JUNIOR’S BIKINI GIRLS POOL SERVICE
By John Dawson
Well, sum-sum-summmertime’s almost over and I’m standing here in front of the bathroom mirror perusing my pool-boy tan, which is like a Farmer Tan except I don’t have an alfalfa sprig in my mouth. My arms are the color of hot dogs you put away in the refrigerator and find eight months later. My face – normally a rakish hint of the Nantucket outdoorsman – resembles an Apache lifeguard who went to sleep in a tanning booth. Aunt Mary, the old horticulturist, says I look like a seven-week old turnip.
But when I peel my Junior’s Bikini Girls Pool Service tee-shirt off, you’d think I was a bashful nudist. My torso – think Michelangelo on a so-so day - is as white as Wonder Bread, but face-wise and from the upper arms down I’m the bronzed god you may have admired in a Danielle Steele book. I wouldn’t be surprised if exotic women are dreaming of me.
It all goes back to a few months ago when Junior Estes and me – I and Junior – are at the De Drop and he’s telling me that his second cousin Emory just got sent up the river again, this time for violating his probation when the Sheriff dropped by the keg party he was having with some eager Eaglette cheerleaders at the Motel Six - all of whom, Emory insisted, had good IDs. But Judge Moody, who’s been putting Esteses in jail for forty years, wasn’t havin’ it and Emory pled down to conspiracy to facilitate the delinquency of a minor – which is exactly what he was conspiring to facilitate - so justice – and the cheerleaders too – were served. But Hiram couldn’t keep him out of jail and now he’s sitting there atoning for three months, examining where he went wrong and vowing to be smarter about it next time. But back to Junior.
“So I’m handlin’ his pool route in Mapleville till he gets out,” he goes, puffing up like he’s Warren Buffett.
“Emory’s trusting you with his pool route?”
I’m incredulous that anybody would trust Junior with anything, especially a relative and I’m his second-cousin so I should know – don’t get me started about my Acme bird feeder. Anyway, nobody in Pine County
“Yep, but I’m giving the money to Brenda and the kids,” he goes, referring to the bodacious Brenda Estes nee Bollinger, Emory’s ex-wife, and their three little nippers who, understandably, need feedin’ while pop’s in the pokey and Brenda don’t want to go back to work at the Pink Pussycat unless impecuniousness compels it. Impressed, I’m about to commend him on his Christian charity or whatever it is.
“Peggy Sue’s making me do it,” he goes, and drains a bitter cup – actually a bitter bottle - of Budweiser.
Pretty pretty Peggy Sue Badger, the Sheriff’s favorite niece, is Junior’s Pine County Senior Probation Officer and according to Junior she lies awake nights thinking of ways to rehabilitate him. One time she made him go to church – notwithstanding his Constitutional right to separation of Pineville Baptist Church and the State Probation Department, he said – and, inasmuch as she’s holding his personal Sword of whoever that was over his head, he pretty much has to snap to attention when she says how high to jump and what row to hoe, statutory rights of innocent law-breakers be damned. Meddling bureaucrats have been have been slowly eroding Junior’s rights for years is the way he feels about it.
“Yeah, dude, check it out. My phone rings, right?”
“Okay,” I go, not knowing else to say when somebody tells me their phone rings. I guess I could have asked him where he stole it.
“And I go what, and it’s her, and she starts right in without even a how-de-do and she’s like (when he imitates Peggy Sue’s voice he sounds like a gnarled-up old witch) ‘Junior, I just got a call from Emory’s lawyer and Brenda’s all crying and stuff, boo-hoo, because they won’t let him out on weekends to do his pool route and the baby needs shoes.’”
“Hmmm.”
“Dude! So she says what I’ve got to do is take over his Mapleville pool route – irrespective of my prior plans - and get this, give all the money to Brenda, who I never liked anyway and for damn sure never agreed to feed her brats without having helped make ‘em in the first place, did I? Which I’d’ve have gladly done if she’d asked me to.” He slams an indignant Bud down, drawing a glaring eyebrow from Chloe, always alert to a threat to her bottle deposits. “Life…”
“Well, she’s been trying to get you gainfully employed (we both grimace when I say that) for three years now. You should have taken that job at the bakery.”
“Yep. I’d’ve cornered the market in hot pies by now.”
“Had your cake and eat it too.”
“Yep.”
“Yep.”
So there we sit, self-medicating – what are cousins for - in order to fend off the melancholic miasma that always encompasses Junior when Witch Hazel pokes her officious proboscis in his business. Having her breathing down his criminal neck night and day in pursuit of her nit-pickin’ policies ain’t enough, no, she’s got to sentence him to – and it’s this last straw that’s breaking the back of his inner camel - ninety days hard labor.
“She’ll have me painting her toenails next,” he muses bitterly.
“Crocheting her pillowcases,” I agree grimly. A thought occurred to me.
“But you don’t know anything about pools, how does…”
He holds up a hand at me like a school crossing guard, reaches in his back pocket and pulls out Pools for Dummies.
“Ah,” I go, thinking he’s at least found the appropriate learning material.
“There’s a bright side though,” he says, postulating that the aquatic quagmire he’s mired himself in has a bluebird swimmin’ in it. “I got a plan, dude, and I’m gonna let you help me.”
