the internal pool affair
Sean Grayson liked, no more like loved to sit out by the old city pool on East Elm Street on the northeast corner of Lake Lock and imagine what it would be like to be a high-roller, a man who commanded attention, beautiful girls, and the finest things money could buy. Sean was a thinking man. He was a dreamer with both eyes fortuitously positioned in the future.
Sean had tired, become downright weary of video games. He’d skied, both slalomed and free styled. He’d maddened all of the Maddens. Played catch the froggie with his baby sister, Harmony Delight.
He’d tried to play the beginning-teen role. Even though he was a male and his sister the opposite gender, Mars to her Venus, he’d provided her a good role model. Once high on raspberry Kool-Aid and caramel-butter-scotch ice cream he’d tried on mom’s gowns over his overalls of course both impressing and delighting his little sister. Her squeals of delight proved that she had liked the show. Yet he tired of such things. Entertaining baby sisters was hard work. Still his mom had him babysitting every Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday night; his imagination, his creativity once had proved par for the course but it was now stretching thin. During these times, he learned something more important than life itself, it was hard pleasing a three year old. Harder than digging ditches he figured. Digging ditches didn’t require your ultimate undivided attention. Ditches didn’t require a new routine every 15 seconds. They were just ditches. Little sisters weren’t ditches.
Sean tired of the neighborhood kids. J.D., the jock that could both chew gum and talk at the same time was a triple threat, obnoxious, rude and conceited. In his mind’s eye, Sean saw a lucrative future in professional sports for J.D. If anything he had all of the attributes necessary for mega-stardom. He would be a perfect role model for naïve little innocents who hung on every superstar’s word. Kenny was deceitfully kind. In essence, he was always on the take. He would sell his own mother for a new X-box. He was the most likely to succeed. Ironically he was the type that grew up to be a politician, a used car salesman or a mobster, always on the take. The kind that every community dreamed of installing a sign in reference to which you would first notice upon entering the town that such and such was born here. It was a shame but deceitful types ruled the world. But you loved them anyway, always vying for their attention, their approval. Shrinks, he knew, owed their living to these inglorious humans. The signs didn’t care whom they promoted, not being living, breathing things; they just didn’t care. Kenny was due his sign, his universal cause for being.
Such sign would seek to placate the viewers of such a symbol, to ease the indignities of all who did live/had lived or might live within the small town and who had never amounted to anything. And the sign would keep on propping up the inglorious ones' fame making it easier for him to withstand the coming—down—to earth—stage that foreshadowed death. It was kind—and slightly evil to say—the sign had a dual purpose.
Small towns had to build up their egos in some way; that was a fact of life.
Signs they never proclaimed, 999 dispossessed citizens, 14 lunatics, 698 child molesters, assorted pedophiles and countless losers and whatnots. Towns had their pride and then their identities, which usually tended toward the dark side because as you know, from the hairs on their heads to the soles on their feet they had more secrets than 1,000 television movies could ever hope to unfold even if given many lifetimes to do so. And that’s a given. A certified fact of life.
Back to the friends, Ben was likeable but usually would brainfart something out too honest for his own good. Sean figured Ben, he wouldn’t make too good of a politician.
Politicians were like most people but then some, their will to please the people, as unknowing as the citizenry were, was just a cool and calculated ruse to get what they wanted while the getting was good, the opportunity was ripe for ignominious behavior as the citizenry with their hearts and minds out to lunch were sitting ducks on the fault line; the politician man was never out to lunch, was always on the take passionately pleading his case all as a part of a master plan which fed his evil and sadistic egotistical makeup. Ben would’ve never been able to keep a secret, keep his trap shut to save his life so accustomed he was to brainfarting. There was hope for him though if his Achilles heel became an Olympic sport.
Until some new more savory kids moved to Lake Lock, Sean knew that he would rather be alone more than anything else in the whole wide world. Being with yourself, surrounded by your lonesome, content with your thoughts, wishes and desires made life one magical mystery tour.
