Chasing Water. Anthony Ervin
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I can’t. I put down the book and wait for it to pass.
Here in my room, at least I don’t have to control it. I can just let it happen. At least here no one is staring at me and avoiding me like at school or like my old neighborhood friends. Everybody avoids me now. Only at swim practice do they act the same around me, probably because swimming is hard and we all do it and what we go through together and have in common is more important than what we don’t.
Yesterday I watched a nature show about animals living high up in the tall mountains. In one part there was a crazy snowstorm and nothing but snow and ice and darkness and freezing wind. It was the last place in the world you’d want to be. Most of the show was about nature and animals, but for one part during the snowstorm it showed the people who filmed it inside their tent, with a little light hanging over them. It was cramped inside and they could barely sit up in the tents and they were laughing and joking about having not showered for ages and didn’t seem to care at all about being crammed into that tiny space because they were warm and had each other. I remember that.
I remember the one bird stuck in the storm. It didn’t have a tent. It didn’t even have a tree. Just the ledge on the mountain. It ruffled its feathers and shut its little eyes and shrunk down into itself. It looked like a tiny statue someone had left on the mountain. It went quiet and deep inside its own body, so deep that it was safe and warm even if its feathers were covered in snow.
They showed lots of other stuff too, like mountain goats charging each other and slamming heads together and a wild cat with her baby. But mostly I remember those men with smelly socks laughing in their tents. And the bird all alone out there with its eyes shut in the storm, not moving because there was no other place to go.
If April is the cruelest month, then adolescence is one long April. For many of us, it’s the hardest period of our life and, like all trying periods, the most formative. It’s the time when we most want to conform and blend in with our peers, yet it’s also the one when we’re most acutely self-conscious of our apartness. It’s when we’re most prey to an excess of sensitivity—our individuality appearing to us not as uniqueness but as grotesque Otherness.9 That’s why Tourette’s is a double whammy: it not only augments that sense of being an outsider, but peaks precisely during that period when it takes so little to feel estranged. That feeling, while less overpowering, has stayed with Anthony. “I’ve always felt the story of my life has been about being normal but on the fringes of abnormality, and it’s the fringes that separate my history from the rest.”
Once Tourette’s came on full force in junior high, Anthony began isolating himself, spending his free time engrossed in books and video games. His heart no longer in competing, his performances dropped off. His mother eventually let him take a break from competitions so long as he kept attending practices. It would prove to be a three-year burnout, prefiguring the exodus that followed his Olympic success. His tendency to withdraw when upset would remain with him, also manifesting on a micro level: to this day, distress can cause him to shut down even in the presence of others into a kind of human sleep mode, a cocoon-like refuge against interaction with the outside world.
Junior high was coming to an end. The most prominent high school in the area in athletics and academics, Hart High, wasn’t in their locale, so Sherry appealed to his academic prowess to get him in. Unlike his regional high school, Hart offered AP courses. His club team was in the same district, so for the first time he’d be attending school with his swim team peers. Even so, Anthony initially resisted this because he’d be going to a different high school than his neighborhood friends. But he changed his mind after an incident that took place in a housing subdivision near their neighborhood. One of the houses there had been empty for years, a blight of a structure overrun by weeds, its back window shot out by a BB gun. One afternoon while Anthony was out with a small group of friends, they decided to climb into the house through the broken window.
Tommy climbs in first, then the others. I follow.
We tiptoe. Nothing in the house. Just a few chairs.
“Check it out, an answering machine.” Travis’s voice echoes through the house. He holds the phone up. “Hello, hellooooooo.” He slams it back down. “I guess no one’s home.” The laughter echoes.
We wander through the house, then return to the living room. In the corner is a box of fluorescent lights. Tommy pulls one out and tosses it to Mikey. Then he pulls another for himself and raises it up with two hands like a Jedi Master. “Luke, I am your father.”
Mikey also goes into dueling stance. “I see your Schwartz is as big as mine.” Then he swings. The long bulbs shatter on impact, exploding in a puff of white smoke. Tommy and Mikey jump back. We all go silent, exchanging uncertain glances. Then, out of nowhere, Mikey breaks the silence. With a cry, he grabs a chair and smashes it into the ground repeatedly until it’s in pieces. And then everybody goes apeshit. Tommy charges at the wall with his arms raised, yelling, “Ahhhhhh!” and at the last second slams his leg into it. His foot goes through the plaster all the way to his knee. They’re all yelling and running around, smashing things up and ripping tiles off the kitchen counter. It’s crazy—all this crunching and shattering and breaking and war cries and whooping and bits of plaster and wood and tiles flying all over the place . . . I don’t break anything myself, I just hang back, watching them. But I still egg them on.
“Dude, what about those!” I say, pointing up at the long fluorescent lights in the kitchen.
Travis looks up, eyes gleaming, and then he starts hurling tiles at them. The first misses but the second makes contact and the light explodes, the shards flying through the kitchen in a cloud of white smoke. We huddle for a moment, shielding our faces in our elbows.
“There’s more in the box!” I cry, and we run back to the living room where I watch him smash those.
When one of the boys, Tommy, later learned that the owner was sobbing in front of the house, he turned himself in. The families of each boy involved had to pay thousands in repairs. Anthony was let off because he hadn’t actively participated in the destruction. He talked himself out of getting in trouble (“lying to save my skin was second nature”) but he knew he was guilty through association. The incident became a forewarning of what might come if he didn’t make a change. From then on he resigned himself to moving to the new high school. His older brother Jackie, who’d already left for college, convinced him that swimming could be fun again since he’d be on the same high school team as his club teammates. He also began to think of the new school as an opportunity to start over without the stigma of a neurological disorder, since the medication he was taking suppressed his Tourette’s symptoms. In late 1995, soon after starting at Hart High, his parents sold their Castaic home and moved to a smaller house in the more upscale Valencia, which was closer to the high school.
At Hart, Anthony’s swimming burnout ended. He continued to train at the Canyons Aquatic Club team with Bruce Patmos, a demanding performance-oriented coach whom Ervin acknowledges was a good trainer who got results from his swimmers. But it was his high school coach, Steve Neale, who rekindled his enjoyment of the sport. “If it wasn’t for him I probably wouldn’t have made it to college swimming at all,” Ervin says. “Steve was all about the family of it. He loved the kids.” Beyond that personal, even paternal relationship with his swimmers, Neale also cultivated the sense, even if Anthony didn’t realize it then, that swimming was about more than just performance.
“Not that it was all fun and cookies,” Neale told me. “But swimming has to have a value and purpose. It has to be meaningful.” Anthony and his three teammates—Ryan Parmenter, John Terwilliger, and Eric Reifman—became known as the “Fearsome Freshmen.”