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.
