My Losing Season (8 page)

“Then I can't start you. Do you understand? I'm hurting the school down the road. You can understand that?”

“Yes, sir,” I said, trying to disguise my misery.

DeSarno was generous in allowing his overstocked team adequate playing time, and he ran us in and out of games. We ended up wearing down those understaffed teams who depended on the stamina of a starting five. Our talent was evenly distributed and we played well together even though we lost our big games by shockingly close scores. We lost to DeMatha, on its way to becoming a national power in high school basketball, by two points, and to our archrival, St. John's, by a single point.

After our loss to DeMatha, Coach DeSarno singled me out in a team meeting after the game and said, “I'd like to apologize personally to Pat Conroy for taking him out of the game after the first quarter. He was playing a hell of a game. But I kept thinking of next year, Pat, and we don't know whether you'll be back or not. The old story.” I had scored eight points in the first quarter of the game when DeSarno replaced me with Buzzy Vail. His doubts about my availability were prophetic.

The following month I was in my room catching up on the voluminous homework that was the scourge of every Gonzaga boy's existence when my mother knocked on the door.

“Could we have a talk, Pat?” She was carrying my infant brother, Tom, who'd been born in October.

I read her face and said, “No, Mom. Not again. I can't move again. I won't do it. You can't make me.”

“The good news is that we're going to Cherry Point,” my mother said. “You've always loved Cherry Point.”

         

I
N THE BEGINNING OF
M
AY
, my father came into the city for the annual father-son banquet and the awarding of letters to Gonzaga's athletes. Gonzaga had become my home and I wanted my father to see for himself how easy I was navigating its hallways and shortcuts. I gave him a brief tour of my domain, even taking him down to the grotesque basketball court, a converted swimming pool, that was, by far, the worst gymnasium I ever saw. I walked him up to 2A, a room I had fallen in love with, and introduced him to all the teachers he had heard me talk about during the year.

My father's mood was withdrawn and saturnine that night, and he resented my perpetual sunniness. We ate dinner among the other fathers and sons without Dad directing a single word to me or to any of the fathers. He brought a closed shop to that banquet and I put a quietus on my own ebullience when I saw his blue eyes go arctic.

After the banquet, the crowd moved toward the school's compact auditorium where the athletes were seated in the fifteen front rows with our fathers seated behind us. The Jesuits possessed a gift for both order and organization, and each athlete had been given a number which told us where we'd be seated during the ceremony. I found a piece of paper with the number 63 taped to the back of the chair that corresponded to the number I carried in my hand. I sat down between Chris Warner and my basketball teammate Tim McCarthy.

When Father McHale, the headmaster, finished his opening remarks, Father Coleman walked up to the front row and barked, “First row of athletes, please rise.” The first row, led by the now-famous William Bennett, walked up to the side steps of the stage, then walked across the stage one by one as Father McHale called their names and presented them with their letters.

Finally, the line of boys sitting directly in front of me were ordered to stand and they responded. A Gonzaga boy sitting to my right, next to Warner, deftly took one of the taped numbers from the seat in front of him and attached it to the bottom of the sports coat of the unwary sophomore who stood with his back to us. Gonzaga boys were famous for their tireless pranks on one another, and this seemed innocent enough. Chris and Tim and I laughed when we saw the poor kid walking toward the stage trailing his seat number behind him.

The evening had turned so tedious that no one expected the guffaws and explosive laughter that broke through the audience when this kid walked across the stage with a white tail fluttering around his buttocks. All the Jesuits' love of control collapsed when the absurd little practical joke caught the audience by surprise. The young man shot the audience a Chaplinesque look of bewilderment, the laughter increasing when Father McHale said something about his unauthorized tail piece. The boy looked behind him and saw nothing and kept spinning around until Father McHale ripped it off and dangled it before the embarrassed boy's eyes. Father McHale then barked at us to settle down, and the rest of the awards ceremony moved with swiftness. I received my two junior varsity letters for football and basketball and felt great pride as I examined them after returning to my seat.

