16.
The Year of the Water Dragon
Adopt the disposition of the octopus, crafty in its convolutions, which takes on the appearance of whatever rock it has dealings with.
At one moment follow along this way, but at the next change the color of your skin:
You can be sure that cleverness proves better than inflexibility.
—Sixth-century BC elegiac poet Theognis
don’t chase that carrot
'til it makes you sick
what do you think you’re gonna prove
just let it dangle
'til it falls off that stick
that’s when you make your move
—James McMurtry, “No More Buffalo”
When I start training again in early 2011, there’s no intent to return to serious competition and vie for another medal. I just need to replace smoking with something else. Weight training and swimming seemed natural alternatives. Smoking pot and cigarettes turns out to be my Kryptonite. Once I stop the lung abuse, my body just resurges and comes to life. But even when the impulse to smoke is gone, I don’t want to stop swimming. It feels good. The pool, a prison for much of my youth, is now a sanctuary.
Though I do a few exhibition swims, and though I take Teri’s advice and reenter the drug-testing pool, I’m still hesitant about how competitive I want to be. But that changes in late March when I go to men’s NCAAs in Minneapolis.
* * *
March 24–26, 2011
University of Minnesota Aquatic Center
It’s barbaric in the Cal section. No other university has alumni representation like us. Last year Cal almost won, so in this year’s lead-up to NCAAs there was a huge alumni swell. E-mails were sent out, urging all to attend: This is the year, after three decades, this is the year Cal will win! Alumni have flown out not just from across America but from all over the world, a Cal bear migration to Minnesota. We’ve taken over a whole section of the stands, painting them gold and blue. By the second night we’re not only chanting for our swimmers, but even roaring when no Cal swimmer is in the finals. There’s no other squad of alumni like us. A horde of boozy pillagers. Hooligan invaders amidst alarmed swim parents.
It’s a dude storm. The Charge of the Brohirrim. The alumni have left their wives back home and for one weekend are reliving their college years. It comes at a cost. After spitting his drink all over a bartender’s face, my friend Mark gets dragged out by his foot, laughing, and dumped into a pile of snow. Another alum, in his midfifties, falls and cracks his nose, later showing up at finals with his face all bandaged. And then there’s Jafari, who gets shoved by a friend, trips on ice, and has to go to ER to get his shin splinted. He shows up that night on crutches, animal that he is, leading cheers.
For the final event, the 4x100 free relay, we just need sixth place or better to clinch the title. As long as we don’t disqualify, we’ll win. Jeff Natalizio is wearing his white pants, bare-chested, swinging his Cal shirt like a lasso over his head, and roaring. Our section is covered in gold Cal placards. Even with safe relay starts, Cal crushes the competition. Tom Shields, who swims third, pulls away in the final twenty-five yards into a clear first, which Nathan only extends.
We’re NCAA champions for the first time in thirty-one years! I charge down to the deck even before the trophy is handed. I clear security right as the team is jumping into the pool. Only after I’ve jumped and hit the water do I think, Oh no, what am I doing? Just because I’ve started to train with the team doesn’t mean I’m on the team. That’s when I know my competitive spirit is back. I want to be part of this energy and excitement. I want to race again.
Both Teri McKeever and Dave Durden, the Cal head coaches for the women’s and men’s teams respectively, welcomed Anthony to their practices, but neither had any idea initially what to make of his desire to train. Durden at first assumed the swimming was “maybe just cathartic” and a way for Anthony to get back into shape (which it was). But after the 2011 NCAAs, Durden could see that Anthony wanted to get back into competition.
Cal swim star and twelve-time Olympic medalist Natalie Coughlin thinks the desire may have been there even earlier, at least at some deeper level. She remembers her surprise when she first saw Anthony at one of the women’s practices back in January. She asked what he was doing there. He said he didn’t know: “But he kept coming. So I kept asking. And he’d say, I don’t know. I’m getting in shape.” But as time passed, Natalie got the sense that he had his sights on Olympic Trials: “I think deep down he knew he was going to do it, but this was kind of a crazy goal knowing his past. I think he knew to keep it close to the chest.”
Anthony has always had a close relationship with Teri McKeever. She remembers him back when he seemed to be “a half-step behind [and] almost overwhelmed” with juggling swimming, school, and social life. But the Anthony who returned was far more mature and confident, “someone more comfortable in his own skin.”
