“For ten minutes each half hour, the pool seems innocent enough. Then the eight 75-horsepower engines surge into action, producing rolling whitecaps three to four feet in height. Swimming amid the ‘debris’ of rented and brought rafts in the eight-and-a-half-foot deep end of the pool was like experiencing the aftermath of a shipwreck.”
Sunday News (Lancaster, Pennsylvania), August 9, 1981
The first time I mentioned to my father that I spent my rare days off from the park at the Jersey Shore with my friends, he looked at me uncomprehendingly. Though it was the most normal thing in the world for a seventeen-year-old in New Jersey, he acted as though I had said I enjoyed the occasional trip to the moon.
“Why?” he said. “Why would you bother?”
To him, the park was a permanent vacation, one that provided all the escapism anyone could require. In his eyes, I was making the ninety-minute drive to the shore for nothing. But that was the point—the nothing. The shore wasn’t expecting anything of me. I had no responsibilities. I hung out with my friends, aping my father’s penchant for associating with characters. There were kids like Chuckie Baby—who resembled Chuck Barris of The Gong Show fame and once responded to a bunch of seniors crashing one of his house parties by chasing them out with a 12-gauge shotgun—and Rich Szuch, whose family owned a house on the shore and whose bed I once puked on to such a degree that his mother had to disassemble the frame in order to clean it up. (This made me realize that I might have been a character recruited into Rich’s life, my first existential crisis.) I chased flocks of seagulls. I surfed—or tried, anyway—and went water skiing. I was free to enjoy the sun and the saltwater or just stretch out on an empty bulkhead. I watched as people in the water let the tide wash over them, monitored by lifeguards who never once had to move from their perches.
I thought it was perfect.
I did not realize my father believed he could improve upon it.
For months, he had been hovering near a massive concrete-lined hole in the ground that grew deeper and wider every time I walked by. It soon sprouted an enclosed operating room that housed enormous fans and pumps that throbbed with so much power they sucked the insulation right off the walls. Workers, led by Charlie O’Brien, funneled lake water from the snowmaking pipes on the mountain into the hole. It was cumbersome work and wore Charlie down. He became surly, growling at employees. Gene often pulled Charlie aside, their voices quickly growing loud enough to turn the head of anyone within twenty feet.
“I can’t do six months of work in four!” Charlie roared.
“I want my hole!” Gene bellowed. “Fourth of July!” This was the cut-off date for maximizing revenue. If a ride missed the big holiday weekend because it was still under construction, my father considered it a catastrophe. The sting of the Alpine opening in September had never left him. He continued throwing manpower at the problem, expecting seven-day work weeks. Day by day, the snowmakers’ habit of drinking during their shifts seemed more and more reasonable.
As my father and the workers sparred, a murky liquid surface began rising in the pool, growing over a period of days to nearly seven hundred thousand gallons. It was as though their expletive-laden exchanges were incantations that had conjured a strange and secret brew. When the fans kicked on, the water rose like a sheet-covered ghost, a forty-inch wave chopping away at your legs, chest, or face with enough force to push you backward. It was a facsimile of the ocean, a not-quite-right replica of nature. Apparently, something like it had been built in Berlin in the 1960s to test the integrity of German ship hulls, researchers watching to see how much force it took to capsize small-scale models attempting to resist the churning water.
Somehow, a recreations manufacturer got hold of the technology and co-opted it for amusement purposes. They called it the Wave Pool. There was one at an indoor aquatic complex in Decatur, Alabama. Others were scattered in public parks around the country. None of them had our demographic, which could charitably be described as increasingly manic. I wasn’t sure we needed military-grade technology sloshing them around in water ten feet deep. Some could barely be trusted to remain upright on land.
“People won’t need to go to the shore,” my father said, looking directly at me. “We’re bringing it to them! It’s gonna be big, big, big. Phenomenal!” He gave a thumbs-up to the laborers, who were wiring the pole-mounted speakers that would soon be pumping top-forty radio into the water-clogged ears of the pool’s occupants. Its dimensions nearly two-thirds the size of a football field, the cost of the pool’s construction was heading well into the six figures, a price tag I heard from one sibling and passed along to another until it got back to Julie.
“Low sevens,” she whispered to me.
