My Losing Season (27 page)

When I turned to see who it was, it was a startling encounter for me. I am the first novelist in the world who has ever been slapped on the fanny by the incomparable Frank Selvy, one of the few basketball players to score a hundred points in a college basketball game.

         

T
HAT
T
UESDAY WE TRAVELED TO
Greenville, North Carolina, to play the Pirates of East Carolina before we took a ten-day break for our midyear exams. Mel refused to let us do our usual warmup drills before the game and required us to run our offense over and over instead. We looked odd and bush-league, and the East Carolina crowd began to heckle us from the sidelines. Hecklers alone could not alter the stern demeanor of our sphinxlike coach, and he gave no outward sign that he even heard the taunts. Mel later would let us know in an aside that he had played ACC basketball where the crowds were truly massive and rowdy and hatred was just another art form that fanaticism could take.

Up in the visitors' stands, I watched my mother and father sit near Doug Bridges's and Dan Mohr's parents. It would be the second college game my mother had seen me play and the first for my father. My father's eyes fell on me like soot left over from Ash Wednesday. We stared at each other and he gave no sign of recognition at all. I waved and he turned away, embarrassed. My mother spotted me and blew me a kiss, and I blew her one back. At that moment, I wished I could have chucked a hand grenade under my father's bleacher. His presence made me as nervous as if someone had placed a cobra in my locker. He could change the weather of any room he entered. I feared playing a game in front of him.

But I saw my mother's surprise when I went out to meet the East Carolina captain. I held the position in the most tenuous and unofficial manner possible, but it pleased me that I was acting as the captain of my team in the first college game my father had ever seen me play. I made a silent prayer that I would not humiliate myself or my teammates before my father's sullen gaze. I could take my father's fury and had proven that over and over during the long, forced march of my debased childhood; it was his laughter and mocking contempt that unmanned me completely, that I would do almost anything to avoid. Again, I prayed for a decent game; a decent one was enough, Lord.

But we were in trouble from the opening tip-off until the game's final horn. No one on the floor came to play against East Carolina and I found myself in my usual role of head cheerleader, going from player to player, exhorting them to greater effort, applauding every rebound, and trying to be aggressive on the fast breaks. Mohr remembers me dragging my pivot foot near the Citadel bench, then Mel leaping to his feet to scream at me as the referee called me for traveling. I remember none of this; this night I had a man I truly feared in attendance.

At East Carolina John DeBrosse seemed like he was floating in a disembodied fugue state, his eyes vacant and lost to the action on the court. He went through the motions, but he never registered his presence on the court with his usual bright authority, and he never got into the flow of the game at all.

Our big men rebounded well and would pull in thirty-one rebounds to the Pirates' twenty-one, but they were as blurry and intangible on the offensive end of the court as DeBrosse. Both Bridges and Mohr shot dreadfully. Mel screamed his way through the first half concentrating his rancor, as always, on the big guys in the middle.

“Do something, Zinsky,” he yelled at Zeke, who also could not buy a basket, even though he hauled down a game-high ten rebounds. “Do anything. Get off your ass!”

When I scored on a drive, I looked toward my parents. My mother cheered loudly, but my father was blank. It was a religious belief of my father's not to show any sign of joy or pleasure when his oldest son made a basket during a game. Eventually, I quit looking at my father and concentrated on trying to rouse my sleepwalking team from its trance. I went from player to player when we lined up at the foul line and slapped their fannies hard, yet I could not touch their buried spirits.

Point guards carry the responsibility for their teams showing up with their best games in their eyes. My team never got near Greenville, North Carolina, on January 13, 1967, and the fault lies with me. Tee came in off the bench and played his fiery, up-tempo game and scored twelve quick points in the second half. Mel became unhinged by the game because East Carolina was in a rebuilding year, and Mel expected us to beat the Pirates badly. But East Carolina hit 52 percent of their shots and beat us 80–72. Their victory seemed more lopsided than that. It felt like they had beaten us by thirty points. As I ran from the court, I carried a lingering feeling of shame that my father had witnessed my team receive such a thorough trouncing.

