My Losing Season (7 page)

After my father had dropped off the nuns and students at Sacred Heart, he drove home in the bus with me standing up front beside him. His great dark interior disturbed the silence between us, and I knew better than to chatter when he had gone inward and his mood had darkened.

“You were afraid today, weren't you?” Dad said.

“Yes, sir, a little bit,” I said.

“I could tell you were chickenshit and didn't want to go into the game,” he said.

“I didn't want to lose it for us, Dad.”

I did not see the slap coming, but its long looping arc caught me squarely on the mouth and I would have fallen into the well of the bus if I had not caught myself on one of the poles.

“Never be chickenshit on a basketball court again,” Dad said. “That's an order, pal.”

“Yes, sir.” On the short ride home I promised to turn myself into a player who is reliable and impudent and highfalutin—I swore I'd be a guy my team could depend on, someone who could calm their fears and strike terror into the hearts of the enemy. From that day forward whenever I saw an opposing team go into a full-court press, I would call for the basketball and tell my teammates to get downcourt. By an effort of will and memory, I would turn myself into a Johnny Brasch.

         

W
HEN MY FATHER RECEIVED
his orders to report to the Marine Corps Advanced Amphibious Warfare Course at Quantico, Virginia, I broke down in front of my mother and raced into the woods behind our house where I wept for an hour. I loved everything about Sacred Heart Academy and was inconsolable at the thought of leaving such a blithe, sun-shot hermitage for the unknown. Though I had moved throughout my childhood, I'd never done it as a high school student and no community had ever enfolded me into its sweet, sufficient embrace the way Sacred Heart had done. My mother found me by following my dog, Chippie, through the woods. Chippie licked the tears from my face and my mother sat down beside me and waited for me to compose myself.

“America needs a fighter pilot,” my mother said. “It's this family's job to provide them with one.”

“You tell me that every time we move,” I said.

“It's true every time,” she said.

“I could live with Bobby McDonnell's parents. Or Paul Ford's. Or Hal Van Pelt's. Bill Thomas's mother seems to really like me. I could ask her, Mom,” I said.

“We're your family. You belong with us,” my mother said. “You'll be gone soon enough anyway.”

“Where will I go to school? Where will we live?”

“We'll be going back to the D.C. area,” she said. “You'll go to some Catholic high school. We don't know which one yet.”

“Great. I'll walk into a totally new school. I won't know a living soul. They won't know me. Finally, I'll make a few friends, then Dad'll get orders again and gee, guess what? I'm at another new school and I don't know anybody.”

“I bet this is our last move before you go off to college,” Mom said. “Let's be upbeat about this thing. I'll bet Dad gets a big Pentagon job after this and you'll be at the same school for three straight years.”

“What choice do I have, Mom?” I asked, rising to my feet.

“None, Pat. But you know that. You're the son of a Marine. You grew up in the corps. You're going to suck it up. Make the best of it.”

When we left Belmont at night, I was in mourning for the three years I would not spend at Sacred Heart. All moves had caused great sadness in me; I felt like I was being kidnapped out of my own life. I would never be fourteen again. Nor would I ever be a champion again.

My father drove toward Washington, D.C., and my appointment with the Jesuits and Gonzaga High School.

CHAPTER 5

GONZAGA HIGH SCHOOL

T
HROUGHOUT MY NUN-SPOOKED,
C
ATHOLIC SCHOOL LIFE,
I
HAD
heard
and digested the urban legend of the Jesuits, the rottweilers of a Catholic boy's education. The order had a reputation for intellectual ferocity and suffering fools lightly or not at all. They were a warrior caste of the intellect, famous for the rigor of both their training and their teaching. Founded by St. Ignatius Loyola as militant advocates of the Pope, the Jesuits have always prided themselves on their fierce reputation as cunning foot soldiers of the far-ranging, free-thinking Catholic mind. Astuteness, acumen, and razor-sharp perceptions were virtues in the high precincts of the Jesuit world.

So began my one year I spent learning the desperate melancholy of the commuters baby-stepping their way into the big cities. That was the year I knew the sadness of inbound traffic when I saw Shirley Highway slowing into gridlock each morning at 5:30, when the Marine who lived across the street from us would find me waiting in his car each morning. He'd turn on the
Eddie Gallagher Show
and we'd listen to the news and good music for the fifteen congested miles it'd take us to drive to the Naval Annex. The ride took exactly two hours, at which time the good major would deposit me on the sidewalk in front of the Annex. I would catch a bus to Twelfth and Penn, then transfer to another one that would take me to the corner of North Capitol and I Street. My days among Jesuits, like Gaul, were divided into three parts: three hours to get there, three hours to get back, and three hours of the homework the Jesuits proudly crowed that they saddled their students with each night. Soon I found myself trapped in days that had too much of everything except time.