One Sunday after church, Sean had hurriedly changed into his Hawaiian print shorts, a favorite tee-shirt, grabbed a p & j sandwich and high-tailed it out the door. Absentmindedly thinking, he plopped-down onto his beach cruiser . Sean considered himself a thinking man. Maybe that’s why he felt more comfortable being alone?
People were like obstructions; they hindered your reality, if you stopped yourself long enough to notice them and their associated quirks, assorted idiosyncrasies and illogical patterns of behavior you often lost sight of who you were. Losing sight of who you were was a tried-and-true, not-so-novel concept to the myriads of people that schlepped their way through everyday-existence hanging precipitously close to the edge of losing everything including their minds' at just a moment’s notice. It was a shame that they didn’t notice it, just like it was a shame that they continuously swept global warming, world hunger and urban blight under the rug. Disease and pestilence and all of those other horrific things were not laughing matters. It was a shame. A crying shame.
It was no mystery to him, like it was to others; Sean’s mind maneuvered around the universe and all of its wonders and its sad tragic stuff, too.
Tracking the lives of others didn’t make the earth spin on its axis, didn’t make the whole ball of wax go round and round but too many people thought that it did. Too many people thought so much about the lives of others that they never had time to invent a life for themselves. And they died, regretting that they had ever lived because they really hadn’t. Sean, by contrast, was cloaked in self-awareness.
Losing sense of who you were he knew was not a good thing. Without direction and focus you could find yourself eating out of garbage cans, sleeping in cardboard boxes on oil-soaked streets and quoting Shakespeare without an appreciative audience in areas where humanity (aware of its so-called creature comforts), feared to tread. His mother, Adelaide Geneva Johnson always preached these truths to him.
She walked around saying, and that’s the gospel truth. If you lose focus and direction, what have you got? You’ve got nothing! No-Thing. And that’s the gospel truth.
Adelaide, he liked to think all grown-up and call her by her given name, (at least in the privacy of his own head), probably knew a lot about focus and direction? Doesn’t losing yours make you some sort of inner Guru? The Gospel Truth anyone? Adelaide had lived through a brief failed marriage with Ted Sanders, Sean’s biological dad. Whatever that meant? He felt that the telling of that story was better left to science. When time came for Ted to pick Sean up (not literally lift, mind you), Adelaide would say, your biological dad is coming to get you. Whatever that meant? Always at that time like clockwork, Sean would fantasize about biology, DNA, dominant and recessive genes, Mendel’s butterflies, Crick and Watson, but he wouldn’t know it. The subconscious world just had a way of bending your ear, coercing you into listening. And it’s listening was better rumination if left untouched by logic. He just wondered if biological was a good or bad thing. And he would try to sort it out, by lock, stock, or barrel or by some other rudimentary algebraic equation. The logical mind unfortunately was always fighting the subconscious part of the mind and since the beginning of mind had done so. Sean, he had a reputation to uphold as a thinking man, even if the reputation’s only solid foothold was mired in the recesses of his cranium.
Adelaide cleaned houses for rich old ladies and their rich old husbands, too if the husbands were just old and not yet having a meeting with their maker. She wiped arses if they, the owner of such arses, were in decrepit shape. A shape where the bones were no longer enamel-tough. A shape that required a cement mixer theoretically and its namesake to bring them back to operational type condition. A shape that hopefully needs no further defining here. Adelaide, she cooked their meals, washed their clothes and wiped their arses if it was outlined in the addendum further defining, detailing and augmenting the job description.
It was just funny about Adelaide and her, ‘gospel focus,’ because She (oftentimes) wiped arses for a living. And besides she couldn’t mapquest her way out of the bathroom. She was like the pokey little puppy except it wasn’t the time gene that was malfunctioning but the directional gene.
