The Slow Lane, Part Two
There’s nothing like swimming to flush the garbage out of my head.
Around 2017, I had a friend on Barrow Street. She talked all the time about her need to start exercising again. She had grown up on the ocean and said she needed to “get back in the water.” I tried to sell her on the pool, partly for selfish reasons. I hadn’t swum for a while, and I wanted to get back into shape. It’s easier to do something with somebody else than it is alone. Most things, at least. She was dubious whenever I told her how it worked - the front desk, the communal shower, the 100 year-old pool that still showed signs of its days as a public bath. The stainless steel jailhouse toilets in stalls that had no doors. The dirt and the freaks.
In the meantime, I renewed my membership - it had gone way up since I last paid for that card, but was still a bargain - something like $200 a year. I screwed up my courage and headed down to Carmine Street one day with an old backpack over my shoulder. In it were earplugs, a crumbling, rubberized fabric swim cap, my suit and an old white towel that had yellowed with age. I had to find new flip flops, my big concession to hygiene. No fucking way was I ever going to put a bare foot on that locker room floor. Dressing and undressing had always been an elaborate dance of putting my flip flops on, one at a time, while navigating my clothing. I had to remember what my padlock combination was. With all that done, I trudged down on a cold November day and checked in at the front desk.
As usual, I had to bond with the poor fucker from the Parks Department who just wanted to get on with their day.
“I haven’t been here in a while. It’s good to be back.”
“Welcome back. Can you show me your card?”
“Hold on a second…”
I finally got through, passed the primitive serve-yourself safe for valuables, then breathed deeply when the chlorine air hit my nose. Home again! I hit the locker room, found a spot on a bench near the showers, then changed. I closed the locker and snapped the padlock shut and headed to the shower. Two or three of the showers were not working and the twist faucets had been removed. No matter. I rinsed off briefly while watching some other guy bypass the showers completely and head straight to the pool. I followed him through the door and stood there. Nothing had changed! That same fuzzy blue rectangle with the same ancient lights hanging above, the warm, humid air, a lifeguard slouched in a chair at the far end, possibly asleep. I hung my towel on a hook, left my flip flops under it, and stood at the shallow end of the slow lane.
I slipped into the water and relaxed. I swam, I dawdled, and I lounged in the slow lane. I did some faster laps in the middle lane and I simply tried to catch my breath. I was older and in worse shape than I had been previously. I made around 14 minutes and got out, showered and went home. I began to do this every other day and told my friend about it. She was reluctant at first. But, like the rest of us at the city pool, she needed that water. The next time I went, she came along. We split up at the locker rooms and, when she emerged, she was dressed for a day at the beach, in shorts and a swimming top. She came out and jumped into the fast lane. A lifeguard immediately told her to get in another lane and that could have been the moment when she said, “fuck off” and left the pool forever, but she didn’t. She just moved over and griped about it. The water had won her over. I could see it.
By the next time we swam, she had bought a one-piece suit and knew the lay of the land. We started going down to Carmine Street twice a week. She began to notice the freak show of humanity I had been swimming with - my people - for the past 12 years. “Did you see Miss Havisham?” she asked. She was talking about Susan, an older woman who criticized everybody, wore a wig, and whose perfume was so strong it made you dizzy. She pointed out the angry guy with the pitchfork beard and the big gut who swam like an Olympian. And there were many more than I can tell you about here. Abby is a student of humanity.
We discussed the lifeguard crew - the burnout who liked blasting The Who on his boombox and turning down the lights when the pool was empty. The dude who looked like Jackie Chan, slept behind mirrored sunglasses and slouched in the office chair at the end of the pool. He talked to nobody. The pervy guy who tried to teach the young women how to swim, whether they wanted it or not. The whole panoply of characters who find their way to the pools operated by the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. These facilities are direct descendants of the old New York City bathhouses that were built in the days of tenements to help people with hygiene. There is a civic glory to the city pools.
