Desperate times call for creativity: jumping off the garage roof

--Number Two

Pools, in my opinion, are a great invention. They provide a social atmosphere in which removing clothes is required, which I wholeheartedly support. Pools can be great, when done right. But when done wrong, they can get real bad.

Let me give a testament to my expertise on pools. Throughout my childhood, I was yelled at every time I didn't take care of the pool... which was once a week. I was charged with vaccuuming the pool, chlorinating it, changing the DE (which stands for diatomaceous earth) in the filter, "bumping" the filter, cleaning the filter basket, etc. I've opened and closed pools numerous times. I've even patched holes in the vinyl siding while the pool was leaking. For all intents and purposes, I know how to care for a pool.

Now, though I had a terrible track record for consistently doing my chores, our pool water stayed reasonably clear. Our neighbors who lived behind us, the Shorts, their pool water...not so clear.

Through a series of similes, strong imagery, and potentially dangerous metaphors, I'm now going to best describe the condition of the Short pool.

• If you removed an Alabama outhouse and exposed the underlying cesspool in the heat of summer, you would know the smell of the Short pool.
• The water could have respawned a mutant polio virus
• There was a Ciba-Geigy plant about 10 miles away that polluted our water with contaminants. I think they went straight to the source and paid Ciba-Geigy to fill their pool with the waste products of chemical synergy.
• http://www.epa.gov/region2/superfund/npl/0200078c.pdf
• Know the glow of the blue screen of death? Imagine that, only green, and you're trying to sleep but the monitor won't turn off all night.
• The pool was purchased at Walmart. On clearance.
• If the filter were ever used, it might have activated a nuclear implosion chain reaction with the pool's "water," triggering the largest single instance of nuclear destruction in the history of the world.
• I "swam" in the pool one time - I am pretty sure I saw Jesus's face in the green algae hanging out on the bottom of the pool. I immediately exited, for fear of contracting Typhoid. I might as well have played in a creek whose primary tributary was a power plant's runoff stream.
• Ever see Erin Brockovitch? If so, you already know where I'm going with this.
  

Maybe I am the way I am because I entered their farce of a pool that one day. It makes me wonder, "how did those kids turn out?" I mean, I never saw THEM in that pool...

Anyway, while looking through the list of topics that "E" told me I could write about, one of them caught my eye. And by caught my eye, I mean I almost giggled like a five year old in the front row of my fixed income class. (Like last night when Jack told me about how he opened up a YouTube video of two gorillas fucking each other at full volume in his equities class). Anyway, that writing prompt was to tell my story of how I encourage idiocy--in this case, how I encourage jumping from edifices (and trampolines) into pools.

In case you haven't noticed already, our family is a bunch of assholes. As children, we were no different. Yes, little asshole children who caused outrages from the neighbors on numerous occasions. Asshole children who dug holes in the backyard to make bonfires from a pile of dried leaves. Asshole children who couldn't be satisfied with Tekken or other video games, children whose alternative entertainment had been banned by the ER staff of Jersey Shore Medical Center and our Mother, we became asshole children who resorted to jumping off roofs. By we, I don't mean my older sister. She would've been all for it, except she was doing something worthwhile, like babysitting, or getting caught by Mom giving a handjob to her boyfriend.

So back in the day (which was a Wednesday), me, my brothers, and one of my friends were bored. It was a sweltering New Jersey summer day. If you've ever experienced one of these, you know that they SUCK. There's no wind, and a disgusting wet blanket of heat hangs in the air. It's probably hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk, but the humidity makes you too lazy to wanna try. Instead, you dream up "cool" shit to do in order to quell the heat.

In our three-bedroom, one-bathroom ranch in Beachwood (before it was ghettofied, before neighborhood thugs went around painting swastikas on our uncle's work truck) we had a pool. For now, I'm going to ignore the fact that there were NINE people crammed into a house with one bathroom. As a result, Dad constructed an extra bedroom in the basement where Ryan and Kyle shared a room with me.

Anyway. In our backyard laid a 4-foot deep above-ground beauty in which we would swim during lightning storms, ignoring the neighbors' protests (details to come in "The Short Story"). But today we had had enough fun simply swimming in the pool and jumping off its sides that had begun collapsing from frequent 10-year old weight on top of them. Fuck it, we needed altitude.

Diagonal from the pool was our garage. It was a serious garage--had an attic and shit, and this was where our Dad stored his rolling cart for changing the oil in the Suburban--the same oil cart that we used to tie to the back of our bikes. The garage was set off from the house, completely separate from our living space. The roof was as high as that of our house, plus it was much closer to the pool. And inside that garage was a ladder.

You know what happened for the next hour.

Front flips, back flips, jack-knives. You name it, we did it. Into a 4-foot deep pool. Dumb? Yes. Fun? Hell, yes.

Ryan, Kyle, Chris, and I climbed up the ladder to jump the 20 or so feet into our pool until disaster happened. No, it's not what you're thinking--or what, by all means, SHOULD have happened. No broken neck, no compound fractures, no one falling off the garage roof. Nope. Instead, our brilliant relief from boredom ended traumatically with our fucking rat neighbor Mrs. Short, calling our grandmother who lived two blocks away. And then Gram called Mom.

On a side note, E & I suspect that the reason Mrs. Short called Gram was because she was jealous of our pool. She had tried to give her kids a pool, but since she was no good white trash and bought her kids a cheap one.

Anyway, if you've read my previous story then you already know what happened. Mom called home (she was at work) and reamed me out so hard--that day, she pretty much made me feel like I was the AntiChrist.

All I have to say is it takes one to know one, Mom!