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 because they felt he was too young. His older brother Jackie was on the team and Anthony would watch him compete at meets; it was only natural he’d want to follow in his wake. 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