I stared into the churning muck, the bleachy smell of chlorine working hard to eradicate whatever parasites were lurking in the siphoned lake sludge. The rusty snowmaking pipes had discolored the mountain water. It looked like a vat of iced tea. I pitied whoever would be in charge of policing this scene.
“You’re head lifeguard,” my father said.
While the Wave Pool was my father’s biggest investment to date, he really had no other choice. By 1981, the amusement industry was changing fast. There was an increasing consumer desire for more of everything, an appetite for thrills that bordered on gluttony. It was not enough to have six or seven major attractions. There needed to be dozens, all of them unique. Kennywood, one of the northeast’s largest parks, now offered six roller coasters. Disney World was putting the finishing touches on Epcot, a massive new world that would offer a glimpse of the future in a giant, orb-shaped building that resembled a golf ball. Great Adventure had introduced a Roaring Rapids ride modeled after the Congo River in Africa. Guests were strapped into boats that went through a series of minor obstacles before launching off a waterfall. They barely got wet, my father scoffed, and the big thrill—a thirty-foot slide that went through the waterfall—was tame. It reportedly cost six million dollars, which my father considered a complete waste of capital. He still measured the worth of a ride by the amount of adrenaline pumping through bodies, not how much it put the operator into debt.
Despite his lack of awe for the new rides, a few things had become clear to him. For one, he said, we needed a flagship attraction in the “wet” category of water-based experiences that could surpass the wow factor of the Roaring Rapids. At a trade show, footage of the Wave Pool’s formidable machinery manipulating the water bowled him over. It appealed to his snowmaking sensibilities. It was another way of subverting nature.
Second, we needed a ride that could “eat” people. This was amusement-industry slang for something so massive and with such capacity that it could entertain hundreds of guests for a prolonged period, freeing up other attractions in the park. The Wave Pool was perfect.
Finally, we needed to increase our advertising efforts. Great Adventure was pushing the Rapids all over television, a ceaseless barrage of propaganda stuffed between Saturday-morning cartoons. We needed to break away from the primitive newspaper ad and its rote recitation of attractions. People needed to see what we offered in action.
In order to stretch his modest ad budget, my father tasked Julie, who had expressed interest in marketing, with producing a commercial. It would emphasize the unparalleled freedom he allowed each guest—thirty seconds of cascading bodies sliding, racing, and climbing. He told her he wanted to capture the relentless pace of the people in the park, who practically sprinted from one ride to the next. The details—who would shoot this, edit it, air it, act in it—were all left up to her. Just as he trusted himself to figure things out, he believed all of us could, too. That Julie could not program the family VCR was irrelevant.
Julie sought out the assistance of an ad agency, but they didn’t understand what made the park special. She wound up writing the commercial herself, which highlighted everything we offered, from the Lolas to the Kamikaze. She even came up with the tagline: “There’s nothing in the world like Action Park, where you control the action.” She scored a camera crew and got a discounted rate on some editing time at a New York television station by agreeing to visit late at night, gamely walking the streets to and from her car in the hope she wouldn’t wind up on a milk carton.
Once she had it done, my father watched the spot over and over again. “It’s perfect, Rosebud,” he told Julie. “Just perfect.” Only his family, it seemed, could fully understand his vision.
A little later, I saw the ad on television when the station cut to a commercial block. I immediately recognized Glen Smocovich, who had bravely tested the Cannonball Loop and, against all odds, still had use of his legs. Now going by the nickname Smoke, he was roughly my age—seventeen—and well built, with a shock of surfer-dude hair he regularly bleached with lemon juice. Ever my father’s daughter, Julie had enlisted park employees to act in the spot because she wouldn’t have to pay them extra.
It was a fast, kinetic half minute that made a visit to Action Park look as exciting as a trip on a space shuttle. It occurred to me that the park was no longer a secret handshake of sorts, a whispered commodity between teenagers. Now, everyone within an afternoon’s driving distance could see it. Television gave it the one thing my father could not, and the same thing it had given Disney all those years ago: the blessing of the cathode-ray tube, which surely only broadcast things worth someone’s time and money.
“Action Park,” Smoke said. “Like, whoa!”
The commercial would change everything.
While Julie was busy promoting us, I was coping with my new role as head lifeguard, which gave me the responsibility of putting together a team. His mediocre acting aside, Smoke was an easy choice as my first recruit. He had his lifeguard certification and was a good swimmer. Telling him he could sit and tan all day while watching a bunch of well-endowed attendees splash around in a pool didn’t require an additional sales pitch. He would undoubtedly use the opportunity to make his appearance in our low-budget commercial sound like he was in the entertainment industry. Already, he had been telling girls he was an extra in The Empire Strikes Back.
