My Losing Season (13 page)

“Well, it'll be good for you. It'll make a man out of you.”

“It'll make a man like Dad out of me,” I snapped back.

“Just how bad is it?” Mom asked. “Give me an example.”

“It's worse than Dad—that's how bad it is. I'd much rather be living with Dad than going to this school.”

After a long pause, my mother said, “Oh, my God.”

Then my father took the phone, and I heard his despised, mocking voice. “It sounds like my little baby boy's having some boo-hoo time with Mommy. If baby boy wants to do some whining he can talk to Daddy-poo.”

“I don't like The Citadel, Dad,” I said, controlling the quaver in my voice. “I'm thinking about coming home.”

I heard my father's laughter, then the hardening of his voice as he asked, “Where's home, son? You no longer have a home.” He hung up before I could talk to my brothers or sisters.

         

I
N
C
OLONEL
J
OHN
D
OYLE
'
S
E
NGLISH CLASS
, I was one of forty plebes who sat in exhaustion as he told us what he expected of us in English 101. Colonel Doyle was fastidious and cultivated. He twinkled when he spoke to us in an elegant accent from the midlands of Virginia. He passed out a piece of paper and asked us to list every novel we'd read in high school. Taking the assignment seriously, I was listing my fortieth novel when I became aware of a strange murmuring. I looked up to see my classmates staring at me with hostility. For ten minutes, I'd been the only cadet in the class still adding to his list, and they didn't appreciate my show-offy gesture at all. I put my pencil down quickly, and Colonel Doyle asked that we pass up the papers.

At the next class Colonel Doyle asked us to write an essay on any topic to give him some idea about our skills in the use of the English language. “Take your time. Write carefully about a subject that has meaning for you.”

Before I began, I studied Colonel Doyle's face, which registered a kindly sensibility as opposed to the cult of masculinity I was facing each day in the barracks. His voice sounded like silk polishing ivory as he warned us to watch for the dangle of participles and the gentlemanly agreement of verbs. He had a face and a manner I trusted, and I began to write. Colonel John Doyle never forgot the inflammatory essay I wrote for him in that heat-dazed English class in 1963.

I described every single thing I could remember about Hell Week, leaving nothing out. I gave Colonel Doyle a cook's tour of The Citadel seen through a knob's eyes when the details were still fresh and pulsing. Taking him through sweat parties in the shower rooms, I told him of doing so many pushups I couldn't even reach up to remove a field cap from my head. I wrote of being marched in a platoon of knobs down to the marsh's edge where the gnats and mosquitoes feasted on us, and we weren't allowed to move a muscle to drive them away. I bore witness to the starvation that took place every day at mess and the indefensible cruelty the cadre displayed to ugly boys or pimpled ones or the skinny and fat boys whose faces burned with shame at the ferocity of the abuse. The barracks were a place where young boys' souls went to die, and I questioned how a man of his disposition and kindness could take such an active part in such inhumanity. At the end of my essay I had an anonymous plebe walk out onto the middle of the quad at 0300 hours and excrete solemnly in the moonlight air as a revolutionary act to express his utter contempt for The Citadel's out-of-control plebe system. I signed my name with a flourish, and after the papers were handed forward I considered the possibility that I'd just performed a reckless, even suicidal act. My college career hung in the balance of my instincts concerning John Doyle's character.

At the beginning of the next class, he handed out the marked and corrected essays, and the room filled with the murmurous discontent of plebes. Doyle was notorious for his rigorous standards and tough grading, and he had flunked four-fifths of the class for their initial performance on the art of the essay. To my infinite relief, he had awarded me an A, but made an appointment for me in his office at 1400 hours the next Friday. “You seem to be having some problems adjusting to the plebe system, Mr. Conroy,” he wrote with an economy of both phrasing and emotion that would become familiar to me.

On Friday afternoon, I sat beside Colonel Doyle's desk as he studied the list of the novels I'd itemized for him at the beginning of his class.

“You are widely read, Mr. Conroy,” he said.

“My mother's read everything,” I said. “She passed that on to my sister and me.”

“You listed more novels than all the rest of your class. Are you unhappy here?”

