Swimming in the House of the Sea

The retard is finally asleep, which is great because now I can head down to the hotel swimming pool and relax. I can finish off this gut punch of a day without thinking about the blown engine on my sedan, or the lung-sucking heat tomorrow’s sunshine will bring.

It’s time to get this nasty, reeking desert sweat off my skin and just float in the clear, chlorinated water. I picture myself, arms and legs extended wide, a big floating X in Hawaiian print shorts. I’ll close my eyes and hover there in the safe, sanitized water, floating static and alone while the world rotates around me. I can let the cool water roll into my ears and amplify the sound of my heart.

I grab my plastic key card with its generic sun-and-palm-tree logo and the words “Casa Del Mar Resort Hotel—Bakersfield, CA” across the top. I slip it into my swim shorts pocket and seal the Velcro shut. I don’t grab one of our ratty, dishrag-thick room towels; there should be some plushies down by the pool.

I take a quick look at my brother, Dude, who is seventeen and still wearing pajamas with Looney Tunes on them. His too-far-apart eyes are twitching beneath his eyelids, which I read as deep sleep. The sound of his breathing fills up the room, eclipsing even the hum of the air conditioner. His thick snore is the final nail in the coffin of my evening’s eligible bachelorhood. Even if I could find a girl to hook up with in this festering armpit of a city, I can’t bring her back to the Snore Suite at Casa Del Mar.

I close the hotel door behind me, clipping off the sound of my retarded brother’s stertoric breathing. I hate the sound of Dude’s breathing, when he’s asleep. It’s like he has to fight the air to pull it in, all sniffles and snoring and open-mouth rasping. Or, as my dad once said to my mom, before their divorce two years ago, “Maybe Dude can’t breathe right because God wants him to stop.”

“Stop what?” asked Mom.

“Stop breathing, living, all of it. Maybe God’s hoping he’ll give up and die.”

Dad was a charmer back then, right before the marriage fell from its hippie foundation. Mom decided that Jesus was her new savior, and told Dad that he had to stop making acid in the tub. Dad got turned off by Mom’s newfound fire-and-brimstone, her nightly Bible readings, her orthodox self-improvement. He shuttled his drug engineering to placate her and secretly reinvested his energies in the pursuit of free love.

Free love turned out to be an ex-Hell’s Angels harem member who claimed to have been in a gang-bang with Sonny Barger and Bob Dylan back in ‘65. Her name was Jasmine and she still lived in LaLaLand, Dad’s preferred real estate.

Jasmine lets my dad drink Jack Daniels from her cooch.

Dads will tell you this kind of shit after a divorce. They think it affirms a newfound buddyhood. The illicit info just bugs me out, but I don’t tell him. He seems happy, to a degree. The older I get, the harder it is for me to question the guy’s decisions. He’s just some older version of me that got caught up in responsibility barbwire.

My mom’s Christ fixation popped the wheel on their party bus. Dad scoped out the life ahead of him, realized living with a bum, a mongoloid, and a Bible-thumper wasn’t going to cut it, and bailed. His decision to run makes sense to me, but it kills the odds on us ever being buddy-buddy.

I only have to see him once a month anyway, when I pick up Dude in LA and bring him back to my mom’s place in Modesto.

I run the errand for Mom, Dude’s custody deal stays smooth, and I get free rent at my mom’s townhouse in lovely northern Cali.

The free rent soothes the sting of being a twenty-one-year-old college drop-out, and it opens up a lot of bonus cash for things like clothes, weed, and new tattoos. So, to supplement my video store-clerk income, I make this long, hot drive once a month.

It’s retard trafficking, and I dig the kickbacks.

Casa Del Mar is a shade short of seedy. The wallpaper varies, floor-to-floor, and there’s an odor hovering in the air, with the particles of carpet sanitizer. It’s the smell of trapped people, desperation; it’s the smell of nervous drug deals, inescapable affairs, lonely masturbation, junk-food binges that spray the air with fructose and crumbs. It’s the smell that’s coming from me, the stale sweat that a bad auto-breakdown in the middle of the desert has soaked me with.

