“yeah, do a flip,” others begin to chant.
I stared at the great undulating darkness and moved closer to the edge.
“He won’t do it, he’s old,” came a comment from behind me.
I glanced over my shoulder. It was an 8 year old girl wearing a pink tankini with orange cheetoh crumbs stuck to her face. She looked like a miniature circus clown as her little brown eyes dared me to jump.
She didn’t say it, but I could read her thoughts. “Who is this old man? Why is he slowing down the line?”
Good question. What was I doing atop this floating diving board staring into the great abyss.
I looked back at the 1st grader. She was staring daggers at me, her arms folded across her life vest.
Relax little clown face girl, I thought to myself. I suddenly felt like tossing the child off into the drink to wipe that orange mustache off her face.
“Are you gonna jump or what?” The question came from my other side, like a stabbing body blow from a 16 year old boy, dripping with lake water. The kid was wearing a tattered, saturated ball cap, and he wanted me, the old man at the edge of the boat to S**t or get off the pot, so to speak.
“I’m really considering it,” I said to the boy. I stepped closer to the edge and felt my arthritic toes push over the fiberglass edge. My toe knuckles curled around the edge like Mary Lou Retton gripping a balance beam.
I put my hands out like a I was walking a tight rope. I stared at the deceptively, undulating darkness below.
“Jump!” the water whispered. “I won’t hurt you.” It was a silent seductive hiss only I could hear.
I snuck a peak over my shoulder. Tankini Clown Girl had her hands on her hips. She seemed thoroughly exasperated at this point.
I visualized what it would take to push off the ledge and curl into a tuck and then come out of the forward roll and then find the water and straighten out. I imagined slicing through the liquid like an olympic high diver, penetrating the void without so much as a ripple. The goal was not to bash my face into the water or radically rearrange my testicles into my spleen.
“Are you gonna jump?” came the darting comment from the cheeto faced demon behind me.
Her words were like a pygmy’s spear pricking my shoulder blade, injecting me with stinging bee venom.
“Back off little person,” I muttered.
The teenager mustered a respectful smile, but behind that layer of crooked teeth I could see a young man’s brain thinking; I hope I never get this old.
I hope I never get this old. And there it was, laid out, in plain site for me to chew on.
I HOPE I NEVER GET THIS OLD!
I turned back to stare at the alluring lake and my thoughts faded to a day when I was that young man with barely a decade of life under my belt.
Suddenly It’s 1985 and I am standing on the roof of an apartment complex. It’s night time and the Los Angeles air is filled with Santa Ana warmness.
The complex is two stories tall, and I am on the roof of the building, which means I am standing approximately where the 3rd story would begin if there were a third story.
The roof top is covered with gravel and rusting nails. The gutter is bent and flimsy held on by spider webs and spit.
I move forward, closer to the ledge. I push my toes against the bottom of my Nike leather High Tops. I am trying to gauge how strong the gutter is, but these shoes are designed for Hooping, not jumping to my death. My toes are trying to send my Brain vital calculations, but the shoes are doing little to yield information necessary for the stupidity I was contemplating.
I looked past the gutter to the ground below. I was easily 25 feet in the air. Below me was a kidney shaped swimming pool.
When the idea took shape in my beer saturated brain, the pool looked plenty big. But that was on the ground where big ideas are just that, big ideas. What started as playful beer keg banter, something to contemplate while talking the with fellas, had degenerated into THIS.
From this crow’s nest of death, the kidney shaped pool looked like a beer cap filled with trouble. What the hell was I doing up here I mused to myself.
My vision scanned past the 8 foot deep end of the pool to a group of three dozen or more college kids. Frat Boys and beach girls holding big red solo cups dotted the cement landscape. I saw a group of guys at the keg, drinking from the tap.
One of my frat brothers looked up from the drunken debauchery and shouted over the din; “Jump you Wuss.”
Man I hate when people challenge me, even from 30 feet in the air.
Sure, I’m the wuss, I angrily thought to myself. I’m standing on edge of a run down building on Menlo Street in South Central L.A. I’m the one up here, contemplating jumping over 15 feet of deck chairs and cement to clear a pool edge that raises up ever so slightly. Who is the wuss again? I’m stupid. I’m kind of inebriated. I am certainly lacking in good judgement. I am the poster child for why we don’t allow our children to jump off roof tops into very shallow pools.
Wuss? I don’t think so!
And with that I gathered in a deep breath of L.A. smog and pushed my toes hard into the souls of my shoes. Gravel shifted and the gutter vibrated slightly.
I could sense people on the ground staring in anticipation.
I took one more look at the white cement that filled the landing zone below me.
I used my best judgement to figure out angle and speed and height and acceleration and the vector needed to clear the cement and then hit the deepest part of the pool.
That was the trick. Clear the cement lip of the pool and go down at the deepest point. The more water between me and the bottom of the pool the less jarring the impact.
If I come up short; SPLAT! I probably die. I’m at least going to the hospital in an ambulance with paramedics asking me if I can feel their touch.
If I jump too far, then I miss the 8 foot optimum landing zone. Anything else decreases the amount of water I pass through, ultimately slowing my decent. 7 feet of water is not as good a cushion as 8 feet of water. God Forbid I hit the cement pool bottom in only 6-and-half foot of water.
That would be like putting on a football helmet and running head first into the side of a parked car. It might not kill you, but it is going to leave a mark.
The whole time I am up here, my brain is trying to calculate weight times mass times acceleration of a body falling out of the sky and hitting 8 feet of water.
It’s a lot to compute wihtout a slide rule and the crowd beginning to chant.
“Jump. Jump. Jump.”
I gaze at the faces below. Some I know. Some I don’t. Some I want to know better.