“I hate this place,” I said.

“This essay you wrote . . . you were testing me, weren't you, Mr. Conroy?”

“I'm not sure what you mean, sir.”

“You knew I could have you thrown out of college if I turned this paper over to the commandant,” Colonel Doyle said.

“Yes, sir, I think I knew that.”

“I gave you an A instead,” he said. “I hope I passed your test.”

“With flying colors, sir,” I said.

“I'm sorry you're having such a difficult time at The Citadel,” he said. “But I'd like you to know the young men who graduate from this college are the finest men I've ever met. A Citadel man is quite the work of art. Your time will be well spent here.”

“If I stay that long, sir.”

“You'll stay,” he said.

“How do you know, sir?”

“Your essay,” Colonel Doyle said. “The plebe system can't touch the spirit of that boy.”

         

O
UR COACHES HADN
'
T THE FOGGIEST NOTIONS
of
what we were going through in the barracks when we left them at the Armory each night. Nor could they have done a single thing about it had they known. My teammates were as tough and strong as any boys in America yet every one of them had trouble surviving the fury of that system. It was not the physical rigor that came near to breaking us, it was the psychological harassment that was a part of those murderous days under the Charleston sun. I stayed at the point of mental breakdown for the entire nine months. I found I was an oversensitive, touchy boy trapped in a milieu where sensitivity won no merit badges and touchiness itself was a capital crime. Very early, I learned that the cadre admired a good attitude, so I tried to bring a boundless enthusiasm to whatever indignity they required. When my first sergeant asked me to do fifty pushups, I dropped to the ground and began pumping them out as though he had flung me a fistful of hundred-dollar bills. It was the boys who flashed anger or irritation that attracted the malignant attention of the upperclassmen hungry for rank. “Racking ass” was an art form among the cadre, and the best among them could break a weak boy in an hour or less. The cadre tried to dismantle me and succeeded every night, but I didn't reveal that coming-apart to them. I disguised myself as a tough guy, a jock, and time seemed to crawl on its hands and knees. I prayed that the year pass quickly and it slowed to a snail's pace. I begged my mother to let me leave. I planned a hundred versions of my escape. In darkness I told Bob Patterson that the end was nearing for me and that he needed to think about getting another roommate.

“We're not like that, Conroy,” my quiet roommate would say.

“Like what, Patter-knob,” I said, using the nickname the seniors next door had given him.

“We're not quitters. Just the way we were raised.”

“I want to be a quitter,” I said.

“Then quit,” Bob said. “You talk about it every night.”

“You know what would really help me get through this year?”

“What?”

“I need you to develop a much better personality. You're a quiet guy, Bob, and I hate quiet guys. I like guys with fabulous personalities, chatterboxes, guys with diarrhea of the mouth. Open up to me. Tell great jokes.”

“Fuck you, Conroy. Go to sleep,” Patter-knob would say, half asleep. His solidness got me through that year, the good-natured competence he brought to the smallest tasks as well as his refusal to take cruelty seriously.

My only glimpse of normal life in the barracks came each morning when I cleaned the room of my four senior privates next door. I made their beds, swept their floors, folded their laundry, straightened their personal items in the four presses, cleaned their sink, and took out their trash. I became efficient and grew to enjoy the easy camaraderie of the four privates who seemed uncorrupted by the lust for rank displayed by most of the cadre.

My freshman basketball team was a superb collection of athletes and we played superbly together. We lost a single game to Clemson that we should've won running away, but we ran most of the other teams out of the gym. Don Biggs was a force of nature under the boards; he was aggressive and well-coached and I loved the way he and Mohr always looked for the cutoff man on the wing when they pulled a rebound off the boards. Craig Fisher and Taflinger were terrific forwards and Jim Halpin was the best shooting guard I'd ever seen. Our team averaged over ninety points a game and developed such a good reputation in the Corps that we started to draw crowds for the freshman games, a rarity.

Coach Brandenberg was laconic and soft-spoken, and devotion to him came easily. His joy in the company of boys spilled out of him, and we would've torn the gym down and salted the earth for him had he ordered us to do so. We hungered for his praise, which he was generous with. We ran the floor for him as though our uniforms were on fire. We embarrassed teams because we wanted our coach to look so marvelously gifted. We fast-broke teams from one end of South Carolina to another, making our college proud in the process.

