Angry White Male

by Steven Travers

  After the “kidnapping” episode, Stan decided to tone his act down a bit. Eventually, Brad moved out of Brady’s apartment and back in with his father in Palos Verdes Estates. They had gotten in the habit of going out on weeknights, and the overall pace of things had taken its toll on both of them. Stan’s grades suffered in his sophomore year. He majored in communications, but continued to take classes in the film school. It was the only class he did well in. He was becoming more and more of a film buff, and was making friends within SC’s tight knit cinema community. Stan was getting to the point where he could discuss film with other bright students and not feel like a fool. He pulled C’s and D’s in his other classes, however. His A in Introduction to Screenwriting during the Fall kept his grade point average above the magical 2.0 mark needed to maintain eligibility for baseball his sophomore year. In the Spring semester, despite getting a B in “American Cinema of the 1960s”, his GPA dropped below a C average. He had to take a class in the Summer and get a B in order to maintain his 2.0 and his scholarship before the next Fall. He did this by arranging with a friendly cinema professor to write a screenplay over the Summer, which he did. It earned him an A in Advanced Screenwriting, and cemented in his mind, for the first, the possibility that a career in the movies might not be totally improbable.

  Stan’s extra-curricular activities hurt his performance in baseball in 1984. Stan was accorded a position in USC’s starting rotation, but his work ethic had tailed off considerably. Partying with Brad and his motley roommates left only so much time for school and baseball. He often missed class, and his weight-training regimen suffered to the point where he saw a noticeable decrease in his fastball.

  Dan was disgusted. Stan lacked the focus and drive that had always characterized his athletic career. Dan had partied in college and dated a lot of girls. But it had never gotten to the point where his pitching career was in jeopardy. Stan felt Dan’s anger and disappointment. He was simply unable to get out of his funk. He was in a rut, and the worse he felt, the harder it seemed to be able to dig his way out of this self-imposed hole.

  A lot was riding on his sophomore performance. The Olympics were scheduled for Los Angeles in the Summer, and baseball would be played as a demonstration sport at Dodger Stadium. It would be a showcase of talent. If Stan could make the team, he would be able to position himself as a potentially high draft pick for his pivotal junior year.

  Every night, Stan went to bed and vowed that the next day would be the “first day of the rest of my life.” He needed to buckle down in school, get back on track in baseball, and keep the partying in check. Instead, every day was a malaise. In his mind, it was hotter that Spring that it had ever been before. It seemed like it was 100 degrees every day. The heat was oppressive, and Stan was lazy. He just could not get motivated. Stan had learned, when he was nine years old, the value of hard work. Now, at age 20, he was learning another lesson. Success never comes easy, and you cannot rest on your laurels.

  In Stan’s mind, alcohol and rock music had played a positive role in his life. It had loosened him up and made him “one of the guys.” It had helped him get over his shy nature with girls. He had engaged in wild, promiscuous acts of hedonism. It had made him a “man.” But it had come too fast. He had lost focus of the important things in his life. Dan had been restrictive, but he had kept him in line. He still needed the discipline that had been part of his life growing up in his parent’s house.

  Stan felt a sense of foreboding in his sophomore year. The “kidnapping” farce was a warning that everything he had worked for could be destroyed. He had to stay clean, but bad tidings followed him around. Early in the season, the Trojans traveled to Las Vegas to play a series against UNLV. Stan found himself rooming with a pitcher named Al Groth in the team’s hotel, located not far from the Strip. Groth did not like Stan. He was a left-hander from West Covina and was big on Christianity. He always led the team in prayer, and was talking about Christ in his life.

  “You have no direction,” Groth told Stan. “You need Christ in your life.”

  “I have Christ in my life,” said Stan. “I just don’t feel the need to talk about it all the time.”

  “If you had Christ in your life,” announced Groth, “you would not make the stupid choices you do.”

  “I make some bad choices,” said Stan, “but I don’t believe it’s all about Christ controlling your actions. I’m going through changes in my life that I feel I need to go through. I’m not perfect, but neither are you. Yet you act like you are somehow. I think it’s about the process of learning, not being on the right path every second.”

  Groth had little use for Stan. The real problem was not Christ, it was that Groth was in competition with Stan for a starting spot in the rotation. When the season started, Stan won the job, which galled Groth.

  The two of them made uneasy roommates in Las Vegas. Stan had been hit hard in losing to Cal State, Fullerton in his first start. He needed a good outing against the Rebels to stay in the rotation. He was scheduled to pitch against them on a windy Saturday afternoon.

  While warming up, Stan heard a familiar voice.

  “My Dan,” yelled Walt Coleman from the stands, and the way he said it was unmistakable. Only one person in the world under the age of 60 spoke in the manner that Walt did. “Don Galuuuuu. Father of Rod Carew. Converted Jew.” His inanities made no sense to anybody unless they knew his little inside jokes, which usually centered on some racially questionable premise.

  “Standard, my Dan,” he shouted. “It’s been a standard for years.”

  It was Walt’s birthday, and he was celebrating in Las Vegas.

  The game started in shaky fashion for Walt. In the first inning, Nevada-Las Vegas’ shortstop, Matt Williams, powered the first pitch he saw from Stan 475 feet over the right-center field fence for a home run.

  “The Dan’s peering,” yelled Walt from the stands. Indeed, Dan was there. He had said hello to Walt, but was increasingly uncomfortable at Walt’s drunken jeering. Walt was well into a smuggled-in six-pack by the first pitch.

  Stan walked the next man, then gave up two singles to load the bases. Dedeaux had the bullpen in full heat. Stan looked over and it looked like 15 pitchers were throwing wildly, ready to replace him not just in this game, but in his SC career.

