The Floater

There is this little girl in our apartment complex named Melissa. She's an adorable, chubby little Latina-looking girl, around five or six years old. I remember the first day we moved in, there was a knock on our front door. My wife opened the door and there was Melissa smiling up with those big, chubby cheeks. "Can I see your kitty cat?" she asked. So we let her in as our first houseguest and introduced her to our cat. Her grandma is our apartment manager and she'll stand as lifeguard during Melissa's daily playtime in the complex's pool. In between splashes we'll hear Melissa call out, "I love you, Grandma!" Adorable.

Anyway, last summer Melissa took a shit in the pool. But it was already an exciting day even before that happened.

It was Aug. 1, and we had finally scored a one-bedroom apartment in the building. Until then we had been cramped into a kiln-hot studio apartment, which had an enormous picture window that faced west with no awning. The Los Angeles sun would begin to hit the window at 3 p.m. and by around 7:30 we would begin bottling urine in fear of dehydration. The window also faced the rest of the units, allowing everyone in the building a direct view of our conjugal bed. Even with the thickest of curtains we still felt constrained during role-play. We were excited to move into our breezier and much more private one-bedroom.

Both apartments overlook the pool and the pool is where the children like to scream. While lugging boxes I was treated to the serenade of unholy squeals from these other two kids, Emily and Jesse, brats who are in the pool around 18 hours a day under the supervision of Chatty Stay-At-Home Mom Sandra (pronounced with three H's). When the sun is hot enough, Sahhhndra and the kids usually file out to the pool at around 11 a.m. Then they never go away. While the kids make their noise and try to drown each other, Sahhhndra sits poolside smoking cigarettes and blasting from her boombox what appears to be a mix tape of bass drums being pounded to no mathematically scalable rhythm.

Melissa was down there too, trying to organize the brats into some sort of game, which inevitably deteriorated into mayhem when Jesse slapped someone in the face or pulled down his bathing suit. A bit later I recognized something to be amiss because things got suddenly quiet. Sahhhndra had paused her chanting of halfhearted discipline toward her son (Don't splash, Jesse), and Jesse wasn't splashing, either. I didn't want to look a gift horse in the mouth, so I just continued hauling boxes, relishing the silence. Until I heard Sahhhndra command, "Don't touch it!"

I looked down and the two brats were standing poolside. Melissa was sitting on the steps in the shallow end, staring toward the deep end, the look in her eyes betraying a great effort to lock something away for safekeeping until a therapy session at age 34.

I looked at the deep end. The rippling rectangle of baby blue was broken only by a stringy, medium-sized, yellow-brown biscuit of little-kid shit floating like it's twilight and time to get lazy. I immediately went into my old apartment and unpacked a mirror I had just packed up. I looked in the mirror and said, "You've been a good man these 27 years. Responsible and kind to bums. And you owe it to yourself to never swim in that pool again. You're worth it, kid."

Now, I'm no fool. I know if a kid goes into a pool, he excretes. Piss, shit, even unclassifiable but diseased kiddie ooze. It's one thing to know it and bury it away on a hot day. It's another to see digested Cinnamon Toast Crunch float on by.

After that, Melissa's grandma hovered over the balcony of the pool, repeating to Melissa, "Come up here. Why won't you get out of the pool?" She hadn't moved her soiled rump from the shallow end steps for around 20 minutes by that point. Eventually she made her way into Grandma's apartment, where I heard loud crying and admonishments of "BABY! You're a BABY!"

Grandma eventually disposed of the evidence. And about an hour later I hear a splash. It was my downstairs neighbor. It was his first time in the pool since he had moved into the complex, and when I walked past he started chatting with me about how great the water felt. I could barely look at the poor bastard.