Most startled of all by Anthony’s return to the pool may have been his 2011 roommate, Ward, who only knew him as a “gutter-punk intellectual” and never an athlete: “Our apartment was fucking disgusting. If you consider Hemingway’s aesthetic of a clean, well-lighted place, it was the exact opposite. It was dim and dirty. And out of that shithole, Tony started waking up again at five in the morning, working out, getting back into it. This English major, chain-smoking, intellectual type . . . It was inspirational for me, because I’m like, If this dude can turn it around, no matter how pathetic I am, there’s hope.”
You needed hope living in that co-op. Ward’s previous roommate had overdosed on heroin and had to be rushed to the hospital. Anthony replaced him, moving in the next day.
It helped that Anthony happened to be in one of the best places in the world to train. He had top coaches, weight trainers, and physical therapists at his disposal. And he had the top American sprinter as his training partner: Nathan Adrian, the NCAA champion in the 50 and 100. Though there was competitive tension between them at practice, they pushed one another to improve. “They may not have that kumbaya moment where they say, Listen, I appreciate you,” Durden says, “but I absolutely believe they do.”
And then of course there was Natalie Coughlin’s presence. “Natalie makes us all better,” Anthony says. “She has nothing left to prove. She can learn from us to a degree, but she’s so advanced, the net benefit is to us.”
If Anthony was to compete again, he had to have his shoulder examined. Doctors soon determined that his biceps tendon had been stretched when his shoulder sublexed in the motorcycle accident. Since his right biceps was thinner and frailer than it should have been, the shoulder might still occasionally sublex. But with weekly rehabilitation, he could still swim again at a high level.
Those were busy days. He began weekly physical therapy. He supported himself through a variety of jobs: coaching in the Oakland Undercurrent swim program; tutoring students on campus; and working the will call counter for music shows at the Warfield or the Regency. And then of course there was coursework and swim training.
5:00 a.m. Alarm. Snooze once. Coffee. Oatmeal.
5:40 a.m. Walk to pool (15 mins).
6:00–7:45 a.m. Swim practice.
8:00 a.m. Walk home. Eggs over greens w/feta. Hydrate.
9:00–11:00 a.m. Class.
11:15 a.m. Light lunch.
12:00–1:30 p.m. Weight training.
2:00–2:30 p.m. Bagel sandwich.
3:00 p.m. BART to Oakland.
3:30–6:00 p.m. Teach/coach Undercurrent swimmers.
6:00 p.m. Chicken skewers at Chinese spot.
6:20 p.m. BART to San Francisco.
7:00–10:30 p.m. Work will call at Warfield.
10:30–11:00 p.m. Watch end of show. Drinks.
11:00–11:45 p.m. Food with Shane and co.
12:00 a.m. BART to Berkeley.
1:00 a.m. Sleep.
This isn’t, of course, my daily routine, but such days aren’t uncommon. Even though my lightest day is grueling next to my former life as a nocturnal couch sloth, I’m nonetheless happy and optimistic, riding high. My greatest challenge is finding the time to eat since my food requirements are double if not triple what they were back when I did nothing and measured time out in cigarettes.
The tutoring and coaching drops off, as they do in the summer, so I soon fall behind on rent. Teri suggests I race in December at the Elite Pro-Am in Oklahoma meet, which offers cash prizes. I win the 100 free in a time of 42.65 and get second in the 50 with a 19.41. With the prize money, I pay my back rent.
After the meet I call Dave Durden and ask if I can join the men’s team at the Colorado Springs training camp. The training there pays off. At the Austin Grand Prix in mid-January 2012, my 50 free time slingshots me in the rankings to second-fastest American in that event. Olympic Trials are five months away. The media begins to buzz. And just like that, it is real and it is on.
Even when I amp up the training, I keep coaching in Oakland. It keeps me grounded. The best kids to coach are the pleasers—the ones who work hard, don’t complain, don’t quit. They’re usually girls. The hardest to deal with are the kids who don’t want to be there. Then there’s another category: the kids who do nothing in workout and then just fly in meets. What to do with them? I realize I was a crossbreed of the two: the kid who resents being there and the kid who cruises through practice but lights it up during races. The worst combo. Certainly not the kid who aims to please.
How much of this attitude has spilled out into the rest of my life? I think back on all the jobs I’ve half-assed or quit when things got hard or undesirable. Like Guitar Center: abandoning it without even giving notice. I could have met some great musicians and artists there, but instead I was indifferent, needlessly rebellious. Or the office job in New York that I stopped going to one day without even an e-mail or phone call. Just not giving a shit. So terrible.