When Father McHale offered final congratulations and dismissed us, I joined the slow procession of boys who drifted down the center aisle to join our fathers in the back of the theater. Moving slowly with the other student athletes up the carpeted rise toward the milling fathers, I was talking to a boy on my left when I received a stunning backhand across my right jaw that sent me crashing to the floor. The blow was delivered with such force that I did not know if I was going to be able to rise, but a furor had taken hold of the men above me. There was shouting and pushing and obscenities. Slowly, I rose off my knees and stood up on unsteady legs, disoriented, humiliated, and confused by where the blow had come from and why. “Are you okay, Pat?” a father asked me, and I smiled and nodded my head, knowing for the first time that any Gonzaga father knew my name. The second backhand caught me on the left jaw, harder than the first, and I went down to the floor again. Then a free-for-all began.

I looked up from the floor and saw my father being tossed around like a Raggedy Ann doll. Gonzaga was a tough, ethnic, inner-city school and many of our fathers were blue-collar, working-class men—big Irishmen, Poles, and Italians—who were making their hard way in America. They had no idea who my father was and did not care. They saw a stranger knock a Gonzaga boy to his knees and came roaring to my defense. Someone punched my father in the back of the head; if I'd known who that man was I'd have sent him brownies every Valentine's Day. I struggled to my feet, grabbed my father's arm, and led him through that angry mob of men, getting him safely to the parking lot and into his car.

It was in this car and on this night that my father took me apart. He gave me a beating like none other I would receive in my childhood. “It was you who taped that number on that kid's ass!” he yelled.

“No, it wasn't, Dad. It was another kid. I swear I didn't do it.” His fist landed so hard on my forehead that I thought the back of my head would go through the passenger-side window. Again, he punched my face and I covered up as he began raining blows all over my body. He beat me until he grew tired of it. “You shouldn't have laughed,” he said. Then he started the car and drove home to Annandale, and I never came out of my rolled-up crouch until he sent my mother out to the car to get me. She had to peel my arms and hands away from my head. I was hysterical when I heard her voice, and Mom screamed when she saw my face. She refused to let me go to school for the next few days and would not let me show myself to my brothers and sisters. I ate in my room and caught up with my homework and wondered if a son ever hated a father as much as I hated mine.

Ten days before graduation, Father Anthony McHale summoned me to his office. I had come to know McHale only slightly, but he recognized me in the hallway and sometimes he would stop me to quiz me about my progress in Latin or algebra. He had a great sense of justice and duty, but lacked that leavening one of humor. When I entered his office, he was studying my file. He looked up at me and said, “You've made your mark here at Gonzaga, Mr. Conroy. I didn't think you'd survive first semester. You're well thought of by your fellow students. Your coaches and teachers speak well of you. Mr. Monte speaks highly of you. We have decided to award you a full scholarship for the next two years. We understand your parents are moving out of the area. We'll arrange for your room and board.”

That night, I heard my parents arguing. Later I heard a tap on my door, then my mother tiptoed into my room. She said, “Your father ripped up the scholarship, Pat. He said Gonzaga or no one else is going to steal his kid from him. He loves you too much to let you go.”

“No, Mom,” I said coldly and in despair. “He hates me too much to let me go. He hates it when good things happen to me.”

“Your father wants the very best for you, Pat. He always has and he always will.”

After the moving van left in June and headed down the highway toward our new quarters at the Cherry Point Marine Corps Air Station, my mother locked up the empty house and walked toward the station wagon, laden down with excess baggage and seven kids. Halfway to the car, a phone rang in the empty house, and my mother ran back to answer it. She returned to the car and said to my father, “It's for you, Don. Headquarters Marine's calling.”

The children grew restless in the fifteen minutes Dad spoke to the unseen Marine who was in the process of changing all of our lives. When he returned to the car, Dad started up the engine and began backing out of the driveway.

“What did he want, Don?” my mother asked.

“My orders have been changed,” he said as Carol and I both groaned aloud. “Shut up, you two,” he demanded.

“Where are we going to be living next year?” my mother asked in a calm, measured voice.

“Beaufort, South Carolina,” he said.

“I've never heard of Beaufort, South Carolina,” Carol groaned.

“It's where Parris Island is,” Dad said. “They built an air station there a couple of years ago.”

“Do they have a high school there?” I asked.

