Chasing Water. Anthony Ervin
“Swimmer of the Year” award at the banquet by saying that at best it should have been shared with another swimmer, Sherry bristled: “Jack had to hold me back in the chair. I thought I was going to run up on the stage and pop him one.” To this day, she hasn’t forgotten the two words at best: “I hold a grudge. I don’t forgive and I don’t forget.”
Yet Sherry’s brusque and guarded exterior belies a generous, doting, and self-sacrificing spirit. She’s always worked unceasingly in service of her children, at times holding multiple part-time jobs, while also cooking, cleaning, and ferrying her sons to and from swim practices. When turtles stray up to her house from the nearby pond, she picks them up and returns them to their watering hole. When her neighbors moved and abandoned their cat like undesirable furniture left curbside, she took the feline in. The pain of the disadvantaged and vulnerable distress and activate her at a primal level.
“I’m not very trusting from being burned too many times,” she once told me, and something in her tone made me realize that whatever her childhood details may be, my youth was a swaddled pampering in comparison. Her Cerberean posturings and iron grip over her sons, like that iron fence she once built around the pool, seem to stem more from her fear of being a neglectful parent than from the actual dangers of the world.
On my last visit, shortly before I left, Sherry leaned in toward me: “Not to threaten you, but if you harm my son through this book, either consciously or indirectly, I will hurt you.”(It wasn’t the first warning. On my previous visit, as I left, she said, “Be nice, or I’ll come after you. Even if I’m dead, I will hunt you down.”)
“Can I quote you on that?”
“Absolutely.”
She then invited me to join them for Thanksgiving and sent me off with a hug and a sandwich for the plane. When I later declined her invite, explaining by e-mail that my mother would have my head if I didn’t spend the holiday with my parents, she simply replied, “I approve.”
The others are so much bigger than me. This is Junior Olympics. Like Olympics for kids. Maybe one day I’ll go to the real Olympics.
I’m so nervous. If my time is in the top eight of all the backstrokers then I make finals. And then, no matter what, I get a medal. I’ve never won a medal before. But maybe not this year because I’m swimming now with the big kids, the nine- and ten-year-olds. I’m the only eight-year-old racing them.
It’s bright and loud with cheering. I’m nervous. I hear Mom yelling, “Go, Anthony!”
Phweeee: the whistle.
I jump into the water. I’m so nervous. I turn and face the wall and grab the handles.
Phweeee. “Take your marks.”
Don’t let the feet slip.
Beep! My feet stick to the wall and I shoot backward.
I kick hard and swing my arms as fast as I can. They made a new rule that you don’t have to touch the wall with your hand when you turn. Now you can roll to your stomach after the flags and then do a flip turn. It’s faster that way. But you have to time it right. I’ve practiced and practiced so that I don’t mess it up here.
I see other arms swinging behind me, so I’m somewhere near the front. But there are at least two others ahead of me. I need to be first or second in this heat to make the top eight. I can’t hear any cheering, only water splashing. There are no clouds today. I swim into the lane line a few times, but I don’t pull on it.
When I finish, two swimmers are already at the wall, so I won’t make the top eight. But then I find out that the top seed disqualified. He rolled over for his flip turn too early, right at the flags, and he missed the wall. This means I’m in eighth place overall, not ninth.
I’ve made finals!
And all because I practiced and practiced my flip turns. That’s why it’s important to learn everything, even the littlest thing, and practice until it’s perfect. You never know when that little thing will make all the difference.
Later in finals I get seventh place and it’s my best time. AND I get a medal. My first ever medal, not just another ribbon. Everyone is congratulating me. I am so happy. Mom says, “I am so proud of you, Anthony.” And Pops says, “Well done, son.” And Jackie and Derek look pleased too.
I won a medal against the big kids. I am so happy.
It was evident Anthony was going places with swimming, even if he couldn’t quite see where. At the age of nine he was selected to his first all-star team, the youngest member. On one away meet he shaved his entire body of its pale fuzz and rubbed baby oil all over himself, except on his hands and feet, which his coach warned him required friction. At the starting signal, he shot backward off the wall and like an oily mink raced to victory, defeating all the ten-year-olds in the Los Angeles region. The next year he set a Southern California age group record in both the 50- and 100-meter backstroke. After one record-breaking race, a few kids approached him for an autograph. This confused him and he turned to his mother for guidance. “I said, Sign it!” Sherry recalls. “He was embarrassed. He was so cute. He really was sweet.”
As the seasons passed, Anthony continued breaking California records. In junior high, he made new friends, many of which, as Anthony put it, “were just as good, if not better, at troublemaking.” As much as he loved the thrill of the race and the praise that followed, his resentment of the sport and its demands only grew. He regularly had to miss sleepovers, birthday parties, and, most devastatingly, a Megadeth and Iron Maiden concert. He pleaded to go to the show with his friends but wasn’t allowed because of a weekend swim meet, despite it being a minor one. Angry though he was, he had no choice but to put it behind him.
In junior high band, he came to idolize an eighth-grade bandmate who once tattooed himself with a safety pin during practice and told a wide-eyed Anthony that he “did the sister” of another bandmate. “He had long hair and a Danzig T-shirt with a chick in a skull helmet holding a bloody knife over a dead dude,” Anthony remembers. “And I was like, Wow, this is awesome! This is what music is all about!” The badboy unrestraint seemed far more enticing than the monotonies of swim training. When he turned eleven he faced a stronger, older pool of competitors. Though he no longer dominated, he nonetheless qualified for regional championships in Seattle. It was his first time flying across state boundaries for a swim meet. It was a high-tier competition but racing had become routine. Comfortable and confident, he also felt bored. So he decided to pass the time by playing with fire.
I’m not racing this morning so I get to stay at the hotel while the others are at the pool. Nothing to do in the room so I wander through the hallways. It’s boring though. Every hallway looks the same. Mundania. I pass a maid’s cart. She’s not there so I snatch a matchbook and run back to my room.
I sit on the bed and light a match with just one hand, using my thumb the way Tim showed me. That’s the cool way to do it. I watch it burn down. The edge of the flame is blue and the match glows red at the place where it burns. When the match goes out, a thin line of smoke shoots up. Like a soul shooting up from a fresh corpse. So cool. I light a match and then put the tip of another unlit one inside the flame. Sssshhphwweeee! Awesomeness. The flame is better when you combine two matches.
There’s a box of tissues by the bed. I hold one up and place a match under it and FWOOF, it bursts into flame and floats up like a spinning fireball! Dope! Not like paper, which burns slow and boring. With tissue it’s fast. The fire leaps to life when I feed it tissue. I can’t stop. I keep burning tissues. I’m like a magician but even cooler because I throw up fireballs from my palm instead of doves. Like I’m now in Xanth and this is my magical power. Burn, Mundania, burn.
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