It’s surprising how many people have welcomed me back with open arms this year. They’ve had no reason to. Just like the friends over the years who took me in, fed me, supported me . . . they had every reason to give up on me long ago. If I hadn’t gotten myself together when I did, how much tolerance would there have been for my irresponsibility and vagrancy?
It makes me ashamed. I owe so much. Time now to give back.
In Book IX of Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus recounts how he and his crew entered the cave of the Cyclops Polyphemus, seeking his hospitality. Polyphemus’s response was to snatch up two men, smash their heads against the rocky ground, and chow down on them, an act which is up there in the Top 10 list for Worst Host of All Time (along with the Red Wedding scene from Game of Thrones). As part of his escape plan, Odysseus plies Polyphemus with wine and tells him, “My name is Nobody. Nobody, my father, mother, and friends call me.” After Polyphemus passes out, Odysseus blinds him by driving a blazing sharpened olive branch into his eye. When the other Cyclopes rush over at the sound of his cries and ask if anyone has attacked him, Polyphemus responds: “Nobody, my friends, is trying to kill me by violence or treachery.” So the others shrug and leave.
This linguistic maneuvering is a classic Odyssean ruse, implausible as it sounds (a Cyclops’s strength of mind must be inversely proportional to the size of his eye). It takes the standard camouflage tactic and amps it up to a protean 2.0 version: evasion not through blending into the environment but through transformative identity-shifting. It also happens to be an escape tactic that Ervin had resorted to, whether consciously or not, as a way of slipping free from external pressures and attempts to pigeonhole him.
As a teenager he simply absorbed these pressures, lacking the pliancy to evade or the will to upend them. When heralded in 2000 as the first African American swimmer to make the Olympics, he had no way of responding except with stock answers. Dropping out of the sport a few years later was his prison break from the Cyclops’s cave: rejecting the primary identity that the world expected of him was an act of radical self-assertion. As with Odysseus’s adoption of the Nobody persona, Ervin more or less abandoned the name Anthony, the signifier for “Olympian Swimmer,” and became Tony,40 a more neutral name that gave him the invisible autonomy he desired. He purged swimming from his life, auctioning off the gold medal. For a period he even mistakenly believed that he had lost his silver, though it was in his parents’ possession all along. “His silver medal wasn’t lost,” Sherry says. “He was lost.” New friends only learned through others that he’d once been a champion swimmer, often months or years later. One sportswriter for the daily Santa Clarita Valley Signal tried in vain to track him down for an interview on his postswimming life. When he finally made contact through e-mail, he told Ervin he’d become his White Whale. “Don’t you know what happens to Ahab?” Anthony replied. He then quoted Dante’s Inferno: “Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate.” (Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.) 41
The Nobody wordplay stunt is only part of Odysseus’s plan. To escape the cave, which is sealed shut with a giant boulder, Odysseus lashes himself and his men under the Cyclops’s sheep. The next morning, when blind Polyphemus lets his herd out to pasture, running his hands over their wooly backs, he misses the men, who are hanging udder-like from their underbellies. The literal blindness of the one-eyed Polyphemus is a metaphor for his deeper blindness and tunnel vision—his inability to see or keep up with the fluid and chimerical adaptations of a boundary-crosser and chameleon like Odysseus.
Though Ervin sloughed off his swimming identity, he didn’t consciously resort to subterfuge like Odysseus. “I never lied about my swimming past,” he claims. “There just was never a reason for it to come up.” Unlike Odysseus, he didn’t have to lie. Since he didn’t conform to the conventional image of an athlete, he could live unrecognized in the open. It was less that he was Odyssean than that others were cyclopean—blind to the possibility that this tatted, chain-smoking, skinny, black-clad “shitty rock ’n’ roller,” to quote a friend, was also a former Olympic champion. Not that they had any reason to view him otherwise. His athletic past was irrelevant to his present self. If he ever felt like Ralph Ellison’s invisible man—one whose real nature others were unable or refused to see out of prejudice and preconception—it was while he was a swimmer, not after: “People who first knew me as ‘Anthony Ervin the Athlete’ could only see me from within that framework. Anything else I did was peripheral.”
