Hydro Death Trap

I will start by saying that I should have written this story a long time ago. My disclaimer, however, is this: the events of this day were so outlandishly bizarre to me that I had no idea how to effectively capture them on paper. I will follow by apologizing for the length of this entry. I tried to be succinct but honestly felt each of the ensuing details was necessary – I hope you can stick around, have I not been worth it?! (rhetorical question, folks, don’t answer that).

It all happened a few weeks ago. I was hanging out with Tim when we thought it would be fun to take his kids either out to the lake or to the pool for the day. We left the decision up to them (without a boat, lakes are probably more fun for adults anyway: barbeque, beer, floaties, cliff jumping… typically non 8- and 10-year old fare). As we expected, the kids chose the pool. West Pool. Specifically, West Playdium Pool… That right there should give you a hint about the kind of people who own and operate said pool, and perhaps even provide a glimpse of their IQ levels. I should have realized then what a nightmarishly horrible situation anybody stupid enough to enter the grounds was walking into.

I need to pause here and say: for any of you who are reading this now and have been to the West Playdium Pool, I will just say: congratulations, the odds of you making it out alive were absolutely against you. They should develop a Purple Heart for bravery and courage just for making it out without Tetanus and all of your limbs intact.

So as soon as we get to the pool, the girls are excited and frantically asking me questions about have I ever been here before? Am I going to get in the pool and play with them? Because ohmygosh its sooo fun here! My answers were “no” and “sure,” respectively, followed by my internal monologue thoughts of yeah sure it’s fun here. Big ass pool in the middle of nowhere, probably a lawn chair on the side and not a slide in sight for kids. Yeah, fun. Holy fuck, if I’d have known I was walking into a situation with limitless story value I would have had a pen and paper out ready to record every hilarious word and observation Tim and I made that day.

The journey began with a ditsy attendant who was so out there I was sure he was high, or drunk, or maybe had been hit in the head really hard very recently, or all of the above. Said attendant (who Tim and I would later name “Claude” – think Hank Azaria from ‘Along Came Polly’) was manning the little spinny Disneyland-esque waist gate leading to the pool. When we didn’t have quite enough cash to get in, Tim produced his debit card. I could go into a lot of detail as to how much of an ordeal the credit card machine was for Claude to handle, but I will just nutshell it by saying, Claude was seriously considering free admittance for all four of us because of the challenge the machine posed. That should have been our first clue… So we walk in the pool grounds and I can immediately see why the girls were so excited to come here. In front of me was an enormous pool, with all manner of play-scapes and fun obstacles.

Everybody heads off to their respective bathrooms to change, and then we all sunscreen up and get in the pool. Tori and Courtney go off to play, so Tim and I are floating and talking, and I’ve hoisted myself up onto this massive pier-looking structure in the middle of the pool (that is covered with astro-turf and cause for many a rug burn). I’m just lying there watching the widespread child revelry all around me, soaking it in, when I just have to say something. I turn to Tim and say, you know, this place is full of hazards! Tim’s eyes instantly bulged and all he could respond with was, I know! I’ve been trying to tell people that for such a long time but everybody just looks at me like I’m crazy! The next couple hours were spent detailing each of the ways one could kill themselves by going to the West Playdium Pool. Here are the highlights:

Exhibit A: The Zip Line of Death. You know at Wild Rivers/Schlitterbahn/Raging Waters, etc how they have those water bridge things where there’s basically a rope slung across the pool with little handles spaced every so often, strategically placed over floating, squishy lily-pad like steps that are usually somehow tied to the bottom of the pool so that they float around and move juuuuust enough to make the lily-pad bridge hard to climb across but super fun? Okay, the Playdium has that too. Except the fun rope is a FUCKING ZIP LINE from no less than thirty feet in the air on one side of the pool that comes to a dead stop thirty yards across the pool about six inches from the concrete lip of the pool in about four feet of water. Oh, and the lily pad steps? The Playdium has those, too, except they aren’t actually part of the zip line of terror, they are just massive, four-foot-across, unmoving, concrete oases strategically placed directly under the zip-line for tanning or lounging, or for little children to pull their drowning selves out of the abyss if they happen to go too deep since there is one person to oversee the entire Playdium experience… but that’s another part of the story, I’ll get there.

Exhibit B: The Playground Slide. The pool also had a water slide. This, however, was not your typical water slide. This “water slide” looked like they’d hired the local hoodlums to go down to the middle school and jack the slide right out of the sand and haul it down to the pool. It was the jankety-ass metal slide that anybody who was between the ages of four and 15 anywhere during the 80’s remembers from the local public playgrounds because it was the same one you would go to steal cups from McDonalds to use to rub down the slide surface to make it more slippery so that you could actually slide down it rather than have your skin ripped and/or melted off from the scorching, not slick metal surface. So that slide was cemented to the edge of the pool with a fucking garden hose snaked up through the steps and plopped over the top so that water was streaming down, thus creating the “water slide.” Oh, I forgot to mention that there were several areas on the edge of the slide that were jagged and possibly rusting from what looks like being hammered back into place.

It was here that mine and Tim’s conversation was broken by a male voice yelling, hey! You have to let go at the bottom of the zip line! after a boy had come careening down the zip line and ran full into the concrete lip at the other end of the pool. The voice came from Claude, who Tim and I noticed was now sitting at the edge of the pool at the deep end now holding a lifeguarding tube, remotely looking like he was trying to lifeguard.

Exhibit C: Diving Boards. If you picture the deep end of the pool as a big L, the low dive was on the small part of the L and the high dive was on the long part of the L. Except, they were both the same distance away from the 90 degree corner. Meaning, as kids were diving off they were literally diving into the same exact place, completely willy-nilly, no supervision or roped off area to aim for. God forbid limbs intertwine and cause mid-air knock-outs.