  The next batter hit a shot back to the mound. Stan knocked it down, scrambled after it, and got the throw to first just in time to get out of the inning with only Williams’ homer. He had kept it small, as pitching coaches like to say.

  Stan managed to settle down after that, pitching six innings. The Trojans went to work on Vegas’ pitchers, rolling to a tidy 9-1 victory. Afterwards, Walt was ready to party with Stan. Stan went off to do some celebrating with his buddy, much to the consternation if his father, who was left to fend for himself.

  Even though it was a Saturday night in Vegas, the Trojans were under a curfew because they had a day game scheduled the next day. They would have to be at the park by 10 in the morning.

  Walt and Stan enjoyed a few cocktails in the hotel casino, but Stan excused himself in time for the midnight bed check. Walt had no room of his own, and Stan gave him his keys. He told him he was welcome to sleep on the floor of his room.

  At about three in the morning, Groth and Stan were asleep in their room when the door opened with a bang. The lights were turned on, and in traipsed Walt with the skankiest black chick imaginable.

  “Wake up, boys,” Walt announced loudly. “Meet Sonia. She’s gonna suck ya all off.”

  Stan just smiled at his preposterous friend. Groth thought the whole thing was hilarious. Sonia was a Vegas street hooker who could be had for about $30. She propositioned Stan and Groth. There was give and take in the negotiations, but neither pitcher really wanted to touch her.

  Finally, Walt went inside the bathroom with her. Groth and Stan eagerly listened to the goings-on. She was giving him head. After a while, they heard Sonia say, “Now you gonna tell me when you is gonna
cum?”

  “Sure, Sonia, sure,” said Walt reassuringly. A minute later Sonia was gagging and spitting.

  “I thought you was gonna tell me when you was gonna cum,” she muttered.

  Groth and Stan laughed uproariously. Stan spirited Sonia out of there, and the pitchers fell asleep. When they woke up in the morning, Walt was asleep on the floor. Groth and Stan got up and went about their business. When the players departed, Walt crawled into Stan’s bed to get some more shuteye. The pitchers went off to the game. Walt eventually packed it in for the drive back to Los Angeles.

  At the field, UNLV was taking batting practice. The Trojans went about there stretching, and were going to take their batting practice. Pitching coach Bill Bordley called everybody into their locker room. Guys were staring at each other, trying to figure out what was up. Stan had told Dan Ferrara what had happened with Walt. As they were heading into the locker room, Ferrara said, “Do you think this is about you and that Walt guy?”

  “You didn’t tell anybody, did you?” asked Stan.

  “No,” said Dan.

  “Then nobody’d know,” he said.

  Bordley presided over the meeting. Assistants usually handled dicey situations.

  “It has come to my attention,” said Bordley, “that we have a serious breach of team rules by one of our pitchers, Stan Taylor.”

  Stan’s heart sunk like a lead weight. He hardly heard a word the rest of the meeting. Bordley knew every little detail about Walt and the black hooker. He spelled it all out in the worst possible characterization. Stan felt like crawling into a crack in the cement floor.

  Then Bordley asked the captains to speak. They were a couple of heavy partiers. Stan had been with them on drinking expeditions. He had seen them put themselves in precarious situations with women. He had seen them make bad moral judgments.

  Now they were acting like Billy Graham, the preacher, not the rock impresario. They sounded like the judge at Nuremberg. Stan felt as if he was being accused of crimes against humanity. Worse, he had let his team down. He had shown no respect for them.

  When Al Groth volunteered to speak, Stan’s cluttered mind cleared just enough to realize that Groth had simply marched up to the coach and ratted Stan as thoroughly as one teammate could rat another.

  “Taylor has disgraced the whole program,” he announced. “He doesn’t deserve to be a Trojan. I say we hold a team vote and recommend that he be voted off the team.”

  This seemed preposterous to Stan, but Bordley let the vote go. Amazingly, Stan was allowed to stay on the team by only two votes above majority. He realized there was still a lot of jealousy and resentment towards him.

  “So here’s what we’re gonna do,” Bordley said after the vote. “Taylor, we’re putting you on a plane to L.A. today. You’re not making the rest of the road trip. You’re off the team. If you want to come back to the team, it’ll be up to Coach Dedeaux. If he does let you back on, we have 14 pitchers in the program. You’ll be 14th on the staff. Where you go from there is up to you, but I could care less. You got anything to say for yourself.”

  “I’m real sorry,” he mumbled. He explained who Walt was, and how he had just shown up in Vegas. He said he knew how it all looked, but he had just offered his key to friend so he would have a place to crash. He said he had no idea the guy was going to come in with a hooker, and that his roommate, Al Groth, seemed to think it was amusing at the time. He said that he knew guys in the locker room who had done some outrageous things, too. The difference was that their deeds were not being examined in the manner of a prosecution. He managed to look around. He saw no friendly faces.

  “I’d do anything to make it different,” he said. “I apologize. It’s just that I don’t see what the big deal is.”

  He could not have chosen a worse phrase worse than “I don’t know what the big deal is.” Groth had said it was a big deal. The captain had said it was. USC baseball said it was. Therefore, it simply was. The one thing required of his sorry ass at that point was to acknowledge that it was a big deal!

  Stan walked out of the locker room in a daze. In the stands, his father was beaming at him proudly. Stan called him over to a private place, and forced himself to tell the old man what had happened. Dan was so disappointed in his son that he could hardly contain himself. Stan’s jail time was fresh in his mind. This was a continuation of that. Stan had forgotten about the kidnapping episode. If the coaching staff knew that story, how much worse would this have been? Stan shuddered at the thought.