The savage diatribe delivered by Mel Thompson in the locker room after that game marks for many of the players the low point of a season chock-f of them. Mel launched into a deranged, near psychotic rage that seemed half seizure and half cuckoo's nest. I thought he would have a stroke before our eyes. My teammates sat with their heads in their hands and their eyes on the floor. We knew better than to make eye contact with Mel when all his demons were loose and our coach went crackers. He screamed about our lack of balls, courage, will, pride, or any of the other signs that imply honor among athletes. I heard none of it because he had begun the most raving, incoherent harangue against any team I would ever play on with the strangest words I had ever heard come from his mouth. “What I have to say to this team isn't gonna be pretty, and it applies to everybody in this room . . . except Pat Conroy.”

Thunderstruck by this unprecedented dispensation, I sat through his savage evisceration of my teammates with a combination of shame and wonderment. In my four years with Mel, I had never once heard him excuse any player from one of his rambling indictments. We had almost hit rock bottom, the place where all the darkness of Mel's coaching was leading us, like it had led all the teams of Mel's I had played on at The Citadel. “I don't even want to see you guys for the rest of the night. It makes me sick to my stomach that I got guys on this club who are just going through the motions. You're nothing. All of you. Except you, Pat,” he said, again an extraordinary singling out unheard-of in Mel's fiery career, which stunned me.

“You guys are shit. You don't have it. You never had it. And tonight, you played like you didn't care one way or the other. You make me sick to my stomach.”

For several minutes after Mel's departure no one moved or spoke. Finally, Zinsky began to peel his jersey off and Root took his head out of his hands. DeBrosse looked perplexed and Tee would not smile for the rest of the year. Even the Green Weenies were shocked by the fierceness of the onslaught.

I sat staring at the locker room when Rat came up behind me and squeezed my shoulders.

“Why did Mel excuse me from his ass-kicking?” I asked.

“Because you were terrific,” Rat whispered. “You scored twenty-five points. You made nine out of thirteen shots. Hit all seven of your free throws. You were good, son.”

Rat moved down the line to soothe the frayed sensibilities of my teammates as I sat there in complete surprise considering the news he had brought to me. Long before, I had given up all hope of ever scoring twenty points in a college basketball game. I remembered the television interview when Mel had put his arm around me and told all of South Carolina that I was fully capable of scoring one or two points a game. A twenty-point game is a benchmark for every basketball player who ever played the game. It is like scoring a touchdown in football or hitting a home run in baseball. In the calculus of sport, it lets the world know in the thoughtless beauty of box scores that you have played one hell of a game. Rat's news took my breath away because I had felt no sense of elation or heightened powers, nor was I even aware I was scoring a career high. I felt only the keen frustration of a point guard unable to rally his team around him.

The head manager, Al Beiner, came up to me and said, “Great game, Pat. You were high scorer on both teams. Your old man's outside. Wants to see you.”

I got up and walked toward my father with my spirits rising. My father had often told me I was not good enough to be a college basketball player, so I felt lighter than air as I skipped across the cement floor to encounter him after I had lit up the scoreboard with my first twenty-point game in my college career. When I saw my father's face, I could tell he was not in an ebullient mood. He looked at me as he always did, as though the mere sight of me filled him with revulsion.

“You were shit tonight,” he said. “Your team was shit. Your coach can't coach worth a shit.”

“We had an off night, Dad,” I said.

“You're shit. You didn't have an off night. Shit don't have off nights. Your full-court press is the worst I've ever seen.”

“We agree on that, Dad.”

Dad put his hand on my chest, pushed me up against a cinderblock wall, and said, “You couldn't hold my jock as a ballplayer. I used to eat guys alive on the court. I saw you help a guy get up tonight. Stuck out your hand to help him off the ground. I'd've laid his ass out.”

