How the Pedricktown Swimming Pool Set Me on a Path that brought me to where I am Today.

A few years ago I used to work in downtown Lansing, MI for the State of Michigan. Next door to my office was a coffee shop called Beaners.  (The name has been changed now to Biggby’s).  Over the years I would go in there to have coffee or tea and talk with the baristas.  Over time I got to know some of the other regulars.  One of them Chris remembered me from when she had been the foreperson on a jury trial I had handled.

Chris is from Iowa and I am from New Jersey.  Over several years we compared growing up stories.  Most of my stories began in the words of an old Robert Earl Keen song, “We were so messed up…”  Chris urged me to write my stories down.  After a few months of her badgering I did start a blog.  Over time several stories of Pedricktown worked their way into the blog.  

What I wrote about Pedricktown was from my perspective as someone who felt he had to flee his home town to grow up.  I made some basic attempts to change street names and the names of people who might be impacted.  Some worked and some didn’t.  Funny thing is that pretty much most of what I wrote could have ended up on a script of Freaks and Geeks.  If you grew up in the seventies this is your life story. It shows on IFC from time to time.  If you haven’t seen it check it out some time.  The one I have never gotten right is the streaking story.  Maybe someday if I have the time and the clarity of mind I will get that one down.

I wrote this current story about three years ago.  In order to protect the “innocent” some names have been changed.  After careful consideration I have decided I am not going to rewrite this story to avoid making myself look like a dumb ass.  In the years from 1966-1974 I was a total dumb ass.

As you read this just remember that when I grew up in Pedricktown I was intoxicated a fair bit of the time. Also I had some nefarious tendencies, perversions and a generally bad attitude.  I was no saint, nope, but neither were any and I mean any, of the people I grew up with. So here is a tale about how that concrete body of water at the end of what is now according to Google Maps called Seminole Lane changed my life. 

Early in my youth my family belonged to a swim club, it wasn’t fancy. New Jersey in the summer gets hot. Having a water-hole built of concrete and filled with filtered cold clear H20 was wonderful. The place’s mere existence was thoroughly consistent with the progress focused American Dream of the sixties. It was onward and upward for us there in P-City.

In retrospect the private club part may have existed for more than just sharing the cost of a common water playground. Being private our man made cement pond was exclusionary for people like us and only like us. This was the country club for the factory foreman and the folks working night shift. You didn’t have to swing a golf club or put on a jacket and tie to socialize someplace, any place out of your house.

Describing the physical place is simple; describing the social place is much harder. As to what one would see with the eye there was a chain link fence surrounding the whole place keeping non members out and wee members in. A little compound, the swimming club had concrete block changing rooms for both men and women. These rooms were housed in a long rectangular box that stretched in a line across the western edge of the site. Access to the pumps and other guts of the pool’s actual operation was obtained through the men’s dressing room, as rightly it should have been back then. I mean men were still men and they worked with wrenches, gaskets, filters and the like. The pool even had a snack bar. Everything about the place smacked of progress and modernity. Our pool represented upward mobility in a solidly middle class way.

The pool itself it seemed to be in my young eyes thoroughly up to date, current as of that minute. It had a shallow end and a deep end with a diving board. Again as it is in all my tales my memory is not reliable as it once was but I think the board was used mostly for cannonballs and belly flops. When used it produced a distinctive sound, a sproing-oing-oing as the fiberglass plank oscillated to a stop. But the board was not the only sound you would here when someone made a dive. When one of my more massive contemporaries hit the water you could hear the smack of that massive torso and feel his wake at the other end of the pool. There was even a separate kiddie pool. Being up to date in all things and given the time’s focus on education during the first few weeks of each summer Red Cross sponsored swim courses were given. I know I got up to junior lifesaver before I quit taking lessons.

