Epilogue
Everything in moderation, including moderation.
—Oscar Wilde
For a year now Ervin had been refuting the image of the dissolute, disobedient, slacker teenager by eschewing cigarettes and recreational drugs, attending practices, working hard, eating well, and foregoing nocturnality. He had become an athletic paragon of the Apollonian ideal—focused, orderly, disciplined. As a result it rocketed him back into the international spotlight and made him a media sweetheart as the “reformed bad boy,” which in a Manichaean society like the US is the media ideal: now that the gelding knife of redemption has done its task, all the juicy naughty bits can be served up without tarnishing the golden image. But with Ervin’s final race over, he was confronted with a simple question: what’s the point of temperance and discipline once their purpose has passed? With Apollo’s duties now over, Dionysus was stepping in.
As soon as their events are over, many Olympians proceed to do the polar opposite of everything that got them there, and with equal energy and commitment. It’s like the confined high school kid off on a tear at college orientation—same story except amped up and involving individuals way more experienced with their bodies. Newton’s third law of motion plays out in all sorts of interesting ways at the Olympics, especially when the equal and opposite reaction happens all at once and involves thousands of rested, tapered, and toned young adults in the best physical shape of their lives. One needs only a rudimentary knowledge of physics and physiology to grasp just how and why the Olympic Village transforms as the Games progress from a squeaky silent military barracks into a giant international set for a dorm porn production. And of course London—with its Victorian-era history of contradictions, where social decorum and antisex crusading coexisted with a thriving underbelly of immoderation and kink—was a welcoming city for the athletes to momentarily flee their glossy, role model–Olympian personas.
Once Ervin made the decision to join the rest of us at dinner, he knew he’d have to break curfew. Exactly how long past curfew didn’t matter: bureaucratic regulations deal in black-and-white, not gray. This was just as well, because Amir, who arranged the dinner, was all fired up to head over to The Box Soho, an exclusive, recently opened cabaret nightclub in the Soho district, where he’d finagled a VIP table for a small group of us. Anthony looked apprehensive as Amir tottered in front of him, whiskey in hand, saying playfully: “As your attorney, I advise you to go to The Box with your buddies.” Back then Amir still had the same frizzy Medusan black hair and excited eyes that cartoon characters get upon accidentally grabbing a live wire. His go-to outfit was Converse sneakers with a vest and tie, and he was fearless in approaching and confounding potential corporate sponsors, who were more accustomed to dealing with slick Wall Street–type attorneys and managers than wild-eyed Dr. Gonzos. But Amir was uniquely suited for engineering colorful gigs, like VIP table service at The Box.
It was futile for Ervin to resist our collective will to debauchery. An hour later we were standing outside The Box. There are always between two and four bouncers in front at any time. The bulk of them are Muscle, usually your typical overgrown, thick-necked, stony-faced doorman with a buzz cut and crossed arms wearing a black oversized trenchcoat and cheap clunky black shoes, the latter a giveaway that he never dresses up or looks so badass outside of work and is probably just some earnest Slavic farmhand who thought he’d try out his fortune in the wider EU world. Aside from all the Muscle, there is the Lord of Admission with the last word on who gets in. He’s neither Eastern European nor muscular, but rather a suave, slender Brit who commands a kind of St. Peter at the Gate authority to all those who crowd around him, seeking his approval and admission.
Without pause Amir rolls up past the lines of swanky people to the stylish gatekeeper and whispers into his ear, pointing at Ervin. A moment later Muscle is parting the red rope for us to the covetous gaze of a blond trio in stilettos who still haven’t been granted entry despite sporting push-up bras and combing their fingers through their hair every time Muscle or St. Peter approached them. Little did we know then that it’s near impossible to gain admission to The Box on the weekend as a single guy or a group of men if you’re not an Olympian or a celebrity or royalty, or unless you’re willing to pay in the hundreds or even thousands for table service. It also helps to know St. Peter, who rather modestly goes by Joe, a name whispered with apprehension and reverence in line, although not everyone remained awed, like the one outraged guy who jabbed his finger in the air at him and blasphemously shouted, “You are nothing!” after St. Peter turned him and his girlfriend away from the pearly gates.
