The Swimming Pool Killer: A Mostly True Story

Three momentous occasions took place in the summer of 1969.  America landed a man on the moon.  Woodstock ushered in the Age of Aquarius.  And on July 4th, Uncle Bob murdered his swimming pool with an axe.

Nobody could have predicted Uncle Bob would turn out to be a swimming pool killer.  He didn’t have a history of violence.  Unless you count railing at Ding-a-Ling.

Uncle Bob lived with his wife and four kids in a narrow two-story house on Hooker Street in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.  Hooker Street was named after General Joseph Hooker, whose army took to calling the ladies of easy virtue who followed them about “hookers.”  Oddly enough “Fightin’ Joe” was a no-show at Gettysburg.  Why the city fathers saw fit to name a street after him is anybody’s guess.

Hooker Street was your low rent section of Gettysburg. It had negroes and everything.  Tourists avoided it.  They sure as hell hadn’t come to Gettysburg to see negroes.  What did Negroes have to do with the Civil War? Well, okay, so the war was fought to free them, but that didn’t mean you wanted to look at them from your tour bus.

I liked sleeping over at Uncle Bob’s house, because it was a sinkhole of moral rot.  From its unsalubrious living room filled with cigarette smoke to its profanity-filled kitchen, bad habits and chaos ruled.  Aunt Shirley was legendary for her lax cleaning, preferring instead to toss everything she found onto the dining room table, which tottered beneath piles of dirty clothing, old board games, stacks of tattered True Detectives, and all manner of things Brian could use to break other things.  The rooms upstairs were equally cluttered, and it was up there that I saw my first skin mags. 

Bedtimes were not observed. There were occasional BB-gun battles in the house.  It was about as different from my house as you could get.

I’d stay the night, then spend the next day running amok in historic Gettysburg with Brian, the youngest and most creatively destructive of Bob’s kids.  Brian was a prodigy of mayhem, and you could practically hear his hyperactive synapses crackling with a million wayward impulses to perpetuate mischief. That he survived to adulthood is nothing less than a miracle.  Last I heard wife No. 3, Arlene, had split because he insisted upon parking the Harley Davidson in their living room. 

Uncle Bob’s chief joy in life was baiting his next door neighbor, Ding-a-Ling.  Ding-a-Ling wasn’t his real name, obviously.  Uncle Bob called him Ding-a-Ling because he was what in these politically correct times you would call learning disabled.  As was his son, who Uncle Bob, a sensitive soul at heart, charitably christened Ronnie the Retard.

In Uncle Bob’s defense, Ding-a-Ling was not one of your inspirational mentally challenged people.  He was not Radio.  He was a prick.  He smacked his wife around and beat his kids and Uncle Bob didn’t like it.  No sooner would Ding-a-Ling start up than Uncle Bob would dash out to the backyard and shout, “Shut up, you retarded bowel movement!”

Ding-a-Ling was the bane of Uncle Bob’s existence.  Ding-a-Ling and the deluxe above-ground swimming pool Uncle Bob bought one year on the condition that the kids assume responsibility for its upkeep.  Like this was going to happen.  His 15-year-old daughter Barb was sleeping with a sailor.  His older son Terry, a member in good standing of the Future Felons of America, kept a sawed-off shotgun beneath his bed.  And nowadays Brian would be on enough Ritalin to pacify a reform school. 

That left Uncle Bob to skim the leaves and change the filter.  But it rankled, and turned his heart into a dark house of resentment. Uncle Bob didn’t even use the damn pool.  He hated swimming.  Considered it counter-evolutionary.  Made a point of cutting out articles about drowning deaths.  Jabbing the cutting with the scissors he’d shout, so as to be  heard above the Black Sabbath blasting from son Terry’s bedroom. “Another one! Gone into the water TO DIE!”

