The Pool
In 1992, I walked home from school every day the same way. I was in the habit of counting my steps by picking a handful of inedible berries from trees that grew near my school. I would toss one berry, watch it roll along the street to where it came to rest. Passing each one, i would count to 4, 4 times, and on the fourth 4 I would toss the next berry. There was no other measurement scored by this clumsy bowling process other than to provide the consistent reassurance of familiar cycles of the number 4.
John Grix lived in this direction, about 11 houses away. He was two or three years older than me, I'm not sure because he failed at least one grade. His personality from the ages of 7 years old to 17 years old was defined for me by his likelihood to whip tennis balls or rocks at the legs of children who rode past on their bikes from a standing position at the side of the road, and alternately by hiding sticks behind his back and approaching in a lunge to ram them in between bike spokes, causing the bikes and subsequent perched children to fall over. Tennis balls to the leg, face or back from close range would sometimes follow. He had a perpetually sunburnt face with squinty eyes, high temples that pointed towards gel-spiked hair, and a nasal voice with a loose-jawed, Buffalo-area accent informed by the television channel WNEB that broadcast sitcoms during the after-school time slot.
Towards the very end of the school year that year when I was in grade 5, John Grix followed me home from a distance, catching up to me closer to my house. He hissed at me to catch my attention, and I pretended not to hear, trying just to count my steps and keep my eyes on the berry I was working toward. He caught up to me.
"Yo," he said, but it sounded like 'yaw'.
"Hi," I answered.
"I saw big tits walking down the street and I thought it was Lisa." Lisa lived this way, one street over, with her tiny grandmother in a little bungalow. She was a couple of years older than me and very sweet and easy going. She was often paired by teachers with a new student because she was friendly with everyone, even John Grix.
I considered that no way he thought that, because first of all, he was walking behind me, and wouldn't he have thought I saw a big butt coming down the street and thought etc etc., and besides I had blonde hair in a braid and was taller than Lisa, who had curly brown hair, always worn in a very tight ponytail. But instead I said "mm-hmm". John Grix stuck close. I walked faster.
"You scared, little girl?"
"No," I said, lying. "I have to get home to let my dogs out."
"Yo, your pool's open. I'm coming to swim in it."
"I'm not allowed to have people in the pool when my parents aren't home," I said, which was true.
"So?," he said, which sounded more like "sah". "I'm going to hop your fence and swim in your pool, and then I'm going to rip your shirt off to see your huge tits." He repeated this a few times, turning the phrases into a rap. "I'm gonna rip off your shirt and look at your tits in your pool." He gave me some shoves from the side and reached for my humiliating, too-young-to-wear-a-bra-but-i-have-to-wear-a-bra sportsbra strap and snapped it hard. Up until shortly before then I had been telling myself that it was all just belly and who can define baby fat anyhow, but there was softball and a dreaded endurance run coming up. "I'm gonna rip that shit too." He was having a lot of fun with this. I was not.
I started to feel a dizzy, dumbfounding, heart-rattling fear and tried to be fast, but if you have had those dreams where you need to run and can't, I have the unfortunate news that sometimes this situation can occur in waking life as well. Besides, he would have tripped me.
Appearing ahead like an angel sent from heaven was a neighbour I loved, Mrs Whelan, who was into books and knew my mom and grandmother. She had taken care of me a couple of times when I was sick and my mom had to go to work, cleaning up buckets of vomit and everything, no complaints. She even took me to see the movie Dick Tracy in the movie theatre with her grandson, John Keldie, who later became a lacrosse player and was a Levi's model for a little while, because she wanted to see it. John Grix drifted away. "See you at your pool," he told me and walked in his affected limp walk towards his house by way of the ditch.
I remained scared of John Grix's promise to swim in my pool for the rest of the summer, and felt a safety no amount of counting rounds of the number 4 could provide when we closed it up for the fall.
In the spring of 1993, my baby sister was born. After the summer, when I started school again that year, I picked her up from her baby-sitter's in a stroller while the weather was warm enough, and would watch her until my mom and stepdad came home from work. I was extra-terrified that John Grix would threaten the baby somehow, and would walk home along different routes each day.
This is a photo taken from the roof of my mom's house in 1994.
To the left of this photo is my grandmother's backyard, which shared this big tree here with our yard. I mowed both lawns. When Pepper Ann was over on Saturday mornings, it was time to mow. That summer my stepdad, who was truly by then becoming just my dad, showed me how to climb onto the roof. I would sit or lie on it, listening to my walkman. Over the red fence was Grant Bittner's house. Grant lived with his single mom and two little sisters. They moved in during the winter of 1994. Sometimes his mom locked him out of the house and he would yell from outside, and break a window to get back in. She called the cops on him a few times.
