by Peter Harmon
Praise for
THE HAPPENSTANCES AT
THE YELLOW COUNTY COMMUNITY
SWIM AND RACQUET CLUB
THE SUMMER BEFORE LAST
“Full of wit, charm, hilarious one-liners and clever digressions, Peter Harmon’s Happenstances plays in a landscape of Americana reminiscent of John Hughes, but with tongue planted in cheek, pokes fun at familiar tropes and archetypical comedic characters while at the same time valuing all the elements enough to deliver a fresh and enjoyable summer read.
Poppy - and full of pop-culture references that’ll have Millennials giggling out loud and sharing the text with their friends - Happenstances doesn’t take itself too seriously while still respecting its readers, resulting in the perfect poolside read (and not only because it takes place at a pool!)”
- Jason Stefaniak, award winning filmmaker
“A sheer wave of nostalgia hits me in Peter Harmon’s book. I am filled with both laughter and tears. Based on our childhood community pool, I am reminded of the pure joy of being a kid and figuring it out. Our pool was an idealistic dream for the American kid. The place where we had our first jobs, our first kiss and most likely our first sloppy joe. It was just happenstance that I happened to be there, and I would not change that experience for the world. Thank you Peter for taking me back to the good ole days! This is a book that I recommend to anyone looking for an endearing summer read.”
- Gabrielle Christian, actress/ activist
“Forget what you think you know about the perfect summer break and allow yourself to high-dive into the heartbreak, exhilaration, and sheer madness that’s waiting for you at the YCCSRC.
Peter Harmon’s charming storytelling will make you believe for the first time in your life that the jerk, babe, nerd and outcast can actually come together to fight in the name of justice -- and, even more surprisingly, make you catch your breath when you realize they might possibly stand a chance.”
- Jamie Petitto, writer and YouTube personality at Gurl.com
The Happenstances at
the Yellow County Community
Swim and Racquet Club
the Summer Before Last
PETER L. HARMON
The Happenstances at the
Yellow County Community Swim and Racquet Club
the Summer Before Last
by Peter L. Harmon
© Copyright 2015 Peter L. Harmon
ISBN 978-1-63393-148-0
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other – except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior written permission of the author.
This is a work of fiction. The characters are both actual and fictitious. With the exception of verified historical events and persons, all incidents, descriptions, dialogue and opinions expressed are the products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.
Published by
210 60th Street
Virginia Beach, VA 23451
212-574-7939
www.koehlerbooks.com
DEDICATION:
To my family, my friends who are as
close as family, and the girl who ran
away with me to start a new family.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 16 1/2
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
EPILOGUE
PROLOGUE
THE SUN ROSE over the Yellow County Community Pool. Pinks and reds washed over the clear blue of the pool’s over-chlorinated water. Clouds puffed out their chests, hoping to be noticed later by sky-gazers and compared to doggies or ducks or whatever general shape the wind had gently sculpted them into. Green shrubs lined the chain-link fence that surrounded the compound. A deck overlooked the pool area.
A sign on the fence read Yellow County Community Swim and Racquet Club: Join Our Family Today!!1 The numeral 1 was a mistake. It was supposed to be three exclamation points, but the gentleman who had made up the sign wasn’t the most computer savvy and had forgotten to hold down Shift when pressing the number one on the final exclamatory punctuation mark—rookie move.
Another sign proclaimed Opening Day: May 27th, Memorial Day Weekend. Celebrate Our 50th Season!! Not only had the person who made that sign quit while she was ahead and stopped at two exclamation points, but she also knew how to make the number’s suffix tiny.
A snack bar sat in one corner of the compound, constructed of painted white cinderblocks. It was not necessarily a moneymaker for the club, but a necessity nonetheless as the closest place you could score a snack outside the pool grounds was over in the next town, strangely named Tuxedo, the kind of place where you wouldn’t be caught dead wearing a tuxedo, unless of course, you were dead, and your hearse happened to drive down Tuxedo Road.
The snack bar provided not just frozen confections and over-syruped sodas, but the patrons really relied on the teens and tweens inside to prepare their meals for them, and that was never more evident than during the lunch rushes at promptly eleven forty-six in the morning and forty-six past noon when adult swim had just begun, and the hordes of sometimes shivering, skinny kids with chlorine-cowlicked hair would tug on their mothers’ cover-ups, asking for a couple dollars to get mozzarella sticks or nachos or, God forbid, chicken quesadillas.
Beautiful brown clay tennis courts were a stone’s throw away, where you would always find a few wheezers and geezers thwunking a ball back and forth, seemingly in slow motion. Twice a week the Yellow County Youth Tennis Team would don their white polos of varying sizes, much like the vastly varying skill levels of those who would participate, and compete against Brown Town Hall and Recreation or Bowie or Glenarden or even Crofton!