From my house in the heart of our little farm town it seems like it was about a four minute drive out to the pool; maybe a mile. In the early years of our membership before I hit what is now considered middle school age my mother would load me, my older brother and some folding aluminum chairs into the big old Ford on hot summer afternoons. Once in the car Mom’s eyes focused straight ahead and we barreled down that old county road, made a right just past the Darlington’s place and kicked up dirt on the unpaved road for about an eighth of a mile until we parked by the pool. What a way to spend sunny summer afternoons. At seven years old it was heaven. My fingers and toes were raisins each day as I came out of the cold, cooling water. At thirteen or maybe fourteen my time at the pool became something else much more interesting.

No matter what age I was I really don’t remember using much in the way of suntan lotion back then. Besides with my buck teeth I really wasn’t at risk for sunburn except for the top of my shaved head. The increased risk of my head for sunburn, the rest of my body being shaded by my buck teeth in case you missed the joke, was because I like every other male child in that part of the world got a shaved head the week school ended as his summer haircut. Our hair would not be addressed again in a Baldini’s or Lomeyer’s barber’s chair until the week before school resumed in September. School started the day after Labor Day as God intended and never before.

Okay let us take in the visual image now of my naked, but for one butt ugly bathing suit, self. There I was under the burning sun, a myopic fat kid with big ears and a shaved head with either a pasty white or blistered red skin tone. Oh yeah I had black horn rimmed glasses held together with electrical tape at the broken bridge too. It is an absolute wonder nobody drowned me for the betterment of society in an act of vigilante eugenic purging. Gary Larson owes me royalties damn it.

While I don’t remember much about some areas of the pool I do remember that the sunbathing areas were uncomfortable. Instead of sand the areas where you would lay out on a towel were covered with small white stones. The net result was that that the surfaces were you could lie out were both hot and uncomfortable. Little sand burrs grew up between the stones waiting to attack a less than watchful patron with a naked foot as he or she padded to a sunning spot. Adding to the pleasure of this space was the issue that back then I only got a small towel from home to lie upon. My legs below my knee would hang out across the rocks. My lower calf would sizzle and drip sweat on those white and hot rocks. The effect was kind of like a steak dripping juices on a gas grill’s lava rocks.

Did I mention this place was heaven to me? No I mean it; the pool really was something special.

As I grew older I would ride my W.T. Grant’s blue/purple banana seat butterfly stingray bike out to the swimming pool. That’s right with my plump legs pumping, my fat ass was hanging out-sort of sucking the whole of my banana seat into invisibility. It was about a 10 or 15 minute ride down an asphalt road that was more a memory of a paved road that a real road. There were patches upon patches of macadam of different shades some oozing as the weather got good and warm, some just breaking up in dry brittle clumps.

On my way to the pool I would head down Railroad Avenue past the town school. It housed all eight grades and has been in use since about 1914. I haven’t been back home in a long time but I have seen posts from folks back in P-City.  The school is no longer in use and weeds seem to be growing everywhere. Still that school to me is what a school should look like. Winding its way out of town to the east the road became empty of houses. There were two exceptions, a farm house and a migrant shack across the street from it. Sometime I would see the Puerto Rican men in their straw hats heading into different parts of the fields.

Curving slightly just beyond those houses the road would pass over a short causeway over a creek. In Mom’s car you didn’t even notice the causeway or the creek they were hidden in some deep foliage. But to a 14 year kid it was a mandatory stop. Might be turtles out there either swimming or sunning themselves. Of course you didn’t stop if the old black people were there fishing. I never stopped long anyway for this was brackish water and there was a plant we informally called skunk cabbage that grew out there. It stank something really awful, if not with the exact aroma then with at least the same intensity as skunk spray.

After the causeway I went up the hill past the big old frame house on the right and turned on that dirt road to the pool. At the start of the road it was sandy and hard to pedal. On a summer day this was the part of the ride that made you sweat. Combining a stiff jaunt up a pretty steep grade (for New Jersey normally about the flattest place in the universe) with pushing a bike through loose sand and I would be working up a real sweat.

