11.
Lethe’s Edge
They are the souls who are destined for Reincarnation; and now at Lethe’s stream they are drinking the waters that quench man’s troubles, the deep draught of oblivion.
—Virgil, The Aeneid
Few people understand the psychology of dealing with a highway traffic cop. Your normal speeder will panic and immediately pull over to the side when he sees the big red light behind him . . . and then we will start apologizing, begging for mercy. This is wrong. It arouses contempt in the cop-heart. The thing to do—when you’re running along about a hundred or so and you suddenly find a red-flashing CHP-tracker on your trail—what you want to do then is accelerate.
—Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
I’m coming down the Berkeley Hills, feeling good, sunlight flickering through the trees, no cars in sight, when I emerge from a sweeping turn and see a cop with the radar gun out, looking down the crosshairs straight at me through sunglasses. I pass him going about 60 in a 25 zone. This is it, I’m going to run. The siren wails behind me and my adrenaline kicks in as I open up the throttle. I drop through Strawberry Creek to the back of Memorial Stadium and blast around into frat and sorority row.
Though I’m now in traffic I don’t let up. I’m lane splitting, riding the yellow divider between cars moving in both directions. The cop is long gone, he wouldn’t chase me through this, but I don’t stop, don’t even slow down. I’m taking huge risks, not in control anymore now that the adrenaline has got hold of me. Everything is buzzing, I can’t let off. I lean left onto Bancroft and accelerate around a red Mustang, overtaking him at three or four times his speed. The driver doesn’t see me. He starts to shift lanes because a car is stopped ahead with its hazards on. Though I notice the Mustang moving left, there’s nowhere for me to go. Everything downshifts into time lag. I brace and he hits me.
My shoulder takes the impact as I ricochet off the car. I manage to keep the bike upright, but I feel my shoulder dislocate as my arm goes limp and dangly. My right hand is still clutching the handlebar but my grip is weak, useless. I’ve got the wobbles and am veering straight for the parked cars. Though it all happens within a second or two, it unfolds in crisp slow motion.
Using my torso and core and whatever muscles I can access around my shoulder, I jerk my upper body. My shoulder sucks back into place, and at once I regain use of my arm. Revving the throttle, I kick out of the trajectory, narrowly avoiding what might have been a fatal collision. I’m so freaked out I keep riding at a blistering pace. If I ride to my apartment I’ll have to park my bike on the street and the cops might find it. So I ride to a swimmer house nearby and leave it by the back porch, where it can’t be seen from the street. I notice I’m hyperventilating as I stash the bike.
I go to the gym and crank through some power cleans, my adrenaline still surging. Then I head to swim practice. The water feels good at first but soon my right arm can’t reach as far as it normally does. Lap by lap, my reach shortens until I can’t even pull anymore. I climb out and leave without telling Mike.
When I wake the next morning, I can’t lift my arm up past my shoulder.
The motorcycle Ervin was riding when the Mustang hit him was a red 2000 Suzuki GSX-R600. He purchased it with prize money he earned in late August at the 2002 Pan Pacific Swimming Championships. The previous owner had wrecked the bike, so he bought it as a rebuilt salvage for a few thousand dollars. There were two reasons Anthony couldn’t afford a new bike with the earnings: after qualifying for the national team in the 50 free earlier that month in Fort Lauderdale, he scratched the 100, much to everyone’s shock, which meant that he wouldn’t be swimming or vying for prize money in either the 100 free or the 4x100 free relay at Pan Pacs.
“Mike couldn’t believe it,” Ervin recalls. “I didn’t want to do it because it hurt too much.” The 100 is a far more physically taxing event than the 50, and Ervin “wasn’t interested in pain,” though he also recognized that “everybody must have thought it was absurd.” On top of this, after that same Nationals qualifying meet in Florida, the USA Swimming national team director Dennis Pursley fined him several thousand dollars for violating the USA Swimming Code of Conduct by going out at night.30 Ervin would have to pay for it out of his Pan Pac winnings, which was galling to him considering he hadn’t even won the money yet. “I felt particularly persecuted by this fine because Erik Vendt was out with me and he didn’t get fined at all,” Ervin says, adding that “Vendt jokingly quipped, It’s because you’re black.”