“I thought you lived in Queens,” one said.
“They shot a lot of it there,” he said.
After Smoke signed up, I roped in Tommy Smith, also known as Smitty, a Vernon local who grew up around a lake and could chop through water like a fish; Vinnie Mancuso, an aspiring bodybuilder who brought his lunch (skinless chicken, unseasoned broccoli) in plastic containers and sank to the bottom of the pool because he had no body fat; Denise DeSimon, one-third of a sister trio in Water World with Buffy and Lauren DeSimon; and Kip Merritt, who started as a ski instructor and moved over to construction. Later, I recruited Doug Rounds, a senior in high school who may have been the best swimmer in the county. Long and lean, Doug glided in water but cautioned that he would use his skill judiciously—routine flailing would not move him from his chair, only dramatic matters of life and death. Chuck Kilby eventually joined as well, a promotion that my father hoped would further endear us to Jim Kilby. Still others would join: Lynette, blond and pneumatic, who could swim just as well as any of them; and Nancy Hallam, humorless and immune to Smoke’s advances.
As head of lifeguard operations at the Wave Pool, I established a dress code to distinguish this new, elevated park clique from mere ride attendants. I settled on red Adidas surf shorts and a white tank top for the guys, and a red, one-piece Lycra suit for the girls. The ladies’ swimsuits were so cheap they became semi-transparent when they got wet. This prompted their aghast mothers to sew lining into the fabric to preserve their daughters’ reputations. Only Denise DeSimon refused the extra layer, preferring to strut around unencumbered by modesty. Later, a teenager named Bob Krahulik took notice of the male uniform and began walking into the park dressed in identical attire with a whistle around his neck. Assuming he was an employee, the ticket attendant let him walk right in. By conservative estimate, he did this a total of twelve times before someone finally caught on. It turned out that he was a certified lifeguard and swam on a local school swim team, so we eventually wound up offering him the job he was pretending to do.
“Well, I’m here anyway,” he said.
Not having any real idea about how to whip a squad of lifeguards into shape, I invented a regimen. It included taking turns rescuing a janitor’s jumpsuit that had been stuffed with sand bags, the head still missing from its trial run through the Cannonball Loop. They all did well dragging it up from the depths, but the dummy only weighed about one hundred and twenty pounds. Park attendees could easily be double that, as well as inebriated, and were likely to resist rescue out of panic or ignorance. This inanimate, decapitated bag of pounded rock was, I suspected, smarter than some of our guests.
The night before the Wave Pool opened, I felt a surge of pride. I was finally stepping into a more demanding role, one I had coveted since moving dirt with toothless snowmakers. I decided to hold my first-ever staff meeting near the gasoline-polluted pond housing the speedboats. I explained what this attraction meant to my father, who was pinning his hopes and a significant line of credit on it bringing in more business—business that would, in turn, keep them all employed for that season and beyond. I cautioned them that parkgoers could be abrasive, petulant, and prone to disobeying instructions. I brought them to Motor World because I wanted them to see how people could behave. I motioned to a man in a speedboat who, having long since exceeded his allotted number of laps, was laughing as a worker waved her arms and insisted he come back in. He gave her the middle finger, then tried ramming the dock.
“This is what I mean,” I told them.
All of them nodded, but I wasn’t sure they were listening. Only Vinnie, who once worked on the Alpine and had been friends with George Larsson, had the park experience to take the warning seriously.
Like soldiers taking the beaches of Normandy, hundreds of people poured into the Wave Pool when it opened on Memorial Day weekend 1981. The manufacturer, WaveTek, had a recommended capacity, but no one knew the number. It was listed somewhere in the phone-book-sized operator’s manual my father had thrown into the corner of his office, uninterested in its annoying limitations.
Whatever the tally was, we were clearly in violation of it. The Jersey Shore had an unlimited expanse, offering each visitor their own private oasis away from everyone else. The Wave Pool packed attendees in with such congestion that people were practically elbow-to-elbow. Previously, Water World’s only bodies of water were small pools that held just one or two people coming off a slide. Here, there were hundreds. You could’ve walked on their heads like a frog hopping on lily pads and never have to touch the water. The pool was so enormous that you couldn’t have a conversation with anyone on the other side of it.