My father was six foot four and I was five ten. He towered over me as he whispered these pleasantries in my ear. “What a southern pussy on the basketball court you turned out to be.”

“We'll get East Carolina when they come to our place, Dad.”

“They'll kick the shit out of you down there.”

“Can I see Mom?” I said.

“Negative. We got a long ride back to D.C. We wasted our fucking time coming to see this shit. You couldn't hold my jock. Never forget it.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, and my father walked out into the cold night.

That night I spent at Danny Mohr's house in Atlantic Beach, North Carolina. The sweetness of Danny's parents offered a vivid contrast to my father's blitzkrieg against me outside the locker room. Both sensed that this basketball season was taking a tremendous toll on their hurt and sensitive son. I had no idea of the extent until I listened to Dan enumerate his list of grievances against Mel to his parents and the endless humiliations he had endured at the hands of our coach. Somewhere, on that long ride to Atlantic Beach, I realized that Danny's disaffection with Mel Thompson was fast taking on all the aspects of sheer abomination. For over an hour, Danny emptied the frustrations of that year onto the laps of his soft-spoken parents. Their love of their son was tangible in that car. His father's gentleness flowed like some rare form of honey over his son's dark mood.

When I prepared for bed, I brushed my teeth in their one tiny bathroom and saw that the shower floor was a wooden slat and that the water drained onto the ground beneath the house. I had never known that Dan Mohr's family was as poor and struggling as it was. It explained why he never had a sports coat over the Christmas break. Before we went to bed, Mrs. Mohr kissed me and said it was a great honor to have another Citadel basketball player sleep in their house. She told me to wake her in the middle of the night if I needed anything. Mr. Mohr then hugged me and thanked me for watching out for his son for four years. It moved me powerfully when Mr. Mohr embraced me, but it was much later that I realized that I had rarely been hugged by a father before, and never by my own.

         

I
N OUR REMATCH WITH
F
URMAN ON
February
19
in Charleston, Frank Selvy made a brilliant coaching adjustment and put the sophomore guard Dick Esleeck on me, and I got to measure how improved the young Esleeck was from our first game together. I was listless and leaden during the whole game. I had liked playing against Furman a lot more when Dick was guarding DeBrosse.

I did a better job on Esleeck in this game on defense, but he got sixteen points, eight of them on foul shots. Esleeck improved as the game went along and no one guarded me better than he did since the magisterial point guard Bobby Buisson of Auburn, in the first game of the season, a hundred years ago. I scored six points and lost the game for my college. Kroboth had sixteen, Mohr fourteen, and DeBrosse eleven, but the team was exhausted. We should have beaten Furman on our home court and beaten them badly. But Esleeck was wallpapered to my back the whole night, and he shut me down with great effectiveness.

Years later, I looked Dick Esleeck up in the Furman media guide and discovered that he was the first-team Helms Foundation All-American his senior year, was in the Furman Athletic Hall of Fame, was twice on the Southern Conference first team, and had been named South Carolina Player of the Year in 1969. I would like to say, Dick Esleeck, wherever you are, it was an honor to take the court against you.

After the game was over, Tee Hooper went to the visiting team locker room and asked for an audience with Coach Frank Selvy. Again, Tee had hardly played and his sense of despair was deepening. “Coach Selvy, if I quit The Citadel, could I come play for Furman? Would you let me play for Furman?” Tee Hooper, who many believe was the greatest athlete in Citadel history, was begging for a chance to play for Furman.

“Tee, you could play for anyone,” Frank Selvy said. Frank Selvy knew a little bit about the game.