  It was not what Dan said, but what he did not say. His face took on that angular, long quality, as if three feet separated his forehead from his chin. Stan knew Dan had never done anything like this to disgrace the Taylor name. He realized that not only was this a personal indictment on him, but a stain on the Taylor Family. The legacy of being a Taylor had never meant that much to him before. He had always been too busy trying to make his way in the world. Avoiding the jeers of junior high teammates or the hazing of Rich Lopez had always been more important than family honor.

  But in the last year, he had begun to take stock of his place in the family hierarchy. Uncle Charles was a national political figure, and Stan knew that he had responsibilities to uphold. Growing up had its share of growing pains. His drinking and carousing was fun and made him feel good, but at the same time he realized just how much growing up he had to do. He was not living up to his end of the bargain.

  Dan and Stan flew back to Los Angeles in total silence. Dan gathered the facts about Walt and what happened. Beyond that he was a piece of stone. It was almost beyond agony for Stan, who still had to endure his mother finding out.

  The next day it got worse. The sports page headline of the Daily Breeze read, “Sex scandal rocks Trojans.” There was a photo of Stan with his USC hat on, and underneath it read, “Stan Taylor…had hooker in room.” The fact that he was the nephew of the Secretary of State was mentioned, but there was nothing about his earlier arrest.

  Al Groth’s father had heard every juicy detail from Groth. He immediately called the Daily Breeze, the Santa Monica Evening Outlook, the Long Beach Press-Telegram, the L.A. Times, the L.A. Herald Examiner, the Pasadena Star-Tribune, the Orange County Register, and the Associated Press. Only Stan’s hometown paper had chosen to print the story. The Times told Groth that if Stan had played on the football team, or maybe the basketball team, it would be a story fit for print, but college baseball was not a big enough venue to advertise such a thing. Groth tried for almost 45 minutes to get the Times to print something. He called two sports columnists, including Scott Ostler, the sports editor, and a gossip columnist, all to no avail. He tried to make hay of Stan’s relationship with the Secretary of State. If the Internet had been invented then, Groth would have had it plastered all over the web. His only tool at the time was a telephone. He even missed that day’s game because calling all the papers took the entire day. Because Stan had not broken any laws, the media, for the most part, chose to ignore the story.

  Naturally, Groth was placed in Stan’s spot in the rotation. Stan placed himself in a personal purgatory, convinced that he was a clown who always manages to blow it at the crucial moment. When Dan read the Daily Breeze, he exploded. A guy named David Einstein had written the story. Einstein had a big, thick black beard and looked to Dan like a Marxist. He had never liked Stan. Actually, he had never liked Dan. He did not think Dan embodied the spirit of youth baseball with his screaming, his ranting, and his emphasis on winning. Einstein never came right out and lambasted Stan, but he painted him in a negative manner. His “tributes” were written more as left-handed compliments. Dan had developed an intense dislike of the man.

  Now, Dan let it all hang out.

  “Goddamn fucking Kuyke Jew bastard,” he extorted. Dan was not taking into account that while Einstein wrote the story, the sports editor probably had chosen the headline and front-page assignment. That did not matter. Dan ranted on and on. Instead of blaming his s
on or finding fault with what Einstein wrote, he could not help but throw religion, race and politics into it.

  “Goddamn Democrat,” he said of Einstein. He did not actually know that Einstein was slightly more liberal than Jane Fonda, which he was. He deduced that this was the reason the man was such a “low down, no-good prick.”

  Stan sat around in a state of shock for a couple of days. On the third day, like the risen Christ that was within him whether Al Groth believed it or not, he rose again. He called his old catcher, Bennie Hussein, who came to work out with him at the Rolling Hills field. He put himself through a hard workout on the weights. He ran the stairs at the football field, up and down, until he had purged himself of his demons.

  He went back to USC, showed up for classes, and took notes. He marched himself up to the baseball office at Heritage Hall and asked for forgiveness. He was still on scholarship and considered a top prospect. Despite this “14th man on a 14-man staff” ridiculousness, he knew he would get his shot sooner rather than later.

  “I want to be a part of this program,” he said.

  The coaches were not very sympathetic to him, but they accepted his apology, and he was at practice that day.

  Stan worked his tail off. He simply rose above his circumstances through sheer will. He was in the starting rotation by the time the conference season opened, and he ran off five straight wins to up his record to 6-1. As soon as he started winning again, the Vegas episode was forgotten. Almost everybody, including Al Groth, came up to him and told him how funny they thought the whole thing was. They told him how he had gotten the shaft. It was because it had happened early in the season, when discipline is more readily enforced. He was made out to be an example, sacrificed. What he had done was no big deal. Guys who had spoken out against him were telling personal stories of wild things they had done that were far more egregious than giving his key to a friend to sleep on the floor, and not kicking him out for bringing a hooker into the bedroom.

  It occurred to Stan that even if he had kicked Walt and the hooker out of the room, Groth would have gone to the coach and ratted him out anyway. Groth was that kind of guy. He could not have won for losing.

  Stan laughed and accepted his return to team normalcy, but in the back of his mind he could not help but think about their pack mentality. Where were these guys when he needed somebody to speak up on his behalf? It was like the time he had been accused of stealing that glove at the youth baseball camp. There had been people in that room who knew he had not stolen it. They could have exonerated him, but instead they just shut it down and let him get flayed in the open.

