Breaking the Surface (7 page)

I’m sure part of the problem with my moods was from the drugs I had started taking in junior high school, starting with marijuana in seventh grade. The kids I wanted to fit in with smoked pot, and some of them were also smart. I didn’t think I had the brains to keep up with them, but I could be a part of their group when I got high.

One of my sister’s friends got me into selling drugs for him, mostly pot. The other kids knew I could get it for them, so they’d ask me, and I’d tell them how much it cost. I’d bring the pot to school, and they paid me for it. Then I’d bring the money home to my sister’s friend. All I got was some extra pot here and there, which I didn’t really care about, since my favorite drug was speed. I wasn’t comfortable buying it from my sister’s friend, so I used my allowance money to buy pills from other kids at school. It wasn’t expensive, and I didn’t take it every day, just once a week or once every other week. If I had a book report due and I’d put it off for too long, then I might do speed for a few days in a row, but generally I was pretty good at pacing myself. At least I thought I was.

The more depressed I got, the more I pushed my parents. I guess I was testing them to see if they loved me, and one way to do it was to defy my curfew. All my parents knew was that they had a stubborn, defiant, and combative twelve-year-old making them crazy. They suspected I was on drugs, but they never found anything in the house.

One time, when my dad said something about me being out past my curfew, I said something back to him and he slapped me. Without thinking, I punched him in the stomach. I think I was more stunned than he was, but we were both very angry. He tried to put me over his knee to spank me, and it turned into a wrestling match. We were struggling on the floor, both out of breath. Mom was horrified.

But a short time later I got into a fight with my mom. I got up early on a Saturday morning and decided to go for a walk. I left a note saying, “I’m going for a walk if you care.” I tossed it on the kitchen table, left for a while, and then came back and went to my room. Mom came in and asked me what the note meant. I said it meant just what it said. She asked me, “Do you think we don’t care? Why would you write something like this?” She told me that she loved me, but I didn’t believe her. Mom came toward me, and I assumed she was going to slap me, so I reared back on my bed and kicked her in the chest. She stumbled back and fell against my closet doors, but she stayed on her feet. Mom was in shock and left my room without saying anything. I was surprised myself, because I’d never done anything to my mother like that before.

Once my mom left my room, I pulled the covers over my head and went to sleep. Next thing I knew, there were two police officers in my bedroom waking me up. They started asking me if I’d taken anything and if I had any drugs in the house. I said no. I can’t remember for sure, but I may have been on speed the day before.

When they were done questioning me, the policemen handcuffed me and walked me out of the house to the patrol car. All the neighbors were out on the street watching. My parents stood there the whole time.

It turned out that after I went to sleep, Mom called my father at work and told him what had happened. She said that they had to do something about me because I wasn’t in my right mind. I’d never done anything like that before, and it scared her. Dad came home and called John Anders to see what he thought they should do. They didn’t know if I was smoking pot or taking other drugs. Mom didn’t smell liquor, so she knew I hadn’t been drinking, but because of my mood changes, she knew I was doing something. They felt that they couldn’t control me, and they had to do something.

When we got to juvenile hall, I was checked in, stripsearched, and forced to take a shower, and they issued me jeans and a T-shirt. The whole thing was more humiliating than frightening. I was angry at my parents for doing this to me.

They put me in a room with a kid younger than I was, probably eight or nine, who was there with his older brother for robbery. Another kid at juvenile hall, in for grand theft auto for hot-wiring cars and joy-riding, was a repeat offender. During the three days I was in there, his parents never visited him, but mine were there every day.

Their daily presence made me start to believe that my adoptive parents loved me, that they cared about me, that they were indeed my parents. Of course, the first time they came to see me, I was still angry at them and said I didn’t want to see them. I was forced to meet with them and a counselor the day after I was taken there. The counselor did most of the talking, and most of the time he talked to my dad; he never asked Mom anything. When he asked me questions, all I would say was “yes” and “no,” but I wouldn’t elaborate on anything.

The counselor asked my parents if they wanted to take me home. Dad said yes, but Mom said no. She told them that I was no different from when they brought me in the day before, that I was still sulky and I wouldn’t talk. She said that she didn’t know what she’d do with me when she got me home.

We met again with the counselor the next day, and I started talking. One of the things that came out during the counseling session was that I wanted to find out more about my natural parents. My parents agreed that I could go to the adoption agency and ask whatever questions I wanted to about my natural parents.

My parents also talked privately with the counselor and arranged the terms under which I would be released. I was allowed to go home if I agreed to go straight home from school for the rest of the school year, to help my mother around the house with whatever needed to be done, and to not hang out with my friends.

During the six months after my stay in juvenile hall, my mother and I got much closer. I know she was happy about the change, because she told me that I’d gone back to being her “sweet, lovable, handsome boy.”

