Four women of the Coast Guard Academy drove me to the airport the next day. All of them were sharp, radiant, lovely. I asked the woman driving what she wanted to do in the Coast Guard.
“Fly an attack helicopter, sir,” she answered.
“No kidding? What are the rest of you going to do?”
All three wanted to captain their own ships. When I was about to board the plane, one of the women said, “How did you like your stay at our school, Mr. Conroy?”
“Loved every minute of it,” I said. “I had the time of my life.”
“How did you like us, sir? The women of the Coast Guard Academy?”
“You’re fabulous. I want my daughters to grow up to be just like you women.”
“Sir, we’d like to ask you a favor,” another one said.
“Anything,” I replied.
The fourth woman said, “When the first woman applies to The Citadel, will you support her? She’s going to need some help and she won’t have much.”
Her suggestion shocked me, and I said, “Young women of the Coast Guard Academy, you don’t know my college. It won’t happen. No way. Not in my lifetime. You don’t know The Citadel.”
The first woman, an Asian from San Francisco who had introduced me the night before, said, “Mr. Conroy, you don’t know women.”
I looked at the four women and said, “You’ve got my word of honor. If a woman applies to The Citadel, I’ll support her one hundred percent.”
Several years later after I read about Shannon Faulkner’s entry into The Citadel, I received a letter from one of those women and I tore it up as soon as I read it. She reminded me of my promise, and said what had moved her the most in my speech was my talk about serving on The Citadel’s Honor Court. She said because of that, she knew I could be counted on to keep my word.
As I threw the letter into the garbage I said out loud, “Those goddamn women are going to get me killed.”
But I thought about the invoking of the honor code of The Citadel. In those words, I heard a subtle, secret taunt that The Citadel’s honor code didn’t quite measure up to the standards of their code at the Coast Guard Academy. I thought about who I was as a man and what was important to me and what I believed in and the things that mattered. Later that afternoon I placed a phone call to South Carolina, and when Shannon Faulkner answered I said, “My name is Pat Conroy and I’m about to become your best friend.”
When I got to Shannon it was already too late. Her sources of guidance sprang out of the febrile cultures of the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Organization for Women, and she was already savvy enough to call a press conference. When I was on my tour for Beach Music in the summer of 1995, I attended a going-away party Shannon’s parents were giving her the night before she became the first woman to matriculate at The Citadel. It was a bleak, somber-mooded party, for the entire nation would be watching Shannon’s entrance through Lesesne Gate. I had never seen more pressure put on a single woman. I heard her tell her friends, “I’m not afraid of the plebe system. If those upperclassmen try to get me to submit to them, I’ll tell them where to get off. I don’t submit to anyone.”
I listened to those words and knew that Shannon Faulkner did not have a chance of surviving the plebe system of The Citadel. She did not make it through plebe week, and her leaving set off a spontaneous, ecstatic dance of both cadremen and plebes screaming out their joy on national television as the women of our nation cast their withering, gimlet-eyed glances toward my college. 60 Minutes came to town and broadcast two devastating critiques of The Citadel’s culture. I called a friend who worked for the college and said, “Who’s your public relations officer—Heinrich Himmler?”
The Shannon Faulkner years marked the nadir of my parlous relationship with my college, and I thought nothing could ever repair the damage. There were alumni and classmates who thought I meant to destroy the college and were eloquent and passionate in their hatred of me. When the brotherhood turned mean against this lone South Carolina girl, I used my own infinite capacity for meanness in return. I thought the entire affair could be conducted with gentlemanly restraint, disgusted when the bumper stickers began sprouting throughout the state—“The Citadel, 2000 cadets and one bitch.” There was a sweatshirt sold at football games that had a picture of Shannon’s face imposed on a Citadel bulldog. Around her all the other Bulldogs were crying, and the words printed below said, “You’d cry too if the only female on campus looked like this.”