Exhibit D: The Basketball Hoop. Just in case zip lines and high dives aren’t for you, the shallow end of the pool had a basketball hoop. Well, I think it used to be a basketball hoop. There was no hoop. Or backboard, for that matter. Really, it was actually just a big metal poll that looked like Medusa. Mangled metal supports (at least four of them) were jutting out at grotesque angles, a mere three to four feet above the surface of the water. The hoop had literally been dunked on so hard that it was ripped from its hangings and was left standing in the middle of the pool, a proverbial Pez dispenser of tetanus.

It was at this point that Tim and I noticed Claude was not manning the deep end with his lifeguard tube anymore. He had moved behind the shallow end of the pool to the snack shack area. More specifically, to the mini pool table that was right next to the snack shack area. It was then that our discussion turned to and focused on Jack-Of-All-Trades Claude. So far, Claude was the money taker, pool sweeper, life guard, zip line bucketer **, and hamburger flipper. And now he’s all of a sudden found time to become Claude, patron of the Playdium who just happens to be playing a casual game of mini pool?? Why the fuck is he the only person working in this watery death trap?

** Yes, at the top of the rickety zip line rope was a wooden structure – half jungle gym, half tree house complete with wooden ladder – from which departing zippers would have to manually draw the zip line back and coil the rope into an empty ten-gallon lard bucket before they can zip. I will also mention that the part of the tree house from which kiddie zippers depart is a completely open faced wall – there are no gates or barriers to keep kids from tumbling over the side and plummeting 20+ feet to the concrete below.

Exhibit E: The Blue Iguana Lounge. Finally, the clincher. I am convinced that the above exhibits should be proof enough the Playdium’s “death trap” status; however, for those of you that need one final piece of evidence to convince, here it is. Next to aforementioned snack shack and miniature pool table was the Blue Iguana Lounge. The Blue Iguana Lounge was basically some bar stools pulled up to a cut out window in a falling down wooden shack that looked like it was super-glued onto the side of the snack shack area. It was a full service bar. Remember, this pool is in the middle of nowhereville, Texas in a tiny-ass town so by full service I mean it has a wide variety of beer: Bud, Bud Light and Lonestar and all manner of cocktails: the Jimbo-rita and the Pink Elephant (Jimbo-rita with strawberry syrup). And if those selections weren’t enough for your sophisticated palate, have no fear, yes the Blue Iguana Lounge does serve Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill by the bottle.

So let’s recap this entire scenario very quickly.

Two diving boards send children plummeting at one another; there is a constant stream of children careening down a 30-foot zip line while dodging unmoving, concrete lily-pads – that is, if they haven’t fallen out of the doorless treehouse; garden hose metal water slide; tetanus-ridden mangled medusa hoop; Claude the solo super employee to who’s repertoire we have now added, “bartender.” As if the above list wasn’t filled with enough causes of death. People, the fucking pool also serves copious amounts of liquor.

I seriously couldn’t make this up. It is honestly a death trap. Coming from my former lifeguard self, I’m shocked there have been no deaths at this place, and I’m not going to lie – I am filled with the same morbid curiosity one has when driving past a massive highway wreck. I have to go back to that place, sans Tori and Courtney, for the sole purpose of watching the tangled web of calamitous potential. From afar, of course. No way in hell am I getting near that damned zip line.

Reflections

Do you ever wish you could turn off your heart? I do. Sometimes I think life would be easier if all the complications of emotion and love were just gone – that I didn’t have to worry about letting go, because there was nothing to succumb to, nothing to throw my heart at and wonder if it was going to sink in or bounce off and shatter into a million pieces. I think if it were possible for me I probably would have let my mind talk my heart out of the game a long time ago. But then something happens that makes me remember why I always opt to dive in and take the hurt with the joy. Something happens to remind me that everybody usually has what boils down to the same fears, just manifested in different ways – fear of being excluded, abandoned, unrequited, of being inferior, etc. The trick is finding somebody you can show all of that to, and it’s still okay. This won’t mean anything to most of you, but it will to someone someday, and it does to me – and that’s all that matters.

Because waiting for the repeated punch line is the best part of the joke.
Because cautious optimism really means elation.
Because there’s a connection in walking in silence.
Because all that’s missing is a million dollars.
Because ‘miserable’ and ‘craving’ fill empty spaces.
Because rhyming and repeating help.
Because one-armed side hugs turn into real ones.

Rainy Monday

I don't mind
You’re someone who ain't mine
But someone that I'll get
And you don't know how
Hard I've tried
To convince myself that I
Can easily forget

But you left this feeling
Here inside me
One that never fails to find me...

On a rainy Monday
...a feeling inside me
Like the days of summer
On a rainy Monday
...I feel it inside me
In the hopes of one day

I won't lie
I still can't say that I
Admit we went too far
And you won't see me change my mind
But I really wish that I
Could forget the way you are

But you left this feeling here inside me
The battle in my mind still fights me

On a rainy Monday
...a feeling inside me
Like the days of summer
On a rainy Monday
...I feel it inside me
In the hopes of one day

I can see that you're not beside me
But I still feel you shine inside of me

On a rainy Monday
...a feeling inside me
Like the days of summer
On a rainy Monday
...I feel it inside me
In the hopes of one day…

Lyrics by Shiny Toy Guns

There's a lot of joy to be had, and even though I know hurt inevitably accompanies it, the former so far outweighs the latter that I can only believe it's worth it. And I’m not about to give up now.