Even his Wikipedia page was often meddled with, sabotaging any sober efforts to identify and describe him. I found some noteworthy edits among the endless Dead Wiki Scrolls of the Anthony Ervin page history. One was the February 11, 2008, addition at 06:31 of the phrase “and he is one long, hard, throbbing piece of wonderful,” followed by its swift deletion four minutes later. Another was the addition on February 3, 2011, of the sentence, “He currently has some unbreakable age group records,” which survived the Anthony Ervin page for almost two months, until an editor on April 1, perhaps putting in overtime and on April Fool’s alert, recognized the absurd conceit and purged the word unbreakable. But the gold goes to Anthony’s 2007 edit that he made himself, described as “nonsense” in the editor’s remarks; it stood as the official Wikipedia biography for Anthony Ervin for forty-eight hours:
Anthony Ervin
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Adrift in the ethereal plane for 7,777 years, Tony (as he is better known) shrugged and tore a hole into our reality. He was immediately attacked by 13 ninjas. When the first ninja met Tony’s eyes he simply exploded like a blood sausage. The other ninjas screamed and tore out their very eyeballs, vowing to never mess with him again. So the legend goes . . .
In his earthly existence, Tony enjoys swimming, sleeping, playing guitar, and singing. He is an Olympic champion in swimming and sleeping, but his musical abilities are second rate at best.
“Nonsense” as this may be, it’s in many ways more revealing than the standard script you might find on his bio page today; it’s a giant middle finger to the inflexible tenets of Standard Narrative—the orthodox account of Anthony Ervin, of records and championships and medals, of predictable biography, and above all of rote reality which, as the bio states, “Tony” shrugged off after 7,777 years of Odyssean drifting by tearing it open and welcoming in another dimension. It privileges fantasy and imagination, reconceiving his daily grind as mortal combat against faceless ninja killers. It’s the manifestation not of Anthony the athlete but of the adolescent imaginaire who sought escape from the regimentation of his home and swimming through fantasy books, where he could look through the eyes of heroes and villains while roaming amongst dragons, wizards, and gods.
Ervin left swimming because he needed to wander in the wilderness and explore other parts of himself. But now he was reversing the equation. He was returning to swimming, but without forfeiting other elements of his identity. He might never be a rock star, but he could still be a rock ’n’ roll swimmer profiled in Rolling Stone. Even the classics had a place in the sport at press conferences, where he could drop literary quotes. Sportswriter and co-owner of Ann Arbor’s Literati Bookstore Mike Gustafson was heartened by Ervin’s return to racing precisely because he felt Ervin was bringing this much-needed new artistry and identity to the sport: “I’m not sure why there’s not more of a fusion with sports and art. I get the sense when Anthony tweets out Shakespeare quotes before his race that it means more than beating the guy next to you. That’s such a black-and-white approach to competition.”
Though Odysseus escapes the Cyclops’s cave through deception, his departing statement is of revelation. As his companions frantically row away, he yells back, announcing himself as Odysseus of Ithaca. Not only does he endanger himself and his companions solely to reveal his identity, but he also later suffers for it because the Cyclops prays to his father Poseidon for troubles to rain down on him. Yet for Odysseus, whose name means “he who gives and receives pain,” the risk and suffering is worth it. Matters of honor, pride, and identity trumped all in Ancient Greece.
For years Anthony felt like he was boxed into a cave. In response he resorted to role-playing, name-changing, retreating into the shadows. But invisibility eventually proved too passive and self-destructive a tactic, and the time had come for assertion rather than evasion. His return to swimming on his own terms was his brazen declaration to the Cyclops over the water.
May 26, 2012, Willard Park, Berkeley
Jolly Roger grins down from up high. Mom bought me the kite after my undergrad commencement in 2010. She told me she wanted to get me a gift. We were walking past a kite shop in the Embarcadero at the time. So I chose this kite. A cartoony red and black pirate, with skull and crossbones.
That night after graduation I was drinking whiskey at an Irish bar with Dad. He’s always been smooth and easygoing, but that night he seemed torn up. There was something in his eyes and the cast of his face. I’d never seen him like that before. He told me about Vietnam, how it messed him up for years. It was the first time he’d talked to me about it. And it brought him down to earth for me: he’s just coping with things, doing his best. Both of my parents have tried to do their best with me. My life trajectory and mistakes are mine, not theirs.
