Observing Dressage

The guy didn’t walk, he pranced. I’m not making a judgment here, I’m just telling it like it is. Like those horses, you know the ones who lift their legs high at the knee and set the foot down just so. I can’t remember what they’re called but they’re beauties. This guy though, well that’s not the first word that would come to mind. He looked like he cut his hair with a butter knife. I mean it was short, tidy in its own way, but it wasn’t even. Not by any stretch of the imagination. He missed one or two good-sized clumps in the back. Obviously, he didn’t own a mirror. And here he was prancing. Anyway, so he comes on in through the gate to the pool, a book in one hand, a towel draped across his arm. He already had his shirt off and from the looks of him the last time he was out in the sun he was wearing a short sleeve shirt. He was buttery, this short-haired prancer.

He found a lounge chair across the way. Still right in full view, he was. Not that I would have turned my head away. How could I? This was a show. He set his book down and then lay his towel across the lounge, snapping the ends of it like an Italian woman shaking crumbs from a tablecloth. He put his hands on his hips and raised his face to the sun and took in a few good deep breaths. Ah this is the life! Then he undid his shorts, let them drop to his ankles, kicked them in the air with a little showgirl move, caught them with one hand and put them on the lounge next to him. Then he smoothed and patted, smoothed and patted like those shorts were his best friend who needed some cheering up. Those shorts, the smoothing and patting, it must have gone on for 5 minutes.

He was so busy that you could barely take the time to notice he was wearing a thong bikini. I said barely. He stood still for a second and then made the international hand sign for Oh I forgot my…. He marched over to the lifeguard stand with his hands on his hips. Not lifeguards really, they were two teenage girls chit-chatting away under the umbrella. I don’t think either one of them ever looked in the direction of the pool for more than half a second. Of course they stopped when he came over and when they got a load of his suit, they instantly made the international facial expression for deer in headlights. I watched them pretend to listen and try not to look at each other and try not to look below the waist. One of the girls got up and handed him a bottle of sun block and he read the entire thing front to back, top to bottom. He took a step back and started in on lathering himself up, the face, the nose, the tips of the ears, arms, legs, toes, in between his legs for the love of god and then you could see him formulating the question before it came out: he looked at the poor girl and pointed to his back.

Don’t do it! I wanted to yell like you do in a movie theater when the hero is about to go down in the basement. Don’t—oh there she goes, God! bless her she’s touching his back. 4 seconds it took. Completely unsatisfying I’m sure. But she finished and then shooed him away like she needed to look at the pool and he was blocking it. And off he went.

Added to my list of makes life worth living.