Читать книгу Making Waves - Chris Epting - Страница 10

CHAPTER TWO

And So It Begins . . .

When I was about eight years old, my mother started signing me up for private swimming lessons. It was all the way out in the San Fernando Valley, and the lessons were given by an old woman whom I would say was about eighty-five. She had a pool in her yard and, for tax purposes, she was not allowed to accept money for giving lessons. I remember that there was just this big old jar on a table that was full of cash, where people would put their “donations” for the lessons.

The old woman was very focused on making me what she called a “pretty” swimmer; that is to say, she wanted me to have beautiful strokes and something called a “six-beat kick” which meant that you would kick your legs six times per stroke. But I was far from a pretty swimmer. In my head, swimming was all about speed. Whatever it took to swim faster, that’s what I was interested in. I had a two-beat kick, which worked better for me. It helped me keep the pace that I wanted, and I was comfortable with it. But it was not very pretty to look at.

My lessons with the old woman didn’t last long. I bounced around from place to place, taking private classes at other pools in the area, including the local high school and at a diving school with a teacher named John Riley. Mr. Riley also wanted me to abide by the six-beat kick, but I was having none of it. Early in my life—at least, when it came to swimming—I became stubborn and didn’t do what everybody else wanted me to do. Little did I know what effect this personality trait would have later on.

The chlorine used to kill my eyes, so I started wearing goggles, which were new in the 1960s. Mr. Riley didn’t like that and he let me know it, but I didn’t care. If I was going to be spending that much time in the water, then I was going to wear goggles.

When I was a kid, it seemed like whenever I started swimming someplace new, there was always some other girl that everyone would say was the best. “She’s the one to beat!” “Nobody’s going to beat her!” In my head, those were always the ones I set out to beat. I think my brain was wired at an early age to always be thinking about winning.

At one of our swim clubs, located in Bellflower, the one to beat was Sherry Duke. She was the golden child of the pool. Her father was also a local cop and my mother, in her ignorance, never wanted me to beat her for fear of getting a ticket. That was how my parents thought. Looking back, it’s almost amazing how clueless they were about life. But her concerns didn’t slow me down at all, and eventually, I beat Sherry. When I was eleven years old, I joined a team in El Monte. There, the girl to beat was Cozette Wheeler. She was untouchable, all of the adults said. She was the one that intimidated all of the other kids. Soon after getting there, I beat Cozette.

But that’s not what I remember most about swimming in El Monte. What I remember most were two other girls, Jill Sterkel and Sandy Neilson, who were also on the team. Little did I know what the future held for all of us—especially for me and Jill. Thinking back, the coach at that club, Don LaMont, must have been really good to develop swimmers of that caliber—including me and my brothers, Jack and Bill.

With the three of us swimming, my family’s weekends were filled with swim meets. In California, where the sun shines almost all year long, we could find a meet practically anywhere. We went to meets in San Diego, Redlands, Los Angeles, Apple Valley, Lakewood, Buena Park, and many other cities.

I loved going to those swim meets. There were hundreds of kids at them. I saw my friends from my own team and made new friends from other teams. I got to see my competition from a wider group of girls—not just from my own club, but from other clubs that were the ones to beat.

Sometimes the meets were far away and we would have to wake up early in the morning to travel there. Other families would stay at a hotel or motel for the weekend, but we would always come home after our meets; we couldn’t afford to pay for an overnight stay. Gas was much cheaper then, so after driving home at the end of the day, we would get up early the next day and just drive back to the meet again. My mom always packed food for us, because we needed to eat constantly and we couldn’t afford to buy our meals at the meet. She packed hamburgers, bananas, oranges—foods to fill us up.

Our meets started at 9:00 AM, with warm-ups at 8:00 AM. At the warm-ups, you could get a feel for the pool—the walls, the lane markings on the bottom of the pool, and the backstroke flags, which hung above the water at the end of the pool so backstrokers would know the wall was coming. You could count how many strokes until you hit the wall so you wouldn’t conk your head.

At those meets, I swam three or four events each day. When I was nine and ten years old, I really liked the breaststroke and freestyle. I never really fell in love with the butterfly, and to be honest, I don’t think I really got the hang of it until I was seventeen or eighteen. I knew all the other strokes, though, and that made me a pretty good individual medley swimmer.