When The Citadel responded to my criticisms by telling the press that I did not represent the average Citadel graduate’s thoughts on the subject, a reporter asked me to explain the difference between myself and the average Citadel man. “Easy,” I replied. “I’m richer, smarter, more famous, and nicer.” My gift for advocacy was not tempered with the subtler tones of diplomacy, and I believe that my championing of Shannon Faulkner made her path all the more difficult.
Naturally, it was worse in the city of Charleston than anywhere else. It got so bad that I could not enter a store or restaurant without being screamed at by an enraged grad. On King Street, a man slammed on his brakes in the middle of the street, leapt out of his car, and shouted, “Fuck you, Conroy!” I waved, and he jumped back into his car, then climbed back out and shouted, “Class of ’59!” In a restaurant, a woman whose father graduated from The Citadel asked me why I wanted to destroy my college. A woman from an adjacent table joined in the fray, and finally my waitress entered the shouting match that had risen up around my Chilean sea bass. There was nothing pretty about the Shannon Faulkner affair as it played itself out in South Carolina. I was in the middle of a firestorm and had no clue how to get myself to an exit. A huge ex–football player threatened to beat me up in a Hardee’s in Ravenel, South Carolina, until his frantic wife managed to pull him back into their van. Hate mail and death threats began to roll in again. But I knew that all of it stemmed from the great passion Citadel men feel about their college. I have shared that passion since I survived my plebe year.
After Shannon’s departure, The Citadel found, to its dismay, that it was surrounded on all four sides by the United States of America, and its name became synonymous with woman-hating all over the world. Enrollment tumbled and applications were dwindling. American mothers did not seem interested in their boys joining the mob who taunted a young woman they had just run out of the Corps of Cadets. Meanwhile, the girls still came and their march through the gates of Lesesne was resolute and unstoppable.
My father asked me to call The Citadel. “The Citadel needs you now, son. It’s in a free fall.” I called the school and thus took the first shy steps back. For two years in a row, they offered me honorary degrees, but offered them late when I had already made other commitments. I also had a nonnegotiable stipulation—the Boo had to be part of my reconciliation. The Boo had remained a fierce loyalist to me when it would have earned him great favor to renounce our friendship.
Near the Boo’s eighty-fourth birthday, The Citadel honored the two of us with a full-dress parade and threw in honorary doctorates. Before the parade began, Brigadier General John Grinalds, who guided the rapprochement every step of the way, told us what was required when the Corps passed in review: “Colonel Courvoisie, Mr. Conroy, because you are graduates of The Citadel, you are required to take one step forward and sharply salute the company you were in when you were cadets.”
The Boo and I stood at attention as the bagpipes and drummers led the Corps out onto the parade ground before a thousand onlookers. I was emotional that my long war with my school was over, and because of my history, I am moved by all things military. As a boy I was awestruck and dazzled by the marching of uniformed men. Now I stood watching a parade of Citadel men and forty women marching out to a field where I once marched. Beside me stood the man who was the subject of my first book; my family stood behind me. I felt all the nostalgia and anxiety of homecoming when I said to the Boo, “Hey, Colonel. Did you ever think this day would happen?”
/> “Hell no, bubba,” he answered. “But you’re on guard duty. You watch Mark Clark Hall for snipers. I’ll cover the chapel and the library.”
Near the end of the parade, I waited for Romeo Company to pass in review before me. Since I was a cadet I knew how to salute and knew how to do it right, but I’d been practicing in front of a mirror for a week. When the R Company guidon snapped down in salute, I raised my right hand to my eyebrow. It took me by complete surprise when I saluted Cadet Captain Rosie Gonzalez, the first woman ever to rise to company commander of the Corps of Cadets. She further delighted me by giving me a wink of complicity as she passed. I was back in the brotherhood—and brand spanking new to the sisterhood.
