The Brian Hansen Poolhouse

by Luke Mazur

Summer is creeping ever closer. In fact, here it comes! But first, a look back.

Back when crispy M&Ms; were still in stores I used to lifeguard at the pool down the block from us. Most summer days the pool would get packed, and the only catch to swimming in it was that beforehand you’d have to flash your Town of Cheektowaga resident ID card to the attendants working at the front entrance. Cheektowaga is a blue-collar town just to Buffalo’s east, comprised of people whose families lived on Buffalo’s Eastside before black people moved there.

As far as I know, the rule was you had to live in Cheektowaga to swim in our pool. Think “Arizona immigration law,” although has anyone besides whoever writes Sarah Palin’s Twitter read that thing? Think “public university residency requirements,” except everyone isn’t from Long Island anyhow. Residents encouraged. Non-residents pay money to use.

A corollary to the pool’s residency requirement was that you had to wear proper swimming attire, which meant suits with liners. This restriction only ever affected the boys though. That is, we couldn’t necessarily decipher whether they were wearing sanctioned swim trunks or just regular shorts and drawers. Girls were easy.

The rule itself didn’t make a ton of sense. Mr. Hansen, the pool director, explained to us at the beginning of every summer that the dye from regular shorts-those without liners-would run, inking up the water for all the other swimmers. A pen explosion that ruins summer for everyone. The dye would mess with the pool’s chemicals and the chemicals would mess with the pool’s other chemicals. That’s what he said, at least.

Mr. Hansen used to pay the people who lived across the street from the pool to spy on us and to call him whenever they spotted us goofing off, or dozing off. We joked that Mr. Hansen was addicted to cocaine because, to a sixteen year old, he contorted his jaw the way a person who uses cocaine does. He also had prematurely white hair, and wore shorts-the kinds without liners-with big white gym sneakers. He drove a Chevy Impala like he meant it. Taken together, it was all probably very tragic. At the time though, we just didn’t like him.

The liner requirement tended to fall disproportionately on black boys. I don’t exactly remember why this was. It could have been that black kids disproportionately did not wear the bathing suits the pool required. It could have also been that the rule was enforced disproportionately against this particular demographic. Because we were socialized by people whose families lived on Buffalo’s Eastside before black people moved there, I tend to think we profiled.

If we didn’t kick out little black kids it wasn’t because we knew it would be fucked up to do so. It was because we didn’t like Mr. Hansen. If we caught some kid slip down the waterslide wearing cutoffs but turned the other way, it wasn’t because we agreed with Thurgood Marshall that the Constitution was defective. It was because Hansen was not a consensus builder. He was our asshole boss, and not enforcing one of the pool’s rules was an act of rebellion against him.

In fact, the ink explosions didn’t much pollute anything. They didn’t ever happen, even when swimmers wore really inky clothing like dark indigo jean shorts. Still, at the end of the day, most of us complied with Mr. Hansen’s directive. We whistled kids to the edge of the pool, told them they weren’t wearing the right kind of shorts, and then walked them over to the head lifeguard. We were working our first job and we were nervous. We didn’t evaluate rules; we just followed them.

Fortunately, not everyone that summer was a passive-aggressive wuss. Our co-worker Stonecold had a good attitude about the kids swimming in the pool. “It’s their summer,” she’d explain as she shrugged off three eight-year-olds body-slamming each other in the wading pool. “It’s their summer,” she’d yell to us if we’d try to bring her attention to some tweens back-flipping into the deep end.

Stonecold wasn’t her real name. We called her that because wrestling was popular then and it was fun to reference Stonecold Steve Austin. The nickname had another layer too: we used to think Jen wasn’t very smart and “Stonecold” alluded to what was going on in that head of hers.

Sometimes, if the other lifeguards made eye contact with each other, we’d imitate Stonecold. For whatever reason our impersonation entailed making our limbs limp, so it looked, I think, like we had passed out in our lifeguard chairs. We perceived her nonchalance regarding Mr. Hansen’s rules as being stupid, as not getting it. We thought that when she wasn’t watching the pool, she wasn’t doing her job. In retrospect, it was most likely that we were the dumb ones.

Mr. Hansen died a few years ago. When he did the Town dedicated our pool guardhouse to his memory, and today the outside of the yellow building reads: The Brian Hansen Poolhouse. I missed the memorial, but I can see his plaque from the street whenever I drive by. I get reflective when I see his illuminated name, interpreting decades of race relations through the lens of his management style.

Impala aside, he wasn’t a total dick. I wish we said something about the bathing suit rule though. I wish we ignored Mr. Hansen because his rule was weird, and not because he was weird. But we were just kids too, I guess. It was our summer.

Luke Mazur is trying hard not to work as a lifeguard this summer.