Blast From the Past
You see the way I remember it is this: we were all ready to compete in the Men’s New York City AAU Swimming championship, “The Cities.” We had a really good team at the Boys Club of Queens and we could win but there was competition. Flushing Y had a good men’s team. So did St John’s University. There was also always the New York Athletic Club to deal with. New York AC always gave out free memberships to good athletes so they could compete for the club in various events. Since the AC was a really prestigious place to belong a lot of athletes took them up on their offers.
We were a sort of a rag tag group of Queens kids our coach, Richard Fair, had developed into well-conditioned, highly motivated athletes. Richard knew how to deal with kids who were half in and half out of the streets. He was a rough tough overweight cigar smoking guy who liked a drink now and then. I don’t know how Richard learned about swimming. I never saw him in the pool. He certainly wasn’t in shape when I knew him. In retrospect I think he didn’t know much about swimming at all but rather about motivation and how to reach the hearts of scared teenagers who wanted to be tougher than they actually were.
“I’ll tell you what,” Richard told us at a team meeting a few days before the meet. “If you guys win the cities I’ll do my world famous belly slide.”
Now I don’t know if I was just dumb or if no one really knew what the “World Famous Belly Slide” was. But we did know Richard was going to match our efforts with one of his own if we were successful. One of Richard’s chief characteristics as a coach was that he was fair as his name implied. He gave you praise when you deserved it and didn’t ride you too hard when you screwed up. Most of us had a lot of other crap to contend with at home. In retrospect again I guess Richard knew that.
I was growing up without a father, money was tight, and the Boys Club was the only place my Mom could afford to send me to stay out of trouble. The Club cost a dollar a year to join. I did odd jobs around the neighborhood usually for old people to earn some extra money, which I threw into the pot at home to pay for stuff me, and my Mom needed. I always had bus fare and clean clothes without patches but I didn’t have a wide wardrobe like some other kid I knew.
I was going to swim the four hundred freestyle in the meet which was to be held at the New York AC’s pool in Manhattan. I had done the best time recorded in the city that year so far. I emphasize so far because all the college guys hadn’t finished their season yet and Tommy Leon from St. John’s was tough in the distance events. I was still a junior in high school and he was bigger and stronger than I was. Richard had motivated me to train hard over the years and though I wasn’t that physically gifted I was in good shape and could do well at events that required good cardiovascular conditioning.
Of course now that I have a college education I understand that competitive sports is a more civilized way for human beings to establish a dominance hierarchy. You know the first thing laboratory rats do when you put them together in a cage is establish a dominance hierarchy. I think that in the caveman days the biggest strongest guy probably just beat the pants off of the weaker cavemen. That happens in the streets now too. But we were athletes and let our performances do the beating. The guy who could swim the fastest was on top.
The day of the meet I took the subway to the AC with a few of my teammates. We walked in and told the guy at the door we were here for the Cities. He told us to go up to the third floor on the elevator. Imagine that putting a swimming pool on the third floor! I went into the locker room and got undressed and put on my bathing suit. I saw Tommy Leon on my way into the pool and said, “Hiya Tommy.” He didn’t answer me. I went into the pool and swam about one thousand yards to warm up and realized I had to urinate.
I walked into the area where the urinals were. They were all full except for one next to Tommy Leon. I stood up into it and started to go and after a few seconds felt something like warm water running down my leg. I looked up and Tommy had a strange smirk on his face. Then I realized he was pissing on my leg.
“What the hell are you doing?” I asked while stepping back angrily.
“Just lettin’ you know I’m here kid. And if you think I’m gonna let you beat me your nuts. I’m gonna piss all over you like I just did.”
I started to say, “There’s no reason to ...,” but decided to shut up.
I took a shower to clean off. The meet dragged on. The distance events didn’t come ’til the end of the meets in those days. And now they swim five hundred yards instead of four hundred and they use digital electronic touch pads on the walls instead of stopwatches but competition and the dominance hierarchies are still going. I see it every day in my work. I sell Mercedes Benz automobiles to people who want them. I see it when the sales figures come out every week and everyone is looking to see where he stands. As a manager I have to deal with all the salespeople who feel one of their “colleagues” snaked a sale from him or didn’t tell him his customer had called back or some other sort of nonsense.
When the four hundred came around my lane was next to Tommy’s. We had the two fastest seed times, which meant we would be swimming next to each other. We got up on the starting blocks and Tommy sucks air back through his nose then gurgles up the phlegm and spits a big hocker into my lane. I looked over to him and said, “Hey man, what the fucks the matter with you.”
“Up yours kid,” he said.
Then the starter cried out, “Take your marks!”
The gun went off and we all dove into the water. Now I was really good at pacing myself through a race. I knew how not to take it out too fast so that I had enough left for the finish. A lot of times my second two hundred yards was as fast as my first which is not usually the case when you swim the four hundred. Anyway, Tommy went out fast and got ahead of me. By one hundred fifty yards he was two body lengths in front of me. I began to ease into picking up my pace. I was in great shape and not tired yet. Tommy was not a smart person and had reputation of going out fast and dying at the end of a race. I began to close in on him. By three hundred we were even. I began to make my move to pull ahead when on the turn Tommy and I made together at three twenty five I felt Tommy’s foot kick my groin. The kick was well placed and hit what I’m sure Tommy thought was just the right spot. I had to back off. I was gasping and could barely make my arms move through the water. Tommy pulled ahead by a body length. After another fifty yards I closed the lead to half a body length but I was spent. Tommy touched the wall first. I actually got third in the event. One of the ringers from NYAC touched me out.