I flew the kite that year on my birthday and the next year on my birthday and now this one. Not sure why, but it’s become a tradition. I’ve never flown it any other day. The kite makes me think of my parents. With Mom I once felt oppressively tethered to her. But now I feel that the string between us connects rather than confines. I am who I am because of her. And with Dad, I now feel his story and lineage extending out, tugging upon me from a distance. Like the kite, they connect me to something larger.
A mother and son approach me. She asks if her boy can try out the kite. I offer him the spool, but his eyes are wide, intimidated. The kite is too much for him alone. So I hold the spool for him. And he pulls on the string, feels the tug from the kite, high up in the sky, fluttering full and proud in the breeze. And he looks at his mother and grins.
In the Chinese zodiac, 2012 is the Year of the Dragon, considered the most potent of the twelve signs. Every sign rotates through five elements—metal, wood, water, fire, and earth—which means the same sign and element appear only every sixty years. 2012 happened to be the Year of the Water Dragon, a paradoxical merging of a fire creature with the water element, signaling a time of transformation and upheaval. It was an apt year for Olympic swimming, and a mythologically auspicious one for Ervin to return to the world stage.
When he made his 2000 Olympic bid, Anthony was a Tasmanian devil of rowdiness and tumult, a swimming savant whose self-awareness in water was equaled by his social artlessness; twelve years later, he had swung to the other side of the pendulum as an exemplar of discipline. Going into Olympic Trials, he cut back on work to focus on training and rehabilitation. He cleared his schedule, aside from one music show and one coaching gig per week. The founder of the Oakland Undercurrents swim program, Ben Sheppard, arranged for Anthony to run some swim clinics so he could make up the lost income.
The meet organizers at USA Swimming didn’t hold back for Olympic Trials. American pizzazz and excess was on full display in Omaha, with strobe lights swinging amidst the darkened arena and neon-pink lights and cascading green waterfalls of light and award ceremonies with gold medalists emerging godlike out of the floor on a mechanized elevating podium and company logos everywhere and announcers egging on the crowd to, “Come on, let’s make some NOISE!” and hissing ten-foot walls of fire blasting up off the deck after every record-breaking swim, emitting a heat that could be felt in the stands.
The first of Anthony’s two opportunities to make the team didn’t pan out: he failed to advance beyond semis in the 100 free. A boy collecting autographs stopped Anthony the next day on his way to the pool. “Are you fast?” the kid asked, holding his pen out. “Not yet,” was the reply. The boy nodded and lowered his pen. Anthony wasn’t trying to evade an autograph. He’d merely given an honest answer, at least by his own estimation.
Had that boy asked him a few days later, he would have gotten an autograph. Anthony not only won prelims but also semifinals with a personal best time by two-tenths of a second. He was seeded first going into the final. But, of course, nothing is certain in the 50.
The Anthony Ervin entourage at semifinals and finals of the 50 free included, among others, Lars Merseburg, Casey Barrett, and Elliot Ptasnik, who was sporting a black shirt he’d made for the occasion that in hot pink read, TONY ERVIN IS ROCK AND ROLL. Anthony’s parents were sitting right below us.
There’s plenty to be nervous about in a 50 free race, especially in an Olympic Trials final: there’s little to no margin for error. A bad start, a bad breakout, a bad finish, and your gold medal can turn into no medal. Compound this with the injustice that, despite year-round competitions and world circuits and Grand Prix, swimming only exists to the nonswimmer public once every four years. Being sick or injured or just off during Trials or Olympics can make the difference between international acclaim, sponsorships, and a book deal on one hand, and history’s memory hole on the other. Compare swimmers to, say, high-ranking tennis players, who get four Grand Slams per year in which to vie for glory and who, within each match, have dozens of games and hundreds of points in which to recover from their errors. Not so with a swimmer, and even less so with a sprinter. Screw up once and you may well be screwed for good. And it’s not as if those who do come out on top are set for life. Try to imagine a scenario where a top NBA player like Kobe Bryant takes a job teaching basketball for thirty dollars an hour after leaving the sport; yet I know several swimmers of comparable achievement who have done exactly that.
