My Losing Season (12 page)

The regimental commander, William Sansom, spoke into the intercom in a clear, loud voice. “Gentlemen, the plebe system for the class of 1967 is now in effect.”

The lights flooded on, and the four cadres of N, O, R, and T companies roared into sudden life and poured like liquid flame through the shocked, overwhelmed ranks of plebes. In the sheer force of their assault, they blew us out like candles, one by one. The barracks turned into containers of overripe noise and chaos. Someone screamed in my right ear, “Right face, smackhead.” But at the same time, the scream came into my left ear, “About face, maggot.” A face materialized in front of me, feral and out of control. “Left face, douche bag! You better do what I order you to do, wad-waste.”

Paralysis set in quickly. The uproar was so cataclysmic that I just held on in the first ten minutes until I adjusted to the pure maelstrom. The cadre overwhelmed us and seemed thousand-voiced and ubiquitous as they cut wide swaths through us. When I executed a left-face, I was a foot away from the terrified face of a chinless boy who could not stop trembling. When I did an about-face, I was inches away from an overweight boy who had begun to cry. The trembling and the tears attracted swarms of upperclassmen who sensed the fragility of both boys, frothing with pleasure when the boys came apart. I never saw either boy after that night, and they made up part of the lost wreckage of my torn-apart class.

I was grateful when ordered to do twenty-five pushups because that generally meant the cadre man was going on down the line to scream at someone else. “One sir, two sir, three sir, four sir,” I'd shout. When I leapt back up, bracing again, someone else would appear and the games would begin anew. The cadre wanted you to memorize their names and do it quickly. I screamed those names back in a plague of words, discordant as a broken hive of killer bees—those debased names cut through the air around my ears. Before the night was over, I knew the cadets who were just doing their jobs and the ones I'd learn to fear. The Citadel was a crucible of authentic leadership, and to a much lesser degree, a hothouse where sadists perfected their grim arts. Nothing has surprised me so much or lingered in memory so long as Hell Night, and, until I endured it, I'd never understood what an overfearful, shakable boy I was. I still wear that night as wound and rite of passage, and the hour where I watched my boyhood die in tears. What I couldn't stand was not my own suffering, which was bad enough, but the suffering of the nameless plebes around me, the acne-scarred, the oversensitive, the nervous nellies, and the mama's boys forced into The Citadel by undermining fathers. It wasn't pretty but it was effective. I saw boys lining up at the gates of Stevens Barracks trembling, desperate to remove themselves from this sanctioned madness. Eight freshmen left R Company that night. Seven more would not survive Hell Week. I would have joined them cheerfully had I not feared my father far more than the wrath of the cadre.

Toward the end of that night, a cadet first lieutenant came to me from the side and said, “Relax your knees, Mr. Conroy. That's it. Your classmates are fainting because they've locked their knees. It's almost over. You're doing well. You've survived Hell Night. I think you're going to make it.”

It was Bud Aston, his voice brotherly and humane. “Sir, yes, sir,” I said, almost blind in my own sweat.

Bud Aston moved out of sight and out of my life as a cadet. When the bugle sounded a merciful end to Hell Night, I heard the shouts of “Get to your rooms, dumbheads. Move, smacks.” I took one step and fell to my knees. With most of my fellow plebes, I crawled to my room. An upperclassman mounted me and rode me like a pony all the way to my doorway. I remembered his high-pitched laughter as he slapped me on the ass to make me go faster.

In the room, I was on my hands and knees gasping for breath when Bob Patterson crawled in beside me. We spent a long minute gasping, then Bob reached over and touched my shoulder. “You okay, Pat?”

“I don't know, Bob. How 'bout you?”

“Jesus Christ. Can you believe that shit?”

“I might have made a slight error in my choice of colleges,” I said.

When Bob spoke to me with such great tenderness and when we laughed together in that darkened room, the brotherhood had begun its deft, healing work. When they began screaming for us to get to the shower room, Bob and I helped each other rise to our feet. I was terrified to go out on the galleries to face them again, and I paused at the door. Bob pushed me and whispered, “Let's show the fucks,” and we headed out toward them.

