Then I had to summon up the courage to ask Mel if he would allow me to have a date after the game. I would rather have asked Mel if I could moon the entire Corps of Cadets when they passed in review the following Friday. He could be courtly and charming when our mothers came to visit, but the subject of sex made him shifty and uneasy. Not once in my cadet career did Mel ask me if I had a girlfriend or if I was interested in meeting one.
Now I believe that Mel was the enemy of all passion and all sense of engagement where one of his players might drift into realms Mel couldn’t control, and I include the carnal arena in this appraisal. His fury at my showboating at guard, my behind-the-back passes and dribbling between my legs—these actions would bring him leaping from the bench because the passion I revealed was antithetical to his desire to tamp down, repress, undermine, and usurp anything original in our games. His rule over us was high-handed, despotic, and totalitarian in nature. He sucked the life out of us and turned a good team into a bad one. By the time our plane landed in Orlando, Mel had lost Bill Zinsky, Tee Hooper, and Doug Bridges and ruined the season of Dan Mohr. Greg Connor’s season had ended with a pretty girl in Jacksonville. The Green Weenies were buried alive on the bench, their names appearing in no box scores, their heroic play against the starting five unsung and unrecognized. By the end of the long season, we were fully under Mel’s control and his iron thumb. I knew this because I fretted about asking him if I could take Laurel Caruso out after the Stetson game.
I thought about asking Mel on the flight to Orlando, but I chickened out. I almost approached him in the baggage claim area, but thought better of it. When I got to the motel room, I lifted the receiver of the phone several times and once even dialed his room before slamming down the phone. On the bus ride to the gym, I walked from the back of the bus, then sat down with Bob Cauthen who sat directly behind Mel and Ed Thompson. Walking behind Mel, I tried to summon the courage to ask him as we drifted through the gym on the way to the locker room. Then I dressed in my uniform and got ready to play Stetson. I would pray for a victory and then ask Mel, in his moment of triumph, if I could take Laurel out after the game.
When I led the Bulldogs out for warmups, I spotted Laurel immediately and winked at her after I made the first layup. She blew me a kiss that I prayed Mel did not see. On the other side of the court, I panicked when I saw my Aunt Helen Harper talking with Mel Thompson. I sprinted toward her and my befuddled coach and took her by the elbow, leading her back to her seat with my Uncle Russ and my four cousins, the Harper boys.
“Hey, Pat,” my sweet Aunt Helen said in her musical southern accent. “I just invited your coach and your whole team over to the house after the game for a Bible reading.”
“He worships Satan, Aunt Helen,” I said. “So do all my teammates.”
“That’s just terrible! Then they need a Bible reading real bad,” she said.
“They sure do,” I said, shaking hands with Uncle Russ and hugging my cousin John. “I may bring Laurel Caruso by after the game. Remember her?”
“A sweet girl,” Aunt Helen said. “We’ll have a Bible reading.”
I ran by Mel and apologized to him. He looked at me, then said, “How many more of your fruitcake relatives do I have to deal with, Conroy?”
“That’s the last one, Coach,” I said, returning to the layup line, loving Aunt Helen even more than I did before.
Naturally, the game was a disaster, and I spent it trying to get my teammates to snap out of the Citadel stare. We didn’t score for the first four minutes and my team looked as though we were playing in a rainstorm. This was a good Stetson team, but we should have handled them easily. Even the reliable John DeBrosse played without style and ended the game with only six points. We made only ten of twenty-one free throws while Stetson was making twenty-six of thirty-seven. Mohr led our team with nineteen points and I got eighteen. My team stank up the court, and we were cringing when we staggered off the court after the final buzzer.
No master of timing, I finally asked Mel if I could take Laurel Caruso out on a date after the game. Because of that critical lack of judgment, I still take the blame for everything that happened later.
Mel looked down at me like I was a stool sample. His face grimaced with his utter contempt. My question was met with disbelief.
“How can you even think about sex at a time like this, Conroy? Losing rips my guts out. It makes me want to curl up like a wounded animal and go somewhere to die. Losing makes you think about sex, Conroy? I don’t reward losers like you. You aren’t going anywhere.”