MY BOOKS ARE ALL DISFIGURED BY the sullen presence of my child-beating father, Don Conroy, and this one is no exception. I can remember hating him when I was a two-year-old boy and first came to consciousness when my mother tried to stab him with a butcher knife and he backhanded her to the floor, laughing, a scene I observed from my high chair. My hatred of him lit up my eyes, causing him to hate my eyes from the time I was a little boy. Playing basketball was my pathetic attempt to build some common ground between us, and it never worked, not once. When I wrote the chapter about the first East Carolina game for this book, I remembered only that my father put his hand on my chest after the game, pushed me against a wall, and hissed at me, “You’re shit.” While doing research for this book, I was flabbergasted to discover I had scored twenty-five points in that game, my career high, and as the smallest player on the court had led both teams scoring. It is a strange and hollowed-out American father who cannot be proud of a son who scores twenty-five points in a college basketball game. But that was my father. I served twenty-one years under him trying to learn how to become a son he could learn to love. When I decided to major in English I was a “homo,” when I published my first poem I became his “favorite faggot,” and when I wrote my first short story for The Shako, I was “Mama’s most precious little girl.” His taunts and his fists turned my boyhood into a long nightmare.
When I was growing up, I thought that not a single one of my father’s seven children would attend his funeral, if the improbable happened, and this vital, seemingly immortal aviator actually had to die like everyone else. I used to dream of spitting on his body in the mortuary, spitting into the center of his dead, embalmed face again and again, until my mouth was dry. Those were the happy daydreams that sustained me in the flyblown classrooms of my impossible childhood. I think I would have skipped his funeral completely if I had not accidentally built the bridge that would lead us back toward each other. When I began to write the first sections of The Great Santini, I had been preparing my entire life for that public unveiling of the ruthless bastard who raised me. My rage was the molten lava of my art.
I did not tell the whole truth in The Great Santini by any means. At that time, I lacked the courage and I did not think anyone would believe me. It was my belief that if I told the truth about Donald Conroy I would lack all credibility and no one would want to read a book that contained so much unprovoked humiliation and violence. It was not just that my father was mean, his meanness seemed grotesque and overblown to me.
My father put me on my knees throughout my childhood, until that magic year when I turned seventeen and it became dangerous for him to do so. To be honest, I do not think I was a physical match for my powerful father until I was five years out of college. But he thought so. The reason I know this is he did not touch me after my seventeenth birthday. He was not a sentimental man, but he was street-smart. Also, he did not need me for a punching bag any longer; I had four more brothers still serving as prisoners of war in his shameful household. I can barely look back on my sorrowful youth, yet it haunts my every waking moment and makes me a terrible husband, father, and friend.
The character of Bull Meecham in The Great Santini is a toned-down version of Don Conroy. I added touches of humor and generosity to Colonel Meecham that my father had never displayed in his military life. I humanized him and sanctified my mother by making Lillian Meecham an emporium of human virtue with a saintliness that would become even Carmelite nuns. My portrait of my mother rings sappy and shallow, but I survived the dependencies of those times because I idolized Peg Conroy, and I needed a flawless icon.
In my life as a writer, each day I bring the ruined, terrorized boy I was as a child and set him trembling on my desk, so I can study the wreckage of myself at leisure. If necessary, I can slap his youthful face, set in the rigid immobile defiance of bravado that he believes, quite falsely, will impress his Marine father. But the Marine sees right through the boy’s most elaborate defenses, sees straight to the yellow core of him, the place where cowardice goes to pucker and hide. Cruelly, I can watch the boy’s eyes fill up with tears, then watch the great internal war convulse his body as he fights with every cell of his imperiled boyhood, not to let one tear breach the spillage of an inflamed lid. I have purposefully shrunken the boy to the size of a barn owl, so I can move him around and turn him easily. As a desk ornament, he is easier for me to study by pretending he has nothing to do with me. As I watch him, the boy hiding his desperate urge to cry, I realize that all my books inch their way out of my flesh because of the million things this boy wanted to say for twenty-one years, but could not. I am simply writing down the screams that stopped in this boy’s chest during the voiceless solitude he felt in his trial by father. I am not an artist, I think. I am a recording secretary. The boy screams my books at me. It is not the violence of his childhood that repels me; rather, it is the violence of his sensibility now, after all these years. The rage does not offend me, but its incurability does. Its acid eats away at the boy’s face, but nothing fades out or drifts into memory or smokes up into time. The acid leaves neither scar nor patina; it just makes the boy’s eyes glisten more fiercely with unliberated tears. Then it strikes me that the boy is a vessel of tears and nothing else. My father did not allow his sons to cry after he backhanded us. If we did, well, then the beating turned serious and then my mother had to pull him off us and, then, my father would turn to her. That was always the most killing moment . . . because we wept, because we did not take our punishment like men, we drew our mother into the bloody, fiery zone of our boyhoods where she would receive her beatings for our cowardice. Those are the steps and the tune and the words of the song that framed the savage dance of my long-ago southern childhood.
