Aquachef

I went swimming with der Brotmeister again. You may recall my first pool encounter with him a couple weeks ago, which left me mortified.

Tuesday morning I didn’t have a tour, so I decided to work out before class instead of afterward. Well, I recognized his fishy form gliding with ease and grace as soon as I stepped out of the locker room. Goddammit.

But once you’ve been seen in your bathing suit with no makeup, bad hair, swim goggles and neon pink silicon nose clips, how much worse can it get? I cursed Fortuna silently but got in the pool and started swimming.

Well, someone had his aqua fins with him, and was doing all kinds of fancy little water manuevers in between annoyingly fast and apparently effortless laps. Showoff.

I much prefer swimming in the lane next to the struggling, chubby culinary chef whose name I don’t know but who tends to swim at the same time as I do when I go in the evening.

Anyway, sometimes when I swim and get in a really good groove, I hallucinate. Nothing scary. Usually I just think I see sharks in the pool, or that I have become a shark. Sometimes I can barely control the urge to bite the swimmer in the lane next to me. Okay, maybe that is a little scary but in any case, I was about 20 minutes into my workout when I notice der Brotmeister is on the bottom of the pool in the lane beside me.

He is swimming along the bottom of the pool exactly like Patrick Duffy in that woefully cheesy tv series of yore, "Aquaman." In other words, he’s not using his hands and arms, and is instead sort of slithering along the bottom of the pool, at speed, from one end to the other and not coming up for air.

At first I thought I was hallucinating, but then I realized he was actually there, doing that, and it freaked me out just enough to lose my rhythm and breathe in when I should have been exhaling.

I came to the surface sputtering and flailing. Nice.

He took his fancy aqua fins and freaky sea snake swimming style and left a few minutes after, thankfully.

For those of you who have intimated by phone or e-mail that der Brotmeister is smitten with my uncanny impression of a manatee when I swim, I offer this:

On my way home Tuesday night, I ran into him.

"Come to see me tomorrow, ya, because I haff two books on swimmink zat I vill lend to you. Because you need help. You really need help."

Yes, Chef.