I can’t wait to get clean; there’s just one more set of stairs till I hit the lobby floor and the swimming pool. The elevator is, of course, stationary for the time being, although a lovely computer-printed sign did apologize for the inconvenience.

I get to the pool entrance, scan my room card, unlatch the door, and walk onto the tile floor. The pool is standard hotel issue, nothing fancy, and the depth tops out at six feet, which means no diving unless I want to surface sans teeth. There’s a hot tub to my right, full of foamy bubbles. Someone must have had laundry detergent on their shorts when they went in.

There’s a large, square skylight over the pool, but it’s been steamed opaque by the overactive hot tub, and I can’t see all the stars. Shit, the star view’s got to be one of the only reasons to inhabit a Godless desert like this.

There aren’t any plush hotel towels in the area, so I’ll have to drip dry on the walk back to my room. Hopefully the hotel catches a little carpet mildew as a trade off for my inconvenience.

The chlorine smell to the air is pervasive, which I find comforting. Caustic chemical odors make me feel safe inside, protected from the bacterial traces of other hotel residents.

I set my key card on the tile in the far left corner of the pool area, looking over my shoulder as I do it, despite the absence of any other pool-goers. Then I jump into the deep end, feet first, and the water splashes up and feels perfect on my skin. Cool, and clean, and mildly astringent. I dip my head under and push off of the wall with my feet, shooting to the other end of the pool with a few strokes of my arms. I open my eyes just before I hit the wall, and the chlorine burns, but the view saves me from smashing headfirst into the circular light mounted at the shallow end of the pool. I close my eyes again, and stand up.

My heart is beating fast as I surface, and I feel the water rolling down my skin, sloughing off the sweat, and engine stink, and frustration of the day. I reach up to push the excess water away from my eyes with the back of my hands. I hear the door to the pool area slide open, then hard, flat shoes on tile. Then, a voice.

“All right, sport, up and out. Pool’s closin’.”

I open my eyes and see an eighty-year-old man wearing a hotel security outfit, the type of outfit that’s vaguely cop-like, but not so derivative the guy could spend his after-work hours impersonating a real officer. For example, there’s a white iron-on reading “Casa Del Mar Security—Rollins” where a badge would normally be. Still the guy’s got a take-no-shit demeanor to his creaky, old voice, and his shoes are so spit-shined I can see my pale face reflected in the tips. I’m confused by what the geriatric justice dealer is croaking at me so I ask him a question.

“Excuse me, Rollins . . . ”

“Mr. Rollins, young man.”

“Okay. Yeah, sorry about that. Mr. Rollins, the brochure up in my hotel room said adult swim is until eleven.”

I can see the guy looking me up and down, catching the tattoos, the earrings, making quick judgments, deciding to take the zero bullshit approach.

“Brochure’s wrong. Pool’s till ten, hot tub’s till eleven.”

I’m not sure how I can respond to this, but I know that I need to swim more, that one lap hasn’t shaken the dirty aura of the day off me. I smile and shoot for polite, even though inside my head every single one of my friends is laughing at how soft I’m playing this situation.

“Okay, Mr. Rollins, I certainly understand hotel guidelines, and intend to respect them, but do you think I can swim for maybe twenty more minutes? I swear I won’t drown or make a mess, and I’ll be a happy hotel resident. I could be here for days, you know, my transmission blew out today and I’m pretty much stranded until my Mom FedEx’s some cash.”

Rollins looks like he wants to throw up on me, on my hokey obsequiousness, on my reliance on my mother. I can see inside his head.

The little puke needs money from his Mommy. When I was his age I’d already fought in the Great War and started a 400-acre dairy.

“Nope, hotel needs you out of the pool at ten. We’ve got automatic chlorine. Stay in past ten and you’ll get burnt. Up and out.”