CHAPTER 20

ANNIE KATE

T
HE
C
ITADEL IN WINTER WAS A REFUGE OF COLD, MONASTIC BEAUTY
to
me. As I made my way across the parade ground at night, the front-lit buildings looked as though they were sculptured palaces of ice and the mist was coming off the river. The cold burned my cheeks and the barracks fell silent as the cadets prepared themselves for exams with great resolution. Most of the time, the barracks were boisterous, noisy places, but always turned monastery-like when our trial by examinations began in earnest. Each night during exam week, I returned to the same desk in the library along the back wall on the first floor. I used it as getaway and pied-à-terre. For four years, it was at this desk where I tried to make myself smart during my Citadel years. The library spilled over with more books than I would ever be able to read in three lifetimes. My soul found ease and rest in the companionship of books. The library staff knew me on a first-name basis; I felt as comfortable entering the Citadel library as a whelk entering its shell.

On a Sunday evening after mess, I spread my papers in that corner of the world and began to memorize the notebooks that I had used to copy down every word my professors uttered in class. I was not happy about the academic progress I had made thus far, and I wanted to prove that I could excel in my coursework the last year I would attend college. In class, I had found myself distracted and unable to train my full attention on the voice of a boring professor. My faculty advisor, Colonel Doyle, had taken note of this and had designed my senior year with six of the most gifted teachers on campus. All were brilliant, self-dramatizing men, and I could not wait to get to class each morning to hear what they had to say about English drama, adolescent psychology, literary criticism, the history of England, the modern novel, and the writing of poetry. It still makes me happy to read that distinguished list of courses and think about the shapes of those textbooks and their varying smells as I marked them up on every page where the professor had placed greatest emphasis. That was the semester I encountered Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde, fell in love with Isabel Archer in
The Portrait of a Lady,
followed Anna Karenina to her death in the trainyards of Moscow, and listened to the gregarious Charles Martin lecture about England with such passion and eloquence that I grew enamored of the country and its people long before I stood on Hadrian's Wall and wrote thank-you notes to Colonel Martin for handing me the country of England as a gift. In a manila folder, I studied the ten poems I would hand over to Colonel Doyle in the morning. Though I was still a bad poet, I could see that there was something in my writing that had not been there before, and I felt euphoric as I read words I had written.

In his office the next day, I writhed in discomfort as Colonel Doyle read them aloud. The great gift that John Doyle gave me at The Citadel was treating every word I wrote for him as though it was literature itself. He read my stuff to me in the same reverent voice that he read Pound or Spenser to his English classes. There was no letdown or bemusement or even gentle irony to betray that he knew he was reciting harmless drivel. When I left his office, he handed me a sheet of paper that said, “A for your work in poetry, Mr. Conroy. You've made a fine start. A for your superior performance against the Spiders of Richmond. As always, it's been a pleasure teaching you. John Doyle.”

On Monday afternoon, I took the exam for literary criticism and spent the afternoon writing an essay on the theories of William Hazlitt, something I have not thought about since. I had to sprint to the field house when that exam was over and was almost late to practice which began precisely at 1600 hours. The practices never let up in intensity during exams, and it never failed to surprise the team that Mel granted us no quarter during this period. The Citadel basketball team, as always, practiced hard then studied hard.

On Tuesday, I took my exam in English drama and the one on the modern novel the following day. I chose to write an essay on the theme of betrayal in
Portrait of a Lady
because I wanted to spend another two hours in the presence of Isabel Archer, even though I felt unfaithful to Anna Karenina in doing so. I filled up two blue books, then ran across the parade ground to practice, the air delicious and winey and clear. I loved the whole shut-down feel of the South in the cold.

There was a sameness to exam week I found comforting and solid. The whole campus turned inward and serious, as the results of the tests were published on the doors of our professors' offices. No names were given, but we found our grades listed beside our cadet serial number. Cries of “Fuck!” or “Jesus Christ!” echoed through the halls as disappointed cadets filled the air all over campus with their grievances. The Citadel felt more like a college during exam week than any other time of year. I had made four A's and a B in my ROTC studies when the roof fell in on me, and I was faced with a decision I thought could get me kicked out of school.

I was walking up the R Company steps when an orderly of the guard called out, “Emergency phone call for Pat Conroy.” Rushing to the guardroom, I picked up the phone and could not understand a single word a drunken, hysterical woman was saying to me.