With the reflexes of a gymnastic cat, I jerk my head up at the Coors Light Lance Armstrong clock and see it’s time to go, but Chloe splashes another Schlitz down in front of me and – you know me, waste-not-want-not – I decide I can at least listen to what he has to say before explaining to him that not only am I too busy to help him – chapters like this take time and patience – but that whatever cockamamie cock-eyed caper he’s cooked up I’m cleansing my metaphoric hands of it before he even gets started. I’ve got an unsullied reputation – depending on who you ask, of course - and consorting with Junior in any of his various nefarious enterprises is like having John Dillinger setting off bottle rockets in your front yard on Sunday morning in his underpants. Guilt by association, you know, and I’ve always preferred my relations with The Man to consist of keeping a sharp eye peeled for America
“Chloe, bring my man here a shot of your finest mid-range spirits,” he calls out and wheels around on his stool at me.
“Dude, wanna make a boatload of money and hang around with hot chicks in bikinis all summer?”
A hush fell over me.
A man’s crossroads, you know. I can’t honestly answer no to that, but….
“Well…”
So to make an aqualoquacious story short, that’s how I allowed Junior to talk me into becoming a partner in Junior’s Bikini Girls Pool Service and why the Coppertone people need to get in touch with me for some good arm shots for their advertising campaigns. And as it turned out, Junior did have a plan, and it was what Aunt Mary might call a doozy. You might call it a lulu. When I think of an imaginative title for this story, I’ll call it that.
But first I’ll have to exposit about Mapleville due to it being the locus of our focus for the next few pages. Back about 1970, some disaffected, rich Pinevillians – bankers, lawyers, politicians, recording industry executives, mortgage brokers, washed-up TV stars, Mafiosi - were sitting around wishing there was a golf course with a country club where they could go to escape their ennui and get away from their wives for a while. No fault of the wives, though. Like all Pineville women, the ladies were all comely down to the last twinklin’ tooth and when they got together in a group it looked like a Mrs. America pageant milling around.
Anyway, real-estate mogul Morty Steinburger takes a sip of his Manhattan and a puff of his Havana and goes well boys, I got an option on a couple hundred acres out there by Mapleville and nothing says we can’t get Arnold Palmer or somebody to come build us a course out there. What’s a few million in tax-exempt bonds?
“The bank’d be interested if we can figure out a way to dodge all the taxes and make a few million under the table for the board.” That’s J. Kemper Roth, Chairman of Pine County State Bank.
“I think the legislature’d listen to the idea of eminent domain and tax abatement, but elections are coming up and I’ve only got a few hundred thousand to work with.” That’s State Senator Harry Valentine, who – not that it matters except to give you a little verisimilitude - used to wear lime-green leisure suits.
“That won’t be no trouble.” That’s Vino Scarlatti, whose family owned Pineville Pimento Importers.
Well, for years immemorial Mapleville hadn’t been anything but about two hundred acres of Sugar Maple trees, of no use to anybody except students taking a field trip out there and pasting the leaves in their Flora of Pine County projects. I think somebody came along one time – actually I know who it was, it was crazy old T. C. Snavely in 1928 – and he thought he could open up a lucrative maple syrup farm off all the free trees just sittin’ there. So he put up a sign that said Mapleville and it stuck. But evidently sap extraction is a complicated action that takes months – you can’t just stick a spike in and wait for somebody bring you pancakes – and although T.C. tried to stick it out, he finally got frustrated and kicked the bucket, branched out and moved on. So before the bulldozers moved in and tore the place limb from limb, all Mapleville was was Andy Rickenbacker’s old Sinclair Station and a stop sign. And a passel of untapped, unsapped Maple trees. I often think – in my philosophical moods, when I have time for ‘em - of all the pancakes that orchard might have slathered. (You probably couldn’t get enough syrup out of it now to feed French Toast to a anorexic pygmy.)
Anyway, when the Pineville plutocrats started pushing their posh country club plans through, the bankers and brokers and planners and speculators started snapping up and denuding the fine Maple orchard until all that was left were a few trees in the middle which is now Steinburger Park
As for the country club, golf course and rolling-hilled communities, the whole shebang looks like it was designed by a dichromatic dunce who got kicked out of architect school and then went to work for Walt Disney where he developed the reefer habit. Amidst the fake rolling hills there are developments and sub-developments inside them and sub-sub-developments inside them – you get the idea – and they’re all called goofy names like Vista del Sol and Las Colinas de Mapleville. For the suburban design buffs among my readers, I’d describe the houses as of the eclectic Casa de Home Depot school. They’re all adobe-hacienda-colored and Spanish-roof-tiled but then – in what I’d describe as architectural anarchy run amok - they’re appointed all over with clashing elements and oddball foofaraw that look like it belongs on somebody else’s house and which reminds me of Salvador Dali in his Catalonia period. Me, I wouldn’t live out there if you paid me. For one thing, I don’t need a Moroccan garage or front door out of one of Henry VIII’s castles.
The more elaborate ones – some of the architects were homosexuals, I think – all have swimming pools and hot tubs and cedar decks and outdoor built-in barbeques and grills and cabanas and changing rooms and what not because a sure sign of swag for your seigneurs of Costa de Lah-de-Dah is to have a fancy pool they pay a hundred smackaroos a month to maintain in order to use once a year to have a party with.
