Guardians of Life

By Evan Butler

A hilarious series of essays and stories about the author's summer job as a lifeguard.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: May 18, 2015
• ISBN: 9781329146723

Book preview

Guardians of Life

GUARDIANS

OF

LIFE

By Evan Butler

Essays and Anecdotes from my Life as a Lifeguard

GUARDIANS

OF

LIFE

By Evan Butler

Printed and Published in my basement.

Just kidding, I self-published it on Lulu.com.

Colophon

MMXV Copr. Work by EVAN BUTLER. Nothing in this work can be copied without the author’s written permission except in reviews of this work.

Printed in the United States of America from Lulu.com.

First Printing: June 2015

2nd Ed. Limited.

All rights reserved.

Usually the typeface is listed here but whatever.

ISBN: 978-1-329-14465-1

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Colophon

Preface

Acknowledgements

Prolegomenon

Dedications

Introduction

The Accident

Big Sister

The Pool is on Fire

Soapman

Sunscreen, the Essential

The Other Accident

Seven Years

The Party I Missed

The Last Generation

Don’t Look Up

Drowning

Cover Me, Bro

The Summer of Love

Oz

Safe Pool

Children are Monsters

Life Skills

At What Point Does Oxygen-Deprivation Lead to Brain Damage

Wet Wedding

Pizza Fist

Boss

Pull the Plug

Epilogue

Afterword

Bonus Story: Swamp Fishin’

Addendum: Here, Read This

End Stuff

Preface

I do my best writing while sitting on the toilet. I want you, the reader, to know that I wrote the majority of this book while on the toilet. Hell, I wrote and submitted my graduate school application while sitting on the toilet. I wasn’t even using it at the time; I was just sitting there with my pants around my ankles, typing away like a madman. I don’t multitask; I focus.

I give all the credit to toilet-strategy for getting me into the program and when I went to meet the faculty, the head of the department even quoted my submitted mission statement, We can only really ever learn when we take a moment to sit down and think about what we have been taught. What he didn’t know was the inspiration for that came while I was perched upon my porcelain throne.

Then again, he may well have leafed through the prospective students’ applications while sitting upon his own toilet in the safety of his own home, drowning out the outside world and getting some privacy from his sweet-yet-overbearing wife, which I like to imagine he has for the sake of this narrative. Maybe this is actually a rather common, if not necessary, practice on the professional level, and it comes as no surprise to my readers that most of the world’s clerical work is done while in the restroom. I can see it now: in between students’ dissertations, the head of the department rubs his temples and reads the shampoo bottle, trying to distract himself as he wonders, just what exactly is zinc pyrithione?

Actually, if you are reading this on the toilet, then everything has come full circle. I’m telling you all of this because I want to get you acquainted with what kind of book this is. This book you are currently holding is a good bathroom book. Just as I wrote it, pants around my ankles, you can read it, pants around your ankles. You can pick up this book and open it to any story and just start reading. There is no real beginning or end, no overarching plot, none of that English-y stuff you learned in school. The essays and anecdotes are only loosely-related and the subject matter is intended to be humorous.

I must admit, many of my readers have applauded the books ability to really reel you in. I’ve had people just go through the entire thing in a single sitting. That’s completely fine, there is no shame in just sitting in the bathroom reading. We all do it; I do it, the head of my department does it, heck, the entire clerical industry is toilet-centric in most aspects of their work. As a piece of advice, if you ever find yourself distracted, unable to think, or frustrated in your work, I suggest that you just go in the bathroom, lock the door, loosen your belt, and have a seat on the greatest invention man has ever wrought. Clarity might just come to you, to put it all in perspective; and now when you need to use the restroom, you are already there. Oh, and if you have a copy of this book handy, you can entertain yourself while you get down to business.

Acknowledgements

I hereby acknowledge Mason, because he is a whiny, little man who whined and moaned and wanted to be acknowledged. Well there, it is done. I acknowledge you. I also want to acknowledge my editor. Thanks, you made this book actually legible.

Prolegomenon

This scholarly work is to be taken at face value on the first read. The second and subsequent reads, I implore you to take your time and write in the margins of this book; write your own stories from your own experiences that parallel the ones contained in this work. Take these memories and copy them in a spiral notebook. Once you have them all transferred, rip out the pages. Then arrange these pages and annotate a sort of fundamental order in which these stories would play out if you were telling them to a dear friend. Copy the pages in the new order to some word processor software and edit out some of the unnecessary parts while adding an introduction and an ending. Give your work a purpose. Send an email with a copy of your work to a literate friend and ask them what they think. Ask for some more help editing, self-publish the work, and hand it out to your friends and family. Make sure to ask for feedback. Take all the feedback, it doesn’t matter if it is positive or negative, and revise. Check it a few more times over, re-edit. Edit it again, get a friend to edit it, edit it yourself one final time. With this new work, read it front-to-back and decide for yourself whether or not it was a great book. If it wasn’t, try again from the beginning. On the off chance that it is truly an inspirational work, publish it, for real this time. Become a writer and find solace in it. That is what this scholarly work is, after all: a place where I found solace.

Dedications

I dedicate this work to a beautiful lifeguard, you know who you are.