So there I am, up and out, dripping but not ready to go back to the room; back to Dude and his loud, sickly breathing. I turn away from Mr. Rollins like a sullen thirteen-year-old, walk past him with my feet slapping wet on the tile like soggy fish, and twist the bubble-jet knob by the hot tub. I can hear his ancient voice-box rattling behind me again.

“Hot tub’s only till eleven. Then it’s up and out.”

I don’t even respond. I stare down at the mountain of foamy bubbles and wait for the old bastard to hobble on to other duties. It’s a relief when I hear the door close again.

The hot tub is a poor substitute for the calm, cleansing waters of the pool. The heated water doesn’t smell half as chlorinated and there’s a dead wasp floating near the drainage bucket, little legs raised to the sky, frozen in a permanent backstroke.

The water feels too hot; the steam from the surface is on my skin like new sweat. Unclean. Hot and unclean. Too many Goddamn bubbles; I’m waiting for a floating Lawrence Welk to pop up and play me a tune. I consider making a beard out of the bubbles, Abe Lincoln-style, but the urge passes. Mr. Rollins already infantilized me enough. I lean forward with my hands in front of me and watch the bubbles squiggle through the interstices of my fingers. It is mildly soothing, and I start to relax until I hear the pool door opening again.

I’m ready to fight Mr. Rollins tooth-and-nail to stay in this rotten little tub. Maybe if I splash him he’ll melt like that witch from Oz.

I crane my neck and notice with a little relief that Mr. Rollins has not returned. My new pool buddies are a couple of guys. The guy on the right is bald, with ruddy red cheeks, white chest hair, and a bit of a paunch above his black swim trunks. The guy on the left is younger, maybe my age, and has a full head of black hair, a slim moustache, a flat, nearly concave chest, and is wearing a pair of long, green surf shorts.

The young one’s carrying an inflated beach ball, which seems a little off. Screw it, maybe people are really into beach balls out in Bakersfield. This is definitely the kind of town where you have to make your own fun. Earlier today I was spitting on the hot concrete beside my broken-down ride, timing how long the saliva sizzled before evaporating.

I watch the new guys for a moment, to make sure they don’t steal my room card. My paranoia goes into overdrive when I travel. Everyone wants to steal everything I own. I relax and remind myself that all I really have right now is my gimpy brother, some stale bagels, and a business card for the auto shop I left the sedan at earlier today. Not exactly the Ark of the Covenant, but you never know what some people will try to steal.

The two guys step into the pool, and I contemplate telling them about the automated chlorine, but decide not to. It could have been a deviant lie on behalf of Mr. Rollins. Besides, it might be more fun to watch these guys get a chemical burn before Rollins comes back to lay down the law.

I turn back to my tiny bubbles and try to ignore the splashing noises to my right. I massage my right leg, aching from the pedal pushing I’d done until the tranny blew out on the highway. The jets seem to have cooled down the water in the hot tub a few degrees, so I decide to put my face under the water. I want to let the water rush into my ears so that all I can hear is my heart and the movement of the water around me.

The water seems a little grimy, so I just hover there, with my face an inch from the surface of the water, running my hands through my hair. The warmth of the water and the mist from the bursting bubbles is actually pretty soothing, and pushes me towards drowsy. I snap out of that right away, and lean back against the tub wall. The idea of passing out in the tub spooks me to the marrow. What if I didn’t wake up? Would the hotel staff find me in the morning, a skinny, tattooed slab of roast beef, pink flesh floating off the bone ready to carve? I picture Mr. Rollins throwing a sprig of parsley on my corpse, then gesturing to the hotel staff. “All right, he’s done. Up and out.”

My guts are starting to heat up and the tub doesn’t feel fun anymore, but if I bail too soon I’ll feel like Mr. Rollins has won. Won what?

I start to look for an answer in my head but I’m distracted by the sound of my new pool buddies batting the beach ball back and forth. They’re laughing and saying things to each other, but the weird tile acoustics in here muffle everything. They seem happy.

