Word got out that I was once a star swimmer, and I faced a critical choice. Luckily, pure dickishness saved me.
Chapter Six
I DON'T REMEMBER HOW IT HAPPENED, but word got out among my math-nerd peers that I was a star swimmer.
I can assure you that it wasn't me. I didn't want anyone to know because I didn't want to have to carry around the label of "dumb jock" anymore. I was desperately trying to forge a new identity: smart Shawn. Nerd Shawn, even. Proud of my nerdiness. Proud that I hung around with what other UNC students openly called "eggheads."
My little math-nerd group ... I really liked them. I wanted them to like me. I was afraid that if they found out that I was an All-American swimmer that they'd not like me anymore. I was actually terrified of it. They made fun of jocks all the time. Several had recounted stories of being bullied by jocks. Jocks were not liked.
So I kept my mouth closed about my boyhood swimming accomplishments.
But somehow it got out.
It was Jim who brought it up. Three of us—me, him, and Laura—had the same physics class. We were sitting around a lab counter before it started early one morning when Jim slapped my shoulder.
"Why the hell didn't you tell me you were this big-time swimmer?"
I remember my heart dropping into my feet. "Who told you?"
"You were a swimmer?" Laura asked, smiling. "High school?"
"This huge state champion!" Jim chuckled. "All sorts of records. Full-ride offers all over the place. And here he is holding out on us!"
I wasn't proud; I was incensed.
"Who the fuck told you?" I demanded.
Jim laughed. "Why didn't you tell us?"
I shrugged. "Wasn't important. Who told you?"
I was struggling to hold on to my temper. Here I had these friends, and I feared I was about to lose them.
"Aaron, a kid in my English lit class. He swam for Loveland High School." He laughed again. "We're walking to the UC when he points at you. You were typical you, head down, backpack bouncin' on your back, hurrying wherever, and he says, 'That's Shawn Helbert. Total machine swimmer. Unreal. I wonder why he's here. I wonder if he's going to swim for UNC.' "
"Aaron swims for the team?" I asked.
Jim nodded. "He was completely stoked seeing you. I bet he's told the entire team by now." He pointed down at the top of my head like I was some sort of display, "Apparently this nerd bucket can make UNC a national contender all by his lonesome."
Laura, smiling, blinked. "Is that true?"
I shrugged with a punctuated sigh. I just wanted to grab my belongings and leave. "I haven't been in the water in a while."
"You should go out for the team!" she said.
I snorted. "With eighteen credits of calculus and physics? With Cavanagh? Are you high?"
"You just want to see him in his Speedos," Jim teased.
Laura slapped his arm. "You're such a jerk half the time!"
"Guilty," Jim chuckled. He then punched mine. While I winced, grabbing it, he said, "She's right. You should go out for the team. Make the Bears proud."
"Cavanagh," I returned. "Going to bed at 3:30 or 4 each morning after another of his sets. Hell no."
Which was the reasonable thing to say. To do. But I was nineteen years old. Reasonable and I still had a glancing relationship with each other. And—
I thought of Mom. How happy she'd be that I was back in the water. I really had no idea how much it had meant to her, my swimming. She never got over me quitting and tucking tail and returning home from Hawaii. How upset it made her.
She was, I knew, in the final years of her life. I knew that. How happy would she be to see me in the pool again, to go to a few more meets?
I sat by at the edge of her bed in the dark. I told her what had happened, how word had gotten out.
She had no idea how hard I was working, the homework, my desire to learn math, to start my life, to be a smart guy, to be respected as one. Dr. Cavanagh, though I still couldn't stand him, was having an affect on me, my attitude. I could see that mathematics backbone of his plain as day, and it was made of steel. I wanted that.
"What do you want to do, honey?" she asked.
I knew. I wanted to stay away from swimming. I wanted to study math. I wanted to have a girlfriend (someday) and go to clubs and dance and have fun. I wanted to stay on the Dean's List, which, somehow, I'd managed to do. I wanted to prove that bitch counselor wrong, and all those in high school who'd judged me as "just a dumb jock." Not a small number.
I held her hand. It was warm. Her grip was weak. It was getting weaker and weaker. Soon it would be cold, and it would be limp. Way too soon.
So I said, truthfully, "I want more than anything to make you happy."
"Maybe you could try it for a semester. Just get back in shape and see how it feels. If you don't want to keep at it, then quit."
"I remember how happy meets made you."
She squeezed my hand. "Watching you made me happy."
I smiled sadly. "Most of the time you were busy chatting up everyone around you and having a good ol' time!"
"What happens next?" she asked.
"I hunt down the coach and see if he'll take me. They're already a few weeks into the season."
"I remember how hard he pursued you," she said.
I nodded. "It's a Division II school." I didn't say that to boast; it was just a simple fact: I graduated high school a Division I athlete.
"He'll probably fall over backwards watching you come in," she said.
I leaned over and kissed her cheek. It was warm. I struggled not to cry. I knew her time was very short. A year? Two? Maybe. At most.
"I just want to see you in those stands again," I said.