“Have no idea, pal,” Dad said as he moved the car out toward Shirley Highway and headed south, away from Gonzaga High School forever.

CHAPTER 6

BEAUFORT HIGH

A
CONVERSATION OCCURRED WITH MY MOTHER SOMEWHERE ON THE
road
between Cherry Point and the Beaufort Air Station. The family had left my father behind to clear up some paperwork connected with his change of orders. My mother knew I was close to despair and was doing everything in her power to make the transition into Beaufort easier. That I seemed inconsolable only made her more determined to ease the pain of the transfer.

“Mark my words,” Mom said, “this move'll be the best thing that ever happened to you. Didn't you love Gonzaga?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Didn't you love Sacred Heart?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“You'll love Beaufort most of all,” she said with great authority.

“I won't know one single kid when I walk into Beaufort High School,” I said.

“Here's what I'd do, if I were you, son,” she said. “I'd go up to every kid there and say, ‘Hey there. My name's Pat Conroy and I'm new here. How about showing me some of the ropes?' ”

“I'm a teenager, Mom,” I said. “I'd feel like an idiot doing that.”

“You'd be taking the bull by the horns. You'd be mastering your own fate.”

“I'd be making sure I didn't have a friend in the world,” I answered.

She thought about it, then said, “I'm trying to help you come up with a plan.”

“I could've stayed at Gonzaga. That was my plan.”

“Now you need a new one. One you can live with.”

“Mom, do you know I didn't talk to a single girl last year? I've never danced or held hands with a girl, much less kissed one.”

“Plenty of time for all that,” my mother said. “Here's my advice. Go into Beaufort and tell yourself: This is my home. We'll be here for two years. Make this town your own. I know how much you've missed having a home. Make Beaufort your home. You deserve one and need one.”

The family station wagon, laden with Conroy children and one black dog named Chippie, crossed the Combahee River into Beaufort County and a new life. When we crossed the Whale Branch Bridge, I pointed to the green fringes along the river and asked, “What's that stuff, Mom? The green stuff?”

“That's called marsh,” she said. “The Great Salt Marsh.”

“It's pretty.”

“That's my boy,” she said. “That's putting a happy face on things.”

         

T
HE SUMMER FELT MUCH LIKE
being buried alive as the temperatures outside our Capehart house, 138 Laurel Bay Boulevard in base housing, climbed to a hundred degrees around noon. It seemed like a pickling process, a salting down that made my skin feel like beef jerky after I mowed the grass or even took the garbage out in the late evening. All summer, I did not meet another teenager, and even worse, the one basketball court at the air station was closed for repairs. Even my game was stolen from me that first summer in Beaufort.

In August, I was preparing to try out for the football team at Beaufort High School after my father had first reconciled himself to the fact that I'd never graduate from a Catholic high school. One of my father's brothers, the diminutive Uncle Willie, came to visit us, and my duty was to entertain Willie by taking him golfing or fishing. Uncle Willie was a terrible golfer, and no low-country fish was endangered when he cast his bait into the water, either.

At dinner that night, my seven-year-old brother, Jimbo, asked permission then raced outside to play before dark. The rest of the family continued eating while Uncle Willie told my father about every hole of golf he and I'd played. Willie was not a gifted weatherman of my father's stormy moods so my uncle had no idea that his voice was grating on my father's nerves like a noisemaker. As Willie got to the only par he shot all day, at the twelfth hole, there was a knock on the window outside the dining area. It was my brother Jimbo, climbing the tree outside, waving happily to his still-seated family. The younger brothers and sisters laughed and waved back until my father barked, “Knock it off. You're gonna get hurt, Jimbo.”

Jim climbed higher. Then, hanging by his legs from a branch on the tree, he knocked at the window with an impish grin, happy showing off for his family—until the branch broke and Jim disappeared from sight, landing on his head. All of us froze when we heard his screams, and he came running into the house with his nose and lips bleeding, rushing into my mother's arms. Desperately, my mother tried to quiet my hurt brother, but her frantic efforts at damage control were fruitless. My father called out in a voice of cold rage, “Get over here, Jimbo. I knew that was going to happen.”