In the bathroom, the screaming was nightmarish as they ran us into a hot shower, had us soap ourselves down, then sent us back to our rooms before we could wash the soap off. Bob and I stood by our sink and washed off as well as we could. Because I'd done so many pushups, I couldn't climb into the top bunk until Bob let me step on his back. I lay awake long enough to hear him breathing easily in his sleep, but before I fell into a troubled, exhausted sleep, I swore to myself, “I'll never raise my voice to a plebe.” And I never did, not once, during my four-year test at The Citadel.

The following Sunday, which marked the official end of Hell Week, the rest of the Corps returned to join up with the cadre that had trained us in the art of becoming cadets. After mess that night and the evening ritual of the sweat party, my roommate and I were summoned into the alcove room of the four senior privates who had moved in next door. Bob and I came in bracing and fearful, expecting the worse.

The four seniors were as relaxed as the cadre were bubonic. They laughed good-naturedly when they saw us bracing and red-faced.

“At ease, dumbheads,” one of them said. Since no one had given that command to us before, Bob and I had no idea what to do, so we remained locked into our braces.

“It means relax, boys,” a red-haired senior said. “We come in peace. You've nothing to fear from us.”

“Do you believe in slavery, dumbheads?” the first guy said, apple-cheeked, his eyes glittering with humor. “Pop off.”

“Sir no sir,” Bob and I said.

“You've been assigned to us,” Jim Plunkett said. “I personally don't believe in slavery, but it exists here at The Citadel. Right, guys?”

“It's terrible,” Dave Keyser said. “I'm a man of God, dumbheads. I'll be entering the seminary next year with slavery on my conscience.”

“I'm going to like having slaves,” Mr. Hough said.

“You'll clean our room every morning, smacks. You'll make our beds, clean our sinks, sweep our floors. This room will be shipshape before you leave for class. You'll shine our shoes, clean our brass—just normal practices common to slaves everywhere. Do you understand, dumb squats?” Plunkett said.

“Sir yes sir!”

“Except for me,” he continued. “I'm an exceptional case. I'm famous for running shit on the system here. I'm a special kind of senior private, right, guys?”

“A pig,” LaBianco said.

“A disgrace to The Citadel,” Hough added.

“He sets a new low for senior privates,” Keyser agreed.

“I'm a slob. A legend among my classmates. I'm allergic to shoe polish. Brasso makes me gag. You shine for these guys. You let me decay at my own speed.”

Then Gary LaBianco said, “Gentlemen, you help us and we'll help you get through this fucking shithole. You lucked out, boys. We're very nice guys.”

“Sweethearts,” Keyser agreed.

“We don't rack ass. We don't buck for rank. And we're not military dicks,” Hough said.

“Wait a minute,” LaBianco said. “Are you boys bucking for rank?”

Bob Patterson surprised me by saying, “Yes, sir. I'm bucking for rank.”

“What about you, Conroy?” Keyser asked.

“No, sir. I want to be like you guys, sir,” I said, sealing my identity in R Company for all time.

“Yep, we got us some good slaves,” Jimbo Plunkett said. “One's a dick. One's a human being.”

And, in time, good slaves did Bob Patterson and I become. First we had to learn how to sweep a floor that would satisfy the antiseptic fanaticism of a surly corporal, and clean a sink where bacteria feared to grow. We had to master the mystery of spit-shined shoes and polished brass. Bob and I learned the Citadel way of folding underwear and socks in clean white sheets of paper. We became the sworn enemies of lint and dust and disorder of all kinds. It took us a month to master the domestic arts of being a plebe, but by the end of the year, I could get a job as a manservant in a Henry James novel.

The mess hall was central to the plebes' worst nightmare during my time at The Citadel. It was at the dining table that cruelty found its proving ground among the cadre. The six weeks I spent with R Company at mess before the basketball season began were desperate. I learned many ways to break a man during my time as a plebe, but none were as effective as starvation. For thirty minutes the cadre could harass us up close as we sat braced and rigid on the outer six inches of our chairs. We learned to fill their water and milk glasses as soon as we sat down. They tested us on our proficiency at plebe knowledge. I still know all the company commanders from that year, and their names make up a fearful litany of Satan's lieutenants that I bring as cargo with me.