But the plebe system reached hard into the ranks of my freshman team. When Don Biggs scored twenty-five points against Clemson, he was met by a half-dozen of his cadre when he returned to the barracks. They gave him his own special sweat party so he wouldn't be in any danger of getting a swelled head. It happened to Taflinger and Fisher after the Davidson game, and Halpin and Mohr after the Furman game. Halpin had scored thirty-two points against Furman and I'd never seen a human being bring that hot a hand to a basketball court. I spent the night feeding Halpin as we ran the pick-and-roll. Coming off me in a flash, Halpin'd be up in the air with a snakelike quickness impossible to defend against, making sixteen out of eighteen jump shots. A Company gave Halpin his own individualized sweat party when he returned to the barracks. The cadre made sure they sullied a freshman athlete's night when he brought glory to the playing fields of The Citadel.

Because I was the only basketball player in Romeo Company, I had a contingent waiting for me after every game that year. They'd halt me under the stairwell and make me run the stairs or do pushups until I dropped. I had scored twenty-four points against the Davidson freshmen, and it enraged the cadre that my name was mentioned in the morning paper.

“You missed three sweat parties, douche bag,” my squad sergeant said. “Hit it for fifty, dumbhead.”

“You feel bad about shitting on your classmates, abortion?” someone shouted above me as I pumped out my pushups.

“Sir yes sir!” I shouted.

“They had PT, a parade, SMI, and you were out gallivanting about with the other jocks eating ice-cream sundaes. Isn't that right, Conroy? Pop off.”

“Sir no sir,” I said, rising to my feet and bracing in front of them for the inevitable, “Give me another fifty, Conroy.”

“You think you're better than your classmates, don't you, wad-waste? Pop off.”

“Sir no sir.”

“You think you're special and valuable while your poor classmates are over here putting out for the Corps while you're taking naps and jacking off over at the Armory, right, smackhead?”

“Sir no sir.”

“You think you're hot shit when you get your name in the paper, don't you, douche bag?”

“Sir no sir,” I said, then all of us heard Jim Plunkett's voice.

“Conroy, get to my room,” Plunkett ordered. “Clean it up or I'll rack your ass till daybreak.”

“We're not finished with him yet, Jimbo,” a conciliatory squad sergeant said.

“Yeah you are,” Plunkett said, wading through them. He hit me hard on the chest with a closed fist. “Get your ass in my room, dumbhead. Scrub the floor with a toothbrush.”

The other three seniors were at their desks, studying hard, when I entered the alcove room and grabbed a broom. I heard some juniors arguing with Plunkett and learned as I listened that the highest-ranked juniors in the Corps lacked the power to overrule the will of the lowest senior private. At The Citadel, the class system was paramount. It was a gallant, if foolhardy, underclassman who dared write up a senior for any infraction at all. Plunkett ran them off with a tirade of well-chosen profanity.

“Mr. Plunkett has a problem, Mr. Conroy,” Mr. Keyser told me. “He's closing in on a hundred demerits. They kick a senior out of school when he breaks the century mark.”

“It's no sweat,” Plunkett insisted.

I went to Plunkett's bed where his scrofulous shoes were displayed, picked up three pairs, and took them over to my room to shine them. My roommate and I spent the entire evening study period polishing up Jimbo Plunkett's scruffy and unsanitized senior private lifestyle. We cleaned every piece of brass in his press and arranged them like crown jewels. When we finished the job as taps was playing, Plunkett's corner of the Citadel world looked like it was inhabited by an anal-retentive plebe. He had accumulated eighty-six demerits and Bob and I pledged to do everything we could to keep our senior in school. We could rescue Mr. Plunkett from his own worst instincts.

         

H
ERE IS THE FIRST POEM
I
HAD PUBLISHED
at The Citadel. Its title was “To Tom Wolf.” It bothered me greatly that my editors had misspelled Wolfe and shortened his name to Tom. But I was a plebe and my editors were not particularly open to criticisms by freshmen.