“Please slow down,” I said. “I don't know who this is.”

“It's Isabel, Pat,” she said. “Just Isabel.”

It was the voice of the mother of the only young woman I had ever been completely in love with, the one whose break-up with me still left me shivering with hurt. During my junior year, I had lost myself as a ballplayer. I learned that unrequited love could cripple an athlete as effectively as a broken bone or a torn ligament. I did not know how to bear a life that Isabel's daughter had walked out of.

“Calm down, Isabel. Tell me what's wrong.”

“My ex-husband's in town. I got a letter from him today. The bastard says he's going to slit my throat. He'll do it, too, Pat—he was a Marine like your old man. You've got to help me! You're all I've got.”

“I've got to go see the Boo, Isabel,” I said. “But I'm coming. Hold tight.” Then her line went dead.

I raced over to Lieutenant Colonel Nugent Courvoisie's quarters on the Citadel campus and banged on the door. His wife, Elizabeth, let me in and told me the colonel was upstairs in his bed. I took the stairs two at a time and found myself facing the assistant commandant of cadets in his pajamas. The sight startled me, and the Boo said, “Sorry I'm in my pj's, bubba, but a man gets tired running after reprobates like you. You got a half hour before taps, bubba. Sound off.” During my freshman year, every upperclassman passed down one law of the land: if you ever get into real trouble, go see the Boo.

I told him about Isabel's phone call and he took down her address and phone number.

“Can I go out there and stay with Mrs. Gervais, Colonel?” I asked after filling in the details.

“Have you noticed this is a military college, Conroy?” he said.

“I did, sir. Yes, sir. Just once, though.”

“I'll cover for you, bubba,” the Boo said. “But just this once. I'll nail you for something later. Now get out there fast. That woman needs you.”

When I got to her house, Isabel was passed out in her chair with her door wide open. I picked her up and took her to her bedroom and covered her up. I checked to see if there were any signs that her ex-husband had already showed up and made sure the house was locked tight. Beside her chair I found the letter her ex had sent her, as nasty a letter as I have ever read. It seethed with hatred and at the end of it, he swore that he would slit her throat and take his time doing it.

I lowered the blinds and turned out all the lights and did a slow surveillance of all the windows of the house. The phone rang and I jumped. When I picked it up, I heard the Boo's unmistakable voice. He said, “You okay, bubba? I worry about my little lost lambs when they wander off the pasture.”

“I'm fine, Colonel. If this guy's coming, he's not here yet.”

“I called the cops on Sullivan's Island. They'll send a patrol car to circle your block every hour. They know the situation, bubba. Call if there's trouble. I can be there in fifteen minutes.”

“Thanks, Colonel. I can never thank you enough for this.”

“Caring for my lambs. Part of the job.”

Ten minutes later I saw a patrol car cruise in front of Isabel's house for the first time. It made the circuit every hour of that long night. I sat in absolute darkness surrounded by butcher knives, a baseball bat, and a jarful of nails. On the electric stove, I kept four pans of water boiling all night. If her ex-husband made it through the front door, the boiling water would be his first sign that he had erred in assaulting Isabel's South Carolina home.

When morning came, I let Isabel sleep as I made myself a cup of coffee. In the trash can in the kitchen, I found the envelope the letter had arrived in. Though it had a Charleston return address, I noticed a postmark from St. Louis, Missouri. Strange, I thought, and I dialed for directory assistance in St. Louis and asked for a phone listing in the name of Isabel's ex-husband, getting one under the name of a retired master sergeant in the Marine Corps.

For an hour, I waited and plotted until I came up with a usable plan. Then I dialed the man's number in St. Louis. “This is Colonel Donald Conroy, USMC, Sergeant. I'm here between assignments at the Pentagon, and your name came across my desk yesterday. I got a call from a Charleston, South Carolina, police chief with a warrant for your arrest. Do you know one Isabel Gervais?”

“I was once married to the bitch,” he said.