Introduction

There is something about water, just the sight of it, which makes people lose their minds. People do the stupidest things around bodies of water. This is a fact of life. Think of the watering holes of the Serengeti, a majestic setting teeming with wild animals drinking from the oasis. This is the pool deck of nature, a site of predation and struggle, where the blood of the slaughtered wildebeest and the life-giving spring water mix in a earthen clay pool. You can picture this perfectly in your mind even though you’ve never been to Africa or know exactly what a wildebeest is but you can see it all as if you were there. This ancestral memory is deeply woven into our genes and explains the existence for all the insanity when it comes to pools. This is the kind of crap I have to deal with on a daily basis.

These stories are pretty unbelievable, but they are completely true. Trust me, I’m a veteran emergency professional with nearly a decade of experience under my fanny pack. I’ve been a guard for a really long time. Maybe too long. Yeah, way too long.

I would also like to take this moment to apologize for my lack of writing skill. I’m not a writer and I’m barely a lifeguard. Most of the time, I’m just bored. Lifeguarding is a boring job, and it isn’t for everyone. To be a good guard, what you really have to master is the zen-like acceptance that you are going to be stuck in one place for hours on end, and that you are going to be spending a lot of those hours doing absolutely nothing. The ennui of the pool is incredibly taxing on the mind, body, and soul. It’s like prison, except you’re surrounded by screaming children, so really it’s much worse. You have to balance this arrested development with the fact that, at literally any moment, something can go horribly wrong. You could be robbed, caught in a tornado, beaten up, or shot. You might have to clean up every body fluid imaginable, handle caustic chemicals, put out fires (literal and figurative), deal with Kodiak-like parents, or wrestle a dead animal out of the claw-like fingers of a toddler. You might work under little-to-no supervision or under way too much supervision; you might deal with patrons or other guards literally losing their minds. It is a delicate balancing act of having to get yourself out of possibly deadly situations and deadly relationships. There may be a need to kill venomous animals in the bathroom, and people can even drown. You have to be ready for anything.

This book is just a small collection of some of my better lifeguarding stories. I have loads more, but I have tried to provide you with some interesting and entertaining reading material. Who knows, maybe you’ll learn something, not just about lifeguarding but about life itself.

The Accident

I often speak of the accident. All in all, it was a pretty fun event. Sure, I now have a giant scar across my face and have a strong disfavor of parties for the rest of eternity, but if I could go back and redo it, I would punch the guy in the face but otherwise, change nothing else.

It all started when the lifeguards decided, Know what would be awesome? A giant party. Needless to say, this was a bad choice. Well if all the guards are partying, who was going to guard the lifeguards? No one.

It began innocently enough.  All the guards just didn’t go home after work. We hung out, swam, laughed, and played water polo. We ordered some pizza and a few of the guards, who had had the day off, started showing up. Soon the pool was filled with guards and their friends and their friend’s friends. Alcohol showed up, too (some would have grouped alcohol under friends). People were shotgunning beers[1][2], taking shots, and the like. Not me; I’m apparently the only person in the observable universe who doesn’t drink, but I found other stupid stuff to do. This included, but was not limited to: doing flips/dives into five feet of water, throwing lawn furniture into the pool, running on said lawn furniture while it was floating in the pool, jumping from lawn furniture on the side of the pool onto lawn furniture floating in the pool, etc. ad infinitum. Essentially, we were having fun in the only way lifeguards can have fun: by blatantly disrespecting the rules.

After a swan dive from on top of the guard stand into the four foot section[3], I swam across the rest of the pool to reach the far side, but halfway there, I met an obstacle. Well, more like an obstacle met me, hard, in the face. Mid-stroke, something from below smashed right into the bridge of my nose, and for a second the world froze and turned bright white. Something deep within my Neanderthal-roots sprang to life and I returned to the world around me. I launched across the rest of the pool without breaking stride and pulled myself out of the water with one arm, shoving two fingers up my nose with the other. This was to check for bleeding and to see if the cartilage had ripped free from my nose and burst into my brain case[4]. Luckily, my fingers came out clean. I smiled, reassured that I had only broken my nose on something and I was otherwise fine. The girl in front of me saw something else, though.

Screaming, she dropped her beer, and clasped her hands around her face as she continued to let out some sort of agonizing wail of pity and a pain that I could not understand. I was confused (and probably concussed), but only for a moment, for as the Neanderthal retreated back within the cave of my mind, I could feel the pain welling up in his place. It spread to every part of my face. Wet, hot tears leaked out of my eyes. Blistering agony burst in my forehead, as if I had broken a bone I never knew I had. While I still had some sensation – the chill in the night air – it seemed as if the tip of my nose wasn’t there at all. One of the bigger male guards grabbed my shoulders and hustled me into the bathroom. Only when I was face-to-face with a mirror, could I see the extent of the damage.

The bridge of my nose had broken open and, within it, I spied the sickening yellow of some cartilage or bone dripping with fresh, warm blood. The pain wasn’t typical, more like a sort of burning or an itch you can’t scratch. Per my lifeguard training, this classified as a medical emergency and, luckily, I had an entire pool filled with drunken lifeguards to help.

Rather haphazardly, they broke into the first aid kit and managed to sterilize and isolate the wound. Most of them wore gloves and masks. Some of them wore a few extra pairs than was required. Between cleaning up the blood (I forgot to mention that at this point, it was everywhere) and bandaging my face, they drank, consumed all ibuprofen they found in the kit, and, in general, made merry. I was hailed