by Jim Gavin
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Contents
Play the Man
Bermuda
Elephant Doors
Illuminati
Bewildered Decisions in Times of Mercantile Terror
Middle Men
Part I: The Luau
Part II: Costello
Acknowledgments
About Jim Gavin
In memory of Barbara Gavin
Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves.
—James Joyce, Ulysses
Play the Man
The Romans had a hard time killing Polycarp of Smyrna. In the stadium, surrounded by bloodthirsty pagans, he heard a voice. “Be strong, Polycarp,” the voice said, “and play the man.” The good bishop smiled calmly at his persecutors. They tried to set him on fire, but his flesh would not be consumed. They pierced his heart with a sword, but a dove issued from his chest. The afternoon dragged on like that, miracle after miracle, until they finally cut off his balls, or fed him to the Sarlacc pit monster, or whatever. I’m not a theologian, so I don’t know all the facts, but eventually Christian artisans painted those divine words, “Play the man,” on the gym wall of St. Polycarp High School in Long Beach.
On the first day of summer practice, Coach Boyd gathered us at center circle. I was going to be a junior and had just transferred from Trinity Prep, a bigger and better Catholic school in Orange County. St. Polycarp had one-third the enrollment, and it was all boys. I didn’t know anybody yet, but according to my racial calculus—seven white, four black, one Asian—I would go straight into the starting lineup. It was 1992. Our shorts were getting baggy and Magic had AIDS.
“This is Pat Linehan,” said Coach Boyd, putting a hand on my shoulder. “We’re lucky to have him.”
Trinity had the best basketball program in the state; I expected everyone to be impressed by my pedigree, but nobody seemed to care. Coach Boyd pointed to the fading mural of St. Polycarp.
“That’s sort of our motto,” he told me. “ ‘Play the man.’”
“Do you mean man-to-man defense?” said a tall white kid with bad acne and luxurious eyebrows.
“You know what I mean,” said Coach Boyd.
“Because we play zone.”
“I know we play zone, Tully. Don’t start with me.”
Earlier, when I first walked into the gym, one of the black kids, Greg Overton, told me that I looked just like Dustin Tully. He was right, except I also had braces, which should’ve come off a while ago, but my dad had lost his job, and our dental plan, and now I was stuck with them.
Coach Boyd was barefoot. I found this troubling. Authority figures usually wore shoes. At the time, with his thinning blond hair and mustache, he seemed like an old man, but he was probably in his early thirties. “Now, listen,” said Coach Boyd. “This summer we’ll be taking a journey together.”
“You mean the tournament in Ventura?” said Tully.
“No,” said Coach Boyd.
“So we’re not going to Ventura?” said Tully.
“We are going to Ventura, but that’s not the kind of journey I’m talking about. Just listen for a second.”
“Do you mean a spiritual journey?” said Tully.
“Yeah, but if you say it like that, it sounds stupid.”
“Since we play zone,” said Tully, “maybe our motto should be ‘Play the zone.’”
“Do you want to run?” said Coach Boyd. “Because we can run all day.”
“Polycarp was schizophrenic,” said Tully. “All the saints were.”
“Baseline,” said Coach Boyd, and we spent the next hour running suicides.
• • •
For extra money my dad used to ref summer league games. As a result, I was lucky enough to grow up in gyms all over Southern California. At halftime I’d run down to the court with a ball, showing off my handle, my range. Even then I was a vain little shit. I imagined the bleachers full of college scouts, but the bleachers were usually empty. Summer league was a languid affair. Players yawned in the layup lines as their coaches sipped Big Gulps. In 1983, when I was seven, my dad worked a tournament at Cal State Dominguez Hills. The first game of the afternoon featured Crenshaw High, the L.A. city league powerhouse. They had John Williams, the John Williams, seventeen and already a legend. He walked in the gym and instead of warming up, he took a nap on the bleachers. I could hear him snoring. My dad blew the whistle for tip-off and one of his teammates woke him up. He walked to center court, still rubbing sleep from his eyes. Early on he got the ball on the right wing, drifted lazily to the baseline, then spun back, hard, into traffic, splitting two defenders, and though he could’ve dunked, he chose, with impeccable taste, to finish with a reverse layup. The beatific vision—you catch a glimpse and spend your whole life chasing it. At my next YMCA game, I tried to skip warm-ups and take a nap, but my dad yanked me up and threw me back among the mortals.
When I got older, he used to drive me around Long Beach, looking for pickup games. If he drove by a park and didn’t see a sufficient number of black guys who’d kick my ass, he’d keep going. His strategy almost paid off, because in eighth grade, after playing well in an AAU tournament, I was approached by a shadowy recruiter from Trinity—a “friend of the school,” he called himself—who said I would be a nice addition to the basketball program. My parents, wanting to vouchsafe my future, agreed to take on the higher tuition and longer commute. When I got to Trinity, the coaches described me as “heady” and “deceptively quick,” both of which meant I was “white.” Apparently, I was using my superior Western European intellect to cross over fools and get to the basket. Somehow this didn’t transfer to the classroom. In ninth grade, I flunked algebra. A counselor suggested I might have a tragic condition called “math anxiety.”
