IHAVE ACCEPTED that I will never swim in any of Los Angeles' more than 50 public pools. The problem isn't inconvenient location or communicable disease or poor personal hygiene. And it certainly isn't price. It's that the keepers of the city pools have made it clear that I'm not their type.
If only I'd read the voluminous regulations beforehand, I might have known I didn't fit in with the teenage swells who relax in our city's capacious pools. Instead I plunged right in, so to speak, taking two of my children out on a recent broiling weekend for a swim at the Hollywood Recreation Center. We were denied entry three times, for three different reasons.
On my first try, the facility was closing early because of a filtration problem. The next day, I was turned away for bringing a stroller packed with the kids' stuff. The same cashier who had turned the three of us away the day before offered to let me leave the stroller outside, warning, "We take no responsibility for it." Looking out over the greensward of the Hollywood Rec Center, where two of the gruff but lovable rogues I like to think of as our very own sans-abris were punching and cursing each other, I thought better of it. After an hour or so of stroller disposing and kid complaining, I returned, only to be informed that I had too many children in tow. Each child under the age of 7 must be accompanied by an adult, as the pool rules say, "in a one-to-one ratio."
"Come on," I said. "Half the city's divorced. Who can provide a full adult for every kid?" But a breathless young lifeguard came around to lay out a "Sophie's Choice" scenario in which I'm holding on to one daughter and watching helplessly while the other one drowns. Sadly, I turned and left, giving my kids the first of what will undoubtedly be a lifetime of embarrassing lessons about the narrow limits of their father's authority.
While I have to applaud Citywide Aquatics' devotion to safety (there hasn't been an on-duty drowning since 1979), the pool rules provide an interesting lesson in unintended consequences. As any onlooker can see, the one-to-one rule actually reduces the number of adults and families at pools. The Hollywood facility has been populated exclusively by tweens and teens every day I've looked, and of the entire pool-going population in the city, barely more than 10% are adults each year. Other rules -- no street clothes in the pool area, no toys, no floating apparatus, no locking lockers -- tend toward the same result: no adults, no families.
