Never Alone

            I work as a lifeguard. Putting aside the cycles of suicidal despair that come when given six hours to do nothing but allow your mind to devour itself, it’s a pretty sweet gig. If you have a few hundred bucks to spend on a red-cross crash course on vague safety regulations, you’re pretty much guaranteed employment somewhere. For there will always be middle class exercise junkies and arthritic seniors clamboring for the miserable wonders of a tepid, indoor pool.

            But just remember, that no matter how wonderful the embrace of early morning’s solitude feels as you step onto that pool deck and feel the breaking sunlight stream through the windows onto your naked torso, you are not alone. The lifeguard is there.

            Obvious, I know, but allow me to tell you a story.

            One day, a year or so back, I was working a shift in the middle of a weekday. The pre-work, morning crowd had left and the post-work, afternoon crowd had yet to arrive. I was pacing in the corner of the pool deck attempting to compile a comprehensive mental list of the thirty greatest Simpsons Halloween segments—the kind of mental acrobatics one is apt to do during six hours of total encagement—when I noticed that the echoing pool deck had been filled with distant sounds of splashing and voices for some time now. I looked up and saw a couple at the shallow end of the pool. Quietly, I walked down the blue tiled deck and stationed myself in a chair maybe ten yards down from them. I continued my mental debate over the comparative virtues of The Shinning vs. Attack of the 50 Foot Eyesores, when I noticed that the woman was crying.

            Discreetly I lifted my head and focused my hearing.

            “I-I-I just can’t believe you’d do this to me!” she whimpered

            “Baby” he said, trying to swim toward her as backed away, “It was just a mistake. C’mon you know it’s not like that”

            She allowed him to finally reach her at the far end wall. He pulled her in, and after a moment’s hesitations, she buried her head into his impressively hairy chest. His back was to me, but I saw him soothingly stroking the hair on the back of her head and whispering to her. I couldn’t quite tell the nature of the comfort he was providing. It could have been that of genuine remorse and love, but then again it could have been the malevolent manipulation of a sociopath. If only I could see his face. I was tempted to dart around the pool deck so to get a front row seat, but ultimately decided that doing so would ruin my cover.

            It didn’t matter though. Not long after, they got out of the pool, toweled themselves off, and exited into the lockerroom. Once they had left I jumped up out of my seat and began furiously pacing around, in disbelief at what I had just seen. I was outraged, really.

            Now, don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t like a “oh, how could you force me to bare witness to such a display” sort of thing. I had thoroughly enjoyed the drama of their scene. As it built, I even began imagining backstories. He held a job at the local law firm, where he had met a woman named Jen. The woman in the pool, Dana, who was his long-time girlfriend, and who had for so long waited on him to finally commit and propose to her, had been initially uneasy about the friendship, but pushing 35, she had seen enough relationships end over jealousy and had decided to not say anything, in spite of the increasing amount of time that he was spending with this new friend of his. This had gone on for weeks until one day when he was in the shower, her anxiety overtook her and she looked through his cell phone. As she was doing it she felt physical repulsion at her own selfish anxieties, but she couldn’t help herself. Finally, four days back was a single text from Jen that he had forgotten to erase. Her heart sank into her chest as she saw the flirtatious, sexual innuendos, and she burst into tears. Her sense of betrayal was so great that she was unable to even feel anger when he came back from the bathroom. She just felt lost.

            This had happened only the day before, and as I watched them leave, I imagined them driving home in utter silence before entering an empty, creaking house. With a look of anger still on her face she would walk up to him and press her warm, lithe body up against his, and shove him hard up against the wall. With the passion of pure anger he would only bother to unzip his pants and would lift her onto the counter. After a few moments of jerking thrusts he would attempt to kiss her mouth, but she would turn her face away in bitterness. And the hardwood floor would shake with the passion of emotion’s death rattle.

            The only thing I couldn’t put together was why they had come to the pool in the first place. Maybe they didn’t have air conditioning and got hot in the middle of their fight. It doesn’t really matter though. The reason I was so outraged, at least on a superficial level, was not that I had been forced to watch, but that they deemed me unworthy of social restraint. Or more accurately, they had neglected my mere existence. As the staff, I had blended into the furniture. A piece among pieces. In an elevator, in a somewhat crowded bus terminal, in the office, they would have died before subjecting their social lives to such public scrutiny. But on the pool deck, all such trepidations had been cast away. In their eyes, they were alone.

            But the staff is always there. The lifeguards and waiters and cashiers and gas attendents. Behind the busboy’s look of neutrality, he is judging you. Behind the clerk’s nonchalant boredom, he is taking in every detail of your story. Behind the sunglasses of the summer lifeguard, he is making a mental image of your tits to jerk off to later (well, probably not yours, since statistically speaking, you are probably either a man or an unattractive woman). It is the only joy of the minimum wage job. Vicariously living through you, absorbing everything with the attentive love of a Facebook stalker.

            Do not take this as some working class screed. It doesn’t matter if the nonentity in question is a forty-three year old janitor, or an upper class fifteen year old at McDonalds. Just remember to look over your shoulder that next time you feel it ‘s safe to tell your friend a story about the guy you fucked last night, or remind a room of supporters of the laziness of America’s worse half.