Removing the sights and sounds of dilapidation, Sean rolled his $5 special beach cruiser, the one outfitted with the rusted, burnt and bent back chrome through his hood. The cruiser, he’d purchased at some old-dope-fiend’s garage sale, it (the sale) being a preamble to the dope-fiend’s nodding out, was essentially a true and trusted friend, his pony and accomplice in a adventure, both real and imaginary.
Funny, but black people he thought had planted hood in his mind. They were still working the fields, tilling the soil albeit in a much more desirable way. They were good at shortening things, making up words, starting trends; at least that’s what Adelaide said the newspeople reported. They said it like the gospel truth she said. Sean knew nothing about black people as far as he knew. Most likely they were from another planet. Once he thought he caught a glimpse of their planet on the television. It was called Soul Train. He had tired of X-box and Madden and the usual suspects, J.D., Kenny and Ben as usual were in his doghouse so the TV had become his escape of sorts.
So he had watched these black people get down on the TV. He often wondered if they were really black. He correctly knew that he wasn’t white. Paper was white; he wasn’t. He would argue with you to the death on that one.
The day was kinda hot. The kind of day where it seemed you had layers of sweat. If you bothered to wipe away the existing layer of sweat, another one cropped up and on and on down the sweat-happy line, the line disappearing somewhere into infinity, kissing the horizon, and doubling back just in time to not miss a beat. Like clockwork, perspiration was a given and like shark’s teeth, there was nothing irreplaceable about it. He figured it was a sure sign that evolution was still in operation and was sharpening its teeth in anticipation of more of the same as it traveled down destiny’s highway.
The pool was cracked, dried up; it looked withered, weathered; undeniably it was on its deathbed, badly in need of resuscitation. Old lady Johnson, his grandmother, had said that a couple of kids died there in the sixties. She’d said, it was a shame that no one knew mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, those sorts of things.
Sean thought that old lady Johnson’s DNA was mighty strong. She’d passed down the gospel truths to Adelaide. Quite possibly she’d passed down the inability to get from one side of the town to another (she was called wrong-way Johnson). She knew just about everybody. It’d been rumored because of her comings and goings that she’d ended up on the doorstep of most every family known to God and man simply due to her ineptitude in remembering from what direction she’d ventured; gaining a lot of friends in the process plus a reputation for being about as direction crazy as a blind goose without any noodles to speak of.
According to old lady Johnson, the LakeLock pool sitting not-too-pretty on its northeast corner had an illustrious past. Kings and queens had bathed there. Basked in the glory of the almighty sun. She’d said tanning contests were huge there in the fifties and early sixties. Back in those days you’d have been laughed out of town if you had a farmer’s (redneck) tan, even if you were otherwise cool. Attending Sunday school, raising money at the bake sales for starving children or recovering alcoholics, even coming from a prestigious family could not remove the stigma afforded such ill-conceived tans. There was just no honor in the tan associated with narrow minds and even narrower hearts, even if most occupiers of such tans were just humble denizens of the land tilling its soil and sowing its benefits.
He wondered if his grandmother knew much about civil rights? Of course all of the tall tales about tanning contests and undesirable tans could’ve just been a thing of legend. Idle gossip could have transpired, been transformed into truth, feeding on imagination and boredom, two entities that in separate but equal measures could create certainty out of far-reaching speculation. Beauty parlors, barbershops, bastions of truth or places where imaginations ran wild, where hair was curled and clipped, where many a reputation was soiled or stripped, therein lays the answer to truth as we know it.
Old lady Johnson said back in the heyday of the hippie movement (obviously at a time when people waved a lot), a couple of small children drowned while their flower child parents were off experimenting with illicit drugs. Spacing Out, she called it. She never failed to mention that these types of people didn’t live in Lake Lock. She thought they had come from StoneRidge, a snooty rich enclave from across the county line, which separated rich from poor, money from no money, haves from have-nots. Sort of our own personal line of demarcation, by necessity borrowed from Pope Alexander VI, whoever that was. As far as she was concerned, they were illegal immigrants. They needed, she would say, to take their sex-loving, drug smuggling, flower powers to ‘Frisco’ or some other weird enclave where strange people congregated and thought with poisoned drug-addled minds that living was all about pleasure and deranged hippie-making love. She wondered about the dysfunctional parents who had contributed to such a fine mess of young individuals----------lost souls, who participated in socially- inept lives, who lived distortions of proper living and celebrated free love like it was their personal Jesus.