Although Pursley can’t now recall the incident, as it occurred over a dozen years ago, he claims there would have had to have been an objective reason to fine Anthony and not Vendt, such as stiffer penalties due to repeat offenses. “I don’t know if he knows this or not, but I actually liked Anthony,” Pursley says. “I thought he was a nice guy. He was [just] in a world of his own and didn’t seem to have an awareness of where he needed to be. I didn’t take that as being rebellious or as a malicious attempt to defy the rules.” Whatever the case, Ervin felt like he was being singled out because he was never the only one breaking the rules.
For some time Ervin had been flirting with getting a motorcycle; after the fine, he vowed to put every dollar of his remaining Pan Pac earnings toward one. A bike came to symbolize a way of escaping those in power. It wasn’t that he needed wheels. With his earnings from World Champs in Japan he’d purchased a black Audi, which he nicknamed Vader. But a car offered no promise of freedom and rebellion. And he couldn’t outrun the authorities in an Audi.
Not that he didn’t try.
I’m in Vader, driving south on the 5 to Valencia. I’m making good time, zooming down the Grapevine, but just as I’m almost through and into the valley, I pass a cop parked on the shoulder. I’m going 135—about 65 mph over the speed limit. The car can go faster but the governor chip limits its speed. If he nabs me I’m screwed. It’s about six miles to the first exit out of the Grapevine. I figure if I make it that far, I can ditch him in town. So I step on it.
Within three miles, the cop catches me. I see him coming in the rearview mirror. Those Caprices are damn fast and they have no governor chip. Game over. I pull to the side and roll down the window.
He tramps over, red-faced, his right hand on his gun. His jaw is clenched.
“Keep your hands where I can see them!” he barks. “Do you have any idea how fast you were going?” His lips are taut, curled back. “I clocked you at 132 miles per hour.”
“Yeah,” I say.
“Did you see me on the side of the road?”
“Yeah.”
He pauses and removes his aviators. His eyes are hard, unblinking. When he finally speaks again, he pauses between the words, accentuating each one. “Then why didn’t you slow down?”
“To be honest,” I say, “I was hoping I was going so fast that you didn’t see me.”
The cop’s mouth drops and he just stares at me, stunned. He stands there for a while in silence. His lips are pursed, his face twitching under some inner struggle to maintain composure. Finally he quietly asks for my license and registration. He takes the papers and goes to his car.
He seems calm when he returns. “You know I could take you to jail for this,” he says.
“Uh, that would be bad,” I reply.
He snorts and shakes his head. “I’m writing you up for 120 miles per hour, though you were going faster. Don’t do that again. And don’t speed the rest of the way.”
I toss the slip onto the passenger seat as he walks back to his car. I resume my journey, sighing and muttering, maintaining the speed limit.
I should have been on a motorcycle.
For that incident Anthony had to go to court, where he pled guilty to reckless endangerment. Though he had more success fleeing the authorities on two wheels than on four, the motorcycle served more as a means for him to escape his own private troubles. His purchase of the salvaged Suzuki coincided with the onset of his depression, when he’d stopped drinking and started isolating himself. The motorcycle was ideal for that. He’d take to the hills for a few hours to get away from everything. Riding demanded his undivided focus, allowing no leeway for his mind to withdraw into its convoluted interiors.
He had never even sat on a bike before. His first time riding was the day he bought one. He passed the written test so he had a permit, which came with restrictions: don’t ride at night, don’t carry a passenger, don’t ride on the freeway. He obeyed none of these rules. And since he never got a motorcycle license, he continued breaking them for all the years he rode. A license required taking a safety course, which he never got around to.
His collision with the Mustang wasn’t his sole accident. He first one was in the fall of 2002, shortly after he got the bike.
I’m east of Berkeley, beyond the hills, and it’s getting dark. I can either take the freeways that loop through Tilden Park or the twisties that wind through the hills. It’ll be nicer through Tilden. I’ll just take it easy.
Hardly any other vehicles out at this hour. I’m feeling good, leaning in and out of the turns, bike purring under me. I take it slow by the drop-offs. No rush.
But it’s hard not to open up when you’ve got all that power available at a twist of the wrist. I don’t know the roads as well as I anticipated, and in the dusk I miscalculate and a left turn sneaks up on me. I lean hard into it but end up lowsiding. The bike falls on top of me but the sliders keep most of the bike’s weight off me. I skid down the road, the bike and I separating as we slide out. I come to a stop in a bank of decomposing bark and wood bits.
