Swimming Pool

Courtney Ryan

“My libido is shot,” I said two hours into our first and only date. It wasn’t either of our faults. I was on antidepressants for suitable reasons: childhood trauma, family psychosis, too much sugar, etc. It wasn’t his business, either, but since he so cavalierly asked how many dates it would take to get us in bed, I chose to be blunt. As far as I could tell, there hadn’t been any indication that this date was going well enough to ask such an indiscreet question, aside from the fact that it was still going at all. I was buzzed and wanted to keep drinking. He was audacious enough to think my sedated libido confession was foreplay. We parted ways at the station, moments before climbing into the same subway car.

 

Like usual, I passed Sal’s house walking home. Inevitably he was on his porch, seated in an old, metal folding chair padded with a thin sofa cushion and waiting for a neighbor to cross his path and stop for a chat. I was obliged to be that neighbor. His legs—bleached-out carpenter shorts, worn New Balance sneakers, gout—opened just wide enough to grasp a cane that he would use to pivot through the doorway behind him. We shared the usual pleasantries. How was the office? How are the kidneys? Did you hear about the man pistol whipping women on the streets at night? Do you like Cuban food? The usual.

I liked Sal a lot. His wife didn’t say hello or care to befriend his confidants from the street. When she stepped out alone for a smoke, she was usually sour, but I never blamed her. No one gives enough credit to the caregiver and, from what I could tell, she was a devoted caregiver. For his part, Sal was exploring acupuncture to manage his gout and had consequently learned all about how the nearby yoga studio had swindled the acupuncturist out of money.

He confirmed I knew what acupuncture was before we said goodbye.

 

In Bible school they taught us that real love wasn’t sexual. It was something deeper: a gentle, lean man who stood among lambs and soft, white children. Sex was a divine gift to us to make intimacy more heartbreaking when committed outside the marriage bed.

“What about blowjobs?”

It was written on a slip of paper in the youth room’s Anonymous Question Box. Previous questions had lightly touched on Predestination, Bulimia, and Was Skipping Church for Soccer Sinful? This question was scandalous enough to draw a crowded circle. A solemn nod from the volunteer in the corner and a heavy sigh began the youth leader’s response.

“I think you always have to ask yourself if what you’re doing is praising the Lord.” He couldn’t make eye contact with any of us. “Because if it’s not, then, well, I think you know already that it’s not right.”

This only led to more questions about blowjobs.

 

I liked Sal, but sometimes I felt that uneasy limp in my knees when I walked away from our daily salutations. A woman’s knees, I am certain, buckle very specifically when a man leers at her as she walks away.

 

On the day after my thirty-first birthday, I doubled my dosage of antidepressants. I was feeling upbeat, which is why I was confident more drugs would work. I spent the day lying beside the neighborhood pool, listening to children shriek in terror as their fathers flung them into the water.

While looking at the clouds, I recalled that youth leader, how he had been prompted to then explain what exactly a blowjob was and why it might not technically count as premarital sex. I didn’t know I was smiling at first or that my smile was, in a way, directed toward a man far more muscular than I was, who had been swimming near me and was dragging his body out of the water and onto the dampened cement slab I was laying on. He was impressed with himself for making me smile. I think, maybe, we shared a moment. Then I was hit with a massive splash of water.

“Sorry, Mom!”

Two girls, probably twelve and fourteen, had cornered me before entering the locker room to helpfully explain that since it was Family Swim, I wasn’t allowed in the pool area without a family. They generously offered to pose as my daughters.

“How about babysitter?” I guess I was old enough to be their mother, but it didn’t feel believable considering their olive-brown skin and my pink shoulders that were already crisping in the sun.

Still, they introduced me to the lifeguard as their mother, and the three of us entered the pool without trouble. It turned out, though, that I was the gullible one and didn’t need to swim with children so much as they needed an adult guardian to get into Family Swim as teens. They continued the charade the rest of the afternoon despite no one else at the pool noticing or caring.

 

The little block of cement that comprised Sal’s porch sat below train tracks that hosted the oldest and dirtiest trains in the city. Whenever an old train rattled over us while we talked, we paused and motioned to the train and then raised our eyebrows indignantly even though we both, at one time or another, had relied on that train for our livelihood. And, honestly, we both appreciated when the train abruptly ended an aimless conversation that we were too polite to end ourselves.

At times I would go off my antidepressants and become a hopelessly nocturnal creature, listening for the nearby train to remind myself that others were awake and functioning at the same late hour. Sometimes I found comfort knowing Sal was likely also sitting awake behind his front door, eyes glowing as he looked out the window in anticipation of the next neighbor to cross his path.

