Chasing Water. Anthony Ervin
Jackie in turn assumed the role of protective big brother. Years later, when Anthony was on the swim team, an older kid once grabbed him by the ankles and tried to dunk him headfirst into the toilet bowl. Anthony fended off the submersion while dangling upside down by grabbing onto the bowl. When Jackie found out, he tracked down the kid and warned him that next time he’d answer to him; nothing like that ever happened again.
If Jackie was Anthony’s idol, his younger brother Derek was his doppelgänger. In photos you can barely distinguish between them, grinning side by side under similar shocks of chestnut locks. They were inseparable. When the Ervins later moved to Castaic in 1985, Sherry put a bunk bed in Anthony’s room because he and Derek wanted to sleep in the same room, often even in the same top bunk. Twice Derek fell out, once fracturing his arm.
While they still lived in Canoga Park, Anthony also spent time with a boy down the street with whom he’d sing and dance to Michael Jackson in his bedroom. It wasn’t his first time listening to the king of pop. Back when he was an infant, his brother Jackie, who was seven at the time, used to run through the neighborhood while pushing Anthony in a stroller and blasting the Thriller album at top volume from a portable Fisher-Price cassette deck. The combination of speed and music delighted Anthony: “I’d be blasting ‘Beat It’ and ‘Thriller’ and ‘Billie Jean,’” Jackie recalls, “and he’d be giggling in the front.”
One of Anthony’s most vivid memories is from when he was six or seven. One day he climbed up onto the kitchen counter to explore the top of the cupboards. While reaching up and groping blindly, he knocked down a thermometer, which shattered on the tiled countertop. At the time he had no idea what it was. He quickly lowered himself and began trying to scoop together the mercury beads that spilled over the tiles. Every time he attempted to collect them, the silver beads vanished mysteriously under his hands. “I tried to clean up the mess,” he recalls, “but the mess just got absorbed into me.”
Far less toxic was his earliest memory: his mother reading to him. The first book she read to him without pictures was Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. He was wowed by the grand adventure, by the renegade outlaw antics of Captain Nemo. These readings and his mother’s instruction in basic math put him ahead of the curve by the time he entered kindergarten. He was taller than the other kids, who didn’t know how to read and write like him. Easily bored, he grew disobedient, and his teachers would often send him to the counselor.
When Anthony turned seven his parents relented to his requests to join a swim team, hoping he’d channel his impulses and energies into the pool. He took to the water with relish and right away showed signs of being a natural. Initially he was most comfortable as a backstroker.5 In retrospect there was something allegorical about the way he’d wildly windmill his arms while staring into an uncooperative sky, often swerving and colliding into landlines. Unlike indoor swimmers, who can chart a straight path by the geometries of the ceiling, backstrokers in outdoor pools are either blinded by the sun or like sailors without navigation, forsaken and unaided under the blank canvas of a blue sky.
Backstroke would be Anthony’s primary stroke until high school. “There was something to not seeing where I was going, to just spinning my wheels,” he reflects. “I was good at that.” At his first competition that same year, he won his backstroke race despite being unable to maintain a straight course. He reveled in the flush of victory.
His speed caught the eye of the older age group coach and Anthony was transferred to the more advanced team. This was no longer swim school; he was now in the blood, toil, tears, and sweat domain of competitive training. Anthony rebelled against the demands for obedience. The coach, Dave, regularly singled him out, punishing him with push-ups, often in excess of fifty per practice. This disciplinary form of strength training served him well, and he continued to prevail over his opponents.
Calculating distances and time intervals in practice also honed Anthony’s aptitude for mathematics. He excelled in his subjects—scoring in the 99th percentile in math and reading on standardized tests throughout elementary school—but his behavior only worsened. He openly disobeyed his teachers, who started writing misconduct notes and calling his parents.
Though Castaic was no ghetto, it was also no gated community, and there was occasional spillover from the nearby prison. For a period, a flasher in a raincoat and pants with the crotch cut out started frequenting the neighborhood. Sherry used to let the boys walk alone to and from the bus stop but now began escorting them. One day when Anthony got in trouble in second grade, he decided not to return home, fearing the rebuke. When he didn’t disembark from the bus, his mother called the police.
I see a police car in the distance. Maybe Mom called the police because I didn’t go home. I turn and walk down the side street. The police car also turns down the street and starts driving toward me. Don’t run, I tell myself. But I start to run anyway. I may be able to run faster than my friends but not faster than a car. I hear the engine. A voice says, “Stop running,” but I don’t stop. And then louder I hear, “STOP,” and the car makes a loud sound like a giant chicken and the lights flash. And I stop.
The policeman isn’t mean but he has a gun and his uniform is scary. He asks what my name is and I don’t say anything and he asks again and I tell him, “Anthony,” and he asks for my last name and I say, “Ervin,” and he tells me that my mother is upset and frightened and it’s dangerous to be out by myself. Then he asks me why I didn’t go home on the bus. I don’t say anything because I’m not supposed to talk to strangers and I already told him my name. I don’t tell him that Miss S. called Mom because I was a disruption in class and that she moved my desk far away from the others. Like I have a disease or something. I don’t tell him that I don’t want to go home because I don’t want to be spanked. He asks me again. I just say, “Sorry.”
He tells me to get in the car. I tell him Mom told me not to talk to strangers or get into cars with them. He say he’s not a stranger, he’s a police officer. I know police aren’t the same as strangers but Mom always told me not to trust ANYBODY. So I just stand there. He shakes his head and says I should get in unless I want him to call more police. So I get in.
He doesn’t do anything bad to me. He’s not even mean. He just drives me home. Mom is going to yell and yell. And Dad will tell her to take it easy and let it go, but she’ll still use the wooden spoon or the belt or something. The worst part about getting spanked on your bum is you can’t see it coming. And then I’ll be grounded and stuck in my room for days and days without video games and I won’t be able to see my friends except at the pool, and even there Dave will shout and say, “Give me ten push-ups,” whenever I try to have fun. That’s why I don’t want to go home. But then I only get more punishment. And then I don’t want to go home even more.
Mom is standing outside on the road when we arrive. She looks mad.
Parents often fall into one of two camps: those who want to recreate their own childhood for their children and those who want to rectify it. Anthony’s mother is among the latter. She won’t talk about her childhood. Even her three sons know little about it. When I broached the matter, she retorted that she saw “no valid reason for opening that door.” Only later, after a few more attempts and after I added that it might give context to her protective mode of child-rearing, did she toss me a valuable scrap from her past: “The most I’ll tell you is I was on my own at a very young age. When you don’t have parents, you have to protect yourself. That’s hard work for a young person. So I was going to protect my children.”
The foster-care past she alludes to may explain why Sherry prickles at the mention of a more hands-off parenting approach. It’s hard to know if one’s survival odds are better getting between a grizzly and her cubs or between Sherry and hers. “I would kill to protect them,” she tells me matter-of-factly. Not the soft-spoken, mousy, blend-into-the-wallpaper type, Sherry runs her domestic affairs with the monomaniacal