Breaking the Surface (4 page)

My mom and Eleanor’s mom put a lot of effort into making us look great. With the help of our teacher, they made all our costumes, which wasn’t easy because the costumes had to be functional. Eleanor and I were little contortionists, doing splits and handstands and touching our feet to our heads. Everything had to stretch. We wore a lot of leotard-type outfits, mostly decorated with sequins.

Mom bought the fabric for my costumes out of her grocery money. I often went with her when she bought material, and she always said, “Don’t tell your dad.” She was afraid that Dad would get angry with her if he knew she was spending so much money on our costumes. I don’t know where he thought the money for the material was coming from, but I knew never to say anything.

It’s embarrassing to look at some of the pictures, because our homemade costumes fit the styles of the times. We had one jazz costume that consisted of a short shirt that tied in front, huge bell-bottom stretch pants, and a multicolored headband. We would have fit right in with
The Partridge Family
TV show. We had another outfit that was all pink, including a pink sequin-covered cummerbund, a sequined V decorating the shirt, and a line of pink sequins down the side of the stretch pants. It was a tuxedotype design. It was very…pink.

But my favorite costume was a little tuxedo. The entire thing, from top hat to tails, was midnight-blue glitter, and my mother had to stitch it by hand because the fabric kept breaking the sewingmachine needle. I was only three, but I knew it was fabulous.

My mom was great. Besides making my costumes, she also took me to my classes and never missed a performance. Unlike a lot of the other moms, she was not a backstage mother. There were plenty of them, hovering over their kids, constantly fixing their hair, getting angry if they made a mistake, telling them: “Bite your lip”; “Pinch your cheeks”; “Point your toes.” The pinching and the biting were to bring blood to the lips and cheeks, for color. But my mom wasn’t like them at all. Her attitude was, “You can’t always win, but you can always do your best.” Her only comment to me before a performance was, “Have fun,” which always brought a smile to my face.

Eleanor’s mother, however, was a bit of a stage mom, and very competitive. I was lucky Eleanor and I were on the same team because otherwise I might have been in trouble. But she was a great sport and, together, she and my mom were right there setting up the props and ladders for us to tumble from.

My dad hardly ever came to any of my performances. He paid for my classes, which was supportive financially, but his main concern was that it shouldn’t interfere with what my mom was supposed to do around the house. It was worst for her on the weekends, when we had our performances, because Dad didn’t like her to go out when he was home.

A lot of times we skipped performances because she was afraid that my father would be angry. On weekends, she’d cook dinner in the morning before she took us to a competition, so all she would have to do when she got home was heat it up. During the week, she’d make dinner while we were at school so she could take us to practice in the afternoon and not be late with dinner.

But diving sparked my dad’s interest, even though it was Mom who enrolled me in classes. She was afraid I’d hurt myself trying gymnastics stunts off the diving board, so she asked about diving lessons at the La Mesa pool, which was right next to the recreation center where Eleanor and I took gymnastics. It wasn’t that my mother had a vision of me being a great diver or anything—she just didn’t want me to break my neck.

I hated my first diving coach. He was a big, dark, hairy guy who was always yelling at us. He was so awful that I thought of quitting all the time, but I stuck with it as soon as I discovered that I was good at it. It was my dad who found me my next coach.

John Anders, a local police officer, often came by to watch us practice. One afternoon, Dad struck up a conversation with him, and it turned out that John used to be a diver and did some coaching on the side. My father later called him up and asked him if he’d consider coaching our team. I wasn’t the only one who wanted to quit; all the divers were unhappy.

John was wonderful, encouraging in a way that made us all want to do well. He took the time to explain things to us and presented diving in a way that made a lot of sense to me, like the dance instructor who had taught me to visualize. John said that he once had a coach who told him that diving should be like poetry, each movement flowing into the next. He also taught us to “ride the board.” He said that when you push off into your hurdle, you should hear the board bounce twice against the fulcrum before you land on it. So I started listening for the board, and pretty soon I learned how to ride it. That’s the first step toward doing a good dive.

John was a very soft-spoken family man. I was impressed with the way he went camping and hiking with his sons. I envied John’s sons, because he was the kind of father I wanted. They spent a lot of time doing the things fathers and sons do together. My father always made me feel like I was putting him out, that I was a bother, that he’d rather be doing other things than spending time with me. The only time he did something special with me was when he took me camping with the Y-Indian Guides. It was the first and last time. He made it clear that he was fulfilling an obligation, and he had a contemptuous attitude toward the people there, as if he was somehow better than everyone else. I was very sensitive to my dad’s unspoken words. So to make sure we didn’t go again, I told him I had a miserable time and asked if it was okay if we didn’t do this again.

Coach Anders, on the other hand, always gave us the sense that he cared, that he wanted to be there with us, and that he wanted us to do our best. At the same time, as long as we did our best, it didn’t matter to John whether or not we won. He made us feel good about getting second or third place. No matter how we placed, he would concentrate on the best dive we had done in that competition and praise us for doing it so well. Of course, for me, that really made me want to win so I could please him even more. Because he made me feel good about myself, I looked forward to practice, even when it was cold and I didn’t feel much like diving. If every coach and gym teacher had those values, we’d see a lot fewer problems with young athletes.

