Pool Boys Know All

Are you a decent human being? Only your pool boy knows for sure:

Pool boys are supposed to conduct torrid affairs with lonely pool owners. James Razsa has passionate feelings about his client, but not the kind likely to turn romantic.



Razsa cleans former President George H.W. Bush's pool, in Kennebunkport, Maine.



An enduring American figure, the pool boy has long stood for one lowly half of the nation's class gulf. When the pool owner happens to have been the most powerful man on the planet, and the pool boy happens to be one of the planet's great despisers of power, the metaphor explodes into 1,000 points of light.



"If every American had to pool-boy for these people for a day, you'd have a revolution on your hands," is how he sees things.

[...]

Granted, the stakes are high at that level. Razsa recalls one day when former first lady Barbara Bush was on her way over, and it looked like there wouldn't be time to bring the pool's temperature up to her desired 82 degrees in time. The family's caretaker was in a panic, he says.



"He kept shouting, 'Barbara will go crazy! Barbara will go crazy!'" Razsa recalls. "This is the same woman who after Hurricane Katrina said (of the Houston Astrodome refugees), 'You know, they're underprivileged anyway, so this -- this is working very well for them.'"

[...]

For Razsa, his job -- the only one he could find -- put him directly in touch with the very sort of power he holds partly responsible for his, and other people's, hard times.



"I look at the biggest middle finger in the world all day," is his more succinct explanation.



I ask Razsa if he has a monologue loaded up, in the event that his next encounter was at closer range. To my surprise, the idea doesn't appeal.



"What do you say? 'Thanks for School of the Americas [ed. I particularly like that snarky comment], and Iran-Contra, and NAFTA, and shipping all those jobs overseas, and arming Saddam, and funding the Taliban?' What do you say -- 'You're a jerk?' [ed. ibid]. There's nothing that can be put into a sentence that would capture the lives these people have taken, and the way of life that's been taken."