My parents—like most parents—didn’t get it right about lots of things, but they had the foresight to realize that swimming lessons at the earliest possible age would be the exact right thing to provide their eldest son.

We were members of the Country Club. That must have seemed an exclusive trophy for my second generation Italian father to collect in the hostile Scotch-Irish hills where he was raised—a badge of assimilation into the WASP power structure, maybe a way to drum up new business, rub shoulders with influential golfers. But really, who cares if any of that was true. For me, it was the gift of a lifetime.

I remember floating to the bottom of the deep end one swimming lesson and the Troy Donahue look-alike swim instructor shouted: “Hey, Denny Boy, too many pancakes this morning?” My mother—sitting off on the poolside deck side smoking her usual cigarette with the other young housewives—must have felt a mild pang of guilt over that remark, but she only shook her head and laughed it off, not intending to correct Troy about the light breakfast of Rice Krispies and cinnamon toast she’d probably fed me earlier that morning.

Water is where I belong. I can’t get close to any body of water with a turquoise or marine blue reflection that I don’t want to devour. When I was young, I wanted to eat the pool. I wanted to breathe it. I wanted to merge with the water and let the water occupy me, so the cells of my body would turn just as blue. Sometimes I didn’t sleep the night before a swim lesson, because I couldn’t wait. I’d sit at the edge of my bed looking outside at a telephone line with a lonely crow perched on it as the evening turned blue and then black, and I’d count the first few dots of light and then the millions of stars swirling and circling. I could become an astronomer if I decided not to be an Olympic swimmer. I didn’t notice the crow flying away. I got tired waiting for my swim lesson to start.

Call it magical thinking, but I’m absolutely certain that I was actually able to breathe under water. After a lesson one day, later that afternoon I was running along the edge of the pool holding onto a bottle of Orange Crush, I think. I slipped fast into the shallow end and split my lip on the smooth surface of the bottom of the pool. I remember two things: (1) I couldn’t get upright no matter how hard I tried to stand up, and (2) I inhabited that undersea world that I loved so much for hours and hours and hours, for the simple fact that I was breathing in it.

Actually breathing under water. Time must have stopped. Lots of kids were thrashing about and I saw their orange and green and pink swimsuits go by me like a kaleidoscope in slow motion, their muffled screams and endless bubbles part of my new aquatic world. The indescribable rapture of discovering my place in the universe—the blue world beneath the pool surface—there are no words to capture the feeling that this was my natural world, the place I wanted to live forever.

Next shot: there I am gagging and snotty, hurling Coke and stomach juices onto the hot concrete deck. Adults in shadows hovered over me. One of them—not Troy—slapped the top of my back roughly and maneuvered me like a puppet. I heaved all my little lungs could heave. I lived. I lived to swim again.

After this happened, I tried to tell my mother and my sister what had happened. They didn’t believe me, but after this episode I knew what my true element was. Now I could swim without fear of drowning, ever. It was delusional, I suppose, but it made me who I am today.

It never stays the same. By the time I passed puberty, my fear and fascination of the older boys squashing cigarette butts on the locker room floor or flinging burning cigarettes into the standing urinals at Marilla Pool made me start to wonder. Maybe breathing under water might not be as important to my survival as living more like these characters. Not smoking in the locker room or thinking I could ever become a juvenile delinquent-Sal Mineo type, adept at preparing an assault against some semi-nude Lolita lounging just outside the changing room, emboldened by the mystique of tobacco and chlorine. My fantasies, like my life, had no clear direction. I just needed to pretend that I might, someday, against all odds—like those guys exiting the Marilla pool locker room into their own blue world—breathe as freely and surely in the dangerous waters inhabited by the opposite sex.

 

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Prompt: Locker room at public pool in Morgantown, West Virginia – smell of cigarettes and chlorine