16 February 2007 | Vol. 6, No. 4

No More Alligator Feet

by AARON H. GILBREATH

Admittedly, the soles of my feet were pretty callous—thick, like tire tread—but when you're a professional pool cleaner thick's a good thing. It helps me walk around a pool deck at a relaxed speed, which means I do a better job skimming junk from the surface and brushing submerged walls; plus, with thick soles I can—well, could—fetch my girlfriend's morning paper from the one hundred-plus degree pavement without burning my feet. It's an adaptation, I told her. Sue didn't think so.

"It's gross. Your feet look like an alligator's. Why don't you just work in sandals?"

"Because," I said, "that's one of the joys of my profession. If you knew how good if feels to have your feet in green grass and a breeze blowing between your toes, you'd be shoeless too."

"It's kind of unprofessional, don't you think? I'm sure your customers think so."

"I don't know; I don't ask. I just clean their pool." I kneeled before Sue and, with the vested interest of a department store salesman, undid her laces and slid off her heels. A cool breeze blew in through the small, screened window. Golden shards of light fell across the couch. "Come feel for yourself."

I led her into our apartment building's courtyard, where, after glancing around to see if any neighbors were looking, she curled her toes into the cool, moist lawn and smiled. "It's evolution, honey. Get on the Darwin train; it's moving fast."

That was a year ago, right after we'd moved in together. She's been sleeping at Terry and Jeff's for the last six days, though, trying to figure out her next move. I've been here in limbo. One-bedroom apartments feel unnecessarily large with just one person in them. Who knows, I may be renting my own studio soon, or staying in this big apartment by myself 'til the lease runs out. But I doubt, despite what Sue may want, that I'll be getting a new job anytime soon.

You don't really choose pool cleaning as a living; it kind of chooses you. My father was a subcontractor until his knees gave out during a particularly grueling sheetrock job, leaving him on the couch on permanent disability the rest of his short life. But before he passed, he always said there was enough pool water in this city to fill an ocean, and someone had to clean it. Three years working construction for some of Dad's old employers and one unfinished business degree later, here I am.

The sight of blue water from an airplane or high ridge makes my stomach tingle: there's my handiwork, I think, cool and clear, like a good man's conscious. And here in Phoenix they need us pool cleaners year-round. People may not be swimming much from October to March, but neglect doesn't keep water clean; you should see the amount of palm fronds and mulberry leaves that end up under the protective blue tarps, looks like duckweed in a Southern swamp. Problem is, cleaning doesn't pay so great; your knees and neck and back constantly ache; you handle lots of chemicals; and even armed with sunscreen, sunglasses and wide-brimmed hats, some guys get melanoma. Every time I see a doctor I expect him to tell me that that purple mole on my shoulder, the one Sue kept poking at, is the lethal proof that I am not proactive. A lot goes into keeping all this water crystal blue, and very little thanks comes from it, so you make a bad thing good: you take off your shoes, breath in the fresh air, read a book in the sun with a nice cold soda on your lunch break, maybe nap in the back seat of your truck. The job may not be something to brag about—which Sue reminds me of constantly at parties and bars—but Sue does like my muscular arms and shapely calves, what she calls the body of a Greek athlete. Still, I feel like I'm drowning here.

Against the momentum of a thirty year habit, I've been trying to dress more my age, wear things like blazers and button up shirts that Sue finds sexy. The night of Terry and Jeff's Christmas party I put on a collared white linen shirt and my best khakis—clothes Sue'd bought me for a friend's wedding—plus these leather open-toed sandals that in the shop window I thought looked too yuppie but that I hoped might be a great compromise between my easy informality and Sue's reserve.

"Like the pants," Sue told me as I modeled the outfit. "But the white is too springy. And the shoes are too, I don't know, informal."

At first I thought, "Springy?" White is white. But, as irritating as it is to always have your wardrobe picked apart, that knowledge is also what I love about Sue: she knows etiquette and fashion and that kind of thing, and she's a go-getter. She has a career path, a vision, and she's chasing it like Blueticks after a scared raccoon.

Still, another part of me just wished she'd let me wear the damn sandals without comment. Not just that night, but always. I'm sorry, I've done a lot of things over the last two years to make the love of my life happy: agreeing to wash glasses as soon as I've used them (they sometimes piled up in my old apartment); not scraping the bottom of my dinner plate or cereal bowls in public because it reeks of classless desperation; letting her decorate the entire apartment—paintings, color schemes, four-hundred thread-count sheets, whatever she wanted. But she's just very concerned with appearing poor or cheap or weird—anything but perfect—to other people.

"Hey," I said one night after her hand had brushed the rough bottom of my feet, "at least I'm not like my dad: he ran around his hometown of Florence, Arizona sliding cardboard under his feet when it got too hot because his folks couldn't afford new shoes."

She laughed and said we'd both be single right now if I did that. She grew up poor and has been trying for something great, who knows what, ever since. Still, sophisticated or not, lovely or not, no one is going to spoil one of the few joys of my job. I'm an Arizonan. Shorts are a way of life here. Plus, the shoes come off in April and don't go back on until first frost in November.

