Your Thursday Regret: Wacky Summer Jobs

You may or may not know this, but back in my college days one of my summer jobs was as a bouncer at a city pool. I am not making this up. The job had some silly title which I cannot remember, but the actual function of the position was to be a bouncer. To stand at the front gate of the pool and say, "you in, you out, you in, you there's no way, you in, you get the hell out." This was what you did for 8 hours a day. The pool I worked at for three summers had SIX of these guys and at least two of them were on duty at any given time during the day.

Now at this point a reasonable person might wonder why a pool would need a bouncer, let alone more than one at a time. If you are wondering this you have clearly never been to a city pool, which is a good thing. I will provide you with some context.

To get an idea of what a Philadelphia Department of Recreation pool is like, imagine a war zone. It helps if you imagine something from a Vietnam movie, because one of the overriding factors in working at a city pool is that you are sitting out on a giant concrete slab in the merciless summer sun all day and it is incredibly humid. So, say, picture the end of Platoon or the beginning of Apocalypse Now (you know, before the movie becomes an insane parody of itself). Okay. You've got your image? Burning heat, humidity turning the atmosphere into a wet sock, blood-sucking insects the size of a Saab flitting about, and Charlie always lurking on the fringes looking to drop a mortar on you? All right.

Now imagine there's a pool in the middle of that.

That's what it's like.

This analogy is remarkably apt. Most of the time - for about 7-7.5 hours a day, honestly - you do very little. You sit about, chitchat, maybe clean your M-16. The people you're with are pretty cool. You're essentially getting paid to hang out. You have fun. I was technologically inclined and managed to set us up with a working Playstation in the pump house so we were entertained (the pool version of opium in the barracks, I guess).

You can do this because most of the time a city pool is open it's running a program of some kind - swim lessons, adult swim, a slot for the summer camp, lifeguard training or whatever and as the bouncer you essentially don't do anything. You never need to really work the door for any of these things because the people who use them are remarkably well-behaved. Adult swim was the best. For two hours in the afternoon/early evening there were maybe half a dozen senior citizens getting their swim on and you could just sit around and smoke cigarettes and shoot the shit.

However, for an hour and a half every day, there was the unrelenting horror that was "free swim."

This means exactly what it sounds like. The doors were thrown open and anyone - well, almost anyone - could come in and avail themselves of the facilities. Trying to work the door during this period was sheer terror.

I started my first summer at Jacobs on the first day the pool was open. The gates opened for free swim, scheduled for 2:30 to 4:00. They were closed at 3:05 when a riot broke out. I am not exaggerating. There was an actual, full-blown riot. By the time it was over 6 police cruisers and 3 paddy wagons showed up. There were close to 20 arrests. As the pool staff watched from a safe distance, the Guard 2, a guy named Jim, said, "35 minutes. New record."

"Record for what?" I asked.

"Longest first-day free swim," another guard answered. I then learned that the riot usually started much earlier than that. This record would hold up for the next two summers I worked there, when both times the first free swim didn't even make it half an hour.

Now understand that a city pool is one of the most regimented, rule-bound, quasi-fascist environments you're going to find outside of a prison or Nazi Germany. The list of things you aren't allowed to do at one of these places is STAGGERING in its length. A strict interpretation of the rules essentially states that you are allowed to stand in place in the water and not move your arms and legs, if the lifeguards decide to let you in the pool in the first place. One of our favorite ways to control unruly crowds - and that's of the ones who got INSIDE, never mind the hordes of miscreants I would turn away at the gate - was to make them stand on the deck and not get in the pool. People hated that.

The fragile equilibrium of order amidst the thrashing chaos of free swim was mostly maintained only by the fact that everyone seemed to know that the cops responded to calls from Jacobs in about 9 seconds and that the staff - usually me and the other bouncers - would dial 911 at the SLIGHTEST provocation. Don't get out of the pool when we tell you to? 911. Throw a soda at a lifeguard? 911. Make the staff think that you MIGHT CONSIDER starting a fight with another patron? 911 double-quick. And it wasn't like we were abusing it. The cops loved us. They would tell us to call them for anything. And they meant ANYTHING. If you were a cop in the 8th District a call from Jacobs was an easy arrest and a painless way to keep your numbers up. Cops loved answering calls from my pool, and we sure as hell made enough of them.

The insanity would largely tail off towards the end of the summer - the worst miscreants were quite literally all in jail by then - but it would never entirely disappear. The fun of working the door never did. You haven't known true despair until you've stood at the gate of a city pool, looked at someone trying to get in for free swim, and said to them, totally 100% seriously, "I'm sorry, you can't take a parole bracelet into the pool."

I said that at least once a week for three straight summers.

To DIFFERENT PEOPLE EVERY SINGLE TIME.

JLK