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Swim Meet I changed into my Speedo in the bathroom stall, but waited to exit until the erection died down a little. This happens every now and then. I looked down at the green and white vertical stripes—the ugliest swimsuits in the league. I always felt like a peppermint candy cane; neck stretched over the pool, standing on the starting blocks, head and shoulders forward. I was always nervous waiting for that gun to blast, gazing at the ripples dancing on the surface of the water and the circular bubbles blowing horizontal from the jets in the corners a couple feet from the bottom. “Bang!” The gunshot startled me and knocked me into the wall with surprise. The boys’ 200-meter butterfly was underway, the first race of the day. I made one final uniform check and unhinged the rusty metal lock. As I moved forward the orange carpet with the purple club logo gradually grew darker and soggier beneath my bare feet as I came closer to the door. Being unfamiliar with this locker room I decided not to change in front of my nudist teammates or in one of those creepy three-wall closets—in case any wardrobe malfunctions transpired. When you’re twelve years old you never know what you’ll discover when you pull out that racing Speedo and put it on. Of course accidents can come with wearing any swimsuit, and if I had a stack of pennies for every time I forgot to use the zipper of those less conspicuous swim trunks we usually wore—but Speedos were for swim meets. Parents and the bastard coach forced me to wear them as team captain to set a positive example because “all the boys looked up to me.” “Come on Chrissy, that’s it, come on baby, go girl!” Some mother was screaming. I was squeezing and struggling past her to get a closer look at the pool. The parents were crowded in an orbit three deep. “Go Belinda… faster, faster… that’s it—yeah!” This meet was going to be a disaster. It was always the first event of the season, a competition of relay races between every club in the league. Wealthy Republican parents from beautiful country clubs and field clubs in three states woke up early and showed up every second Saturday in June to drink lemonade and grapefruit juice disguised with vodka and smoke cigarettes to show that summer had begun. Somehow they all looked the same: manic and tanned and united in the exclusive bourgeois society that celebrates competitive athletics and living vicariously through the Speedos of their children. “Wooo-hoo!” I elbowed my way to the center of the pool area where the lifeguard chair rose like a throne to hold the man with the gun. Here the most vociferous parents were linked together elbow to elbow, scrutinizing every second of their beautiful pubescent daughters racing breaststroke; screaming at them with incredulous expressions—as if they were swimming naked—avid, attentive and apparently watching much more than simple reflections from the midmorning sun bounce like magic ping-pong balls off their expensive timepieces into the turbulent surface of chlorine-infected water. “Bang!” This time I was expecting it. His hand was in the air and I saw the smoke rise from the blank. My middle-aged coach was standing beside the chair holding onto the white metal bar with one hand to safely lower his body out over the pool. As always he had a clipboard in his other hand. I’ve never seen him near a pool without that clipboard, and if you only came to watch the meets you might wonder whether that brown wet board with the yellow pencil connected by the rusty chain to the musty hole in the clip was attached to his appendage. An avid hunter, apparently he lost his entire hand in a chainsaw accident when he was younger and replaced it with a prosthetic one. He used special magnets to attach the clipboard, so even if he tried to throw it across the pool that thing would stick like semen. “Frog-kick, frog-kick, frog-kick!” Coach Bob was screaming and leaning over the pool so far it seemed he was threatening to pull the lifeguard chair off its steel hinges. The middle-aged man with the gun didn’t notice since he was busy smoking a cigarette and staring at the clouds. His job was done until the next relay was set to start and he was content just being bald and sitting under the umbrella. “Yeah baby!” Coach was waving the clipboard back and forth with steady maniacal spasms as if he was swinging a tennis racquet over the swimming pool, with topspin emphasis on his forehands toward the direction the breaststrokers were headed. “That’s an illegal kick goddamnit!” Behind Bob the crowd was a mob, mouths open and shouting at the water like lunatics. It was impossible to decipher one shout from another unless you listened for specifics and stood in front of their faces with one ear tilted toward the tongue you were aiming at. The fifth race—my race—the boys’ 400-meter butterfly, was set to start in about five minutes. I had a vision of a bird landing on a telephone wire in the distance. He was beautiful with blueberry feathers and a tail that fluttered in the wind. I could almost hear him sing if I listened hard enough. “I have something to show you.” A voice came from over my shoulder. He was an Indian boy with orange hair and I had seen him many times at meets throughout the years. He was a fine swimmer, with long legs and strong muscled arms. He was a few years older and his father was a lumberjack-looking policeman tall as a ballplayer. He seemed to relish the fact that my Speedo was bulging as he pressed his arms up against mine to get a closer look at the water—as both of our clubs finished at the same time, first and second