In 1996, my father was diagnosed with an advanced case of colon cancer. For two years he fought with courage and resilience, but on St. Patrick’s Day in 1998, Don Conroy began to die in earnest.
In the last three weeks of Dad’s life, I would go every day to my sister Kathy’s house in Beaufort and interview my father about his life. He had become a savvy protector of his own legacy and he knew what I was doing when I first set up my tape recorder beside him.
“I’ve always been your best subject, son,” he said from the bed he would never leave.
“No doubt about it, Dad,” I said.
“What’ll you call this book about me?”
“The Death of Santini,” I said.
“Hey, great title. You know how to make a guy feel swell. You sold it yet?”
“Yeh. Nan Talese and Doubleday want it badly,” I lied. “Julian Bach wants to have a bidding war.”
“You need to get another subject, pal. I’ve been a cash cow for you for way too long. Any movie interest?”
“Warner Brothers. Paramount. Twentieth Century. The usual suspects.”
“The money any good? This should be the hottest thing these Hollywood fruitcakes’ve seen in years. This is Academy Award shit we’re talking about here. Oscar time guaranteed. Huh, jocko?”
“That’s the talk, Dad,” I said, extending my lie.
“The money, pal. Talk figures here. We’re talking big bucks, aren’t we? Seems to me, we’d be talking millions.”
“Millions,” I said.
“Any actors interested yet? Tal
k about a role. The guy ought to be polishing his Oscar night speech. Getting his tux cleaned. Lining up a new agent. Getting his ducks in a row. Any names in the hat?”
“Redford, Newman, Hoffman,” I said.
“Too small. I’m tired of being played by midgets.”
“That’s a line I can promise won’t make the final cut.”
“I guess this will be one of your old love-hate numbers. At first I’ll be the biggest bastard who ever lived, then slowly you’ll reveal the true humanity hidden beneath my rough exterior.”
“Bull’s-eye, Colonel.”
“Does it bother you, son, that you’re a mediocre novelist? That’s what all the critics say.”
I looked at my father’s face and saw the look of the trickster, the playful wisecracking imp with the touch of pure malice in his mean Irish eyes. “They say you’re not as good as Updike or Roth or Styron or even that broad from Mississippi—what’s her name? Dora Delta.”
“Eudora Welty,” I said. “They’re all better writers than I am, Dad.”
He looked at me with hard eyes. “Never admit that again. That’s an order, pal. You’re my son and you get it in your goddamn noggin that you’re the best writer that ever lived. You got it, pal? There’s no such thing as second best. I raised you to be the best, so you bear down and kick Updike and Roth’s asses. You got me, jocko?”
He had risen to a full-pitched fury and was his old self again. It was one of his bravura performances. Red-faced and enraged, he had raised up on his right arm and was pointing at me with his left forefinger.
“Hey, Dad,” I said. “Name me one book John Updike ever wrote.”
My father roared with laughter, laughed until he hurt. He motioned for me to hand him the tape recorder, fumbled with it inexpertly, and said, “Time to get going, pal. Hollywood’s waiting for this stuff. They don’t make guys like me anymore. Guess they broke the mold.”