#firstclassproblems

A cartoon yellow sun hung over a frothy pool of splashing kids and she wriggled in the AC, biting her lip a little harder each time the diving board sprang like a doorstop.  See, there was a community pool in her backyard.  And that was fine when she built her house in the development ten years prior.  The community then was seventy.  The community now is seven hundred: thirty three percent little boys and thirty two percent little girls who all love swimming and are forced to do it competitively by nostalgic parents.  

            The real issue isn't the playful little kiddies and their squirmy little bodies.  Rather, it's the fact that she works at home and types medical transcription, i.e. transposing voice recorded southern speaking physician's notes into readable text. The kiddies scream and yell and it infiltrates her every thought, breaking her concentration and stressing the skin below her bottom lip.  She turns the volume up and keeps plucking away at the keys. This is summer.

            Winter's no better.  Apparently, sometime in the last couple years the community decided it would be a good idea to train their elementary swimmers year round.  Thus, they began hoisting large skeletal ribs around the pool with cranes and spreading a large white tarp over to create a dome in the fall.  The structure works as an acoustic amplifier, turning shrieks into ambient howling, again infiltrating the poor woman's brain and stressing her bottom lip. 

            One time, it was so upsetting that she walked over to the pool in her slippers, bundled with a fleece coat.  The stocky coach pumped up his chest as she explained the predicament.  He told her that he was sorry, but there was no possible way to keep the kids down.  She bit her lip and walked back to the house.  Upon phoning the then community board president, Jerry Graft, who softly told her that he completely sympathized, the noise slowly subsided.  After a few months, the team started hosting swim meets every week, which bellowed cacophonous renditions of pop songs and distorted screaming.  The woman phoned Jerry again, who shakily informed her that there was nothing he could do about it. 

            See, Jerry's wife had recently cheated on him three week's prior with the swim coach.  He left work early to surprise his wife with flowers and upon creeping up the stairs to muffled vibrations, he caught her spread eagle on his satin sheets moaning like a dog.  One thing Jerry has never been very good at is confrontation.  So, after his extended peek, he merely turned around and went back to work never saying one word to his wife.  He threw the flowers away in a dumpster two houses down.  He imagined those sweating calves of the swim coach, at least eight inches wide, and those full-veined arms and hands, clinched like a baboon.  He feared for his life should he make a scene or even mention the event to Sally, which happens to be his wife's name.  Surely, things would work out if he let the isolated event slide, he thought.  And things did, he thought. 

            So when the woman phoned him and said that the swim meets were entirely too loud and obtrusive to her household, Jerry decided that no action could be taken.  The woman, obviously unnerved, marched over the frosty grass to the swim meet in her slippers and pulled the swim coach aside.  "Have you the nerve" and "how disrespectful can you be" were a couple things she said.  The coach turned the stereo down a notch and told the kids mockingly that they should keep it down.  And, naturally, they got louder.  Steam poured from the poor woman's ears and she almost bit right through her lip as she ascended her carpeted steps.  Ted, her husband, told her that it wasn't that bad and that she should stop focusing on it.  She told Ted that he needed to grow a pair of balls.  And Ted didn't.

            The weeks passed and winter lifted a little. With it lifted the canvas of the "white albatross," which the woman had cleverly described it once in an email to a girlfriend.  As summer approached, a few things were changing.  One was that Jerry discovered that the banging of his wife by the swim coach was, in fact, not an isolated event.  In fact, it was happening every Tuesday and Thursday after the coach finished taking his morning shit, which he did religiously at 9:30 a.m.  It lasted until 9:48 a.m. where he would then shower and head over to Sally's.  Jerry figured this out when he questioned Sally about a dozen tiny splotches of the swim coach's semen on his maroon satin sheets.  Almost dripping with saliva at the question, Sally exploded on Jerry in a tirade of unabashed confession, describing the positions she had screwed the swim coach in and how much more satisfying in bed he was than Jerry.  As a finale to the rant, she held up a bottle of KY Jelly which she kept next to the bed and tossed it out the window, claiming that if she added that to the moisture she produced for the coach, he may slip all the way through her.

            Jerry calmly phoned his lawyer and requested a divorce explaining to Sally during the telephone conversation that he didn't want any trouble and that he would take his things and leave.  And he did, thereby resigning as community board president, the most prestigious title he would ever have in his entire life. 

            News of Jerry's resignation flowed throughout the community, but no one cared that Jerry was leaving. Everyone was simply mentally picturing and gossiping about the amazingly hot sex that Sally had had with the swim coach.  Even some of the kiddies' mother's began looking at the coach out of the corner of their eyes on the pool deck.  The coach wore a smug grin and stood tall, like a prized stud horse in Kentucky.  Because he was. 

            With the flimsy political environment in the community, middle school kids stayed at the park past dark.  And parents stayed at the pool past closing time.  It was obvious that the reigns of power needed to be handed over.  They needed to be handed over to a "real leader" the woman said to Ted. And Ted said, "I liked Jerry."