There are more Mexican gardeners in Mapleville than at the Archbishop of Acapulco’s house. As a result, the flowers and trees and bushes and what not are all trimmed and mowed and raked and clipped and snipped and made to conform to community standards – as opposed to Pineville, where our neighborhood beautification program amounts to whatever wants to grow just grows until it gets in somebody’s way and he rips it up or chops it down.
To Pineville, Mapleville is kind of like a snobby older sister that married money and don’t come around anymore. Of course we go to the mall – especially in summertime when the Cineplex cranks its air conditioner all the way up and we have to go watch a Jennifer Aniston movie to get out of the heat. But on the whole, we don’t mix with Mapleville and Mapleville don’t mingle with us and we don’t care about ‘em much one way or the other anyway. All that glitters ain’t gold, Shakespeare said, and like usual he hit the nail smack on the uneasy head that wears the crown.
Well, I didn’t have time to think about it any more for about a week – I’m polishing a piece for Arizona Highways called Dirt Roads and Where to Find ‘Em - but come Saturday morning, I’m up and tryin’ to talk Hector – the mongrel, you know - into some fried eggs, but he ain’t having ‘em so I’m toasting him some Eggos and all of a sudden, ear-shattering the morning serenity of Les Village des Pinecone, I hear a bugle call - a fanfare or Assembly, or whatever they call it when somebody’s blowin’ their horn at you to get up like you’re GI Joe.
Well, we don’t often get soldiers marching down Pinecone on Saturday morning and I’m wondering if the Sons of the Confederacy have maybe had a little whiskey this morning. So I go have a look-see - much to the chagrin of the dog, who’s eyeballing the toaster and me back and forth like a tennis match and clearly thinks I should stay by my post until his waffles pop up – but I go open the door and there’s Junior, grinnin’ like a politician and jerking his thumb out at the street.
He’s painted his old Chevy pick-up pink – I’m not up on my pink tincts so I can’t tell you if it was amaranth pink or zoroastrian pink or wherever in between pink – but trust me, and I’m positive, it was pretty pink. It says Junior’s Bikini Girls Pool Service on the side.
I’m about to ask him if he’d mind parking down the street – I don’t want the neighbors to wake up and see a pink pick-up parked in front of my house on Saturday morning (there’d be rumors I shouldn’t have to address) - but he bustles on in by me, all Man-With-A-Plan and he dumps a pile of manuals and diagrams and maps and what not on the coffee table and ask me if I have any beer.
The mutt, meantime, after several failed attempts to vault up on the counter and snatch his Eggo from the jaws of the Toastmaster – his dog school teacher said he had impulse control issues and I told her no, he’s just a pig - he goes into his Mistreated-Starving-Orphan-Dog routine where he sucks in his breath so his ribs show and his cheeks get hollow and he looks up all whiny-teary like he’s an actor in an Animal Rescue commercial. I tell Junior to wait a minute and I go detoaster the Eggos, get out the Land O’ Lakes and the Knott’s boysenberry syrup and do my part for mistreated animals worldwide.
“Dude, check it out.”
Junior hands me an aerial picture of Mapleville. I can make out the Target and the Cineplex real well. “See all them blue blobs? Pools, dude.”
I nod my head. The pool business ain’t too hard so far.
“Dude, check it out,” and he hands me an official list of all the pool permits in Mapleville. There were 43 of them – movers, shakers, and evidently swimmers. “You know what that means, dude?”
Treading carefully, I go “Well, it appears to me that there are 43 pool permits in Mapleville, and…”
“Dude, listen up. Emory’s only got half of ‘em on service. That means my competition – our competition – is Walter’s Triple-A Pool Service, and he’s so old he has to use a walker to get around his pools.”
“So…”
“Now here’s the best part!” He pulls the Morning Herald out of his back pocket and flips over to the Help Wanteds:
Girls - Need a great outside summer job?
Interns 18+ needed. Work in the sun for
free drinks. Learn a trade, get a tan,
have fun! Meet rich people! Permanent
positions possible. Free training. Must
look good in bikini and be willing to work
hard and socialize with wealthy men.
Bonuses paid at end of summer. Interviews
Saturday 610 Pinecone 10:00 AM .
“Wait a minute. That’s my house. And today’s Saturday. And it’s almost ten o’clock . What…”
“Ding dong!”
“Welcome to Junior’s Bikini Girls Pool Service, partner!” And he - having found it without my help – pops open a Pabst. “Let’s greet our applicants!”
Before I can say anything or even check for dirty socks laying around, he opens the door and my living room becomes atwitter with a glittering litter of eighteen-nineteen-twenty-something femlins of the Grade-A yowza-neck-strainer variety. They’re poking around all over the house like visiting cats, asking me where the bathroom is, fiddling with their pocket phones, checkin’ their complexions in their purse mirrors and chattering like a bunch of parakeets on amphetamines. The house begins to smell like the perfume counter at Old Navy, and the dog – agog as I am at this unforeseen domestic development – stares at the six aromatic she-men and thoughtfully chews his Eggo. We haven’t had this much female company since Aunt Mary had her book club meeting over here one time, and those were just a bunch of fussy old goats who sat around drinking wine all afternoon and never got past page one.