Unlike our other rides, there was no queue. People dove in from anywhere, splashing into the shallow end or sinking like stones into the deep end. Most tended to come in on the right side, since that was closer to the pool-area entrance. They jumped into water that was just deep enough to cover their head or neck, unprepared for the waves battering their faces. This area was immediately designated the Death Zone by Smoke, who nonetheless took up sentry duty and paid close attention to signs of trouble. He did this even as Lynette and Denise filled his peripheral vision, their clingy red suits tight enough to look like a second skin.
The waves were on a timer—twenty minutes on, ten minutes off—to give swimmers a break from their pummeling aggression. We had a digital countdown display, similar to a scoreboard, that let people know when the waves were coming. If they got in during a lull, they happily paddled about with a false sense of security, some sitting on the tiny rafts, mats, and inner tubes rented out at a stand nearby.
When the waves hit, their force caught our guests unprepared. Powered by the insulation-sucking fans, the waves struck with the same violent menace originally meant to create a series of mini-shipwrecks. Most people on the flotation rentals capsized. Devoid of their occupants, the tubes looked like soggy Cheerios floating in milk. The canvas rafts, made to hold one person, were often overstuffed with three or four. They were also prone to trapping people underwater, plugging the limited space between swimmers and preventing anyone from surfacing. If one occupant went under, the others would try to help. Pretty soon, the small party would all be in peril.
“I can’t see shit,” Smoke said, angling for a better view through the sea of people and the still-murky water. “Fuck. Look at that guy.”
Smoke pointed to a broad-shouldered teenager waving his arms and bobbing in and out of the water. I got Lynette’s attention, and she jumped in to help, only for the guy to suddenly break into a grin, flip his middle fingers, and cut underneath the surface like a dolphin. He was in no trouble.
“Asshole,” Smoke seethed.
By noon, the congestion began spilling out onto the margins of the pool. The wraparound deck was full of people tugging their dripping swim trunks over their exposed cracks. Others dove in without bothering to remove their sweatpants or jeans. Children ran laps, the wet concrete threatening to send them sliding into a leg cast. Teenagers with gold chains around their necks scanned the pool, looking for friends. When they found them, they would dive in with the express goal of landing on someone’s head. Their target would resurface, distributing headlocks in retribution.
The waves produced an anticipatory nervous energy. Pushed by the fans via massive air vents—it was like a network of leaf blowers—the water rose more than three feet above the surface, looming over its victims and appearing to pause before collapsing on top of them. Instinctually, people put their arms over their heads or turned away. It made no difference. Few could remain standing if they were in the waist-deep areas. Without a firm footing, they’d be carried away. The waves abruptly cut off conversations.
“I’m thinking of taking the boys to—OMPHLEGGHM,” one woman said, unable to finish her thought before being claimed by the pool. It was like watching the Rapture.
We were all armed with buoys, ring-shaped chunks of high-density foam that we could toss to people having trouble with the tide. By the end of the day, we had used them all repeatedly, not realizing that they had absorbed water and developed the density of a brick. When one hairy-chested occupant struggled to swim against the current, Vinnie tossed him a waterlogged buoy. His powerful arms made it sail like a Frisbee. It landed just as the swimmer was surfacing, smacking his face and shattering his nose.
“Gahhhh!” he cried.
Consumed with their own struggles, no one in the pool paid him any mind. I waded in and escorted him out and to the infirmary, tiny red droplets leaking from his face and dotting the pathway.
Smoke made our first dive-in save, dragging out a swimmer who had been tossed out of his raft by the waves and left to flail in the water. Smoke got him to dry land immediately. I exhaled in relief. This is manageable, I thought. Everything will be okay. Action Park is “like, whoa,” but that’s all.
Then came another. Lynette jumped in. Then two people began going under at once. Smoke pulled a man out as another began panic-paddling right next to him. Dragged beneath the surface by the hysterical guest, Smoke began punching him in the head to make him loosen his grip. The mood had become manic. From that point on, none of us was ever out of the pool long enough to dry off. Vinnie Mancuso didn’t bother sitting down the rest of his shift. I saw fear in some of the guards’ eyes. They were exhausted and scared, the full weight of the responsibility beginning to slump their shoulders. A summer job had turned into a struggle to keep people alive.
