Swimming

Through the unheated hallway briskly, running on the blue plastic corrugated map.

Exchange pleasantries with Fowad.

Goggles spit on and affixed.

Into the cool blue water. I swim easily, falsely, the Australian crawl because I am not out of breath yet. It is a 90 lengths to a mile pool. I swim the first lap in good form, breathing once on every third stroke on alternate sides. My kick is lousy, mainly to elevate my feet. It's a poor expenditure-of-oxygen-to-velocity part of my stroke, so I economize. Not unrelatedly, when I am rounding my fourth length, lap number two, I am already looking forward to the transition at the end of length five. Because in fact I am fucking out of breath and pushing it just to maintain a brisk form and not start waving at the water and rocking from side to side like a little boat bath toy.

My switch over is to the breast stroke. I can do the breast stroke forever, certainly for a mile (though it would take me almost an hour). I breast stroke happily back to Fowad, sitting on a plastic chair reading a tabloid. I go back to the crawl from the wall to the shallow end. It is not only that I am at this point most comfortable moving from breast stroke to crawl every 25 meters (or whatever the pool is). The fact is, I am better swimming the crawl well toward the shallow end, where the upward slant of the floor tiles give the impression of greater and greater speed. This makes the finish very easy. In contrast, swimming the crawl while almost out of breath moving toward Fowad and the deep end, is to see the tiles move more and more slowly under one's gaze, and feel like a flounder with its eye migrating around so it can stop wallowing and lay still.

After a while I start enjoying it, or almost. About lap fifteen or seventeen, when it is clear that I am going to cover my half mile in a twenty or so minute period. Then I start fantasizing about 27 laps, the 1 KM mark. Most often if I have time to do more than forty lengths (which I call half a mile) I will do fifty, not fifty four. I have not yet swum a mile at the JCC pool.

I make a great show of the last lap and swim the crawl without breathing for the last eight strong strokes, and hop out without using the ladder. I get my towel and 750 dollar glasses. Fowad says, "So how is it Paul. How's he doing?" Who, I sometimes ask. "Obama." Okay, I say. He's got a tough job. We discuss Madoff. I point out absurdly that he took advantage of other Jews, even imitating a Jewish matron I heard complaining on the radio. Fowad shows me Bernie Madoff's black and white profile, his hook nose. "You see." Yes, I say. Look at my profile: and I am only half Jewish. We share a laugh, me and the Moroccan lifeguard at the Jewish Community Center, who knows that Obama is a Muslim and once you are a Muslim you can never turn back, and so has his doubts. But he kind of likes Obama. He's not "doing so bad."

I get into the steam room. It takes about twenty minutes to heat up, and it shuts down if not fiddled with every fifteen minutes. I.e. it's a Jewish steam room. Today I got lucky and the temperature was at 115, a once in a month occurrence. I sat and steamed and read the Washington Post best I could, the print from the reverse side showing through in the wet.

I know all the men in the locker room at this point by sight. I remember about half their names. I used to swim later by a half hour, and there was Paul the financial guy and his wife, who swam together. There's Mike who wears flippers and backstrokes just about a stroke behind my speed. There's a woman who really swims, a fast half hour on the right (1.5 M. shorter) lane. Bye bye. There's a big guy who sticks to the crawl the whole way whom I lap every ten or so.

In the locker room there's a few guys who work out and change about that time. An older financial guy who teaches for a pittance in his retirement. It is much better to exchange views with such people when your penis and overflowing belly are visible. That way, there is only the pretense and farce that can be mustered out of nothing in the conversation, no bullshit stemming from a suit or hidden nipples and so on.

I love old Jews, and loved changing in the locker room in the YMHA on 92nd street years ago with the old handball players. Those guys are all dead now. They would be in their 100s. But I was scared of them then. You saw a couple of tatooed numbers, not many. Mainly thin guys with tits. I remember one man with a hanging weeping willow bonzai hanging between his legs under his hunched over form. Yiddish uptown accents, all gone now. These were the men who you felt you should know, but you did not know, they were foreign. They were New York.