I wonder if Dude would like to play a game like that? Simple fucker, I’m sure he would. I could wake him up, bring him down here and introduce him. The beach ball guys would laugh when I introduced my brother as Dude, myself as Wolf. People always laugh at our names. I don’t bother to explain the situation to them, how our parents spent the seventies on some tripped out Kahlil Prophet shit and decided, in all their addled wisdom, to let us name ourselves. If I ever bother to breed, I’m naming the kid before it even pops out the womb. Some nice, Biblical name. I’m sure Mom could help me come up with something.

The paunchy older guy gives the beach ball a good whack and sends it flying above the pool, a high arc of rotating color, blue, to white, to yellow, to white, to red, to white, to green, and it lands outside of the pool, rolling towards me. The heat of the tub and the noise from the Gidget brothers has killed any chance I had at relaxation, and as the ball gets closer to me I swear I’ll pop it if I get the chance.

The twentysomething kid with the scrappy little moustache jumps out of the pool and picks up the ball before it has a chance to reach me. He regards me quickly as he grabs the ball, and I give him a hard look, the good old aimless ice grill.

Aggression without reason is a bit of a stress reliever in itself. Let somebody else absorb the shit I’ve been through today.

The kid nearly runs back to the pool, and jumps in with a splash. I’m sure Mr. Rollins would consider that horseplay. I wish there was a convenience phone right by the hot tub so I could rat these guys out and simmer in peace.

I lower my shoulders beneath the water. I sink my head so that my eye-line is just above the tile border of the hot tub and watch Paunchy and the Moustache Kid play their mutant beach ball game. There are no apparent rules, they’re just batting the thing back and forth, but the Moustache Kid asserts he is winning. He screams it up at the skylight. “I’m winning! I’m winning!”

Watching them play makes me think about Dude, about how we used to kick a soccer ball back and forth for hours in the backyard while Mom and Dad sat on the porch and roasted Js and listened to Iron Butterfly. Special times, right? Didn’t last though, because I kept growing and Dude didn’t, really. By the time I hit high school Dude had left standard issue brother status behind and become My Retarded Brother. Our parent’s marriage was beginning to crack around the acid-fried edges, and a lot of the responsibility for Dude got sent my way.

I dodged it, begged out, and abandoned the duty. I figured I’d only be young once, what right did my parents have to saddle me with their mutant chromosomes. I hadn’t even really talked to Dude for two years, when Mom offered me the free rent/mongoloid transport trade off.

We still don’t talk much, although Dude likes the sound of his own voice, and will go on at length about cartoons, and sailboats, and his beloved Elton John. When he gets agitated on car rides, we listen to Elton John’s “Carla Etude” over and over again till he chills out.

I hate Elton John. I hate “Carla Etude.” I hate bad transmissions and overpriced mechanics and crying brothers that can’t be reasoned with because the Elton John tape is stuck in the deck of my broke-ass sedan. I hate all these movies that make retards look like saints and idiot savants, because I spend a lot of time with Dude, and all he seems like to me is a fucking broke-ass person whose brain won’t click over and work. Yeah, I sort of hate Dude.

I hate these guys to my right, playing baby games in the pool I was supposed to be relaxing in.

I keep watching them and now they’re wrestling with each other, and I wonder if this place is turning into a Roman bath house. They’re smiling, and laughing, and pulling each other’s hair. The Moustache Kid leaves long scratch marks on Paunchy’s back.

I couldn’t see it before, but I do now. I thought they might be businessmen ending a long day of conferences, or some kind of daffy foreign sports enthusiasts.

No, these guys are together.

This beach ball business is foreplay. Some kind of weird, childish foreplay killing my last shot at chilling out.

My dogshit day has fully invested itself in me. I’m seething, angry in my bones.

I have to do something.

