My Losing Season (29 page)

“He'll just beat me up,” I said.

“Would you do me a favor, Pat?”

“Anything.”

“Don't talk about getting married again,” she asked. “I have enough pressure on me already. Let's let the baby get here. Then we'll talk.”

So I kissed her like I thought I knew what tomorrow forever felt like—Annie Kate could always stop me from talking by asking me to kiss her. It was a tactical command for silence that I enjoyed.

My game improved while I was in love. Like a madman, I dove for every loose ball, knowing that George Norwig, the voice of the Bulldogs, would send my name cruising along the airwaves into Annie Kate's radio. My love of Annie Kate transported me through the cold months that year. Because I was a Citadel cadet I could not visit her during the week and only could see her on Friday nights and Sunday afternoons. Saturday was always game night and there was not enough time to drive out to Sullivan's Island and get back to the barracks by midnight curfew. But we talked on the phone every day and my letters poured into her house in a ceaseless flood of adolescent emotion. I loved writing letters to a girl who said she loved me every time I spoke with her. I felt handsome for the first time in my life. We beaten boys have trouble liking the faces our fathers tore apart with their fists. I grew to like my face when Annie Kate could not seem to look at it enough.

I did not see the terrible isolation of Annie Kate and her mother until it was too late. Their solitude was so complete that I became their sole link to the outside world. When I would call, the phone would ring once and Annie Kate would answer it with great immediacy and ardor. Always, she would put Isabel on the phone to talk with me for several minutes and Isabel would laugh at everything I said to her. At that time in my life I saw myself as the carrier of a great tragedy—the fact of my father's great violence to his family—and I did not place myself as the jokester who offered comic relief in the drama of my own life. But Isabel howled the whole time I was in her house or on the phone and sometimes would bend double when I was telling some stories of barracks life.

On February 16, 1965, I received a phone call at the hotel where the team was staying. In sheer terror the whole team had gathered in Bob Kiggans and Dick Martini's room to watch an episode of
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
. We had originally been watching this program separately, but by the end of the production, all of us clustered terrified in our co-captains' room. In the pandemonium of that moment, the phone rang by Dick Martini's bed. Thinking it was Mel telling us to keep it down, he answered it. He looked puzzled then looked up to me. “Hey, midget,” he said to me, “it's for you.”

I answered the phone and heard Isabel on the other end of the line. “Annie Kate went into labor last night. My kid had a tough time. The baby didn't make it. The umbilical cord wrapped around its throat. Strangled it.”

“Boy or girl?” I asked, stunning the room still in pandemonium around me.

“What difference does it make? Dead's dead,” she said. And then she hung up.

I wept that night for the lost child. I had felt it kick in Annie Kate's womb so many times and had promised that child that I would father and protect and champion it. For a week I called Annie Kate at her house and no one answered. Her letters, which had arrived on a daily basis, stopped arriving at all. We went on another road trip the following weekend and I still had not heard from her. Davidson handled us easily, but my mind was scattered and desperate, and I do not remember if I got in the game or not. The next Sunday I drove out to Sullivan's Island to see what was going on with Annie Kate.

She was expecting my visit. Annie Kate rose to greet me and met me at the door with a sisterly kiss. In my dress grays I looked around the tiny room and saw that someone had removed every clipping and photograph of me with a basketball.

“I'm sorry about the baby,” I said to Annie Kate.

“There is no baby, Pat,” she said. “It worked out for the best. For all of us. You won't have to drop out of The Citadel. You won't have to break your mother's heart. I get to pretend that none of it happened.”

“What do you mean, none of it happened, Annie Kate?” I said, bewildered. “It changed everything. It changed me . . . forever.”

“Pat, listen to me. I knew you were going to be difficult.”

“Difficult. I'm in love with you. I want to marry you,” I said. “What's difficult about that?”

“Please sit down,” she said. “Pat, listen to me. You've got to understand me. I've just lived through the worst year of my life. I can't describe the humiliation I've felt. The shame of not being able to leave the house except at night. What I've felt was despair. I thought of killing myself a hundred times, Pat. Then you came into our lives. What a sweet, nice boy you've been to us. You saved my life, Pat. You really did. But you made the mistake of loving me during the worst time of my life. You loved me when I hated myself. You loved me when I hated the world. Don't you see, Pat, I can never forgive you for
when
you loved me. I've tried, I promise. But both of you, you and Mama, are the only two people who saw me during that whole horrible time. I'm going to start over, Pat. I'm making a fresh start. I'm looking for a normal life. That's it. Nothing else. A nice guy. Sells insurance. Goes to the Methodist church. He'll never know a thing about what happened to me. Neither will my kids.”