Inside everything glowed red and pulsed, with gilded mirroring and plush carpeting and golden horn–blowing Eros sculptures mounted on the rococo walls and even an upright piano upon which lounged a four-foot nude Aphrodite. The speakers throbbed with house music, so the cumulative vibe was something like Tiësto spinning in an opulent nineteenth-century bordello. Our first bottle came out at once and the mood, which was already at a buzzing pitch from the restaurant drinks, quickly got feverish. It was strange to see Anthony uncoil and let loose. For over a year now he’d been leaving early anytime we went out, ordering sparkling waters to our whiskeys and pints, and now here he was, throwing in the Apollonian towel and going for broke with the rest of us. As he later recalled, shaking his head when asked if he remembered details from a street brawl later that night: “We gave over control to Dionysus. We were just players, puppets in the play.”
We were on our second bottle when the burlesque acts came on. The Box is known primarily for two things: 1) a royalty and celebrity patronage that has included Prince Harry, Zara Phillips, Princess Eugenie, Emma Watson, Kate Moss, Bradley Cooper, and Rihanna; and 2) its controversial shows, which have included things like a survivor of Thalidomide42 doing a burlesque act that involved throwing off his arms along with his clothes, as well as more explicitly sexual performances that probably shouldn’t be described here in detail, but let’s just say that our night had an Olympic theme and the closing act involved some inverted gymnastics by a drag queen whose stage partner then used her as a human torch-holder by planting the Olympic flame down where the sun don’t shine. Not everything is so shocking—there are also astonishing feats of acrobatics at The Box like the man who hopped upside down on one hand and later did a headstand upon a basketball that was perched atop a makeshift pyramid of bottles and plywood boards—but there certainly was a fair amount of staple raunchy burlesque, like the woman who smoked a cigar on stage (not from her mouth), as well as just plain old weirdness like a man wrapping his package in tissue paper and setting it on fire, or a transwoman, wearing a loose-fitting microskirt with nothing underneath but her flappy bird, twerking inches from the gawking faces of uncomfortably aroused males, or the onstage dinner couple where the woman held up an unopened bottle of beer and her dinner partner promptly thrust his arm into a giant vat of Crisco (skip to the next paragraph if you’re squeamish) and then, standing up and turning around so everyone had an unobstructed view of his backside—and to a chorus of groans and gasps from the audience—plunged his arm forearm-deep up his own arse, retrieving a bottle opener like some desperate prisoner contraband-smuggling tactic.
At some point in the debauchery, Anthony turned to me. The tension from his face was gone, replaced by astonishment: “Whatever it is I thought was ailing me, I’m doing all right.” The only person in our group who was indifferent to the acts was Lars, who watched it all unmoved and said in deadpan Germanic drawl, “I’ve seen as much in Berlin.”
Once the final act ended, culminating in the aforementioned triumphant and terrifying planting of the Olympic torch, the space erupted into a thumping dance party. There must have been a fair bit of pill-popping because there was a touchy-feeliness in the air that made for easy transitions into fondling/makeout sessions in one of the VIP alcoves and on the couch upstairs. As the night went on it only got sloppier, with girls sitting slumped with skirts hiked up almost to their hips and the tops of their hosiery showing and guys stumbling around with the kind of dazed, slackjawed expression you’d otherwise find on someone who’s just been smashed in the face with a shovel.
Whether because it was so early in the morning when Anthony returned to the Olympic Village or because the guards were mellower, he didn’t get in trouble for breaking curfew. But someone else did that night: the 200 back gold medalist USA swimmer Tyler Clary, who was later fined thousands. The irony is that he was meeting with the owners of the club Chinawhite to set up for the following night when he was slated to deejay for his fellow swimmers in a Team USA bash celebrating the final day of competition. To this day Anthony hasn’t forgotten the officials responsible for punishing him at the 2000 Olympics, so he interprets Clary’s subsequent preference for racing cars over swimming as an expression of resentment against the swim authorities: “He was trying to do a good thing for our community and he was penalized for it.”