I was swimming hard by the winter of 2019. My friend was there often, although we sometimes missed each other and would compare notes later. When the Covid pandemic hit, the city shut down fast. I was at the last lap swim of the night one evening, just when people were beginning to worry about Covid, so it must have been late March. I remember being the last guy out of the pool that night and thinking to myself, “I wonder if this is it for a while?” The next day, the city shut down. Every non-essential facility and many important ones suddenly stopped. Only emergency services operated. And discount drugstores, along with supermarkets. All the service workers who manned these places were suddenly called “essential workers,” but they weren’t given any extra money. They just showed up, wearing masks and looking exhausted and scared. The recreation facilities went into a deep freeze.
I knew two people who died that first month. They died fast. Swimming was not on my mind for at least a year. I was navigating the new reality of life, much of which jumped online. I took my bike out, though, and enjoyed glorious rides through a deserted city. I thought, “It’ll never be like this again.” Only immediately in the days after 9/11 had the streets been so devoid of life.
After a few months, the Carmine Street Pool posted a notice on their website. It said the facility had some structural damage and they would keep it closed until repairs were completed. How long? They didn’t say and nobody knew. I remembered one of the Carmine Street lifeguards telling me about the old potter’s field beneath the outdoor pool and I wondered if those bodies were going to be dug up during the repairs.
I don’t remember when the Chelsea Rec. Center on 25th Street re-opened, but it took a long time and I was too scared of catching Covid to go up there and swim. This was my new, strange reality and it went on this way for a couple of years. Other parts of the country didn’t treat Covid as seriously, but we had taken it hard in New York. I would stare at the refrigerated morgue trucks outside the hospitals. I had friends on ventilators. And then we had to endure the small, fanatic fringe saying it was not real. My own life was split into “before Covid” and “after Covid.”
When the Chelsea Recreation Center finally opened, I didn’t plan to swim. But, after I got Covid and recovered, in 2022, I began to think about the pool again. I had to deal with the extreme fatigue of post-Covid and could not walk without getting tired. I was too tired to bike for six months. I finally got back to normal and, by 2023, I was curious. I got my bag together. It lay in my closet, unopened since that last night at the Carmine Street Pool, three years earlier. The suit and towel, everything in it was dank and nasty, but I didn’t care. I trudged up to 25th Street.
When I got there, the locker room freaked me out. It was crowded and steamy and everyone was coughing. I changed into my suit, but chickened out, got dressed again and came home. At least I had broken the ice. I had not given up on Carmine Street, but the online notice said they were still deep into the construction procurement process, so Chelsea became my new home pool. In theory, at least. I didn’t swim for a while, but I ordered new goggles and began to leave the backpack near my front door.
After a few more months and another case of Covid, my fear of the virus was less than my fear of a life without swimming, so I took the bus up to Chelsea and finally got back in the water. It was glorious. I called my swimming buddy and told her about it, but she wasn’t ready yet. I swam a bit on my own and started to feel better.
There’s nothing like swimming to flush the garbage out of my head. The pool is more crowded and I’m a bit slower than before. I stick to one of the two slow lanes. The one on the far right had always been the most extreme. It’s where you went when you just didn’t want anybody to fuck with you. People might still fuck with you, but if you go too fast in the slow lane, you’re just an asshole and everybody will tell you to leave. I like it there, with the old ladies and the compromised, but unbroken souls. We all just want to float and be free.
There’s an old traffic cone at the end of each lane. On ours, somebody wrote “SLOW” in big letters with a Sharpie. There’s a woman who swims one way, then climbs out on the ladder at the far end. She walks back, jumps in and does it again. Another woman floats like a log, doing a slow-mo kick with her legs as she goes from end to end. Some swimmers in the slow lane do a steady pace and keep me honest. They come up on me from behind and don’t let me dawdle. There’s another woman who clutches her kick board, then kicks so slowly that we all have to swim around her and even under her. Others make half laps and come up behind her again.
Some serious swimmers, new to the pool, don’t know it’s a slow lane and we have to yell at them. The thing is, we all make some effort to tolerate each other because we all need to be there more than we can afford to leave. One skinny old guy does the breast stroke slowly, like an ancient frog. We talked a few weeks ago and he said, “This is all I’ve got.” I wanted to cry.