“Were you pretending to love me, Annie Kate?” I said.

“I wasn't pretending at all. But I see your face and I see the worst December I ever spent on earth. I see your face and there's the worst January. I see your face and there's February. It shouldn't be that way, but it is.”

Annie Kate and I cried hard and soon I got up and made my departure. I drove back to The Citadel dazed and hurt. It had never occurred to me that I could love someone with my body and soul and simply have that love returned to me as cheap merchandise. That night as I brushed my hair for retreat formation, I looked up and saw my face and my own repulsion as I looked at it for the first time as the face of a boy that Annie Kate Gervais could not bring herself to love. And now, three years later, Isabel said as she walked me to my car, “You found yourself a girlfriend yet?”

“Not yet, Isabel,” I said. “Still looking.”

“No, you're not, Pat. You still love my girl,” she said. “It's written all over your face.”

“Then I've got to change my face.”

“Timing's everything. Yours was off.”

“I didn't know I was being timed, Isabel. I didn't know anything.”

CHAPTER 21

STARVING IN UTOPIA

W
HEN THE
C
ITADEL TEAM PULLED UP TO THE SHODDY MOTEL
near
the interstate that cut straight through the city of Jacksonville, Mel made the mistake of letting his team lounge about the seedy waiting room as he checked in with a sad-eyed, unshaven man at the main desk. Some of the team heard the man ask Mel, “You want these rooms for one hour or for two? Also got half-hour rates.” Our laughter embarrassed Mel and he silenced us with a scowl like a lion baring his fangs at the antics of bothersome cubs. Still, we giggled and I looked the place over with renewed interest. The run-down whorehouse seemed emblematic of the depths to which our promising team had sunk.

Later Cauthen poked his head out of his room and said, “You got your room for one hour, Conroy.”

“I always need two, Zipper,” I said.

“Bullshit, you've never even had a date,” Bob said as I opened up the room next to his and threw my bag onto the bed nearest the window. Greg Connor followed me inside and surveyed the room. Both of us got into our underwear to take a nap before the game. Before we went to sleep, Greg said, “Conroy, could I ask you a favor?”

“I'm a senior and it is my job to take care of helpless little sophomores,” I said.

“Listen to me, Conroy. This is important. Someone from A Company set me up with a date with a sorority girl after the game tonight.”

“Congratulations. I'm supposed to have a date, too,” I said.

“You?” Greg said, surprised.

“Rumors of my prowess are beginning to spread among the coeds of the Southeast. Entire sororities surround Fourth Battalion on big weekends chanting my name.”

“Cauthen told me he was positive you were a virgin, Conroy,” Greg said. “Have you ever had sex with a girl?”

“I've thought about it,” I said. “In fact, I don't think I've thought of anything else for more than four or five seconds since I turned thirteen.”

“I haven't had a date since I've been to The Citadel. Not one. It's driving me crazy. This is supposed to be a really nice girl. And pretty. She's supposed to be real pretty. I've got to go out with this girl . . . I've just got to. Will you talk to Coach about it?”

“I'll be glad to. But Mel's never taken a great interest in his team's love life. He doesn't want some strange girl taking over his job of removing all bodily fluids from us.”

“Conroy, it kills me when I see the cheerleaders on the other teams. They're so damn beautiful. The Auburn girls . . . the East Carolina girls . . . my God, the Florida State girls! I've been so horny the whole time I've been here, I just want to go out on a date. That's not a crime, is it? I've been playing pretty good ball lately.”

“You've been playing great ball.”

“Who's your date?” Greg asked.

“A girl I met last homecoming. A cadet had stood her up, so some Florida cadets searched the barracks and found me studying. I put on my salt-and-pepper uniform and became her date for homecoming. Her name is Karen, and she apologized when she met me for wearing such thick eyeglasses. They were thick, but I couldn't help noticing that the girl who wore them was lovely. I got a letter from her this week, and she wants to show me Jacksonville. But I don't think we'll be going anywhere, Greg. Mel's a little weird about sex.”

“I'm not talking about sex,” Greg said. “I want to go on a date. I want to talk to a girl.”

“I'll ask Coach after the game,” I promised.

“You think he'll say no, don't you?”

“I know he will.”

“If he doesn't let me go on this date, I may quit the team,” Greg said, his voice despairing.

