Chasing Water. Anthony Ervin
My eyelids are so heavy. I lift my left foot up and hold it off the ground. That works but I can only do it for so long. I let it drop. I try to just close one eye at a time, but it’s a struggle keeping the other eye open. Mr. Mansfield is writing a formula on the chalkboard. I try to focus on it, but my eye starts fluttering. The scraping of the chalk sounds so far away. So far away . . . I let both eyes close. Just for a little while. Just a little.
Just . . .
. . .
. . .
I raise my head and look around. There’s laughter. Where am I? I don’t recognize anybody. This isn’t my class. Kids I don’t know are grinning at me. Mr. Mansfield is standing over his desk, chuckling. It’s the next class. I slept through the end of my class and he didn’t wake me.
“Don’t worry, Anthony,” Mr. Mansfield says. “Your study hall teacher was notified that you were . . . otherwise preoccupied and would be on your way shortly.”
Everybody starts laughing again. My face is hot.
“Sorry,” I say, and grab my backpack. I try to laugh but a weird sound comes out of my mouth. He smiles and opens the door for me. I walk out, the laughter following me out the door.
I stop and just stand there for a while until my face cools off. Then I walk down the empty hallway toward study hall, trying not to step on any lines.
His first two years in high school, his friends were exclusively swimmers. But as an upperclassman he needed some separation and escape from that world, which incidentally was mostly white. His junior year he met Quincy, a Filipina, who became his best friend. Through her, he made a new posse of friends, among whom he was the only non-Asian. “A couple of them fulfilled a warped form of the ‘model minority,’ acing tests while regularly ditching or sleeping through class,” Ervin recalls. “Otherwise, they probably cared more about break dancing than school. And more about cars and girls than anything.” Something about their laid-back indolence as protest against demanding parents, their outsider status as Asian Americans, and even just their plain friendliness and acceptance of him, Tourette’s and all, appealed to and comforted Anthony. They also may have helped him get in touch with a minority root he didn’t know he needed at the time. But mostly they offered him an alternate community outside of his routine of swimming and family—something he would continue to look for through college and after. One of them, Vouy, cut everyone’s hair, including Anthony’s, in a high tight fade. “J.R., Peter, Ray, George, Jabez, Sandro . . . it was like the black barbershop thing except it was a crew of Asians,” he says.
One day they bought black T-shirts with red nWo logos (a pro wrestling team) from the mall, posed in them for a group photo as a wrestling troupe, then returned the shirts for the refund. Another time they took off in a three-car day-trip caravan for San Diego to challenge a master gamer at the video game Marvel vs. Capcom in a drop-in tournament, “just like karate masters in old Japan might travel to challenge somebody to a fight.” It’s the only trip he recalls from high school that didn’t involve swimming or family.
Throughout high school he associated swimming with straight-laced restraint. Swimmer gatherings consisted of “eight people sitting quietly in a room, drinking punch and eating cake.” It wouldn’t be until his recruiting trip to University of Southern California that he got his first sip of college swimming life.
“Chug it, chug it, chug it, chug it . . . ” Others get in on it. “CHUG IT, CHUG IT!”
I raise the wine cooler to my lips. It’s half full but I don’t lower the bottle until it’s empty. It’s sugary sweet and goes down easy. I slam the empty bottle onto the table. They all start laughing.
My third bottle. Most I’ve ever had. Snoop Dogg is bow-wowing from the speakers. Two guys are holding one dude by the legs upside down over the keg and a crowd is around him chanting out the seconds: “One, two, three, four, five . . . ” He makes it to twelve and then foam starts spilling out of his mouth and over his face until he gags and sputters, spraying beer everywhere. They put him back on his feet, his face red and dripping. He throws his arms up and beats his chest. The next guy goes up and lasts seven seconds and everyone boos. Another guy is slinging his arm around any girl he stumbles upon, pulling her face into his pecs and whispering into her ear. They don’t even seem to care. One girl, after he says something in her ear, even turns to him and squeezes her boobs between her biceps, shaking them back and forth. Her friends start hooting and shouting, “You go, girl, shake those titties!”
What the hell is going on here?
The guy who did the kegstand dry heaves during a game of beer-pong and charges to the balcony. We all watch him through the window as he doubles over the balcony banister and barfs. People throw their arms up, cheering and high-fiving.
Soon people are laughing too loud and too hard over things that aren’t even funny, and the place starts spinning, so I head into one of the bedrooms where there are fewer people. I sit on the bed and start talking to a girl. She keeps leaning in close and her T-shirt falls open, displaying the bright orange of her bra. After a while the others in the room leave and it’s just the two of us. I don’t even know how it happens but we start kissing. I can’t believe it. I’ve only made out with a girl twice before and she was my friend so that was weird and didn’t really count.
I don’t know what to do so we just keep kissing while sitting on the bed. And then she gets up and turns the light off and comes back to me. I can’t believe this is happening . . . Now what? What if she wants to—
And then the door opens and this guy comes in and turns the light on.
“Hey! What the hell? That’s my bed,” he says. He’s got the broad jaw and face of an action figure.
“Don’t worry, it’s cool,” I say.
“What do you mean, Don’t worry, it’s cool? Get off my bed!”
And then, next thing, I’m back out in the noise and harsh fluorescence of the living room and the girl leaves with her friend and my chance is gone.
But the following morning, even though I have a killer headache, I don’t even care because I know I was at a real college party where I made out with a real college chick.
For real.
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7. Fucking pop culture. Return to text
8. The and/or reflects scientific uncertainty. Research now suggests that individuals with Tourette’s don’t have an excess of dopamine production, as previously believed, but rather a supersensitivity of the postsynaptic dopamine receptor sites. Specifics aside, the gist is that the nervous system is jacked up and there’s some serious neural firing going down. Return to text
9. That, at least, was my experience growing up in a rural Maine blue-collar mill town as a shy, bookish, gangly kid with heavily accented immigrant parents and a long foreign name that allowed for all sorts of mocking back-of-the-school-bus adaptations (the worst two being Constantine Stringbean, which played on my insecurity over my daddy longlegs physique, and Constanteenie-Weenie, which I found grossly unwarranted since the girl who coined it had never even seen my weenie). Junior high felt like a three-year trek through a minefield. But if I now try to pinpoint how I was actually victimized, I come up short, which makes me think I was just hypersensitive and insecure and 90 percent of my angst and fear and persecution complex was self-inflicted. It’s representative of what most kids go through, though I probably bottomed out lower on the insecurity spectrum than most. I even told my YMCA swim club coach to call me Chris instead of Constantine, which explains why