This Be the Place: A Budget Pool in East LA

This Be the Place is a series of short essays in which poets explore the mysteries and meaning of a particular place.

Three days a week, I do laps at a budget indoor pool in Los Angeles. The other clientele and I have our gripes. The water is clouded by an unknown murk which, combined with the often-steamy temperature, evokes the sensation of exercising in soup. The smell of chlorine coats my skin like an industrial perfume. An errant cockroach sometimes turns up dead on the tiled floor—those tan little tiles affixed in grout that’s turned the color of pitch. Our lifeguards are a revolving door of squeaky teenagers unknowingly tasked not with saving lives so much as negotiating with octogenarians to stay in the “water walker” lane.

It’s hardly the leisurely pool of cliché, that postcard-perfect teal rectangle nuzzled by lounge chairs and exotic plants, nor the kidney-shaped pool of my Arizona childhood, the water perpetually studded with wasps. But these pools, and arguably all others, mimic their counterparts in nature: the oasis. My pool in LA serves as an oasis of a different kind. While we certainly chat and gossip, we aren’t interested in recreation or play. We’re largely here to work, heal, and keep our hearts pumping for as long as we can.

Something other than affordability keeps me coming back to this bargain pool in a bargain gym in East LA: the regulars. The age gap between me and them is measured in decades. While much of the social glue that bonds us is made tacky by our endless complaints (the toilets are broken again?), routine and physical proximity ensure that we care about each other. People learn basic pleasantries in the many languages of Los Angeles: Armenian, Korean, Spanish, Farsi. When there are birthdays, we all break into song. (One woman recently donned a spangled “80-YEAR-OLD QUEEN” sash as she sauntered across the pool deck, giving us her best mock-Queen Elizabeth wave.) Though I’m quick to playfully bicker with the arthritic swimmers purring over the warm water by telling them it makes me feel like a lobster meant for a plate, we’re more alike than not. I’m no less grumpy or impatient, no less religious about my laps.

For almost a dozen years I’ve woken up early Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to swim a little over a mile. If I stray from this pattern, I feel like everything will unravel. So, like my compatriots, I cling to my routine with an animal hunger. As soon as I attempt the physics-defying stretch of an elastic cap over my head, I feel some part of myself uncoil. By the time I’ve hopped in, I’m antsy. “You’re like a bullet!” my friend L always tells me. On rare occasions, someone legitimately fast shows up, leaving a churning maelstrom in their wake. The shark, these one-offs are called. The motorboat.

While I swam club as a child and JV in high school, I’ll own I was never very good. I returned to swimming in my twenties after enduring a chronic pain in my feet I didn’t understand. I was terrified for months, uncertain what my future would look like based on my uninformed notions of disability. (Would I ever hike up a mountain again? Be able to enjoy a museum?) Mostly, though, my own body and how it could fall apart seized me in a terrible grip. Eventually I got a handle on my pain with the help of specialists and medication. Then I wanted to regain a sense of control over how I moved. Despite my unease, swimming was the mode of exercise that felt safest. It was the sport I knew best.

There is a reason older adults swim—it’s a workout that’s easy on the body, especially your joints. (“Remember, your knees are like gold!” a fellow swimmer often reminds me.) But even if you’re hurt, or recovering from something big, the water acts as a protective bubble. One morning, a woman nudged open the locker room door only to be met with whoops and applause; someone even burst into tears. The smiling person padding across the mildewy tiles had undergone a kidney replacement and been away for months. She spoke Russian, a language known by only one other person in the water. Despite this barrier, everyone cared about her wellbeing and heralded her homecoming. They are no less supportive after a sibling dies or a spouse suffers a fall. We sign cards, place a dripping hand on an exposed shoulder. (If you haven’t wept in the arms of someone over political news, begging for a kernel of time-earned wisdom while both of you are wet and half-naked, you haven’t lived.)

I turn to them for advice in such moments because, once you scratch the surface, many of these people have survived much and have led wild lives. Like the Argentinean woman who told me, simply, “You’re lucky—in my country he would have stayed in power for decades.” Or L, my friend and sometimes lane mate. A woman in her 80s, the meaty middle of L’s life was spent in Los Angeles as a kindergarten teacher. But, also: “I ran a USO show on the beach in Chu Lai,” she tells me. “It was quite a time!” Then there’s S, a man L’s age but not nearly as nimble, who fled Iran during the revolution. He tries to dictate where people swim with jabs in the air, water flicking off his finger. S has the heart-seizing habit of trying to cross my lane right when I flip and push off the wall—when I can’t see him and I’m moving my fastest. “S!” I say, “Look out!” “I know what I’m doing!” he yells back, as someone nearly plows into him.

The regulars provide a model for an empowered life, despite aches and ailments—a model that is precious to me since developing that confounding chronic pain, which roars back from time to time. Over the years, I have shared lanes with people who use wheelchairs, who are blind, who are undergoing cancer treatment. Here, I see how one reconfigures the physics of swimming (using foam noodles to exercise despite bum knees, paddling in the water walker lane, floating on backs). These people give me a charge of certainty when I tell my non-swimming buddies: “I can do this for the rest of my life.” As we grow older, we’re told, life is smaller, quieter, ailment-ridden, lonely. These friends allow me a window into my future, if I’m lucky. Despite heart surgeries, hip replacements, injuries, losses, and setbacks, they are here, chatting, laughing, flirting, moving—living. As we swap recipes or gossip about who lost his temper, I watch the innumerable ways I can continue to move through something as deceptively simple as a rectangle divided into equal parts.