respectively—but yet too close to determine. “Please, it will only take a moment,” the boy said. “Bang!” That one made me jump forward on the balls of my feet. I clenched my toes and he laughed and grabbed my shoulder and tried to calm me. “Relax.” I told him I was and don’t even remember following him into the empty locker room where the home team changed. I was locked in a stall and wardrobe malfunctions were the least of my problems. All I could smell was chlorine and Clorox. I felt dizzy and intoxicated. I didn’t know whether it was wonderful or criminal, but I kept my mouth shut and listened to the high-pitched chatter of cheering parents and children as the murmur merged with the rough engine of an airplane flying overhead and grew louder, rising each second until it reached the ultimate threshold and the walls of the stall seemed to be shaking softly, then deafening silence and conversations from outside. I faded into the ineffable words of the mothers with the highest voices. “Bang!” The words were meaningless and wooden doors were creaking and the beautiful music of the locker room was keeping our secret meeting a mystery. The screaming returned and the doors stopped creaking. Precious moments merged into minutes and golden silence was vibrant and the eyes of the flies on the wall the only witness. “Where’s Kyle?” Oh how sad when words can rip you apart with such worry while wasting a moment that should have lasted another eternity. “Damn,” he said. “This is it, stay here… come get you in a minute.” He slammed the door and I could hear him running down the steps outside. “There you are boy—didn’t you hear us? This is your race.” I could hear my mother screaming my name. This is not when you want to hear such a thing. “Where is Jackie?” I could hear my coach and male teammates screaming and doors creaking in the other locker rooms next door; I had no time to check for wardrobe malfunctions. “Where the hell is Jackie?” I opened the door and ran down the steps like a candy cane, nearly poking out the eye of a little child chasing a bouncing ping-pong ball on the pavement as I jumped down those final four steps and sprinted a few meters to the starting blocks. “Uh-oh…” I would have made it too, if I hadn’t slipped on the wet concrete connecting the plastic standing platform with the edge of the pool. I landed on my back and everybody saw it. The damp pavement was warm and it felt wonderful against my body. “Oh Jack.” I could hear girls giggling, grandfathers laughing, ladies whispering, and my mothering asking, “Why Jack, why Jack, why?” I got up as fast as I could and pulled the goggles down over my eyes so everything was blue, but now I was stuck and there was nothing I could do. I was only on that starting block for a few seconds but it felt endless and even the sun broke free from the clouds and began to shine upon me like a spotlight from heaven. The man had the gun in his hand raised at the air and I tried to hunch over best I could, like I often did in the morning when I had this problem but needed to urinate—except this time there was no wall to grip onto and I definitely didn’t want to false-start and do it again. This race starting position seemed it would never end and so it lasted an eternity for an adolescent boy yearning to be back in that bathroom closet with the toilet and the airplane drone and the Indian. “He was in there with that boy from the other team.” I could hear them all talking, a hundred different conversations all about me. It’s funny—when there was all that shouting it was a chorus of cries producing a symphony of silence and one distinct sound—but now I could hear every word whispering through the wind. I tried to find the bird but he was gone. Their words were burning into my mind. Mothers were giggling in unison, rival clubs united by the excitement of the spectacle I had created. Plastic multicolored banners were fluttering from electrical wires in the early summer wind. Trophies were lined up according to height on a table covered with an orange satin cloth embroidered with two purple eagles. I looked closely: bronze statues with a wood base. “He was there with that other boy… they didn’t even hear us—oh my—they were lost in that locker room… nobody could find them… look at his swimsuit… oh my…” It was awful and endless. Their voices all merged into one gossip and I could hear every sentence. “Bang!” I never dove off a platform so fast in my life. It didn’t hurt when I landed but I could hear them laughing in my head when I was kicking and swimming under the surface of the water. I resurfaced and eventually emerged from the pool after my two laps in second place. I knew the Indian came in first, but he was nowhere in sight. “That Indian says this peppermint cowboy tried to rape him,” said one of the coaches, approaching the lifeguard stand as if it were a tennis umpire chair and the designated place for arguments. Bob, shaking like a swaying piñata, pushed the man away with his clipboard. “That’s crazy,” Bob said. “Jack would never do that. Jack’s straight as an arrow. But that Indian boy… knew he was gay the first time I laid eyes on him.” I was still the center of attention, but half the spectators seemed more interested in the race. The other half looked back and forth from the pool to my face every second, like it was a tennis match and the ball was my own, swinging back and forth from my Speedo to the pool. The next thing I know I’m walking toward the locker rooms when one of the doors swings open and I’m staring down the barrel of an orange Speedo holding a .44 Special. “Bang!”
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