High Tech Tanning Bed

Every spring I have the urge to go to a tanning bed.  I am not one of those forever bronze people who looks like an Oompah Loompah.  I do, however, feel better with a tan and thus I have been known to fake-n-bake.  It helps get me out of a winter funk and into an exercise regime.  I know that lying in a tanning bed does not count as exercise, but it does help mask fat dimples, so I feel like whatever exercise I am doing might be making a difference.

Last spring I was lured into a slick new tanning place to get a base tan before a family vacation that would put me in a bathing suit long before I was mentally prepared to wear one.

In my college days, I would tan in the seedy back room of any cut-rate hair salon or nail factory that offered a good deal.  But I am older now, and I think about germs and faulty equipment and bulbs exploding, so the newness of this place attracted me.

It was clean and bright.  In casinos, they keep it bright so you don’t know what time it really is.  In tanning places, they keep it bright and sunny so you fool yourself into thinking it is completely normal to get a tan in the middle of a snow storm.  The lobby was adorned with posters of very young and attractive people with beautiful tans having lots of fun in their bathing suits.  The young and attractive people working at the place did not look like they were having very much fun, but they did look very tan.  Very, very tan.

After I signed up, they had me place my finger on a little gizmo that recorded my fingerprint.  The gizmo checks your print every time you come so you don’t tan on somebody else’s account.  I wondered how much tanning bed fraud could possibly occur, but I was nonetheless impressed with the security measures they take to prevent it.  Then, despite the bright lights and orange walls, my thoughts turned dark.

What security measures are they using to protect that record of my fingerprint?  How are they using it?  Is this bright, clean tanning place really a front for some kind of identity theft factory where they steal fingerprints and sell them on the black market?  What is the going rate for a fingerprint?  Thank goodness I paid cash or they’d have my credit card information too.  Then I looked at those posters and wondered if those young, attractive tan people were really spies like in La Femme Nakita or the Bourne Identity.  Or, maybe they were just people having a great time on some middle-aged schmuck’s credit card.

I snapped out of it when the very tan young man at the desk told me I could go to room number 19.  Room 19?  Could there really be 19 rooms in this place?  No, there were actually more.  This place can hold 30 people at a time.  That is a lot of tan people.

I chose a standard bed.  They offered a standup spray thing with an exotic name, but that just seemed too fake.  If I’m going get a tan, I should at least get hot and suffer the UV damage.  For a price, you can opt for a bed that separates out the UVA or the UVB rays, but that conversation was way too complicated so I chose the cheaper, standard bed with all the bad rays that go into a real tan.  I told myself I should suffer the long term consequences of my vanity.

Room 19 was clean and had everything a person might need for tanning enjoyment.  A fresh towel and a sign on the bed told me it had been sanitized.  Little goggles were laying there too.  In my college days those goggles were offered but never used.  This time, I used them. A personal speaker offered a variety of music options that young, attractive, tan people might listen to.  Fans blew so I hardly felt the heat of the bulbs burning my flesh.  The digital timer counted down each second of my tanning experience.

I felt good lying there, listening to the buzz of the lamps and the whirr of the fans and pretending I recognized the music that the young, attractive, tan people listen to.  I stopped thinking about fingerprint theft and thought about my upcoming vacation.  I relaxed and forgot about all the stuff I should be doing with that 20 minutes instead of lying there in an artificial bed of light.  That white light absorbed me and all my worries.

I didn’t sign up to stay in too long — another change from the college days.  As the last seconds ticked off, I felt calm.  This had been a good experience.  I was glad I had let myself indulge in this bright new world.

Then, the lamps cut off and I jolted back to reality.  I felt oddly violated as I changed out of my bathing suit and slid my clothes back on over my slightly sweaty body.  I felt sleazy.  I slunk out past the front desk feeling like I should say goodbye, but then not really wanting to make eye contact with those young, attractive tan people who had conned me out of my fingerprint and were probably in the process of uploading new video of a fat middle-aged lady in a tanning bed and posting it on You Tube.

I felt dirty and used.  I rushed back to my car, hoping I wouldn’t run into anyone I knew on my walk of shame out of the bright world of tanning and into the overcast world of reality.  I didn’t want anyone to know that I was just another vain sucker willing to surrender my privacy and my fingerprint for a tan.

A few hours later, the tan stated to show.  I waited two days and went back for more.