 

For a while I was dating a chef who had blocked the light into his bedroom by covering its single window with a massive television that he won in 2001 at an after-party for his high school graduation. I’m not sure, but it looked to weigh about as much as a gymnast’s trampoline and was at least as cumbersome. Our dates consisted of smoking weed out of a filthy pipe in front of the television while eating seared scallops and squid-ink noodles. I laughed a lot, but never at him. Someone, maybe my grandmother, once told me never to date a man who wasn’t funny.

Of all the reasons to not date a man.

 

The occupants of the abandoned building next to Sal’s place liked to host parties. They converted the kitchen into a small bar, removed the old cubicles and disconnected the dead landlines on the bottom floor to clear a place for a stage, and erected tents throughout the upper floors to create sleeping quarters. Since I had the benefit of walking down the street to use my own bathroom, I can’t speak to what the washrooms looked like.

On the weekends they hosted punk bands. On weeknights it was mostly stray drinkers or occasionally a heavily bearded man with nothing but an acoustic guitar and a handful of people who wanted to hear him. On monday mornings broken bike tires, cigarette butts, and empty cans littered the sidewalk. During the winter only cigarette butts.

Once, as Sal asked if I had completely changed my haircolor (I had indeed), a large shepherd-like dog shot out of the abandoned building and hooked its jaw around the neck of a spaniel mix who was casually strolling by with its owner. I screamed.

Amid the commotion, the owner of the shepherd emerged from the abandoned building and pried his dog away from the spaniel. He explained that his dog had not then, had never before, and never would draw blood. “Now I’ve seen everything,” Sal shrugged.

The truth was that Sal had been a detective for the city until his kidney disease caused his legs to go out. This is how he knew for certain that the nearest police precinct was utterly incompetent. He cautioned me to only walk down the middle of the street at night and to come over if I ever felt unsafe.

“Just come knock on the door. I’m always up and I’ll let ya right in.”

My knees buckled as I walked home.

 

My grandmother once started to explain why she was afraid of swimming. My mother, her sisters, and everyone else who ever fell under my grandmother’s care wore a bright swim cap in all bodies of water no matter the depth. The reason, she explained, was that when she was a young girl, a dozen or so boys had dragged her into a lake.

“And then what happened?” I asked.

“A bird pooped on my head.”

It was true. Her silver-dusted auburn perm was suddenly coated in the white dumpings of a bird completing its digestive cycle. It turned into quite the scene. My grandfather didn’t like birds, for example, so he had a lot to say about it.

I never did learn what happened after those boys dragged her into the lake.

 

The trains above Sal’s house reminded me of an ex-boyfriend who lived next to a different set of tracks. We would both lay awake at night listening to trains pass by, too angry with one another to sleep.

 

My therapist gasped every time I told her about someone I used to date. She gasped so often that I sometimes wondered if she traveled through time from the Victorian era since that’s the only way to explain the salaciousness she perceived in my rather mundane relationship history.

One guy had three hairless cats. Gasp. Another was a busker in Canada. Gasp. One was even a virgin. Heavy gasp. She believed I had hit the jackpot when I told her I went out with someone “nice” who I just wasn’t “attracted to.” This was, she thought, my chance to start over and stop settling for shocking maniacs. If only I could learn to open myself to this opportunity in the shape of an underwhelming man. I continued to see her for two more months despite knowing she gave lousy advice.

 

The neighborhood we lived in was getting fat. Entrepreneurs and young professionals hovered around its edges, biting holes in the seams until they made room for their julep bars, scotch egg parlors, and expensive gyms that promised to tone calf muscles using nothing but an early-century leather medicine ball. Sal wasn’t too worried since he owned his home and claimed to have seen the “exact same developments” throughout the neighborhood many times before. A claim, I’m sure, no city records could back up.

I was worried, but I suppose my coming to the neighborhood only a few years prior foretold it all. I liked to speak out, but I shrunk away from taking any sort of action beyond shopping at the mom-and-pops and, once, ending a date midway through dinner because he expressed enthusiasm for the expensive ramen chain that was replacing a sixty-two–year-old dive bar.

He was what they called a team captain at a startup that made a small electronic device you could hook onto your cereal box and it would tell you when you had exactly enough cereal left for one more bowl. It would also alert an up-and-coming cereal delivery service that you wanted to reorder and, within hours, your cereal reserves were replenished. He said the company was growing. He also said the ramen chain would create more jobs and bring fewer criminals to the neighborhood than the dive bar did. I ended things there.

One of my neighbors downstairs was the daytime bartender at the dive, which was notable for its $1.25 pints of light beer and a pool table that was roughly three-fourths the size of a regular pool table. When my neighbor’s daytime shift ended, she was replaced by Rita and Amanda, who managed the bar with stoic efficiency. The regulars usually left hours before the bar closed on account of arriving there during the afternoon. Some, my neighbor told me, would come in when it opened at 11 a.m. and then go home for a nap before returning later in the evening.

