9.

In a Dark Pool

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

—Shakespeare, Henry IV

I will speak no more

of my feelings beneath.

—Alice in Chains, “Down in a Hole”

Upon his return to Berkeley, the Olympic 50 free champion was broke and homeless. Ervin turned down the $83,000 eligible to him in performance bonuses if he turned professional, opting instead to remain a collegiate swimmer. This was partly because of his devotion to his college team and partly because he was still unsure of swimming’s importance to him. His friends and teammates let him stay on their couches while he found housing.

The Olympics had taken place in early fall, so Ervin had already missed several weeks of school. The university waived the eligibility requirements, allowing him to take the semester off. He made few practices. One housemate, Matt Macedo, remembers once going to bed while Ervin was playing video games and then waking up for morning practice six hours later only to see him still on the couch, fixed in front of the screen. Ervin lived on a shoestring budget, eating spaghetti almost every night, but his partying didn’t suffer. “I never paid for any of it,” he recalls. “People gave me all the alcohol and weed I wanted. Everyone wants to get drunk and stoned with an Olympian.”

The house was notorious on the block. At one point the neighbors signed a petition to have its residents evicted. The swimmers consequently toned down their parties, but the place could still degenerate into an animal house when there was no morning practice the following day. And many house traditions still stood postpetition, like the partytime law that anyone skunked at foosball had to run around the block naked (women were permitted panties, but no bra). As if to warn against foosball arrogance, posted on the wall was a photo collage of various men and women sprinting down Ward Street in various states of undress.²⁶

In the house was a musty old plaid recliner that the housemates wanted to get rid of but didn’t know how. One late night, a few of the guys hit upon a theatrical strategy. As the resident couch surfer at the time, Ervin was among them. They pocketed a lighter, picked up the recliner, and started carrying it down the street.

A car drives by as we lug the recliner down Ward Street but the driver doesn’t seem to notice. The street’s dead. There’s no one in sight when we get to Ward and Fulton so we go for it. We drop it in the middle of the intersection and put the lighter underneath the footrest. The fabric catches fast. We sprint back down Ward to the house. After a few minutes we step out again and stroll back up to the intersection. The recliner is ablaze. Others have gathered to watch. We stand off to the side, acting as shocked and confused as the others are. Pretty soon the whole recliner’s a giant fireball in the middle of the intersection.

The smoke must be visible a mile away. The flames are leaping up and everyone gathered around is aglow and orange like this is some weird urban campfire. Soon the fire truck comes careening in with lights going and sirens blaring. Since the recliner’s in the middle of the road and there’s no wind or risk of the fire spreading, the firemen just let it burn down. They kick back and lean against the fire truck and watch. Only once the flames have consumed the recliner down to its smoldering steel frame do they spray it with that white powdery crap. And then we just stroll away from that charred skeleton, thinking, Holy shit, we actually got away with this . . .

A few months later Ervin moved into another swim house on Parker Street. He could only afford the basement room. It was small and dark, with a lone tiny window. It also had an ant infestation problem so he sometimes woke up covered in ants, but at least it was a room of his own. He now had a girlfriend, K, a dancer whom he’d met upon returning from Australia. His first serious partner, she served as a stabilizing force, possibly standing in in some abstract sense for his mother, who’d always kept him in line and who no longer played a central role in his daily life. Despite the partying, he started making more practices. He covered his basement walls with posters of Muhammad Ali and Rocky to motivate him to get to the pool.

Though Ervin aced tests through midterms, he stopped going to class once swim season got into swing. As a result, he failed several courses, burning through his remaining AP units from high school to remain eligible. But he was at a high point in the pool. At the NCAAs in March, the sophomore Ervin won the 100-meter free, tying Matt Biondi’s NCAA and American record time of 41.80, which had stood for fourteen years. But it wouldn’t be until World Championships in Fukuoka, Japan, when Ervin would swim what he considers the greatest victory of his career.

