Longshot (9 page)

Jeff Swinton was the stake president
of the new area we were moving into. A
stake,
in LDS terms, means a boundary of collective wards—churches or congregations—in a close geographical area. A ward is presided over by a bishop. There are usually at least three wards that form a stake, which is presided over by a stake president.
*

Jeff guided us not only through the lawsuit, but also through our conversion into the LDS faith. He and his wife, Heidi, spent countless hours mentoring my parents, helping them rid themselves of the negative thought patterns and guilt they had developed while growing up and living in the Group.

With the new life I was finding for myself in Salt Lake, there was also another side of me emerging, one that I was scared of and that I tried my best to keep hidden from others. Before we left the Group, I had been given several lectures in Priesthood classes for twelve-year-olds about homosexuality and masturbation, and how masturbation was a sin and a gateway to homosexuality, which was the most abominable sin.

As I broach this topic, please know that today I have no issues with homosexuals. I know plenty, and one of my cousins, a wonderful person, is gay. But at the age of thirteen, while still trying to distinguish the old lectures I had received as a child in the Group from those I received in the LDS church, I wasn't so secure in my standing. My developing mind, which had endured a traumatic shift in religion and paradigms and a summer on the run, was beginning to have weird, conflicted thoughts. I now know it was the beginning of my obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). But at that age I had no idea what was going on. Throughout my life I had always tended to think and analyze things too deeply, but this was something altogether different.

The first time I truly noticed it was one Saturday when Dad took Court and me to see Jim Carrey's
The Mask.
It was the first time I ever saw Cameron Diaz in a movie. She was gorgeous. Being thirteen and undergoing puberty, I was feeling some funny things. But that was normal, and I knew it. What happened later wasn't, though, when my mind engaged in this dialogue:

Cameron Diaz is so beautiful; I'd love to have her as a girlfriend. Women are so amazing, they're the most beautiful things God ever created, and I'm so glad I'm not gay. But…

And here is where it began:

But what if I'm gay? Lance, you know you're not gay. You're attracted to Cameron Diaz, and she is a woman. Yes, she is attractive, but what if I'm gay and I don't know it? Well, you don't have to be gay. Well, what if I have no choice, and I for some reason do something “gay”? Well, it won't be a problem, since you're not attracted to men. Yes, but what if I slip, and…. What if, what if, what if….

I can what-if myself to death. What-if became my nemesis. What-if was and still is the hardest opponent I face. And here is the key to understanding those who suffer from OCD: we know that these stupid obsessive thoughts are irrational, but we cannot stop thinking them. Even though I knew that my thoughts about being gay were irrational, I couldn't stop worrying about it. I'd go through the whole dialogue every hour.

I tried talking to Dad about it, and he got confused. He, too, was in transition, as we were still emerging from the shackles of our extreme conservative mind-set. With a worried look on his face, his Tourette's causing a slight twitching, Dad asked, “Are you trying to say you're attracted to other little boys?”

This gross oversimplification of my question didn't help in the least. That my father would even raise that question made me feel like I was doing something wrong. I was convinced I was going to hell—I seriously was. And I went into the bathroom and prayed, tears running down my cheeks, pleading for my soul.

“Just stop thinking about it,” Dad said, as though I could turn it on and off like a switch.

But I couldn't. I had to think about it. I needed to, or else—…I never knew that answer, but I needed to. If I didn't think about it, I might fall into complacency and suddenly become gay. I had to think about it. Telling me not to think about it was like asking an alcoholic to never have another drink. I just had to. If I didn't think about it, something bad
would happen, but I never knew what. I knew only that something bad would happen, even though nothing ever did.

After the routine dialogue of what-if scenarios that I'd recite to calm my fears, I'd pray to God, this angry God, in fear of his hell: “
I'm sorry
, I'm sorry. I don't want to be gay. Please don't be mad at me. I'm not gay, I like girls, please don't let me be gay. Please take these thoughts away.”

The compulsive praying and internal dialogue helped at first, as they would calm my anxiety for a good few hours, but over time the soothing effect of the compulsion lessened, to the point where I was praying every fifteen minutes to my broody God. I didn't tell anyone, or dare to, after my little chitchat with Dad. I kept these thoughts and other obsessions to myself.

Had basketball not come into my life shortly after these thoughts began, I'd have deteriorated dramatically. But thanks to basketball, I was able to calm my obsessive thoughts and shameful fears, or at least channel them, on the court. I was able to attach a new identity to basketball, hiding my personal demons on the hardwood.

My obsessive thoughts didn't go away when I began playing basketball, but at least I could now dwell on things I could have some semblance of control over. I could now obsess about a bad play, bad pass, or bad call and would stay up late at night pondering and replaying, saying, “What if….” I could obsess about basketball things and think about them without feeling guilty, as I got my mind off of “bad thoughts.”

In a positive way, my obsession—my compulsion to play through scenarios of what I should've done on the court and what I'd do the next time—is part of what fueled me. My obsession demanded perfection, and it's what drove me and motivated me to keep working and working, to constantly make up for the mistakes I made on the court. I was my own worst critic and always will be. No matter what negative thing anyone says of me on the court, I have already have said something much meaner to myself.

 

I had always been worthless as an athlete. But that all began to change in my new setting, at Bryant Middle School. As I started eighth grade, I was five-foot-ten. I constantly got comments that I should start playing basketball—from kids at school and members of my new ward, and especially from the coach of the ward basketball team. I continued to grow. By December, I was six-three, and I was in a lot of physical pain, as my body was growing so fast.

They held tryouts for the Bryant basketball team, and I made it, but only because I was tall.