Jim's crying grew louder and more frightened as he approached my father, for good reason. Everyone in the room, with the possible exception of Uncle Willie, knew what was coming next. My sister Carol and I had recently written a play satirizing the Conroy family dynamics. Carol had rechristened us the Bon-Bonroy family, and in one scene, she had a bawling infant being slapped around by Colonel Bon-Bonroy for the treasonous act of crying within the earshot of an American officer.

“Stop your boo-hooing,” Dad ordered, then slapped Jim hard across his still bleeding face. Where before Jim wept because he was hurt, now he screamed out of the shock and terror of my father's assault. My mother began screaming at my father and I kept my eyes fixed on my plate as an old pandemonium began gathering its strange magnetic powers, its unpredictable dance around my family.

Carol, who sat on my father's left, had turned her back on him, her face inches from mine, when I saw her red-faced and grimacing trying to contain her laughter. She was straining so hard to cut off a guffaw that she looked comical and grotesque at the same time. We both knew she was dead meat if Dad caught her laughing at him while he waged his war on one of his kids.

It was not Carol who laughed.

It was me, and it came bellowing out from deep within, from an uncharted and forbidden place. The belly laugh caught everyone in the room by surprise, especially me, since the act seemed suicidal and lunatic. In horror I saw my father staring at me with his furious blue eyes. I watched him lift his full iced-tea glass and hurl it at me with the same motion a major-league pitcher employs when he delivers a pitch high and tight to a cleanup batter. He was less than five feet away when he threw the glass. I still do not know if it shattered against my left brow bone or when it hit the table.

I put both hands over my eyes, blood pouring through the fingers of my left hand, and I heard my mother's voice. “Nice going, Don. You've blinded him.”

In the chaos that followed I remember nothing except my mother screaming at my uncle. “That's it, Willie, skulk out of here and pretend you didn't see what happened!”

The next memory I can pull out of that lost night is the sound of my mother's voice composed, even serene, as she drove me to the naval hospital emergency room. I was holding a bloody dishrag over my gashed eyebrow.

“Okay, Pat, here's the story, what we tell the doctor. We're going to run through the details a couple of times to make sure we have them down. You know that exposed water spigot that sticks out of the ground between our yard and Colonel Penn's?”

“Yes, ma'am,” I said.

“Well, the whole family was playing a spirited game of touch football. Just like the Kennedys. In fact, I'd mention the Kennedys. It gives the story believability. So we're involved in this game and your father breaks away from Uncle Willie and Mike, and you're the only one who can prevent your dad from scoring. So you leap to put a tag on him, forgetting the water spigot. That thing's such a hazard anyway. I've called base housing about it twice already. You slid into that water spigot and cut your eyebrow. Okay, let's go over it. What game was the family playing?”

“A touch football game,” I said, my voice mocking. “A spirited one.”

“Get rid of that tone, young man,” my mother said. “This is serious business.”

“Why don't I tell him that my father hit me with a tea glass after my little brother fell out of a tree?”

“Don't play cute with me, young man,” she said. “If your father ever got picked up by the MPs for hitting his wife or child, that would mean the end of his career. We wouldn't have a roof over our heads or a pot to pee in. We'd be out on the streets without a penny. You could forget about college, kiddo. Everything depends on us protecting the flanks of our Marine. He may not be perfect, but he's all we got. This doesn't come under the category of lying. Tonight you're going to save your family's life, your one job. Can I trust you, Pat? Otherwise, I'm going to turn this car around and you can bleed to death for all I care. If you don't care about me, you could at least think about the futures of your brothers and sisters. Their lives and futures depend on how well you tell your story tonight.”

When the doctor asked me how I hurt myself when he was stopping the flow of blood, I told him about the touch football game, about my family's deep devotion to the Kennedy family, about my Uncle Willie's slowness afoot, my father's fabled athletic prowess and his breakaway run. I told the doctor about my lunge at the imaginary goal line and my being spun at breakneck speed into the spigot. I told the story without a hitch or a quiver or attracting a single cross interrogation. My mother added that everyone in the family, including her, had bruises and skinned knees from those rowdy games every night.