There was no B squad. We all worked from 10:00 a.m. to sunset that day, eating lunch on our feet, our arms scratched from people clawing at us as we wrangled them to the deck. I started interrogating the rescues, searching for evidence of some kind of misunderstanding or defect. Something we could fix.
“Why did you go under?” I asked one man. A soggy Van Halen shirt clung to his protruding stomach. “Are you okay in the water?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’ve been in the Central Park fountain.”
A boy came up to me. “Mister,” he said. “How deep is the water?”
“Over your head,” I said. “Don’t go in.”
I turned around. When I turned back, he was upside down in a tube, legs pumping in the air like he was riding an invisible bicycle. I pulled him out. “What happened?”
“You’re supposed to pull me out before I drown,” he said.
“You need to be more careful,” I said, a paternal hand on his shoulder.
“Eat a dick,” he said and dived back in.
A horrible realization came over me. The Wave Pool’s occupants had taken on a collective, stupid consciousness, one that paid no mind to the threat of drowning. The commercial had sterilized the park. Nothing on television could be hazardous. Nothing could happen to them.
With the water cloudy from body oils, suntan lotion, and other excretions, it was impossible to peer over the edge of the pool and see the bottom. After we finally ushered everyone out, I dove in and made two passes, convinced I was going to find dead bodies that had been obscured by the filth. Satisfied I did not have to summon the coroner, I went directly to my father, who was reviewing attendance numbers.
“Eleven thousand people,” he announced. “That’s twice our best day!” I had witnessed it firsthand but had not been able to process the math. A blast of furnace-hot weather, Wave Pool hype, and the commercial had colluded to create a surplus of humanity.
I collapsed into his leather office chair, exhausted from the heat and exertion. “We got a problem,” I said, waiting for him to look up. He didn’t. I explained that, if we couldn’t see the bottom of the pool, that meant we couldn’t see any people at the bottom of the pool.
“Andy,” he said, shaking his head. “You can’t see the bottom of the ocean, either.”
“So?”
“So, that doesn’t mean you stop people from swimming in it if they want.”
This was Gene Logic, which used nature to explain why things weren’t really as dangerous as I feared they might be. Sure, you could fall off the Alpine and crack your head open, he’d say. But you can also get into a car accident on the way to the park! Don’t go outside, you might die of a bee sting! Come on! People want to have fun!
I wanted to point out that the concept of acceptable risk includes understanding the risk, which was not necessarily the case with the pool and its unique method of assaulting people with water. In my weary and sun-stroked state, I just mumbled something about limiting the number of swimmers going in at once and having a designated point of entry. These seemed like small but manageable victories.
“We’re not making people wait in line,” he said. My father hated lines. They reminded him of the DMV.
“Then let me turn the fans down,” I said. “At least let me do that.”
“I would make them stronger if I could,” he said. “I’m gonna ask the design people about that.” He looked around his office. “Where’s the operator’s manual?”
The next day, we upped the chlorination in the Wave Pool to cut through the oily sheen on the surface. We became amateur chemists, mixing calcium chloride with baking soda without any real idea of how to filter such a massive body of water. On days we got it wrong, kids would emerge from the pool wincing, their eyes red with irritation. For ten hours, we performed a ballet of rescue and retrieval, dragging out and admonishing people who came out sputtering after nearly being killed by their own lackadaisical attitude. Because the countdown display had gone unnoticed, I tried using a bullhorn to announce when the waves were coming. It merged into the tinny sound of the speakers blaring “Celebration” by Kool & the Gang on an endless loop and was ignored by all.
At the end of the long weekend, Julie and I held a meeting of the lifeguards. We sat around a cafeteria table in silence. Vinnie Mancuso kept his head down, staring at the skinless chicken he hadn’t had time to eat.
“You guys did great,” I said. Lynette was sobbing.
“We need to shut this fucking thing down,” Smoke said, black circles around his eyes.
“I know what the problem is,” Julie said, her face adopting the emotionless gaze of middle management. It startled me. “We had a lot of church groups that got bused in from the Bronx this weekend.”
“We get buses every weekend!” Smoke shot back. “The bottom line is, New Yorkers cannot fucking swim! These are land people!”