It's not love me or leave me, but I do have to be me. Anyway, that night I swapped the sandals for some, I don't know, fancier leather shoes, loafers, whatever you call them. I should have just worn the sandals, for once stayed with what I thought looked good. I mean, shit, they cost ninety bucks, but, as usual, Sue was worried what her friends would think.

"I don't want them to see your calluses," she told me, which made my eyes roll and brow buckle. These are people we've been joining for a monthly Sunday dinner for a whole year, and she's known Terry since age sixteen. Weren't we past the impression stage and into the maintenance stage? Didn't Terry and Jeff already have an idea of what kind of person I was? Sue was?

Plus, I didn't tell Sue what to wear. Maybe I should have: Less slacks, more skirts, and make 'em short. See how horrible that sounds? You can't see my calluses from up top anyway.

The Christmas party was fun, if you consider fun hearing Terry and Jeff's coworkers, complete strangers, complain about the work and hygiene habits of other complete strangers. I told Sue and our hosts that it was a great party. Actually, the word I used was 'wonderful.' Sue likes when I use more imaginative, expressive words. Words like 'stuff' and 'thing' and 'good' are cop-outs, she says, the default setting for people who don't take the time to scoop deep into the well of the English language and find the word that precisely expresses the nuances in what they're saying. There's a word for everything, a college professor once told her, and our minds dull every time we don't use them.

Oh, and no cursing in public; it sounds too gruff. To that I say: fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. Shit shit shit shit shit.

Sometimes I mutter profanities under the rush of the shower where no one can hear. Sometimes there's no better word for the situation than 'fuck,' no more perfect word to express your emotion than one that amounts to a grunt, and the only way to get out my emotion is to do it by myself. I swear sometimes I think I suffer from a dangerous linguistic back-up, and that when I empty my mind of all the backed up profanity, my shoulders stop hurting and I can stand straighter than I could before. If anything, I'm going to develop high blood pressure before skin cancer.

Cursing alone in the shower is like dumping a bucket of stabilized chlorine into a filthy pool: a quick swoosh and it's just like new. Which is another irritation: we can't afford to have our own pool. We swim laps at 24-Fitness and sometimes, in a pinch, at our apartment complex's pool. But that one is too small to park a Beetle in and so green that a kid wouldn't even want to climb in to pee in it. Trust me, I know.

Anyway, I've been steadily putting money aside for a big purchase like a house—I always envisioned it being a down payment after I got married—and one day, I swear to God, I'm going to save up enough to buy a two-bedroom or bungalow complete with fireplace and garden and a big beautiful blue pool. Actually, if Sue and I had our own house we could have one of those nice aboveground pools with the plastic siding and little stepladder, which is far cheaper than a custom pool and requires a bit less upkeep. One day. (Damn, I sound like my mother who's always saying, "One day, when I win the lottery, I'll split it with you." She's been playing for forty-something years.) Until then, it's just 24-Fitness and this nasty apartment puddle, which I recently had the balls to clean myself—just in and out one night, commando style, when no one was looking.

—

It's been a long week. Before she left, I showed Sue a trick my parents showed me as a kid: park in the Palms Resort lot, walk through the side gate and treat yourself to hours of play in their legendary 1960's era pool. All for free. My mother always said, "You don't need to be rich to enjoy most of life's pleasures." But Sue was nervous about getting caught. "Will they arrest us?" she said as we sat in her car applying sunscreen. "Charge us for a room or something?"

I assured her that, when some friends and I got caught swimming there in high school, staff simply asked us to leave. She shook her head and looked like she was about to restart the car.

"We'd look like such idiots."

"No one is going to notice us anyway," I told her. "Trust me."

She thought we'd look less suspicious if we drove her new, charcoal gray

Nissan sedan, not my pickup, which was smart because that's the trick: look like a guest, blend in. I brought white towels that I'd stolen from the Palms years back—the same fluffy feel, same enormous dimensions, as swimmers would have. We parked among the Benzes in the large, sweltering lot—black asphalt gummy from the summer heat. High palm fronds rustled in the breeze. White light blinded us despite our sunglasses as it shone off the resort's thick clean stucco.

In the background stood the smooth red sandstone of Camelback Mountain, the city's most prominent geographic feature. Sue always found it beautiful, and she wrapped her thin lotioned arm around mine and gave me a kiss, shooting goose bumps all the way down to my ankles. We didn't kiss as much as we used to, didn't have sex that much either; I kissed her back and smiled. "Wait 'til you see the pool."

Absolute work of art. One of a kind. Occupying twice the area of a three-bedroom house, the pool stretches like a giant amoeba around a twenty-foot tall pile of artificial sandstone meant to resemble Camelback. Swimmers can wade into the rock, and once you pass through the cool wall of rushing water pouring down on either side, you enter a moist, dark cavern with a wet bar and Jacuzzi inside.

Vacationers from as far as Germany and Japan cover the deck every summer like beached driftwood. As strange as it was to be mixing with people who made as much money in three months as I did in a year, the anonymity was thrilling, that invigorating sa