No Swimming...or Diving

Today we continue yesterday's post:

After the second near drowning I took a four year break from swimming. No pool parties, no trips to the beach, not even as much as a slip n slide. Then I graduated elementary school...

It was the sixth grade class trip to Kings Dominion. There was a girl that I liked. (There's always a girl.) She wanted to get on the water slides. I thought that she was feeling me a little, so in all of my 11 year old coolness, I decided to give water another shot. We stood in line for about forty-five minutes to get on what looked like the water slide to hell. Lucky for me (or so I thought) this was a dual slide. There was an easy one and a gateway to hell one. The girl kept talking about how she couldn't wait to get on the daredevil one so secretly I was doing cartwheels like, Thank God!

We get all the way to the top and just as we're about to sit down, she chickens out. Women have an In Case of Emergency voice that they can break out to get men to do stupid shit. She batted her eyes at me the right way and convinced me to be the big, strong man and switch slides with her. I went down the slide and for the first few seconds, it wasn't half bad. Then a stream of water went over my face and I panicked. I did a huge no-no for a tunnel-type water slide: I sat up. I hit my head on the top of the slide which dazed me for a second. I started choking on the water and my reflexes made me try to sit up again. This time there was no tunnel wall. I opened my eyes just to see myself approaching the end of the slide and nearing the five foot drop into the water.

There was a huge splash and I started choking even more. I kicked my legs and flailed my arms. I started screaming for the life guard and the whole time I'm yelling with my eyes closed, Help, I can't swim!!! A woman in a bathing suit came up beside me and yelled for me to calm down. All the while I'm screaming. Finally she yelled back, stand up! I stood up to find the water at my waist and the girl was just staring at me like I was a damned fool. It would be sixteen years before I'd see her again on Facebook.

After that I left swimming alone for a LONG time. Eight years to be exact.

I needed an elective in college, so I figured that I'd finally conquer my fears. Here I was, twenty years old and still afraid of water. This time would be different. This time, I was paying out of pocket to learn to swim. I knew damn well that my cheap ass wouldn't let that money go to waste. For three quarters of the semester, I was right. I was the perfect student. Everything the instructor said was gospel to me. I knew that my life depended on it. Then, something happened. He fell ill for a week. He had a substitute come in and he was out of his fucking mind. He told us that we were behind so he wanted us to just skip a few things. The way he saw it, our instructor was holding our hand too much. He and I had words, so I sat on the side of the pool everyday that week refusing to do anything.

When the real instructor came back, he was on some other shit. The temp teacher must've gotten to him because he said something similar like, I have been going too slow and in order to pass the final, we're gonna have to speed up. We left the safety of our five-foot maximum depth pool to go to the other pool...the one with the 15 foot depth and the diving boards.

Jump in from the side of the pool, when you reach the bottom just kick off and ride the momentum to the surface. That's what he said out of his mouth. No joke. Last week, we were learning to float in four feet of water. This week you want us to do what!? I took him the entire class to convince me to do that shit. Have I ever let you down before, he said. I will be here the whole time, he said. I decided to trust this man because he even had his teaching assistant--who was a lifeguard by the way--get in the pool with me as backup.

I jumped in. I went down. I almost made it to the bottom. To this day I don't know what went wrong. All I know is that I came to an abrupt stop about four inches from the bottom of the pool. Time slowed down and my brain turned into a boardroom with different parts of my mind debating what to do next. The board agreed that I should exhale the last pocket of air from my lungs and use my arms to push myself downward. It worked well enough to get my big toe to touch the bottom of the pool. Despite my best effort, the big toe just wasn't strong enough to push my body back up. I moved maybe a foot. So I tried again. Still nothing. By this point, I'm looking up toward the surface expecting Aquaman to come rescue me and all I saw was that scary ass image of light rippling off the surface of the water.

I freaked the hell out. I tried one more time to make it to the bottom and when that didn't work, I just started kicking and doing my best to swim to the surface. I don't know how much time passed on land, but under the sea...according to mermaid time, like a whole week passed while I tried to stay alive. I was out of breath, out of energy and with my last bit of strength I pushed upward and then I felt my hand touch the air right before my head popped out the water.

I took one long breath of air and immediately exhaled it with curse word after curse word for the instructor--Aquaman was actually walking toward the platform when I broke the surface with a big stick that had a hook attached to it. It took no time for me to process what was going on and even less time for me to verbalize it:

Are you JUST coming to help me. Do you have a fucking hook!? What happened to you jumping in? Why the hell didn't the lifeguard/ assistant swim down to get me?

His response:
I wanted to see how you handled the situation. I know CPR so I was prepared to revive you if the situation called for it. Look at the bigger picture...you're treading water!

My response (as I doggie paddled to the side of the pool and climbed out):
I didn't come to this class to learn to tread, I came to learn to swim. I already knew how to tread.

I stormed out of the pool, made my way to the locker room and haven't been in a pool since. Oh...and I failed the class due to not taking the final.