Let me be frank: I sucked. I couldn't dribble to save my life. I shot the ball before ever looking at the hoop. I couldn't time a layup. And if I did, I always jumped off my right foot to shoot with my right hand, which is just awkward. But every so often I pulled something out of my pocket and hit a miracle shot, then nonchalantly jogged back to the other end like I was a badass, knowing full well that the shot had been pure luck but managing to somehow convince others I had skill. Confidence is the name of the game.

Basketball didn't come naturally to me. The biggest challenge for me was simply being able to balance my overly large head on my rail-thin body. I was like Don Carlos de Austria, among the last of the Spanish Hapsburgs, who fell off a window ledge one night while trying to sneak out for some romping fun. His head was so large that it distorted his center of gravity, causing his fall. I could make it down to the other end of the floor, but that was about it. I was a clumsy giraffe.

I also suffered, and still suffer, from asthma, and it was never much fun to have my bronchial tubes constricting my airways, so I tended to stay away from sports. But an inhaler changed that, or at least made it easier. I always thought the other kids were having as hard a time breathing as I was, but then our longtime family doctor finally informed me that I was usually breathing for two, such was the pressure that I had to fight in my airways.

Not only was I now on the Bryant team, but I was also on a popular Junior Jazz rec-league team, named after our local professional team. I also played church ball, not only for the deacons' team, which was my age group, but also for the teachers' group, and then the priests'. I was on five teams. The Bryant team played Wednesday nights, and church ball was on Thursday, and then there was the Saturday rec team. Lots of games, but very little practice, so I really never got better. Strangely, I went from never having played organized sports to having them define my week.

I wasn't anything special, as was evidenced in a deacons'-team game. I got an offensive rebound and quickly put it back up, and missed it; and reached up and grabbed it again, and missed it again; and grabbed it again, and missed it again…eight times in a row. I was so much taller than all the other kids, who were just jumping beside me trying to outreach me. I just stood there, nearly flatfooted, and played yo-yo with this
ball that refused to go in. On the eighth try, when I missed it one more time, I gave up and yelled out in frustration, letting the ball bounce past me as the other team grabbed it and went the other way. I just stared at the rim that had defied me.

Although I sucked, I was on good teams, well-coached teams that won. Since we won, it was fun enough to keep me interested and not too frustrated with my uncoordinated body.

It soon became clear that I was up against more than my uncoordinated body. In my second official game we were battling a tough opponent in a nail-biter that was coming down to the last minute. We were tired and bloody, doing anything we could to pull out the victory.

An opponent was fouled. As he stepped up to the free-throw line, we raised our hands in the air, not waving or moving them. This was the rage back in the mid-nineties—to hold your arms up when you were the defensive team at the foul line, hoping that it might distract the shooter. It never did a lick of good, though. The only thing that's going to psyche out a foul shooter is himself.

The player shot it and missed. But the ref blew his whistle and gave him the ball back. He signaled that two shots remained instead of one, giving the kid a do-over. I didn't know enough about basketball and all its rules to understand what was going on. The kid shot his free throw again, but before the ball even hit the rim, the ref blew his whistle, pointed at me, and called a technical foul.

I raised my hands in confusion:
What did I do?
The ref was turned away from me, so I couldn't see what he was saying. A teammate came up to me and pulled me down, to speak into my ear: “Put your arms down.”

“Oh.” But it was too late, with the technical foul adding two more free throws on top of the original still left to be taken. The kid hit all four free throws to seal the victory. I felt terrible and walked out of the gym to find a safe corner to cry in. I had cost the team the game because I had not heard the warning.

Afterward, my father went up to the ref and said, “Excuse me, sir. What was the technical about?”

“That kid was ignoring me. I warned him, but he arrogantly kept doing what I asked him not to do, which was holding his hands up while the other team was shooting a free throw. All he had to do was put his hands down.”

“I'm sorry, sir,” my father said as he held out my large hearing aids in the palm of his hand. “That's my son, and he is deaf.”

The haughty and stern visage of the official turned ashen: “Oh, shit.”

 

That eighth-grade year, when we finally moved into the new house on 1300 East in downtown Salt Lake, we still had to honor the lease for the main-floor apartment, and so the seven of us lived in the upper apartment and the basement. Vanessa and I ended up sharing the living room—yes, the living room. We were cramped. Court had the dark and broody basement all to himself. I was too claustrophobic to want anything to do with it and its low ceilings.

When I graduated from Bryant, I had the choice of attending one of two high schools, East or West, since we lived in a neutral zone in the school district. Court attended East, which was much closer to us and had more middle-class kids like me, but for foolish reasons, I decided to attend West High.

I attended West only my freshman year. I broke my foot at the beginning of the basketball season and barely managed to play a few weeks at the end of the season. I was garbage. But I did make an important discovery during that year. During a game a kid tussled with me for a rebound and accidentally head-butted me in the ear. By this time, I no longer had the tubed hearing aids that wrapped around the earlobes and rested there; instead, I had smaller ones that, although they were still visible, had the mechanism itself fitted within the ear frame.

The force of the head butt shattered my hearing aid and cut up the inside of my ear canal. Several smaller fractured pieces were jiggling around in my ear. I had to go to the hospital, where they probed my ear with long, cold rods. Even though my ear canals are less sensitive than most people's, having become accustomed to having plastic or rubber shoved down them to a very uncomfortable depth just for the hearing aids themselves, it still hurts when people shove a rod down my ear. The only thing that would hurt worse than having a hearing aid explode in your ear, I imagine, would be having a contact lens shattered in your eye.

Since then, I have never played a game with my hearing aids in. Practice, yes; but in a game it's different. The surrounding sounds from the crowd and speakers during a game actually serve as an amplifier, pushing the immediate sounds toward my ear (for example, my teammates' or coaches' voices). When I wear my hearing aids during a game, the
sound is so loud that they actually shut down, overwhelmed by the magnitude and the quantity of different sources of noise.