We talked about all the things my father was not going to do, like force people to wait in line. We discussed the drunk who had scalped himself diving into six inches of water, briefly clearing one end of the pool as he bled into it like a shark-attack victim. Julie refused to entertain the idea of a raise from three dollars and ten cents an hour to accommodate the psychological toll exacted by the job. We agreed that no more than two people should share a raft, and that we probably needed a sign cautioning people about the waves. Doug Rounds recommended everyone get hepatitis shots.
“The commercial is going to keep running,” Julie said. “So, I mean . . .” She looked at me. “It’s probably going to get a lot busier.”
At the end of the meeting, two people threatened to quit. I begged them to stay. The next day, Tommy Smith took to scrawling the letters CFS on the admission bracelets of people who had been dragged from the pool.
“What does that mean?” I asked, watching one such guest bounce to another area of the park.
“Can’t Fucking Swim,” he said.
Midway through the summer, Smoke and his cousin Danny went to a lifeguard recertification class at the Red Cross. The instructor was demonstrating CPR on a doll that resembled a toddler. A young woman shifted in her seat, uncomfortable. “I don’t want to do that,” she said.
The instructor asked where she worked. It was a local public pool. She told her not to worry. “The odds of you needing to perform CPR are a million to one. It’s unlikely you’ll pull out even one person this summer.”
Smoke and Danny looked at each other. The guards at the Wave Pool had collectively pulled out one hundred people the weekend prior.
Like surgeons, we grew to adopt the necessary arrogance of people charged with saving lives. Pleased with the increased attendance, my father agreed to spring for varsity-style jackets for the team with “Wave Patrol” and “1981” embroidered over the chest. We wore them to and from the pool, in the employee break room, and while we circulated after our shifts. Wave duty was serious business, reserved for the elite. I turned away candidates at tryouts like a coach dismissing NFL Combine stragglers. We did laps at the beginning of each day, guests applauding as we emerged.
Making the cut cultivated a sense of pride. Ride attendants walked the grounds. We strutted. One member of the Wave Patrol got a vanity license plate on his car using the eight characters allowed: LIFEGARD. When Smoke saw it, he got one, too. His read LIFGUARD, though I wasn’t sure he knew about the character limit.
As head lifeguard, I was at the peak of my confidence, my fitness, and my tan. And I had not forgotten Ginette Molina, the seemingly unobtainable beauty who had caught my eye the previous summer. She was back again, migrating from ride to ride as a manager in Water World. I would not be dissuaded by Julie, who declared Ginette out of my league.
“She’s two years older,” Julie said. In teen years, that was like two decades, but I forged on.
I casually walked over to the Kamikaze, where Ginette was supervising an attendant sending down guests at fifteen-second intervals. We usually waited until the person at the bottom had cleared the pool, but sometimes attendants would get distracted and not notice a person going down too early. If this happened, the unofficial protocol was to scream, “Look the fuck out!” at the oblivious person below. Sometimes this worked. If not, their speeding bodies could collide while the first guest was still looking for their stripped bathing suit at the end of the slide.
Guests were being spaced apart, and I was impressed that Ginette actually took her job seriously. We hit it off and began seeing one another. Ginette’s beauty was renowned around the park. I felt like I was dating our version of a prom queen.
While the Wave Patrol helped our social lives, we made enemies, too.
Smoke made a positive identification of the fake victim. He was a lifeguard at Dorney Park, a corporate oasis situated two hours southwest of Vernon in Allentown, Pennsylvania. A creepy clown named Alfundo—for Allentown, Fun, and Dorney—loomed over the entrance. Decked out in our jackets, we crashed his turf in retaliation several times, heckling guards at Dorney’s large but otherwise unremarkable swimming pool. We splashed in the water, boorishly channeling our own feral patrons. Then we put on our jackets and sauntered off, secretly envious of the fact that the water there was as clear as glass, unsullied by the sweat of the teeming hordes or residual fuel splashes from Motor World.
When I saw two of the Dorney guys back at our park, I braced for reprisal. Instead, they looked at me with sympathy.
“This is like the end times here, man,” one said, looking at the cascade of bodies bouncing, floating, and sinking.