These people she went on were so loved-in, peaced-out and stoned-out-of-their minds that logical things like personal responsibility, paying bills and capital punishment never entered their thought process. These types of people were so brainwashedly sick that war as a means of effecting peace never entered their equations. Memories of those insidious peaceniks she would say burnt at her soul. God knows that was true. Her aura was half-fried. Adelaide (bless her heart), always concurred. What else was she to do; she wiped old people's arses for a living?
She would say these hippies all free-loving and doing their illicit drugs had spaced out while two of the young 'uns' were losing their right to lives, liberties, and their own pursuits of happiness. Theoretically it was believed that one tried to save the other. End result was that both perished while their parents sashayed to the high heavens in their drunken stupor. That's what the paper, The Golden Globe and Chronicle had said.
When someone pulled the pair from the water, it was told that the hippies meditated. Prayed to some of their pagan Gods. Mouth-to-mouth resuscitation might as well have been a foreign language because history says that no one initiated the action. With those unfortunate events coming to pass, the pool was closed; the luxuriousness of it all lay waste to a sordid past. Its waters were now considered cursed.
In the seventies some skateboarders were seen cavorting inside of its dry walls. They too were presumed to be visitors form StoneRidge. They were run out on a rail. Quite literally they were chased down the railroad tracks. The citizens of LakeLock had memories such as elephants did.
Legend has it that the pacific citizens of LakeLock had exacted vengeance on StoneRidge and its residents for their prior misgivings and so the skateboarders high-tailed it like screaming banshees. Their hairs stood up and saluted as they ran in shit-fear down the tracks. The thought of the re-invention of tarring and feathering ignited their travels. It nipped at their heels. Like mad dogs they yelped. Like consumed prey they saw their outlaw lives flashing before their very eyes.
Sean lay there on one of the rotted out chaise lounges, relics from the tormented sixties, still in existence, though unwieldy shaped. He imagined the raucous parties. He imagined the drunken free-loving longhaired illegal immigrants. He imagined the hippie girls strung out on flower power, daisies in their hair, beaded earrings strutting down their lobes. He pictured them wearing native-American clothing. Clothing that Pocahontas and her fellow Indian maidens would wear if they were in a western or a Disney movie. Images of dead children did not enter his mind. Images of that ghastly sort were off limits. The elephants were held at bay.
LakeLock's pool, both its location and entity had been dead and buried long ago. It's ghosts presumably haunted the perimeter; even swam in the waterless pool. He figured ghosts don't need no water. It was a no-man's land. It was off limits. Its exterior consisted of a shiny, new, chain link fence as high as a basketball goal. The fence's intent was to keep out intruders. Immigrants. Ne'er do wells. Triangular signs with big black lettering, with the haunting words Keep Out spelled out for all the world to see were affixed to the top of the chain-link. Another sign ominously spelling out Danger-Beware juxtaposed itself to the keep-out-ones. Some signs speaking the same language in Spanish also posed on the chain-link. This narrator doesn't speak Spanish so no translation is available.
Sounds of reverie, beautiful young ladies in pool wear lounged around Sean as he took in eyefuls of delights. Their giggles permeated the warm, tropical air. Their cocktail glasses clinked their armor. Hanging above the estate was a sense of camaraderie and belonging. A belonging that was a preamble to free love. At least in the sense of good will toward men.