“The police chief wanted the Marine Corps' help in tracking you down, Wilson. He said you threatened to slit this woman's throat. That couldn't be true. You're a semper fi guy, Wilson. I know you're retired, but Marines don't turn to shit that fast, do we?”

“Sir, how do I know who I'm talking to?” he said, growing suspicious.

“Surprise, Wilson. You don't. But look me up, pal. I'm a fighter pilot, jocko, but because someone fucked up my orders, I'm lucky enough to find myself privileged to call losers like you who get their rocks off threatening their old girlfriends. Write it down. Colonel Donald N. Conroy. N stands for nothing. No middle name. Call my number at the Pentagon, and you'll get ole yours truly on the horn. Want my fucking ID?”

“No, sir. Sorry, sir. Just checking, sir.”

“Let me run an idea past you,” I said in my father's voice. “The Marine Corps is a little sensitive about its image these days and tell the truth, Wilson, an ex-Marine who slits his ex-wife's throat does not make the PR guys happy. Get my drift?”

“Yes, sir. I do, sir.”

“So let's come up with a plan. Say I call this chief of police guy. I get folksy with the son-of-a-bitch. Then I tell the shitbag that I chewed you a new asshole. Get my drift, Wilson? You got drunk. You wrote the bitch a letter. You couldn't remember a thing in it. You with me, Wilson?”

“Sir, I see where you're going,” Wilson said.

“Okay. I tell the police chief that I talked straight to you. Marine to Marine. I said to you, ‘Wilson, can you leave that broad alone? You give me your word as a Marine?' We semper fi the shit out of each other. You swear to me on the honor of the corps that you'll leave that broad alone? You gotta mean it. Make me happy, Wilson. Leave the broad alone.”

“I will, sir. That's a promise.”

“Promise me as a Marine, Sergeant.”

“You have my promise as a Marine, Colonel,” Wilson said.

“Then that arrest warrant will be ripped up today, Wilson. Semper fi, Sergeant.”

“Semper fi, Colonel Conroy.”

I hung up the phone and found Isabel on her couch, bent double laughing. She had listened to my entire performance.

She fixed me breakfast that morning before I went back to take an afternoon exam. I left to go back to The Citadel as soon as she brought her daughter's name up. The mention of that name still carried the power to hurt me.

         

I
N MY ENTIRE FOUR YEARS AT
T
HE
C
ITADEL,
there was one young woman I truly loved and one woman only. In the novel
The Lords of Discipline,
I wrote a fictionalized version of this young woman and called her Annie Kate Gervais. She will remain Annie Kate Gervais in this book. Annie Kate ended up marrying a fine man, and I know her three children rather well. When I lived in San Francisco, Annie Kate and I lunched fairly frequently although neither of us ever alluded to the events that altered both of our lives forever. We did not discuss the thing that burned most brightly between us. I never once mentioned the ecstasy of my love for her and Annie Kate never once mentioned the baby. I still do not know if she ever read
The Lords of Discipline
or not, and she knows I will never ask that question. Our lost love is a secret that lies mysteriously between us. Our friendship is shallow, brittle, and lacks intimacy, yet remains important to both of us. When I look at Annie Kate I remind myself that I was once a boy who thought this woman was a goddess and her body a field of fire. When she looks at me, her eyes find the boy I once was, the lost, lost boy who woke up in the middle of his life a stranger to himself and heard a hurt and pretty girl call out his name. The boy did not know then he could only love hurt women, nor did he know that all the women in his life who would call his name would come from the cold country of hurt. The sons of beaten women do not often make the best selections among the women in their lives. In my own life, the women I did not choose remain the lucky ones.

I met Annie Kate by accident. At the end of my trying plebe year at The Citadel, one of the seniors I was assigned to in the alcove room next door to me in R Company told me he needed me to date a girl who had been stood up by another cadet. Since the recognition of the knobs had taken place several days before, I could double-date with him without any fear of his being accused of fraternizing. I now belonged to the brotherhood.