Junior – heretofore known as a man of action only when fleeing the scene of a crime – claps his hands and tells ‘em all to siddown and shuddup.
“Now girls, I’m Junior Estes, President and CEO of Junior’s Bikini Girls Pool Service. This here’s my partner…” at this point he introduces me and I can tell from their reactions that they’re thrilled to meet the famous Pineville scrivener but not wanting to show their excitement they just gape at me.
“Today we’re going to tell you all about your great summer opportunity of a lifetime!”
“Dude, can we smoke?” That’s Mandy Milligan, who I happen to know her mother’s been yelling at her to get up off her butt and get a job for two years.
“Lemme go through my indoctrination deal first and if there’s anything I don’t cover then you can ask. We got a lot to do today and time is money. First off, who wants a beer?”
“Well, can I smoke in here?” She turns and blinks a couple of cornflower blues at me. Frankly, when a nymphette who looks like a blasé goddess and probably has a bikini on under her trendy Gap ensemble asks me if she can smoke in my house my feeling is that if she wanted to start a bonfire in the living room it’d be all right with me.
“Now girls, listen up. Here’s the deal. You’re all hired, and we’re gonna divide you into teams and partners during your training today. We start work Monday in Mapleville, so you can tell your parents and probation officers and what all that you got the job.”
That struck a melodic chord with ‘em and they exchanged high-fives.
“But first, we’re going to tell you all about the job itself, your responsibilities, some rules and regulations and your benefit packages and how we’re gonna have more fun than a clown convention. Now, this here’s a map of Mapleville.” He holds up his map and leers like he’s Captain Nemo and it’s the lost riches of Atlantis.
“What are all those cute little blue blobs?”
“Your job – and it’s so easy you’ll see why we don’t pay our interns – is like being invited to pool parties all week long! How’s that for a summer job, girls?”
“Awesome!”
“Now first, before the fun begins, you’ve got to learn the five basics of swimming pool maintenance. That’s so easy we can train you in about ten minutes – first here in the Classroom, then we’ll all ride on out to our training facility so you can get your hands on some poles and practice for a few minutes before your graduation party starts. Everybody’s got their bikinis, right?”
I raise an eyebrow at Junior, expenditure for off-site training facilities being of course of importance to a partner.
“Now, who likes to exercise just enough to be able to tell their friends they’re working out?”
Four comely hands shoot up – Veronica, Alexis, Tory and Katie, if I’ve got my budding pool protégés straight.
“Excellent! You girls are now our Junior’s Bikini Girls Pool Service professional pool technicians! Everybody say pool technician with me.”
“Pool technician with me!”
“So can we like swim in the pools and stuff?”
“Excellent question, Katie! Sure you can and the only restriction on you jumping in the pools is if the customers are at home at the time. Of course, if they’re there and their wives aren’t, they’ll be happy for you to jump in the pool!”
Delighted squeals of approval echoed throughout the Classroom, heretofore used basically to sit down and watch PBS in and take my socks off, but now a dynamic training module for Corporate America.
“OK now, listen up. Here’s how it works. There are only five things that need to be done to a pool every week. Who can guess what they are?”
“Clean up the beer cans and ashtrays?”
“That’s two…”
“Well, yes, Veronica, that’s right. But for our purposes today, we’re going to talk about the five points of proper pool procedure. The first two involve Pool Technician Team Number One, and that’ll be Mandy and Alexis. You girls will be our Vice-Presidents for Nets and Brushes and in charge of cleaning whatever crap up that’s in the pool – leaves and stuff, you know. By the end of summer, ladies, you’ll have better arms than Madonna!”
“Oooh!”
“Yep. Now Team Number Two, that’ll be Tory and Katie, you’re our Doo-dads managers. Most pools have two doo-dads, called sweepers and skimmer baskets. Your job is to dump the debris out of the doo-dads and then act like you’re testing the pool for chemicals. Then, you pour some stuff out of a white bleach bottle in and boom, you’re done and can go back to the truck and have a smoke and a beer on our way to the next pool.”
“Can I be a Vice-President too?”
“Now, here’s the deal. When we pull up at each pool, all four of you’ll jump out and run into the back yard – we’ll carry all the equipment for you, we don’t want you to get tired - do all of your assigned fun jobs and get back to the truck in ten minutes. This way you’ll get the best, healthy outdoor exercise you can get without breakin’ a sweat and we’ll be off work by noon . That’s when you can start going to all the pool parties the rich owners’ll invite you too.”
“Awesome!”
“What if the customers invite us in for a drink or a…?”
“Hey, I ain’t your mamma. We want you to have fun! So yes, it is permissible to accept social amenities from a customer, but only after – and this is in your manuals – you go up, put your hand on his arm and whisper in his ear that what you’d really like is for Junior’s Bikini Girls Pool Service to be his one-stop shop for maintenance, filters, clarifiers, sweepers, skimmers and assorted doo-dads he’s got to have. It’s all in your manuals.”
“Now, does anybody have any sales experience?” Ten glittery decaled fingers shoot up.