  Two months after the Vegas incident, Al Groth got so drunk at a frat party that the cops had to be called when he started throwing beer bottles, smashing them against cars, the street, and the sides of buildings. Groth had just smiled and laughed at Walt and the girl. He had never said, “Get her out of here,” or “I need my sleep,” or “This is not right.” He just filed it and used it to hurt Stan.

  Groth held his spot in the starting rotation. He was a pretty good pitcher, although Stan could not tell for the life of him how he got guys out. He seemed to throw a straight 80-mile per hour fastball right down the middle, but hitters would swing and miss. He must have had a good change-up or something. Whatever it was, he was fairly effective.

  Unfortunately, Stan’s season did not end well. He went on a losing streak, and the team folded like a tent down the stretch. Stan finished with a 7-4 record, and was not a starter during the last two series of the season. This meant that he did not pitch against Billy Boswell and UCLA.

  Bos was wrapping up a masterpiece of a season: .427, 33 homers, and 87 runs batted in. Both The Sporting News and Baseball America named him the College Player of the Year. He won the Golden Spikes award as the nation’s best amateur baseball player. There was considerable opinion among baseball punditry that said he was not just the best college player, but simply the best baseball player alive! He took UCLA to their first-ever College World Series championship at Omaha, Nebraska.

  Stan hated him by this time. He had gotten so far ahead of him there was no longer a comparison. Rivals? The papers had talked about the rivalry, but Boswell made a mockery of this. Boswell’s rivals were All-Americans, not struggling pitchers getting thrown off their teams for having prostitutes in their hotel rooms. UCLA was the National Champions, just as Palos Verdes had won the Southern Section and been ranked number one, all at Stan’s expense. Sportswriters were saying that if Boswell had signed out of high school instead of going to UCLA, he would have been the Rookie of the Year, maybe even the MVP.

  Billy being a Bruin just seemed to rub salt in Stan’s wounds. Having grown up bleeding Cardinal and Gold, he had no love for UCLA. Now this guy had led their football team to the Rose Bowl, and their baseball team to the Promised Land. SC had talent, but they were lackluster. The whole season was a waste of ability and opportunity.

  Stan was invited to pitch for the Alaska Goldpanners in the Summer of 1984. Normally, he would not have merited the invite based on his season, but the ‘Panners were not getting the best players that year. That was because it of the Olympics. That was where Billy Boswell went. Stan had held out hope that he would get a chance at the Olympic team, but he was never contacted for the try-outs, despite the fact that Dedeaux was the United States’ coach. The try-outs were largely a waste of time. The team was pretty well picked out ahead of time. Mark McGwire of USC made it. So did Mississippi State’s Will Clark and Rafael Palmeiro. Arizona State’s Barry Bonds did not make the team.

  In future years, baseball analysts like Peter Gammons would say the 1984 U.S. Olympic baseball team was the finest collection of amateur talent ever assembled. That said, they still managed to lose to Japan at Dodger Stadium.

  The Summer of ’84 was a comeback road for Stan. Pitching in the relative anonymity of Alaska, he re-dedicated himself to his craft. Installed as a starter on the Goldpanner staff, he found pitching in Fairbanks to be a dream come true. It was everything he had ever hoped that it would be. Stan lived with a family in town, and painted fences three days a week for spending money. The country life of an Alaskan Summer was just the anti-dote after his year in the Los Angeles fast lane. No Bruk’s, no Brady’s, and no drugs. No wild Sunset Strip nightclubs, sex parties or floozy women.

  Stan was still that little kid who loved nothing more than to practice baseball with his dad, and to please him. In one year, he had gone from being the guy on the team who never had a girl to the guy who had to be reigned in. While his SC teammates kept their dalliances within the limits of the university, Stan had branched out to an “adult” world. Like Eve biting the apple, he had tasted Original Sin. It had, like watching Linda Lovelace in “Deep Throat”, both repulsed and excited him.

  The indulgences he had experienced in the past year were not available in Fairbanks, or the other sleepy Alaskan towns the Goldpanners traveled to. He went out with the guys and drank beer, but Stan even made it to church on Sundays with his host family. The players had free gym memberships, and Stan got himself back into tip-top condition lifting weights. He never had a date or had sex, but was not terribly disappointed about it.

  Stan was 8-4 with Alaska with a 3.54 earned run average. On the way to Wichita, he beat the Olympic team, 3-1. A lot of scouts saw that game, and Stan felt a significant amount of satisfaction in beating the vaunted Olympians. He pitched the Goldpanners to the National Baseball Congress title game, and was named All-American by the NBC. He had set himself up nicely for his junior, draft-eligible year.

  Back in Los Angeles, Stan went into the 502 Club and, lo and behold, there was Rebecca. Rebecca had dropped out of school early in the Spring semester of the previous school year. She had some good modeling offers, and a few others that might not have been so good. She was still young and gorgeous. When she had dropped out of school, nobody knew where to find her. Carl had no clue. The guys at the frat house did not know. Stan tried the San Marino phone direc
tory, but he did not know her last name. She was like a ghost, and now she had re-appeared in his life.

  The night Stan saw her at the 502 Club, she was straight, and fairly reserved, as if life had not proven to be all parties and sex over the past months. She did not say if anything had happened - a run-in with the police maybe, a family spat perhaps - but there was just a tinge of sadness to her.

  The 502 Club was quiet on this evening. Just a few locals, and not the usual riotous students, which would naturally produce a phalanx of horny guys just drooling over Rebecca. Instead, Stan bought her dinner, and they talked about real life. She was so beautiful. Now she was vulnerable. Stan fell in love with her. In his mind, they were both misfits who were meant for each other.