I pop out of the hot tub, jump into the pool, and snatch the multi-colored beach ball from the Moustache Kid’s hands before he can even comprehend what’s going on. Then, as quickly as I got in, I’m out, dripping on the tile with their ball clutched under my left arm. I turn to face the guys.

The Moustache Kid looks five seconds from crying, and it’s a weird, questioning look on his face that I can’t fathom, so I turn to Paunchy and say, “Pool time’s over. Up and out.”

I pop their beach ball between my hands, and feel the stale air move across my wet skin. Paunchy is coming towards me, his face and bald scalp bright red.

I hit the light switch and bail out of the pool entrance, leaving the buddies back in blackness. I begin to run, wanting to enjoy this but not quite able to bring any laughter to the surface.

I hear the pool entrance open behind me, then slam shut. I run a little faster as heavy, bounding footsteps rush up behind me.

Before I can react, there are wide, heavy hands upon my shoulders, spinning me around like a little top and grabbing me firm again. Then I’m being slammed into the wall behind me, and I’m face to face with Paunchy, feeling cheap plaster tinkling down on my scalp where my head impacted the wall.

Paunchy’s breath is on my face, hot, and he’s got me looking right into his wide, brown eyes.

“Why?” he asks.

“Why what?” I play dumb. Paunchy won’t stand for it and gives me another good smack into the wall.

“Why? Why do people like you have to ruin everything?”

“Ruin what? Your stupid little game? Your faggy little pool party?” I’m about to piss myself, but Paunchy’s reaction is so unexpected that part of me is still tweaking, playing tough. And I don’t know where the “faggy” business comes from. The whole straight/gay thing is a non-issue to me. Pick a hole, have at it. I don’t care.

Paunchy shakes me again, demanding my attention, his eyes on the verge of tears.

“You think we’re gay? What do you know? You don’t know anything; people like you just want to take things away, to hurt people like me, like my son. My son is crying now, back in that pool, and I’ve left him alone.”

I’m nervous, beginning to stammer, confused. “Yeah, but the guy should be able to handle himself, he’s like twenty . . . ”

“You fucking jerk, my son is schizophrenic. He can’t handle things like a normal twenty-year old. That’s why he’s crying right now. Because of you. The kid never has fun, his brain’s got him all twisted up, and he’s scared all the time, like he’s stuck in hell. But he was smiling tonight, he liked the game, he liked the pool, and you took that away. And for what? I mean, can you tell me why?”

I have no answer for the man. Which is bad, because he’s balling one of his fists and I’m thinking he might want to beat an answer out of me. Where’s Mr. Rollins when I’m about to be maimed?

Paunchy shakes me again, just short of furious.

“Why did you have to mess with us?”

I have no answer for the man.

His son exits the pool and approaches us, stops just short of my right shoulder. His eyes are red and bleary. He speaks. “Hey, Dad?”

Paunchy takes a deep breath, then responds, “Yes, Michael?”

“Dad, there aren’t any towels by the pool.”

“Well, there should be some back at the room. Do you know where that is?”

“Yeah, Dad.”

“Okay, well, head on up and I’ll meet you in a sec’, okay?”

“Okay.” The Moustache Kid walks away and turns to the stairwell. He is shivering, although the hotel is stifling hot.

The kid is shivering because of me, because I popped his ball and left him behind, in the dark. His dad leans in close to my face, our lips almost touching, his eyes deadlocked to mine.

“I’m going to go take care of my son.”

I want to say sorry, to say something, but nothing comes across my lips.

Paunchy throws his meaty right fist into my soft belly and I hit the floor. He spits a quick, harsh “Fuck you” before turning to the stairwell.

I manage to retain my lunch and start breathing again. I half walk, half crawl my way up the stairs to my floor.

I reach into my Velcro shorts pocket and come up with nada. My Casa Del Mar room key is still down at the locked pool, but I don’t want to risk running across Mr. Rollins, or head to the front desk and ask for a replacement.

I knock on the door for two minutes before Dude wakes and opens it. He’s confused, and tired, and wants to know why I’m bleeding.

