Chasing Water. Anthony Ervin

      3.

      The Iron Fence

       Man does not control his own fate. The women in his life do that for him.

      —Groucho Marx

       And if you wanna find hell with me

       I can show you what it’s like.

      —Danzig, “Mother”

      Anthony Lee Ervin’s first sprint was out of the womb. The orderlies at California’s Northridge Hospital didn’t even have time to wheel his mother, Sherry, into the delivery room. They were running her down the corridor, urging her to hold on and paging the midwife, when he slid out onto the gurney. The only thing the doctor delivered was the afterbirth. Within fifteen minutes Sherry was up on her feet again. “The easiest part about me and Anthony was his birth,” she says. “After that it all went downhill.”

      For the first six or so weeks of his life, Anthony had gastroesophageal reflux, a condition where the valve connecting the esophagus to the stomach opens at the wrong times, causing regurgitation. Sherry had to hold him at an angle and feed him slowly so the milk would stay down. Breastfeeding sessions could take two hours. Even after the nursing, Anthony was a slow, fussy eater. Sherry sometimes prechewed the food because he found it more palatable. He rarely ate meat, although his mother once walked in on him sitting on the kitchen floor, surrounded by grizzle and smeared in what looked like Crisco: he had eaten half a package of raw bacon.

      Graduating from diaper to toilet was initially a source of anxiety for Anthony. The prospect of discharging directly into the toilet bowl terrified him, possibly out of a fear that he was losing part of himself. He’d stand in the corner of the bathroom, arms tightly crossed, refusing to participate in this monstrous violation of his anatomical integrity. Sherry found creative ways around such biological and existential obstacles. To first get him to pee standing up, she poured glitter into the toilet water and told him to shoot for the stars.

      He was restless from infancy. Sherry doesn’t even remember him crawling. Athletic and wiry, he went “straight from the crib to running.” Even the crib phase was brief: he soon began clambering out of it. She once found him standing on the rails, his back against the wall and arms outspread. That night his mother transferred him from the crib to a bed, but he wouldn’t stay put. He was back on his feet every time she left the room: “I must have put him to bed forty times that first night.” This pattern would play out metaphorically for many more years: her trying to put him to bed, him trying to get out. Even when asleep, he wouldn’t stay in bed. An intrepid somnambulist, Anthony once sleepwalked right out of the house. His elder brother Jackie recalls waking to his mother’s cries that Anthony was gone. The front door was wide open. His parents found him around the corner, standing on the sidewalk, still fast asleep. After that Anthony’s father, Jack, installed a chain on the door.

      For the first four years of Anthony’s life, the Ervins lived in a house with a pool in Canoga Park, an ethnically diverse, predominantly Latino neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley, north of Los Angeles. His mother occasionally took him into the pool with Jackie, who was six years older. But it wasn’t until Anthony was two, shortly after his brother Derek was born, that he had his first unmediated encounter with the water. It was an especially hot afternoon. Exhausted from nursing, his mother unintentionally dozed off on the living room couch with Derek, who was also asleep in her arms. Outside, beyond the glass patio doors, the pool sparkled, the sun flashing and vanishing on the surface like flaring matches. Moments after she fell asleep, Anthony awoke from a nap in his bedroom.

      Wakie wake. Stretch ssttrreettcchh

      Uppie.

      Up.

      Up.

      Carpet sssssssoft. Door. Turn. Push.

      Walk walk walk.

      Momma and Deerek on couch.

      Sleepytime for Momma and Deerek.

      Walk walk walk.

      Glass. Closed. CLOSED.

      Push glass. Push. Puuuuuuush.

      Ope-ope-opening door. Oooooopen.

      O P E N

      Hot. Feet hothothot.

      Walkwalkwalkwalkwalk.

      Pool Sun Sparkly

      po

      ol

      st

      ai

      rs

      Step.

      Stop.

      feet wet

      Step.

      Stop.

      knees wet

      Sit.

      Pool Cool. Pooool. Cooool.

      Foot splishie foot splashie.

      Tick-tock, Tick-tock, I’m a little cuckoo clock.

      Like Jackie swimming. Swimming like Jackie.

      S h S h

      p s p s

      l i l a

      r

      a i

      i n

      n g

      i’m swimming.

      i’m Swimming.

      Sherry awakened to find the glass patio door open. Little Anthony was sitting on the pool stairs, splashing his legs. She rushed outside, her stomach in knots. As she reached down to scoop him up, Anthony looked up and said, “Look at me, Momma. I’m swimming.”

      Within a week, contractors were erecting a black wrought-iron fence around the pool. The imposing barrier, with its skyward spears tipped by black spades, transformed the pool into an object of fascination and fear for little Anthony. “Not necessarily my fear but others’ fear,” he recalls. “The pool came to represent freedom. A freedom that could lead to annihilation.” In retrospect the fence was as ironic as it was iron: by high school Anthony would feel fenced into a pool, not out of one.

      * * *

      Though Anthony actually wanted to join the swim team from the age of four or five, his parents insisted he wait

---

Скачать книгу