We started to keep a running tally of saves. Near-drownings became abstract black dots on notebook paper. I worked seven days some weeks, sometimes for fourteen days in a row. Weeks of uninterrupted sun exposure seared the tip of my nose and turned it into a bright-red bulb. I stopped going out and instead retreated to the resort condo I was staying in for the summer to avoid the hour-long commute home. There I would lie motionless until the alarm rang. The condo was the model home for the resort units my father was developing, which would eventually swell to more than 1,300 spread across the property. I’m sure some prospective buyers thought I was a squatter.
We continued to have problems with water visibility. A pitched hill that rose up on one side of the Wave Pool was no more than twenty feet high, but it was made up of loose and untended soil covered by brown grass. After several days of rain, the precipitation and the dirt combined to create a thick and viscous sludge. Overnight, it had slobbered down the hill, encroaching past the concrete and into the water. We scooped out the larger globs, leaving an unsightly muck behind.
“It looks like the Jolly Green Giant took a shit in here,” Chuck Kilby said.
“We’re not closing it,” my father said, coming around and anticipating my request. The Wave Pool had become his most sensational attraction. He continued to pepper newspapers in the tristate area with a giant ad that featured a cartoon person surfing a giant tidal wave.
“Let the waves gently rock you to sleep,” it read. I don’t know who in the fuck wrote that ad.
“It’s disgusting,” I said, trying to sway him. “Look at this.” I stirred some of the water with my toe, disturbing a brown sheen of filth.
“To empty this out,” he said, “would take a week, minimum. Then we’d have to fill it back up, which would take another week, minimum.” He started to tell me what two weeks of disappointed patrons would do when they came to see his attraction only to be turned away. They’d tell friends, and they’d tell their friends, and pretty soon no one would be here.
He waved me into the pump room. We tweaked the controls to the chlorine pumps and filters, which began to cycle through the water at a rapid rate. A strong chemical odor began to mix with the mud to create a kind of sterile-smelling swampland.
“You let that run today and part of tomorrow and that should clear it,” he said. “No more than that.”
The pump room was messy, full of discarded potato chip bags, and had unexpected amenities like a cot, a lamp, a dresser, and a stereo—things you might find in a serial killer’s van. My father was, thankfully, oblivious, but I knew the reason why. Park gossip had gotten back to me that Smoke had constructed a makeshift bachelor pad inside. He had nailed foam mats to the walls to help dampen the noise generated by his hormones. Walking in to check the fans the next day, the noise they made overwhelmed me. It sounded like a 747 taking off. Smoke was making up the cot.
“How can you stand to be in here?” I shouted.
“You gotta do it quick,” he said. “Ten minutes when the fans are off. Then out.”
I should have evicted him, but good lifeguards capable of standing up to the demands of the Wave Pool were few and far between. In lieu of a raise my father would never give, letting him have a poorly lit den of inequity on park grounds seemed like a proper compromise at the time.
By way of non-monetary compensation, I also began what became an annual tradition of taking the Wave Patrol on an overnight camping trip on top of the mountain. The bashes were for guards only and were intended to take their minds off the precarious nature of human life. Unfortunately, we nearly killed ourselves in the process.
After toting beer and other necessary supplies up the mountain in Charlie O’Brien’s Jeep and Bob Krahulik’s Dodge Dart, we settled in around the fire. As it crackled and sparked, I told the Patrol how happy my father was about the Wave Pool’s success and how important their work was to the growth of the park. It was supposed to bolster their morale and keep them from quitting, but I meant every word. Their courage in the face of lunacy was inspiring.
Less than sober, we swam across the mountaintop lake that helped feed the snowmaking machines. Swimming under the influence is one way people drown, but we were in our teens and twenties and felt invincible. Plus, we rationalized, if someone was in real trouble, there were a dozen lifeguards around. We made our way across, laughing and talking as we went. The water was refreshingly clean compared to the Wave Pool’s mix of sweat and lotion.
Once it got dark, a lifeguard named Dan Giachin suggested shining the headlights of the Jeep in our direction. Dan started the engine, then began backing up to turn the vehicle toward the fire. He must not have known how close to the edge he was, because the rear wheels lost their traction and the Jeep fell straight back on the hill, disappearing from sight.
We ran over to the edge, expecting to see Dan falling backward into darkness, envisioning indifferent snowmakers discovering his mangled form the next morning. Miraculously, the Jeep was sitting on the incline. Tommy Smith forced wooden boards under its rear tires to give it traction to return to level ground, and Dan and the Jeep were saved. When it came to averting disaster, we had become professionals. Later that night, the head parking-lot attendant and only civilian we had invited, Steve Moran, passed out in the lake after getting up to pee in it. I heard the splash and retrieved him. He passed out peacefully on the ground.