I was about ten years old when I started with Coach Anders. It was a very important time for me, because I really flourished. A year later, in 1971, he got me to the national Junior Olympics at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. I made it all the way through local and regional one-meter springboard competitions, and I qualified. This was my first national competition, the biggest meet I’d ever been to. There were divers from Florida, New York, Arkansas, Washington—all over. It was the most exciting competition I’d ever been in, but also the hardest. I don’t know if it was the pressure of my first national event or what, but I wasn’t diving as well as I knew I could. There were about thirty divers, and each time they cut, I was the last one to make it. So when they cut to the top sixteen, I was sixteenth. When they cut to the top twelve, I was twelfth. My parents, who were there with me, knew something was wrong, especially when John took me over to see them before we finished the second round and I wouldn’t say anything. My father told my mother to take me outside and talk to me.

I didn’t want to talk to anyone, not even my mom. I’d done so well before I got to Colorado that I couldn’t understand what was wrong. I just clammed up. Mom walked me to the restaurant next to the pool building and asked me what was up. Suddenly I started crying. I told her I was afraid of disappointing her and my father and, worst of all, Coach Anders. She told me that it didn’t matter to her what happened, because I was always going to be her son and that, no matter what, she would always love me. She told me that however I did, it was okay. I don’t know why, but this came as a surprise to me. She’s told me the same thing all my life, and it’s one of the things that I’ve always counted on.

Mom walked me back to the pool, and I did my last three dives better than everybody else. From twelfth place, I moved up to tie for second. Number two was okay because I knew my mom loved me and that John was proud of me. And I had something to work toward: number one. Even then, winning was a way of making sure they loved me.

For the first two years I dove, my father took me to the pool for practice after school three days a week; in summer we trained every day. He didn’t just drop me off and then come get me after the workout, like the other parents did. Most of the time he sat on a bench outside the pool area and watched every single dive. I would have been happy that he took such a great interest, except that on the way home he would repeat every word that my coach had said to me during practice. That was especially tough on bad workout days, because I already felt bad, and there was my father telling me all over again what I’d done wrong.

It wasn’t only that my dad repeated the criticisms; it was also that he showed so much interest in my diving after having showed no interest in my acrobatics, gymnastics, and especially my dance. He rarely came to any of my performances with Eleanor, but he was there for every one of my diving meets. Looking back, I realize now that my father might have had more time when I was diving because by then he was more established financially. But at the time I just thought it was because he didn’t think that dancing and acrobatics were the kind of thing he wanted his son doing. He was saying that these things I loved weren’t worth doing. So when the kids at school started calling me “sissy” and “faggot,” I thought my father was saying the same thing by not coming to my performances, and maybe he was. His interest in my diving was the other extreme—it felt like my father was
too
involved, like it was more about him than it was about me. When I was eleven, I finally asked him not to come to my workout sessions anymore.

One day I was supposed to learn a back one-and-a-half pike on the one-meter springboard. It was a new dive, and I couldn’t get myself to do it. I was physically prepared, but mentally I couldn’t do it. Actually, I was scared. Learning new dives is terrifying, because you don’t know yet what to expect. You don’t know what you’re going to see as you go through the dive, and you don’t know exactly how to execute it. It’s the fear that you’re going to crash and burn. Besides, it was a very cold day. So I just stood on the board, freezing and frozen. No matter how many times John urged me to just do it, I couldn’t. I can be pretty stubborn, so the more he pushed, the more stubborn I got. Finally, he gave up and said, “Let’s try tomorrow.”

Dad watched the whole thing, and on the way home he didn’t say a word, but I knew he was angry. When we got home, he said, “Get your suit on.” I looked at him and asked what he was talking about. He said, “You’re going to do that back one-and-a-half pike.” He wanted me to do it on the board in our pool, and I said, “Dad, it’s not a regulation springboard.” He said that he didn’t care, and he took off his belt and told me not to talk back. You didn’t argue with my father. There was one way to do things— the logical way, his way.

Mom tried to stop him, telling him to give me time, but he got mad at her. He didn’t like when she contradicted him. I can’t remember if he hit me with the belt then or waited until I had my suit on, but he hit me across my backside and legs until it burned. That I can’t forget. I didn’t want to give my father the satisfaction of seeing me cry, so I held it in.

I got into my suit and put on a short-sleeved wet-suit jacket and went down the stairs to the pool. That’s when I started crying—I was still afraid I’d crash and burn on the new dive. He made me do four or five back one-and-a-half pikes. To punish him, I would land flat, purposely trying to hurt myself. Fortunately, the wet suit took some of the sting out of hitting the water flat, but each time, it knocked the wind out of me. I wanted my father to feel bad that he was forcing me to go out on such a cold day in an unheated pool using a substandard board. I was furious with him and felt really hurt. He didn’t understand me at all. So I tried to punish him by hurting myself.

My mother didn’t come down to the pool. She stayed up at the house and watched from there, crying. There was nothing she could do but watch.

So, what were my father’s reasons? Had I embarrassed him by not doing the dive? Was he punishing me for failing? Part of me thought I deserved it, and in an awful way, his punishment helped motivate me. But I never wanted him to do it again.

That evening I had a conversation with my mom. I told her, “He’s going to tell me that he has to take me to workouts because you have to cook dinner and keep the house clean.” She agreed to offer to take me to my workouts in addition to cooking and cleaning, but she insisted that I talk to him myself.

The next day I talked to my dad and told him that I didn’t want him coming to my workouts any longer. My heart was pounding as I said this, and I’m sure my voice was shaking. I told him that I still wanted him to come to my competitions, that I still needed his support. From then on, Mom would drop me off at practice and then go run errands. She was interested in my diving, but it was different. She never pressured me. What was most important to her was that I be happy with whatever I was doing.

I’m sure my father realized that what he had done was wrong. In retrospect, that experience taught me how to stand up to my father. He pushed me to stand up to him, and that made me much stronger. I’d love to know how he felt about what happened that day, but we never talked about it before he died.