There was such a communal feel at those meets. Part of it had to do with the snacks we ate: Jell-O powder right out of the package, pixie sticks, rainbow pops. Sugar everywhere. That’s part of what held us together. Then there were the things we did to kill time between the races. I remember everyone playing with Clackers, those hard plastic balls you’d clack together on a string that were eventually taken off the market because they would shatter. It didn’t matter, though. We still had plenty of yo-yos, Frisbees, another popular toys to help wile away the time. But the thing I liked best was playing cards. Poker, Twenty-One, War, Go Fish—it was my favorite way to pass the time at the meets.

When I was eleven, my mom became very interested in a woman named Loretta Reed. The Reeds had some money and lived in Rancho Palos Verdes. Mrs. Reed would sit on the pool deck in El Monte, watching her daughter (and my friend) Pam swim alongside me. My mother was quite transfixed with her, impressed with her lifestyle and fancy car. I would always see them talking on the deck of the pool while we swam. I’d never seen my mother so interested in another person. She would sit there, looking at Mrs. Reed’s stopwatch, and soon she had a stopwatch of her own that she would use to time my laps.

One day, as we were driving home from one of our club practices, my mother asked me how I did that day and what my times were. I told her I thought I had done well. All of the sudden, she began beating me with her fist. I couldn’t figure out what I had done wrong. I pushed myself against the passenger door of our Plymouth station wagon, trying to get out of her reach. But there wasn’t enough room for me to get away from her. She was angry that I had not swum better times. It was crazy. These were practices, not races. But she didn’t care.

Day after day, the same thing would happen. “How do you think you did today?” she’d ask. “Fine,” I’d say. And the beating would start.

One day, as my mother was hitting me in the front seat, Jack, sitting with Bill in the back seat, asked, “Why do you only care about her?” Driving wildly down the freeway and steering with her left hand, she reached back and started hitting him with her right fist. “Is this what you want?” she asked. He never posed the question again.

This began a new pattern of abuse in my life. No matter how I answered my mother’s question about my performance, she would start hitting me. This went on for months. My mother would beat me in the car after practice, and then my father would molest me at night.

One day, we actually went to the Reeds’ house in Palos Verdes. It was beautiful. While our mothers were having coffee inside, Pam and I sat outside together.

“Does your mom hit you?” she asked me.

“Yeah,” I said. “How did you know?”

“Well, my mom beats me, too,” she said. “I think she told your mom that it was a good way to make you swim faster.”

Thanks a lot, I thought.

I really did enjoy swimming back then, because the pool had become my sanctuary. No matter what took place in the car after swim practice or in my bedroom at night, when I was in the water, I was safe. It was a haven where I could have fun and make friends and get stronger. That was one thing about me—I enjoyed becoming a better swimmer, and I was very competitive. It was all I had in my young life. Besides playing the flute in school, it was really the only other activity that I took part in. So I made the most of it.

The coaches may not have wanted me in the beginning and my parents may have been abusing me, but while I was in the water, I was safe and free to become what I wanted to be: a strong swimmer. That was my plan. But plans change, of course, and for my family, things were about to be altered in a very serious way.

We moved around from pool to pool and I swam on lots of teams. I also began competing and had great success early on.

When I was thirteen, I started swimming on a team at Golden West College in Huntington Beach, California. It was called Phillips 66, and it was sponsored by the Texas energy company of the same name.

This team was significant for me on two levels. First, it got me out of El Monte and away from Loretta Reed, which meant my mom’s beatings would stop soon after our arrival in Huntington Beach. Second, and more importantly, this was where I would meet one of the two most influential coaches I’d ever have.

His name was Ralph Darr but he went by “Flip,” and he was one of the most amazing men I have ever met. First of all, he just seemed really cool. He drove a Jaguar and smoked a pipe and there was something very low-key, yet nurturing, about him.

Flip was also an incredibly innovative and successful coach. He eventually coached swimmers that would go on to earn sixteen world records, eight gold medals, nine World Championship medals, the three Pan American Games medals, and thirty-one U.S. national swimming titles. He placed swimmers on the U.S. team in the 1968, ’72, ’76, and ’84 Olympics, and he would go on to serve as the U.S. coach of the 1975 World Championship women’s team, the 1991 World Championship open water team, and many others. Flip was also known as one of the first coaches to bring hand paddles into mainstream swimming during practices, which was revolutionary. He also utilized surgical tubes for resistance training—another breakthrough.