A guard office sat by the fence near the front entrance and locker rooms, where the lifeguards had a bird’s-eye view over the pool so they could monitor safety issues, monkeyshines, or just scheme on that girl who came with her friend for the first time who none of them had made out with yet.
The crown jewel was a high dive jutting over the twelve-foot deep pool well, wearing a regal blue sash that connected the handrail to the support bars. There was a stretch of scratchy black tape on each step to grip the wet feetsies of those brave enough to climb them. When other swim teams visited for a meet, they looked up and coveted that thing, hoping, but not voicing it to their coaches, that there would be a free-swim time after the meet in which they could jump off of that freakin’ awesome board.
Usually Memorial Day was a grand affair at the club. There would be a watermelon race where every member of a family had to be present to push a greased watermelon from one side of the pool to the other and back again. Invariably, the kids would beg their father to participate; Dad would balk, and Mom would have to put her flip-flopped foot down. Next thing you know, Daddy would be in the shallow end with his shirt on, rolling that watermelon, and he would g
et into it, recapturing a bit of the competitive edge he had back in high school. He would be picturing himself muscled up, wearing his sporting uniform instead of the now see-through off-white undershirt covering his beer belly.
Another favorite was the soda dive. Cans of soda were thrown into the deep end, some with dollar bills rubberbanded around them. Kids, separated into heats by age, would wait by the edge of the well, jockeying for position. Every once in a lifeguard’s tenure, a child would slip or be pushed in before the starting whistle and the trigger-happy tots would all dive in before the go was given. But, if rules were followed and everything went as it was supposed to, the ultimate prize was the lukewarm root beer with a soggy dollar strapped to it—the dollar that the snack bar would receive only minutes later.
Yes, on Memorial Day there was a laundry line of drying singles hanging above the order window in the snack shack. They would dry a little crispy, be put into the register with the rest, and counted that night for the bank to receive.
Those crinkly dollars were the kings of the deposit bag. Sure, there are dollars that have been in more exciting places than the pool, singles especially, but those prize dollars could stand up straight, crack their backs, and tell their tales of deep water diving to the limp George Washingtons who were fresh from some tween’s sweaty wallet.
CHAPTER 1
THAT PARTICULAR MEMORIAL Day morning started out not particularly memorably. A portly man in his thirties, with strong arms and back but a tummy devoid of definition, dove into the as yet unbroken, glasslike water of the pool, disrupting the calm. He swam a lap to and fro underwater without taking a breath, a dark-blue silhouette in the aquamarine. Either his legs didn’t get the memo that his arms were doing the breaststroke, or his arms forgot to send it, because his legs were thrashing out behind him, making tiny bubbles in the water, in the style of free. He slapped the side of the deck upon completion. His head broke the water with a shake and a smile, and he climbed out of the water, droplets dripping off of his generous chest hair. He ran a hand through his chestnut-tinted hair and wiped his hand over his face, the already pruning tips of his fingers rubbing against his burgeoning laughlines. He opened his surprisingly blue eyes, the same color as the water, even though his features were dark.
The temperature would reach the mid-nineties that afternoon, but it was still early, and nipple-stiffeningly chilly. The cool temp didn’t hurry his hustle, as he casually stepped through the chill morning air.
His clothes were waiting for him on a nearby blue and white striped deck chair. He quickly toweled off, stepped into his red lifeguard-issue bathing suit, and donned a silver- colored whistle on a red lanyard. Over his head he pulled on his official Yellow County Community Swim and Racquet Club polo shirt. Size medium. A little snug. His name, Jonathan Poole, was stitched proudly across the left breast.
The stitching was done apathetically by an automated sewing machine over at the baseball cap shop. A minimum-wager had typed the letters of Jonathan’s name into the template and selected the standard script font that was available for no extra charge (Edwardian Script, for example, was five cents more per letter, and when you’re embroidering polos for the whole staff, that starts to add up), hit the ‘any’ key, and voila, created the personalized prize that Jonathan donned daily.
So no, the stitching itself and the stitcher were not too bowled over by their handiwork, but the stitchee, the one whose name beamed from this particular polo, was indeed proud of the shirt, and especially of the little letters underneath the name (two rows of stitching, that’s a whole dollar extra per shirt) that read Head Lifeguard In Charge.
Jonathan moved through the small lifeguard office with purpose, deftly dodging the dangling whistles, saying a “How do you do?” to the CPR dummy (Tim), and putting a stack of binders under the cot that was pushed up against the wall facing the door.
Through that door entered “Wild” Bill Peterson, a man who discovered heavy metal late in life—thanks to the high-school-aged grandson he’d taken care of for a spell—and committed to it whole hog. He was in his mid-sixties but wore black band T-shirts, size large, for the large amount of rocking he did while wearing them. The shirt was decorated with electric chairs and axes, and its owner kept a head full of long, scraggly hair despite the yarmulke-sized bald spot on the top of his dome. Metal was usually blasting from Wild Bill’s ever-present Walkman. He had that yellow one with the rubber grip. And at that moment he turned the volume wheel down a couple notches.