We had two dogs, little-to-medium sized, who would stay in the backyard during the day in the summer. They are in this photo over here. I should mention that after a fruitless power struggle, John Grix and Grant BIttner partnered up in a criminal alliance. I had forgotten about him for awhile, and while maintained an oily presence at our junior high school, I stayed busy enough with other things that I did not have to encounter him all that often. Though he did live close by.
One day I came home from being out on my bike in the early evening, to find my Uncle Garry in the backyard with my mom. Uncle Garry was crouching over Pumpkin, the smaller dog, trying to give her CPR. Cody, the slightly bigger dog, was out of sight. In the juniper bushes, which you can see here, there were bricks around the soil that hadn't been there before. The pool was also full of bricks.
The vet thought that Pumpkin had died of a heart attack from fear, after Cody was killed when bricks hit his ribs, rupturing his internal organs, and smashing his head. He estimated also that she had been under this stress for some hours, to induce a lethal response.
I felt a similar hot, dizzy fear as I had felt when John Grix had promised to swim in my pool. This time there was no Mrs Whelan to shuffle over and wave her magic wand of protective disapproval to make him disappear, in her filthy bare feet and old shorts.
The next day I sat on the deck of the public swimming pool, which was in a park very close by, just over here. My mom did the pool man's taxes, so we had this above-ground one installed very cheap.
Angel Smith was a punk girl with crazy dyed hair and patched up clothes who made rude jokes about boys, in her late teens. She lived here, next to Grant Bittner. Angel did PCP and hung out in the park all night, and while she did bad teenager stuff, was never scary to me. She liked me. When I was 5 she asked me what colour my eyes were, and I said "grass green", and from then on she thought I was a funny kid. Angel was at the pool in her bikini with a torn Ramones tank top over it. She had a tuft of green hair at this time, and wore green elastics on her braces to match, more lime green than grass green. One summer a few years before, she partied in my mom's house with a short-tenured babysitter. She invited Aaron Moran over, a headbanger who lived next to Lisa, this way. He blasted Run DMC and Aerosmith's "Walk This Way" on our stereo and lip-synched in a really hypnotizing way. I let him and the other stoner teenagers drink all of my coveted Cokes and even eat my mom's off-limits Jenny Craig food. They put on hilarious plays with my Cabbage Patch dolls and I totally loved them until the babysitter was fired for letting me shave my legs. One time Aaron Macilroy was peeing in my bathroom and I opened the door by accident. I remember that he kept his sunglasses on while he peed.
At the pool, while I sat on the deck, Angel asked me about my dogs. I remember very well not confirming that Grant Bittner and John Grix had thrown bricks at them for an afternoon, only that the pile of bricks in Grant's backyard was a little smaller, and that there were bricks all over my backyard, and that the bigger dog, Cody, had been crushed and that bricks were on his body and around it. I left out altogether washing blood and gut-bits away with water from a bucket so we wouldn't get flies. I mostly didn't cry when I told her.
"Fuckin dicks. Fucking Cody and Pumpkin. Those fuckin dicks," she repeated, floating on her back in the water. She could spit little fountains of pool in arcs. The pool smell in the warm air was nice and felt soothing while I grieved.
And then, I witnessed a moment of perfect, golden chivalry. John Grix and Grant Bittner blobbed onto the pool deck from the boys' change room. I remember the taste of Sprite in my mouth, and trying not to choke on it. Angel Smith hoisted herself from the pool onto the deck in a cool easy teenage way, breaking no strides, until she was right in the face of Grant Bittner. Grant was already 6 feet tall, and built like 3 full bags of wet compost stacked on top of each other. Angel, compact and wild, yelled in Grant's face, very loud, very full of braces and gums, very intense, many swears involved. He backed away from her, pushing her here and there. She was like an angry little plough, though. She pushed him, her body at a 45 degree angle until he was at the edge of the deep end of the pool. Lifeguards blew whistles, but were afraid to get involved.
Then Angel would up and executed the cleanest, most cinematic right hook you have seen. Grant Bittner landed in the water, causing a little tsunami, roiling and humiliated. John Grix was nearby, deeply not protecting his friend. Angel grabbed his arm and dragged him the pool ledge, kicked him hard with her wet bare foot, pulled down his swim trunks and pushed him in. "Piece of shit!" she screamed at them.
She was thrown out in a hurry and banned from the pool for the rest of the summer. She swam in my little pool instead.
When I went to high school, I did odd jobs in the English department. It was a bad school, and I think the teachers were happy to have a reader. One time, I was paired up with a student from an older grade to help him with his schoolwork. John Grix showed up for only one of those meetings, and barely said anything. I think maybe he couldn't read, not illiterate, but not very well at all. He mostly looked at the ground or the ceiling. I waited for him to make fun of my chest, or backside, but it never happened.
Yesterday, my baby sister graduated from high school. The same high school that John Grix, Grant Bittner for just one year, Angel Smith, Aaron Macilroy, Lisa, my mom, my Uncle Garry, my stepdad, the lifeguards from the public pool, and I all went to.
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