But beyond all of that, he was just a really solid guy who took his swimming very seriously and looked after me—at least it seemed that way to me, anyway. He was decent and kind and thoughtful, which I think may have helped save me back then and may have even given me the strength to change my situation.

When I got to Huntington Beach, Susie Whitaker was the girl to beat. And not long after joining the club, I did beat her. But it cost me. She had a big makeup party and I was the only girl not invited simply because I had bested her in the pool. It didn’t really bother me, though; I wasn’t used to being one of the gang and usually kept to myself anyway. And I didn’t care about makeup, or about being popular. I was just there to beat them all.

These victories of mine over the “best” kids gave me kind of an inner strength. Even to this day, I tell young people: “Don’t ever give up hope. Wherever you go in life, there’s always going to be somebody who’s identified as the best. And if you set your sights on it, there’s no reason you can’t be the one who, one day, everybody will look at as the best.”

Again, a lot of this came from an inner sense of competition that I think I was born with. I was also very focused because I blocked out other things happening in my life. That combination really helped me develop into someone who was not only unintimidated by the so-called best on the block, but who also relished the challenge of trying to beat them.

At thirteen years old, I took my first plane trip to Cincinnati for the 1970 Short Course Nationals, which I had qualified for. Getting to the Nationals required hitting a certain time standard in each event. Basically, you had to swim at a sanctioned event and turn in a faster time than the standard in order to be invited to the Nationals. Then, once you were there, you would get seeded based on your times.

The Nationals are held twice each year. They’re what you’re really training for. Flip was excited the day he told me at practice that I was going.

“Good news, Shirley,” he said, his ever-present pipe in hand. “You’ve qualified. This is a big first step for you. Don’t be nervous. Just go have fun. This is how you learn to compete, so don’t put any real pressure on yourself.”

For our trip, one of the girls’ moms, Mrs. Hanson, made matching outfits for all the girls on the swim team: white polyester tops with sweetheart necklines and red skirts.

It felt so great to be on my own for the first time. I didn’t do that well in the one race I swam, but it was okay; as Flip had said, I was learning how to compete. I was having a blast, too. It was exciting to fly on a plane and compete at a big event like the Nationals.

I think my first real brush with the media took place when I got back from Cincinnati. Once I was back in junior high, a boy who wrote for the school paper came over to me in the cafeteria. “Do you think I could interview you for an article that I want to write?” he asked. “Sure,” I replied. “Why not?” So we met after school, and he conducted his interview.

“Did you have fun in Cincinnati?” he asked.

“Yes,” I answered.

“Is it true that this was your first plane ride?”

“Yes.”

“Is it tough to swim in those races?”

“Yes.”

“Are you going to continue as a swimmer?”

“Yes.”

“Was it fun coming back to school?”

“No.”

A few days later, the school paper came out. When I got home that afternoon, my mom was waiting with a copy in her hand. She was not happy. “You really gave these answers to him?” she asked, pointing at the paper in disgust. “This is your idea of how to give an interview?”

“Yes,” I answered, without any kind of irony.

My mother explained that, whenever somebody asked me questions, I was not to give yes or no answers. “You have to make a conversation,” she said. “You can’t just say yes or no. If you want people to learn about you, then you have to give better answers.”

I understood what she was saying. It made sense. But what my mother didn’t know was that, in the process of teaching me how to do an interview, she probably opened up a bit of a Pandora’s box. When the microphones were in front of me in the years to come, I think a lot of people wished that I would just shut up. For now, I would take my mom’s advice and try to give more developed answers whenever I was interviewed. However, this process also spawned my lack of trust with the media early on, when I was interviewed by our local newspaper soon after my middle school interview.

As my mother had ordered, I gave what I thought were thoughtful and conversational answers to the questions my interviewer asked me about swimming. But once the paper came out, I saw sections in print that I knew I hadn’t spoken. I didn’t even know the meaning of some of the words being attributed to me, so how could I have said them in the first place? Such was the beginning of my love-hate relationship with the press.

Back home, it was still a house of horrors. I didn’t want anything to happen to my baby sister, but didn’t know what to do to protect her, either. I couldn’t go to my mother. I don’t think my two brothers knew what was going on. I had not told them, and I doubt they had picked up on anything. What was I going to do?

As it turned out, I didn’t have to do anything.

One night, there was a knock at our front door. It was in the evening, around eight o’clock or so. My father was at work; the rest of the family was home.

As my mother opened the door, I saw a group of men standing in our doorway, maybe six or seven deep. They all looked very angry and upset.