In preparation for World Champs, Ervin remained at Cal to train. To his surprise, his main college adversary, the South African sprint freestyler Roland Schoeman, flew to California and trained with him over the summer. Schoeman had been the heavy favorite to win NCAAs the previous year in the 50 and 100, but came a close second to Ervin in both. In the 50 free prelims, Schoeman had tied Mark Foster’s short-course meters world record; after his finals swim of 21.22 he would have been the sole world record holder had Ervin not out-touched him by 1/100th of a second, denying him both the NCAA title and world record. At the time, Schoeman never spoke to Ervin or congratulated him. But upon arriving in Berkeley he confessed to Ervin his earlier resentment and jealousy, adding he had gotten past those feelings and come around to respect him. “I admired this coming clean,” Ervin recalls. “I wished I could have had that kind of strength.” By mid-July, when they traveled to Fukuoka, Japan, for World Champs, they had become solid friends. Schoeman and Ervin’s rivalry rarely gets press but its duration and competitiveness is remarkable. In 2000 at the NCAA championship finals in the 50 free, only 1/100th of a second separated them. And a dozen years later, in the London Olympics 50 free final, 2/100ths separated them. In those two major competition finals over twelve years, that’s a total of 3/100ths of a second, or 1/10th the duration of an eye blink. That’s a rivalry.

Earlier that summer Ervin had begun meditating at a Zen temple, which aided him in his races. The meditation was an extension and progression of what he’d learned in Phoenix from Dr. Sommer on the advantages of maintaining focus before races. On the first day of the meet, Ervin set a championship record in the semis of the 50 free. The next night, in the 50 finals, he again beat Pieter van den Hoogenband to take gold. His summer training partner, Roland Schoeman, tied for third, taking his first international medal.

But the most exciting race was the 100 free. Going into finals Ervin was seeded fifth behind the favorites: the event’s world record holder Hoogenband and Ian Thorpe, the Australian who the previous year at the Olympics came back in the 4x100 free relay to deprive the US men of gold for the first time in history. Before the race Ervin told his coach that he felt the only way he could win was by going out hard, even if it meant dying in the final meters. Bottom agreed.

At the start Ervin immediately pulled half a body length ahead of the field. When his feet hit the wall at the 50-meter mark, the clock read 22.60. It was an absurdly fast split. Head SwimMac Carolina Coach David Marsh remembers the race: “You’d never seen a guy throw himself out in the 100-meter freestyle like [Ervin] would. He would put himself all out there for a 75 like a great track athlete would for a 400-meter race. And he would allow himself to die, just dieeee. And yet he’d touch the wall [first], and [that] year was the world champion by doing that. He got so far ahead, nobody could catch him.”

But no one knew Ervin had won that race when he finished. After he and Pieter van den Hoogenband lunged in unison at the wall and looked at the timeboard, there was no number beside ERVIN. Next to HOOGENBAND was a 1. The Dutchman roared and pumped his arms. Ervin stared at the scoreboard, puzzled. From the deck Mike Bottom was yelling that he’d won, that the timeboard was wrong. After Ervin climbed out, the screen showed the slow-motion replay, in which Ervin seemed to out-touch Hoogenband. But only as Ervin was walking down the deck, cap and goggles in hand, was the glitch resolved. A roar went up in the stadium, and he glanced over at the scoreboard and threw his arms up. He had won with a time of 48.33, the fastest time in the world that year and a new American record, ousting Biondi’s thirteen-year-old mark.

That night Ervin tried calling K to tell her about the race—his greatest victory yet because it had been so unexpected. No answer. It wasn’t the first time he’d been unable to reach her since arriving in Japan. But this time doubt gnawed at him. He called again and again. Her roommate answered once, but said she hadn’t seen K. He called others but no one knew where she was. Was she okay? Was she seeing someone else? The thrill of victory dissipated as worry set in, and he slept fitfully. Throughout the following day he kept calling. Suspicions crowded him as he obsessed over the possibility of her infidelity.

His mind was still in disarray that night when he anchored the 4x100 medley relay. In the final meters, Ian Thorpe closed in and out-touched him. It was a demoralizing end to his swims. And it turned out to be far worse even than silver. After climbing out, Ervin learned he had left the blocks prematurely, disqualifying the relay.

Any high from his earlier victories evaporated. He had failed his relay members and the team. And he was convinced K had abandoned, maybe even betrayed, him. He blamed her for the disqualification, resented her for her inaccessibility. He consulted with his roommate, who agreed she’d probably cheated on him, which further derailed him. Yet to the outside world he was still a stud and celebrity. The championships had been widely televised in Fukuoka and the winner of the 50 and 100 was a familiar face everywhere. One swimmer likened it to Beatlemania whenever Ervin stepped out.

