A Big Splash

He was different. You could not help but notice this the moment he entered the YMCA natatorium. It was the way he walked, up on the balls of his bare feet, with his hands out at his sides. He looked like a young girl in her mother's high-heels, in danger of toppling over. My two friends and I quit our tomfoolery to watch him.

To my surprise he came directly over to where I stood aside the diving board.

"I can make a bigger splash than you," he said.

With that he hopped up on the diving-board.He paused for a moment, then he sailed off the end of the board and up into the air. He tucked his knees into his chest and came down with a resounding cannon-ball. I followed after him with a jack-knife. By the time we pulled ourselves out of the pool we were both laughing and ready for the next go round.

"See," he said. "I told you."

For the next half-hour he and I and my two friends turned the pool water choppy with our vast repertoire of splash making plunges off the end of the board.

Afterwards while we were toweling off and changing into our street clothes I asked him why he walked the way he did. He said it was due to an ice-skating accident. With that he asked me to accompany him to a near by drug store. There was something he said that he needed to get.

The sky was slate gray and overcast, a typical New England fall day. We kicked at pebbles on our way to the store.

Inside the store was festooned with ghouls and goblins, witches and ghosts. Without hesitation he walked directly over to the aisle with headache remedies and slipped a bottle of baby aspirin into his coat with the finesse of a practiced thief.

With that we left the store. Beneath the slate gray skies he offered me an aspirin. I declined. He popped one into his mouth, chewed it down to nothing, and swallowed. He had another and another. He said he like the flavor and had another.

By the time we made it back to the YMCA he had eaten the entire bottle. We parted company then. He went to one part of the building and I to another. An hour or so passed.

I was not surprised when the ambulance came. Even if I was only eleven years old I knew enough about medicine to know that it was not candy. Paramedics wheeled him out on a gurney. They placed him in the back of the ambulance and closed the doors. I watched the ambulance go until its siren and whirling red lights faded in the distance.

I never saw him again.

In the ensuing forty years that have come and gone since that day I have thought of him off and on. And when I do I like to think that he became the queen he was destined to be and that he continues to make a big splash whenever he enters a room.