My brain was average and so was my body. The coaches who liked my game kept asking when I was going to “fill out.” I was six-foot and scrawny, with a weird concave chest that was a major source of shame. After playing JV my sophomore year, starting about half our games, I expected to move up, but several transfers arrived from exotic places like Westchester and Fontana and they were all seriously filled out. One kid was featured in a Sports Illustrated article as the best fifteen-year-old in the nation. At some point, Ted Washburn, the varsity head coach, called me into his office. He was a big man, with jowls, and in his Nike tracksuit, he exuded the portly air of a Renaissance king. After zero small talk he advised me to transfer so I could get some playing time. I vowed to fight for my place. “I like you, Pat,” he said. “But you don’t have a place here.”
• • •
Coach Boyd finally told us to get water. As we drank from the porcelain fountain, sucking its leaden bounty, he conferred privately with Tully and then called us back to center circle. “I don’t want to be an asshole,” he said. “I had plenty of asshole coaches and I don’t want to be like that. All I ask for is your respect.”
That’s when I started to lose respect for Coach Boyd. I thought we’d go into drills, but instead we divided up for a scrimmage. Chris Pham, the starting point guard, wore Rec Specs. He couldn’t go left and every time he tried to change direction, I ripped his ball. I got down low and barked in his face, the way I had been taught. My rabid defensive posture amused my new teammates; they all sat back in a listless zone, waiting for something to happen. Tully was
the tallest guy on the team, but he liked to hang around the three-point line. Overton and another black kid, Devaughn Weaver, swatted me a couple times, but otherwise I carved up their zone, either finishing or passing to someone with bad hands and no imagination.
After practice Tully asked why I had transferred. Anticipating this question, I had prepared a lie. “I got in a fight with a coach,” I said.
“Did he try and rape you or something?”
“No.”
“So the sex was consensual?”
“Don’t listen to him,” said Overton, laughing and pushing Tully out of the way.
Weaver asked about some of Trinity’s players, guys with big local reps who were going to Pac-10 schools. I lied again, saying that before I left, I was also getting recruited.
“Serious?” said Weaver.
“Nobody good,” I said, with preening modesty. “Fresno State. UC Santa Barbara. Places like that.”
“I’m going to Cypress Junior College,” said Tully. “My stepmom went there, so I’m a legacy.”
I quickly changed my shirt, hoping no one would notice my weird concave chest.
“What’s wrong with your chest?” said Tully.
“Nothing,” I said. “It’s just like that.”
Everyone was staring. Pham switched from Rec Specs to glasses.
“My cousin’s got the same thing,” said Weaver. “It’s all pushed in.”
“It looks like somebody dropped a bowling ball on your chest,” said Tully.
More than humiliation, I felt stunned by the cold accuracy of his description. That’s exactly what my chest looked like.
My mom was waiting for me in the gym parking lot. She worked the perfume counter at Montgomery Ward and she was still in her nice clothes. My three little brothers were in the back of the minivan. They spent their lives getting dragged to all my practices and games. My mom turned on KOST-FM and we all sat in silence, listening to Barry Manilow. Just before the Los Coyotes Diagonal, I heard thumping bass and saw Tully cruising alongside us in a burgundy Chevette. Overton was slumped in the passenger seat, with his leg out the window resting on the side mirror. They were both drinking forties. At a light they pulled up alongside us and put down their bottles. My mom turned and noticed them.
“Those guys are on your team,” she said.
“I know.”
“Well, say hi!”
I stared straight ahead.
“What’s the matter with you?” She started waving and yelling out the window, as if her life depended on this minor social occasion. “Hey! I’m Pat’s mom!”
“Hello, Mrs. Higginbottom!” said Tully.
“Linehan!” she said. “We’re the Linehans!”
“I’ll see you at the regatta, Mrs. Higginbottom!”
My mom looked at me. “What the hell is he talking about?”
The light changed and Tully accelerated past us. Before getting home, we stopped for gas. My mom believed that gas was somehow cheaper five dollars at a time, which meant we were always stopping for gas. I pumped while she stood next to me, smoking a Winston Gold and squinting into the four o’clock haze. She was still baffled by the Mrs. Higginbottom business.
“Was that little shit making fun of me?”
• • •
We lived in a leafy neighborhood near the Long Beach Airport. When we got home, my dad was up on a ladder in the driveway, putting a new net on the basket. He used to be an electrician, but ten years ago he started teaching at a vocational school. At first it was for extra money, but after a string of knee and back surgeries, most of them the result of his continued participation in a men’s basketball league, he happily started teaching full-time. He worked with apprentice electricians, helping them get ready for their journeyman exams. Since the school closed in January, he had been looking for contract work, but new construction had slowed down and he was having a hard time “getting back in the game.” My mom didn’t think he was looking hard enough. They had frequent arguments on this point. As we came up the driveway, he climbed down the ladder on his bad knees, wincing in pain, to make my mom feel bad for being such a tyrant. She walked past him without saying a word.
“Good practice?” he said.