As a twenty-year-old, he had already been an Olympic champion, world record holder, multiple world champion, and multiple NCAA champion. He was at the peak of his fame. And he was at a new low.

“Dude, everybody in this bar is looking at you,” Bart tells me. It’s true, they are. It’s weird, I’ve never felt so many eyes on me before. “We’re taking off,” he says. “You coming?”

“Hold on,” I say. I scan the bar for the hottest girl. They’re all staring at me. I crook my forefinger at one and she comes. I can’t believe that actually worked. I ask her if she speaks any English. “Little,” she replies.

Chad and Bart are shaking their heads, laughing. “Looks like you’ll be just fine,” they say and leave.

We’re not getting far in conversation. Her friend comes over, and she speaks a bit more English. But eventually the friend wants to leave. “So what do we do?” I say to the first girl. And then she just grabs me and kisses me. A little later she pulls me toward the door.

It’s sunrise when I leave her place. On the way out she asks if I remember her name. I butcher the pronunciation beyond recognition. She smiles sadly and corrects me. I feel terrible. Only when I get back to the hotel does what I’ve done really sink in. I cheated on my girlfriend. I slept with another girl. Me, a cheater. I never thought I’d be that guy. And here I’ve been furious at K for maybe doing exactly what I just did. What a hypocrite. What a scumbag.

The next night we all go to a swimmer’s party. I get bored fast because everybody is hitting on swimmer girls and I have no interest. I leave early. As I enter the hotel, the front desk girl is walking in the opposite direction. She just got out of work. I ask if she wants to grab a drink with me at a nearby bar. A few drinks later and I’m asking her if she wants to come up to my room. She’s afraid she’ll be fired, but I convince her it’ll be fine.

Cheat once and it’s easy to repeat. The injury is done. It’s just piling more damage onto damage. And with enough drinks you can push aside the memory and postpone the guilt.

On the flight back to LA I pop a bunch of Ambiens and get loaded on gin-and-tonics. I hang out with a couple of teammates in the flight attendant alcove where the booze is stocked. After a while they kick us out and we move on to the next alcove and drink there until eventually no one will serve us anywhere on the plane. I reel back to my seat, seeing double.

I wake up hazy, still drunk. As we disembark I’m told I passed out during the flight on the passenger beside me. Apparently I was like dead weight on her. One of the coaches even came over and started slapping me in the face to wake me up, but I was out cold.

After baggage claim, press is waiting. They swarm me with cameras and microphones and questions. I’m groggy, nauseous, half-drunk, half-hungover. I mumble something to them. Who knows what.

Some hero I am.

Upon return to California, Ervin was again approached with an offer to turn pro, which he again rejected. But due to a change in eligibility rules, he was allowed to pocket the prize money from World Champs, which he recollects amounting to “a crisp $60K.” The money was like manna, but it didn’t alleviate his guilt over those two nights in Japan. He tried to work things out with K, and even flew to meet her in Hawaii, where she was studying. But she could smell the guilt on him, and she kept asking if he’d been unfaithful. He denied it. She in turn claimed she’d been inaccessible while he was in Japan because of a demanding school project. There was no resolution for either of them. It was a cheerless trip. He went skydiving alone because she didn’t want to join him. Same with windsurfing. The winds were strong and he couldn’t get the sail up: “Failure after failure. That’s all I remember.”

Back in California, Anthony and K began fighting. “I was so guilty and busted up about Japan that I was toxic,” he recalls. “I wasn’t good to her.” Eventually they broke up.

Bart Kizierowski remembers talking to Ervin in Miami Beach after Gary Hall’s wedding in December 2001. “I got the sense he was depressed and lost,” Bart says. “Disappointment with success and what comes with it.”

Things kept getting worse. Ervin began drinking aggressively, sometimes to the point of blacking out. The worst incident took place at a bar in Walnut Creek, California. One of his teammates worked as a barback there, so he was able to drink despite being underage. One night he randomly ran into K’s sister. Even that encounter was enough to trigger memories, and he started drinking hard. The last thing he remembers is guzzling a drink. His next memory is of regaining consciousness in a hospital.

I’m on a stretcher, being pushed down a hallway. The fluorescent ceiling lights are painfully bright. My disorientation gives way to panic.

“Where am I? Where am I?!”

