pool deck is made out of big, square, pebble-mix tiles. The edges of the pool walls are tiled with light blue, ridged tiles, chunky and chipped here and there (chips repaired, I note, with black electrical tape). The pool floor and walls are painted the traditional light blue, but here and there it’s either slightly darker or slightly lighter, where slipshod repairs have been undertaken. The men’s changerooms are largely made out of chunky moulded concrete, smoothed by 40 years of feet and slippery when wet. The windows of the changerooms are that frosted glass with chicken-wire in them.
The pool is book-ended at the north and south by hi-rise council flats. Built around the same time as the pool these towers are monuments to outmoded ideas of public housing and minimalist building methods. Not only in Prahran, these council flats hover, brown and grim, over some of the most popular and expensive streets in inner-suburban Melbourne. Again, due to being adequately maintained but not in any way refurbished, they too retain, resolutely, a feeling of authenticity. Little boxes built out of what could be exactly the same pebble-mix tiles of the pool deck.
When I visit the Prahran pool I kind of wish I could be amongst women in polka dot bikinis and big sunglasses and men in high-waisted buttoned shorts, or even, if I’m lucky, one of those baby-blue zip-up towelling play-suits that Sean Connery wore poolside in Goldfinger. The Prahran pool, on a hot day in midsummer, I feel, should look like that—something really spy-cool from Miami. But of course it doesn’t. The architecture and surroundings may be authentic sixties, but too much has changed and the crowd is essentially, disappointingly modern. Not to mention homosexual. As well as being positioned in the middle of the two council hi-rises, the Prahran pool just happens to also be slap bang in the middle of Melbourne’s gay ghetto. Down Malvern Road, off the corner of Chapel Street and Commercial Road. Melbourne’s G-spot. And on a hot day in the middle of a hot summer you can tell. There are a lot of men preening and posing, but above all perving. It’s quite amusing to trace the different kinds of pervs that are going on at any given moment. He’s looking at him who’s looking at him who’s checking him out—it’s a veritable cat’s cradle of perving.
A couple of summers ago, before I went away to Spain, a friend of mine convinced me to come with him to the pool. It was the first time I’d been and he gave me the low-down on the different areas of the pool with specific regard to homosexual occupation of same. There’s a nice big L of lawn curving around the west and south of the pool, a bit browned off due to the water restrictions, with a couple of lonely-looking palms and scraggly shrubs and trees ranged around the edge. The up and down bit of the L on the west side of the pool is the family area, but the base of the L is, so my mate told me, known as the ‘Pansy Patch’. Whether just to him or in general I don’t know, but sure enough, when I looked down, pansies all in a row. There are bleacher steps all along the east side of the pool, made of concrete and aqua painted boards. The southernmost part of these steps is gay. The northernmost part straight. You don’t think there could possibly be such rigid, strictly adhered to guidelines? Go then, and have a look for yourself.
Above the rooms that house sauna, spa and massage room is a sundeck with plastic moulded banana lounges. This my mate called Club Med, but I prefer calling it the Lido Deck. It’s a mixed area where the harder of the hardcore tanners seem to congregate, with a bit of sneaky nude-ish sunbathing going on every now and then.
So yeah, perhaps that’s another reason I spent so much time at the pool that summer, I admit. Not only did I appreciate this perfect little oasis of sixties kitsch, it was also a great place to do a bit of summer perving on some rather fit homosexual men in a variety of quite revealing swimwear. A single man must take his pleasures where he can.
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There were a number of regulars I saw at the pool most afternoons. Mobile Mary, a gym-bulked young man who pranced around and around the pool talking on his mobile, or pretending to talk on his mobile. He was very much doing it for attention, though, because I noticed that his phone conversations were louder and funnier when he was parading past some good-looking and appreciative boys (oh how he laughed!) and likewise were pretty much non-existent when he walked past the family section.
Then there were the Rumpelstiltskins. I’d only seen these two a couple of times, but they were a great old couple. They lived over the road in the council flats (they left at the same time as me once and I saw them crossing the road and going home) and they just seemed so magnificently old and wrinkled and slow. He had a bent back, like almost 90 degrees, and she wore horn-rimmed specs with a regal air as if she was maybe a long-lost Russian princess. He would get in the pool in his singlet and just sit there with the water up to his neck. She would swim a few strokes of that old-person breaststroke with her head right out of the water. She would leave her glasses on and her hair didn’t even get wet. Then they would get out and go.
Fat Annie. She had really skinny legs but an upper body like a packet of crumpets. She wouldn’t give way to swimmers faster than her and would do a tumble turn right on top of you if you happened to be in the way. She gave me the shits and I tried not to swim in the same lane as her.
Then there was Red Trunks. I called him that because, no, wait for it, because he wore red swimming trunks. Is there no limit to my creativity? They seemed a size or two too small for him (gratifyingly), but as he was quite heavily built and big, perhaps that was because he bought them when he was a size or two fitter than he currently was. It was the body that could very soon go either way—either he could regain the structure once again and be hot shit, or he could wake up one day with a white pot-belly. You know? He was very business-like in his swimming. He would get in and do his laps, slow and splashy and plodding, then get out and leave. I developed a soft spot for Red Trunks. He wasn’t my usual type, but he was almost the absolute opposite of Spanish Leo and I guess that was the point, right? There had been a glance or two and small nods of recognition pass between us, and given an introduction and an ounce of encouragement, I’d give a fuck a go.
There were others. Not everyone got a name. Not everyone reappeared. Young and old and all shapes and types. With one thing in common amongst the gay boys, dark glasses and baseball caps, eyes hidden but heads alert and scanning, back and forwards back and forwards. Round and round and round. The old cat’s cradle of perving.
I felt like these fellow regulars at the pool were friends. They all had their names and some even got a back story. But the truth is, of course, that I didn’t know these people. I thought I did, in a way, because I saw them every day, and this familiarity led me to make assumptions about what they were like. But there’s nothing to say I was right, or even close. It’s funny, feeling like you know people but knowing you don’t really. We all do it. People you might see on the tram one morning, or workmates you’re not particularly close to but nod at in the lift. Or even people you read about in the paper.
I enjoyed the distance and disconnection of all that pool perving. It suited me that summer. I wasn’t engaged with those people, nothing was expected of me. I barely talked to anyone. I’d say, perhaps, a ‘hello’ to whoever was on the desk when I got there, maybe nod acknowledgement to Red Trunks, but I wasn’t quite there. I’d just swim my few laps, dry off in the sun, read the paper, people-watch. Then I’d go home. It was the next step up from wanting to have showers all the time and stay in bed. Sure, while I was out of the house I may still have been wrapped in my ‘little cocoon of wallow’ (thank you sis) but it was like a scab, where all the healing is going on underneath—you can’t pick it off too early, it has to come up from the edges in its own time, bit by bit, with a lovely little itch.
At one point I thought, I wonder if anyone’s got a name for me. Perhaps there was a people-watcher watching me, and perhaps he or she had a name for me. And a private story.
Anyhow, my pool routine would end with a tram back into town and another round into the Docklands, where I would buy a six-pack, take the lift up to Sharon’s Place and drink enough so that I could sleep through the night.
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