The next morning, we all awoke to pounding heads. Chuck Kilby couldn’t be roused at all, so the rest of us piled into the cars and left. Chuck would later wake up and discover someone had stolen his shoes. Groggy, he staggered down the mountain on foot wearing moccasins he fashioned out of leaves. He was determined to lay into all of us for abandoning him, but it was not to be. He had walked down the wrong side, ending up in the nearby town of Stockholm.
When Chuck knocked on a stranger’s door to ask for a phone, a very alarmed woman greeted him in the doorframe. Just then, a police car happened by. Evaluating Chuck and his moccasins, the officer asked what he was doing.
“I’m from the mountain,” Chuck said, as if that would explain everything.
On a particularly congested weekend before Labor Day, my father strolled up to the Wave Pool with oversized sunglasses obscuring his face from his forehead to his cheeks. He would periodically emerge from his office to take in the splashing and screaming of patrons, carrying himself like a chef wandering the dining room. “Having fun?” he asked kids, bending over and peering into their faces to better absorb their cheer. He bought ice cream for crowds of people ten deep. The throngs, now reaching fifteen thousand on some days, were causing food shortages. We rationed nachos until our supplier could catch up.
At the pool, he checked the fans to make sure they were cranked high, worried I might give occupants a fighting chance. I marveled at how he always seemed to arrive during a lull, then leave just moments before someone began gurgling for their life, reinforcing his untarnished perspective of the park.
After my father wandered off, Smoke nudged me, pointing to two heavyset women climbing into the pool with a raft. They balanced on it at opposite ends, splashing and shrieking like they were on a teeter-totter. By now, it was obvious to me who was capable of fending for themselves in the pool and who would immediately put themselves in some kind of danger. You learned to recognize the body language of a swimmer, who entered slowly and eased into the depths, and the spastic, who jumped in feet-first, sometimes while still in their jeans.
Smoke stood up and slid off his Ray-Bans, ready to jump in and preempt disaster. We had been at this for months. The beating sun was now peeling off my top layer of skin. My elbow throbbed from knocking it against the edges of the pool. My voice was dry and weak from screaming at people to grab the buoy. Cold fall air chilled my bare legs.
Reflexively, I put my arm out like a turnstile, stopping Smoke from bringing the whistle up to his lips. “No,” I said. “Give it a minute.”
The two women had come in between wave cycles. Barely keeping upright, they laughed and stuck their arms out for balance.
“They’re going under in two seconds,” he said.
“Just wait.”
The fans came on with a throoooom. The women held on with the first cascade, but the second capsized their tiny vessel. They started paddling with frenetic energy, trying to hold on to the side of the raft for support. It floated away from them with the next wave, and they quickly disappeared.
Vinnie tossed in a buoy. One of the women managed to get a grip, but the other ignored it. Smoke flew past me and dove in, grabbing the second woman. Slick with suntan lotion, she kept slipping out from his grasp. Panicking, she put him in a bear hug, dragging them both under. When they resurfaced, he pawed at her bathing suit top, searching for purchase. The fastener came undone, causing the top to slide down. Soon, Smoke was holding her up by her bare breast, embarrassed but desperate to keep her afloat. Lynette jumped in, and together they eventually got her to the side. Exhausted, Smoke began coughing up water. Beside him, the woman turned green and threw up all over Smoke’s arm. I couldn’t help but laugh, a sinister, reedy cackle that was startling to hear.
I tossed Smoke a towel as he came stomping back over, bits of half-digested hot dog staining his shorts. “What the fuck was that, Andy? Why didn’t you let me warn them?”
I looked out at the replica of the Jersey Shore my father had erected, everyone floating freely and soothed by their expectations of rescue, beckoned by a commercial that had sanitized the danger. I told him I didn’t know, but I did. Their obliviousness and freedom from consequences had worn on me. For one brief moment, I wanted them to feel as accountable for their own lives as we were.
I told him I was taking a break. On the way out, I passed the countdown timer for the waves. When guests stopped paying attention to it, the lifeguards modified it into a counter for the number of saves in a given day. The display’s number read twenty-seven. I reached over and hit a button. It now read twenty-nine.