“In a hospital,” replies a voice. “Just calm down. You’ve hurt yourself. You need stitches.”

I look over. The person talking to me is a cop.

“What the hell is going on?” I cry. “Get me the fuck out of here!”

I’m yelling, freaking out, as they roll me down the hallway. The cop is hissing at me to pipe down. People we pass are looking over at me. I’m just hollering blindly.

After I get stitches the cop cuffs me, puts me in his patrol car, and drives me to jail. I still don’t know what’s happened. All the cop tells me is that I fell on my face and split my chin open. It’s around two a.m. First I’m taken to a processing area. My arms are uncomfortably cuffed behind my back, so I step my feet back through the cuffs to bring my arms in front of me.

“Hey, what you doing!” a cop snaps.

I climb back through them again, but he keeps harassing me. I try to stay calm.

“Can I make a phone call?” I ask.

“Don’t worry, you’ll get your call later,” he says.

My frustration gets the best of me. “Do you know who I am?” I say.

“Who?”

And I tell him, and then he just starts laughing. I’m embarrassed for even trying to play that card. I keep my mouth shut after that.

They lead me into the drunk tank. It’s a big holding cell with benches against every wall. In the middle of the room, a thin Scandinavian-looking guy in fancy form-fitting clothing is sleeping in a fetal position on the floor. He’s using his shoe as a pillow.

I take a seat. Across the room is some white guy in bad shape. A junkie maybe. He’s wearing a hospital bracelet and covered in scabs. He’s picking at one of them. Next to me is a guy in super-baggy clothing, sitting more on his underwear than on his jeans. He motions to the guy in scabs and tells me to keep my distance because that guy’s got HIV. Then he starts going on about how he’s been unjustly thrown into prison.

“Man, this bitch called the cops and had me thrown in here just ’cause she be mad at me. Shiiiiit, they don’t question her side of the story. ’Course not. They just cart my black ass off to jail.”

He keeps going on and won’t shut up about it. Everyone else is glum and withdrawn. I touch my lips and they’re numb. I must still be drunk. I try to remember what happened at the bar but it’s all a blank.

Only hours later do I get my phone call. I call Jackie and tell him I don’t know when they’re letting me out. He doesn’t seem to know what to do, but I ask him not to tell Mom. Then they escort me back to the drunk tank.

While I’m held in there other people are brought in and then released. The well-dressed European guy who slept on his shoe wakes up and brushes himself off. Eventually he’s let out too.

My hangover grows fangs as time passes. Only by looking at the right angle through the sole narrow window, which is set in the door, can I see a clock. Time slows to a crawl, reduced to the uniform buzzing of the fluorescent lights overhead. There are about a dozen other guys in with me at one point and then the number tapers off. I keep thinking about that guy picking his scabs on the bench, about how I have fresh wounds. I sit upright the entire time. I doze off like that on occasion but it’s nothing resembling sleep.

The following morning they let me out. I’ve been in there for over twenty-four hours. And who’s there waiting for me but K and her mother. K and her mother . . .

I have no idea how K found out or why she came, and with her mother of all people. All I know is this is one of the most shameful moments of my life.

Ervin still doesn’t know exactly what happened at the bar that night. Though his coach suspected someone spiked his drink with a roofie (“He was a hero to a lot of people and someone wanted to knock him down”), Bottom still made Ervin sign a contract pledging to stop drinking. The abstinence lasted a week or two.

After the jail incident, Ervin and K briefly got back together, although it was really just a pastiche of fights, breakups, and makeups. That fall, after an especially bad breakup, he wrote her a nasty letter. He later apologized, but it was too late. She told him she could no longer deal with his lifestyle and behavior. Ervin was devastated. He even approached her parents in hopes of reaching her through them. They were kind, but the message was clear: K didn’t want to see him. “The reality,” Ervin now says, “is that I didn’t deserve her.”

First experiences in love are potent: Eros’s first arrow deposits a festering arrowhead, and the wound never heals well. Ervin dealt with the breakup by drowning himself in drinking and womanizing. Through the rest of the fall and into spring he went on a rampage: “I was reacting from being a scorned, broken-hearted lover and began treating women as objects for me to destroy at will,” he says. Only in retrospect does he recognize how his psychology was at play. “Essentially, I was trying to deaden the sensation of physical intimacy, which was tied up for me with emotions. And I wanted those emotions to go away.”

