Off the Deep End

By Steve Rushin

This spring, as workers dug a swimming pool in my backyard, I imagined myself adrift on an inflatable chaise or just gazing out at the Barbicide-blue water, my days passing in a flip-flopped, tank-topped bliss.

Two months later, I sometimes feel like William Holden in Sunset Boulevard floating facedown in the pool with a bullet in his back. "The poor dope," he says, narrating from the afterlife. "He always wanted a pool. Well, in the end, he got himself a pool."

Except that I didn't really want a pool. I never thought I was the kind of person who should own one (Hugh Hefner, everyone on Cribs), didn't want to dress like the kind of person who owned one (Hef again, or Dustin Hoffman in Meet the Fockers) and never even cared all that much for getting wet (I hadn't owned a bathing suit in 10 years; I now have three).

Who do I think I am, owning a pool? Or worse: Who do the neighbors think I think I am? Thanks to the theme from The Beverly Hillbillies, swimmin' pools will always be synonymous with movie stars--a sign of self-indulgence, of idle-rich ennui. When Liv Ullmann said, "Hollywood is loneliness beside the swimming pool," she wasn't paying the town a compliment.

Rock stars, too, like their swimming pools: Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones was found dead in one, Keith Moon of the Who claimed to have driven a Lincoln into one, and Joe Perry of Aerosmith--among many others--has one shaped like a guitar. Bono has lampooned the average activist rocker as a guy "with a swimming pool shaped like his own head." Paul McCartney said he and John Lennon used to sit down to compose saying "Let's write us a swimming pool."

Of course, there are more pools in the U.S.--an estimated 7.4 million--than wealthy celebrities. Florida alone has 1.1 million swimming pools, and they can't all be at Mar-a-Lago. (Or can they?)

So I persuaded myself that pools weren't only for cartoon billionaires like Donald Trump or the Monopoly mascot. And then the contractor installing my pool introduced himself as--this is not a joke--Joe Rich.

And just because millions have one doesn't mean it's not an extravagance. Watching a tanker pump 30,000 gal. of water into an empty pool at a cost of $1,200 gives new resonance to the phrase "pouring money down a hole." Yes, that's less than a 10th of the water that the Neptune Pool at Hearst Castle holds, and we opted for vinyl and stamped concrete instead of Hearst's glass tile infused with gold and 17th century Italian bas-reliefs. Still, throw in a fence, a heater, a motorized cover and a filter pump that runs 24/7, and I've spent tens of thousands of dollars to surround myself with water, no different from the guy who buys a yacht and names it Liquid Assets. Is that me? I worry that it might be. Look into a swimming pool, and you'll see your reflection.

Some days, then, when I say I feel like a dip in the pool, I really do feel like a dip in the pool. The first (and only) time my wife and I swam at night, she said, "This is a scene from every slasher movie ever." It seemed so decadent--swimming under the stars in our own wooded backyard--that we half-deserved to be filleted by Freddy Krueger.

And then there are the manifold physical horrors: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns of RWIs (recreational water illnesses), which sounds like an airport code but is actually a euphemism for diarrhea from swallowed pool water. Insurance companies will no longer insure diving boards because of spinal injuries. Our pool came with no fewer than two dozen warning stickers to affix in and around it, so you feel as though you're swimming in a carton of Marlboros.

The warnings are not frivolous either. Drowning is the second leading cause of death for children under 5. I have two toddlers. Mix these facts, and you get instant anxiety. Just add water.

And I do. I add water, chlorine, algicide. Still, the pool seldom has a proper pH: sometimes too much chlorine, sometimes none at all. There are days when I think of my pool as a malign presence that may or may not be full of chemicals, like having Barry Bonds in the backyard.

But as the dog days approach--and little feet are slap-slapping on the concrete and young voices are calling "Marco" and "Polo"--I increasingly love that pool and don't care who knows it. Most people, like most pools, have a deep end and a shallow one. I'm going to enjoy my shallow end for a while.