An Unofficial Map of Papio Bay Aquatic Center
by Zachary Benak
The Front Desk
A flock of gangly theater kids and band geeks in transition lenses, pit stains seeping through our canary yellow staff shirts: it’s not what you want to see, shrouded beneath Nebraska’s 80% humidity, but it’s what you have to see.
We’re a merciless bunch, reducing 47-inch-tall children to tears on a daily basis as we slap on red wristbands that forbid them from the high dive. Your child standing on his tiptoes won’t be an exception. It’s an insurance liability, I’ve learned to say. Beyond us lies a zero-depth swimming pool across five acres of land. Your access to it hinges upon a $5.50 admission fee for you, $4.50 for the kid. Cash, Visa, or MasterCard only. That you only brought your Discover is not my problem. There’s an ATM you can go use just a mile west on Halleck Street. I see your eyes behind your sunglasses and watch you resist the temptation to tell a smarmy high school sophomore to go fuck himself.
The Back Counter
While pretending to organize souvenir inventory and season pass paperwork, I watch the male lifeguards rotate chairs every fifteen minutes, memorizing their torsos.
The Break Room
A lifeguard eating a Jimmy John’s sandwich on a folding chair. The school district’s copies of The Grapes of Wrath, assigned as AP Literature summer reading, sprawled on a table. An industrial-sized tub of sunscreen in the back corner. A broken sliding glass door on the Coca-Cola cooler. Six cursive loops forming my initials on the timesheet.
The Hill
Amidst the nacho tray debris and astringent puddles of sunscreen, one young pool rat calls the other a faggot.
“Don’t say that,” I demand. They roll their eyes at me, reclined on the lounge chairs I’ll have to drag back down to the pool deck at sunset. “Seriously.” The irony that I’m clutching a rainbow of littered Airhead wrappers in my hand is not lost on me.
The Concessions Stand
One soft pretzel with salt but no cheese, one soft pretzel with cheese but no salt, and one soft pretzel with no salt and no cheese.
“So you just want the third pretzel to be warm bread?” I ask, curling my upper lip in disgust. The tween stares back. Stale odors from the pizza warmer and popcorn machine waft out from behind me, scenting our standoff. It’s not much, but these random acts of bitchiness are the only ways I can exact revenge on the homophobic children around me. “That’ll be $8.25.”
The Party Deck
Time to be butch while the lifeguards at the First Aid stand watch on. Braving the hornet’s nest in the storage room to carry tables to the deck, armed with a tape gun dispenser and pink plastic table covers, birthday party setup is a senior responsibility that amplifies my sense of self-importance, as if my high school summer job becoming my college summer job isn’t slightly humiliating.
The Dumpster
“You can’t vote for Trump,” I say from behind the wheelbarrow. “You just can’t.”
“But I hate Hillary,” Jason says. (Or maybe it was Tessa? I took a number of seventeen-going-on-eighteen-year-olds under my wing that summer.) Past the pump room and sand volleyball courts and away from patrons and managers, this is a safe space for forbidden conversations. Here, I take everything I’ve learned from my freshman year of college in Chicago and impart it upon these kids like their wise elder. We launch trash bags from the wheelbarrow into the dumpster, dodging the leaking cocktails of soda and hot dog juice.
“Then please just vote for Gary Johnson,” I say.
Sheryl’s Office
Somewhere in the crevices of my camera roll or someone else’s, there is a photo of me asleep in Sheryl’s chair. I have a Toni Morrison novel in my lap. There are drawings from Sheryl’s grandkids tacked on the corkboard behind her desktop. My feet are propped up on the metal shelves alongside stacks of Sprite and Orange Fanta syrup boxes. It’s a rainy day.
The Slides
This year, the park attendants are brave enough to join the cliquey lifeguards at their annual after-hours party: Christmas in July. There are at least three lifeguards that Kristen and I both want to fuck us, though I know her odds are better than mine. We are uninhibited, daring to be as reckless as they are. That’s what propels us to pile onto an inner tube with two other staff members and ride down the steep yellow slide, bracing ourselves against the rubber and each other ahead of the massive splash at the bottom. And that’s how Kristen tears her ACL.
My Dreams
They come in April, when the pool is being re-painted and the new hires are training on cash registers. They come in May, as my body anticipates the annual opening over Memorial Day weekend. Sometimes a stray one will even come in December, the context and content both inexplicable. I’m not sure when we started selling snow cones instead of ice cream. The garter snake that crawled out from behind the grill on Fourth of July 2015 makes a surprise appearance in the bathhouse. There are renovations I don’t remember; there are patrons yelling at me about our no-refund policy. All that desire and heat I felt in my hormonal teenage body is alive again. My forebrain remembers working like hell on some days and doing absolutely nothing on others, accruing hundreds of dollars every two weeks at a meager minimum wage, putting it all away for private school tuition and rent for a Chicago apartment so I could build and have a life away from here. I did, and I do. But over a decade later, my unconscious mind still demands that I return, a prodigal son of the public pool, paying homage to five hot, shitty, formative summers of my past.
BIO: Zach Benak lives in Chicago. His prose appears in Reckon Review, Bear Paw Arts Journal, Litbreak, Gasher, Sweeter Voices Still: An LGBTQ Anthology of Middle America (Belt Publishing 2021), and elsewhere.