Suddenly, I spot a beautiful blond girl standing by a poorly lit palm tree on the side of the pool. She is wearing a revealing halter top and a mini skirt. She has eyes that seem to twinkle even this far away. I stare at her from my perch of death. I figure she can’t even see me, some half lubricated idiot on a roof top surrounded by black L.A. night.
But then I see it. The slight separation of her rosy lips revealing beautiful white teeth. Like a light house beacon guiding sailors away from the rocky cliffs, her smile is brilliant and blinding and lights up the pool. Her azure eyes stair directly into mine and I can see she is watching me, wondering what kind of guy does something so stupid or so brave.
After all, nobody else is on top of this building. Just me. Alone in my bravery. Alone in my stupidity. Alone. I have the spot light of dumb all to myself and she is in the front row watching to see how it will turn out.
Illuminated by the radiant beam of her smile, I am at the moment of truth. Step forward. Step back. Step back and you are a Woos, but at least you live to Woos another day. Step Back and maybe the girl with the radiant smile says hello to you anyway. But more than likely the girl with the azure colored eyes latches onto the next frat stud to show her light house.
Step forward and hope your calculations are correct. Step forward and hope the gravel doesn’t slip and the gutter holds for the one push off you will need to clear the cement. Step forward and prepare for the unknown.
“Jump. jump. jump”
A palm tree beside me fills with a gust of wind. The radiant smile of expectation from the mini skirt, halter top wearing girl is all I see. I want to drink beer in her lighthouse.
Alcohol swirls in my brain, but still bits of rational thought are filtering through.
I exhale and step forward.
I push off the ledge. I feel gravel give way, but it’s too late. I feel the gutter bend, but it’s too late.
I immediately wish I had a better take off but it’s too late. Suddenly I’m in mid air. White concrete is racing up toward me. The shimmering water of the pool is racing into my visual air space. Did I leap off far enough? I think randomly.
A shudder of fear crosses my brain. No time to worry. I push the fear away. Let the free fall continue.
It all happens in a moment, but I remember that moment. I remember focusing on the pool and the deck chairs below. I remember a mental image of the girl as I am falling and the idiots gathered at the keg.
I feel the stares of everyone now. Nobody is drinking. Nobody is talking. I own this moment. Good or bad. Life or Death. Hero or idiot. This moment is mine. The people at the pool will either be witness to my insanity, or witness to my triumph.
If it goes well, then dozens will tell me what it looked like from their point of view. If it goes bad, at least there are plenty of witnesses to talk to police and my family and explain what it looked like when my head hit the pool and split open like a cantaloupe stuffed with M-80’s.
time catches up to the moment.
SPLASH.
The next instant is a white flash of abruptness, pain, and water filling my ears, nose and mouth. there is concussive force. I feel the pool bottom. My feet smash violently into the hard concrete of the deep end. My knees thrust up into my chest cavity at unbelievable speed.
I am stunned and I think I am floating sideways. I am surrounded by water. There is a strange green light flickering nearby. Wetness and silence and momentary confusion fill my thoughts. I feel pain, but I also feel life. within moments I am pushing to the surface. 7-and-a-half feet away is oxygen and realization that if nothing else I am alert enough to know I want to breathe.
I break the surface and feel the water exiting my ears. As water trickles out, boisterous cheers begin to trickle in. I see the keg boys high fiving. I feel my veins pulsing with adrenaline. I look to the girl in the halter top. Her smile is pronounced, her Aura splendid, her radiant beams of attraction directed at me, and only me. The light house is open, I think to myself.
I pull myself from the pool and check my body parts. My chest is sore from where my knees thrust into my ribs crushing them like a Mike Tyson body blow. I am sopping wet but no worse for ware.
Someone hands me a beer and slaps me on the back.
“You’re a crazy son of a bitch Cordan,” the frat boy says to a round of cheers.
It is later described to me that I cleared the pool’s edge by a good margin. In fact, I cleared it so well, I over shot my landing spot and hit around the 7-foot mark.
Oh well, it’s not like I had the scientific schematics of Isaac Newton up there with me. All I really had was a beer buzz and some youthful fearlessness.
I moved to the girl with the azure eyes and brilliant smile. Her halter top was even more alluring up close. She was a vision of loveliness and seemingly excited to talk to the crazy guy who just jumped off a building.
The night was young and I was all ready wet.
“That was cool,” she said in a more than casual way.
“Yeah, it was kind of nuts,” I said looking back at the roof top ledge which seemed a long way away in the darkness of the L.A. night.
The memory dissipates.
I am suddenly back at the lake and my tentative perch above the water.
25 years have passed in the blink of an eye. The attractive blond has been replaced by an angry Cheeto faced 8 year old who thinks I’m her grandpa.
The calculation of the jump and the possibility of clearing a cement pool deck and hitting a narrow slice of water is replaced by a 100 mile long lake that is deep and all around me.
“It’s clear, sir,” the polite teenager says as he urges me to go.
I think of the cute blond in the halter top. Her gaze fills mine from the murky depths of my memories.
I am filled with the courage I felt that night on the rooftop. I push off the double decker party barge and let gravity due its job.
I don’t do the flip I imagined, in stead going for the safer “old guy straight ahead” jump.
I hit the water and make a clean entry. The water is green and murky and I quickly pop up to the surface. I am pleased.
“Nice flip,” the little clown girl muses out loud.
As I swim to the boat ladder and a waiting beer, I think back to days gone by, when I would have flipped into the unknown for little more than a smile and the desire to know what if.
But on this day, youthful recklessness has been replaced by sagacious wisdom that comes with maturity.
As I drink a beer, I watch the teenager in the hat do a flip off the top level. he lands it perfectly. Everyone cheers. They toss him a Mr. Pibb. Somewhere there is a cute teenage girl applauding his bold action.
I have to laugh. what’s old is new again!