I don't remember the reason why, but when I chose to go talk to the coach, whose name I don't remember (it was never important for anyone to remember it, I suspect), I asked Laura to go with me.
Possibly it was because she was genuinely excited for me. I recall her peppering me with questions about my past exploits, about Hawaii and why that didn't work out. I recall her face when I told her about Mom, about her illness, about wanting to be close to her in her final years, not worrying about swimming for some idiot team half a world away.
Laura's gentle faith touched me. It was quiet, not the intrusive, loud, and invasive type so common to Christians in northern Colorado at the time as evangelicals swamped the area with Campus Crusade for Christ among other proto-fascist cult organizations. She carried herself with a quiet strength that I wanted to protect. She hung out with the Root Six-Niners and didn't condemn our endless crudery, our love for "satanic" heavy metal, our occasional boyish bluster, which Debra joined in with great enthusiasm, often becoming the ringleader. Debra used to call Laura "princess" behind her back, and sometimes criticized her with a stinging acid tongue that sometimes actually made me flinch; but when she didn't know anyone was looking, I could see that she probably had a bit of a crush on her.
On the day I'd chosen to talk to the coach—a Friday, as I recall—the latest exam scores from calculus were reported. Professor Cavanagh dutifully wrote the top and bottom scores on the board, complete with the median and average, and standard deviation. The top score, I remember to this day, was 81.9%. When he handed my test back to me, I gawked, because it said 80.2%.
"Number three, Mr. Helbert," he commented, staring down at me. "Coming up in the world, I see."
He walked on.
That moment etched itself permanently upon my spirit, because it was the precise moment I realized that I could do this—I could major in mathematics and get a degree in it. Jock Shawn. Dumb Shawn. The guy who should take an "easy" major and get a tutor. That guy.
I remember putting that exam into my folder, and I remember feeling great consternation, because now that possibility faced extinction, as I saw it, in endless thousands of training yards in the pool, traveling to hell and back to go to meets, and losing my new friends, who I found myself caring about more and more.
When class ended, Laura smiled as I approached her outside the class. "Ready?" she asked.
I nodded, faking confidence. "Let's go."
In any highlight reel of my life, what happened next will make the cut every time. Not that it was this big dramatic event; it wasn't. But sometimes it works like that. The real highlights—the ones that should actually make the cut—are often fairly quick, fairly quiet. This ended up being one of those.
UNC's coaches were all located in a big office space with their own cubicles. The UNC men's swimming coach was located in the very back down a long aisle that cut between the cubicles. I had to ask for directions to Whoever He Was; the secretary outside the office pointed and showed me.
Laura smiled as we walked up the aisle. "I'm so excited!" she said.
I didn't say anything. I was actually grieving the possibility of not getting to hang around her and the Root Six-Niners anymore. I was calculating how the fuck I was going to do Cavanagh's homework and sixteen thousand yards a day and weights and meets. I was grieving those late-night calls, listening to KAZY, immersing myself in studying and books and the feeling that I was becoming something more, something better.
We came to the end. The cubicle on the left was the coach's cubicle. He was sitting at his desk.
I hadn't made an appointment. I simply got his office hours from several swimmers, who had approached me several days before and were very excited that I was going to join them. "He's always in there," they said. "You won't miss him."
Here he was.
Picture an angry Wilford Brimley. He glanced up impatiently over wireless glasses. "Yeah?"
I extended my hand. "Mr. Whoever You Are?"
"Yeah?" he said, staring at my hand.
"I'm Shawn Helbert. I thought I'd join the team. I know the season is already underway—"
He cut me off. "I don't need some hotshot swimmer thinking he can come in and disrupt my team," he said, standing. "Get the hell out of here."
I withdrew my hand, blinking. I remember very clearly hearing Laura exhale next to me.
"Okay," I said, flushed and intimidated. "Sorry for bothering you."
We turned and walked back the way we came. I could feel his stare boring into the back of my head the entire way.
When we left the office, Laura spoke. "Oh ... my ... God! What a dick!" *
Despite being angry for being abused, I was celebrating massively inside.
"It's okay," I said. "Fuck him."
"Yeah!" she said. And then she used another swear word I'd never heard her use before. "Fuck him!"
I was visited by eight members of the team the very next day at the University Center as I sat by myself studying physics. I don't know who told them what went down with their dickhead coach, but here they were.
"We'll talk to him," they said. "He'll come around."
"No thanks," I said firmly. "I appreciate that you guys cared enough to come find me, but no."
They left grumbling. Not about me, about Coach Whoever He Was. I heard them.
Here's the thing: I felt bad for them. I really did. They actually cared. They seemed like nice guys. Solid.
Which tempered my sense of schadenfreude quite a bit when, not even a week later, the college newspaper reported that the men's swimming team was being cut. This was their very last season.
My swimming career was over. Thankfully, mercifully, gratefully over.
The way forward to get a degree in mathematics was once again clear.
* He was apparently a close professional associate of John Mattos'. So yeah, a dick.
~~*~~
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