Sean on the spur-of-the-moment had renamed himself Dabney Duchryche for this occasion. Dabney bathed, utterly basked in the (after-effect), glow of his own personal paradise. His fantasy island. Hula girls, sporting seductively slanted eyes and soft, sexy hips adorned by native dress, smiled and shimmied to their shake, rhythmically beating to the dance of the 'Sun Gods.' Sean, 'the Dabney Duchryche version', or short, ;The Duke, ' smoked a Cuban and toasted the fine, rhythmically dancing creatures. He toasted those who had exquisite DNA combinations. My, I would guess he was thinking, if he could think in such a manner, how he would, he'd like to (see), become acquainted with one of the marvelous double helix configurations.
Here in this vast wasteland of sun, Dabney, 'The Duke', could be anything that he so desired to be. And that was the gospel truth. He could be away from the neighborhood, that year by passing year slipped further into the abyss of small-town urban decay. Away from the one factory that still remained (standing), the others stripped bare, robbed of their dignity, their rightful place in history. The one that remained alive; standing, in all its haughty grandeur belched smoke incessantly and ill-willingly like the dinosaur it was. Sean figured from all the smoke it exhaled that it must smoke Cubans by the cartful. Out here he could be somewhat detached , away from its insidious, noxious odor. Out here he was free. Out here he was the summer's breeze.
Those twin monsters of family and neighbor, both friend and foe alike, had no say about Sean while he pranced his wares as 'The Duke'. Inside he laughed at the thought of old lady Johnson, up in years, yet still sharp enough to lay claim to the spotting of an illegal immigrant. Sean knew at precisely this moment that he was that illegal immigrant.
Party girls toasted to the sun and its killer rays. They giggled like innocent, little girls who haven't yet felt the weight of the world on their shoulders. They smiled at Sean. 'The Duke' returned the favor.
Internally he knew that it was all a momentary illusion. He would grow out and up. He would forget the cheeriness, the carefree nature of childhood. He would come home every day to a wife and 2.5 kids. He would without hesitation and with no reservation and extreme determination pay the mortgage. Bringing home the bacon would be his motto. On his forehead it would be inscripted in bold yet invisible typeface. Possibly Blue Highway. He would grow fat (pot-bellied) and weary. He would tire of the world, its pathetic losers and its insouciant people. He would unknowingly join their rank-and-file.
Driving down indifferent highway, the insouciants, himself included, wouldn't bother to inform or if you will educate themselves of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and its proletarian technique. In their haste and waste, they wouldn't give a rat's arse about anything. Living the haunting melodies of a life-unfulfilled, he would grow tired of sex, love and unadulterated kindness. And not necessarily in that order. Eventually things such as everything, the whole kit and kaboodle would come to a head. And stand on it. He would figure out how to mapquest his existence. To leave his legacy. How to leave no stone unturned. Then he would die. But not before, time willing, he would figure out that without a straight-and-narrow course, a rock-hard focus and a sharpshooter's direction that getting done what needed to be done in the right way was virtually impossible.
In his haste but wise meandering he would sign up for self-help seminars and trumpet their objectives and honor them with platitudes. Entering yoga poses uninhibitedly he would start to chop away at the unhealthy duo of body fat and mind inebriation. Vegetables would become his primary palate. He would enter vegetarianismhood. He would do without/disavow people in the hood that disagreed with his views on this and that. He would espouse and announce to the world that everything he believed in at this day and time was the gospel truth. He would lament the fact that the last dinosaur, (the candy-making, i.e., confectionary) factory would close and urban blight would further darken the local economy.
After four days, Sean had advanced from beet-red to crab reddish-brown to brown as a pinto bean, His neck wasn't a redneck variety, more like a special exotic brand of premium roast chocolate. It now was the pedigreed version of the noble, exotic cocoa bean that caused shoppers to gasp and gawk awkwardly at their outlandishly high price.