I nodded. We had a real father-son thing going. Before dinner, I worked on my ball-handling. On the back patio I had set up an old full-length mirror and I spent an hour in front of it, trying to shake my reflection. My mom called me inside and we ate Costco lasagna, a bottomless pit of goo that had lasted for three days. After dinner, my dad came outside with a beer and watched me shoot my requisite two hundred jumpers. Twenty years ago he had been a second-team all-league selection at Mayfair High School. Now, he finished his beer, dropped the can on the lawn, and signaled for the ball. After missing his bank shot, he picked up the empty can and walked back inside. My little brothers had to rebound for me—it was on their chore wheel. Everything in the Linehan household revolved around the development of my midrange game. Even after my exile from Trinity, we were all operating under the assumption that I would eventually fill out and earn a scholarship somewhere. My mom kept assuring me that I was a “late bloomer.” When I finished my drills, I granted my brothers use of the ball and went inside to watch tape. In 1986, I recorded the Big East Tournament final between St. John’s and Syracuse, and since then I had watched it approximately seven million times, studying Pearl Washington’s exquisite crossover.
After everyone went to bed, I put on another tape, an illicit Cinemax movie I managed to record just before the cable company cut off our service. The story dealt with the tribulations of an heiress. Most of her personal conflicts were resolved in poorly lit drawing rooms, among hirsute Europeans. The nonpenetrative frolicking didn’t serve as masturbation material because I didn’t masturbate. Ever. I’d just sit there, piously erect, a disciplined connoisseur of nipple and thatch. Even by apostolic standards, my repression was freakishly quaint, but I also remember enjoying these long passages of dreamy adoration. I’ve since read of Gnostic heretics in Asia Minor who, in abhorrence of their own bodies, sought a higher form of pleasure through the practice of coitus reservatus. Maybe that’s what I had going on. Whatever the case, it meant that I was fifteen and still having wet dreams. At night I would sneak into the backyard and bury my soiled boxers in the trash can.
• • •
Coach Boyd handed out our summer schedule. First we had our rinky-dink Catholic league, and then the big tournament in Ventura. With a note of apology in his voice, he told me that St. Polycarp was in the same round-robin bracket as Trinity Prep.
“Will that be weird for you, Pat?”
“No,” I said, feeling my stomach drop.
“Their loss is our gain,” said Coach Boyd. “That’s the way I look at it.”
Before he took over in the spring, Coach Boyd had been a substitute teacher at St. Polycarp, and a volunteer assistant coach. During that first week, he kept arriving late to practice. He blamed his Volkswagen Thing, which had a tricky ignition. “You have to get it just right,” he told us, jiggling an imaginary key.
I expected him to install some sort of offense, but every day he just rolled the ball out. “This summer,” he said, “I want you guys to play free.” I didn’t want freedom. I wanted guys to run their lanes. I wanted to come off a pick with a second and third option. We had several “Big Wallys”—my dad’s term for big, clumsy white guys. Tully wasn’t a Big Wally, but he was the laziest guy I ever played with. This killed me, because he was actually pretty good. Now and then he’d drop step and dunk on someone, but otherwise he rarely made it below the three-point line on either end. Coach Boyd yelled at him a few times, and made us all run for his sins, but it didn’t make a difference. I dove for a loose ball once and Tully started clapping.
“You’re a coach’s dream, Higginbottom!”
Overton was just as useless. He had the curse of the two-footed jumper: he was a highlight reel in warm-ups, but could never gather himself enough to
dunk in an actual game. His dad, an Air Force mechanic, lived in Victorville, the high desert. Overton hated going out there—he referred to it as “Tatooine”—and he once brought a tumbleweed to practice to symbolize the desolation of his weekend. His dad wanted him to join the Air Force, but after graduation Overton planned to get a job in Hollywood as “one of those guys who do lighting and shit.” He and Tully usually got high before practice. I never used drugs because I didn’t want to make the same mistake as Len Bias, throwing away my golden future for one night of partying.
Weaver was the only guy I liked playing with; he understood when to cut and he could glide past guys, but he was high-strung, and if he missed a layup, or did anything wrong, he would slap his head and scream at himself and sometimes burst into tears. I asked Overton what was wrong with Weaver. “He’s a Jehovah’s Witness,” he said, as if that explained everything. Coach Boyd spent a lot of time with his arm around Weaver, telling him not to be so hard on himself.
Pham graciously conceded his starting point guard position. “I’d quit,” he told me, “but basketball looks good on college apps.”
I dreaded summer league, playing teams that actually ran sets. The Trinity game was in three weeks, but I was already having trouble eating and sleeping. I’d stay up late, imagining miracles. I would play the game of my life and Coach Washburn would beg me to come back to Trinity. But these visions would give way to the nightmare of getting destroyed, over and over, by guys who were actually getting recruited by Division I schools.
One day after practice I expressed my frustration with the offense. Coach Boyd didn’t have an office, so we sat in the bleachers.
“In the spring I tried to put in a flex,” he said, “but it got too confusing and I started yelling at the guys. I hate it when I get like that. Then we had the riots and there was no use having practice. I don’t know about you, but I spent two days in front of the TV, watching the fires, and all that . . . I really don’t think it was anger. It was pain. Do you know what I mean?”