My gloves are shredded and the sleeve of my jacket got pushed back while sliding so I’ve got nasty road rash on my wrist. Lucky for me, I’m wearing my full leathers. I’d be a mess without them. They’re hideous and ridiculously 1980s, with leather patches in the shape of lightning bolts sewn on the back, but they’re now the best sixty dollars I’ve ever spent on Craigslist.
While I’m still on the ground, a truck comes around the bend and pulls to the side. The driver runs over to check up on me. My knee hurts where the bike fell on it, my back feels messed up, and I’m disoriented, but aside from that I’m all right. He asks if I want a ride to a garage in Berkeley. It’s either that or wait for a cop to show up, which would be all sorts of trouble since I recently got a warning for riding without a license plate and for carrying a passenger without a license. I couldn’t run at the time because I would have endangered her. Fortunately, she sweet-talked the cop and he let me off with a warning. But if a cop comes now and sees that I still don’t have a license plate and that I was riding in the dark, I won’t get off so easy.
The guy helps me load the bike onto the truck bed. Then he drives me down to a garage.
I feel my back stiffening on the ride down. But only when I step out of the truck to unload the bike and find myself walking like C-3PO do I realize just how messed up it is.
With a bruised, swollen back, Anthony spent the next few days convalescing in bed. His friend and Cal athletics advisor Mohamed Muqtar, who like others had been warning him about his reckless riding, remembers calling him a few days later only to be forwarded to “an outgoing message that said, Okay, it happened, now you guys can gloat.”
Anthony isn’t sure precisely when his suicide attempt took place in relation to his motorcycle accidents. As far as he recalls, the timeline is 1) Tilden lowside, 2) clonidine overdose, 3) Mustang collision. But then again, 2) and 3) may be reversed. Or 1) and 2). In fact, the only certainty is that he lowsided before he hit the Mustang. His memories aren’t compartmentalized by time but by areas of his life—for example, swimming, depression, mysticism, motorcycling—even if they overlapped. Within each facet of his life he knows the ordering of events, but the worlds they each inhabited were so disparate that when viewed in relation to one another they seem jumbled and disassociated. Whatever the case, when the Mustang hit him, he was either depressed or recently depressed, so when viewed against that darkness, the accident wasn’t as traumatic as it might have been. He mostly just felt relieved. But it wasn’t from having survived a game of high-speed Frogger on wheels. “After the shoulder injury I knew my swimming career was over,” he says. “I felt relief I didn’t have to worry about swimming anymore.”
He continued to train and compete, but in his mind, swimming was over. It showed in his performance. At the 2003 World Championships in Barcelona, entering the 50 as the defending world champion and championship record holder in the event, he again raced Popov and Hoogenband. But there would be no repeat of the 2001 World Champs final in Japan. In fact, there would be no finals for him at all. Or even semifinals.31
Those 2003 World Championships would be Anthony’s final major competition—at least for the next eight years. After that, he would all but officially retire. Swimming offered him nothing meaningful anymore. But riding did. With his monthly stipend from USA Swimming, he sold his red bike and bought the next-generation model, a 2001 Suzuki GSX-R750. The 750 was a flashier yellow, with more torque and horsepower.
Ervin was still hooked on speed. And he was still fast, in fact faster than ever before. But his speed now had nothing to do with the water.
