Trouthe, Lies, and Basketball

by Charley Rosen

  Trouthe,

  Lies,

  &

  Basketball

  a novel

  CHARLEY ROSEN

  SEVEN STORIES PRESS

  New York • Oakland • London

  Copyright © 2019 by Charley Rosen

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Seven Stories Press

  140 Watts Street

  New York, NY 10013

  www.sevenstories.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Rosen, Charles, author.

  Title: Trouthe, lies, and basketball : [a novel] / Charley Rosen.

  Other titles: Truth, lies, and basketball

  Description: First edition. | New York : Seven Stories Press, [2019]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019010166| ISBN 9781609809416 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781609809423

  (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Basketball players--Fiction. | Basketball stories.

  Classification: LCC PS3568.O7647 T76 2019 | DDC 813/.54--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019010166

  Printed in the USA

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Every one of the illegal, immoral, dishonest, and despicable events depicted herein are based on actual, historical happenings.

  Chapter One

  Iwas deliriously happy to accept a basketball scholarship to the University of Southern Arizona, for several reasons:

  The USA Lobos had won six of the seven previous NCAA championships, and sent eleven players to the NBA.

  Coach Woodrow James was universally celebrated as a model Christian, who believed that love, not fear, was the best way (the only way!) to lead young people to achieve greatness. This was touted in dozens of interviews on TV, profiles in newspapers and magazines, as well as in his own autobiography—Love of the Game.

  Literally dozens of other colleges offered me lucrative no-show jobs, my use of hookers on demand, tutors to research and write all of my term papers, guaranteed A’s, and straight cash payments that ranged from $200 per week to lump sums of $20,000 per year. But Coach Woody’s program at USA was famously fair and square.

  Indeed, USA’s powerhouse programs had never been penalized—in fact, had never even been investigated—for even the slightest of violation of NCAA rules.

  I was incredibly naïve.

  What was even more attractive about USA was that in Tucson, Arizona, I’d be 2,119 miles away from my father.

  Here’s why this was so important:

  Dr. Jonathan Hersch was the chairman of the English department at Hofstra University, and he certainly looked like the quintessential scholarly egghead. He was so ashamed of being bald when he was in his midtwenties that he started shaving his dome back when such a thing wasn’t fashionable yet. His literal eggheadedness was underscored by the shape of his face, which tapered to a small, bare, slightly rounded chin.

  Otherwise, his thin, nearly invisible glasses that fit loosely on the bridge of his hawkish nose magnified his squinty blue eyes. He had a tight upper lip that was barely noticeable, particularly when compared with his fleshy lower lip, which he sucked on whenever he was reading.

  On those rare occasions when he stood up straight, he was five foot eight, but normally he leaned slightly forward as though he were carrying the whole miserable world on his back.

  Add to the mix his professorial tweeds, the leather arm patches on the elbows, his bow tie that wobbled up and down when he spoke. . . . He even smoked a fucking pipe.

  His dream for me—nay, his insistence—was that I’d follow his footsteps into the swamps of academe and become a tenured professor of English literature at “a reputable college.” He would grandly “allow” me to choose another field of expertise besides his own specialty—medieval lit—providing “of course” that I “shunned” American writers.

  Even so, there was one overriding concept that he drummed into me as soon as I was capable of rational thinking.

  “You must always be truthful,” he’d say. “Lying is the sign of cowardice, villainy, and selfishness.” This was his mantra, repeated a dozen times a day, every day as long as I can remember.

  He even had a hand-painted sign posted on the door to his study. A quote from “The Franklin’s Tale,” one of the Canterbury Tales, written by his all-time favorite writer, Geoffrey Chaucer:

  TROUTHE IS THE HYESTE THYNG

  THAT MAN MAY KEPE.

  Once, when I was ten years old, I lied about having sneaked into the kitchen and eaten the last slice of leftover strawberry pie, which had been tucked away in the refrigerator. A testimony easily disproved by the red, fruity smudges on my chin.

  Whereupon he took me over his knee, lowered my pants, and slapped me very hard on my bare ass until I cried. My further punishment was to write the “Trouthe” quote a hundred times in a special hard-covered notebook he’d bought just for that purpose. Furthermore, when I finished the task, I had to sleep with the notebook placed under my pillow.

  TROUTHE IS THE HYESTE THYNG

  THAT MAN MAY KEPE.

  So, even though I was a rowdy little boy when freed from the confines of home, I was always afraid to lie. For if I did so, even while playing in the schoolyard or playground, and my father found out, I’d be spanked again. Eventually I never even dared to tell “little white lies.”

  This devotion to “Trouthe” was the only valuable lesson I learned from him. And it became the foundation of my attitude toward The Game.

  As for my mother, Sarah, she was not beautiful—something every child would prefer to believe about their mother. She was short, stocky, and slightly horse-faced, and had always been so, according to old photographs collected in a family album. Nonetheless, her soft gray eyes revealed her capacity for love and compassion. She’d taught elementary classes in a ritzy Park Avenue school, but left when she became pregnant with her first child.