  That night, he took her back to his empty apartment. He maintained his pad at the Regal Trojan Arms for his entire USC career. With Bruce Springsteen gently crooning on the record player, Stan made sweet love to Rebecca while a bright moon shone through the window. It was the first time he had ever made real love to a woman. His prior sex adventures had been drunken pick-ups, psuedo-gangbangs, and various spin-offs of that theme.

  This was a first for Rebecca, too. She had only known how to be manhandled and objectified. She had learned how to please men in a million ways, but she had never insisted on being pleased herself.

  “You’re the most exciting woman I’ve ever been with,” Stan said to her while staring into her eyes and kissing her lips. “I love you.”

  “I love you, too,” she replied.

  They embraced, and kissed, their tongues probing warm mouths. Stan performed acts on Rebecca he had never thought he would do. He took her into the shower, scrubbed hear clean, and spent an hour satisfying here every need. He discovered that he was a natural expert. Rebecca melted into the bed.

  Then she returned the favor. They made love in various positions, and Stan maintained an endless state of readiness. After hours of sex, he had a shuddering orgasm, and they fell into each other’s arms. They kissed and held each other tight, and told each they loved one another over and over again. Stan had never been happier.

  Whatever Rebecca was, she was young, beautiful and intelligent. She had a heart of gold. She came from a good family. Her upside was tremendous. Stan could care less if she had been with a lot of men. Now she was with him.

  The next day, Rebecca left. Stan asked for her phone number, but she was evasive, saying she was unsettled, and would call him. Stan was confident that she would.

  Brad had finished up his sophomore year on the El Camino baseball team. He was a left-handed relief pitcher, and his prospects were not good. He had thought about transferring to a four-year school. Maybe Pepperdine, maybe Cal State, Long Beach. That Summer, while Stan was pitching in Alaska, Brad had been dating a pretty Tennessee debutante who had come to Hollywood seeking acting fame. She had been cast as the Nurse Ratchet character in the Long Beach Playhouse’s performance of Ken Kesey’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”. She was too young and pretty for the role, but she was a fairly accomplished actress, so they gave it to her.

  Brad was infatuated with her, and he started hanging out at the Long Beach Playhouse just to be around her. They were still casting for the McMurphy role, that Jack Nicholson had made famous in the 1975 film. Then it hit Brad. He was perfect for the part. Especially the baseball scene, where McMurphy rattles off an imaginary play-by-play of the 1963 World Series when Nurse Ratchet refuses to allow the TV to be played.

  Brad had done some acting in high school. He decided to spread his wings. He got a hold of the script, memorizing the lines of the play-by-play. He studied by picking up the cadences of Vin Scully, the Dodgers’ announcer, and went for the role. He was great. The director was enthralled as Brad rattled off about “Koufax with the big fucking curve ball for strike three,” doing it in perfect Scully-speak. This was especially amusing, because nobody had ever heard the actual Scully, a man of infinite integrity and class, swear, especially on the air.

  Brad got the role, and performed all Summer to rave reviews. A talent agent discovered him. He told him that he knew of modeling and acting opportunities in Paris. Brad had never much thought of anything outside of baseball. His brother, Darren, was the actor in the family. Darren was studying drama at USC, where he would run into Stan and chastise him for partying too much and “wasting the talent God - if such an entity were in fact to exist - gave you, my friend!”

  So, Brad would go to Europe. While he was waiting to go overseas, Brad continued to live at home, but he partied at SC with Stan on weekends. Brad, like Stan, had extended himself during the Bruk-Brady year of 1983-84. He had, in fact, gone even farther, delving into the drug habit that Stan eschewed. He had had a few close calls. The whole experience was a wake-up call for him. Brad had tremendous good looks. He was now better looking than Jeff, finishing up his senior year at SC. Darren had never had the looks of his brothers. He was more studious and serious.

  Brad was at the point where his looks made things easy for him. He had landed the “Cuckoo’s Nest” role partly based on this quality. He could get any girl he wanted. Now, he had modeling assignments waiting for him in Europe. Something inside him was seething for something more, though. He felt kinship with Jim Morrison. Morrison had been loved for his sex appeal, and frustrated that his poetry, serious lyrics and intelligent philosophies were overshadowed by his tight leather pants and flowing black hair.

  Brad started reading poetry, Greek mythology, Irish mysticism, and world history. He devoured Keats, Kipling, Descartes, Hemingway, Shakespeare, anything he could get his hands on.

  He would show up at the Regal Trojan on Fridays, having spent the week in his father’s den reading books. He was ready to let it all hang out. Brad moved through a coterie of USC girls that he met with Stan at the Five-oh, or the Three-two, as the 32nd Street Saloon was called. At first, they tried to keep their wanderings local, as if the innocence of the college atmosphere would protect them from themselves. They had both seen a deviant side of themselves in the previous year.

  Enter One-Armed Bob. Bob idolized these two guys for their looks, their athletic skills, and their ways with women. He also had a car and was perhaps the most skilled driver in the L.A. Basin. One-Armed Bob could drive a stick shift down the Sunset Strip at 9:30 on a Friday night, drinking a beer, putting in a dip of Skoal, chewing, drinking, putting in quality tapes in his cassette, and on top of that the man always found a place to park, right in front of where they wanted to go. If anybody else were doing the driving, they would have to park in some residential neighborhood in West Hollywood. The locals hated the savage weekend partiers who invaded their fair neighborhoods. They made loud noises, pissed on their lawns, and left empties to be picked up in the morning.

