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.
One tissue lands on the bed and the sheet catches on fire. I put it out but not before it’s burned a hole into the bedsheet.
Back in Mundania. And in deep, deep shit.
The maid reported the damage, and Sherry soon learned that Anthony was being sent back on the next flight. She and Jack would have to foot the bill. When they met him, he was hiding behind the air hostess, who’d served as his steward in transit. Anthony, who’d been in tears on the flight back to LA, feared the physical punishment that awaited. But there was only disappointment from his mother. It was his first memory of shame. Her anger was instead directed toward the swim league for leaving Anthony unattended. (Due to her subsequent pressure, the rules were changed to mandate that swimmers had to be on deck for all races and could never be left unsupervised.) Around Thanksgiving he had to appear at a tribunal, where he was given community service and barred from all-star trips for a year.
There were other sources of tension at home. Jack had been working in production control for an aerospace firm but was laid off when the industry shrunk after Reagan left office. For supplemental income, Sherry returned to waitressing at an upscale restaurant. The swim club made an exception on their swim fees, offering them a reduced rate. Between chores, homework, swim practice, meets, and the frequent punishments, where he’d be sequestered to his room without video games, Anthony felt like he was missing out on life. He begged to quit swimming, but to no avail. Now that he was competing less and practicing halfheartedly, his performances suffered and he no longer dominated in his events. He harbored anger toward his parents—not just about the swimming, but also about what he saw as his mother’s disciplinary excess and his father’s lack of intervention. The decades since then have given him a new perspective: “As I’ve gotten older I feel like they were just trying to do what they thought was best. My mother tried to let us live the lives we wanted within reason. Yeah, we had to help out around the house, but somebody had to. She had enough responsibility. On the one hand was the iron fist and on the other was a boy who needed control and structure because he was wildfire.”
That winter, not yet a teenager, Anthony started running off for short periods, often absconding through his bedroom window. It was nothing dramatic—he usually went to his friend’s house or wandered through an undeveloped scrubland area nearby called “The Wash.” He sometimes found sanctuary in a treehouse that he and his friends had built. On the day before Christmas Eve one year, he took his winter jacket, a blanket, and a flashlight, and headed out. He didn’t return until the next day.
The sky looks like the lox we used to have for breakfast before Dad got laid off. Against it, the tree looks haunted. The birds are still chirping but not as much as before. I hurry and am soon climbing up the tree. One of the footholds is