A particularly passionate regular, who was frequently kicked out for starting fights and had a lifetime pool ban placed on him, was known for monopolizing the jukebox. Every night, inevitably, he picked Boston’s “Amanda,” and as the tender arena rock began to play, he would turn to the bar and bellow, “Amanda, this is for you!”

“Great,” was her nightly reply.

 

When Sal returned from the hospital, we spoke for at least four train passings. He was purple. His kidneys were failing. He would never eat pork again. His brother in Missouri had died. I told him that the vacated space where the taqueria used to be was set to become a gourmet kombucha bar with skeeball. He thought kombucha was a Soviet liquor. We both raised our eyebrows and shrugged as if this news were a passing train.

 

It turned out that the abandoned building next to Sal’s place did indeed have an owner, and that owner had been living in Poland for the past seven years and only recently discovered that the property was no longer a shabby office building under the tracks but a lucrative bystander to the city’s latest neighborhood revitalization. The occupants were summarily notified that they were trespassing and given a rather generous thirty days to clear out.

And so, for thirty days, visitors from near and far arrived to bid their farewells. They traveled in caravans, arriving by bus, train, bicycle, motorcycle, or Toyota. Some even walked. They came as performers and guests, bearing gifts such as twenty-four-packs, incense, and liquid pot. For thirty days the parties faded from night into day and back into night again. At first the air was jubilant, but, by the final week, the mood turned violent. A bass drum was smashed, the front window shattered, scrimmages broke out, and there was a rumor that someone fell from a third-floor window.

Sal made the most of those thirty days. From the comfort of his folding chair, he listened to the bands, heard the gossip, smelled the weed, and ignored the puking. He confessed a week or so after the building was boarded up that he missed hearing live music, even if it wasn’t that great.

 

I sat next to a woman on the train wearing my perfume. I had worn that fragrance for nearly three years with little variation until about two months earlier when I decided to try something darker. That day, though, smelling her familiarity despite layers of winter attire made me drift pleasantly back in time and recall, despite the chill outside, what it was like to stand in the evening air, wet from the summer’s humidity.

Then I looked up and saw a man with tobacco packed in his cheek, drooling brown spittle into an empty Mountain Dew bottle.

 

When I saw an ambulance in front of Sal’s house, I admit I didn’t rush to get closer. I walked slowly until I finally saw Sal being carried out on a stretcher. He was alert and even held his head up to look around like a cat that has found itself being carried away after climbing into the laundry basket. He saw me and stopped moving. He looked ashamed of himself, and afraid, but I didn’t know what to say or if I should wave or ask how he was. We just stared at each other in silence. And then he was gone.

I don’t know if he died then or weeks later, but I never saw him again. His folding chair disappeared within days, and only his wife could be seen after that, sometimes smoking on the small porch, as sour as ever.

 

When Sal died his wife fled, perhaps due to immense grief or to enjoy her sudden liberation, or for any other reason a casual acquaintance can’t possibly guess. Curiously, she didn’t sell the property, and after a while the burnt yellow grass began to climb skyward and then fold over due to its brittle health. Eventually someone came by to tend the lawn with a mower that spit out clumps of grass all over the yard and onto the front sidewalk so that pedestrians walking by carried the clumps on their shoes for half a block.

After several months the looters came, tearing the metal railing off the stairs and pulling the metal gate off its hinges. Once the metal from the front was gone, they broke into the small garage behind the house. When they were finished sifting through what remained and pocketing what could be sold or employed, they didn’t bother to shut the door behind them.

 

I was dating a graduate student who studied bookbinding. As there weren’t many jobs for bookbinders, he worked part-time at a gallery that specialized in photography. Not long before we broke up, we attended a show at the gallery that was billed as a wry commentary on gentrification and featured before-and-after panoramas of the neighborhood I used to live in taken from Google Street View.

Perhaps it was the drabness of even the most recent images, but the exhibit had the unintended effect of making it appear as though the neighborhood hadn’t actually changed all that much. This led to one of the more popular pieces being pictures of the intersection at the end of my old block where the transformation was especially vivid due to the installation of neon lights under the train tracks. Where in one photo was an abandoned office building, taqueria, bodega, and a payday loan place, a newer photo displayed a boutique hotel, two-story bar with rooftop mini-golf, and an ayahuasca cafe. In the new photos Sal’s house had been swallowed up by a massive condo development.

As I began to move from the crowd, one of the older photos caught my eye. It was a panorama of the abandoned building, and a good chunk of Sal’s house was visible. And there, on the far right of the panorama, was Sal, wearing a windbreaker and sweatpants, his cane firmly locked between his knees. With his chin raised just slightly, he was looking directly at the Google Street View car, thrilled to greet whatever it was coming his way.

 

© 2019 Courtney Ryan

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Courtney Ryan writes literary fiction and comic books. She lives in Chicago.