Then Mel turned and headed for the locker room in a rage. I trotted over to where Laurel Caruso was sitting and said, “Laurel, my coach just told me I couldn’t go out with you tonight.”
“You want to sneak out later?” Laurel said, surprising me.
“With my luck, he’d catch me.”
“So what, Pat?” Laurel said. “You’re twenty-one years old.”
“You know something, Laurel?” I said. “With Mel Thompson, I’ve never thought of myself like that. Not once.”
Pretty Laurel Caruso kissed me on my sweaty cheek and walked out of my life forever.
My depressed team boarded the bus in somber disarray. We looked like soldiers from a beaten nation being sent to a point of extermination. Not a word was spoken as we drove back to the motel. Mel Thompson’s fury burned like an ember in the dark. When the bus stopped, the manager, Al Beiner, stood up and said, “Team meeting in the coach’s room. Right now.”
Dan Mohr looked over at me and said, “We haven’t had a team meeting all year, Conroy.”
We herded ourselves into Mel’s room preparing ourselves for a long harangue about our lack of pride. Little Mel did a head count and went over to whisper something in Mel’s ear. Mel looked up furiously as his eyes surveyed the room. “Conroy,” he said, causing me to jump. “Where is Tee Hooper?”
“I thought he was here,” I said.
“Well, take a look around, Conroy. It seems Mr. Hooper took a little joyride. I seem to have got me a team of quitters and losers and whiners and now joyriders. I got me any other joyriders on this team?”
Mel screamed at us for ten minutes. The specter of Tee Hooper loomed over the entire diatribe. Tee was a great guy and a solid citizen and I was more worried about his safety than his absence. In his commitment to athletics, Tee was in a league of his own.
“Get back to your goddamn rooms and if anyone hears from Hooper, tell him to report his ass to me on the double,” Mel said.
I was the roommate of Doug Bridges on this road trip, and Doug said to me, “Wherever Hooper is, I hope he’s having a good time, because tomorrow he has to die.”
“Do you think he’ll kick him off the team?” I asked.
“No,” Doug said. “If Mel does what he really wants to do, he’ll bury Tee up to his neck in shit, pour honey over his head, and let the ants eat him.”
“Tee’s a dead man,” I said.
I was reading As I Lay Dying because the first draft of my senior essay was due soon and I was behind in my reading, when there was a harsh knock on our door. Doug was in the bathroom so I went to the door in my underwear. I opened it and found my two coaches, Mel and Ed Thompson, standing before me.
Before I could say a word, Mel spoke in his most doomsday, prophetic voice. “We finally know what’s wrong with this team, Conroy. We’ve finally patched it all together and come up with a reason why this season turned to such shit.”
“What’d you come up with, Coach?” I asked.
“Pussy,” Mel said.
“Pussy?”
“That’s right, Conroy. You guys are more interested in pussy than you are in winning basketball games.”
“Coach, if you’re right and the reason we are losing so many games is pussy, then I assure you, it’s the lack of it that’s causing these losses,” I said.
“Get out of our way, Conroy,” Mel said.
“What’re you doing, Coach?”
&
nbsp; “Searching your room for pussy,” Mel said.
“What? Coach, there’s no girls in my room. You’ve got my word. I’m on the Honor Court and kick guys out of school for lying. You can take my word to the bank and I give my word of honor there’s no girls in this room.”
“Get out of my fucking way,” Mel said, putting his hand on my chest and shoving me across the room. I was outraged.
“Stand against the wall,” Mel ordered. “Look under the bed, Ed.”
Little Mel got on his hands and knees and lifted up the spread under both Doug’s bed and mine.
“No women here,” Little Mel reported.
“You know,” I said, “I hope you guys find some girls in this room. Yes sir. I’d like that better than anything in this world.”
“Shut up, Conroy,” Mel said, and I did. “Look in the closet, Ed.”
Ed Thompson approached the closet as though the Rockettes were going to spill out when he opened the door, their hundred legs a-kicking. He threw the door open suddenly and peered into the closet’s shadow.
“Nothing here, either, Coach,” Little Mel reported.
Mel glowered at me then said, “Where’s Bridges, Conroy?”
“He’s in the bathroom, Coach.”