Riding down to LA in jeans and body armor and hovering around 100 mph, I come into a long open stretch with no wind and few cars and trucks—this is the place, time to find out what I can do on this yellow streak of lightning, time to ride that razor’s edge—I rev and tuck down as the bike leaps forward and the Gs kick in, that’s what this bike is made for, that’s the only way it’s comfortable, under acceleration, so your weight gets pushed back into the seat where it belongs, not all mashed up in the front where you’re up on your arms like in a push-up position—I crouch down as the speedometer turns over into the 110s, 120s, 130s—making myself as small and narrow as possible, tucking down behind the windshield, minimizing resistance—140s, 150s—I come up on a car so I let up on the accelerator and drop to 120 since the turbulence around the car can be unreliable—then shoot past it—130s, 140s, 150s, and climbing toward the 160s when I come upon a semi truck with a cargo trailer in tow—again I let off, even more than before because of the behemoth’s denser turbulence pocket—even at 110 and giving a wide berth the wind hits me hard—but I’m ready for it, I’ve done this enough, I may be a squid but I’m no noob—and soon I’m past the truck too and it’s open road again, this time I know I can get it up as high as it will go—130s, 140s, 150s—I stay locked tight onto the bike, hugging it with everything even though my collar is digging in as if I’m being pulled back on a leash and the wind is trying to pry my legs apart—160s—the asphalt is a gray blur streaked with stripes of orange and white from the reflectors and highway paint—170s—now the whine of the engine is all I hear—175—the tachometer is maxed out—176, 177, 177, 177—max speed, I’m at the limit, I’m riding right on the edge—
As I’m approaching LA I realize the engine is so hot it burned a hole through the header—the bike backfires whenever I ease off the throttle—I bum around LA for a few days, then take the scenic route along 1 back up to Berkeley—but you can’t get distracted by the sights on the coastal twisties, that’s how you go down on a bike: distraction, lack of focus—stray out here and a landslide may trip you up—or a rabbit—or a rogue Bambi—so instead every now and then I just pull over and take in the view and then move on, keeping my eyes on the road—that’s the lesson I’ve learned: always look forward, never back, always keep your attention where you want to go—when the mind strays the body strays, which can be fatal on a bike—here error carries the ultimate penalty—you learn from mistakes fast and hope they’re not hard ones—so now when I pass cops with radars I don’t even look back—my heart rate barely rises, no adrenaline kicks in, there’s nothing to fear because cops can’t keep up, they can’t weave through the traffic like me, not in those clunky steel cages—I just note them in passing, giving them no more thought than I would a pothole—not to say a motorcycle patrolman wouldn’t nab me, but I haven’t had the pleasure of passing one yet, and who knows whether or not I’d actually pull over if a cop on a bike tried to run me down—one thing I’ve learned is that riding is all about knowing limits and riding within them, about calculating risk—sure, I pushed those limits by maxing out on the ride down to LA, but that’s the one time I really moved out to the edge on this bike, and you’ve got to step out to the edge now and then just to find out where it is—no one else can tell you, it’s a private matter, you’ve got to find that border for yourself—of course, there are unaccountables that can come out of nowhere even when you’re within the limits—unforeseen gusts, mechanical failures—like the time I popped a wheelie along those vast treeless sweepers up in Sonoma and my chain snapped, that’s what I got for riding on a stock chain—but I got lucky because the chain didn’t get stuck in the sprocket and send the rear tire into lockdown, which does happen and which would have been nasty—instead I just lost power and came to a stop and pushed the bike down the street to the closest house—and go figure, the guy there just happened to tinker with bikes and have spare parts and he rigged me up a new link for my chain on the spot, just like that—even invited me for dinner—life has a way of working itself out, well, sometimes it does, just like sometimes it has a way of falling apart—who knows, it’s all a devil’s gamble—all you can do is ride like a warrior, with confidence, with fearlessness, ’cause that’s what gives you the best odds of getting out alive—
One place Anthony often rode out to was the residence of Della Lorenzetti, a masseuse and sports therapy specialist whom Mike Bottom had introduced him to his sophomore year. But he wasn’t riding there for rehab or bodywork. Della had become a kind of surrogate mother to him (to this day he refers to her as his godmother), cooking him dinners, calling him just to check up on him, etc. He also felt comfortable confiding in her. “She became the only person I could really talk to when things with K melted down,” Ervin says. “If I talked to other guys they were always like, Fuck it, dude, go bang other girls. That was their only advice.”
Vivacious and warmhearted, Della opened her home to him, offering strong coffee, Italian hospitality, and an attentive ear anytime he needed it, or even just a safe haven where he could sip a coffee and stare off into space. Anthony and Della grew so close that Mike Bottom would often check in with Della to get a read on Anthony’s psychological state.
