by Pat Conroy
I have always been a closet weeper, a man who cries easily but does it better behind closed doors, hidden away. When my father would take me apart as a child, I could not cry in front of him or the beating became more savage. I learned to disembody myself from the boy who was getting beaten. Later, I would cry for much of the night for that kid whom I abandoned when he was being torn up. I never thought of him as belonging to me.
In the locker room in Charlotte, that boy caught up with me and put his arms around me and swore we would never leave each other again. He understood my tears at saying farewell to my game, and that boy joined me as I gave up the thing that had brought me the purest and most shining and most unconditional happiness I had ever felt in my unhappy life. I gave it up. I left my game forever in Charlotte.
The next morning Mel Thompson, who had never offered me a compliment in my whole life, said in the News and Courier: “Pat Conroy gave another great performance. That kid gets more mileage out of his talent than any player I have ever coached.”
CHILDREN, HEIRS OF MINE.
You may put those words of Mel Thompson’s on my tombstone, and I will smile in joy for all eternity. I take those words to the writing desk every day of my life. When I cannot write or find the words cunning in their refusal to present themselves to me or bend to my will, I read his words again. I say, “Mel Thompson, my Ahab, my demanding and melancholy coach, one of the hardest, most authoritarian men I have ever met. The hardest taskmaster, the demon-driven coach of my college days, the dark icon of madness told the world that I got more mileage out of my talent than any player he has ever coached.”
I took Mel’s words and applied them to my future life. I used them as talisman and mantra and omen for what I wanted to become. I took those words of praise and applied them to the writing life I had dreamed about since childhood. I took Mel’s words as metaphor. I soared upon them, gathered strength from them as I stormed out to my life as a writer who wanted to create winged and roaring sentences, the kind that would set the language free and make people come to my house and sit on my knee and listen to the song I was born to sing.
CHAPTER 29
EX–BASKETBALL PLAYERS
FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE I WAS NINE YEARS OLD, I AWOKE AS AN ex–basketball player. The most I could hope for now was to ripen into a knowledgeable fan. Because I couldn’t sleep well, and my leg throbbed with pain, I finished rereading Absalom, Absalom! sometime in the middle of the night, taking careful notes for my senior essay. I still felt humiliated by Moates but William Faulkner tamed and mesmerized me. I loved the way he could pack the whole world into a single sentence. Faulkner could inhabit a line the way God loomed over the universe.
In the next bed over, Root slept happily after playing his last wonderfully accomplished game. Because of the incandescent joy I take in reading, a secret alchemy worked without my knowledge, and I ceased to be the boy who has just given up thirty-nine points to Johnny Moates and felt myself transformed into the word-stung boy who let himself be taken on the floor by the flashy, unapologetic, grandstanding prose style of Faulkner, the agonizing descent into madness of Quentin Compson. From that troubled, long-ago night, I have forgotten neither Compson nor Moates.
In 1995, I spoke at a gathering at the University of Mississippi, delivering the main address for the Annual Conference on the Book. I was three months away from John DeBrosse’s dramatic approach at the bookstore outside of Dayton. The afternoon before the speech, Dean Faulkner Wells, the pretty niece of William Faulkner, led me on a hushed tour of Rowan Oak, the legendary home of her famous uncle. My father was with me, and so was my high school English teacher, Eugene Norris, and my editor, Nan Talese. As I roamed through the many-roomed house listening to Dean tell the necessary stories of her uncle, I thought of Root and Moates and the Richmond game, and of reading far into the night.
When we returned to her house, Dean and her husband, the writer Larry Wells, asked me if I would sign their copy of The Prince of Tides, pointing me to a desk by a window that looked out onto a gas station.
As I signed their book, Dean said, “Pat, I’d like you to know something. That desk you’re writing on is the desk where my uncle, William Faulkner, wrote Absalom, Absalom!” To this day, this remains the most thunderstruck moment of my writing career, which has been far too lucky already. I turned to Gene Norris, my teacher, but Gene was walking to the front door at a fast clip. I found him staring off into the traffic, as moved as I was.
“Mr. Norris. Gene,” I said, after a moment. “I first read Absalom, Absalom! in your class. You assigned it to me.”
“I know that, scalawag,” Gene said, his voice catching. “Now please go back inside. I need to be alone with this moment. I don’t think this has ever happened to a high school English teacher. I need to savor this moment, Pat, for all of us. Every last one of us.”
The day following the Richmond game, an article about me appeared in the News and Courier, written by Louis Chestnut. Louis had gotten much closer to my team than any other sportswriter who covered us that season. I return to that interview when I need to hear myself speak as a twenty-year-old.
Louis wrote: “Two hours before what was his final basketball game of his college career, Pat Conroy was his usual bouncy, peppy self.
“‘I don’t have any real feelings about not playing anymore,’ Conroy said. ‘I do, however, wonder how I will adjust and what I will do to stay in shape. I don’t want to ever allow myself to get out of condition.’ [The fifty-four-year-old novelist reads this eighty pounds over his playing weight and writes in the margin, “Shut up, kid.”]