“What’s he doing in there?” Mel asked.
“I think he’s taking a shit, Coach.”
“Oh, sure, Conroy. Think we’re going to fall for that one?” Mel asked. “Knock on the door, Ed.”
Little Mel knocked on the door.
“Yeah?” Doug Bridges said.
“Open the door, Bridges,” Mel demanded.
The door swung open and I found myself in a direct line, staring at a nude Doug Bridges sitting on the toilet seat. When he saw me, Bridges simply cracked up laughing. He had heard the entire scene and thought he would wait it out on the toilet. The two coaches peered in suspiciously.
“Check behind the shower curtain, Ed.”
Little Mel took the shower curtain and pulled it back quickly to reveal the presence of a bathtub. Bridges put his head down and began laughing hysterically. “Hey, Conroy. These guys think I’d be taking a shit with a girl in here!”
When the two coaches left our room, I was shaking with rage, but Bridges came out of the bathroom screaming with laughter. The sheer ludicrousness of that encounter had tickled Doug like nothing else. He fell across the bed and howled, holding his stomach with one hand.
“It isn’t that damn funny, Bridges,” I said.
“It’s hilarious, Conroy.”
“Tell me the funny part.”
“Conroy, he was searching your room and mine. You and I’ve never been spotted with a girl on our arms.”
I said, “Speak for yourself.” But I was surprised to hear Doug admit this about himself. Doug’s extraordinary handsomeness was a given on the team, and his physique was legendary in the weight rooms. DeBrosse would say later, “If I’d been born with Bridges’s body, I’d still be playing pro.”
At three in the morning, I received a phone call and heard the voice of a very distraught Tee Hooper on the other end.
“Pat, I hear Mel caught me.”
“He sure did.”
“What do you think my chances are?”
“I don’t think they’re good, Tee,” I said.
At breakfast the next morning, the team was on edge, so filled with a vague sense of dread and premonition of disaster. Tee wore his mood swings on his face. He was jumpy and exhausted and afraid that morning. The team ate in silence like teams always do when they stink up a court as we did the night before. The question that was whispered among us was, “Where was Hooper?” In whispers, the story made its way from table to table.
Tee, sensing that his sophomore year lay shattered around him, and that there was nothing he could do to redeem it, was at the point of despair. Since Mel had settled on me and DeBrosse as guards, Tee was often the third forward called upon and found himself coming into games after Kroboth and Bridges. He still found his demotion from starting guard a travesty of justice. Simply stated, Hooper thought he was a far better player and athlete than I was, and it was a crime and an outrage that I was starting in his place. His behavior became bizarre even to Tee.
After playing a small amount of time against Stetson, something snapped in Tee and while I was asking Mel if I could go out with Laurel Caruso, Tee had beelined his way toward the comely Stetson cheerleaders and begged two of them to take him to any kind of party they knew was going on that night.
“I just lost it, Pat,” Tee told me years later. “You know I was a solid citizen. That I would never do anything like that to hurt the team. I’d gotten bitter about what happened. I snapped when I went over to those cheerleaders. But they were nice girls and they took me to a nice party. It was wonderful. Just wonderful. That year was so hard. There was never anything to look forward to, Conroy.
“Coach Thompson didn’t even look at me the next morning. I just waited for the ax to fall, but it didn’t. I felt terrible about what happened, but I didn’t know if he was going to kick me off the team or take away my scholarship or what. It was agonizing getting back to school. We had a five-hour layover in the Jacksonville airport. When the bus finally pulled up beside the Armory, Mel and Ed jumped off and Al Beiner made the announcement that Mel wanted to see me in his office right away. Conroy, you did something funny. You jumped up and pretended to play the violin at my funeral. It was funny, not mean. It broke the tension and the team laughed.”
Tee then walked into Mel’s office as emotionally unbalanced and distraught as he would ever be at The Citadel. He passed the spot where the plaque honoring his induction into the Citadel Athletic Hall of Fame would hang one day. The best athlete in the history of The Citadel would enter Mel Thompson’s office to learn both his punishment and his fate.