Warding off sorrow with emotionless sex may be a short-term solution, but as with binge drinking, sickness follows. The aftermath was particularly acute for Ervin, whose sense of identity has always been bound up, for better or worse, with the women in his life. In childhood that was his mother; in adulthood, his girlfriends. “Women totally alter my conception of self,” he says. “When I was in a relationship with K, I saw myself in context of being part of a whole.” The random parade of females that followed was corrosive: “There was a stream of faces that didn’t make any sense to the point that I couldn’t even recognize myself in a significant other.”

Even though these faces were willing accomplices to his promiscuity, his behavior was shameful to him. His disgust with any woman who cheated on her boyfriend with him stemmed from his own self-loathing: “I find that horrible because I’ve cheated myself. So I’d treat her and think of her as I’d think of myself, like a piece of garbage.” In retrospect, the casual sex now seems “repugnant” to him. “Not that I don’t believe it’s a livable lifestyle,” he adds. “It’s just not for me. I can’t handle it.” That said, the whole Ervin-as-unscrupulous-Lothario perspective may be as much a construct of his fingernail-chewing conscience than anything else. It’s just that, for those who aren’t innate libertines, any licentiousness can feel like a monstrous moral straying.

Just as his relationship with K had stabilized him, the random hookups only further destabilized him. His sense of self, already confused by the media attention on his race, was further eroded and thrown into question. He was buying into all the hype that he was a talented slacker, and he started missing even more classes and workouts. He now found himself playing out the stereotype of the gold medalist party animal, the champion jock playboy, the shallow star athlete.

In short, he was living a giant, hollow cliché, or more like a whole passage of them.

It goes without saying that time heals all wounds, even a dagger in the heart. To be honest, I know there are other fish in the sea, and when one door closes another opens. But you know what they say: once bitten, twice shy.

K may have an axe to grind with me but it still cuts to the quick that she won’t let sleeping dogs lie and let us take out a new lease on life. I’m no knight in shining armor or blessing in disguise, but rest assured I can turn over a new leaf after our trial by fire. And let’s set the record straight and call a spade a spade: it takes two to tango. She’s not exactly pure as the driven snow herself. Takes one to know one. She left me out in the cold during my moment in the sun in Japan when I was literally dying to talk to her. Mark my words, K, to err is human, to forgive divine. To add insult to injury, she’s now avoiding me like the plague even though every fiber of my being is basically chomping at the bit to lay eyes on her. At the end of the day, I’m not asking for red carpet treatment or seventh heaven.

The fact of the matter is, I should stop rubbing salt in old wounds and go with the flow. I may not give 110 percent in training or be the best thing to grace earth since sliced bread, but to be fair, at this moment in time, I’m the big cheese, the real McCoy for all intents and purposes. I’ve even got money to burn. It’s my moment of glory. So carpe diem, grab the bull by the horns, full steam ahead! Make hay while the sun shines! Let the good times roll!

Snowball’s chance in hell of that . . . I’m skating on thin ice. Life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. The naked truth is, I’m down in the dumps and there’s no light at the end of the tunnel. Just a stranger in a strange land, weathering out the storm. No rest for the weary.

Oh, cry me a river . . . Pass the bottle, it’s high time to tie one on. Trust me, hair of the dog is just what the doctor ordered.

I should keep my eyes peeled for any handwriting on the wall, not that I’d make heads or tails of it. I’m not being funny or anything, but it’s all Greek to me.

Clichés aside, after the breakup Ervin started smoking cigarettes, the one vice anathema to swimmers, who rely on powerful lungs the way boxers rely on fast feet. He previously smoked on occasion at parties but he was now smoking a few cigarettes a day when sober. In March 2002, during his taper for the NCAA championships, he briefly quit smoking and took up dipping instead. Even with the tobacco handicap, he swam well at NCAAs, winning the 100 free in American record time and getting second in the 50, a mere .02 seconds behind Roland Schoeman.

Later that spring Ervin moved into a new apartment, which he shared with a roommate. They soon endured an infestation of green flies, which swarmed the apartment for about a week. No matter how much two-sided tape they stuck on the walls and windows, the shiny, metallic flies kept returning. The infestation eventually tailed off and disappeared. But it wasn’t until the following year, when Ervin moved out, that he discovered its cause. Upon moving his bed, he found dried vomit caked on the wall and floor. He must have rolled over in his sleep one night and puked against the wall. “So dark and disgusting that something like that could even happen,” he says. “And that I wouldn’t even notice.”