On that fateful July 4th my family drove over to Uncle Bob’s house for a barbecue.  We could look forward to lighting sparklers in the great indoors, goggling at the fireworks arcing above the carnival grounds, and drinking enough orange Nehi to rot every every one of teeth four times over. 

All was right with the world.

Or so it seemed for the first couple of hours.  We kids devoured hot dogs and chips and splashed around in the swimming pool, ignoring the time-honored rule that you shouldn’t swim for at least a half-hour after eating lest you cramp up and drown.

Then the filter went kaput, and up went a hue and cry for Uncle Bob, who was exercising his god-given American right to celebrate the birth of our great nation by getting shitfaced, to get up out his lawnchair and fix it.

And something in him snapped.  No one, and the family has spent years rehashing the dark incident, knows quite why.  Seems he was just plain fed up.

In any event he did get off his lawnchair, muttering darkly, only to disappear into his garage, a dilapidated wooden shed that listed ominously to starboard.  From inside came the sound someone hurling things around.  I saw my dad give my mom an anxious look.  Then I saw Uncle Bob, with a maddened Raskilnikov-like gleam in his eyes, standing in the open doorway with an axe. 

After that, things moved very fast.  His face set in a glower of malevolent intent, Uncle Bob crossed the lawn with long Paul Bunyanesque strides, and without a word commenced to chop down his own swimming pool.

His first swing penetrated the pool lining.  He yanked the axe back out, and a jet of water shot through the hole.  Soundlessly he stood back to survey his work, then, really throwing his body into it, took another whack.  And that was all it took.  A thousand gallons of pent-up water rushed through the breach, producing a mad torrent that sent Uncle Bob, axe still in hand, spilling across the lawn, us right behind him.

The floodwaters dashed Uncle Bob against the fence separating his yard from Ding-a-Ling’s, us right behind him.  In a sputtering tangle we lay there, never to swim in Uncle Bob’s backyard again.

Another man would have pulled down the rest of the pool and carted it off to the junkyard as fast as could, out of sheer embarrassment.  Not Uncle Bob. He left the empty pool stand behind his house for years, as a warning to others.

Comments

[Jeffers]

Ye-haw, hats off to Uncle Bob! Quite nice.

[Martijn]

Damned good story. Swimming being counter-evolutionary is far out!(Do people still say that? I only used it because I couldn't remember the correct spelling of brilliant.)

[Steve]

mAN, THIS STORY HAS EVERYTHING!
Fighting Joe Hooker ( he was never the same after Chancellorsville) Black Sabbath, Skin mags and a flood not seen since Noah built the big boat.

Its almost the anti-thesis of the bunch that lived across the street from me, and their Dad, Owen Kaiser. he was the most anal man you ever knew, lived by the mottos of "A place for everything and everything in its place" and use the right tool for the right job".
He had 3 boys, each born exactly 392 days apart, according to the lunar calendar. He and his wife were regular as clockwork.

[UF Mike]

Kaiser--the name's appropriate. I always use the wrong tool for the job. I once tried to drive a nail with a loaf of bread.

Hey Steve! Why aren't you blogging????

[Steve]

Herr Kaiser.
I was friends with all three of his sons, who were all as big as he was, and scared to death of him.
The oldest, John Lesley Kaiser, grew up just like his dad. I still see him from time to time. He does the same things everyday at exactly the same time, things like cleaning out his gutters WEEKLY, or oiling refigerator door hinges MONTHLY, applying graphite powder to all doorlocks YEARLY and stuff like that.
When you go into his garage, it is like an altar. He has everything from metal lathes to Water Saws, and there is not a speck of grease, dirt or sawdust anywhere to be seen.
He has his first car, a VW, Bug up on blocks in the back yard, and keeps it washed and waxed.
I went over there one time to borrow a certain needle-nose plier that he had. It was like two feet long and offset. I had no idea they even made such a thing. I had to fill out paperwork to use it.
The Kaisers...what an immaculate piece of work they are.

I'll be back to blogging ibn a bit...