Though Mel was a wizard of absolute control, I bet Tee’s opening volley must have surprised him greatly. Tee looked at Mel and said, “Coach, I’m so sorry about what I did. I’m so sorry about it and I’ll do anything to make up for it. But why did you bench me, Coach? Why did you do it? I earned my way back to playing. Everyone knows that. Even Pat knows that. I’d go through the wall for you if you asked me to. You know that. But you bury me alive on the bench. Why, Coach? Please, just tell me why?”
The rawness of unharnessed human emotion was not the arena where Mel Thompson distinguished himself. I imagine Tee’s outbreak unnerved him. It took a few moments for Mel to regain control of the situation. When he did, Mel said, “Someone who works in the athletic department told me you were saying some things in the barracks.”
“No one in the athletic department’s even allowed in the barracks,” Tee said.
Mel looked at Tee and then to Ed Thompson and then back to Tee. “I was told that you tell the cadets that you fill out my lineup cards for me. That you decide who’ll play and who’ll not play on a given night.”
With the mystery of a loused-up season finally clear, Tee Hooper burst into tears. Through great, gut-wrenching sobs, he said, “Coach, I never, ever said or thought anything like that at all. Ever. I wouldn’t say such a thing. It’s not like me, Coach. I’m not that kind of a kid. My whole season screwed up for something stupid like that. Coach, why didn’t you come to me and ask if that was true? I didn’t play because of a rumor some jerk hears from the barracks? It’s not fair, Coach. You should have told me. You should have told me man to man. Man to man.”
I first learned of a stranger’s participation in Tee Hooper’s ill-fated season thirty years later in Tee’s elegant office headquarters in Greenville, South Carolina. None of the pain of that season had diminished for Tee as we talked about what had gone wrong for him. The memories still stung like paper cuts. But he told me something that surprised me. Because of his fiery tears of denial that he had spread the rumors attributed to him, Tee Hooper did not run a single lap or receive a single punishment for having skipped off to a party with two Stetson cheerleaders.
Thirty years later, I was sorry I hadn’t gone to the party with him.
CHAPTER 27
LEFTY CALLS MY NAME
SINCE BECOMING A NOVELIST, I HAVE FOUND MYSELF FASCINATED BY the many ways that writers construct theories about how the passage of time affects the tone, structure, and seriousness of their work. I once studied Proust and the theories of time and duration that he had absorbed during his infatuation with the works of Henri-Louis Bergson. Both men seemed to think that time, as it is generally thought about, did not exist or existed on a very different and theoretical plane. I could not help but notice, however, that, according to the biographies of each man, both of them happened to be dead.
In my own lifetime, nothing has been clearer or more unremitting than the inflexible and man-eating current of time. My life is chock-full of madeleines that send me reeling back on tides of pure consciousness to moments in my life lit up with consequence. But no matter how mystical my encounters with my past, I remain fully cognizant that my body is a timepiece that can kill me tomorrow or let me live a hundred years. It is this hard, inexorable passage of time that, I believe, is the one great surprise in every human life.
Because I was a basketball player, time itself has a solid substructure to it. I have felt it passing through me with terrifying insistence with each sunrise, every beat of my heart. In all my books, there is a beginning, a middle, and an ending. My experience with time is based on my cold eye when gazing at reality. At The Citadel, I answered to the gold-tongued voices of bugles that woke me up at reveille then put me to sleep at taps, with hard, busy hours in between. I also had developed an expertise with the measured times of games where a first half contained twenty minutes, a halftime break ten, and a second half another twenty. I would begin a game with a crisp, sweet-smelling uniform and end with a uniform that looked as though I’d thrown it into a lake. I could begin a game fresh and ready to roll and would end it exhausted to the bone, spent of every ounce of energy. I am time-steeped and time-cured and time-infused and time-beaten. I know how it works in life and in the pages of fiction. It moves, claw-footed and famished, toward the end of my days, as it always has. It moves the way it did before the Davidson game when I was shocked to realize that I was playing my final regular-season game in my Citadel career. Take the word “final,” roll it around on your tongue, gum it well, cut your tongue on its edges, taste its metallic finish, spit it to the ground in scorn and distaste. It will still mean the same thing. It shocked me on the day after, where I read it in the News and Courier, and it shocks me as I read it again and write about it thirty years later.