Mind Over Muscle

Or, how smart-ass brains defeated dumb-ass muscle.

Now, kids, don’t try this at home. I’m not exactly proud of what happened, in view of that much-improved vision known as hindsight. But the following is a true story; only the names have been changed to – you know. Well, it’s true if by true you recognize that I’m strictly following my own 85/10/5 rule.

Anyway, let’s go back in time a bit, shall we? A little over two decades ago. Ah, summertime in the late 80s! Van Halen and hair bands shredding on the radio. MTV actually played music videos. Ronald Reagan hard at work smashing communism and driving college professors nutty. Speaking of college, I was between them in the midst of my 11-year degree plan. I did have a full-time job that netted me $180 a week. I also had no real responsibilities, either at work or at my parent’s home, where I still lived. I never left home without old faithfuls like my $1.50 pack of Marlboro Lights and just about every night me and my buddies drank countless cans of Coors. My body laughed at fatigue and alcohol poisoning. It was a great time to be alive.

There was a group of us that hung out together at that time, a group of eight or nine or ten of us that met just about daily at this one guy’s house. We did a lot of things in all sorts of various permutations. Loitered around the Jersey shore before it became associated nationally as the turf of self-involved idiots. Went up to the mountains in my parent’s weekend house when it was available. Massive parties at my place when my parents were away. We’d all go out to see movies together, back in the day when you could still smoke in a movie theater. A few of us were musicians and tried to get bands going. Concerts – I recall seeing, in no particular order, AC/DC, Joe Walsh, The Who, a Roger Waters-less Pink Floyd, the Allman Brothers, REM, and a whole smattering of other groups in 87 and 88.

A’right, ’nuff background; here’s the story. One superhot weekend in July or August the group of us decided to go to one of those water parks. There were a couple we went to, such as those man-made mountains of waterslides on the piers at the shore, but this one was an actual mountain. Can’t recall the name or location, but we went there a few times. It had just about everything: mini-white-water-rafting, rollercoaster-sized water slides, an underground slide into an ice-cold lake, and a group of pools where you could sun yourself dry or get a chlorine fix.

We bought some lockers and changed into our swim shorts and hit the slopes. About midway through the day, after lunch, we decided to chill for a bit at one of the pools. Five of us, I’d guess, left the food courts and headed in that direction. The lanes snaked this way and that, past attractions or whatever devoted to separating you from your money, when Steve pointed over his shoulder and said, “Let’s cut through here.”

It was an area walled off by a wooden fence where the park stored its dumpsters. About twenty yards across, and then there was the pool. There was no one there, and the gate was slightly ajar. Sure, we all decided. It would save about ten or fifteen minutes of meandering about.

Well, just as we got to the other side and could hear splashing in the pool just beyond, another kid suddenly pops out in front of us. He seems as startled as we are. Oh, and he’s a lifeguard; he’s wearing officially-logo’d shorts. He’s also the polar opposite of us: muscle-bound, ripped abs, crew cut, tanned. “Hey, you can’t be in here!” he barks at us.

“Sorry,” Steve says. “We didn’t know. We just want to go to the pool.” I can see the pool just beyond muscle boy.

The lifeguard decides to exercise some power. He blocks the gate. “No, you can’t come through here. You have to go back the other way.” He points to the gate we came through.

Is this guy kidding? What was the big deal? In five steps we could be at the pool. He really wanted us to walk all the way back to the gate we came in, twenty yards away, and then walk a hundred or two hundred yards to circle through the park and come into the pool area the official way? I think some of us even say as much to him.

But the lunkhead is not giving an inch. Even though we outnumber him five to one, we acquiesce.

It actually takes us almost an hour to get to the pool. We pick up two other friends, have more grub. We buy stuff, and get distracted by other stuff. Eventually, though, we cross those golden official entrance doors to the pool, and Bob grabs my shoulder.

“Look who it is!”

The muscle-bound jerk is sitting in the lifeguard chair. We hesitate for a moment, but hey – it’s a free country, right? We paid our money to get in to the park. Then, lunkhead jumps off the chair, points to a kid in the water, and shouts full-force at the top of his lungs, turning beet-red: “NO JUMPING OFF THE WALL!” The pool is divided by a small wall that juts out of the water about two feet. A lot of kids are sitting on it, and apparently, it’s a big no-no to jump off this wall.

Bob, ever dramatic, pulls us into a huddle. “You know what we gotta do, don’t you?” he asks all of us, making eye-contact, one-by-one, his win-it-for-the-gipper speech.

“We gotta jump off that wall.”

I remember being struck immediately by the cosmic justice of it all. It was as if God, my very immature, non-believing conception of God, wrapped up for us all a nice little Christmas present and handed it to us free-of-charge. Here, take it, my son Guido over there needs some humblin’, and you are the men to do it.

The only problem was the very real threat of being ejected from the park.

Then, inspiration struck me. “We need to enter separately, and sit at different parts of the wall. Only one of us should jump off the wall at a time. You jump, wait to get yelled at, get back on the wall, and someone else jumps. That way we won’t all get thrown out at once.”

So, four of us get on the wall, and take turns jumping into the pool. One at a time. And every time, lunkhead leaps over to the pool’s edge in fury, screaming like Neidermeyer in that Twisted Sister video: “NO JUMPING OFF THE WALL!” He even yelled at me, and added, eyes wide in disbelief, “DIDN’T YOU JUST HEAR ME?” as I jumped in a little too soon after he screamed at my friend.

All in all, we torture the kid for about ten minutes before growing bored. The kid has yelled at each of us, one at a time, about fifteen or twenty times in total. He looks like he’s ready to faint, but he’s too proud to admit defeat. But we know it when we see it. We all wave to him, and head out of the pool area.

I noticed Steve didn’t jump off the wall, and I ask him why not. “I was waiting for him to get back on his chair,” he says, “and then I was going to push it into the water.”

Poor little muscle-bound jerk. He didn’t know how close he came …