He knew his excessive social drinking needed to stop, so he finally put an end to it. But his remedy was to replace it with solo day drinking. He started putting back a 40 of malt liquor each day. At night he’d smoke weed and play the first-person shooter game Counter-Strike. His appetite left and he was losing weight. His motivation to train withered. His coach tried various tactics to revive his enjoyment of water, once even asking him to do nothing during practice but sit on the lip of the pool and splash his feet in the water like a child.

It would make a slick script if Bottom’s strategy had tapped into Ervin’s initial encounter with water at his childhood Canoga Park pool and rekindled his fascination with it. But life rejects tidy narratives. Ervin soon stopped even trying to wake for practice. And when he did, he would lie in bed in a stupor, staring listlessly at the walls or ceiling. A lethargic gloom settled upon him. At times the murk would lift but these windows of relief grew briefer and less frequent. He moved about his apartment in a torpor and spent long periods immobile, either playing video games or staring off blankly.

As he sank into despondency, he stopped drinking altogether. The alcohol had served to numb the unhappiness and he no longer wanted that balm. “You start to love your own misery and the loss of self-esteem,” he says. “You can get high on your own melancholy.” He returned to the grunge music of his high school years, this time soaking in the angst-ridden lyrics of bands like Smashing Pumpkins, Alice in Chains, Nirvana, and Soundgarden: “It’s like I romanticized feeling bad. Like I was pouring it all over myself, basting myself in it. It’s sick.” Though he lay off booze, he continued smoking marijuana. Without the stupefying effect of alcohol, the THC threw his already unsettled mind into overdrive. Even under paralysis of ennui, he often found himself ambushed by feverish inner monologues. In this disorderly agitation of the brain, a deluge of questions and anxieties crowded him without resolution or relief.

Such misery. And no end to it. I could ride it out if only I could see a way out. But this fog of grief won’t lift. I’m trapped in it. I just keep on screwing up and hurting people. I had such a good thing going with K last year and I threw it all away because I was too insecure to give her space. I cheated, I lied.

And then all this hoopla and fame. I’ve been built up into someone I’m not. What would I have without swimming? Nothing. I’m worthless for anything else. All I have is this persona as talented slacker. I don’t even believe in it and yet I’ve become it. That’s me. The black spokesman who’s white. The Olympic hero who’s a fuck-up. I’m a zero. I don’t want any of it anymore, none of it. This all belongs to someone else’s life, not mine.

Nobody understands, and when I try to talk about it I just get flip answers or uncomprehending looks as if to say, Why are you lying around, or, Why don’t you get up and go to swim practice, or, Why don’t you just get out and do things and grab life while you can and suck out its marrow, and I want to tell them, Because I feel ill, damnit, can’t any of you understand that, can’t you just leave me alone, just let me be bedridden? I may not be spitting up snot or shitting water but I’m sure running a fever.

I just want to hit reset like I hoped would happen a few days ago when I had that allergy or whatever it was that caused the nosebleed and I just sat down on the bathroom floor letting the blood run and it poured all over me and on the tiles and I wondered if I could just bleed to death like that but of course it stopped on its own, not like if I slit my wrist, that would work, but how messy and violent, I wouldn’t want that, what’s the purpose of all this anyway, why don’t I just end it all, what if I do, what would happen, maybe I’d reincarnate or maybe I’d meet a god who would give me some answers or maybe I’d just start over, I mean worst-case scenario the universe would cease to exist and so would my miserable life which is basically just a huge pile of rotting garbage so good riddance anyway, I just don’t see the point of any of it anymore, I mean if you just look at it with a cool mathematical mind it makes perfect logical sense to take the next step because if there’s a god I can get some answers and if the hell and brimstone preachers are right and I go to hell for the sin of suicide then I don’t carebecause I’m already in hell and if I just reincarnate with no memory of the previous life then great I’ve succeeded and if there’s nothing at all well that’s the worst option that’s what scares me the most the possibility of extinction of nothingness but even that I’m prepared for because all this here is so god awful terrible that at least it will all be over at least it will end please just make it end make it end make it end make it end make it end makeitfuckingend.

 

This must end.

