Part One - Mom's Best Friend
I was born to swim. My high school coach joked I must have been a water birth to take to it so naturally, but mom assures me she gave birth very much in the modern way with her feet in stirrups and a full epidural. Somewhere between her long, slender body and dad's massive offensive tackle's body, I inherited broad shoulders and a barrel chest over narrow waist and hips with ridiculously long arms which seemed to hang to the knees of long, gangly legs. As ungainly as this child of Frankenstein appeared on land, once they threw me in the pool at age four I moved with grace, ease, agility and power.
By age sixteen my shelf was loaded with swim trophies, college scouts were looking me over and I began training for the junior olympics. The only other thing my misanthropic body could do well was play piano, which mom insisted I begin at age five. I took to it immediately and discovered that besides being a natural, I enjoyed it. Teased as an ugly child by other kids, music became my refuge. Mozart composed this first piano concerto at age ten. I mastered it at the same age and won as many piano awards as swim trophies. Not a genius and not a child prodigy, my grades suffered except for mathematics. They say that good musicians are good with numbers and it's true for me- something about how our brains are wired. Were it not for the long string of A's in math, I'd have been much worse than the C student I turned out to be.
There was me at age thirteen, growing up in swish suburban Phoenix, Arizona, having won nearly every swim meet I entered and capable of sitting at a piano and playing Einekleine Natchmusik with almost perfect intonation and what happens next? Puberty. My ungainly body had already reached six feet by then and the seventh grade basketball coach tried to interest me in playing center, but I politely declined because I couldn't even dribble a ball. When he pressed the issue my swim coach told him to back off. The hoops coach resented this until he saw me swim one day at a meet we won, in part, because I won all my races, including every relay event in which I participated.
"I get you now," he said, shaking my hand afterwords. "You're an individual athlete, not a team athlete. Congratulations."
"Thanks," I said, then shrugged: "I'm still part of a team."
"Yes, but your performance is individual, even in relay events."
He was right. Even as we huddled and practiced and plotted strategy for relay events, each of us knew we were a collection of stronger and weaker links, meaning faster and slower swimmers, depending on event and distance.
Many boys go through puberty only to discover they're not the child athletes they once were. It's not their fault their bodies change into something else. Some bodies get better, some stay the same, and some get worse. I only seemed to get better as my body grew and filled. Muscles began appearing everywhere: calves, thighs, butt, shoulders, arms, neck, chest. And sizable muscle, too. Thick sheets of it on my back. I couldn't believe it. With a minimum of weight training they grew even more, pulling me ever faster through the water. By fourteen I hit six-one and a six pack rippled across my abdomen. By sixteen the daily weight training had sculpted my body into a mean, lean swimming machine and I topped six foot four. They called me Torpedo, and not just because of my speed in the pool.
Most boys aren't really aware of their equipment while growing up. I always assumed mine was normal, probably because dad was hung like a bull, but I learned quickly in a sport where everyone wears a Speedo that my bulge was bigger than everyone's. It was partly due to having large kahunas, but one glance around the locker room told me my penis was big, too. Like I say, as a boy I never thought about it, but as a self-conscious teen, I knew my goods were on display every time I pulled on the Speedo. Girls noticed. Women noticed, too. Adult women. Moms of swim team members, for example. They tried to be discreet about it, but couldn't help letting their eyes wander. At first it bothered me, but by eighteen it had happened so often I didn't care anymore. Everyone checks everyone else out, right? Dogs sniff each other's butts, and humans run eyes over each other. No big deal.
I had dated a few girls in high school but didn't have a steady until senior year. They seemed so ridiculous these schoolgirls, so serious about going steady one day then dropping guys for someone else the next just so they could gossip about it with their friends. Being introverted, I had a reputation for being shy with the girls. I wasn't shy, just quiet. Did they understand the difference? No. Watching my body change into a man's, mom warned me about boy-crazy girls so I avoided the merry-go-round of high school romance. At the same time I enjoyed the eyes of older women wandering over me, especially my mother's friends, and I enjoyed flirting with them, mostly because I had known them all my life and trusted them. Not long after I turned eighteen the flirting became something more.
One Friday after supper my mother sent me over to her best friend's house with a load of stuff for a party they were having the next day. I unloaded the minivan, mostly chairs and tables and stuff, and helped her set it up. We worked alone, her teen daughters out and not expected back before their 11 PM curfew. Her husband was away on business. He was always away on business. After we finished she sat on their piano bench and invited me to join her. I smiled, anticipating the fun. We had been playing duets together for as long as I could remember. She looked like Dorothy Hamill, the Olympic skater: she had the same huge blue eyes, same smile, same build, and even her haircut sometimes had that retro Hamill look.
"Teach me something new," she said.
I showed her a simple melody/chord combo, she practiced it a few times and then I dove in playing a much more complicated jazz rhythm which required my arms to move over and interlace with hers. Great fun, we bashed it out laughing together, our bodies leaning into one another and our arms brushing as they crossed. We played for maybe a half an hour, each improvising and trying new things. Jamming. I don't know if it was her perfume or our arms brushing, or sitting hip-to-hip pushing our torsos together, but at some point it became sexual for me. Erotic. There were stolen glances and smiles which suddenly meant much more than two people having fun.
