THE 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.
BECAUSE 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.
Toward the end of the game, I took a pass on the wing from Randy Randel at center, and brought it to the middle of the court where the two Ridgeland guards lined up to stop me. When I reached the top of the key I went behind my back when the first guy tried to steal it, then flew by the second guy and scored on a reverse layup on the left side of the basket. It brought the crowd to its feet. It brought my mother, brothers, and sisters to their feet, but not my father. My mother blew me a kiss and I blew one back at her, but disguised it as though I were wiping perspiration from my face.
Then I heard it for the first time from one of the Ridgeland guards, and it would become a common theme among my opponents for the next two years. “Hey, number thirteen. You play just like a nigger. You know that?”
“Sure do,” I answered, swollen with pride.
I scored twenty-eight points in my first game as the point guard of Beaufort High School, more points than I had ever scored in a basketball game. I was so accustomed to walking down a school corridor with no one knowing my name that I received a shock the next morning when the entire school seemed to be calling out my name. Scores of kids called, “Good game,” as I passed them in the hallways, yet I didn’t know a one of them. That day, Bruce Harper, a basketball teammate and the vice president of the Student Council, asked me to spend the night with him that weekend; I had not seen the inside of a Gonzaga boy’s home. That season I would go on to score twenty-five points against St. Andrews and Garrett high schools out of Charleston, and thirty-one against Conway after a defeat the previous night against a Myrtle Beach team that would go on to win the state championship. My game had finally caught up with what my imagination told me it should be, and I averaged eighteen points a game that dream-born junior year. Basketball had put my name on the lips of every student at Beaufort High School, and the following May, my classmates elected me the president of the senior class. My mother broke down and wept when I told her. My father judged my class with more severity when he said, “Talk about a lack of leadership, pal. That class of yours must be pathetic.”
IN THE SUMMER BETWEEN my junior and senior years, Bill Dufford, my principal, gave me a key to the Beaufort High School gymnasium and a job as a groundskeeper for the summer. Because of some incurable wound my father suffered during the Depression, the Colonel instituted an ironclad rule that none of his seven children could take a paying job. Mr. Dufford was delighted that I’d move tons of dirt from one end of campus to another while refusing to take a single dime. I thought the physical work would be good for me as an athlete, and I spent the summer in the blazing heat, resodding and planting grass on every bald patch that disfigured the vast greensward of my pretty campus. Mr. Dufford also let me practice basketball in the gym the last three hours of the day before he made me close up at six. But I practiced hard, pushing myself to absolute limits. Every day, I set up long lines of folding chairs that stretched from one end of the gym to the other, and I dribbled right-handed, left-handed, weaving between them at full speed, sprinting as hard as I could go. My ambitions exceeded my talent but I didn’t know that then, so I drove myself to the point of collapse. I worked on going to my left all summer, and during one of those hours I’d only dribble with my left hand and only throw up left-handed hook shots off the drive. I invented dribbling and passing drills for myself, playing imaginary games from start to finish in my head. Those games, populated by a whole nation of made-up players, were my first attempts at composing short stories, and all games ended the same way, with me in a heroic, winner-take-all, last-second shot on a drive down the lane with my invisible enemies closing the lane down around me.
In the first days of my senior year, I caught the mumps and never fully recovered from the five weeks of classes I missed. When I got back to Algebra II and trigonometry, my natural weaknesses in math overwhelmed me, and the figures on the blackboard looked like Sanskrit and chicken scratch to me, lost in a funhouse of ghastly numbers. Though I developed a crush on my French teacher, Nancy Rogers, I never attained the sangfroid it required to stand up in class and order a meal in French with the comely Miss Rogers. I struggled in economics and physics, a course my father insisted I take after he made me drop a typing course.
When basketball season dawned, the students and teachers of Beaufort High School looked at me through different eyes. The school expected a lot of my
team and it expected the world of me. Unlike the previous year, when I came on in the tailwinds of my father’s orders, I’d take no one by surprise either in my school or in my league. On the first day of practice, Coach Jerry Swing named Robert Padgett and me as the team’s co-captains and told us all that he knew this was the best basketball team in Beaufort High School history. Swing trimmed the team down to twelve men who could all play ball. If my team had a single weakness, it was a noticeable lack of height. In the team photograph taken by Ned Brown that year, it looks as though we are all the same height—though we ranged from five ten to six one. We were quick and game and an easy team for a coach or a school to like. A buzz of high expectancy hung over the breezeway as I held my breath for the opening night. Half the school wished me luck as they passed me in the hallways. Julie Zachowski, the senior class vice president, gave me a garter she had sewed to wear beneath my sock for luck. So much was riding on the success of this basketball season that the worst case of the butterflies in my career had almost bent me double in physics class that morning. Butterflies are what fear masquerades as in the cocoon of an athlete’s stomach.
As I lay down in my top bunk, resting for the game, my father came into the room to talk about the coming season. He kept his voice low so my mother wouldn’t hear him.
“Hey, jocko. Want to hear my prediction about you and your team?” Dad said.
“Yes, sir.”
“One game below five hundred,” he said. “I don’t think you’ll win half your games. You’ve got no height. No big guys to get you the ball under the boards. This league’s going to be gunning for you this year, son. I don’t think you do well under the spotlight. You scored over eighteen a game last year. The other teams make adjustments and I say you score less than ten a game this year.”
“Thanks, Dad.”