With the pool in sight my legs pumped the hardest they would on the whole ride. I would be straining on the pedals of that bike, a machine that was a couple of years too small but which was still my ride. But I pumped hard, real hard so that when I got to the hard packed sand of the pool parking lot I could lock up those coaster brakes and kick that dusty dirt into the air. Cool is very relative to a way too immature 13 (or 14) year old.

I have been thinking about the pool because of Facebook and the recent heat wave.  Cooling water would be nice right now.  On the other hand Facebook is an insidious thing (what does social utility mean anyway). Recently I got a friend request from one of the people who, in my mind at least, is tied to my memory of the pool forever and ever. I have not seen or talked to this person to the best of my recall since 1975. It was a hoot seeing her image. She looks good, older but still good. But my memory of her will always be atop someone’s shoulders in a two piece yellow bathing suit chicken fighting in the shallow end of that pool on a summer day.

I have struggled as to how and frame this story, should it be about the pool or the people? If it was about the people I should mention the lifeguards. I remember a couple of the lifeguards in particular. Actually I knew at least one lifeguard pretty well. Her name was Linda and she went to the University of Michigan. She was fairly intellectual and a bit of a wild child. Sitting on her elevated chair on a sparsely attended July afternoon she was desperate for conversation with anyone and there I was. She talked to me about things that were interesting like Camus’ The Fall and The Stranger and about Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool Aid Acid Test. We talked about music. All the while I was sitting at the foot of her life guard stand like an acolyte to an elevated female Buddha. Her love of U of M probably impacted on my choice to go to Michigan State.  Michigan to hear her describe it was a little bit of the Promised Land, only colder.

Linda had been a mutant child herself, a little too academically smart for her own good and thus somewhat mistreated in school. Me, the year she was our lifeguard, I was fat and somewhat academically talented, you do the math on the peer torture equation. Plus I was the last child and my parents were tired of raising kids and dealing with adolescent angst and trauma. What I got was not the most hands on parenting advice. My Dad’s response when I got bullied was to tell me, hit ‘em back. That stratagem never worked out for me, ever. Linda would always tell me to get out, to go away to college. She swore to me that once you got away from your hometown choices opened up in terms of socializing. She was right in my case and I thank her for that. Had I not been at that swimming pool I might not have gotten that advice.

There were other people there too. Some of them I correspond with now thanks to Facebook, e-mail and the like. Some I don’t. The people that are the key to this story are individuals we will call Teenage girl 1, Teenage girl 2, Buff teenage dude 1 and Buff teenage dude 2. Somewhere floating at the edge of this was one of my now dearest friends, but I don’t remember her being involved in the sort of social scene that the above four were. Because I was at the pool on a daily basis I was kind of a voyeur on these folks' adolescent social development. These girls were growing breasts finally that were bigger than mine. I did mention I was fat didn’t I? That one change seemed to stir all sorts of stuff up.

So very much of what we learn about life comes in places outside of schools. Sometimes the education is subtle like watching the kind gesture of someone sharing food with a friend. Sometimes that education is pretty brutal like seeing a beat down start at a bar and then watching a couple of bouncers get even more brutal to break it up. At the pool one summer the education came by watching what happened when hormones, pheromones and cold water combined.

As I was saying when you are hanging around the swimming pool midday in the summer as an early teen, a very fundamental education in life just happens. If you are fat and ugly you aren’t a real participant this was lesson number one.  Still you would get to watch teenage bug lust on display. As you get to the pool most days there are the guys who clearly are going to play football in high school sunning themselves on the white rocks. They are already conditioning themselves and their bellies and upper torso are taut.

Nearby are the girls. They would lie upon their towels and would rub suntan oil on each other. They wore bikinis. If they had been at the beach they would have unhooked their bra straps for a better tan as they lay face down. But this was a small town and that was just too risqué.  I struggled with the last word in the preceding sentence originally typing risky.  What I meant was risqué, i.e., verging on the slightly indecent.  Risky works too.  Lying on the rocks with an unhooked bikini bra strap would only invite someone to drop ice or something cold on their backs. We are talking teens here.