The slow lane is filled with heroes, survivors with nowhere else to go. Here are the ones who just try to stay alive and afloat. It’s a strange, temporary society that arises every time there’s a lap swim. A society that comes and goes. People get in and they get out. I keep an eye on the locker room doors to see what trouble might be headed our way. In the fast lane, there’s a certain amount of preening and posing - younger people sit on the shallow end or stand with their arms crossed. Some try to out-swim each other. In the slow lane, people commiserate with each other and shake their heads in amazement at what other people do. Some of us enforce the lane - “HEY! YOU’RE GOING THE WRONG WAY” - and some are just out for themselves. Most of us realize that we’re all in this together. You have to cooperate and find a way to make it work.
There are a lot of loners in the slow lane, people who don’t want to interact, but they still find a way to do it. We come from all strata of society, all ages, all nationalities and ethnicities. It’s a cosmic mirror of New York City and a truly egalitarian one. We don’t represent the richer side of this town, but everyone else is here. We have random chats. We ignore each other. We get our laps in and climb out. We talk about stuff, but in a wary way. We are regulars and know each other by the color of our swimming caps.
Sometimes, as I churn from one end of the pool to the other, I think of the slow chant, almost a dirge, from the Sun Ra Arkestra that goes, “We travel - the space ways - from planet - to planet” over and over and over again. I look at the clock, squint through the fog of watery goggles with myopic eyes. Ten more minutes. I can do it. I never want to get in the water - this is some ancient childhood fear. Once I’m swimming, though, I am happy and don’t want to get out. I am always glad I made it to the pool, even if I had to squat at the end for a minute, overcome the fear, and push myself into the water.
The Carmine Street pool may soon be gone. The city is trying to demolish that historic building and give it up to “developers” - oligarchs who want to put up a “mixed-use” tower for other rich people to live in. The Chelsea Rec. Center pool has become my new home pool. A few days ago, it was much colder than usual. I was with Abby and we swam, but it was more than brisk. It was cold. My worst fears had come true. When I finally jumped in, I began to howl, but I kept moving. It was a General Swim session, where they rope off a kiddie section and leave the rest of the pool open, so we did short laps, from side to side instead of end to end.
It was cold, but I could tolerate it. At one point, we saw a teenager in the kiddie side. He was a little heavy and had a blank look on his face. He was also a pale shade of blue. We didn’t know whether it was some problem with his circulatory system or the freezing water. He eventually sat on the side in the shallow end and stared dimly into the distance. A mom brought her two young kids. It was so cold that one clung to the ladder with both hands and kept screaming while the mom tried to pry her off. The other kid clung to the mom’s back. We did an hour and got out, then caught the M11 bus downtown. The driver had cranked the air conditioning for some reason and we shivered in the bus, as well.
Abby called me the next day and said they had posted a notice that the Chelsea pool was going to be even colder than normal, so I called them up. They told me that a pump had broken and they were waiting for the repair guys to come and look at it. They also said, “Some of the regular ladies have complained.” Now I knew the problem was real. Those “ladies” were the women I share the slow lane with and they don’t fuck around. I called again a few days later and they told me they were waiting for a part. As usual with the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, they knew no more than that.
The city may have fixed it as of this past week. We went twice and it was not so bad. The latest problem is the Parks Department scheduling all of the slots for local school swims, adult swim classes, water ballet and all kinds of other crap. What about regular citizen swimmers? What about plain old “Lap” and “General” swim times? I began to look at the schedules for other city pools, mainly the Gertrude Ederle facility, on the Upper West Side. The same shit is happening at the other pools. The only one that looks decent now is the venerable Asser Levy Center, way over on the East River Drive. I don’t want to travel 50 blocks to swim, but I have always found a way to overcome that ancient fear and make it to the pool. If I make it over there, I hope they have a slow lane. I’ll have to ask somebody which one it is. When I get in that slow lane, I’ll be home.
Click here to read Part One…
All photos by Paul Vlachos.
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Yes. I read both right through, entranced. Still, what I wouldn't have given to see you pass those guys on your bike. Great sensibilities all around in these 2 pieces. Thanks again. C.