The Monday after Hell Week was the first time I caught up with my fellow freshmen basketball players. All six of them were in the same state of shock when I met them. We looked like survivors of a death march, and our glazed eyes gave the locker room a hushed, funereal aura. Coach Paul Brandenberg, the freshman coach, introduced me to my teammates.

“Hey, Pat. We lost you in the crowd somehow. It's taken a week of red tape to get you over to the gym. What happened to your train?”

“It was five hours late, Coach,” I said.

“How'd you do the first week?”

“Never had so much fun, Coach,” I said, and heard Bill Taflinger laugh.

“Told you he was funny,” Bill said, coming over to shake hands with me.

Coach Brandenberg said, “This is Danny Mohr, Pat. One of the best players out of North Carolina last year. He's from Wilmington, a southern boy like you.”

“I used to live at Camp Lejeune and Cherry Point, Danny,” I said.

“Another southern boy, Donnie Biggs of Macon,” Coach Brandenberg said.

“I was born in Atlanta,” I said to the six-six forward who was built as well as any boy I've ever seen. Donnie was so depressed that he could barely look up to greet me.

“You guys are the first three boys we've ever recruited from the South in this basketball program,” the coach said.

“Lucky us, huh, Donnie?” I said to the big man from Macon.

When we dressed and went out to the main court to shoot around, I noticed right away that I was the smallest man on the team by four inches. As I watched the five scholarship boys making jump shots from around the perimeter, I felt the first attack of panic set in. These guys were not just better basketball players than I was, I was not good enough to be a manager in their league. When we played a three-on-three half-court game later that afternoon, the difference became even more apparent to me. Jim Halpin, who I learned led the Catholic League of Philadelphia in scoring his senior year, was a six-foot-two-inch guard who covered me like a film of sweat on defense and had the quickest, most accurate jump shot I'd ever seen. Taflinger, the other guard, at six three kept posting me up down low, using his height and long arms to score at will.

That Friday before practice I sought out Paul Brandenberg and told him, “Coach, I'm not good enough to play on this team.”

“Who says so?”

“I do, Coach. I've never seen guys this good. Taflinger scores on me every time he gets the ball. Halpin takes the ball away from me every time I dribble.”

“No one's ever taught you how to play defense, Pat,” he said. “We'll teach you that. That move Halpin has—he flicks the ball away by going behind you when you dribble. That's a big-city move. You only see it in the Northeast. Especially in Philly. We're going to have to break Jim of that habit. The refs down here have never seen it. They'll call a foul on him every time.”

“Jimmy hasn't fouled me yet,” I said. “I can't figure out what he's doing. I dribble by him, he ducks behind me and flicks the ball out of bounds.”

“Try this,” Coach Brandenberg said. “The second you go by Halpin, do a crossover dribble. Just change hands.”

That afternoon with Jim Halpin guarding me again, I took my coach's advice and switched hands on the dribble the instant I flashed by him. He kept slapping the hand where the ball had been and I was sailing through the lane for a layup. In the far corner of the gym I watched Coach Brandenberg observing the game in secret, since it was against NCAA rules for coaches to oversee practices until October 15. Smoking a cigarette, he pointed at me and nodded his head in approval. Good coaching is good teaching and nothing else. I saw him walk behind the bleachers to his office.

That Sunday I went over to Mark Clark Hall to place a collect call to my family in Omaha. I flooded with emotion when I heard the phone ring in another strange house I barely knew. Though I'd tried to hide my disappointment, it had hurt my feelings that I was the only freshman I saw on the day the plebes reported who arrived without his parents. I heard the operator say, “Collect call from a Mr. Pat Conroy. Will you accept charges?”

I exploded with rage when my mother said, “No. Sorry, operator, but we don't know any Pat Conroy.”

Slamming the phone down, I immediately made another collect call and when the operator spoke I said, “Accept the damn phone call, Mom.”

With great reluctance she did. “Don't make this a habit, young man. You know this family isn't made of money. How's your first couple of weeks in college going? You having a ball?”

I began weeping and couldn't stop. I'd suffered a mild breakdown of spirit and character as I lost a grip on all the words I'd planned to say to my mother. For thirty seconds I sobbed until I could gain control. “Mom, you sent me to a torture chamber,” I gasped out finally.