The four of them would banter back and forth. They would talk about what would happen next year. They would talk about who had been seeing whom at the end of the last school year. They would count up their change and go by a soda at the snack bar and maybe a frozen Zero bar. Ah, this was a real frozen Zero bar not to be confused with the ice cream confection branded that way that they sell at convenience stores now. They made small talk that wasn’t so much about the topic at hand as it was about learning to talk to someone of the other sex. Me I lay there and read Shakespeare. Fat, nearly blind, mutant child reading Othello; could I have been any more of a pariah?

Yes I am wallowing in self pity right now.  However Linda was right, once I got out of P-City things got better.  First were the summers I spent in Ocean City and then came the college years in East Lansing at university.  I lost weight, I learned to dress myself and buy my own clothes.  It was the seventies, a pair of jeans, a flannel shirt and some photo-grey glasses and you were covered.  The seventies didn’t require a great deal of style sense.  If those later years hadn’t played out that way this piece might be bitter but it isn’t.  The pool to me is a fond and cherished memory.

Eventually the bunch of them would go into the pool the heat of the rocks having gotten to be too much. The guys would try and do some dives woofing on each other for various perceived short comings. The girls would sit at the edge of the pool and drop their legs into the shallow end slowly. After a minute or two of swirling their legs about they would drop down into the water and shiver and giggle. They were indeed such girls. In memory they were very beautiful, in the extreme even.

Once Teenage girl 1 and Teenage girl 2 had entered the shallow end the diving would soon stop. The girls would work on their strokes. Buff teenage dude 1 and Buff teenage dude 2 would inch their way down to the shallow end diving under the buoyed rope separating the two parts of the pool. At first they would rest their elbows on the edge of the pool and pretend to be talking about something, maybe a summer job at the vegetable packing house, maybe not. Eventually the girls would stop and would come over and join in the Buff dude’s conversation. Maybe a small rubber football would be thrown around, maybe not. But most days it the end it ended up in a…..

Chicken fight!

A chicken fight works best if certain rules are observed. The lower part to the two person team should be the stouter, stockier of the duo. This is why mixed doubles are the rule in really good recreational pool chicken fights. The upper part of the team should be agile and sinewy. Buff dudes on bottom, teenage girls on top. With her fingers locked in her opponent’s fingers forearm strength and general flexibility are definite pluses for the female top of the tower. Twisting, torquing and wrenching all at once the goal is to knock part or all of the other team back into the water without going down yourself, or at least being the last to fall and submerge.

There isn’t any more hormonally charged but theoretically more wholesome activity for two 14 year old boys and two 15 year old girls than water bound chicken fighting. Think about it; is there anything more sexual you can do while still being in open public in broad daylight than thrashing about the water in such embrace? Freud just kind of oozes from the imagery of these erect young figures writhing about in so much moisture. It was a teenage boy’s dream come true.

A willowy and breast endowed teenage girl would sit elevated above the water. Her smooth legs wrapped around a beefy teenage boy’s neck, her foot heels pressed into the top of his ribcage in the shallow water. Okay maybe it would have been the teenage boy’s dream if he was facing the other direction but still it wasn’t bad. Hey the water was warm and splashing was involved.

As I mentioned I was the fat kid standing off to the side, on the concrete sidewalk that surrounded the pool merely watching. Myopic but focused on the events transpiring I would just never be part of the action. I was fat not strong. Like a character in Portnoy’s Complaint I stayed on the sidelines and just watched. How is that for a late 1960s reference? Note unlike the main character in Portnoy I was Baptist, not Jewish.  However I along with being a mere observer had lots of guilt much like the Portnoy antihero.

