo at the far end of the gym. The late Richard Barathy ran his American Combat Karate school out of Rab's. He looked like he should have been in Black Sabbath or the Long Island chapter of the Hell's Angels, but this amazing man with flowing black hair didn't let losing an eye at age 3 nor a lifelong battle with lupus erythematosus hold him back. He appeared on ABC's Wide World of Sports as well as the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson in 1979, where he famously demonstrated his chops. Literally.

Rab's—the name was perfect, like "rasp," "reps," and "abs" compressed into one angry syllable or slang for some excruciating exercise, as in Hey, where you goin'? You got one more set of rabs! Turns out, it was an acronym: Richard A. Barathy.

My friends and I occasionally lifted at Rab's starting in late high school and then with greater frequency in college over winter breaks and all through those summers. Among the Rab's regulars I was an anomaly, burning the athletic training candle at both ends. I've always been a distance runner, competing in cross-country races as far back as grammar school but getting very serious about my sport from high school onwards. And that has always meant lots of mileage. But I also had a very pressing practical need for upper-body strength: at the end of freshman year in college I signed on the dotted line to be a US Army infantry officer. A lean 155 pounds on a 5'11" frame, I routinely ran two miles under 11 minutes, but I could also knock out three sets of 8-10 bench-presses with 185 pounds.

Rab's was one of many things for which my friends and I all feel lucky to have lived when and where we did. A typical lift might go this way: we meet up at Jason's house and drive to Rab's in his dad's Monte Carlo SS. Nobody beats us off the line. And no need to crank a cassette tape because the radio teems with amazing music. Wait, go back, that was Van Halen! Ah, the solemn opening of "I'll Wait" . . . now the world changes, heightened, you look out at it rushing past with sharpened eyes. Eddie lays down that majestic guitar solo, his crisscrossed axe weeping over unrequited lust. You can't imagine what your image means//the pages come alive. And it's good to be alive! We park. You hear the report of a pre-4th bottle rocket. Some girls walk by in Jordache jeans, tube tops, and hair that took them each an hour to attain that level of perfection. Are you for real? It's so hard to tell from just a magazine//Yeah you just smile and the picture sells—look what that does to me.

Time to get your mind right: today you're going to see if you can bench two-and-a-quarter. Enter a world: plate-clank, fan-buzz, claps, shouts, a room full of steel, testosterone, and Billy Squier on high declaring Lonely is the night—Rab's is humming just the way Nature intended. Warm-ups with 135. A first set with 185. Your hands chalked, the diamonded etch on the bar: you're welded to the weight. Eight satisfying bench-presses: strict, controlled, no arch, no spot needed, all you. Your friends do their sets. Now, let's see what we got. The bar weighs 45 pounds—plus four 45-pound plates makes 225. Take a deep breath and hoist that bar free from the bench's little cradles. Damn, it's a whole other order of heavy! The bar presses down across your chest like it means to crush you but you start pushing. It's going up; you got it! Lock your elbows and ease the weight back into position. More shouts; this time it's you and your boys….

The lift savages you—in the best way possible. After the workout you go home, get cleaned up, and meet for pizza. It's Long Island in 1986 so, of course, you're eating the best pizza on planet earth. The carbs and the proteins go straight to your pecs and arms: the "pizza pump." What's that line from Wallace Stevens? When to be and delight to be seemed to be one….

Goodbye to Rab's.

* * * * *

This piece is dedicated to my friends Chris, Jason, Kevin, and Mike.