Chasing Water. Anthony Ervin
about my alter ego until a run-in with the pool director, in which he shook their hands and congratulated them on Chris’s performance. Return to text
10. Not with each other. Return to text
11. Drafting is when one swimmer tailgates the swimmer in front—fingertips entering the water just inches behind the toes of the lead swimmer—and thus gets pulled forward in the current, or slipstream, created by the lead swimmer. Basically it lets the person in front do the work for you. For a Look, Ma, no hands! illustration of this principle, stand in waist- or chest-high water a few inches behind the head of someone who’s doing a backfloat. Then start walking backward through the water and, presto, the person floating will get sucked into your wake and travel along with you.Return to text
12. To “die” in swimming is standard lingo for describing the state of All Systems Fail at the back end of a race. Unlike the pleasurable la petite mort of an orgasm, this little death brings only the fireworks of pain. Return to text
5.
Experiments
What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier returning to the range, admire?
—James Joyce, Ulysses
There was something very queer about the water, she thought . . .
—Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
Anthony had no problem getting into college: he was one of the fastest sprinters in the country who also, thanks to AP and honors classes, had a 4.2 GPA. He wanted to attend Stanford, as he thought it would be the best place for him to pursue a degree in computer science or electrical engineering (which was mostly related to his love of video games). As much as he liked Berkeley and the coaches there, he planned to quit swimming after his first year, so Berkeley wasn’t his top choice. But though Anthony was admitted everywhere he applied, Mike Bottom was the only one who secured him a full ride. A full scholarship at a top-tier school was, for his mother, the clincher: he was going to Berkeley. The decision may well have sealed his future as a swimmer. At another school like Stanford, where the coach wouldn’t have accommodated him or supported him as much as Bottom did, Ervin would have probably, in his own words, “had a mediocre season and washed out,” or, more likely, been tossed off the team.
Upon accepting Berkeley’s offer, senioritis set in. Anthony’s grades slipped, his GPA for the first time dropping below 4.0. After passing one of his AP tests in the spring, he ditched the class in the final weeks to play StarCraft in the computer lab with his friends, which led to a brief suspension. Another teacher threatened to try to revoke his college scholarship because he kept sleeping in class. His high school coach remembers receiving calls from other teachers about Anthony’s lack of effort and, according to one teacher, insolence.
His senior year, Anthony had a car, as handy for skipping practice as for getting to it. Recognizing her son’s propensity for evasion, Sherry would drive by the pool on her way to work to make sure his car was parked there. It always was. What she didn’t know was that sometimes he’d be sprawled out in the backseat, asleep. But even slacking off, he still got best times in the 50 and 100. By the end of his senior year, he was the fastest high school freestyle sprinter in the country.
After spending the summer in a suit and tie selling sportswear at Robinsons-May to yachting types, Anthony showed up at Berkeley as out of shape as he’d ever been. It was his first extended period away from home without supervision. During Welcome Week he drank continuously, smoked marijuana for the first time, and, more momentously, lost his virginity.
I can’t believe I just met A the other day and now we’re lying here in my bed. Naked in my bed. The light from my alarm clock makes her hair shine blue. She’s running her fingertips along my head, playing with my hair on the sides where it’s been buzzed short. I remember at that party how she was looking at me from across the room, tapping her blue flats to the music. And then how she glanced away when I made eye contact, hiding behind her black hair. She’s not glancing away now.
“Have you done this before?” she asks.
I’m about to make a dumb joke, like, What, talked to a girl? But she interrupts me.
“Sex, I mean.”
Is she hoping I have or haven’t? I can’t read her. If I say no, I’ll look pathetic. Everyone has had sex by now.
“Sure, I’ve done it.”
“Oh,” she says, and looks down. “I haven’t.”
It’s too late now to tell her the truth. Now I have to keep up the lie.
She smiles, a little forced. “I still want to do it.”
“That’s cool,” I say. “We should. It’s no big deal. It’ll be fun.” Fun? I actually like this girl and here I am sounding like a frat guy who just wants to get laid.
But she doesn’t seem to mind. Or not enough for us not to do it.
A few nights later we come back to my room, but this time my roommate is there. He looks asleep. A and I get in bed and start kissing. After a while, he rolls over in his bed and adjusts his pillow.
“We can’t do it here,” she whispers. “He’ll hear us.”
“He won’t. We’ll be quiet.”
And that’s two more lies to pile onto my first one.
Even if the relationship lacked elegance in its origins, it was more than a Welcome Week fling: they dated exclusively for the rest of the year. They would often stay up late, fooling around and laughing in bed, much to the chagrin of Ervin’s roommate, a quiet and reserved engineering student, who would be trying to sleep a few feet away. And when A wasn’t over, Anthony would be up late playing video games. He’d set three alarms for morning practice, often sleeping through all of them. “I’d steal my roommate’s protein shakes too,” he recalls, shaking his head. “I was the worst roommate ever.” He regularly stole food from the dining court that first year. He’d order a sandwich or burrito in one part of the food court, and then stroll past the cashiers by the exit, pretending he’d already paid.
His teammates didn’t think too highly of him initially. Even on the recruiting trip, he’d left the impression of being a slightly cocky kid only interested in video games. Still in the virginal wine-cooler phase of his drinking career, he bowed out of all the beery proceedings at freshmen hazing: no Century Club (a shot of beer every minute for one hundred minutes) or Beer Mile (run a lap on the track, pound a beer, repeat three times). The only event he participated in was the one where he had to wear women’s underwear for the day: he borrowed a G-string from a classmate (“It’s like having a wedgie all the time, I don’t know how girls do it.”). Even at a liberal bastion like Berkeley, the fact that he went for the thong-a-thon and opted out of the beer guzzling probably only led to more eyebrow-raising over the new kid from Valencia.
At the first team meeting he didn’t show up. The coach had to send scouts to track him down. Without his mother there to drag him out of bed, he rarely made morning practice. His former teammate Richard Hall was one of the guys who, along with Anthony, was suspended at one point for not making enough practices. Most of those swimmers had around 70 percent attendance. Richard remembers Anthony’s because it set a new record low: 37 percent. Despite the full athletic scholarship, he was making roughly one out of three practices. This didn’t sit well