“It’s difficult to imagine the slender 5´10´´ guard out of condition,” Chestnut wrote. “He seems to be charged with a certain electricity that will keep him on the move forever. He moves even when he is sitting down. I asked Pat about this tremendous energy: I asked him if he had to drive himself harder on the court in an effort to make up for his lack of size.
“‘Not at all,’ Conroy laughed. ‘The reason I always try to move toward the basket in a big hurry is because I can’t shoot from the outside. I am probably the worst outside shooter in the history of the game. One reason is that my eyes are rotten. I have no depth perception.
“‘All I try to do is get close enough to the basket to see it,’ he said. ‘And when you drive the basket you sometimes have to go through people, and you sometimes get decked. I think I picked up the driving technique in D.C. where it was considered chicken to shoot from the outside.’ ”
Louis, often writing of my life as a Marine brat and my love of the town of Beaufort, South Carolina, asked me about my future. “‘My ultimate aim,’ Conroy went on, ‘is to write. I love to write poetry, and I think eventually I would like to write for a living. I know one thing—I have no desire at all for a military career.’ ”
On March 5, 1967, I had declared in public my desire to be a writer, having no idea how to go about it. Afterward, I watched every tournament game and tried to remember every move of every player, noted the colors of the uniforms, the faces and hairstyles of the cheerleaders, the hairlines of the coaching staff. A writer, I thought, must notice everything, experience life more deeply and spiritually than anyone else, and let every cell of his or her body quiver with a lust to take in every stimulus that came along. I wanted to develop a curiosity that was oceanic and insatiable as well as a desire to learn and use every word in the English language that didn’t sound pretentious or ditzy. As I sat in the Charlotte Coliseum watching Moates’s Richmond team lose in the quarterfinals against West Virginia, I knew that I would one day write about my humiliation by Moates. I would write about everything that touched me or hurt or cut or bruised or bedazzled me. I ordered myself to be brave. A writer, like a point guard, was not allowed to show fear. In the Southern Conference program, I began outlining my first novel about the Citadel baseball team I had played on the year before. It was an odd choice to make, but this was long before I learned that I had to turn the wr
iter’s eye inward to find the gargoyles and stunted trolls that ate me alive. Then, I didn’t know that I would build my house of art on my demonic, yet powerless, hatred of my father and my wrecked, guilty love of my fabulous and treacherous mother. But I promised myself I would be ready when my heart began to tell me its stories and reveal its secrets.
With my teammates, I watched the championship game and saw West Virginia tear the Davidson Wildcats apart. Then I walked out of my life as a basketball player and left my game behind me. I had gone as far as I was going in the game of basketball. My mediocrity in my chosen sport has kindled in me my whole life, and I have suffered for it. Athletics is mercilessly fair.
I had returned to the Armory very few times until my graduation day, but Root had an encounter with Mel that April. Danny had gone there to collect his laundry money when Mel came out of his office suddenly. Mel began shaking his head sadly and approached Danny with a look of derision or possibly contempt on his face.
“What’re you doing here, Mohr?” Mel asked.
“Picking up my laundry money, Coach,” said Danny.
“You only have to pick it up once more,” Mel added, beginning to walk away. Then he turned back to say, “You know something?”
“What is it, Coach?”
“I’ve always been jealous of people who had more talent than I had. You’re one of those people, Mohr.”
Mel turned and walked back into his office and never saw Danny Mohr again.
MY LAST THREE MONTHS AT THE CITADEL were lyrical and elegiac to me. I joined the Corps for the first time, marched with Romeo Company during parades on Friday, drilled on Tuesday, ran PT on Thursday, and put on full dress for Saturday morning inspection. I learned about barracks life as it was lived by the average cadet and not the jock I’d been for four years, and I thought it was all terrific. It surprised me that marching in Friday’s parade pleased me and how proud I was of my classmates who called the cadences and shouted the orders and commands that put the two-thousand-man Corps into a dance as intricate as flamenco and as symmetrical as ballet. The easy camaraderie of parade was unknown to me and the congeniality of the seniors making jokes, trying to get the plebes to laugh and draw down the wrath of the juniors and sophomores was all brand new. When R Company finished first in most of the parades that spring, we would wait impatiently for the adjutant to announce the results over the loudspeaker, then explode in a cacophony of joy and machismo when R Company came on top again and again. Romeo Company felt like a team in a way my poor basketball team never did. I have rarely felt as close to a group of men as I did in that triumphant, crowing moment when we would break into the Romeo song on the way back to the barracks after parade:
Oh, we’re the men from Romeo,
we just don’t give a damn.
We come to school to win parades
the hell with our exams.
The hell, the hell with studying,
the hell, the hell with school.
And if you’re not from Romeo—
the hell, the hell with you.
There was nothing like it in the world, I tell you, there was nothing like it.
