When I was a lifeguard in a poor neighborhood one of my regulars was a kid named Jeremiah.
Jeremiah was around 12 years old. He’d swim at my pool every single day. When he wasn’t swimming, he’d hang out in the adjacent playground.
As I got to know him, I really liked him.
Like me, he grew up poor. He moved a ‘ot. He, his brother and his mom lived at his aunt’s house. His father had abandoned them. He was smart and did well in school. He liked to read. He liked hanging out with the lifeguards and talking a lot. He asked a lot of questions and was always quick with a joke.
I nicknamed him Bullfrog because of the song “Jeremiah was a bullfrog“.
When the end of the summer came I knew I’d miss my regulars like Jeremiah. As we said our goodbyes, I told them I’d see them all next summer.
Next summer I returned to the same pool.
I was happy to see Jeremiah and my other regulars. The kids got a little taller. The adults a little fatter. A few of the older teenager boys were graduating from high school and joining the Marines. Others had part-time jobs and couldn’t hang out at the pool as much. Some like Jeremiah, were entering their teenage years and just starting to figure out where they fit in to the world.
One day a few minutes before the pool opened, I was sitting on the deck chatting with our “Pool Cops”. The Pool Cops were a pair of City Police officers who were assigned to cover all 20 city pools. They’d drive around each day, visit different pools and talk to the lifeguards to see if we needed help with any problem visitors.
I never needed help, but I welcomed their visit because the female pool cop was cute and I shamelessly flirted with her. If I could work up the courage, I planned to ask her out.
My relationship with the pool cop and with Jeremiah ended that day.
Jeremiah was standing at the gate and yelled down at us,
“Hey, when are you going to open up the pool?”
I laughed and said,
“Hold your pants on Bullfrog, we’ll open up at 11AM, just like we always do.”
He made some smart ass remark like,
“Well maybe if you weren’t all bullshitting you’d get up and open the gate.”
Something he said or the way he said it triggered the female pool cop. She stood up and said to him,
“You need to shut up and leave here immediately.”
He replied,
“You can’t tell me what to do. It’s a free country.”
Maybe she was having a bad day. Maybe she just wanted to teach him a lesson. Maybe she was used to dealing with serious troublemakers at other pools.
Something triggered her and she exploded. She ran outside the gate, grabbed Jeremiah and slammed him into the fence. He squealed and cried as he tried to escape but couldn’t. She cuffed him and threw him in her car.
I was shocked.
First, I couldn’t believe how quickly she went from having a casual conversation with me to jumping into full violence with a little kid.
Second, she was majorly overreacting. After she had him in the car, I tried to ease the tension. I told her that he was a good kid, she’d given him a good scare and he’ll never talk back to a cop again. But she insisted on taking him to jail.
A week later I saw the pool cop again.
She stopped by to chit chat and flirt. I asked about Jeremiah and learned that she put him in a cell and made him wait for hours until his mother could come down after work to get him out.
Then she banned him from the City Pool, the adjacent park and the ballfield. She said if he was found onsite at any of these, he’d be arrested and put in juvenile detention.
I wish I could say that I told her she was wrong, that I went to the city to complain and that I pleaded Jeremiah’s case. After all, Jeremiah had nowhere else to go all summer long. He was just a poor kid, but a good kid, who made a smartass remark.
But I didn’t. I told her I thought that was too harsh and she disagreed. She said,
“No kid can talk to me that way. I am police officer. Next time, he’ll know better.”
I don’t remember having many conversations with her after that.
I saw Jeremiah only one more time.
It was at end of the summer. In these last few days, we only had a handful of swimmers because school was about to start, the days were getting shorter and it was getting colder.
I happened to look up in the playground and saw Jeremiah trudging past. I shouted “Hey Bullfrog!”
He shot me the finger and kept going.