“We'll miss you.”

“How many dates—real dates—have you been on after basketball games, Conroy? I want to know.”

“Two,” I said. “Cauthen set me up with two girls from Winthrop after we lost tournament games in Charlotte.”

“Two dates in four years,” he moaned.

“It's the price of being part of a big-time college basketball program,” I said.

“Conroy, do you have any idea how many times we'd be getting laid if we'd gone to civilian colleges?”

“But we wouldn't be whole men. Citadel men. We wouldn't be able to wear one of these,” I said, flashing my Citadel ring in the air.

“We wouldn't be horny. Don't you think it'd be great not to be horny?”

“I wouldn't know what it's like not to be horny,” I said, turning away from Greg, trying to sleep. “I'll do my best with Mel. Try to have a good game. We've got a lot better chance if we beat Jacksonville.”

“I'll play my ass off,” Greg said. And he was as good as he promised.

When I walked into the Jacksonville Coliseum that night for the game, Karen was waiting for me by the door. I was last off the bus and she surprised me by kissing me squarely on the lips, becoming the first and last girl ever to kiss me in a college gymnasium. I was both delighted that she had done so and grateful that Mel had not witnessed this singular event.

“I told the girls in my dorm that I'm dating a college basketball star,” Karen said.

“Player. You're dating a college basketball player, not star. And Karen, my coach may not let me go out with you,” I explained.

“That would be terrible,” she said.

“It certainly would,” I agreed, then saw a cadet from Jacksonville that I knew.

“This is my friend, Karen,” I said to the cadet. “If I can't go out with her after the game, would you set her up with one of the cadets who came down for the game?”

“Be glad to,” the cadet said.

“I'm sorry I wear thick glasses,” she said quietly to me. “My mama promised me contacts for my birthday.”

“I have two sisters who wear thick glasses, Karen,” I said. “They're both beautiful girls, just like you.”

“My father used to call me beautiful,” she said, her eyes filling with tears. On our homecoming date, Karen had wept for twenty minutes when she told me of the recent death of her father, whose parachute had failed to open in a skydiving accident. I do not think it ever had occurred to me how much a daughter could adore a father until Karen's grief proved it to me.

“Your dad was right,” I said, then saw Rat running toward me in his manager's uniform.

“Pat, have you gone nuts? Mel's looking for you,” Rat yelled.

“See you after the game,” I said to Karen as I broke out into a jog for the dressing room.

As the team was shooting jump shots before the game began, DeBrosse approached me with the strangest look on his face.

“Conroy,” John said, “what's that I'm hearing?”

I listened for a moment, then said, “Down South, we call them elephants. I don't know what they're called in Ohio.”

“Fuck you,” DeBrosse said. “How many elephants have you ever heard at a basketball game?”

“This is a coliseum, DeBrosse. They got all kinds of things going on here. I saw a poster saying that the circus was in town for tomorrow.” And then I heard the answering call of a pair of lions.

“Elephants and basketball. Jesus Christ, Conroy,” John said.

Before the opening tip-off, Greg Connor pointed out his date who was sitting among the small cluster of Citadel fans. Despite the time span of over thirty years, that young woman's fresh good looks still have not lost the capacity to move me. Without knowing it, she carried all the incalculable and breathless power of a woman's loveliness with her. As she waved down at us, she changed the way Greg and I thought about the world. Three rows above her, my Aunt Evelyn sat with my Uncle Joe and my four cousins Carolyn, Evelyn, Joey, and Johnny. I blew them a kiss. I had left tickets for the whole Gillespie family, and it always made me feel like a big shot that I could do it. My Uncle Joe, who was not a shy man, bellowed out to the crowd, “That's my nephew, Pat Conroy, and you'd better watch out, Jacksonville. He's going to teach you some tricks.”

I thought I would collapse from embarrassment, but one of the refs came looking for me, and I went over to shake hands with the Jacksonville captains as Uncle Joe kept screaming out my name and telling the city that I was his nephew. Uncle Joe gave new meaning to the word “irrepressible.”

Ed “Little Mel” Thompson came up to me in the pregame huddle. “Hey, Pat, who's that guy calling out your name?”

“That's my Uncle Joe.”

“Could you make him stop?” Ed said. “He's getting on Mel's nerves.”

“You don't do anything to stimulate my Uncle Joe,” I said. “It's best to ignore him.”