While I was hanging on the wall of pool trying to keep from vomiting. Richard came up to me and said, “I saw the whole thing. I’m going to lodge a protest.”
“Forget it,” I said pulling myself out of the water.
“Well, I know you could have won. Why don’t you want to do something about it.”
“Oh it’ll come out in the wash Richard. Tommy’s a fuck. I just don’t want to deal with him anymore. His crap will come back at him someday.”
“Have it your way.”
After I rested up by the side of the pool for a while and watched some of the rest of the meet. I went into the locker room to get dressed and go home. I walked by the area where the toilet bowls were and saw a crowd of people congregating.
“Let go!” I heard a scream hiss.
“No you let go first!”
“No you.”
“You first.”
“What’s going on,” I nudged a guy in back of the crowd.
“Tommy Leon’s trying to put Maury Johnson’s head in the toilet.”
“Holy shit!” I said. Now Maury Johnson swam for the Flushing Y was Tommy’s closest competitor in the two hundred free, an event that I didn’t swim. The Y, the AC and us were in close competition for the city title.
“Yeah, Tommy was trying to psyche Maury out and Maury said something to him. Then Tommy put Maury in a headlock and tried to put his head in the toilet. Maury grabbed Tommy’s balls to stop him. So Tommy grabbed Maury’s balls. Now neither one will let go.”
I looked and I could see Tommy and Maury each in a bathing suit squeezing each other’s balls with clenched fists. I started to laugh but controlled myself.
“Why doesn’t somebody do something?” I asked.
“We wanna see who wins,” yelled a guy in front of the crowd.
At this point I decided I’d better do something and went to get Richard. He came into the locker room and said, “OK son let go,” putting his hand on Tommy’s shoulder. “You too,” he said nudging Maury with his knee. I guess Richard had an air of authority or something because both of them did what he said.
“I’m gonna report this to the meet officials,” he continued while Tommy and Maury were massaging their balls and checking if everything was still there. Richard did report them and as it turned out both Tommy and Maury were disqualified from the meet for unsportsmanlike conduct. All their points were taken away. That left us in first place and we won the meet by one point over St John’s, the one point I scored when I got third in the four hundred.
Richard and a bunch of us went up afterward and accepted the trophy. It was a huge ornate cup with a guy in the pose of a swimmer on top. We loved it. Richard took it back to the club with him and put it on display in the aquatic office window. The meet ended on a Sunday and the next day we were all at practice standing outside the window looking at the trophy when Richard came in.
“OK everybody in the stands,” he yelled putting out his cigar in the ashtray in the office. We all sat in various places in the stands. There was no one in the pool since we were supposed to be practicing. Richard stood in front of us and said, “You guys did it. You won the Cities. I promised you if you did I would do my world famous belly slide, so here it is.”
Now the deck on the side of the pool was ceramic tile. It was we from all sorts of splashing from kids who had been in the open swim just before practice. Richard produced a bar of Ivory Soap, peeled off the wrapper that said, “Ninety nine percent pure,” and dipped the naked bar of soap in the pool water. He was standing there on deck in his usually attire, bathing suit and T-shirt. He set the bar down in the water next to the deck. It floated while he took off his T-shirt. Then he picked up the soap and began to spread it all over his protruding stomach and made a huge lather on it.
“What’re ya gonna do?” yelled Darryl Stone one of my teammates, “Take a bath?”
Richard didn’t say anything but continued to soap his stomach while he walked to the end of the pool. Then without warning he threw the soap down and moved back to the end of the building as far from the end of the twenty-five yard pool as he could be. Then he began to run forward. If you’ve never seen it the sight of a fat man running is very unusual. Before he got to the edge of the pool he did a racking dive and landed on his soapy stomach on the ceramic tile deck. With the combination of his momentum and the soap Richard slide the length of the pool, all twenty-five yards on his belly. We had just witnessed the world famous belly slide. Everyone laughed, clapped and cheered. Richard dove into the pool to wash off then got out and got us started on a warm up drill we called chaos.
Richard produced a number of city championship teams at the Boys Club. I graduated high school and went to college on a swimming scholarship and graduated there too. I heard Tommy Leon became a New York City policeman. I kinda realized that job fit his personality. Yesterday, while I was reading the paper at lunch I saw a headline, “Jail Time for Leon.” I read the article and learned that Tommy Leon had become a police lieutenant and been convicted of police brutality. He helped a bunch of cops beat the shit out of deaf kid who didn’t turn around when they called him. Of course he couldn’t hear them but that didn’t seem to matter. Anyway Tommy was facing three to five years in jail. I don’t know but I’ve heard d that cops who go to jail don’t have a very easy time of it. I wonder what Tommy will do if someone tries to put his head in the toilet in jail. Things always come out in the wash.
