LOM Chapter 13. Swim Test
The barium enema—whatever it was—could not be scheduled for another week and a half. Meanwhile, the water polo team was starting summer mini-camp—two weeks of twice-daily practices. You could skip mini-camp if you wanted to; the team was small enough that it wasn’t too hard to get onto varsity, but I liked hanging out and playing ball without the stress of school. Besides, now that I was not working, I needed something to do.
The first day of practice was the swim test. All the players had to do it, whether or not they played the previous season. Along with the rest of them, I stripped to my trunks and jumped in to the pool. It felt cold but good—I was glad to be back in practice.
The first part of the test was treading water for ten minutes, which should have been easy to the point of boring. I couldn’t do it.
“What the hell is wrong with you, Peary?” Coach Cooper yelled at me.
I was working too hard to give breath to an answer. I was struggling to stay up, but could not let myself quit.
“Peary, are you planning to drown in my pool?”
He was right—things seemed to be headed that way, but there was a lot riding on my staying afloat. It was my senior year, and I was a shoe-in for varsity. If I did well, it would help me get into college, because a lot of schools were building their water polo teams.
But ambition and ability were two different things, and neither kept me afloat. My head dipped under the water and I came up sputtering. Cooper hit me on the shoulder with a pole and told me to grab it. When I did, he dragged me to the side of the pool. I had made it four minutes, maybe five—not even close to ten.
“Peary, you get hit on the head or something? Forget how to swim?” he asked.
I coughed a bit, then took a deep inhale. “No, sir, Coach,” I said, my voice hoarse from coughing. “I just got a bit sick over the summer, and lost some weight. I’m just tired. I’ll get it back.”
“You better,” he said, “or you can’t swim in my pool. Go home and come back when you’re feeling more energetic, give it another try.”
“Coach Cooper, I can do this,” I protested. “You know me. I can swim, I can play.”
“I know, Wes,” he said, “I know you can do it. But the rules say I can’t let you practice until I see you pass the swim test. Sorry, man—that’s just how it is.”
I toweled off next to the pool while the rest of the team finished their swim test. Pete swam over. “Wes, dude,” he said, still treading water. “You look awful. Is this the same thing you had on the surf trip?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I got a new doctor, but they still haven’t figured out what’s wrong with me. He did say it was the medicine that—you know, caused the problem the next morning. That’s why I wasn’t supposed to drink.”
“Wait—what happened?” asked one of the other players, also treading water.
“Wes drank a can of beer at, like, eleven in the morning,” said Matty. “Then he starts spewing, just as we’re trying to get back to Orlando. Pete’s car was like a vomit comet, with a trail of barf behind it the whole way.”
“Nasty,” said the other player.
“It wasn’t that bad,” said Pete. “He only puked once after we started driving.”
“We had to roll down the windows,” said Matty.
I let that go for a minute, then balled up my towel and stuffed it into my pool bag. “I guess I should be getting home.”
“Later, Wesley,” said Pete. “Feel better.”
“Come back when you can hold your liquor,” said Matty.
As soon Matty had said it, Coach Cooper reached over from the deck and pushed him under water. After a moment of struggle, Cooper let him back to the surface.
“Coach—what the fuck?”
“You want to be on my team? I better not hear about you drinking any. Got that?”
As they argued, I picked up my bag and walked off the pool deck. I got in my car with the intention of driving home, but on the way my guts began to clench and sputter. There was not a lot between school and home, and I knew better than to push my luck again. The only place to stop was a small convenience store about mid-way. I pulled into the parking lot and jumped out of my car.
The swarthy man who ran the place saw me come in and guessed where I was headed. “Restroom for customer only,” he grunted.
“Okay,” I said. I kept going, briskly.
“You need key,” he insisted.
I turned around and walked to the counter, my guts writhing and my anus already starting to pucker. I stood at the counter for a moment, looking at the clerk, before I blurted out, “Can I have the key?”
“You buy something first. Key for customer only.”
I grabbed a pack of gum—priced at twenty-five cents—and pulled a dollar from my wallet. The man rang up the sale with as much pomp and ceremony as he could muster, then reached underneath the counter for the key to men’s room. I snatched it and skittered into the bathroom.
My rectum detonated in the bathroom just moments after I pulled down my shorts. I caught myself with the earthquake bar, grabbing hold to keep from having to sit down on the filthy seat. Hunched over, pants around my ankles – my anus tightened into a perfect little nozzle and I sprayed watery poop into the toilet. I splashed all over the rim and onto the grimy tile floor. It was tiring; my legs could not hold me in that position for long. My anus, apparently the only inexhaustible muscle in my body, continued sputtering feces into and onto the toilet.
When I finished there was no toilet paper handy, and none anywhere in the room. I hopped over to the sink, still holding my shorts to my knees, and wiped my rear with coarse brown paper towels. The towels might as well have been sandpaper, and they went into the trash because a hand-lettered sign on grease-stained cardboard told me “No Flushing Of Paper Towels or Anything Other Then Toilet Tissue”. I pulled my shorts back to my waist and washed my hands.
I would have felt bad about the condition of the toilet after I left, had getting in there not been such a struggle. Merely unhygienic when I arrived, the bathroom was now a wasteland. I had no intention of cleaning it up or even apologizing to the despot running the place; asking for the key had been humiliating enough that I was determined to return it with as little fanfare as possible. I dropped the key on the counter on my way out without saying a word. “Thank you, come again,” the man growled after me, but I left, and I never went back.
League of Mortals by Duncan Cross is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.