Water polo season ended at about the same time that my relationship with Cam fizzled. My friends Jeff, Jennifer, and Trisha all left the Vista Swim Team shortly thereafter. This put me in a tough spot, though I couldn’t exactly blame Jennifer or her family. Her career had stagnated with Mr. Malone, and she possessed entirely too much talent to let herself just sort of muddle along through the rest of her career. Her parents felt that she’d gone about as far as she could go with the Vista Swim Team, and they were probably right. They took half the team with them when they left, however, establishing a gigantic multi-family carpooling effort by way of sharing the daily forty-five minute one-way treks out to Mt. Caramel that joining their new swim team required. Through this they got access to vastly superior facilities and to a coach who’d put swimmers into the Olympics. That was probably worth it for Jennifer, but a lot of other kids got pulled along in her wake, and poor Jeff spent almost all of his time behind the wheel of his old beater hatchback for the next few years.
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| On a beach in San Diego: Layne, Shirley, myself, and John. |
My parents and I discussed our options, but it was even further from Fallbrook than it was from Vista, and my dad liked and respected Mr. Malone far too much to allow me to leave the team.
I didn’t want to leave Vista either, but I wondered if maybe my career hadn’t started to stagnate as well. With Jennifer and the rest gone, I was left as the undisputed fastest-kid-on-the-team. Though this was satisfying in a certain way, it did nothing to help me improve. Morning practices became lonely affairs, and afternoons were only slightly better. My friend John showed up most mornings, but sometimes I swam alone while Mr. Malone watched silently from the pool deck. Dad got into the water with me occasionally as well, but if he swam with courage and determination, he remained entirely hopeless in all other respects.
I’d hit a plateau. I didn’t set a new personal best for months, and in fact, it wasn’t until mid-year that I even equaled my previous best time. This didn’t concern me at first since I was still exceedingly satisfied with the memory of freshman year’s “AAAA”. As the months dragged on, however, it became a thing. Fifty-five grew to be as much a mental block as a physical one. I dominated my second season of high school dual meets, but if the crowds cheered excitedly now, I barely noticed. Privately, I was locked in a cycle of frustration and pointlessness. I hit :54 at the CIF Championships and again placed fifth.
In a year, I’d gone almost exactly nowhere.
The upshot of all this was that I spent gobs of time with Layne and my other friends. The Vista Swim Team now consisted of exactly four high schoolers—me, Layne, Shirley, and my good friend John. By the time school let out and long course season started19, everyone but John had gotten our driver’s licenses. We spent the summer driving to meets as a foursome, and if I was frustrated in the water, I was damned happy out of it. One meet in particular, we spent the afternoon driving around Mission Viejo in Shirley’s white BMW, listening to Depeche Mode on a cloudless summer day. I sat beside Layne and couldn’t stop thinking about how happy I was. We’d gone out for lunch that afternoon, and though we had to be back in time for finals that night, I couldn’t bring myself to care. I swam poorly that day, but unusually, I didn’t care about that, either. I was with the people that I loved, and all was right with my world.
Layne was everything that I wanted in a woman—a year older, naturally, and beautifully blonde and funny, too. She smiled constantly. I don’t know what she felt about my obvious infatuation, but she left tracks on my soul that ran a mile wide. We stood outside her house grilling one night right before my family left San Diego forever, and I watched the setting sun as it painted the sky red with fire. Layne smiled or laughed, and I thought that I would never find another girl as beautiful as she was.
As always, what I wanted didn’t matter.
Dad broke his leg during a parachute jump that spring, and after some deep-seated soul-searching, his Division Commander decided to move Recon Battalion’s change-of-command up several months. My father’s career was suddenly in turmoil while he himself was stuck briefly in a wheelchair. He drove us crazy for two weeks, but soon he was up and about on crutches, wearing his cast like a badge of honor.
“Yeah, I broke my leg jumping out of an airplane,” he’d say. “Hooyah! I’m a Recon Marine.”
You could tell by his face how much he enjoyed those words.
His impending loss of command created real uncertainty, though. We waited months to found out would happen to our family. About the time I finally got my driver’s license, we at last learned our fate.
Special Operations Command, MacDill Air Force Base, Tampa, Florida.
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
19. Swimming has seasons. Short course season lasts through most of the school year. Long course season runs from late spring to the end of summer. During this time, swimmers compete in the fifty meter pools that you see in the Olympics.
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