“Jonathan,” Bill said.
Jonathan was startled. “Bill!” he said as if he had been caught polishing his whistle instead of in an office where he had every right to be.
“Got here a little early, didn’t you? The newsletter said that the employee meeting wasn’t until seven thirty today.” Bill was more amused than confused. Of course, Jonathan was there early. This was his Christmas Day, and he would be more anxious than a tot trying to spy Santa Claus coming down the chimney.
“The newsletter?”
“The Yellow County Community Chronicle…”
Jonathan got on his game. “Duh, the Chronicle. I got that the other day…in my mailbox. I just thought I’d get an early start. I don’t want anyone to be disappointed.”
“I’m glad you’re back. Isn’t this your tenth summer?”
“Something like that.” Jonathan knew the real answer; it was several more than ten.
“They all run together after you get to a certain age, don’t they?”
Jonathan didn’t respond, but they certainly did.
“What have you been doing the rest of the year?”
Jonathan hesitated. “You know, keeping busy.”
“What is it you do in the off-season again?”
Jonathan opened his mouth to speak, not knowing really what his answer was going to be, but hoping he could trust his brain to think of something satisfactory before noises started coming from the hole in his face. But at that very opportune moment, the kind of moment that happens in a situational comedy or a film perhaps, when someone is going to speak when they don’t want to, a thin young man whose parents hailed from India with a mop of black hair scurried by the guard office.
Roheed Mahaad was sixteen but looked quite a bit younger, and he didn’t stop moving. He gave a little “Hello, sirs” as he passed along with the universal hand sign for live long and prosper.
“Looks like people are starting to show up,” Jonathan offered, internally relieved.$
“Rock on,” Bill replied. There were things he didn’t know, nor did he really care to know, about Jonathan. Bill’s attitude about him was heck with it. Jonathan was a good lifeguard, and he didn’t seem to want to divulge much about his personal life, which was absitively posolutely okay with the Wildman. He put his Walkman phones back on his head and cranked that sucker to twelve.
CHAPTER 2
CARS BEGAN TO fill up the Yellow County Community Swim and Racquet Club parking lot, the drivers mostly being dumb-looking teens with stupid haircuts, the tires of their parents’ beaters that they let their sons and daughters borrow bouncing on the road, where tree roots had cracked and split the black asphalt. Middle-schoolers with train-tracked teeth walked from down the street where they made their moms drop them off.
Working at the YCCSRC was a rite of passage, a coming of age. One summer you were playing tennis baseball down by the volleyball court or soap hockey in the showers, then you blinked your eyes and boom, you were starting your first day of tennis court maintenance, then snack shack candy window, then grill window, then grillmaster, and then, Lawd willin’, you were a licensed food handling snack bar manager, gazing out the window of the shack, craning your neck to catch an inning or two of the game, as board-short clad, shaggy-haired youths thwacked the neon balls with loaner rackets, trying to hit the ball over the big green wall with the stripe painted across it, the one where lonely gentlemen would hit balls to themselves, waiting for a doubles match that would never be.
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br /> On that first day, the chubby young bucks would pass through the locker room to enter the pool grounds, seeing the fresh soap sitting in the dish, and for just a moment think of taking that sucker down, grabbing a couple dudes, and having a full on soap hockey scrum, kicking the slippery bar across the wet tile. But then they would snap out of it, remember that they were now employees of the club, and trot away to begin their minimum wage entry into the working world.
Charlie Heralds pulled into the lot and parked in the far corner. He was a slim, handsome young guy wearing a full-length trench coat. He walked to the trunk of his car, looked around, and took off his dress socks.
His toes were webbed—not just a minor elongation of the flesh between a toe or two, but all-out Kevin Costner in Waterworld. He had asked his parents early on in life if they would get him the minor cosmetic surgery to de-web his toes and they had thought him too young, plus, his dad said, they would build character. Charlie always assumed that he would pay for the surgery himself when he had the cash and anyway he had Bing’d webbed toes and Wikipedia had said that Dan Aykroyd had webbed toes (I’m sure not to the extent of Charlie boy), and if it was good enough for Dan Aykroyd, it was good enough for young Charles. But that didn’t mean he would ever walk barefoot down the drive to pick up the morning paper, no sir.
He unbuttoned the trench and exposed that it had a fake collar and tie sewn to the top and fake pant legs sewn to the bottom. There were even fake dress-shirt cuffs sewn into the coat’s arms. He went from looking like a young man completely dressed for an office job to a late teen wearing board shorts and a YCCSRC snack bar manager shirt, size M on the tag, but it had been worn and washed enough times to fit more like a SMedium.
Charlie slipped old white socks and beat-up grey New Balances 420s onto his flippers and flopped them onto the cracked asphalt of the parking lot.
