Pool Therapy

I’ve started pool therapy. The pool is at the hospital and primarily serves the rehabbing elderly and obese. Being relatively young and thin, I am an enigma. When I broke my pelvis in 2006 I visited the pool and was offered medicinal marijuana, naked, in the locker room. This time around, I have again, been engaged, naked, in conversation.

Specifically on the topic of how Anton signed up at age 16 to serve in WW II and how he dislocated his hip falling from a broken ladder onto a concrete dock from a ship at Rouen, France. He went on about how the nurses wrapped his legs together in knotted sheets.

“But it taught me a trade,” he declared.

“How?” I asked.

“After the war, I was a Merchant Marine!”

During this trip down memory lane, I spied my t-shirt and wet towel figuring both to be too small to knot around much anything, and that even hopping on one leg, should I have to ditch my wheelchair, I could escape Anton if necessary, naked or otherwise.

The ambient temperature at the pool is much the same as a tropical island during monsoon season. I make a conscious effort to not let the water touch my face or lips. Despite the distinct smell of chlorine, seeing for instance Biker Dude, the morbidly obese, lost member of ZZ Top, paddling around in the water freaks my freak out. The nappy chest length beard and massive water displacement keeps me on edge.

Getting into the pool is a sort of mall-parking-lot-carnival-show in itself. The lift is a hand crank number and the fiber glass chair is akin to the pink seats at Baskin-Robbins. I settle in, pull down the hand ‘safety’ rails to grip while the therapist rips on the crank to lift me high above the deck before swinging me out over the shallow end of pool with some good ‘ole fashioned body english. The old folks scatter from ground zero beneath me and look up from the shallow end railing, questioning to each other loudly who the young whippersnapper is and why he is getting the lift treatment. I imagine myself like the Pope or another dignitary high above the peasants, waving in a fake appreciation for their indentured servant hood. Once in the pool, I come back to reality, grab my floatie belt and Styrofoam dumbbells and retreat to my corner of the pool to do 30-minutes of work that when healthy would barely be a warm up.

I should give Anton more credit. Truth is, at the pool he is my only friend. In his 80’s and living alone, he enjoys egging me on to do standing dumbbell pushups in the deep end.

“Try to keep up!” he taunts.

Being as vain as I am, I give in. Then the old folks start to turn their heads towards us. Next, they approach. Just as the challenger in a Kung-Fu movie stays on the horizon for most of the film before suddenly arriving for the climactic final fight scene, the blue hairs take a good few minutes to float and paddle over to watch the contest of man-hood known as the ‘Styrofoam-dumbbell-standing in the deep end-push ups-to prove I’m stronger than you old man-contest’. It’s always a close battle but I win every time. If bike racing only taught me one thing it’s that the PRO never concedes to the local hot shot.

Anton has alternative motives for me to smoke him in floating tests of feat. And his motivation is partly why he is so loud and boisterous when he tells me what a hard ass he was in his day. I remind him that for a career merchant marine, his skin, virgin of tattoos, doesn’t back up his story too well.

“We should go out drinking, play some pool, get in some fights and then get naked lady tattoos,” I offer.

He laughs and tells me of how many diseases he avoided by staying clear of dirty needles and whores.

"That’s some damned good advice," I say.

I’m guessing purely on my experience of watching Dr. Ray of Dr. 90210 fame on the E! Entertainment channel that face lifts have come along way since 1976 or so. At the pool is “Madame Happy Face Lady” who is of the age where during the Ford administration one might've thunk if a little nip/tuck is good, then a lot of nip/tuck is better. She carries herself with the kind of poise that indicates she knew how to balance tall hair, high heals and a short skirt at the country club and not spill her third martini.

Madame HFL is as tall as myself, boney thin and save for her perma-grin, shows the deep wrinkles of a dark tan from bronzed decades of old. She still has good hair and keeps it in a sort of B-52ish bob like Carol Burnett or Molly Ringwald for that matter. Not that Molly is old, she’s the same age as me, she just has a certain retrofique (my wife’s word) style.

At any rate, I am sure that when Apollo launches meant it was time to swing, Madame Happy Face Lady sent her fair share of men into orbit. Anton is sure of this as well and is using me as his launch pad to be her astronaut. The thing is, from afar she looks like a nice old lady –but up close, kind of like Jack Nicholson in Batman.

Anton concedes to my superior -if only for youthfulness- strength and I bid ado and call for the pool assistant to lower my chair so I can get the hell outta there. As I am leaving Madame HFL inquires to Anton why the young boy was in the pool and must use the lift.

“He broke his hip and his elbow.”

“How?” she asks.

“In an accident.”

“What kind of accident?”

“Hell if I know, we were naked when I asked!”

I’m guessing that a line like that isn’t gonna get Anton a walk on the moon.