At the Watering Hole

I missed summer—I missed skin. In Austin we’re spoiled. By the time March rolls up we’re already half clothed and showing our different colors like young peacocks. I love seeing my own skin begin to tan—like there’s less between me and the sun, like we’re starting to follow the same orbit and its palm rests on my chest making it warm and dark.

I went yesterday to the pool and swam laps. I love going to the pool because that’s when we all really strut, and that’s when everyone’s looking at everyone behind the cover of books or sunglasses, or maybe behind no cover at all—bold and brash locking eyes saying, I see you.

And we watch. And we survey. And we take stock. Who could I see on top of me, and when, and where, and our minds do tricks of the imagination.

Breast stroke is best for me, and I swam 100-yard intervals, and I felt like a long scull manned by little rowers knifing through the water. I had donated blood two days earlier and I got tired quickly. The thing about exercising in the water is the more tired I get the more I feel like I’m drowning—you want to suck for air but you have to hold your lungs up tight in your chest. And that’s exercise. After four intervals I felt like I might suffocate, and so I pulled up to the edge of the pool and watched the other swimmers slosh toward me, somersault, and dart off the wall underwater.

Getting out of the pool is one of my favorite parts. I dip underwater with my fingers sprayed out on the dappled concrete, and then shoot out straight to standing. And the water carries up with me as if I’m an enormous scoop, and it flushes down off me, and I whip my hand around my bald head so the water comes off in a single sheet, and I stand and take it all in.

I headed back to my towel and what a performance it is, a calculated swing of the hips, an erect tautness stringing my muscles out—it’s unavoidable. Because everyone looks, and you want everyone to look, because it’s the pool and we’re all wearing skin and why else would you be there?

I lay down on my towel and took out The Turn of the Screw, which I was reading for class. I took turns reading and checking everyone out—us humans, gathered at the watering hole. A woman about my age came close, her towel near mine, wearing a bikini. And it was impossible not be infatuated by skin that day, and hers was like an ingredient, like a cream to be added to the frosting separating layers of cake. She lay down without drying off, and her dripping mascara made her face look long and fragile, and the droplets of water dotting her skin were one thousand miniature magnifying glasses saying, This is where to look—just here. And here. And here—

The pool closed at five and I hadn’t read much. Sunday afternoon, easy as could be—who cares. I went to the men’s locker room and rinsed off. A middle-aged Chinese man held his young son up to the shower head so he could catch water in his mouth, laughing as he said something soft to his son in Mandarin.

I used to be so stiff. I used to freeze at the thought of being naked around other people. These days it’s easy, and there’s always pride in being able to be a man among these other men, shedding clothes like we’ve been waiting all day to be free of them.

As I toweled off I saw another kid, blonde, maybe four, covering his ears. As if all this skin and hair and musk was a deafening howl, and that if he could just press the sides of his head hard enough he could seal us all out.

I reached up to a shelf to get my underwear and my shorts and my shirt and put them on. I sat down on the bench and reached under and grabbed my shoes, and looked out as I put them on. The men in the locker room were in various states of undress—some were naked as buck with cuts of white meat around their groin and butt. Some in small swatches of bathing suit, some in board shorts, some with plastic flip flops, some with their bare heels on the blue tiled floor. It felt animal. Strange—but it did. It felt primal, manly, like if us men were called upon to hunt a pack of buffalo, right now, naked, loin clothed, flip flopped, bare footed, bare up and down, we could do it. We could hunt in packs.

There’s something objective about seeing a man naked in a locker room. Sure—does he have muscles, does he look fit, could he run flat out for half a mile without sucking wind. But there’s also the way he carries himself—is he slumped and skittish, or do his shoulders reach back and his chest fill the air in front of him? Could his hands tie rope? The man speaking Mandarin to his son—would he kill game with the swift and silent tip of an arrow, or would he herd his targets with loud noises and drive them off a cliff? Would the small blonde boy pressing his ears be the first victim of a nighttime ambush by wolves, or does he survive because he knows the best places to hide?

I put on my shoes thinking about this, thinking attributes, thinking of us humans as animals and what we’d be like if we lived in 4,000 B.C. There’s something about a locker room . . . Something about it that makes my brain turn. Because we’re all stripped down, and really under all our clothes we’re just flesh and bone, and I realize how similar we all are. How the man who spoke Mandarin would protect his son just as fiercely as would the father of the blonde boy pressing his ears. How we could all be fierce if we had to, and how we have teeth for a reason, and brains that can tell us to make fists for a reason, and all of us in that locker room are just itching to be tested. And it’s on the tips of all of our tongues, and if someone were to just call out we would all spring.