  Not so with One-Armed Bob. The man would pull up to Barney’s Beanery or the Rainbow. Parking spots opened up like the Red Sea. One-Armed Bob was Stan’s “exit strategy” after a night of drinking. He had had a few close calls with drunk driving. Left to his own devices, Stan had no intention of getting behind the wheel intoxicated. But One-Armed Bob was as safe and reliable as the Secret Service.

  By his junior year, the Strip had become the weekend destination of Brad, Stan and One-Armed Bob. They usually started at Barney’s, then the ‘Bow, or perhaps Sloan’s. Brad, the aspiring actor, was in his element in these Hollywood haunts.

  For all their carousing, they were safer than they had been hanging around the Redondo drug element. There was a collegiate quality to their efforts. An interesting pattern began to develop. Brad had become so adept at picking up girls, that he was overshadowing his buddies. One night at Sloan’s, Stan and One-Armed Bob met up with Brad and his buddy Timmy, an aspiring film editor/producer/writer, who in reality was driving some Hollywood lowlife around town.

  The drinks were flowing, the barbs flying, and good times were being had by all when Stan hooked up with some amazing bimbo. She was blonde, a little ancient for them (maybe 33),
with breasts that threatened to tear her sweater off. She had the body of a 19-year old ballet dancer. She claimed to be a former Dallas Cowboys cheerleader.

  The girl was intoxicated on drink and drugs, and from the get-go she was an obvious candidate for rough sex. Stan was prepared to service her needs. The things she whispered into his ear were so foul, so deliciously vulgar, as to arouse in Stan an animal mechanism that scared him. That he could be capable of filling her foul necessities was not in line with his Christian beliefs. Briefly, he thought about his mother, and his apple pie upbringing in Palos Verdes Estates.

  You’re not in Kansas anymore, baby, he told himself.

  Of course, he was more than happy to handle all of her requests. Her claim to be a former NFL cheerleader created in Stan’s mind an image of hung black pro football stars lined up for a tag team.

  It was a fait accompli. Sex would occur between Stan and this broad, whose name he never could remember even though she had told him several times. She grabbed his balls and whispered things in his ear as they departed the premise. One-Armed Bob trailed them because he was the driver who would get the lovebirds back to Stan’s off-campus sanctuary. She had not acknowledged One-Armed Bob’s presence, but she was obviously so nasty that he held out some hope that she might just throw a blowjob his way.

  As they were walking out, Stan’s arms draped around her shoulders, one hand caressing her breast. Thy ran into Brad and Timmy.

  “Hey, man,” Stan said, “I gotta go.”

  “Whaddaya mean, ya gotta go?” asked Brad. “You can’t go. We’re drinkin’ tonight.”

  “Dude, this chick’s a freak,” Stan said, nodding at the girl.

  “Oh, yeah,” said Brad contemptuously. He eyed her, and she eyed him right back. Introductions were made. Then Stan and his girl left, followed by One-Armed Bob.

  In Bob’s car, the blonde sat on Stan’s lap while Bob performed his magic driving skills. There were several ways he could get back to SC from Sloan’s, but as fate would have it, he chose Melrose headed east towards the 101, which would intersect with the 110. That was the Harbor Freeway, which would get them back to their little place in the world.

  Melrose on a party night is a true sight, filled with neon lights, mini-malls, gay bars, strip clubs, seedy dives, ancient hotels, restaurants, and a million other city delights. Stan and his girl were locked in a kiss. Her sweater was off, and Stan’s mouth wrapped around her mammoth breasts. Stan’s erection was going full steam. Suddenly everything stopped.

  “Park the car,” she exclaimed.

  “What?” said Stan.

  “I have to go in there,” she said, referring to some gay strip club they had just passed.

  What is this, déjà vu all over again? thought Stan, thinking about the crazy girl in the halter-top who had gotten him in trouble with the Redondo Beach Police Department after telling him stop at Big Daddy’s. It turned out that “Debbie Who Does Dallas” had a gay roommate, that he was in this bar, and she had to tell him she would not be coming home tonight, or else he would worry. This seemed to be a reasonable request, but in the back of Stan’s mind he figured that this chick was the kind of girl who would disappear for two weeks to be the main course at a Hell’s Angels barbeque. What was up with this touchy-feeling BS about letting some limp wrist know where the hell she was?

  The traffic on Melrose was intense, and parking almost impossible. One-Armed Bob could easily have just kept moving with the flow, and the next thing they knew, they would have been on the freeway. The pure flow of traffic would have provided the excuse that they had not been able to stop. This did not square with One-Armed Bob’s incredible driving skills.

  “There ain’t no place to park,” said Stan, and he was right. All he wanted was to get this sexpot into his bed and pleasure himself beyond imagination. But One-Armed Bob was Mario Andretti negotiating the backstretch at Daytona. He swerved one car, avoided another, sped up, slowed down, backed up, and within seconds they were legally parked directly in front of the gay joint.

  Tittie Monster got out and went inside. Stan and One-Armed Bob reluctantly followed, drawing the usual gay stares. The place was disgusting, not because its patrons were queers, but because it was beyond Sunset dive motif. Drugs and illicit behavior seemed to ooze from the walls.

  As I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, Stan said to himself, let me fear no evil.

  Tittie Monster found her guy. No introductions were made. She told him she was going home with the tall, straight man waiting for her by the door. He checked Stan out, figuring him to be an athlete, and told the girl she needed to be careful, because “some of these All-American types are real freakoids, baby.”

  The girl was counting on that, and Stan was ready to deliver the goods. Out the door they went. Now the way was clear to paradise. Back into the car they went. Hands on crotches. Lips and tongues, sweat and saliva, hard-ons and wet pussy. All the things that make life worth living.