Any attempt by those in the grips of depression to describe their desolation usually comes across to the comfortably healthy as maudlin and indulgent. As a result, the suffering feels intolerably private and incommunicable, futile to convey. Nevertheless, writers have tried. Ishmael tells us in Moby-Dick that he takes to sea whenever he finds himself “growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul.” Dante opens his Inferno by telling us that midway through his life he lost his way in a dark wood. Graham Greene, who in his youth had a penchant for Russian Roulette, referred to his misery as a little worm in him that sometimes “starts wriggling.” Sylvia Plath also invoked an animal metaphor to describe her anguish: “As if a great muscular owl were sitting on my chest, its talons clenching and constricting my heart.”

Poets are among the most susceptible groups to the ravages of mood disorders. And poetry, with its power to rewire meaning and thwart the routine limits of language, is ideal for conveying the smothering darkness and desperation of depression. “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,” Emily Dickinson wrote. “And Mourners to and fro / Kept treading—treading . . . / And then I heard them lift a Box / And creak across my Soul / With those same Boots of Lead, again, / Then Space—began to toll.” Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote of this anguish in his so-called Terrible Sonnets, with first lines like, “I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day,” and, “No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief.” Ervin wouldn’t encounter Hopkins’s poetry until much later in life, but when he did it resonated with him, conjuring up that time in his life when he had lost his way in a dark pool.

* * *

When viewed from outside, Ervin’s life didn’t seem all too bad. He had a full scholarship at a top school, he was exalted around the world for his prowess in the pool, and he had a network of friends and teammates. But depression often descends without apparent cause and can transform a benign world into a malignant tumor. The source of the distress often remains obscured. This is why the question “But why are you so upset?” can be so irritating to the afflicted: to even pose the question is to miss the point. They’re upset; the rest is a fool’s errand. The writer William Styron, who recounted his spiral descent into suicidal depression, described the acute sufferer as in a “state of unrealistic hopelessness, torn by exaggerated ills and fatal threats that bear no resemblance to actuality.”

That’s not to say there were no external troubles in Ervin’s life. His new roommate had on the sly started dating a girl whom Ervin had just broken up with. She would constantly be over at their apartment, allegedly as his roommate’s friend, even though Ervin knew they were secretly having a relationship. While for most people this might be a source of resentment, for Ervin it just seemed an inescapable nightmare, yet another lie and deception, even if not his own, to compound upon others. He had never before sought out professional help so there was no diagnosis of depression. But the diagnostic symptoms were all there: a depressed mood, a lack of interest in pleasure, weight loss, a sense of worthlessness, suicidal thoughts, and an obsession with death.

Shortly after the 2000 Olympics Ervin had stopped taking his Tourette’s medication. His symptoms had been decreasing and he found he could alleviate them with marijuana. But though he no longer took clonidine, he still possessed a canister of pills. At regular doses clonidine lowers blood pressure. At higher levels, it can lead to respiratory depression, hallucinations, apnea, cardiac conduction defects, and comas.

For so many years he had relied on those pills to calm an excited nervous system. And now, after a week of deliberation, he decided to turn to them for relief one final time.

I empty out the pills into my palm. There are thirty-three. The most I’ve ever taken is two. I stare at them for a while. Then I swallow them all with water.

I sit on the bed in a lotus position. I shut my eyes and just start to breathe in and out deeply.

I hear the front door and I open my eyes. I remain in lotus.

The door to my room is open and my roommate glances in. He’s with a friend.

“Hey, man,” he says, “how’s it going? Just came back to grab something.” While he goes to get it, his friend waits by my door.

“I just popped a handful of pills,” I tell him.

“Whoa, man, that’s crazy,” he says.

Then they leave the apartment.

I close my eyes again and return my attention to my breathing and to stilling my mind. There’s no need for thought anymore. Soon it will all end and I will get answers.

A blanket of heaviness starts to press down on me. As it does, an intense fear grips me that I’ve made a terrible, terrible mistake. I open my eyes. My vision is clouding over.

I don’t want to die.

I panic and shove my fingers down my throat. Blackness closes in on the periphery of my vision. I retch but nothing comes up.

Then, darkness.

 

_________________

26.  The first night Matt Macedo met his now-wife he skunked her and she ran. One of the finer how-did-you-two-first-meet stories. Return to text