HIGH BRIDGE POOL CULTURE

It’s a locker room, a men’s locker room or so I thought. By now I’m used to the snickers and outright mockery I get for training in a racing suit, that’s fine, and even expected, but this exchange that happened in the showers while I was rinsing off was ridiculous.

“Excuse me mister.”

I turn around to see what looks like an eight-year old kid peeking around the wall. “Yeah?”

“People are coming to use the shower and we don’t want to see your privates.”

“Alright.” I finish up and wrap a towel around me and on the way to the changing area (which happens to be a basketball court with lockers) a group of kids walk by all of them wearing those absurd board shorts about as long as a pair of pants.

Used to be surfers themselves wore short shorts, anyone who’s seen a photo from the golden age of surfing or a Beach Blanket film would know that (a general lack of curiosity is another matter altogether). But it’s been creeping up now for awhile—the new bodily shame, longer shorts, the wearing of shirts and wife beaters in the water. Up here in the Latin community I blame it on the Catholic church for instilling that kind personal loathing into the young mind. When I was a kid, and even in college we used to go skinny dipping, and hardly anyone gave it a second thought. I couldn’t imagine that sort of thing for anyone over age three around here.

But the pool has it’s own culture. Kids are made to wear clean, white underwear, and changing in the locker room strikes fear into the hearts of those who scurry into the bathroom stalls to get out of street clothes. It’s a given some of these kids are too young for junior high and high-school locker rooms, where when I was a kid you were forced to accept that fact eventually you’d have to drop trou to put on the jock strap and athletic uniform. Sure it sucked, and everyone felt weird for awhile, but most grew out of it and learned it was no big deal, at least those who went on to still go to gyms as they got older. Those that didn’t (and I have friends like this), get all freaked out being naked around anyone. Grown men at that. Grown men ashamed of their bodies. I’m so used to being at the YMCA and surrounded by nudity that I don’t think twice about it, and swimming for years in racers has erased any sort of self consciousness, especially around my swimming compatriots. We’re there to swim and this is our uniform—this, this nothing thing we wear, this is what helps make us fast.

But some of these kids are old enough to know what a locker room is like, and they act like they’re got something special to hide, something so private and precious no one else but them could possibly see it. So it leaves older guys like me, the handful of us who go there, as something like freaks or suspect. It doesn’t help that the locker room isn’t safe, safe in the sense an office door that opens to the locker room often has women in it with a clear view of the changing area, or the other day when a female employee just walked in while people were in various stages of dress or undress to shoot the shit with the gaggle of pool workers who perpetually hang out in the locker room talking trash and getting paid for shit. I wondered if that goes on in the women’s locker, men walking in. Crass, base bullshit.

But I love this pool and there’s a small handful of guards and employees I’ve come to know with whom we have mutual respect. It makes it worth the regular gym-bag search on entry, or the occasional asshole smoking in the bathrooms or odd looks. And every now and then some kid will ask me if I’m an Olympic swimmer and I just have to laugh, but it’s better than some kind of epithet, implied or otherwise.