Another secret of the regular Corps revealed itself to me as I worked on my senior essay. It had never occurred to me in my career as a cadet that anyone could use the afternoon to study or relax or just talk. After the chaos of that losing season, life in the Corps felt leisurely, uncomplicated and rhythmic. I had large quotients of free time as I finished the five great novels of Faulkner and compared them to the five best novels of Sinclair Lewis. When asking me to compare the works of those two, Colonel Doyle expected me to be severe with and contemptuous of the novels of Mr. Lewis. When I ended up loving both writers, he chided me. “But surely, Mr. Conroy, it had to occur to you that the talent level of Mr. Faulkner makes Lewis look flatfooted and vulgar.”
“Colonel Doyle,” I argued, “they’re different writers completely. Faulkner’s magisterial, but Lewis is great in his own way.”
“I find him loathsome and untalented,” Colonel Doyle said. “There is no poetry in his soul. He wrote some terrible books.”
“Arrowsmith was wonderful,” I said.
“If you say so,” he said.
“Colonel Doyle, will you let me write my senior essay the way I want to?”
“I certainly will not,” he said. “We have had this discussion many times, Mr. Conroy, and you pilloried me in the last issue of The Shako because of it. You made a fool of me in your piece ‘The Great Senior Essay Scandal.’ My wife, Clarice, was much put out with you.”
In the spring issue of The Shako, I had written a second short story that I thought was satirical and funny. A senior private named Tim Jackson gets kicked out of school for daring to write a senior essay that is entirely his own original work and does not contain a single footnote. It was a running argument that Colonel Doyle and I carried on all through the year, but because of Doyle’s impeccable courtliness, it was conducted at the highest level of discourse. I told the good colonel that I wanted to find out what I would write about The Sound and the Fury and Light in August much more than I cared what academics and critics I had never heard of thought of those books.
“It is a matter of discipline, Mr. Conroy,” Colonel Doyle said. “A quality that you are much dismissive of, both in your life as a cadet and as a student of literature.”
“I want to be free to write about Faulkner and Lewis the same way you wrote about Frost in your book, The Poetry of Robert Frost. You wrote what you thought about Frost’s poetry and didn’t rely much on the opinions of others. There’s not a single footnote in your book. I know, because I read it.”
“It was a work of deep scholarship, a distillation of my lifelong love affair with Mr. Frost’s poetry. Every word I wrote was deeply felt and deeply considered.”
“I promise that everything I write about Faulkner and Lewis will be deeply felt and deeply considered.”
“I trust the depths of your feelings, I truly do,” Colonel Doyle said in all his sweet formality, “but I doubt if you’ve taken the time to deeply consider anything.”
I laughed out loud, and Colonel Doyle twinkled with pleasure. “That’s a perfect description of my personality,” I said.
“You give off much static electricity, Mr. Conroy, and I would like to see you more grounded,” he said. “How many pages of your senior essay have you written thus far?”
“About fifty, Colonel.”
“Be honest, as I know you will. How many footnotes do you estimate having used?”
“I estimate approximately none.”
Colonel Doyle covered his eyes with his hands and sighed. “Mr. Conroy, Mr. Conroy, what am I going to do without you?”
“Where do you think I should go to graduate school, Colonel Doyle?”
“Tell me again where you’ve gotten in?”
“Virginia, Emory, and Vanderbilt,” I said.
“And where were you rejected?”
“Duke and the Iowa Writing School,” I said. “The last is the one I really wanted to go to.”
“Mr. Conroy,” he said, “I’ve told you before. You do not learn how to write novels in a writing program. You learn how by leading an interesting life. Open yourself up to all experience. Let life pour through you the way light pours through leaves.”
“Have you ever seen light pour through a footnote, Colonel?” I asked.
“They will devour you in graduate school, Mr. Conroy,” he said sadly. “They will simply devour you.”
WHEN I RETURNED TO CAMPUS AFTER the Easter break, I received a note from Mel that summoned me to a mandatory meeting of all the team captains of the athletic squads to vote for the Senior Class Sportsmanship Award. I entered the front door of the Armory for the first time all season because I realized I had nothing to fear from Mel anymore.
In a meeting room, the fifteen captains representing every form of athletics from the rifle team to the golf team arose one by one to deliver a short speech
in support of their nominee for the award. When my turn came, I gave a speech far more passionate and emotional than any other speeches given. I nominated Jim Halpin, then told the story of playing freshman basketball as Halpin’s backcourt mate, and my sense of awe when I watched his prodigious talent. I described his leading the Philadelphia Catholic League in scoring his senior year in high school and his extraordinary guard play his freshman year at The Citadel when he led our team to the best freshman record in history.
I said, “I could not have played a single minute of a single game if Jim Halpin had remained healthy, gentlemen. He had the quickest, most accurate, most beautiful jump shot I’ve ever seen. I think he’d be in The Citadel’s Hall of Fame if he had not sustained a terrible knee injury. How did Halpin handle it? Like a champion. Without complaint. Without bitterness. Whatever light was in our locker room, Halpin provided it. He represents the very best of what a Citadel athlete can aspire to be. His fate as an athlete was bad. His character and sportsmanship were what we all wish we could be.”