When Kroboth went up for the opening tip against the very game Dick Pruet, I heard a muffled “Pat Conroy's my nephew,” then my Aunt Evelyn regained a measure of control over her husband. Dan Mohr was not starting at center, and his dejection was so obvious that it stood out like a simple sentence etched across his face. The ruination of Dan Mohr's senior year had hit its full stride.

My Citadel team had come to play that night, and we gave the Dolphins the game of their lives. I had never seen my team move with such swiftness, vivacity, or dash. We got after them from the opening tip and I felt like a point guard who belonged on that court as I directed my team.

But the night belonged to the bullish, well-muscled Greg Connor who threw his body at every rebound for the glory and well-being of the Citadel Bulldogs. It was a joy to watch him. He astonished the big men of Jacksonville as he attacked the boards with a relentlessness that bordered on masochism. He scored from everywhere, and I got him the ball as many times as I could. Greg's play made me look brilliant that night. My whole team was cooking, and the fast break was taking care of itself. I could see in the Jacksonville players' eyes that they knew they were playing a different team than the one they had beaten earlier at The Citadel's field house. Connor had not been a major factor that game, but he was as hard to move away from the boards as a freight car on this night. I was the only one in the gym who knew that the brilliance of Greg's performance emanated from the glow of a pure sexual intoxication. He was playing for that pretty Jacksonville girl and no one else. When he was shooting one of his seven free throws that night, I made a mental note that we could win a bunch of games if I could get Connor laid after every game. We pulled away to a 38–31 lead at halftime. We played as good a half as we had all season.

That year Jacksonville's Coach Joe Williams was turning his school into a big-time program that would soon showcase the likes of the great Artis Gilmore, teams that would take Jacksonville deep into the NCAA tournaments in the early seventies. Already he had two players, Wayne Kruer and Dick Pruet, who could play on the best teams in the country. Kruer was a six-foot-five guard who DeBrosse graciously told me I would be guarding.

Kruer was a new kind of guard in the world that was fast proliferating in college basketball. He would have easily been the second or third tallest man on my team, but he had learned to handle the ball well enough to play outside the lane. His jump shot was wonderful to watch and hard to block. When Wayne saw that I was going to guard him, he looked as though someone had given him a free lunch. He taught me that night what it meant for a larger man to post up a smaller man. During the entire game, he would take me under the basket, establish his position just outside the paint, and call for the ball. Because he was six five, he had played forward and center in high school, and he knew what to do when his teammates got him the ball. All night, I tried to front him, but his teammates would lob it over my head for a score. The guy could play the game and once again, I found myself in over my head. Only one guard on my team could stop a scorer like Kruer. His name was Tee Hooper, and he watched the game from the bench, his year in shambles. He watched helplessly as Kruer ate my jock throughout the first and second half. Though he does not know it, I have had nightmares about Wayne Kruer.

But I fought him, and my team played heroically against the much better Jacksonville Dolphins. Greg Connor led our team in scoring with twenty-one points, final proof of the great potency of sex in the life of an athlete: it hurt our team when Greg fouled out with 1:40 to play. Greg ran to the bench exhausted, a spent, depleted warrior. He had enjoyed the finest game of his Citadel career with his first date sitting in the stands.

Though we led Jacksonville 38–31 at halftime, Jacksonville fought back to a 44–44 tie in the opening minutes of the second half. Though we led most of the second half, once by six points at 65–59, Jacksonville rallies kept us from putting the game away. The game was tied nineteen times before the final buzzer.

Everywhere I looked that night I ran into the courage of my beaten-down teammates. Zinsky played like the magnificent athlete he was born to be. When Kroboth got into foul trouble, Mohr came in and scored fourteen points in the second half alone. DeBrosse was a thoroughbred guard and I was lucky to play in the same backcourt with him that night. Steady as the internal workings of a clock, DeBrosse hit jumpers at vital times when his team had to call on his outside shooting.

A sophomore guard for Jacksonville named Alan Treece hit two free throws with a minute left and put Jacksonville up by two. We ran down and missed a shot, Jacksonville controlled the ball, but not the clock. Instead of freezing the ball, Kruer took me deep to the right side of the court and did not let enough of the clock run off and missed a jumper that was rebounded fiercely by Zinsky. He shot me the ball with less than fifteen seconds left, and I did what point guards were trained to do.

I brought the ball up the court at full speed, made eye contact with Dan Mohr, and Dan read my look with matchless precision. Root made a move against Pruet, and I slipped a pass under Kruer. With sweet efficiency, Root faked left, then pivoted to the right. His beautiful jump shot swished through the net, sending the game into overtime.