Deep August

But anyway, the August before my senior year, ai carumba, hot like a sauna, sticky as hell, you go to bed and sweat all night long, windows open, no breeze, just a thick towel of air pressing down on you. We didn’t have air conditioning, best you could do was aim a fan at yourself but it didn’t help that much. I was nearly recovered from getting dumped, making slight forays into hook-up culture with girls I had no business kissing. Lily was still around, packing up for college but every once in a while kind of showing up nearby. I’d heard she was on the rocks with her new boyfriend. I think she’d let that slip to my buddy Jody.

Usually all of the local kids would meet up at dusk outside Denham’s, near the pizza place and Lenox Video, whose proprietor was married to an insanely attractive woman from whom we’d rent movies just to get to stare at her, and we loitered so much that the Denham’s folks said we were scaring away business.  I remember thinking we were their business, but I guess they meant the tourists looking for dessert after Tanglewood.  The people who were actually buying things.

Whatever.  We sat on the curb, waiting to hear whether or not anyone had beer, whether there would be a party in the woods and how, theoretically, one would get there. This was the summer of a house party on Lori Court, one of those infamous ones where the parents were away and the girl lost control and holes got punched in the walls and people vomited in the dryer and the cops came. I wasn’t anywhere near that one – those kids were from the Pitts, mean streets compared to us down in Lenox. Nobody I knew was there. But we all heard about it.

We stuck to fields and clearings and occasionally someone’s basement for our get-togethers, although those tended to be more like movie nights than parties. More often than not, we just piled onto the fetid carpet in the back of Mullen’s Suburban and drove around. Mullen and Weaver had Suburbans, Arment had a station wagon and Dotch had something, maybe his mom’s Chevy Celebrity. I had the Festiva and Jody had a Mustang until he rolled it into a ditch on Route 7. He’d been trailing the girls soccer team to a game up in Greylock and had stopped at Burger King, then, eating a Whopper while trying to steer, he’d let the patty slip through the bun and fall onto his bare inner thigh. The heat from the burger caused him to lose control of the Mustang, which ended up upside down in the median. That was his story and he was sticking to it.

I don’t know whose idea it was to go pool-hopping, or, for that matter, why we’d never thought of it before. In our gang, inertia was a powerful force. We could sit around doing nothing for weeks at a time. Even when there were parties, we wound up just hanging out in the driveway with each other. Mullen and Dotch were the bold ones, the ones with the fake licenses and the girlfriends, who weren’t tethered to sports and thus were less afraid to get caught with beer. Weaver and I sort of wanted to be wilder than we were – although Weaver was more successful than I was at it – and Arment had that quality of rogues everywhere of seeming to be right in the thick of things and then vanishing, only to turn up the next day, unscathed. Not entirely unscathed, actually. He’d been caught with beer in his car at a school dance the past spring and banned from basketball. Jody just wanted people to forget about the Mustang.

Maybe it was the heat, or some wild dread/exhilaration mix at being so close to the beginning of the end, but we took aim at a pool at a Day’s Inn on Route 20. Wasn’t much of a challenge, really. We were all already wearing shorts, ratty sneakers, the bare minimum. The Day’s Inn pool was right in front of the reception and we rolled up on it in a caravan. There was a moment of doubt, at least for me. How illegal is this? Would we get into trouble, like real trouble? I had soccer in the fall, then basketball. Practices were already starting. Weaver was a legit skier. All of our parents knew each other, and Weaver’s mom had called my mom when she found the tiny silver corner of a condom wrapper in Weaver’s jeans pockets while doing laundry. I think it had been an underutilized condom, but a condom still. There’d be calls made if any of us got busted.

But the heat. This seemed like a defensible proposition. Almost a birthright. I mean, this is America. It’s been 95 degrees and humid as shit, and there’s this nearly empty pool sitting right here, blue-green and beckoning. Maybe if pressed we would have thought about liability and property rights and stuff like that, but there wasn’t a whole lot of analysis going on in the car. Instead, it was “Will we get caught?” And then “Maybe.” And then we jumped out, hurtled over the low fence and leapt from the deck into the cool water. There was a moment when we were all in the air, a glorious moment when we had not yet done it but could no longer not do it, then a quick splash, head under. Felt good like a lightning bolt. Hopped right back out, piled back into the cars, and burned rubber out the drive. People in the pool were untroubled. Some seemed amused. 

Back at Denham’s we were pretty fired up.   We decided to up the ante. What about the Garden Gables? That was a few price points above the Days Inn and had a higher fence. We consolidated the automobiles and piled into Mullen’s Suburban. The way-back smelled like wet socks and the alkaline tang of adrenaline. Kids were coming out of the woodwork, jumping in. Kevin? Jon Lucy? Muggsy climbed into the front. Weaver’s feet were in my ear. Jody was crammed into a ball in the back. We drove towards the Gables, a white clapboard bed-and-breakfast on Main Street with a 70-foot pool. Mullen pulled over across the street, in the driveway of St. Anne’s Church, and we all jumped out before we spent too much time thinking about it. The whole property was fenced off and the pool was across a long lawn, but it was otherwise unguarded, and we raced across the soft turf, eyeing the dark veranda for snipers, and leaped into the blue depths. Someone yelled something, but by the time the lights came on inside we were already halfway back across the grass, dripping, slipping on otherwise winged feet. Mullen had left the keys in the ignition and we were gone even as the exterior lights came on.

