THE DROWSY LIFEGUARD

By Tony Martins

When I was a listless and apathetic lad of 18, I took a weekend-long training course to become certified as a lifeguard. I’d heard that youthful pool monitors were scarce in the summer and that there were jobs to be had. 

But I signed up reluctantly because in truth I had no real interest in having a summer job of any kind. My boyhood buddies had dubbed me the Supreme Lazy Being for good reason. As a rule, I didn’t want to do much of anything except play sports and hang out. I lacked enterprise, you might say. 

Still, I needed seasonal employment to keep my mother off my back and lifeguarding seemed like a good fit. You sat around, watched the pool, and worked on your tan. Nothing to it, right?

After enduring a mostly farcical certification course (the lead instructor was stripped of his credentials for breaking several safety rules and for choosing only the buxom female participants for his prolonged demonstrations of the full-body injury search), I lucked out and was hired to guard perhaps the tamest and lamest pool in the city. It was located on the grounds of twin condominium buildings—dwellings mostly occupied by, shall we say, the retiring type. That meant there’d be no frolicking kidlets or party-hardy teenagers to cope with.

Surrounded by a pointy metal fence to keep out the riff raff, the modest pool had a huge shallow end and a rinky-dink deep end. Here’s how things worked: plump and pale old folks shuffled down through the gate mostly to sun themselves. They’d cool off with the odd dip and then haul their wrinkled forms back to lawn chairs and paperback thrillers. For a lifeguard, this was the life. It was probably the easiest drowning-prevention assignment you could imagine, but it did not come without challenges.

Although the pool was frequently empty until at least noon, my shift typically began at 8 a.m. This meant that I was often alone for hours before any bathers showed up.

What’s more, if the air was too cool or the sky too overcast, the pool could very well remain empty for the entire day. The Supreme Lazy Being, now a sleep-deprived teenager, often had a good number of lonely hours to fill—hours during which he would usually become supremely sleepy.

And that, you might have imagined, is how the trouble started.

On one particular cold, cloudy, and windswept morning, I clocked in on time but simply knew that no bathers would appear. Very quickly, as was my wont, I was bored out of my skull and, true to form, barely able to stay awake.

In the absence of actual rain drops, I could not call head office and request a closure for the day. Instead, I shivered alone with a book on the pool deck for an hour or three, valiantly fighting off sleep. 

But it was a fight that I was destined to lose. Heavy-lidded and defeated, I grabbed two foam flutterboards (kept on hand for the assisted dogpaddle that was the pool’s most popular stroke) and ducked into the men’s changing room. Arranged end-to-end, the flutterboards served as a makeshift sleeping surface. Confident that no swimmers would appear, I’d determined to make the best of it by catching some cherished Zs.

Sighing with contentment, I reclined upon my improvised mattress, but before I could happily drift off, something caught my eye: a pair of grey nylon swim trunks were hanging on a hook, obviously left behind by a bather on the day previous.

I rose to examine the trunks and discovered that they were exactly my size. Still chilled from hours of exposure on the windy pool deck, I reasoned that I could use another layer for warmth. I also reasoned I could use a nice pair of grey swim trunks. So I removed my jogging pants and slipped the mesh-lined shorts on over my Speedo. (I was 18. Speedos were de rigueur.) 

With jogging pants back on over top, I curled up again on the foam boards and quickly fell into a deep and oh-so-satisfying slumber.

But the bliss was short-lived.

I was violently jarred awake when the change room door flew open and the dark shape of a man loomed in the doorway, silhouetted by the blinding sunlight that streamed in all around him.

Squinting and defenseless in fetal position, I struggled to contain my shock and shake off the drunkenness of slumber. Mired in an unpleasant mix of panic and stupor, I heard the featureless man say something that sounded like:

“Hob hugh sheem muh horz?”

Of course I was far too panicked and disoriented to decipher what he was saying and could only issue a kind of groan in response. This prompted him to articulate again, now in a more insistent tone, “Hob hugh sheem muh horz?”

Now sitting up, I’d recovered enough of my wits to recognize the man as one of the elderly gentlemen who often frequented the pool. To my great relief, he seemed completely unconcerned to have come upon me, the lifeguard, here in the changing room, sleeping on the floor.

But a new type of anxiety gripped me next when the man repeated his garbled inquiry for a third time and at last I figured out was he was saying. 

All along the man had been asking “Have you seen my shorts?”

My mind raced, blocking rationale thought and sending my heart up into my throat. 

Now there were two reasons for which I felt completely exposed. I was certain that intense feelings of shame, guilt, and humiliation were etched all over my face, giving me away as both a sleeping lifeguard and a petty thief. 

Somehow I muttered the response, “Uhh, no.”

A blatant lie, yes, but cut me some slack. Could I possibly have said: “Yes, I’ve seen your shorts—and I’m wearing them for safekeeping”? 

I had already been discovered asleep on duty by one of the people whose lives I was entrusted to extend. Could I now also admit a theft to the very person from whom I’d thieved?

“I’m sure I left them in here yesterday,” insisted the man, now inside and pointing to the very hook on which the shorts had hung just a short while ago.

“Really? Well I haven’t seen anything,” I replied, scratching my head, shuffling my feet, and praying that the shorts were not poking out from beneath my jogging pants.

Lingering for a moment, the man looked exasperated and said something like “Damn.” 

And then, just as suddenly as he’d appeared, he was gone. 

I was left alone. In silence. Thinking on my many sins.

The episode had been so sudden, swift, and surreal that almost immediately I questioned whether it had actually taken place. I mean, what were the chances of such a sequence of events occurring? Could even a punishment from God himself for my simple misdeeds be so swift—and so punishing?

To distract myself from all this, I hurried outside onto the pool deck, now anxious to vigorously do my duty, not caring a hoot that I would be the only human witness to the renewed diligence. God would be watching.

Soon afterwards, the much-needed rain finally came.

It released me, though it did not cleanse me. 

Still wearing the grey swimming trunks that would eventually become a permanent fixture in my young adult wardrobe, I did what I had been yearning to do all morning. 

I went home to bed.