Hot August Naught

Ken’s Story
For Kay’s 13th birthday party, which happened to be on Friday the 13th in August, we booked the municipal pool after they closed for the night. Refreshments included watermelon so the only cleaning up was to hose down the area next to the pool after the event.

Sam’s Version
A soon-to-be eighth-grader and her friends are, most naturally, beneath the recognition of her soon-to-be sophomore brother. But, Kay (the gracious person she is) allowed her brother to invite some high school friends. Mom and Dad, at no extra cost, were happy to save me from the boredom - the giggling gaggle - we high-schoolers derisively called “little buggers”.

And little did Mom know that she set me up for a grand humiliation of adolescent proportions. We are not called “wise-fools” without reason.

The Auburn pool is large for a small town. It was built during the Great Depression by the WPA. My grandpa was on the crew that built the pool and the other structures in Legion Park. Mom always claimed that WPA stood for We Piddle Around. I never quite saw it that way. The stone sidewalk bridges, the public restroom, the band shell, and the pool bath house were well constructed but lumpy, in a nostalgic folk-art way, formed from rounded reddish-brown glacial erratic boulders (Sioux quartzite drug down from Minnesota during the last Ice Age) cemented into pillars and walls. Massive, yet tactile.

Although Dutch elm disease had run through town a decade earlier, there were still enough mature black walnut trees, hackberries, and red oaks to give the park and the pool a cool, secluded atmosphere. At twilight, the pool could be refreshing and mysteriously romantic.

In the mind of a fifteen year old dweeb, a kid whose self-confidence inhabited only academic and minor sporting realms, Kay’s party on a fine summer Friday presented a perfect opportunity for a helpless romantic. I had lots of friends who were girls, but zero girlfriends. It’s true that, while delivering May baskets in fourth grade, Janet Ely had caught me and kissed me. Some say I let her catch me on purpose, but I say that I am still embarrassed at having been run down by a girl.

Back in the day, the May basket was a much better indicator of who you liked than the traditional Valentine’s Day celebration, which by law required you to give a Valentine to everyone in the class. But expressing an innocent fondness for a few girls in grade school, in my case Janet, Anne, or Mary Lee, gets lost in translation on the other side of puberty. Especially after Joy and Cathy, so confusingly feminine, arrive on the scene, causing my vocal cords to crack and pimples to rise, turning my words into gibberish, and jellifying my intestines. So in high school, I stuck mainly to the weather and one’s health.

An after hours pool party was a real treat in a town with no movie theater, one stop light, and six lanes of bowling. Properly chaperoned, it was also an innocuous enough occasion that even the tongue-tied could invite a girl. Although I still admired Janet and Mary Lee for their talent and intelligence, it was not love. Joy was out of the question. She was my Daisy, as unattainable as a green light on the end of a dock. I asked, anyway, and she demurred. She and Cathy sat for a time in the bleachers outside the fence on the west side of the pool, chatted with the swimmers, and left. It was often hard to tell if I was mad at or mad about Cathy. At the time I was trying to get her to notice me by ignoring her. Never a winning strategy, especially for fifteen year old dweebs.

So the focus of my attention was Anne. Anne of the golden hair, the dangly ear-rings, the soft piano of a silver voice. We had been together in practically every classroom since kindergarten. One winter break, after Mom had gone back to work, Kay and I stayed during the day at the Oestmann’s house. It was the year that the Strawberry Alarm Clock had their fifteen minutes of fame. When the movie of my life plays in my head, Anne’s theme music is “Incense and Peppermints”. That and Burt Bacharach’s “Close to You.”

I invited other high school kids to the party, of course - older sisters of Kay’s friends, marching band chums, and most of the sophomores on the football team (this being almost the last weekend before “two-a-day” practices started). I did not invite Rick Kennel. He and Anne had been a handsome pair, but had broken up earlier in the summer. My secret desire, my purpose, my plan, was to watch for the right moment, to talk quietly to Anne, alone in the moonlight, and, if my heart didn’t first explode in my throat, ask her out.

Alas, with the duties of a host, the dynamics of that many teenagers floating around the shallows, and Joy and Cathy watching from the end zone, the right moment, or, more to the point, the right amount of nerve, never quite materialized. It came time to wish Kay a “happy birthday”.

I climbed the ladder to the life guard’s chair, away above the high diving board. Only the privileged few, the Red Cross trained, can occupy this chair. Or in this case, the master of ceremonies at an after hours pool party.

As I settled into the chair and picked up the microphone for the PA system I glanced out over the pool. In the far northwest corner, in the dark, shaded from the lights by the tall black walnut trees, one of the football players, Bill Fitzgerald, and Anne sat in three feet of water, alone and talking comfortably.

With the radio station disconnected from the loud speaker, we sang “Happy Birthday” to Kay. It was then eerily quiet as the crowd looked up at the crow’s nest, expecting some remarks from her older brother. What ever speech I had prepared to toast Kay was lost in annoyance over this unexpected turn of events with Anne. So, instead, I told some lame jokes, real groaners, in a vain effort to distract Anne from her chat with Bill, you know, to impress her with my wit. Failing miserably, as a comedian and as a helpless romantic, I launched into a long ghost story (this being Friday the 13th). As I rambled on, I noticed that Bill and Anne had resumed their mutual admiration society, and at very close quarters.

My insides were now too upset to pay much attention to my brain. I lost the thread of the ghost story, stumbled over a couple of the plot twists, and completely flubbed the punch line. By this time the party guests were mostly ignoring me, resuming their splashing and laughing in the night.

So I did the only decent thing I could think of to put a miserable performance to an end. I put down the microphone, stood up on the life guard stand, and did a pratfall into the deep end. A belly-flop from eighteen feet. Closing my eyes to the glimmering dance of lamplight on the playing water, closing my ears to the smooching in the far corner, I smacked into the pool and accepted the sting of humiliation.

By the time I surfaced, someone had plugged the radio back into the loudspeaker. Gilbert O’Sullivan’s “Alone Again.” Naturally.