  Barbara, aka “our little sweetheart,” died just before her second birthday as a result of a sudden and mysterious convulsion. My poor mother had been grieving ever since. So much so that she never returned to the classroom. Then, three years later, I arrived on the scene, unplanned and not entirely welcome.

  If my father blustered on with his teaching and writings, keeping whatever mourning he experienced to himself, my mother looked twenty years older almost immediately after the tragedy. Her glossy brown hair quickly grayed, she was forever on the verge of tears, and even her teeth soon turned from sparkling white to an infected-looking yellow.

  She mostly stayed home and moped, wearing shabby housedresses whose decorative red roses had faded into ghostly flowers. For her shopping expeditions, she simply donned an old overcoat, whatever the weather.

  Since they never ventured out of the apartment together, my father didn’t have to be embarrassed by my mother’s shabby appearance. As long as she satisfied his every whim, he seemed to be content.

  Perhaps because I was “an accident” and wasn’t “a little sweetheart,” I never received much affection from either of them. An occasional peck on the cheek from her, an even rarer pat on the head from him.

  But that was okay. I enjoyed being alone and making up my own silly, pretend games. I was invisible. I was a vampire or a werewolf. At nine years old I was president of the United States.

  Around that time, my father’s attitude
toward me changed dramatically. Maybe there had been some problem at the college, or he’d been diagnosed with some life-threatening illness. . . . I never knew the cause. But I sure became familiar with the result: he’d take off his belt and whip me across my back and ass for being “such a stupid, careless child.” Maybe I forgot to flush the toilet after “defecating” or “urinating” (I never heard the words “shit” and “piss” until my third-grade classmates in P.S. 4 clued me in). Or hadn’t made my bed. Or had broken a dish. Or allowed my dirty clothing to spill over the edge of the laundry basket and wind up on the floor.

  My mother pleaded with him to stop. As for me, I stubbornly resolved never to cry. Indeed, my only defense was to say to him, with as much calm as I could muster, “This isn’t fair. I didn’t lie about nothing.”

  Then, for my tenth birthday, I was presented with a small, shiny new basketball. This was my mother’s idea. Perhaps she’d finally accepted that her little sweetheart was dead and that I was alive. My father thought that a book would be more fitting instead, but when he tried to rip the ball out of my arms, he was forced to back off when I started screaming hysterically and beating my head against the wall.

  So the ball became my treasure, my best friend. “Bally” was its name and I often talked to it. “Never tell a lie, Bally, because truth is the highest thing that a ball may keep.”

  Unbeknownst to my father, I threw my “Trouthe” notebook down a sewer, and instead slept with Bally, dribbling him around the apartment when Father was out, or outside on the sidewalk when he was home. I also taped a stretched-out wire hanger to a wall in my room, spreading my blanket on the floor so that my father and the mean downstairs neighbors wouldn’t complain about my noisy dribbling. And now I was Clyde Frazier, Oscar Robertson, Magic Johnson, but usually Larry Bird, because he was white and I liked birds. Hawks. Eagles. Birds of prey. And, accompanied by my own play-by-play narrative, I hit the winning shot at least a hundred thousand times.

  My father didn’t approve of my new hobby, and routinely threatened to stick a knife in my ball. But my mother and I cried and pleaded so passionately, that he and I eventually made a deal.

  I could keep Bally and continue my phantom games as long as I maintained a straight-A average in school. Which was okay by me because it was so easily done.

  This same arrangement carried over into my junior and senior high school careers, which was also okay.

  What wasn’t so okay was that, over the summer before my sophomore year in Reagan High School, I had a sudden growth spurt. I went from being a five-foot-eleven-inch, 175-pound Bar Mitzvah boy to a six-foot-four-inch, 205-pound adolescent. That was when, instead of beating me for breaking a glass, for example, he’d say to me, “My God, Elliot. You oaf. Be careful. What’s wrong with you?”

  I’d tell him I was sorry, but I was in truth delighted, because I no longer had to be afraid of him.

  Years later, my shrink suggested that growing so tall so quickly was my unconscious way of stopping the beatings.

  In any event, my father continued to spend most of his at-home time in his study, a room I was still forbidden to enter. That’s where he researched and wrote a book whose thesis was that every one of Geoffrey Chaucer’s poems was underlain with Christian allegory. “My life’s work,” he said, and indeed he labored over it for the better part of twenty years. As far as I know, he left it incomplete and unpublished when he died just last year.

  He sometimes tried to brighten his ultra-serious attitude by telling juvenile, quasi-lewd jokes to select audiences. Mostly a handful of other department heads and various deans of this and that.

  “What’s the difference between a preacher praying and a woman taking a bath? . . . The preacher has a soul full of hope! . . . Get it?”

  “What’s the difference between a rooster and a shyster lawyer? . . . A rooster clucks defiance! . . . Get it?”

  But he was a PhD in Medieval Literature, a tenured full professor, and the chairman of the English department, so his underlings and even his superiors always chuckled at the punch lines, although they’d already heard them dozens of times.

