I’ve never been called a pervert but once, and that once was yesterday when I went downstairs for a swim. The building’s got a nice pool that hardly anyone uses. Most afternoons I do a few lengths. It helps settle my mind and, theoretically, helps to keep the blubber from gathering around my middle. When I’m done, I turn on the hot tub and let the jets massage my muscles. I like to close my eyes and sink low in the water until everything below the nostrils is submerged.
That’s what I was doing yesterday when this guy comes into the pool area from the men’s change room, this middle-aged guy, this guy with a gut like mine, and a comb-over, and flip-flops. And this guy’s carrying a three year old girl with water-wings on her arms, and this girl laughs at him and calls him daddy. Holy shit! This guy—with his banker’s haircut and his retirement portfolio—this guy’s a new dad. It seems wrong to me—me with my kids away at university and my vasectomy—it seems wrong that a man my age should be breeding. Nevertheless, this guy seems happy the way he slips into the pool and coaxes his little girl to jump into his arms. Who am I to judge a guy for wanting to be happy whatever his age?
After I’m done with the hot tub, I walk the length of the pool to the change room. As I pass the guy and his daughter, I suck in my gut and nod. He sucks in his gut and nods back. The daughter’s too busy having fun to notice either of us and our guts. I try not to laugh at the guy’s comb-over which has come unstuck from his scalp and hangs like a drowned rat off the side of his head.
In the change room, I have myself a shower and tamp myself dry with a the beach towel Andrea gave me last Christmas. It was a hint that never took. Once I’m mostly dry, I set my bum on the bench beside my locker and work the towel between each of my toes. I hate putting on socks when my toes are wet. It’s a sure recipe for foot rot, like what the soldiers got in both World Wars.
While I’m powdering my toes, I hear the door from the pool open, and a high-pitched laugh, and a man’s voice calling from around the corner:
— Is everything okay in here?
My toes look clean and dry, so I shout back:
— Everything’s hunky dory, thanks.
The little girl scampers into the change room and halts in front of me, staring between my legs at the middle-aged dong hanging off the edge of the bench. Her father follows, and when he sees his daughter staring at me in all my revealed glory, he makes a sound like a raccoon and a hound stuck together in a sac.
— I asked if everything is okay in here.
— And I said yes.
— But you’re stark naked.
— It’s a change room. People get naked in change rooms.
— You’re exposing yourself to a three year old girl.
— You make it sound so dirty.
— I’m trying to protect her. The world’s full of smut and porn and all that.
— So sitting here in the body God gave me, that’s smut and porn?
— It’s indecent.
The guy’s getting pretty steamed at me. I can tell by the way the pitch of his voice gets higher and higher. Even so, I was sitting here minding my own business, doing whatever I’m entitled to do. I don’t see how he has the right to talk to me like this; I need to say something.
— Smut and porn isn’t about naked; it’s about how naked gets used. I read somewhere that it’s, like, all about power.
— For crissake, cover yourself.
— You’re a righteous tool, you know that?
— My daughter’s gonna have nightmares.
And he lobs a balled up towel at my crotch.
I’m not sure how things go after that, or at least not the order of things. What I do know is that he gets off the first punch, a sharp crack across the jaw. Afterwards, I tell the cops it was unprovoked, but in the heat of things, I may have called him a couple names, and both of them a notch or two up the scale from “righteous tool”. He says it’s one thing for me to be waggling my wiener at his daughter, but quite another to be using foul language in front of her. That’s when the first punch flies. I make a point of learning from my mistakes, so when the second punch comes zooming at my nose, I do a feint-jab-uppercut combo that gets the blood flowing from his left nostril.
While he dabs the blood, he says that, for doing what I’ve just done, I’m the most totally shit-fucked man on the planet.
— Daddy, and his daughter stares up at him with bright saucer eyes. Daddy, what’s shit-fucked?
— Do you see? Do you see? This is how it happens. You expose yourself and before you know it, she’s saying stuff like that.
He lumbers at me like a bear and tries to jam me bodily into the corner. But I’m in pretty good shape from all my swimming, so I dodge left and knee him in the nuts. While he’s writhing on the floor and gasping, he motions to his daughter.
— Honey.
— Daddy?
— Honey. In a couple minutes, Daddy’s gonna call the cops on the pervert. But first I need to get changed. Bring me the bag with the clothes. That’s a good girl. Now come over here and help Daddy take off his swim suit.