One reason Anthony could so easily talk to her is because he knew she’d once been down in the trenches too. Della first told Anthony about her own troubled past after he remarked that he didn’t care if he lived, that if something happened to him, so be it. “That disturbed me,” she recalls. “That’s why I told him about my experiences. We all have an appointment with death, but we can bring it on ourselves if we’re foolish.” Once a manager in the entertainment industry who used to travel with rock bands and ride with bikers, Della had a dark and adventurous side and was no stranger to crazy living. She had lost many loved ones, including her boyfriend, to drugs and violence. When her own life started spiraling out of control, she had an epiphany, what she describes as a life-altering experience of God. Overnight she transformed her lifestyle and turned to Christianity. But she never forgot the dark ledge that Anthony now found himself on. “I know you can go to the end and not come back—a lot of my friends didn’t,” she says. “I almost didn’t.”
Della saw echoes of herself and her past in Anthony, and it scared her. She remembers driving behind him at night, watching helplessly as he popped a wheelie and rode a stretch of highway on his back wheel.32 At times he rode to her house high. “Oh, Della,” she remembers him saying when she protested, “you did this too.” But while her troubled past made her an ideal confidante for him, it also made her fear for him. “Anthony doesn’t know this [but] I called one of my friends and said, Anthony is probably going to do something to kill himself, and I need to prepare myself for that.” She also recognized there was only so much she could do. “Then there were times when I said, I just need to love him for who he is and enjoy the present because we may not have it again.”
Anthony wasn’t pulling as many stunts like wheelies or supermans33 or top-speed riding on his first bike. Most of that was on his more powerful Suzuki 750. Yet he considered himself a safer rider on that bike. Experience had taught him to know his limits and ride within them. And experience gave him confidence, which was critical to his riding well.
But all that would change. One night he moved not just to the edge of his limits but way out beyond them. And it started with two hits of acid.
I could have and should have died last night—that’s the refrain playing over and over again in my bleary-eyed skull as I lie there, groaning in bed—I could have and should have died—what in hell was I thinking jumping on the bike yesterday afternoon right as I was peaking—right as the fractals came on and the walls started breathing and my mind began kicking like a fetus, with the world warping around me convex like in a funhouse mirror—and for some reason I thought this was a good time to go out riding into the hills??—remembering how I picked up my Arai helmet and just stood there for a while, noticing, really noticing, the red fire-breathing dragon painted on it, the flames so fiery they seemed to leap off the helmet—and then zooming up into the hills—normally so confident and comfortable leaning in and out of curves through alternating patches of sunshine and tree shadows but none of that ease or open-range freedom this time, instead discomfort and inability to gauge distances clearly and just a growing oppressiveness—I wind my way up to the Wall on Grizzly Peak—the Wall a waist-high stone memorial where a biker went over the edge, a lookout point where other bikers hang out for bayview sunsets and remember the fallen—and I park and dismount and even on two feet everything feels unfamiliar, foreign, my body now like some alien vessel out of which my consciousness peers nervously, an uncertain navigator—and if walking is awkward think of what that means for riding, where shifting body position a few inches can mean the difference between taking a corner smoothly at a high speed and your helmet popping like bubble wrap under a sixteen-wheeler—a couple of riders are just wordlessly standing side by side at the Wall, probably just enjoying the burning sky over Sausalito and Oakland and the Golden Gate Bridge, but in my dosed oversensitivity I’m convinced they’re actually mourning my death—and suddenly I’m standing there too, hanging my head, thinking, Shame, shame, he had this gift of life but went and threw it all away by breaking the cardinal moto rule, Know Thy Limits—I shudder at the, what, premonition?—and that’s when I call J, my biker buddy from the auto shop who first taught me something about turning a wrench and who would become my main riding partner once I got my second bike—right away J knows something is wrong—“Hey, man, you sound weird, you all right?”—so I tell him—he’s silent for a moment, “And you’re on your bike . . . ? Duuuude, that’s no good, that’s dangerous, can you get down to the shop?”