  There was the 101 Freeway, the last straight passage to unfettered sex. Closer and closer One-Armed Bob’s car got, getting past heavy traffic, red lights, pedestrians and cars blocking, and crossing, Melrose Boulevard.

  “We have to go back to Sloan’s,” came her words.

  Stan’s head just sunk, his chin hitting his chest. A sense of inevitability hung over him. She was too sexy, her breasts were too large, her sexual inhibitions too enormous. Getting a girl like that was simply too good to be true.

  The conversation took its normal, natural twists and turns. One-Armed Bob could have ignored her words, as if he had not heard them, just as he could have ignored her pleas to park in front of the gay bar. But he was skilled. He made a few more experts turns and the next thing they knew, they were headed back towards Sloan’s.

  Why One-Armed Bob so quickly and expertly followed her orders instead of driving back to USC was beyond Stan’s understanding. He just chalked it up to some cosmic law that he was beginning to think existed. The law, more or less, said that good things did not happen to him. Or, just as possibly, he was being protected from bad things happening to him. This girl had all the potential of being a genuine femme fatale. She was straight out of a Raymond Chandler novel.

  Stan tried to talk her back into the sex lane, but something had changed. There was no explanation from her, but the hands, the touching, the stroking, kissing and licking ceased.

  At Sloan’s, One-Armed Bob found a perfect parking spot in front. The blonde quickly bounced out of Stan’s lap and was in the bar. Stan and One-Armed Bob reluctantly meandered into the place. Stan realized that if he wanted to visit the Promised Land tonight, he would have to buy the same real estate twice. The price had doubled.

  Stan re-entered Sloan’s. It was a great bar filled with girls, but they held no enticement for him. He had lost his edge. He found Brad and Timmy. The blonde was on Brad as if she had ordered him from a stripper’s telegram service.

  The whole thing was not fully explained to Stan. The blonde ignored him as if he did not exist. It was Brad she wanted. There must have been some kind of offer when she saw Brad the first time, she had considered it, and before committing to Stan had decided Brad was the better choice.

  Stan and One-Armed Bob kept drinking in quiet anger. Brad and Timmy left with the girl. Stan and One-Armed Bob then left. Stan knew where Timmy lived. He had a place near Pico and Robertson. He instructed One-Armed Bob to go that way. One-Armed Bob did just that. They parked and walked to Timmy’s pad.

  The two guys traipsed on up the steps to Timmy’s place. The door was open. They entered. On the couch, Brad was on the bottom. The girl was sandwiched between them. Timmy was on top. They had her in full double penetration.

  For a brief seconds, Stan thought about joining the party. One-Armed Bob was hoping for the blowjob that never seemed to come around. God knows he needed one.

  “Get out!” yelled the girl.

  “Get out!” yelled Timmy.

  “G
et out!” yelled Brad.

  Stan was done. You could have stuck a fork in him. He and One-Armed Bob just drove home with their tails between their legs.

  Brad did some major damage before leaving for Europe. He would pick up on the daughter’s of famed movie stars and directors, telling Stan and One-Armed, “I’ll see you tomorrow.” The next day he would drag back to Stan’s apartment looking like something the cat had dragged in.

  USC was filled celebrity kids. Jack Nicholson's pretty daughter, Jenny was a regular at the 502 Club. Laker owner Jerry Buss's daughter, Jeannie, was there. So was James Garner’s daughter. Actress Ally Sheedy attended SC. It was a fun, exciting place to be, filled with Beautiful People.

  In October of Stan’s junior year, Brad departed for Europe to begin his acting and modeling career. He had courage, going to a distant land in which he knew little of the language. He did not have much money, and would be on his own. But Brad was a survivor, and he was determined to stake his claim.

  With Brad gone, Stan hung out more with his roommate, Mark Terry. Terry liked to hang out with the fellas. He had all the earmarks of being a man’s man. He chewed tobacco, drank beer and played cards. Terry loved hearing the ribald stories that Stan told of his adventures with Brad and One-Armed Bob. But he was a one-woman man.

  When Terry broke up with his girlfriend, this was a development of great interest to many women at USC. He was 6-3, 220 pounds, with deep, dark eyes, black hair and the face of an Irish scoundrel. He was a hunk. Terry carved out a sexual niche of own.

  Terry also gave Stan a nickname that would last for years. Jim Murray of the L.A. Times wrote a column about a racehorse titled, “This big horse is a little psycho.” To Mark Terry, this was the perfect description of big Stan Taylor. Stan was a “big horse” who was definitely “a little psycho.” Terry started to call Stan Big Horse.

  Stan and Terry threw a bash at their apartment. Two female tennis players showed up. They were both attractive “party animals.” Stan got very drunk and belligerent. At the end of the night, the two pretty tennis players bid Stan and Terry adieu. Stan probably could have had sex with both of them if he had played his cards right. Instead, he drank, chewed tobacco, and loudly quoted “Apocalypse” and “Patton”. He went up to girls and said, “Hey baby, take yer clothes off.”

  The theme of clothing removal became a weird obsession of phrases.

  “Well awwwriigjht,” he screamed like Mick Jagger, “take yer clothes off, and let’s have a look atcha.”

  “You know, Big Horse,” Terry tried to tell him. “A lot of these girls think you’re a big strapping guy when they see you around school, but I don’t think quoting ‘Patton’ is the way to their hearts.”

  The two tennis girls thanked Stan and Terry as they were leaving.

  “Thanks for inviting us to your party, Stan and Mark,” they said. Nice girls.

  Stan stood like a specter on the top of the staircase and watched them as they walked down.

