FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. — Local teenage lifeguard Jeremy Keenum openly wished yesterday that someone at the recreational pool he covers would somehow forget how to swim and start to choke and suffocate, thereby giving him something to do, bemused sources confirmed.
“Oh my god… this summer has been so fucking boring so far,” said Keenum during a recent afternoon shift. “[Park owner Walter] Scraggs said lifeguards can’t have their phones out anymore, so all I really have to do is sit here and yell at kids running. It’s a real pisser.”
“The most exciting thing that happened so far was some guy in a Tommy Bahama shirt dropped his hot dog and then stepped on it,” Keenum added glumly. “We all had a good laugh, but, man… it’s been dead other than that.”
Scraggs, the owner of Cool World Swimming & Bumper Boats in Flagstaff, said Keenum has been a reliable, if not remarkable, employee over the last two summers.
“Yeah, Jeremy’s a good kid,” he said. “He’s like any of these brats I hire: they come in stoned and sit around the pool, staring at girls and making sure no one gets hurt. Ever since I banned phones and video games by the pool, though, he’s been doing some pretty troubling things — like letting little kids use the high dive, and turning the lights off when it gets dark out. I don’t think I’m going to ask him back next year.”
Keenum admitted privately he might not be best suited to actually save a life.
“Sure, it might be fun for a second to feel the adrenaline rush… but I’m a little rusty on actual first aid procedures,” said Keenum. “I blew in a dummy’s mouth a few years ago and got a little card, but I really don’t know what I’m doing. If anything really scary went down, I’d just have to hope the guys from the fire department get here fast. They’ve helped out a lot around here.”
Indeed, during an incident at Cool World last summer, fire marshal Tyler Brainard helped a child whose foot got lodged in a pool filter, after Keenum struggled for 45 minutes to free him. For his part, Brainard was sympathetic to the lifeguard’s underwhelming summer.
“Yeah, I get it, kid… but welcome to the working world,” Brainard said. “I was just sitting around wishing a house would explode when you guys called me.”