—so I ride down there, nerves jangling, the Wall haunting me—huge relief to get to his shop—I can always count on J, of Chinese immigrant stock but from generations back, not from any recent brain drain, and an ex-con too—but J did his time and put that criminal life behind him and is now just a friendly madman auto mechanic, and a badass rider and fiercely loyal friend to boot—it’s after five p.m. so the shop’s now closed and no one’s there but him—he goes off when he sees me, “Duuude, you’re crazy riding around on acid, we’ve got to get that shit out of you,” and right away pulls out a bottle of vodka and throws down an eight ball of coke—“Come on, let’s get you straight”—so we start racking rails, doing lines, which pushes the acid out of my system, or at least out to the periphery (coke not something I usually do or even like to do, just don’t care for it really, maybe ’cause the first time I tried it was at a sorority party sophomore year, just me and my buddy and about sixty girls, so you can imagine what that was like . . . talk about chasing the dragon, everything after that was like taking turds), but it does start helping me feel more grounded—and not sure which one of us suggested we go riding but since I’m feeling mighty fine now we hop on our bikes and take the Bay Bridge, aglitter with lights, ushering us into the San Francisco night—I do a few wheelies, and while even this may sound sketchy the reality is it’s very hard to spill backward and I’d spent many late afternoons practicing them for hours in an empty parking lot after a few puffs on a joint—but never mind my modest wheelies because J of course is doing sick moves on the bridge, like jumping off the bike and surfing on the titanium skid plates he’s installed on his boot soles—so imagine: you’re driving along the Bay Bridge in your car, all comfortable and buckled in and nuzzled by AC and surround sound, and suddenly this biker zips past you and then he just JUMPS off the side of his bike (OMG, is this some horrible suicide?!), only to be suddenly waterskiing alongside the bike, sparks flying off his heels like some kind of biker demon incarnate—try to imagine that—crazy jaw-dropping shit, but that’s how J rolls—he’s not actually a madman, mind you, just a skilled rider who knows how to put on a show—so anyway, we get to San Francisco and go to a bar and drink and order another eight ball and do more lines and then ride back to his shop in Berkeley—more drinking, more lines—then yippee-kai-yay back out to SF again—same deal, different bar—then ride back to his shop in Berkeley—a few more lines, why the hell not—and then zoom back out over the Bay Bridge for a third time to SF, close a club there and it’s coming on dawn when we ride back—the plan being to snatch a few hours of sleep and then head out early to a big biker meetup down past Stanford, so as to have the road all to ourselves, with those long sweeping curves through the redwoods—though once I’m in bed it takes a full hour for my spinning mind to reel itself to sleep and by then I’m already starting to feel grim but nothing close to what’s to come since the coke is still masking the underlying fear and sapping of confidence that’s started to trickle through—
And then awakening to no more trickling for the dam has broken and the horror of morning realization floods in—and so now here I am, lying in bed, pinned and needled by morning light, reflecting in cotton-mouthed dread upon yesterday afternoon and night—in one fell swoop that sense of invincibility that I’ve been feeling for so long evaporates in a snarling hangover of coke and vodka and acid—never have I binged like that, certainly not in any proximity to a motorcycle—I could have and should have died last night—knowing full well I’m not riding anywhere today—knowing in fact I may never ride again now that fear has entered my heart, at least not ride like I once did—because once fear enters, you can never ride that razor’s edge again—because 90 percent of riding takes place between the ears, and if when you ride the edge the heart no longer beats softly like that of child, then you’re finished, which means I can’t ride at all because the edge is why I ride—I could have and should have died—I know it in my thudding rabbit heart, I know it in the miasma between my ears, I know it:
My motorcycling days are over.
_________________
30. Yup, again. Return to text
31. His time of 22.74 put him in a tie for seventeenth place with two other swimmers: Salim Iles and (drumroll) Roland Schoeman! His former teammate Bart Kizierowski, meanwhile, tied for eighteenth, also with two others, with a time of 22.75. That’s six swimmers narrowly missing semifinals, all touching within 1/100th of a second of each other. Return to text
32. Though she never rode with Anthony, they once rented snowmobiles. “Don’t open them up full throttle, they can get out of hand,” the guy warned them. But out there in the open fields with Anthony, Della reverted to her older reckless self: the two took off on a tear, opening the throttle, sliding everywhere, until Anthony eventually crashed, flying over an embankment into thigh-high snow. Return to text
33. Superman is where you lie flat on your belly so that the ends of your legs are sticking out horizontally over the back of the bike. A classic squid move. (Squids are newbie riders who ride crotchrockets way too fast and pull stunts like supermans, often in T-shirts, the kind of bikers who whiz by you and whom you expect to find farther down the road at the end of a long red streak.) Return to text