The doctor suggested we not play any more games as a family for a while, unaware that he was in the middle of one of them as he stitched my eyebrow back together. Long before I ever wrote my first line of fiction, I had years of practice in making up the stories of my life.

         

B
ECAUSE OF THE GASH ALONG MY EYEBROW
, I couldn't go out for the Beaufort High School football team when it began practice in the middle of August. I entered Beaufort High with two butterfly bandages holding my brow in place, making me an object of curiosity as I walked the hallways in the first days of school. I had my English class in my first period, and I stood by my seat waiting for the teacher to give the class permission to be seated. My Catholic education had brainwashed me to such an extent that I had never sat down in any classroom without saying a prayer, then having a nun or priest grant permission for me to sit. The room was noisy and chaotic when my teacher, J. Eugene Norris, entered and noticed me standing my lonely vigil beside my desk. He eyed me peculiarly, put his books down, then walked down the aisle toward me. “Sit yourself down, boy. Have you gone crazy or something?” He pushed me lightly and I took my seat as the first delicious moments of the anarchy of public education settled into my consciousness. At this school, I could take my seat whenever I saw fit.

In the first week of school, Mr. Norris played Ravel's
Bolero
during class then ordered us to write an essay on whatever the music brought to mind. I wrote about a gypsy encampment outside of Seville which is massacred in the middle of the night by either the Loyalist forces or some of Franco's men. I'd just read Hemingway's
For Whom the Bell Tolls
and was deeply embedded in my Hemingway period when I tried to make all my sentences true and good. My essay was a derivative mess, but it was different from any others written in my class, and after he read and graded it, Mr. Norris approached me and said in his exaggerated and heavily accented up-country patois: “You're something, boy. You ain't nothin'. You got some things to say, don't you?”

I went out for the Beaufort High School varsity basketball team in the middle of October. My father bet me a dollar I wouldn't make the team, and I prayed that he was wrong. When I was dressing for the first practice, my heart fluttered when I heard the news that last year's basketball team had won only three games, losing fifteen. I'd not picked up a basketball since my final game on the Gonzaga JV team, and I felt hamstrung and rusted out and lead-footed as I went through the layup line for Coach Jerry Swing on the first day of practice. He barked sharply at us that first session, but it was out of custom and not predilection. I always liked coaches who yelled because they thought it was expected as part of the natural order of things. In the companionship of boys, Coach Swing had a gruff but good-natured style without a trace of the bully. Fifty boys went out for the team. After a week, I held my breath as I walked up to the typed column of names listing the twelve who had survived the final cut. All week long I'd rehearsed what I could say to my father if I didn't make the team. I had considered running away or feigning a serious injury or dropping off the team to concentrate on my studies. My play at practice had seemed uninspired and second-rate. I couldn't summon up a portion of razzle-dazzle or pizzazz if my life depended on it, and I, for one, thought it did. I missed my name the first time down the list and thought I'd faint. On the second run-through I found it listed alphabetically after Ray Burgess. I felt relief but not a scintilla of joy.

That night on the long ride to Laurel Bay my father asked in the great silence that lay between us: “You got cut, right?”

“No, sir. I made the team.”

“Bet a dollar you don't make first string,” he said. “You'll ride the pine, just like at Gonzaga.”

I looked over at him, terrified, and thought about betting a hundred dollars that I'd start, but kept my mouth shut. I'd let my game do the talking.

Something happened to me in our first game against Ridgeland High School that had never happened previously. It was on the court in front of the largest crowd I'd ever played before when a thought struck me with an immense, impersonal force. Though I couldn't see myself that night, I could see a change in the faces of the Ridgeland players as they tried to stop me, and I could see a transformation in my teammates' eyes as the game progressed. I could hear the humming of the crowd whenever I took off on a fast break or dribbled the ball into the paint. I had come into my own without my knowledge. The dreaming I had laid out for myself as a ten-year-old boy ignited into flame on the court as I took my longed-for place as a player to watch. Cries of “Go, Conroy” rattled through the gym all night, and I bloomed with pride as I heard the Ridgeland boys asking my teammates, “Who's this guy? Where'd he come from?” My teammates had no idea where I came from, because none of them had asked.