An Ocean's Depth, Part 2
When I agreed to swimming lessons, I hadn’t reckoned on facing hazards other than drowning. As it turned out, the road to aquatic independence would be fraught with trials and tribulations, and the biggest challenge would be faced before I even set foot in the the building, much less the water. Since our memberships were good at any New York City pool, my girlfriend and I settled on Metropolitan Pool in Williamsburg as the most mutually convenient location. Since the pool’s rules about alcohol and mesh-lined trunks would likely cut my encounters with ironic flannel and PBR to a minimum, I figured I could come to terms with being another indistinguishable face in a sea of failed writers wandering a hipster neighborhood, at least for a few minutes each week.
Aside from risking exposure to lethal doses of sarcasm and trucker hats, the biggest drawback to our pool was its close proximity to to Fette Sau, one of the most delicious barbecue joints in the city. Every time we walked to the pool, I would inevitably find myself drawn towards the intoxicating allure of smoked meat and neon. But as a child, I was always told to avoid eating for an hour before swimming, or in my case, before standing in the water pretending to be Aqua Man stuck in constant breach-mode, so it was easy enough to avoid a pre-swim snack on medical grounds. But it was a lot harder to routinely convince myself on the way home that celebrating an evening of exercise by stuffing myself to the gills with pork belly was probably counter productive to say the least.
When I eventually managed to rip myself from Fette Sau’s doorway and reach the water with appetite intact, I was a little embarrassed. Not only had I never learned to swim, but the better part of two decades had passed since the last time I’d made even the most halfhearted effort. It’s never easy to admit that you don’t know how to do something, especially when it’s something everyone around you learned at such a young age, and catching up requires you to flail a bit too violently for your ignorance to remain inconspicuous. Plus, I typically reserve being shirtless in public for special occasions like midnight apartment fires and swingers’ parties. It’s not that I have a bad body image, more that the people around me will if I show it to them. And they are all but guaranteed to have better eyesight to boot.
I’ve never been the biggest fan of changing rooms, but there’s a certain special awkwardness reserved for changing rooms in Williamsburg. There’s taking your clothes off with a stranger and then there’s taking your clothes off with an Hasidic stranger. Whenever I find myself in the presence of devoutly religious people, I can’t help but feel like I should be apologetic for my decadent, secular lifestyle. Perhaps its being raised in a hippie town where we were raised to respect everyone, or just garden variety paranoia, but I always worry that people will mistake my failure to adhere to their beliefs as an intentional refutation of them. But I’ve found that’s it’s not generally considered socially acceptable to say to tell a pantsless stranger that you really meant no disrespect to anyone when you selected your brightly colored underpants in the morning. Plus, not to say that being religious blinds you to the basic facts of human anatomy, but I tend to assume that any group that discourages promiscuous sex probably has a few things to say about public nudity. But clearly they don’t share the deep-seated sense of bodily shame that I’ve learned from a lifetime of Pepsi commercials. After all, if a man had the same kind of hangups about his body that I do, he probably wouldn’t be hanging around public locker rooms, or would at very least make a greater effort to keep his fly closed.
Once I’d figured out how to remove my clothes without making eye contact or conversions and made it into the water, learning the basics of swimming was actually fairly easy. Within an hour I graduated from sinking to treading water for seconds at a time, and even moving forward a few yards. Most importantly, I had the motion down for the perfect Little Mermaid hair toss, and would only have to wait a few more months for the appropriate mane.
Over the course of my life I’ve tried to learn a great many things (most of them involving cooking, computers, or pretending to understand human feelings). But in all that time I’ve never tried to learn something where it took so little time and effort to get the gist as swimming. Sure, if you threw me in the ocean I probably wouldn’t last long enough to cry for help, but by the strictest dictionary definition, I could swim.
Rumor has it that practice makes perfect, so in spite of my irrefutable natural talents I figured I should keep up with the lessons for a little while, if for no reason other than to give hope and inspiration to anyone else who might sheepishly wander into the pool, their heads hung in shame. Over the next few weeks I continued improving to the point where I felt confident enough to brave the deep end. Or, to be more accurate, to brave the bit by the deep end where I can still keep my head above water if I stand on my tiptoes. If you’ll forgive me for saying so, things were going swimmingly.
That is, until our pool closed for renovations. This was little more than an annoyance since there are a good number of pools in the New York system that would honor our memberships. All I had to do was find a slightly less convenient pool and fight my natural inclination towards grumbling, and we’d be all set.
We settled on a pool in Chelsea. Despite the changing room being packed with an unnecessarily boisterous gang of youths who seemed unable to identify the aerobic difference between swimming and standing around with their shirts off, the facilities were a bit of a trade up; the changing room was larger, the showers were cleaner and had dividers behind which to hide my shame, and the pool was significantly larger. After seeing the layout, I was ready for another amazing swimming experience.
The lifeguard, on the other hand, was less optimistic. He interrupted us a few minute into our less to tell us I couldn’t go into the deep end because I’m “not a strong enough swimmer.” He also said that I shouldn’t be there for lap swimming time, which is all the New York City pools offer in the evening, and should come to the daytime family swim time instead. The normal embarrassment of having my swimming skills questioned was further compounded by the fact that he didn’t deliver his decree directly to me, he talked to my girlfriend as though I were an over-enthused puppy and it was her job to keep me off his lawn. Under other circumstances, I would just write this off as Manhattan pool guards taking safety a little more seriously than Brooklynite hipsters who are no doubt guarding the pool ironically. But it’s hard to believe that I was really the weakest swimmer in the beginners’ lane when my dressing down was being witnessed by a pair of tiny, old Asian ladies who were making their way down the pool by crawling along the wall. Surely my swimming skills were superior to someone who had differentiate a body of water from a climbing wall.
I was tempted to argue with the man, but I couldn’t see any good coming from my telling someone who held my aquatic fate in his hands what I imagined his mother was strong enough at, or questioning whether or not he was a strong enough heterosexual. So I kept my mouth shut and continued to do mini laps in the shallow end.
Humiliation aside, this poses a very practical problem for a grown man of my statue. Being freakishly tall, the shallow end doesn’t even come up to my waist, and it’s surprisingly difficult to tread water when extending your legs even the tiniest amount results in standing up. I wanted to call it a day and see if I could get a better workout by flooding my tub, but as a man I had to stay at least long enough to make a point of annoying the lifeguard. Once that important task was dealt with, I was ready to head home and wait for my normal pool to open its doors and welcome me back to the world of aquatics with open, indifferent arms.
I was determined to show that life guard exactly how strong a swimmer I could be, and I left the pool that night with a new found resolve to excel at what had previously been nothing more than a hobby. A few more weeks of training and I was sure my swimming skills would be on par with Johnny Weismuller, or at least Agustus Gloop. So when our home pool’s renovations were scheduled to conclude, I marched in the door, held my head high, and was told that a pipe had burst and it would be closed for the next three months. So I marched back to Chelsea, held my head low, and hoped that the lifeguard wouldn’t recognize the tall man flailing around in the beginners’ lane.
-TC