If you’re a fervent fan, this period immediately before the race begins is when your stress levels are in the red zone: the point when you’re trying desperately to convince yourself that none of this really matters, not next to life, love, family, etc., that it’s just a damn race, just one of millions of races that have taken place and will go on taking place until the end of the human species, that no matter what happens the sun will still be there tomorrow. But though you know these things to be true, they don’t feel true: the hairs on your arms are sticking straight up and your heart is throbbing from somewhere inside your Adam’s apple. It may all be irrational, just as rooting for your home team may be irrational, but there’s an invigorating activation of glands and caveman fibers inside your body in these moments. Normally squelched by antiseptic day-to-day life, these primal howling-at-the-moon aspects of our being can now emerge. You’d be hard pressed to find such a mass display of human passion in one place outside war and genocide. Screaming and howling in public is generally frowned upon, so sports offer us a socially sanctioned place where we can all do it together without killing each other.
We empathize with athletes for the pressure they face before important races, but spectators are an ignored, invisibly suffering bunch (except when fan-suffering is exploited to boost TV ratings, like in the World Cup, where cameramen revel in the ironic pathos of fans with colorful painted faces who look like they’ve just been told their dog is dead). There’s more jitters and overactive bladder activity in the stands than behind the blocks, where autopilot mode and prerace routines help keep nerves at bay.
Every hyperstressed spectator copes with these tensions differently. Some turn to trash talking, others to prayer, while still others, perhaps lacking faith and/or feeling hostility, seek alcohol’s balm. But booze can also backfire, as it did for Elliot twenty minutes earlier when, blinded by nerves and a beer-fueled craze, he threw a fist pump and yelled out, “YEAH, Coach Troy!” to the head Olympic coach Gregg Troy after his Florida Gators swimmer Ryan Lochte touched third in the 100 fly. It was a genuine gesture on Elliot’s part because it was a personal best time for Lochte, but it was also obviously, at least to those of us unfortified by four pints in one hour, a disappointing finish: to qualify for the Olympics in an individual event you must place first or second, so to come in third is to be first loser. Elliot’s shout-out came a split second after the mustachioed Troy—who in heated moments looks like a cross between Gary Oldman in his more dynamic personas and Super Mario after eating the fire flower—cried out, “Damnit!” while slamming his rolled-up heat sheet against the balcony rail. The brief stormy glance he then cast back in our direction instantly sobered Elliot, the alcohol suddenly operating on him as the depressant it really was.
The time had come. The 50 free Olympic Trials final. Silence, then: “Take your mark.” The starting signal went off and the bleachers erupted. Anthony was behind off the start, as expected, but gaining every meter. Casey was the first to call it. “Yes!” And then we all saw it too and jumped to our feet, roaring, as Anthony closed in on the leaders. “Yes, yes, come on, yes! Come ON! YES!!”
He pulled ahead in the final meters, charging into the wall, head down. He didn’t win—he was 1/100th of a second behind Cullen Jones—but the order was irrelevant: top two is all that matters at Trials. He’d made the team, and with another personal best time: 21.60! It was hard to believe that the same guy who just a few years ago said he couldn’t imagine even swimming a thousand yards freestyle, and who had last qualified for the Olympic team a dozen years earlier, would again be an Olympian.
During the ceremony, it’s Gary Hall Jr., of all people, who drapes the medal around my neck. Then I make my way down the deck, giving high-fives, almost walking past emcee Summer Sanders, who pulls me back for the postceremony interview.
I’m buzzing with energy, barely able to contain myself. After a few questions, I grab the microphone out of Summer’s hand. “You know,” I say, turning to the audience, “it’s been an incredible journey, but the journey continues because I’m going to Londooooooon.” As the crowd roars, I extend my arm straight out by my head and drop the microphone, keeping my arm extended and fingers spread apart for dramatic flair until after the mic hits the deck. Cullen Jones, who is waiting nearby for his interview, throws his head back in laughter. Summer Sanders, meanwhile, just stands there, hands out and palms up in a flabbergasted WTF? pose. I raise up both arms, prompting a roar from the delighted audience, and take off on a celebratory run down the deck, slapping hands with spectators as I jog by them.
_________________
40. His mother detests the diminutive “Tony,” which she associates with a guy with a handlebar mustache shouting in a ghetto Bronx accent from a flophouse window. (Anthony says friends would call home looking for “Tony,” and his mother would reply, “No Tony lives here,” and hang up.) Hence, in her presence I only refer to him by the maternally permissible Anthony. That’s also why I only use “Anthony” in this book. There are times for risk-taking and times for thinking of one’s neck. Return to text
41. It should be obvious by now that Ervin has a quixotic penchant for the dramatic and for seeing giants in windmills. Return to text