My memories of Sacred Heart Academy shine in a pearly light; Gonzaga suggests far harsher tones. A dark sensuality and a celebration of the masculine virtues as tribal rites inhabited each corner and room of that beleaguered, ghetto-encircled school. Everything was tough about Gonzaga, including its neighbors. The Jesuits possessed a genius at making learning itself seem like a martial art. Before I met the Jesuits, I'd never encountered another group who thought that intellect and arrogance were treasures beyond price and necessities in waging wars against blasphemers, heretics, and the many faces of Protestantism itself. At Gonzaga I always felt as if I should be wearing a coat of armor instead of a coat and tie. The school taught Latin as though it was sorry it was not Greek, and Greek as though it was sorry it was not Mesopotamian. The paint was so drab that each classroom looked like it could have served as a holding cell for Galileo. The hallways stank with boy sweat and boy fear and candlewax with a light touch of incense leaking out of the church, and old Jesuits shuffling along in cassocks both shiny under the armpits and late to the dry cleaners. The whole school smelled like eau de Catholic boy, cheap pipe tobacco, and stiff drinks on the rocks. Gonzaga was the kind of place you'd not even think about loving until you'd left it for a couple of years.

I took one crown jewel from my Jesuit immersion at Gonzaga High School. When the scholarly, charismatic Joseph Monte walked into 2A that first day, he radiated an owl-like authority and a passion for literature I'd never come across in a classroom. The way he talked about fiction must have been similar to the post-Pentecostal apostles spreading the word of God. He brought his love of books and words and fine writing to us every day of that year, and he thunderstruck me with the mesmerizing power of his teaching. He came into my life as a rose window onto the world of literature. He opened me up to the pleasures of Greek tragedy, Shakespeare, Faulkner, and dozens of others. The first book I read for Mr. Monte for extra credit was
History of the Peloponnesian War
by Thucydides, the second was
David Copperfield,
and the third was
The Sun Also Rises
by Hemingway. Each time you finished a book you would have to find Mr. Monte to discuss the intricacies of that book with him. He gave off the aura of having read every book worth reading since Gutenberg invented the printing press.

“Read the great books, gentlemen,” Mr. Monte said one day. “Just the great ones. Ignore the others. There's not enough time.”

“How will we know the great ones?” Chris Warner asked behind me.

Mr. Monte shot Mr. Warner a look that was part bemusement and part contempt. “Ask me, Mr. Warner. Show a modicum of intelligence in these things.”

In November, Mr. Monte suggested I read
The Sound and the Fury
. I took the book home and began reading it with enormous anticipation because I could sense Mr. Monte's reverence when he spoke about the pleasures of Faulkner, and he considered this his masterpiece. When I read the first ninety-two pages, I fretted, then despaired because it felt like I was reading the book underwater or weightless in outer space. I was not sure I understood a single line or had the slightest clue about where the book was tending or drifting. Shaken, I reread the same ninety-two pages that begin with the sentence of the curling flower spaces and end with Benjy in Caddy's arms. The second reading left me even more panic-stricken and perplexed.

When I approached Mr. Monte in the cafeteria, I told him I was not yet smart enough to read Faulkner, that I had not understood a single syllable of the first part. Mr. Monte took off his glasses, cleaned them with a handkerchief, smiled, then said, “Mr. Conroy, how familiar are you with the works of Shakespeare?”

“I read
Twelfth Night
last year,” I answered. “I read
Julius Caesar
in your class.”

“Do you know where Mr. Faulkner's title came from, Mr. Conroy?”

“No, sir. I have no idea.”

“Sometimes literature is direct and straightforward,” Mr. Monte said. “Sometimes it makes you work and expand your mind. Mr. Faulkner has given you a clue in the title. Go to Act 5, Scene 4 of
Macbeth
. There you will find the key to your dilemma, if, Mr. Conroy, you're the student I think you are.”

I rushed to the library and walked straight to the Shakespeare section and removed a copy of
Macbeth
from the shelf. Sitting down in one of the straight-backed wooden chairs I turned quickly to Act 5, Scene 4, where I read the words of Malcolm spoken to Monteith. Although I was lost in a play I had seldom heard of, the words of these unknown and fictional men rang true to me and I found them easy to understand. Then I came to the entrance of the sexton announcing to Macbeth that his queen was dead. When I read the words I did not know that the queen was his wife or that Lady Macbeth was an immemorial fictional creation. I did not know I was nearing the end of one of the great tragedies ever conceived. But I found the answer to Mr. Monte's question in Macbeth's heartbreaking response to the news of Lady Macbeth's death. Word for word, I wrote that speech down in the spiral notebook Mr. Monte made us keep in his class. As I copied the last line of that speech, I felt like one of those forty-niners who pan for gold in rushing western streams for years, until they reach the summary and defining moment of their gambled-out lives and lift a pan from the ungenerous stream brimming with a king's ransom of gold. I thought about the first section of
The Sound and the Fury
and I thought about Macbeth's speech when he hears the news of his queen's death. I put them together. I unlocked the mystery.

The next day I approached Mr. Monte again. His great reserve made it difficult to draw close to him, but I thought I carried the goods he wanted delivered.

“Do you have something for me, Mr. Conroy?” he asked.

“I think I do, Mr. Monte.” I opened my notebook.

“Do not waste a moment of my time, sir,” he said, his eyes twinkling. “If you have something, show it now. Out, out with it, Mr. Conroy. Why did I choose that phrase?”