I tell him I took a bad dive, down at the pool, that the deep end wasn’t deep enough. I don’t mention the large, angry man who decided to crack some drywall with my skull.

Dude walks me over to our bathroom, the legs of his rayon pajamas whisping against each other. I sit down on the toilet and Dude puts a towel to my head, which has developed a steady, jackham-mer throb. Dude presses the towel down too hard, while he’s trying to staunch the blood seeping from my split scalp. It hurts, sending quick, white-fire pain down my spine, and I lash out with my left arm, pushing Dude into the bathroom counter.

“Stay away from me, you fucking retard.” He’s out the door quick, and I flop off the toilet, then reposition myself to vomit.

I take off my clothes and crawl into the shower. I start the water up, sharp and cold, to try and wash away the whole day, the whole evening, everything. I can hear Dude crying in the other room. I’m good at that, I guess. I try, but I can’t work up any crocodile tears for myself.

The shower isn’t helping. I’m trying to make things right inside my head, trying to replay the pool situation in a way that doesn’t make me feel like a total asshole. The cold water isn’t helping my noxious headache.

I get out of the shower and dry off. I throw on some flannel pants and wrap the last clean, ratty towel around my head, and hope my scalp wound will clot soon.

I walk out to the air-conditioned hotel room and see that Dude has cried himself to sleep in his twin bed on the left side of the room. I sit on the edge of my bed and look at my brother.

My vision is blurring, and I probably have a concussion, but it feels right to look at him like this, like for once I’m the vigilant and caring older brother. I think for a moment about all the times I’ve told My Poor Retarded Brother stories, playing the pity card to get into some drunk girl’s pants. I think about the times I’ve seriously considered abandoning Dude at some rest stop along the highway, picturing the guilty relief that would spread across my parents’ faces when I tell them Dude had disappeared.

For the first time, the thoughts feel like poison in my bruised belly. I don’t know how to shake the feeling. The digital clock on the bed stand reads 3:23. I collapse into my bed.

I can’t sleep. Things are too wrong to sleep.

So, at 3:27 I slip out of my bed and into Dude’s. I let one of my arms flop onto his thin chest. He wakes for a moment; his thick, unsteady breathing smoothes out. He turns his head towards me, and opens his eyes, surprised that I’m there.

“Wolf?”

“Yeah, Dude, it’s me.”

“Okay. Are you going to sleep by me?”

“Yeah, Dude.”

“Okay. Hey, Wolf?”

“Yeah, Dude.” The irritation I’m trying to shake comes back into my voice.

“Sorry I hurt your head earlier, Wolf. I didn’t mean to.”

I’m thinking, “It’s okay, I know you didn’t mean to, and I’m sorry I hit you, I’m sorry for so many things.” I can’t get the words out of my mouth. Looking at Dude’s wide eyes, hearing the care in his voice, I’m almost paralyzed.

Then my whole body is shaking, and I can tell I’m a moment away from sobbing. I wrap my arms tight around Dude, and shake against my will. I don’t cry out loud, because I don’t want to upset him anymore. I hold the tears in and feel heat radiating from my face.

He can tell I’m upset and he runs his fingers through my hair for a moment, each finger tracing a soft line across the side of my head. Dude whispers to me.

“I know, Wolf. I know it hurts. But you’re going to be okay.”

It’s like the little fucker wants me to cry. So I do, I break, and I cry for longer than I ever have before, and Dude just keeps running his fingers through my hair until I stop shaking.

When I’m done, all I can think to say is, “Thanks, bro.”

Dude repeats it back to me. “Thanks, bro.”

Those are the last words we speak before Dude slips back into sleep. I want to pass out, but I consider my probable concussion and fight to stay awake, while my brother fights to breathe.

Should he stop breathing, I’d be there to save him.

This is the oath that I swear into the too-bright sunrise, as the desert heat returns and our room at the Casa del Mar fills with new light.