“Do you know why we’re here?” one of them asked my mother.

“Do you know what’s going on?” asked another.

My mother just stared back at them, not saying a word.

As I looked at these men, I began to recognize them. They were our neighbors. They were the fathers of other children who lived on our street.

“Your husband has been molesting our children,” one of the men said.

My mother shook her head in silence, denying the charge.

Another man spoke up. “Yes, he has! He’s been molesting them in your garage. Our daughters have told us everything, and now we’re doing something about it.”

My mother took a step back from the door. The color had left her face. I think she knew that this was it. This was the moment. All of the secrets and dark lies and sinister threats and abusive behavior was being exposed right before her eyes—and mine.

“I—I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she stammered.

“Liar!” one of them yelled. The others joined in, shouting the word at her.

As the men continued lighting into my mother, I felt a surge of vindication inside. This was what I had always wanted: adults confronting my parents about their behavior. I had dreamed about this. Back when my first-grade teacher had suspected that something was going on, I had thought that would be the moment. But it wasn’t. Little did I know that a knock at the door would be the beginning of the end for my father.

The men’s voices grew louder and louder as they told my mother in no uncertain terms that they were going to call the police and have my father arrested.

As relieved as I was that this was happening, I was also growing sick to my stomach at the thought of the other children he had touched. Had he molested my friends? Who had been in my garage? What had he done to them? I thought back to all of those times when he had filmed my friends at our backyard pool parties with his home movie camera. Why had he taken such a special interest in them?

Never in my life had I imagined that he was doing this to other children. How many lives had he ruined? How many people had he destroyed?

After a few minutes, the men left. My mother closed the door slowly and didn’t say a word to me. My brothers had been in their rooms, and hadn’t seen the confrontation. I didn’t say a word to her, because I knew there was nothing I could say. Reality had finally slammed her right in the face, and she was going to have to deal with it. I walked to my room quietly and went to bed.

The next morning, there was another knock at the front door. I watched my mother open the door and saw two policemen and a policewoman standing outside.

“Your husband has been arrested for child molestation,” the policewoman told my mom.

My mother didn’t react, so the policewoman repeated that my father had been arrested.

My mother seemed to come out of her daze. “But my dad is a pastor,” she said. “My dad is a pastor.”

The policewoman was confused. “Ma’am, we’re not talking about your dad. We are talking about your husband.”

To this day, I’m not quite sure what my mother meant by that. On the one hand, it seems like she was suggesting that her father might be able to help with the situation. On the other hand, knowing what my extended family was like and how strict and unforgiving everyone was, I suppose she also may have been scared about how her father might react to all of this.

The police asked her a few more questions, took some notes, and then left. They must have arrested my father at work, I remember thinking. But he was never really in prison for what he did. It was like a furlough program. He could still go to work each day, but as I understood it, he would return to some kind of minimum detention facility at night. As I remember, after a year or two, he came back home. Back in the early ’70s, these kinds of crimes just weren’t dealt with the way they are today.

A few days after my father was taken in, on the way home from swim practice, we stopped at the McDonald’s in Norwalk, where we often had dinner. As we were waiting in line to order our food, a man who was eating at a table started looking at us with a peculiar expression on his face.

He stood up and approached us, looking us up and down. When he finally finished studying my mother’s face he raised his hand and pointed a finger at her.

“Her husband has been molesting all of your daughters!” the man shouted, so that the whole restaurant could hear him. “All of the young girls in this town were victims of her husband. Her husband is a monster. Her husband has been molesting all of our little girls!”

Immediately, the people standing near us in line started backing away. It was a busy night at the restaurant, and it felt like everyone in the place was backing away from us. There were looks of horror on everyone’s faces as they stared at my mother and me and my brothers. People started saying things and yelling at my mother. It was starting to feel dangerous.

Quickly, my mother hustled us out of the restaurant and into the car. As we left the McDonald’s, I can still remember the yelling of the angry mob behind us. If there had been a bunch of people with pitchforks and torches at our house that night, I would not have been surprised.

It was time for us to leave Norwalk. Thanks to my father, we were now being treated like lepers. With my dad incarcerated, my mom made plans to find a place for us to live where no one in the whole town would know who we were.

At the time, I didn’t have too much time to think about all of this. I had a race coming up that would help me escape the madness. The moment I had always dreamed of—the opportunity to get away from the pain of my family—had finally arrived.