“I was a telemarketer for two days once but I hate rejection and…” That’s Allison McGonigle, who I thought I recognized when she paraded in. She was runner-up for Miss Crawdad a few years ago and she’s still got the beauty queen deal going on and an extra pound or two don’t look all that bad on her because it’s in the right places, bouncy-bouncy-wise, if it ain’t too incorrect of me to say so, and frankly, the prospect of seeing Allison in a bikini made me think of the Seven Wonders of the World, which I seldom do.
“Does band candy count?” That’s Amblee Chamblee – picture Barbra Streisand with a regular nose - who set the school record for World’s Finest Chocolate sales at Pineville High last year. I bought four cases myself.
“Excellent! You lucky ladies are now Junior’s Bikini Girls Pool Service’s Vice-Presidents for Sales, and since you have experience and we’re generous to our interns, we’ll pay you a ten percent commission on all your sales when we give out bonuses at the end of summer.”
“So, like how much is that?”
“I almost drowned once when my like uncle chased me into…”
“Don’t we get to exercise too?” That’s Allison, VP-Sales, of late concerned about the fit of her like, hottest jeans.
“You betcha do,” goes Junior, and he yanks out some copies of Junior’s Bikini Girls Pool Service Guide for Sales Girls and Helpful Phrases. He hands ‘em over and tells ‘em to look ‘em over there’ll be a pop pool quiz and he’ll get to ‘em in a minute.
“Now, like any job, girls, you’ve got to learn just enough to make the customer actually think you know what you’re doing. And you’ll see how easy this is because as a rule pool owners don’t know their pump basket from a pimple on their butt. So all you got to do learn the motions and memorize a few key words and phrases and you’re good to go.” He pulls out some flash cards.
“Your first keyword is algae. Let’s say algae, girls!”
“Algae, girls!
“Awesome! Now algae – and I’ll break this down scientifically for you – is pool cooties.”
“Ewww!”
“Yep, and if there’s one thing that customers are scared of, it’s algae. So we use this word every time we talk to a customer because for one, all they know about algae is that it’s mysterious and they don’t want it. This is called marketing.”
“So, we like sell them new algaes?”
“No, but that’s a good question, Amblee. What we do is tell them they’ve either got or they’re about to get algae – it comes in two colors, green and black – and they’re gonna need a new filter, sweeper or some expensive chemicals and doo-dads to fix it.”
I’m like beginning to see the subtle genius behind Junior’s business plan.
“Your second keyword – actually a key phrase – is ‘I think your old filter may be cracked.’ Let’s all say it!”
“I think your old filter may be cracked!”
Well, this goes on for a while and one thing I’ve got admit about Junior, he’s prepared. He’s not only got his pool facts down, he’s handling questions like the IBM computer who beat the Jeopardy champion. He turns his attention to our Sales Department.
“Now Allison and Amblee, you’ll see in your training material there’s a list of twenty-three addresses in Mapleville, and those are all houses with pools that don’t use Junior’s Bikini Girls Pool Service. Boo!”
“Boo!”
“What you’re gonna do is walk around Mapleville in your bikinis – don’t that sound fun - go see all those people and offer ‘em a free on-the-spot checkup and a ten percent discount on our usual low rates to ditch Walter and sign up with us. As it says in your manuals, poise and personality are very important.”
“And when the customer asks me what do I know about pools, I say are you kidding I was born in a pool and have a degree in marine microbiology!” Allison goes, clasping her manual to a bikini-friendly bosom while wondering what Marines have to do with it.
“Way to go, Allison! See girls, everybody wants a free checkup, so when they take you to the pool – they’ll let you lead the way – what you do is jump in and swim around for a minute. Then you slowly climb out, adjust your bikinis, walk up to them, and what do you say?”
“I think your old filter is cracked?”
“Close, but remember the customer has got to watch you bending over the pumps and stuff for a few minutes first before you can tell them you think their filter is cracked. It’s in your manual. Amblee, you try. After your free check-up, you slowly rise from the pool, shake yourself off, adjust your bikini, go up to the customer and say what?”
“Sir, your water is very hard and getting harder. You’ve got calcium carbonate deposits and your PH level is growing high. When’s the last time anybody but that old tool Walter tested your pool? Omigod, I wouldn’t let a rat swim in this kind of alkalinity until Junior can like take a look at it. Seriously.”
“Everybody give Amblee a hand!”
“Does PH mean what I think it means?”
Well, like I said this goes for a while and I have to say we’ve sure got a lot of
Esprit de naval corps on the team. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a group of girls so happy to have a job that don’t pay anything but I guess the perquisite of getting their parents off their soon-to-be-tanned-like-a-beach-goddess backs is good enough for them. Plus, Junior’s doling out my Pabsts like they’re free check-ups (this is a lesson in morale-building that Corporate America ought to take a look at) and so they’re not just pool interns, they’re happy, buzzed pool interns, which I’m to discover is part of Junior’s Human Resources policy. A happy employee is a productive employee, he goes, and says Tom Peters backs him up on that.
Anyway, the girls are all chatty-animated and having a good old time, eager as any batch of beavers gnawing at the bit to get their paws on a pole as you ever saw. Finally, Junior announces that they’ve all graduated from Classroom Training and with a gravitas befitting the Earl of Oxford – I’m surprised he didn’t pull out some of them tasseled hat deals - he bestows pink certificates with a gold star on ‘em. Then he yanks out some pink tee-shirts. “You can wear these uniforms over your bikinis, but not when you’re at a pool.”