The following night’s party at Chinawhite—another exclusive and lavish club but without the burlesque or transgressive mystique—was the launch of a weeklong Dionysian phase for the rest of the swimmers. Michael Phelps was elsewhere that night, but Ryan Lochte was present, along with most everyone else on the team, so it was enough to draw the paparazzi and make the online gossip rags. After months of training and sobriety and pressure and focus, for all these honed physical specimens to be let loose in the VIP section of a club where one of their peers was deejaying and where bottles of top-shelf liquor were always within arm’s reach was nothing short of savagery. A tall blond Scandinavian athlete liaison who had mistaken me for a Team USA member bought a platter of shots for Anthony and me and, after making us knock back three in succession with her, ripped the top of my shirt open with both hands43 and proposed a threesome, at which Anthony turned to me with the expression of a lemur. It was one of those parties where others have to fill you in on some of the details, and whatever memories you do have are disassociated and weirdly detailed random flashbacks. For example, I distinctly remember reflecting on the nineties TV advert catch phrase “Abs of Steel” while dancing with one of the women’s team swimmers but don’t remember spilling half of two mixed drinks down the front of Lochte’s shirt after knocking into him on a bar run (and neither did he when I apologized a few months later). It was pure pillaging on all fronts, with ice cubes being passed mouth-to-mouth like Chinese whispers and all sorts of other exchanges and zestful interactions that you’d expect from prime thoroughbreds who’ve been penned up for months and finally put out to pasture, details of which can’t be shared out of respect for the athletes’ Olympic blood oath, What happens in the Village stays in the Village, the spirit of the maxim still prevailing even outside the Village.
That said, Anthony claims the Olympic Village, at least for Americans, isn’t nearly as universally licentious a scene as it’s reputed to be—its notoriety perhaps due to hyperbole from horny journalists projecting their fantasies onto their work. Amir and I did visit the Village with him earlier that day and, considering all the media reports about the record-high numbers of condoms supplied, had hopes of seeing some balcony action or even just some passing window nudity. But it wasn’t all that unlike an empty college campus during summer break with a high population of international students who’d left their national flags hanging from their windows. The only notable sight of any shock value was the McDonald’s in the athletes’ food court.
On the final day of swimming in London, the day after the 50, I’m finally able to cheer in the stands without the pressures of competing. It’s not about me anymore, it’s about those now swimming. No longer under the microscope, I’m free from all responsibilities except supporting the team. The atmosphere is charged, electric, crackling. We roar from the stands as we win both the women’s and men’s 400 medley relay. During “The Star-Spangled Banner” in the relay victory ceremonies, I fiercely sing the last three words in the line, “And our flag was still there!” in a higher octave. This pumps up the others, who bellow out the rest of the anthem. It feels so good to be part of it and even lead the musical charge. I wasn’t able to participate like this before my race. It takes such an emotional toll to watch finals that I was always resting in the Village. Only this last day am I free of the burden of racing. In retrospect, I wish I’d gone to other finals. It would have helped me escape my head.
Being here feels like when I walked into the dinner last night, when my narrow individuality was subsumed within the community of family and friends. Cheering and singing with the team, celebrating relay victories, I no longer feel myself as Anthony Ervin but as a member of a collective—a teammate, an American. We’re all together, one voice singing our anthem and fight song. It’s a proud song, and in such moments it’s earned pride. That’s not to say the sublimation of the individual into the collective can’t lead to terrible things. As Samuel Johnson said, “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” But the flag and anthem needn’t be used as a wrapper in which to hide one’s misdeeds. I’ll wave the flag and roar that anthem and chant USA! USA! as loud as any jingoist, but that doesn’t erase the unpleasant social and political and economic baggage we carry. I won’t say America is the “best” country in the world, because that makes no sense. Maybe one can talk about the best swimmer. But even that is tied to temporality. You’re the best only for that moment and then it’s past and you must prove it again. In my experience, being the best is awesome for a second and then sucks.
But even if the US isn’t the “best” country, it’s still my country. I didn’t choose to be born in the US, but I choose it as my favorite. And I’ll die an American, even if in a faraway land. There’s a shared bond among all swimmers in getting where we are, and one can broaden that out to all Americans. Of course, ultimately this extends out even beyond nationality. It’s less about nation than community. I celebrated with my friends from other countries who did well, and I tried to be there for those who didn’t. Friendships transcend borders and performance.
Now that my race is over, I feel light again, even if it’s tinged with disappointment. It’s liberating to be in the stands, relieved of all expectations. This year has been harder and less fun than last year, when I first returned to swimming and no one, not even I, expected anything of me. Last year was my high. I was still in the shadows then, flying under the radar. The last six months I’ve been sighted and saddled with responsibilities. Not that I don’t want them—they’re essential to the productivity I want of my thirties. They may stress me, but that’s just how it goes. And the pressure that comes with being a professional and a teammate pays off when I’m in the stands like this with my team, fused into something greater than myself.