Until recently, I didn’t know that my mother had to have surgery on her breast because of that kick, which apparently aggravated a problem she’d been having with cystic mastitis. I felt awful, especially since I was so caught up in my own world that I didn’t know anything about it.

Every day after school, I’d come home and we’d sit at the kitchen table and talk for an hour or so. Sometimes we talked about diving. Sometimes we talked about school. Our relationship really turned around. She didn’t judge me. She made me feel it was okay to feel and think whatever I was thinking or feeling at the time.

One of the things we talked about when I came back from juvenile hall was drugs. At one point she told me to bring home a joint and we’d get stoned together, so she could see what I was talking about. But I didn’t like getting high on pot, so we never did it.

My relationship with my dad remained pretty much the same, but we talked more. The most meaningful conversations we had were about diving. It was the one thing about my life he could talk about in any depth. He was interested in my trips, my schedule, and my training. And it was something I felt comfortable talking about with him. After I got out of juvenile hall, he got me a dog and a color television, trying to make up for having me put in juvenile hall. It seemed odd that I was being rewarded for having done something bad.

As promised, after I got out of juvenile hall, we made a trip to the adoption agency that had handled my case. I found out what my biological dad looked like and that he was interested in sports. I didn’t find out much more about my mother than I already knew, except that she was living in San Diego. I didn’t know where my father was. My father had apparently wanted to keep me, and his parents had wanted to raise me as his brother. That alone was enough to convince me that my natural parents cared about me. That’s what I needed to hear the most: that I was wanted. But I also found out that my natural mother didn’t want me raised by my father’s family because, the adoption agency said, she wanted me to have more opportunities in life than they could offer.

It was comforting to know that thought went into the decision to put me up for adoption. I had always assumed that my biological parents didn’t love me. There were so many blank spots in the story, and I had chosen to fill them in as negatively as I could imagine, a pattern I repeated often in my life. I assumed that my biological parents had simply wanted to unload me. I never thought of two teenagers knowing they wouldn’t be able to provide the opportunities they wanted me to have. I never thought that giving me up might have been a difficult decision for them.

At that point my curiosity was satisfied. I knew I had been loved by my natural parents, and I realized that the Louganises
were
my family. My natural parents may have been the two fifteen-yearolds who had me, but Peter and Frances Louganis would always be my real parents. That realization really helped turn things around for me. But the emotional damage had already been done, and I’ve struggled throughout my life with trusting whether anyone genuinely cared for me.

W
HEN
I
STARTED TAKING
diving lessons in 1969, training for the 1976 Olympics never crossed my mind. I didn’t have any long-term goals other than doing my best in competitions and learning the most I could from my coaches. The two biggest challenges during the years leading up to the Olympics were finding a place to dive and getting enough consistent time with my coaches. With Coach Anders, we traveled to wherever we could find a pool that had the proper facilities, which was especially tough once I started training on the threemeter springboard and the ten-meter platform. Platform facilities were nonexistent in San Diego, and the three-meter facilities were terrible. We spent more time driving than diving.

Despite these frustrations, the three years I dove with Coach Anders were very exciting because I began competing in regional and national meets, I had the chance to go the Junior Olympics in Colorado Springs, and in the summer of 1973, I got to compete in Europe for the first time in the World Age Group Championships. My dad’s friend Joe Madruga sponsored me, covering the cost of my travel to New York, where I met up with the U.S. team for the trip to Luxembourg. Joe also paid for all the required uniforms: a travel uniform, a parade uniform, and sweats. Almost every Olympic athlete has a similar story about someone who helped finance supplies and travel. People like Joe Madruga are true Olympic heroes.

The trip to Europe was a blast. We were all kids, so you can imagine what it was like, many of us away from home for the first time. The youngest of the group was Bruce Kimball, who was later one of my major competitors. He was only eight years old, and before we left for Europe, his dad asked me if I would keep an eye on him.

Some of the things we did were pretty typical: shaving-cream fights, water balloons tossed out the hotel window, romping through the streets, stopping traffic with back flips. We were kids, but we were athletic.

After my first couple of years training with John Anders, he began telling me that I needed to find another coach. He could only take me so far. So in the summer of 1974, at his recommendation, I went to live with a family in Tucson, Arizona, to work with a new coach, Charlie Silber, who lived near a training center that had a diving platform. Then after I came home in the fall, I started working part-time with Dr. Sammy Lee, an Olympic diving coach.

A year after I stopped working with John Anders, my mom came into my bedroom one morning and threw a newspaper on my bed, very upset. I started going through the paper and there was a picture of Coach Anders. He had died of a heart attack. I was lucky to have had so much time with him. He taught me many of the fundamental diving skills I’ve used throughout my career. But more important than that, he was one of the few people who taught me to value myself. If only I had learned that lesson better.