“Yay!”
“Woo-Hoo!”
Women worldwide always love a free pink gift.
“All right now, listen up. What we’re gonna do now is do your bikini inspections to be sure you meet our standards, then we’ll all load up in the truck and go out to the training pool, where you’ll spend an hour or so playin’ with your poles and learning what exactly doo-dads do. We’ll show you how to dilute your chlorine, scratch your head thoughtfully in front of the customer, empty the doo-dads without breaking a fingernail and make a sad pool into a happy pool. OK, everybody, stand up!”
Well, it’s a proven fact that readers have active imaginations, so I won’t need to write out in the meticulous detail you may have come to expect from me what my living room looked like about six seconds later. Just imagine Hugh Hefner’s house right before everybody decides to go to the grotto. The girls stood up and peeled their clothes off like they’re extras in Baywatch and sure enough underneath the outer raiment they’re all wearing the latest in designer bikini fashions or what there is of ‘em.
Wait, let me retract that. I wouldn’t know the latest in designer bikini fashions if they came up and bit me on the nose. But I have seen some Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issues – you can hardly avoid ‘em in this licentious age – and let me just put it this way. If I had sand in my living room and a romantic sunset peeking through the screen door with the proper chiaroscuro, the Sports Illustrated boys’d be falling all over themselves tryin’ to get in the door.
“Junior, I’ve got a bikini my mamma won’t let me wear, and…”
“Absolutely,” the Man of Decision rules.
So after inspection – they’re representing the company so they’ve got to be perfect from head to twinkling toes at all times and I’m glad to be taking a more active role in the firm - we all go pile in the truck, me and Junior in front and the bikinied Bikini Girls in the back amongst a boatload of buckets and bottles and poles and nets and hazardous chemicals. Junior pulls away, honking a blaring bugle call that’d wake Robert E. Lee’s grandpa up. We made a quick stop at Cecil’s for a case of Corona and some limes – you don’t stint on employee morale, he goes – and headed up Pinecone toward Tenth, attracting a red-blooded gawker who ran into a tree on his bicycle which, I can tell by the hilarity out in the bed, the girls enjoyed a whole lot. But up front, Junior and I are strictly business. We got our motor runnin’ and we’re headed on the highway to Mapleville.
“Dude, for one thing…”
“Dude, relax! Let me ask you a question. It’s legal, there ain’t no real work involved, we roll around swillin’ beer all day with a bunch of babes in bikinis, we make more money than Donald Trump, and when Peggy Sue sees Emory’s pool dough goin’ to Brenda she’ll open up my report card and give me a gold star. Poke a hole in that, Perry Mason.”
“Yeah, but how…”
“I got that covered. I know a guy who knows a dude whose brother works at Home Depot in the Pool Aisle. Dude, they got more chlorine and chemicals and pool parts than the Olympics and this guy works the night shift and…”
I didn’t know Home Depot had a pool aisle. Just goes to show you I don’t know how the other half lives, I guess.
“And by legal, you mean – I mean, you can’t tell me you’re going to pour beer down these girls all day and somebody isn’t gonna slip and crack her head on a deck…”
“Or a filter! Crack ‘em both at the same time!”
“Ha ha!”
Not really funny when you think about it, of course, but what can you do. “But what I’m sayin’ is don’t you need to have permits and insurance and what not?”
As an executive, of course, foremost in my mind is the safety of our staff. That, and if I get my eye poked out with one of them escalating pole deals I’m gonna wanna sue the socks off somebody.
“Dude!” He looks at me like he’s Napoleon and I just pooh-poohed his Prussian imperative. He pulls a folder out and hands it to me and it’s chock-full of permits and licenses and what not. I see the Good Neighbor people are poised to spring into action as of 12:00 PM last night.
“Peggy Sue says I got a responsibility to the public not to inflict any more damage on ‘em than I already have. So I got Hiram to pay off whoever he needed to to get all this stuff, and dude, we’re as constitutional as the Ethan Allen and the Foggy Mountain Boys.”
“Junior, the cops in Mapleville ain’t gonna let us run around with a bunch of loosy-goosy near-naked girls in the back of a pink pick-up truck drinkin’ beer and pullin’ up on La Playa de la Paseo jumpin’ into people’s pools like we’re a Ft. Lauderdale Spring Break movie on location.”
“Hiram had an idea about that too. He went to see the Chief yesterday with a donation to the Old Flatfoot Fund or whatever it is and told him I’m doin’ my probation on Emory’s pool route and showed him all my paperwork over pasta salad and a martini at the Olive Garden, givin’ him the heads-up that we’d be out there and to ask him to tell the boys not to yank us over like they normally would, due to of course truck beds teeming with girls in bikinis are known to arouse the suspicions of patrolmen looking for crime.” He took a deep breath, which I would too after a sentence like that.
“Then,” he goes, “Hiram told him you were my partner – I guess he reads or somethin’ – so he said he’d tell the boys to leave us alone although he thought it’d be nice if the girls could show up at his brother’s bachelor party in a couple of weeks so we got to pencil that in. Otherwise, as long as the girls don’t throw beer bottles out of the truck we’re good.”