  He also had a special joke that he only told when my mother and I were with him. He would point up at me as though I was eight feet tall and say this:

  “Sarah here must have had an affair with a very tall milkman. Or the postman. Or the Fuller Brush salesman. Which one was it, Sarah?”

  While his audience burst into rehearsed laughter, she would blush and wish she would die on the spot.

  There was no question that by my junior season at Reagan High, I was a really good player. I could shoot from distance; hit pull-up jumpers going both ways (but better going right); execute tricky, unstoppable crossover and change-of-pace moves; finish with either hand in a crowd; make alert, unselfish passes; and jump so high and so quickly that I could often beat much bigger players to rebounds. I also respected the game, my coach, and even the refs.

  What couldn’t I do?

  Play adhesive defense, which was why Coach Fletcher put me in the middle of our 1-3-1 zone, where I just bounced around and waved my hands.

  And, of course, neither of my parents ever came to see me play. She wanted to, but he wouldn’t let her.

  Nevertheless, I was All-State third-team in my sophomore season, second-team High School All-American as a junior. To cap off my senior season, I averaged 35.5 points, 12.7 rebounds, and 11.9 assists, and led Reagan HS to the New York State championship. In fact, ESPN and Sports Illustrated said I was the best prep-school basketball player in the country.

  No wonder I was convinced that I could lead USA to four more NCAA titles. Also that all the cheerleaders and campus queens would eagerly open their legs for me, just as they’d done in Reagan HS.

  However, my achievements in that otherwise glorious senior season were nearly curtailed by my father after the fall semester when I received a B from an old biddy who taught my Advanced English class. She had preceded my father as chairman of the department, and announced several times in class that she hated “basketballers.” A gleam came into my father’s beady blue eyes when he insisted that the terms of our still-in-effect deal demanded that I forgo playing basketball in the spring semester.

  Coach Fletcher was outraged. Especially since I was the Senior Class president, destined to give the summa cum laude speech at the graduation ceremony, not to mention my being his only hope to win a state championship and possibly be offered a coaching job at some Division One college.

  So he spoke to the principal, who put enormous pressure on the old lady—threatening to arrange her schedule so that she’d be teaching only freshman composition courses until she retired. The prospect of having to read several years’ worth of “What I Done Last Summer” compositions quickly convinced her to change my grade.

  My father was skeptical of the reason for the change—“clerical error”—but there was nothing he could do.

  Okay, that was my first experience of lying/cheating. Although the results benefited me (and Coach Fletcher and my teammates), I had no part in the subterfuge. That’s why I believed I was still as honest as George Washington.

  I was so young, and I dominated those schoolboy games so easily, that I couldn’t appreciate the beauty of The Game.

  I was The Man.

  That’s all I needed to know. And all I wanted to know.

  Chapter Two

  Because USA was the only school I was interested in, Carlton Lee was the only recruiter I invited to come speak to me.

  He was a lanky six-foot-two-inch point guard who had directed the offense for Coach Woody’s first two NCAA titles. Lee had been quick with the ball, ferocious on defense, and had a genius-level basketball IQ. But he couldn’t shoot himself in the foot. Which was why he was only a late second-round draft pick, and his one and only NBA season—with the Minnesota Timberwolves—was mostly spent riding the pines. />
  A week after the T-Wolves cut him, and with no other team showing even a spark of interest, Coach Woody hired Lee as his chief assistant—the first black man on his staff.

  That was ten years ago, and the leansome Lee looked like he could still hoop big-time. I would have loved to play him one-on-one down at the local playground, but he was dressed in a stylish, Italian-cut light blue summer suit fit him perfectly, along with a light blue shirt, a black tie, and blue alligator shoes.

  He might have looked like a Mafia hit man, or a slick movie star, except for his smiling, open face, his Caucasian features, and the sheer grace with which he moved.

  And the NCAA championship ring on his wedding finger attested to his devotion to Coach Woody’s program.

  He gripped my hand hard and pulled it toward him to demonstrate that he had more power than me. Then he shook my father’s hand gently and my mother’s with extreme delicacy.

  We all sat down in the living room, my mother, father, and I squeezed together on the couch while Lee sat facing us in my father’s favorite brown-leather recliner. Then Lee opened his briefcase and, next to the coffee and home-baked cookies Mom provided, spread his materials on the coffee table between us.

  He showed us large glossy photos in an album while he talked about USA’s history. Born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, Lee spoke with a soft Southern lilt.

  “The school was founded in 1903 by the Jesuits as a women’s teaching college with an original enrollment of a hundred and thirty-seven. The classes were held in an old Spanish mansion that was rehabilitated in 1927, and still serves as an on-campus museum. We value tradition.”

  My mother and I bent forward to admire the photo. “It’s beautiful,” she said. But my father only moved to relight his pipe.

  “In 1912, when Arizona was granted statehood, the school was taken over by the state government, and became a coed public institution. That’s when the curriculum and the facilities began to expand exponentially. . . .”