For four marvelous high-heaven days, he had dined with kings and queens. Girls had showered him with more-than-sisterly affection. Honors had come his way. He was the most tanned of the most tanned. A member of the outdoor tanning hall of fame. The tanned elite inducted him into their brown-as-a-bean circle. He'd never run into the hippies who lost themselves in bliss with such a blast and utter ferociousness that they forgot about others and the safety of them. The utopia he had discovered was all his own.
All of the neighborhood, J.D., Kenny, Ben, his sister, Harmony Delight, Adelaide, old lady Johnson and Ted Sanders had scoured LakeLock with a fine-tooth comb leaving no hair unturned. Tire tracks had been sampled. Witnesses had been enlisted for their testimony as to his whereabouts. Still no one had seen hide nor hair of Sean. No one knew that he had fallen off into the deep end, waded into the pool of self-obscurity and/or self-discovery, totally destroying Sean for a brief sacrificial moment in time and re-surfaced for a brief moment as 'Dabney The Duke.'
Hope was virtually given up and placed back on the shelves in the useless abstraction category. The townspeople were already planning a funeral, a last rites event for Sean. Old lady Johnson wanted to meditate on the matter first. Hold a prayer vigil. Leave no stone unturned.
On the 5th day, Sean scaled the 10-foot chain-link, brown as an illegal alien from across the border who made an obscure living in the fields of plenty, intending to metamorphisize back into everyday, ordinary, run-of-the-mill, no-one-would-ever-notice-me, Sean as if nothing had ever happened. Yet his whole being, his every last molecule would disagree with the assumption that he was the same being as before. By the pool, he had experienced a life-changing transformation. Same DNA. Different Sean.
As he climbed onto his rusty, trusty, cruiser, his stallion in waiting, a police officer walked up. With intensely red eyes and coffee-stale breath the inquisitor looked at the boy and then looked down at a picture that he held in his hands. Sergeant, O'Dooly'han looked back and forth from the picture to the boy to the picture to the boy to the picture. Sean stared back at the stare-crazy officer in blue.
"Your name, sir?"
"Dabney. Dabney Duke." Sean swallowed. An enormous lump had gathered in his throat.
"Excuse me, have you seen this young man?" The officer pushed the picture too close to Sean, violating his personal space, he believed. "Name of Sean Grayson, I believe. Been missing for days, possibly weeks?" Sounds of desperation echoed in his voice.
Dabney (Sean), didn't crack a smile or even take in oxygen. He held his breath. Like he was thinking. Thinking real DEEP. He painted the most elegant stroke of nonchalance that had ever been painted in the universe. The universe's. That's what he was thinking.
"Don't reckon I have."
The man's eyes peering out from the steely blue uniform questioned Sean or Dabney if you will, for all he was worth. Sean wondered if he was a human lie detecting machine.
"Well if you see him..............you best run along, your folks probably looking for you."
Dabney didn't know if that was true or not. On the northeast corner by the rusted-out pool with cracks in its crust he had become a man. He had outlived IF. The boy in the picture no longer existed. During his poolside sabbatical, the madly-yellow Earthian sun had blessed him with immigrant-brown skin. It had fried his youthful brain showing no MERCY. In his pseudo spiritual awakening, realization after realization had whapped him up side the head. Enlightenment, nirvana, something new and pure and wholly wonderful had occurred out there in his personal wilderness. His Shangri-La.
In a few days he had learned what it takes most men lifetimes to comprehend. It was like the defiled pool air so distraught with its own memories had done him in. A rite of passage had taken place. Man had replaced boy. And still as strange as it seemed and probably because life was so utterly bizarre, yet inordinately fascinating, he still didn't know in which direction he was headed or what adventure he was taking up next. He just knew that boyhood and lounging by the pool, smoking Cubans and hitting up pretty ladies in their poolside best was a relic of a very distant past. If he knew one thing, it was that.
Somewhere as sure as night and day encompasses 24 hours of a typical Earth day he could hear the shrill yet melodic voice of old lady Johnson in all of her dotage say, and that's the gospel truth.