“Macbeth says, ‘Out, out, brief candle,' when he hears about the queen's death.”

“What does he mean by that, Mr. Conroy?”

“How short life is, sir,” I said.

“What does that tell you about Mr. Faulkner's book?”

“Nothing, sir. It's later in the speech. When Macbeth says, ‘It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.' That's why I was confused, Mr. Monte. I was reading a tale told by the idiot, Benjy. It was surfaces and shadows and what Benjy thought he was seeing. Faulkner was writing through Benjy's eyes . . . through an idiot's eyes.”

Mr. Monte opened his grade book, which he carried with him everywhere, and he entered a notation beside my name. “A+, double credit, Mr. Conroy. This is a good moment in the life of your mind. It's a good moment in my life as a teacher. We should both cherish it.”

Goose bumps marched the length and breadth of my body and the back of my neck tingled as I knew for the first time that learning itself could carry the sting of divine inextinguishable pleasure. Joseph Monte could make the intellect look like the most lustrous and forbidden city of all. After my single year with Monte, I wanted to be curious and smart and unappeasable until I got a sentence to mean exactly what I ordered it to mean. Whenever I wrote an essay in that spiral notebook that he checked once a week, I tried to show off for Mr. Monte, distinguish myself from my classmates in a unique way. I took off on one boilerplate English assignment and wrote what I now realize was my first short story. When I turned the story in, I spent an uncomfortable weekend thinking that Mr. Monte would consider me pretentious or worse for not following the assignment literally. When he passed out the notebooks the following Monday, I turned to the story, breathless, and saw this notation: “More of this, Mr. Conroy. A+, double credit. For imagination.”

Monte rubbed my face in his theory of great teaching. It was oxygen, water, and fire to me. I could not get enough of it; I could not get enough of him. Before I left his class, he passed out a list of great books that he'd compiled. “I've put down one hundred novels it would behoove you to read before you go to college. The scoundrels and ne'er-do-wells among you will toss it in the trash before you leave today. But for those of you with a faint pilot light flickering in the stove, it might offer you a path to enlightenment.”

Before I left for college, I had marked all one hundred of those Monte-championed books off my list. Joseph Monte hit me like an ice storm, and I still think that great teacher was sent into my life by God who saw the directionless, blemished slide my life was taking in my disfigured household. The great teachers fill you up with hope and shower you with a thousand reasons to embrace all aspects of life. I wanted to follow Mr. Monte around for the rest of my life, learning everything he wished to share or impart, but I didn't know how to ask. All I knew was, I was not the same boy who walked into Gonzaga that previous fall.

In November I had gone out for the junior varsity basketball team, drawing down the wrath of my father who wanted me to try out for the varsity. I explained to him that only one sophomore had been invited to try out for the varsity and only because he had excelled on the freshman team the year before. Coach Mike DeSarno cut the JV team down to sixteen and I breathed a sigh of pure gratitude when I saw my name on the list. There was no scene I dreaded more than that imaginary one where I'd have to return to my house to inform my father I'd been cut from a team.

By making that JV, I began the hardest and least manageable part of my Gonzaga experience. The freshman basketball team started their practice at four in the afternoon, followed by the varsity at five, then followed by my JV team at six. When practice ended at seven, I walked to Union Station to take a train into Alexandria where my father would meet me every evening at eight o'clock for a twenty-minute ride to our house in Annandale.

Before practice I would often go to the National Gallery of Art to do homework on one of the benches in one of the garden rooms. Admission was free and soon the guards grew accustomed to my presence as I did my Latin and algebra and biology homework amidst the palms and the sound of falling water. If I finished my homework early or just grew bored, I could wander through the galleries, studying the paintings and trying to memorize the names of the artists who painted them. So often did I come to their gallery during basketball season that year, that whenever I return as a grown man, it has the feel of a homecoming to me.

It was not a successful year for me as a basketball player, nor was it a total bust either. The squad I played on was a very good one, and all sixteen of us could play the game at a fairly high level. It was the most evenly matched team I was ever a part of, but we could not seem to find our identity. My coach, the itchy, unreadable Mike DeSarno, was a man more comfortable with football than basketball. He carried himself with great authority, was careful in his grooming and dress, and ran a quick and efficient practice. When Coach DeSarno shot the basketball, he displayed exceptional style and form, his mechanics were flawless, but the ball almost never went into the basket.

The team was explosive and erratic. DeSarno told us all year long that we had the makings of a great team. He could never make up his mind about a starting lineup, and we had a dizzying series of changes over the year. I started a third of the games, but DeSarno would always taunt me with the fact that I was a military brat who could disappear overnight.

“Conroy, what does Gonzaga get out of it? I mean, I could be playing a kid who'll be here for four years instead of one. I'm making you a better basketball player for another school that neither of us even knows about. Argue with me. Tell me where I'm wrong.”

“My parents think I'll be here three years, Coach,” I said.

“Can you promise me that?” Coach DeSarno said. “Can you put it on paper?”

“No, sir. We might go to war or something.”