4/4]

The first time I shaved my legs I was ten and in a hotel room shower with a leg forward and my father guiding a razor downward. When none was left he looked up and said we were lucky I didn’t have any more yet.

Yet.

A word that after time became: not yet, after, afterwards, never. Words I use when someone asks if I’ve been a fifty-two in one-hundred breast. If I’ve been a forty-eight in one-hundred fly. A forty-six in one-hundred back. A forty-four. A nineteen. If I achieved the times I wanted.

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3/4]

The swimming I refer to is not one you will know. It is not the one loved by parents living through their ten-year-olds and how few seconds they can place a hand on a wall. This, the section of hell with AC and cushioned bleachers, is not the one I refer to. Neither is the swimming “loved” by people who have never really swam. The ones floating up and down lanes in rec centers and the forty-five-year-old Fitbit warriors doing participation award triathlons. This definition not even an antonym. 

Swimming as a sport is straightforward. By definition it is the amount of time it takes to get up and down a lane. An ultimate streamlining of good and bad. Fast and not.

Your time: the only factor for who is invited to the big meets. The ones that matter. The ones where you meet everyone else who matters and those who think they do. At these you’ll meet swimmers like Richard Shields. Men who stand six foot six with hairy bodies barely tight enough to contain themselves. These are the ones who only taper for Olympic trials. For the Olympics. These kinds of men would not hang out with me. 

On the surface this is all that matters. The reduction of action to time. The devaluation of person to time. 

Beneath the surface is where I spent most of mine. 

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2/4]

Beneath the water it is all about catch and drag. The reduction of drag. The shaving down of a body to an angle. The reduction of a hand to an edge. It is all about the fewest bubbles at the fingertips.

When I still had to go to practice, on rest days we did starts and sprints with an underwater camera. Usually, an assistant coach with a pole equipped with a camera at the end. I would dive in and do what I was supposed to. On the pool deck, I stood with the coach and watched the underwater movement of arms that did not seem like mine. Of a singular arm. Of the bend of it. And the coach, marker in hand, tracing lines over the screen to where my fingertips had initiated their pull and needed to take water back in a straighter line.

I spent so much time saving tenths, hundredths, all sorts of seconds: from watching film of myself to trying different angles of hand entry and different two and three beat kicks. And this I didn’t have to pay for. It was all the tech shit, all the stuff you paid for where the trimming really took place. From the full-body zip-up, six-hundred dollar polyurethane suits that let you float on the surface to “aerodynamic” caps that were cut with angles and had a microscopically elevated line at the center. Or my personal favorite, the double-angled mirrored goggles where you couldn’t see anything in front of you because of the split in the angle and because it wasn’t as necessary to see as it was to save a tenth. 

There is a certain type of swimmer, and there are only a handful of these in the world, that can play around with tenths, with hundredths, with full seconds. They are so fast that it does not matter what they wear. When they dive in, if they want to, they will touch the wall first. These are the types of swimmers who swim Olympic trials in a Speedo and a beard and make the team. They are the types that when you look at their bodies their lats look as if they are hydroplanes hanging off their backs. You have seen this type before if you have seen Michael Phelps swim in person. When you see him swim, which you won’t now, you will notice that when he swims fly his hands are over the lane lines and that it is almost like he is gliding across the water and placing his hands next to each other as he presses his massive frame into the water, riding the line his lats cut. A line so hard, drag is irrelevant. 

Who I remember most is not Phelps, but my teammate, Richard Shields, and all his drag. The open tears in his drag shorts revealing massive thighs rippled with vascularity. The massive gold piece he’d wear in his left ear. The right nipple ring he’d later wear at the 2013 Nationals, as if to say: See how fast I am, see how much drag I can beat you with. But what I remember most about his drag is his yellow-dyed fauxhawk and his bushels of chest hair and how when he dove into the pool you could see the hair blasting back across his body like eelgrass blown across ocean floor. 

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1/4]

What I really remember most about drag is the removal of hair. The shaving of time. Of hair follicles sliced at the root by a blade against the grain. Of a blade held in my fingertips traveling up contours of muscle no longer there. Up the V of a body I no longer have. That is no longer essential to my life. 

It is here I need to start cutting down to what I have to say. To what I remember most. To the practices in February before Nationals where the women on our team swam with hair peeking out the corners of their arms. Of their suits. Where they would all complain about how hairy they were becoming. Saying how weird it felt to be in the water with all this hair. All this drag. How they needed to feel what it was like to be slow before they shaved it all off. How AnthonyCepal always kept his armpits shaved. Even in the off-season. Even when he retired from swimming. And how we all joked after practice, naked in the showers, that he was gay, at the very least bi, because of this. 

My father certainly thought he was gay. Just gay. Telling me how Anthony might be fast, but he was gay. And I thought then, the moment my father first said this, how a man’s preference for the removal of hair had made my father believe he was gay. Yet, we were all shaving. We were all doing the same. What we were told. My father even, years previous, in the bathroom with me guiding a razor in the wrong direction. 

With the grain. How he went. But it’s a slower shave. It leaves more of the follicle. More of the drag. And as I lie here in the darkness of my boyfriend’s bed with my hand tracing over his hairless chest, I am drawn to the beauty of the shave. Of how fast he would shoot through the water if he swam. But he does not and is not, and later, when we have stopped kissing and my tongue has moved downward across his smoothness and found the titanium tip of his pierced cock, and his hand, gripping my hair, guides me, I feel the back and forth of the titanium tip against the roof of my mouth, splitting it and piercing through to my brain, to where I am back on the blocks at the 2013 Nationals and Richard Shields is swimming full speed into the wall, and through the spume of his strokes I see the reflection of his gold earring and when his hand comes over the top of the wash and collides with the wall, I am off the blocks, and in the air, and alone, and hairless, and I feel the tightness of my arms against my ears and the speed with which I slip into the pool until I never have to come out.

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Robert Warf is from Portsmouth, Virginia and is a PhD student at Oklahoma State University. He has work in Post Road, X-R-A-Y, HAD, and Variant. You can find him at robertwarf.com