It’s so different now from Sydney. There, I was the champion but unhappy. The media expected me to speak on behalf of the black experience, even though I’d never thought of myself in black or white terms before then. I’d been cast into a mold and I had no control over determining who I was. Or at least I lacked the capacity and consciousness to do so. And then I was thrown out of the Village. This time it’s been the opposite: USA Swimming and its staff have been nothing but supportive of me.
There’s no medal this time, but there’s camaraderie. Sure, the media have positioned me within the “rock ’n’ roll comeback kid” story line, which is just another construction, but that’s no big deal. No real outside forces are at work. Not to mention my skin’s thicker. And I’m not a hapless victim anymore to the culture of excess that comes with being a champion jock.
I’m still an outsider this time, but only because I’m older and my road has been unusual. I may look different because of my ink, but even tattoos are no longer rare. I don’t feel alienation anymore, just identity. The identity of someone forged between black and white, yet living a life uniquely outside them in the overlapping spaces.
* * *
The next afternoon I’m in the Hilton lobby when a woman approaches me. After the usual Is it true you’re an Olympic gold medalist? shtick she asks how I did. “I came in fifth,” I tell her. “I’m sorry,” she replies. It’s happened several times in the last few days. I try not to let it bother me. She’s only perceiving the surface notion of success that society and the media project. And in all fairness, it’s easier to grasp than the deeper sense of success, which is subtler and has more to do with what Melville described as “the ungraspable phantom of life” than with medals and podiums. It’s important I maintain this perspective. It’s easy to sink back into the default understanding of success and failure, to see my fifth place as a flop after such a successful and unexpected year. I have to be vigilant not to sink into a Charybdis of private gloom.
Her comment still weighs on me when I leave the Hilton with Amir and Constantine. The sky is the gray of an overboiled egg. I’m walking just in front of them, about to cross the street. I glance left, as I habitually do, not noticing the LOOK RIGHTÆ injunction painted on the asphalt to warn foreigners that in this land people drive on the left. Then I step off the pavement and into the street. A loud warning cry from behind causes me to spin my head around. Just to my right I see a red double-decker barreling at me. I lean back hard, throwing my hands up in a surrender pose, barely pulling back in time as the bus shoots by me, the driver slamming on the horn. A gust of air hits me as the blaring bus passes within inches of my face and chest. Amir’s phone falls from his hand with a clatter. We’re all frozen in place as the driver brings the bus to a stop, clearly also rattled. Amir and Conz are looking at me as if they just saw a ghost. After a few seconds the red bus pulls away, leaving us standing there, petrified and wordless, pulses thudding.
Just like my start in the final, it all happened in under a second. My balance and reaction may have failed me on the blocks, but not on the street where there was more than a medal and glory at stake. I was inches and milliseconds from a meaningless death.
For days the specter of death haunts me. After having come such a long way, from having dove down into the blackest gorges for years and soared out of them again to become invisible in the sunny spaces of a London sky, I know the darkness awaits me, tempting and challenging me to continue finding myself again and again and again.
Berkeley Marina, May 26
The snowy owl hovers high overhead, gazing down with golden eyes. Anthony bought her earlier today at a kite shop. Minerva, he calls her. A birthday gift to himself.
There’s more wishful thinking than truth in the transformation-and-redemption narrative. His slumps still come, bouts of gloom when he wants to drop everything and withdraw. But he now has an ally: self-knowledge. It’s telling he chose an owl, the symbol of wisdom, for his kite. You can’t change who you are, but you can change how you are. So when the winds change, you can do what you know you need to do to stay aloft. To keep yourself from nosediving.
Elliot and I toss a Frisbee. Anthony is off on his own, gazing up into the blue. Beyond us all, the bay glitters, its waters spilling forth and renewing themselves within the Pacific, evaporating as mist, thundering down as rain, surging as rivers, heaving as oceans, always in flux, chasing new places, ever restless, ever turbulent, ever unconstrained.
THE END
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42 A sedative drug withdrawn a half-century ago after thousands of mothers gave birth to disabled babies with stunted limbs. Return to text
43 The actual fabric, not just the buttons. Return to text