want to conform and blend in with our peers, yet it’s also the one when we’re most acutely self-conscious of our apartness. It’s when we’re most prey to an excess of sensitivity—our individuality appearing to us not as uniqueness but as grotesque Otherness.9 That’s why Tourette’s is a double whammy: it not only augments that sense of being an outsider, but peaks precisely during that period when it takes so little to feel estranged. That feeling, while less overpowering, has stayed with Anthony. “I’ve always felt the story of my life has been about being normal but on the fringes of abnormality, and it’s the fringes that separate my history from the rest.”
Once Tourette’s came on full force in junior high, Anthony began isolating himself, spending his free time engrossed in books and video games. His heart no longer in competing, his performances dropped off. His mother eventually let him take a break from competitions so long as he kept attending practices. It would prove to be a three-year burnout, prefiguring the exodus that followed his Olympic success. His tendency to withdraw when upset would remain with him, also manifesting on a micro level: to this day, distress can cause him to shut down even in the presence of others into a kind of human sleep mode, a cocoon-like refuge against interaction with the outside world.
Junior high was coming to an end. The most prominent high school in the area in athletics and academics, Hart High, wasn’t in their locale, so Sherry appealed to his academic prowess to get him in. Unlike his regional high school, Hart offered AP courses. His club team was in the same district, so for the first time he’d be attending school with his swim team peers. Even so, Anthony initially resisted this because he’d be going to a different high school than his neighborhood friends. But he changed his mind after an incident that took place in a housing subdivision near their neighborhood. One of the houses there had been empty for years, a blight of a structure overrun by weeds, its back window shot out by a BB gun. One afternoon while Anthony was out with a small group of friends, they decided to climb into the house through the broken window.
Tommy climbs in first, then the others. I follow.
We tiptoe. Nothing in the house. Just a few chairs.
“Check it out, an answering machine.” Travis’s voice echoes through the house. He holds the phone up. “Hello, hellooooooo.” He slams it back down. “I guess no one’s home.” The laughter echoes.
We wander through the house, then return to the living room. In the corner is a box of fluorescent lights. Tommy pulls one out and tosses it to Mikey. Then he pulls another for himself and raises it up with two hands like a Jedi Master. “Luke, I am your father.”
Mikey also goes into dueling stance. “I see your Schwartz is as big as mine.” Then he swings. The long bulbs shatter on impact, exploding in a puff of white smoke. Tommy and Mikey jump back. We all go silent, exchanging uncertain glances. Then, out of nowhere, Mikey breaks the silence. With a cry, he grabs a chair and smashes it into the ground repeatedly until it’s in pieces. And then everybody goes apeshit. Tommy charges at the wall with his arms raised, yelling, “Ahhhhhh!” and at the last second slams his leg into it. His foot goes through the plaster all the way to his knee. They’re all yelling and running around, smashing things up and ripping tiles off the kitchen counter. It’s crazy—all this crunching and shattering and breaking and war cries and whooping and bits of plaster and wood and tiles flying all over the place . . . I don’t break anything myself, I just hang back, watching them. But I still egg them on.
“Dude, what about those!” I say, pointing up at the long fluorescent lights in the kitchen.
Travis looks up, eyes gleaming, and then he starts hurling tiles at them. The first misses but the second makes contact and the light explodes, the shards flying through the kitchen in a cloud of white smoke. We huddle for a moment, shielding our faces in our elbows.
“There’s more in the box!” I cry, and we run back to the living room where I watch him smash those.
When one of the boys, Tommy, later learned that the owner was sobbing in front of the house, he turned himself in. The families of each boy involved had to pay thousands in repairs. Anthony was let off because he hadn’t actively participated in the destruction. He talked himself out of getting in trouble (“lying to save my skin was second nature”) but he knew he was guilty through association. The incident became a forewarning of what might come if he didn’t make a change. From then on he resigned himself to moving to the new high school. His older brother Jackie, who’d already left for college, convinced him that swimming could be fun again since he’d be on the same high school team as his club teammates. He also began to think of the new school as an opportunity to start over without the stigma of a neurological disorder, since the medication he was taking suppressed his Tourette’s symptoms. In late 1995, soon after starting at Hart High, his parents sold their Castaic home and moved to a smaller house in the more upscale Valencia, which was closer to the high school.
At Hart, Anthony’s swimming burnout ended. He continued to train at the Canyons Aquatic Club team with Bruce Patmos, a demanding performance-oriented coach whom Ervin acknowledges was a good trainer who got results from his swimmers. But it was his high school coach, Steve Neale, who rekindled his enjoyment of the sport. “If it wasn’t for him I probably wouldn’t have made it to college swimming at all,” Ervin says. “Steve was all about the family of it. He loved the kids.” Beyond that personal, even paternal relationship with his swimmers, Neale also cultivated the sense, even if Anthony didn’t realize it then, that swimming was about more than just performance.
“Not that it was all fun and cookies,” Neale told me. “But swimming has to have a value and purpose. It has to be meaningful.” Anthony and his three teammates—Ryan Parmenter, John Terwilliger, and Eric Reifman—became known as the “Fearsome Freshmen.” The two standouts of the group, Anthony and Ryan, could, between the two of them, win every individual swimming event at high school competitions. Local newspaper clippings from that period with titles like “Hart Pair Making Splash” include photos of Ryan and Anthony posing in the pool with crossed arms (knuckles pressing out on biceps to make them bulge) and the kind of dour don’t-mess-with-me expressions that still seem cool and badass when you’re a teen.
Upon beginning high school, Ryan, John, and Anthony made a vow: All right, boys, we’ll be men soon. Our goal should be to each have a threesome10 before we leave high school. It was not to be, however, for the young idealists. “We were so far off,” Anthony recalls. “Not one of us even lost our virginity in high school.” Despite his swimming fame, Anthony remained introverted and shy, especially around girls. His freshman year he was particularly tongue-tied around the older girls on his swim team, who by then had come to recognize the power of their sexuality and had no qualms about exercising it over the young star swimmer.
I still have at least a half hour before the 100. Lauren and Danielle sit on each side of me on a beach blanket laid out on a grassy area right outside the pool. Their towels are tied around their waists and over their bathing suits.
“Hey, Anthony . . . ” Lauren says.
“Hi, Anthony, what’re you doing?” Danielle says. She’s sitting really close to me and smiling. Just last night she was making faces with spaghetti hanging from each nostril and an orange wedge stuffed between her lips, but now all I notice are how her boobs are squished under the bathing suit.
