Havana
Lou Morgan
For me there is something disquieting about an empty swimming pool. There is a deeply buried fear of tripping and landing hard, of splitting my lip on broken teeth, and blood dripping on chalky cement. It is the very same emptiness as endless stairwells in nightmares. It is dangerous and wrong.
This is another kind of empty pool. The Cuban colours and the lines are as crazily pretty as a Dr Seuss illustration, but my mothering amygdala sees that diving board as a suicide machine. I picture teens spinning with the joys of extreme risk, in between lives of school and responsibility, this place would be their quiet chapel of sensation-seeking.
Then there is the story of a California man, in the early days of the skater craze. His dying teenage son was a skateboarding fanatic, so he drained the family swimming pool and had the Dogtown boys come and skate the echoing cement hollow. His son looked on, the Santa Monica sun shone brightly; cancer, skateboards, sunshine, testosterone, adrenalin and death. It became known as the Dog Bowl Pool. Young men around an empty swimming pool, and the only one with no chance of life was the one too sick to take any risks.
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