By this time we’re in Mapleville, cruising down Calle de Maple and now, finally, after years of wondering, I’m beginning to understand how people in circus parades feel. Junior’s blowing his trumpet horn like we’re the Krazy Klown Wagon and we’ve got the sparkling, glamorous Gazosczky Sextuplets from Czechoslovakia
The female psyche, Junior says, and I want to make the point that this is Junior’s opinion, not mine, actually enjoys getting a little buzz on and wearing an itsy-bitsy-teeny-weeny bikini and having mankind drooling at it – it’s in their inner nature, like shoes, he goes – and an added benefit of their summer internships will be that the girls will always have the sweet memory of the halcyon summer when the world was at their feet and they could actually drink all day, party and parade around in their flesh-spewin’ bikinis, get a great tan and a fun workout, get their parents off their freakin’ back, drive rich, interesting older men crazy, learn a trade they’ll always be able to fall back on or plunge back into and get paid a bonus for it at like the end of summer. It’s every girl’s dream come true, he goes.
I’m about to thank him on behalf of all womankind, but we’re stopped at a light and he blows Assembly on his horn like he’s Bobo the Klown come to town to cause some madcap mischief. I look over and see three Arby’s customers pause in mid-bite of their Roast Beef and Cheese Deluxes. A Mapleville cop pulled up beside us, tipped his cap and wished us a nice day. Three unemployed people driving around with their mouths open and nothing else to do turned around and started to follow us.
We turn into a development – Estadas El Playa dos Maples the sign said – and wind around for a while and finally pull up in front of what looked to me like a modernistic Greek Orthodox megachurch built on a expansive adobe seaside villa overlooking the Pecos River Athens
“Morty Steinburger Jr’s house,” the Pool King informs me, “good guy, I met him in juvie once. Don’t play cards with him, dude. His daddy left this house and about ten million smackaroos to him when he died in Leavenworth
“What? Turn around and go home right now?”
“No, dude. He’s invited all of his neighbors with pools over to have a few drinks in a couple of hours and watch the girls and meet us all and ask questions about their pools. That’s where the girls graduation party comes in, see?” He points to his brain. “I’m thinkin’ all the time, dude.”
“So when they come up and ask me about their freakin’ phosphates I tell them their old filter’s cracked, right?”
“Not right off. You first ask him how old it is, what kind it is, and when was the last time it was serviced. He don’t know any of that so he’ll just smile like an idiot – he knows he’s pool-stupid, but don’t rub it in - and then you scratch your head thoughtfully and whistle for one of the girls and tell her to go bend over the filter deal for a few minutes, and while she’s doing that you tell him that all of Walter’s old filters have been cracking lately and we’ve got a special deal on ‘em this week, and…”
Well, Junior’s Bikini Girls are spillin’ out of the truck – and their bikinis, I notice in one or two isolated incidents – and he hushes ‘em up and tells ‘em for the next hour, we’re gonna go concentrate on how to work poles and empty doo-dads and we don’t want no monkey business so leave your beers in the truck and if everybody does good we’ll have a graduation party and everybody can have a drink and jump in the pool and meet some Mapleville millionaires.
“Yay!”
So me, Junior and the six Chlorine Goddesses slog up Morty Jr’s. driveway past his Italianate fountain, through his Japanese rock garden, around his American Beauty roses and through the French doors to the back yard, where we’ve got to trek uphill another fifty yards before we get to the actual Mediterranean pool with its breathtaking view of the outskirts of Mapleville. The back yard is covered over with decks and levels and cedar nooks and built-in picnic tables and fireplaces and crannies and stairs that don’t lead anyplace and I don’t know what all and after lugging the poles and nets and brushes and what not through all of it I’m understanding what Junior means when he talks about the girls getting some exercise.
“Now girls, you’ll notice the slight incline here leading up to the pool. This is the best exercise for the thighs and glutes!”
Well, my thighs and glutes are in pretty decent shape from what I’ve been told, but the girls sure seemed to appreciate the exercise and I made sure to watch them closely as they ascended up to the pool to make sure they navigated the unfamiliar terrain successfully.
Well, just like Junior said, cleaning a pool ain’t hard, particularly if you’re supervising. And since the girls had already graduated Classroom Training they knew all about nets and brushes and poles and muriatic acid and doo-dads and they’re all raring to get their hands on some equipment.
.
Well young women, of course, aren’t used to handling tools like men are. What I’m saying is, give a man a wrench, and he’ll wrench something with it. Give a man a hammer and he’ll whistle a tune and go and find something to hammer. But girls aren’t used to handling tools and machinery and building bridges and what not like men, so when you train them in the use of tools – and pool poles are the primary tools of pool pros – you have to take it easy, in a one-step-at-a-time hands-on kind of way.
I found it to be similar to golf instruction. The optimum method, I quickly determined – managers are nothing if they can’t make snap decisions – to instruct young ladies in the use of the telescoping pool poles is to stand directly in back of them and guide their arms as they manipulate their poles up and down, back and forth, in and out – much as the golf coach oversees one’s swing, it’s a matter of delicate timing and balance. After about fifteen minutes with Pool Technician Team 1 – respectively Mandy and Alexis – I felt that the girls were ready to solo with their nets and brushes. A great responsibility to teach employees the right way to do things and rewarding in its own way. I know now how Dale Carnegie feels.
