Swim Lessons

Hope you enjoy this semi-autobiographical passage from my next book: The Filthy Easy Encyclopedia (name subject to change), dropping Late Summer, 2025

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Swim Lessons- Allow me to paint you a picture. It is 3PM on a blustery autumn day in some small New England town. The sun is already beginning its nightly wind-down process. It’s not quite being tucked in and given a goodnight kiss yet by some old man in the sky, but it’s preparing a heated water bottle to put on its lap to stay warm overnight. You are waiting outside your elementary school near the pickup lane. It’s just you and Mr. Gorbowitz, the nebishy science teacher who is getting antsy waiting for your mom to arrive. He has thirty spaghetti towers to clean up after this. Finally, your mom pulls up in her forest green Honda Odyssey and releases the automatic door, revealing an anthropomorphic Monster’s, Inc. booster seat designed to look like Mike Wazowski. You say bye to Mr. Gorbowitz, who is picking his nose with his regular waving hand and has to awkwardly summon his left hand from his pocket to wave to your mom. You climb into the van and your mom asks you how your day was, and if you want to listen to this Rafi CD she just picked up from Circuit City with a new version of “I Like to Eat, Eat, Eat, Apples and Bananas”. You tell her it was good, but you are hungry and want to go home. She hands you a clementine and a Danimal’s drinking yogurt and then delivers the news: It’s a Wednesday. She’s bringing you to swim lessons at the town pool. Fuck. You despise swim lessons. The one saving grace of attending the lessons is that at the end of every 8-week session, you get to pick two airheads from a plastic pumpkin container in the lifeguards’ office. You ask your mom if it’s a candy day. She says no, last week was meant to be a candy day but they had to cancel lessons because Vinny Parker let a brown torpedo loose in the deep end. So, she’s not sure if they’ll have candy today. Okay, maybe you’ll get candy, so maybe this won’t suck as much.

You arrive at the red brick community center and your mom gives you a drawstring bag with a swimsuit and towel in it, and tells you to hurry into the locker room to change. She will be watching practice from the balcony. She tells you not to forget to shower. You tell her yea, yea, but you know full well that the elderly Asian men will be in there doing their thing. You rush into the locker room and start to get changed. A few other kids are in there putting on swim caps and those little skin-tight speedo trunks. You’re glad you at least have a regular, hibiscus flower pattern swimsuit with the netting inside. Fuck aerodynamics. You’ve always been more of a diving board specialist than a speed guy anyways. Jackknives, pencil dives, cannonballs, spread-eagle belly-flops, half retarded can-can lemon drop mctwists. Okay that last one was made up, but you get the point. You head into the showers and try to stare down at your Adidas massage-bed slides, but all around you are elderly Asian men with ballsacks hanging down to their ankles, drooping like coconuts just past the length of their Fu Manchu gray pube beards. You’ve heard from your friend Ben that the showers at the JCC are somehow even worse. You rinse off your hair and take your towel and ice blue goggles down the hallway and to the pool entrance.

Bursting through the doors and out onto the pool deck, you’re hit with a waft of chlorine and piss smells. Peering into the lifeguard’s office, you don’t spot any candy. Shit. You see your flabby, elderly widow swim instructor sitting by lane three. She is wearing a navy blue one piece bathing suit and conversing with Donna’s mom. Donna’s mom has been trying to get Donna to go off of the diving board for weeks now, but Donna just can’t bring herself to jump. You think you overhear the words, “Push her”, “Life-altering trauma and aversion to swimming altogether”, and, “Not covered by our waiver”, whatever all that means. The instructor is holding a stack of kickboards, which is good news, since being on a kick board is infinitely better than just swimming unbuoyed laps all afternoon. A few kids from your class are sitting on the cold steel bench behind lane three, but all eyes are turned towards the steps leading into the shallow end where a priest in some flowy, ornate Balkan Orthodox church getup is dunking a screaming baby into the water as his unibrowed parents watch on excitedly from the edge of the pool. Presumably the chlorine and piss would interfere with the baptism process, maybe even leading to the development of an antichrist child, but they don’t seem too fazed.

Your instructor—Margaret is her name—calls for you and your classmates to hop into the pool to get the lesson underway. You brace yourself for impact, but the polar plunge is simply too bone-chilling to ever truly be prepared for. The temperature gauge says 77 degrees, but you swear the water had to have been brought in straight from the Arctic. Margaret seems to think you are in a hot tub. Maybe her sensory receptors have become obsolete with age. Or she’s just a good actor. One kid, Frank, is still seated on the bench, refusing to go in. Margaret yells at him to hurry up, but he stays firmly planted on the bench. Margaret and Frank have been through this before, and there is only one solution. Frank’s dad is called over. He bear-hugs Frank, who is now shrieking and begging for mercy. Frank’s dad, stone-faced and resolute, picks up little Frankie and hucks him into the water. Frank surfaces after a few moments, coughing up water and flailing around blindly trying to grab hold of the edge of the pool. Margaret thanks Frank’s dad and moves to begin the lesson.

“Alright kids, today we’re going to work on our breaststroke. We’re first going to start with the kicking technique, using the kick boards, and then we’ll go on to the full stroke. Alright, let’s start out with 12 laps of just kicking.” Twelve laps! Moses almighty, what did you do to deserve this torture? Tucker and Ralph’s parents don’t make them take swim lessons. They’re probably back at home now, dry and warm, playing ATV: Off-Road Fury 4 on their PlayStations. You snap your goggles into place and get to kicking. Kick. Kick. Generations old memories encoded in your Ashkenazi genes start flooding back. Ten mile hikes through snowy wastelands wearing nothing but tattered, striped pajamas. Nazi officers barking indiscriminate orders in a harsh manner in their harsh language as they prod you like cattle. Kick. Kick. One lap down, 11 more to go.

As you hit the wall and turn around, you hear some commotion coming from the diving board area. Peering out from your cloudy goggles, you spot Margaret with a noodle camped out under the diving board. “NOOOO! PICK ME BACK UP! I CAN’T DO IT! I CAN’T DO IT!” is the cry from up above, where Donna is clinging to the board by her fingertips. Donna’s mom storms in and scales the diving board steps, ignoring the lifeguard’s repeated whistle blows. The lifeguards have been briefed about the possibility of this very incident. Donna’s mom walks to the end of the flexible plank to where her daughter’s fingers are gripping tightly. She picks up her clogs and stomps down on her daughter’s fingers, sending her plummeting down to the greenish-blue water and Margaret’s doughy embrace. Before anyone can process what just happened, another scream is heard from the walkers-only lanes where one of the droopy-sacked samurai is pointing at what looks like a floating Milky Way bar. “Vinny Parker! Vinny Parker!”. The swim lesson is cut short as the pool is evacuated for clean-up. Now every time you see little Vinny Parker roaming the halls of the elementary school, you can’t help but hear Chad Kroeger belting out, “And they say that a hero could save us, I’m not gonna stand here and wait!”. Vinny Parker: Aquafecal Vigilante, in theaters Fall 2025.