After that, there was no stopping us. We hit the Wagon Wheel, Eastover, the Apple Tree, even the haunted pool at Whistler’s Inn. We hit some retirement community on the Pittsfield-Lenox Road. We refined our approach, crawled up the lawn at the White Pines condos and hit an indoor pool with a couple of open patio doors. An indoor pool!  Someone came out and yelled at us, but what are you going to do with a crew of wet teenagers racing around? We were untouchable.

At Blantyre, Dotch knew the security guard, and wrapped him up in a conversation as the rest of us ran past, leapt into the pool and then ran back out. The guard didn’t know what his obligations were at that point. Report the conversation? 

It occurred to us that the endeavor rewarded enthusiasm, that is, if you rushed into it wholeheartedly – leapt before you looked, as it were – you were also the first out and back to the car. If you hemmed and hawed, you wound up racing after a set of taillights. Jody hemmed a little bit. A couple of kids we barely knew were along at that point – they vacillated between full-throated participation and spectator status. Arment, unsurprisingly, cracked the code and was usually hopping out when the rest of us were hopping in.

At Belvoir Terrace, the art school for girls, we parked on the road and crawled on our stomachs up a long hill to a pool surrounded by a tennis fence.  The fence was twelve feet high, wrapped in green mesh. We scaled it like commandos. The water fragmented against the mesh.  The fence sang.   We splashed in, committed, something like nine of us at this point. I wasn’t sure if we were gaining members or losing them. Lights came on in the main house. I back was over the fence in a flash, hauling ass down the hill. I cut myself on something. My foot started to bleed, not much but enough, and/but by the time we made it back to Denham’s it had stopped.

We spilled out of the car, shorts wet, t-shirts hanging limply around our damp shoulders. There were a bunch of kids around, hanging out, drawn by the vibe of something illicit. Girls appearing like fireflies. They watched us tumble out, coalesce, separate. They stared at the Suburban, as if it were a sort of transsubstantiator, capable of taking a kid from the sticks and turning him into Han Solo. I limped through the crowd, milking my wound and the smell of the chlorine in my hair.

How many you hit? someone asked, like we were bandits.

We felt like bandits.

Don’t know what you’re talking about, someone answered with a wink.

I spotted Lily in the crowd. She might have gone to a different high school, but in the summer everyone gathered in the same places. Jody took me aside, told me she wanted to talk to me. Jody was acting as an intermediary, a role both appreciated and infuriating. Lily and I had reached a sort of détente in our broken-upness. She still had the upper hand, on account of having done the actual dumping, but I no longer felt like I was … on the lower hand? I no longer felt as wounded and awful as I’d felt for most of April-May-June-July. August was ok. 

I went over to her. She was talking with some other girls – Amy Van Sickle?, maybe Margaret?, leaning on her car. She looked up as I closed in, acted as if she hadn’t known I was coming.

“You wanted to talk to me?” I asked.

She stiffened a little, shook her head, said “Nope.”

She was a cute girl. Big cheekbones and greenish eyes, I think.  Hazel, maybe.  It was a while ago. She had a little gold fleck in one of her irises, and always looked like she was putting something over on you, or me, at least, which might have been true.

I shrugged and turned back away. Nope, huh?  It didn’t hurt. I’d just jumped into a half-dozen pools, at least a half-dozen.  All of them unlawfully.  Nothing hurt, except my foot, but that was a good hurt.

I found Jody in the crowd and we decided to walk back to my house and watch Bruce Lee flicks. The crowd was thinning out, but there were still kids around. Mullen was off with Desiree, probably, Dotch was talking to a crowd of girls. Arment had vanished, as was his style. I figured we cut before it felt like we didn’t have anything better to do.

We walked over the low hill that separated the Denham’s parking lot from the hair studio and set out on the Church Street sidewalk. It was late enough that everything was closed and dark, but still early enough to feel like the night had potential. By the time we made it back to my house, we could chill without pressure.

As we came along in front of the hair studio, Lily’s car pulled up next to us. Jody and I stopped. Her passenger window slid down. She leaned over from the wheel.

“Actually,” she said, “can I talk to you for a minute?”

I looked at Jody. He was already headed back to Denham’s.

Sure, I said.

She wasn’t smiling, exactly, but she seemed sort of hopeful.  The streetlights glanced off her windshield.

“You want to get in?” she asked, the first line in a dialogue that would occupy the next few months and ultimately lead nowhere. At the time, though, it was just one more thing that I would previously have thought too long about and probably concluded -- correctly -- was not a good idea. And what fun would that have been?