Meanwhile, Junior had Pool Technician Team II, Tory and Katie, playing Hide-And-Go-Dump-the-Doo-dads, a practice exercise where one of ‘em emptied the skimmer basket and dumped it in the sweeper, and then the other one emptied the sweeper and dumped it into skimmer basket, and so on, and the quicker they did it the more points they got. After about five rotations, they were juggling their doo-dads so well they could have electrified a pool products convention. Pretty soon, he had ‘em practicing their chemical tests – necessary only when the customer is watching, he stressed – and how to funnel water into the chlorine jugs.
“Now girls, you’ve done such a good job today I’m going to give you a bonus opportunity right now! When we start the route Monday, the first girl to find a dead, bloated mouse in the skimmer basket gets 500 bonus points!”
“Yay!”
I include this exchange as an example of how surprisingly effective a motivational leader Junior was – give the Pool Devil his due - and how halfway zonked the girls were. Normally, you even suggest to a woman that she go within thirty feet of a skimmer basket with a dead, bloated mouse in it and she’s in the next county by the time you finish your sentence, bonus points be damned.
Then – and Tom Peters insists on this, he says – Junior had ‘em switch and do each other’s jobs – gene-pooling, he called it - so I was obligated to train Tory and Katie in pole handling too. Each student, of course, presenting her own unique challenges in the training endeavor, much in the same way a golf instructor would adapt to students of different heights, different reaches, and various different individual protuberances, the instructor must be prepared to guide each girl closely but firmly in order to ensure she achieve complete pole mastery. And it’s a funny thing – I never knew I was so good at it, if I do say so myself, because pretty soon the girls were handling poles like they’d been born to a blind Venetian.
While all this was going on, our Sales VPs – Allison and Amblee – are walking around memorizing their manuals, shooting questions at each other from the Q & A section.
“Knock-Knock.”
“Well, young lady. Good morning.”
“Hello sir, my name is Amblee from Junior’s Bikini Girls Pool Service. Smile and wait for him to say hello.”
“Hello there, young lady.”
“Hi, Sir. I like that shirt, it looks good on you. I’m (your name) with Junior’s Bikini Girls Pool Service, and we’re offering new pool customers a free check up and ten percent off our usual low rates to sign up with Junior’s Bikini Girls. There’s been a lot of dangerous algae going around lately in Walter’s pools, and I can jump in right now and take a complimentary look for you, courtesy of Junior’s! Or I can come back later when your wife’s not home.”
“Correct!”
So there we all are, and when I eventually looked up from my work – I was training Tory in Sunscreen – I see Junior engaged in a friendly, back-slapping conversation with a bespectacled guy in a Hawaiian shirt who looked like he got kicked out of prep school for forging transcripts. Morty Steinburger Jr., I surmised, and sure enough up they come and Junior introduces us. Behind Morty there are eight or nine superannuated-type guys in Hawaiian shirts walking in and they’ve all got cocktails in their hands and crooked smiles on their faces and blonde trophy wives wiggling behind.
Junior calls the girls over to congratulate ‘em on passing their Field Tests and gives them their Final Exam: Jump in the pool, swim around for a few minutes, then following the Pool Egress Protocol that’s on page twenty-two of their manuals, slowly pull themselves up, whip their hair back and forth, climb out of the pool like they’re in slow motion, bend over and wring their hair out, adjust their tops, adjust their bottoms, turn and make eye contact with a customer and walk toward him like Bo Derek on the beach, clutching a coupon for 10% off a filter service.
Somebody put a tequila sunrise in my hand and somebody’s trophy wife came up to me and…
To tell you the truth, things got a little blurry after that, but ever since I finished War and Peace I’ve been conscious about puttin’ too much filler material in my stories anyway and you’re probably wishing I’d stop.
So that’s how Junior’s Bikini Girls Pool Service got started– I just thought of a good title for this story – and for the next three months…but, wait don’t get me started. I’d have to make a sequel deal out of the rest of the summer, due to a lot of things happening like the time Rhonda Scarlatti and Tory and Katie got into a fight because Katie backwashed – a technical pool term that can best be described as giving an enema to your pool filter – about ten pounds of pool scum onto Rhonda’s Jackie Kennedy roses. That was a thorny issue, and a lot of mud was thrown.
Today, Mapleville is a better place, though, and when Emory got out, Junior gave him his original twenty pools back – happy customers, one and all, he assured him - and sold him the twenty-two new pools he and the girls had signed up the very first week. Those pools won’t need much maintenance, either. They’ve all got new filters, sweepers and skimmer baskets, and you could eat your dinner off ‘em if you wanted to.
The Mapleville Jaycees nominated Junior for Outstanding Young Businessman of the Year, but due to a technicality in their eligibility requirements he couldn’t actually accept the honor, although they did take us to Olive Garden for lunch.
When we counted up all the money we made over the summer – after we sent Brenda Emory’s share of the monthly maintenance fees – and what Emory paid us for the rest of the pools and the 100% profit Junior made off all the parts he sold, we were able to give girls real nice bonuses for which they were demonstrably appreciative.
If I ever get around to the sequel – I think Reflections of a Pool Boy might be a good title - I’ll tell you all about it.
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