Pre-adult Swim

Temple City had one bowling alley, one miniature golf course, and one movie theater, the Temple Theater. This last caused me no end of confusion as a kid. “We’re going to the Temple” could mean a baffling and stressful trip to the theater (Dad liked his war movies) or the interminable boredom of Temple Beth Shalom. Why, oh why couldn’t my parents leave me with a babysitter?

We had one mall (by the early 70s), one small library, one park. The mall had not yet succeeded in killing off our one short but thriving Main Street. We had a few big nurseries nearby — always fun for catching bugs and lizards — and a few elementary schools, which in those days were ungated and stayed open on the weekend.

And we had one public pool.

Summers, my parents signed me up for swimming lessons at the Temple City High School pool. I was always, and I shall always remain, a Pollywog. None of my teachers ever felt the need to promote me, so every summer was a recap of the summer before. Odd thing: the kids in my Pollywog class got younger and younger every year. What a pisser.

In the first class of summer, the teachers lined us up against the red brick wall enclosing the pool. We practiced mock swimming strokes against the wall, the hot brick sponging moisture from our hands. When one of the kids fainted from the heat, that was the signal it was time to get into the water to practice our kicking. Oh, baby, this Pollywog can kick with the best of them, let me tell you.

I remember the teachers as strident fascists, junior Lee Ermeys practicing their best drill-instructor bark. One teacher drove a little Asian girl named Orchid to tears. He had another teacher watch us while he took the hysterical girl somewhere out of sight for a good talking-to. Or something.

I was eight or nine, an irredeemable pervert (back then, pervert meant obsessed with sex, rather than its current meaning, sexually obsessed with dead people or farm animals or dead farm animals*), and I knew something was happening. Orchid’s cowed appearance upon her return, and her willing, nay, eager desire to cannonball into the deep end proved that something had happened. I didn’t dare ask what. I was afraid it would happen to me.

For me, swimming lessons were always about sex. Back then, I didn’t have the vocabulary or imagination to have proper sexual fantasies, but I knew the girls around me had very little clothing on, and I liked that. And my fantasies weren’t half bad, when you get right down to it. Never mind the fact the instructors had to fish me out of four-feet-deep water; in my dreams, I would dive into the deep end to rescue poor crying Orchid. Trembling, she would clutch my hairy hobbity chest, look up into my eyes (I was tall in these fantasies, too — at least 4’6″), and say, “Dry me off, please?”

Swimming lessons were a carrot-and-stick proposition. Semi-naked girls were the carrot, sadistic swim instructors were the stick.

Flash forward a few years. I still didn’t know how to swim, but that didn’t keep me away from the pool. Those girls? They’d grown up and into their bikini tops and bottoms. Some of them would even flirt back (not that I ever had the guts to follow through).

In 9th grade, the adults in my life tried once again to teach me to swim. Swimming was a require rotation in PE, and if you didn’t jump twice from the high dive, you’d fail. Twice. As an aquatic rock, you could psych yourself up for one jump, but two?

Somehow, I got through it.

Swimming in PE was an unremitting hell. No girls in class, so this activity had all the minuses and none of the pluses of those swim lessons of old. On top of everything else, we had to shower afterwards, then stand naked in line while Coach Creepy Johnson doled out towels and leers one by one.

And I still don’t know how to swim. If I focus on kicking, I swallow water. If I focus on breathing, my legs sink like shark chum.

Sorry. No punch line. I gotta go make ricotta cheese fritters.

D.

*Suisan and Kate, pay attention. Even in an otherwise serious post, I still take great pains to work in common google search phrases like ‘sex with dead farm animals.’ That’s professionalism.

Walnut, May 11, 2006. Category: Memoirist BS, Sex.

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