Back and forth they went, twisting and turning, splashing and laughing. Teenage girl 1 and Buff teenage dude 1 tipped back from a sudden drop followed by an upward push from Buff teenage dude 2 and Teenage girl 2. Buff teenage dude 1 then crouched in a near squat planting his feet and steadied himself. On that rigid human oil derrick Teenage girl 1 pushed Teenage girl 2 with more strength than I thought she could have mustered. Teenage girl 2 leaned back at about a 70 degree angle to the water’s surface; it was almost the tipping point.

With a flex of her right shoulder and a push forward Teenage girl 1 pushed forward sending Teenage girl 2 ass over head into the water. Lunging forward to complete this motion it happened. With that right arm extended almost straight out and now part of a 45 degree second side of a parallelogram with Teenage girl 2’s falling body, Teenage girl 1’s left cup of her bikini bra fell open and there it was, her nipple.

It was wonderful. Assuredly it was the first female nipple I had ever seen that wasn’t covered with a glossy coating incorporated into a body segmented by a tri-fold with staples in her abdomen located in the center of a thick men’s magazine. As nipples go for me it was Plato’s concept of the ideal, lying in a world somewhere beyond that tainted realm that our five senses bound selves inhabit. That wet perky puppy was perfection and beauty. It was the standard against which all nipples would be judged for years to come.

If this sounds like arrested development, it probably is, I am after all a man and nothing more. However I am not a pervert, well not unless it suits my purpose and everyone else involved is okay with it. But that wardrobe malfunction was magic and did something to me. (No I am not talking about that obvious thing that you are most likely thinking happened to me although that probably did also occur). That areola with its tiny little pill box center was a key to my future of sorts.

A quick glimpse pretty much confirmed to me I was heterosexual and that I wanted to see more nipples. All the key clues were there, a quick pumping pulse, my heart rate was surging. Stop it now if you think the next sentence should reference something else surging. I had a slack jaw and was overcome by a transient catatonic state. I think I kept staring at the same spot without moving although the water fight was over for a good minute afterwards completely lost in a place that you visit only once in a lifetime.

That flash motivated me. If I was going to see another nipple I would have to lose weight. And lose weight I did. I think by the end of that summer I had dropped about 35, maybe 40 pounds. Hey it was a fair tradeoff for the hairy palms. My mind understood its biological drive was to see more of those puppies and that looking like the fat kid from a Far Side cartoon wasn’t going to get me there. That little pencil eraser shaped piece of flesh surrounded as it was by goose bumps would never been seen by me again without change on my part. Okay while I never saw that particular breast again the changes I made did eventually work out. I mean I am married and have kids that are putatively mine.

As this “damn short movie” has sped by, that day and in fact most of the experiences I have recounted here had slipped from my mind. But having found out thanks to Facebook that Teenage girl 1 and Teenage girl 2 are still alive and kicking I have been reminded of that place, and of the hormones that rage through the bodies of young teens. What a charge to remember that time and the absolute energy tied into the building sexual tension of my then young body. The flash that day was a pebble that started a ripple which became a cascade that became a tsunami of personal redirection for me.

In closing I guess three things come to mind. First I am despite my comments to the contrary am an oversexed pervert, despite my missing prostate. However, I am simply going to put that conclusion in a mental box and shove it onto a mental shelf if the back of my mind’s garage with a post that says look at this later. Second, it makes me think that some much of lives are determined by chance occurrences, insignificant things that are catalysts for major change and shifts in life’s direction. Had I not seen that nipple on that day at that moment I might not have been so electrified by hormones sufficient to motivate weight loss. Of course there were other factors but what was the tipping point? I think an argument can be made for that afternoon. Finally I am certain that much more of our lives are hard wired by the structure and sequencing of guanine and the other elements of the genetic code that we are willing to acknowledge. Hormones and hard wired instincts are the drivers of our lives to a far greater extent that our intellect will allow us to believe.

As I sign off I offer a simple thanks to Teenage girl 1 and to Teenage girl 1’s nipple for that one flash that helped changed my life there at the P-City pool.