  “Yeah,” he yelled, “just leave. Drink all my Goddamn beer. Listen to all my records. Just use me for your own guilty pleasures and leave. Shee-it!”

  “Bye, Stan,” the tennis girls said sweetly. They thought he was pure comedy.

  “You know, Big Horse,” Terry, who had observed the exchange, said with a smile. “You really ought to take over that column from Miss Manners. ‘Big Horse Manners Rules of Etiquette.’ ‘Big Horse Manners.’ Horse. Horse B. Manners. Horace B. Manners. Horace ‘Bad’ Manners. Horace B. Manners. Horace. Horace B. Manners, and the ‘B’ stands for bad. Bad manners.”

  Stan heretofore became known to everybody at USC as Horace B. Manners. Over the years, anybody who knew him in his last two years at the University of Southern California knew him as Horace.

  Stan started to hang out with a couple of girls that Mike Hoffmeister had introduced him to. Tammy Rubenstein was Marta’s sister. She had dark hair, was just as cute, and a lot more approachable. Stan had struck out with Marta, but hoped to score with Tammy. Everybody wanted her in the worst way. She dated most of the star athletes, but claimed she was a virgin. This was technically true, although every skill position player on the Trojan football team had engaged her in the “69” position.

  Tammy’s partner in crime was an exotic beauty named Sandra. She and Tammy were regulars on the SC party scene. They saw Stan all the time, and they became friends. Stan wanted sex more than friendship, but neither girl was interested. They thought he was hilarious, though.

  Both girls dug Terry. Girls were always using Stan to get to Terry. Stan had spent hours “working” on a sunbathing blonde at the Regal Trojan, only to discover she wanted nothing to do with him. She was obsessed with Terry. It was the same old story.

  Neither Tammy nor Sandra knew Terry, but they were determined to. The competition was on between them. Sandra made the first move, using her friendship with Stan. Stan knew about a film school party, and arranged for Terry to make extra money as the doorman. Sandra and Tammy both planned to attend. Sandra told Tammy she would meet her there. Sandra showed up early, and found Stan.

  “Hi, Stan,” she said. “Would you do me a favor?”

  “Sure,” said Stan.

  “Will you introduce me to your roommate?” she asked.

  “Oh, I see how it is,” said Stan, smiling.

  Sandra smiled demurely.

  “Are you sure I can’t ask you out first?” asked Stan.

  “Come on,” said Sandra. “Please.”

  “You got it,” said Stan.

  Stan brought Sandra to Terry.

  “Hey, roomie,” Stan said with a smile. “Don’t say I never brought you a present.”

  Sandra worked Terry like she was running for mayor. Tammy showed up a few minutes later. She tried to interject herself. She was not above stealing boyfriends, but Terry was hooked. Stan tried to offer himself as Tammy’s consolation prize, but she was not interested in doing 69 with him. She preferred black running backs and DBs, anyway.

  After that, Terry was again “One-Woman Mark”, and Stan hardly saw him. Sandra lived over at the Moon Apartments with another sexy girl who was getting phone calls from Arnold Schwarzenegger.

  “Hallo Juleee,” Arnold would leave messages on the machine. “Dis is Aanuld.” Terry enjoyed erasing Arnold’s messages, which probably benefited Maria Shriver. Stan tried to get Julie to go out with him, too, but she had gotten wind of all the Horace B. Manners stories and was not impressed.

  Stan managed to get into the worst fight of his life at Tammy’s birthday party, which was held at Marta’s apartment in Westwood. The lovebirds Sandra and Mark made a quick exit. It was a crazy affair. Stan found himself sitting next to Marta and Tammy’s mother. She was very well put together.

  “How come I can’t get either one of your daughters to go out with me?” lamented Stan. Stan worked Mrs. Rubenstein for 45 minutes, no doubt trying to re-live “The Graduate”. She was friendly but not willing to play Mrs. Robinson to Stan’s Benjamin.

  Once she was out of the picture, Stan reverted to his practice of heavy drinking. By 1:30 on the morning he was standing on the street with his pal, Pit Boston. Pit managed to get into a heated argument with an enormous guy who was a tight end on the football team and a wrestler at UCLA.

  “Apologize,” Pit told the behemoth. That was all Stan heard. Blind drunk with false courage, Stan stepped in front of the behemoth.

  “You’re not gonna fight him,” he told him. “You’re gonna fight me.”

  Words ensued. Stan never really knew what happened next. It was later described to Stan that he had literally walked into the punch. Stan remembered being blindsided. The punch was bad enough, but the real damage came when Stan’s head hit the pavement, opening up a bloody gash. Being drunk and stupid, he tried to throw a punch from his knees.

  “Stay down,” yelled his baseball buddy, Bruno.

  Too late. Stan caught another punch and was down for the c
ount. When he reached consciousness, he and Pit, who had taken a punch for good measure, walked away, holding each other up. Wrapped in makeshift bandages and covered in blood, they looked like the drum-and-fife corps from Revolutionary War paintings.

  To add insult to injury, Stan noticed Billy Boswell and Matt Hobli just before he got in the car to depart the premises. Boswell was all over Tammy Rubenstein.

  69 is divine, he said to himself. Neither Pit nor Stan had represented SC in this fight with UCLA, but nobody could say he had backed off a challenge.

  “Sometimes you gotta throw a purpose pitch,” Stan muttered in the car. Sometimes, discretion is the better part of valor, especially when the other guy is 6-3, 250 pounds. Stan was taken to Orthopedic Hospital, where the doctor stitched up his head. His combination hangover and stitched-up dome made for a brutal hangover the next day, but he was young and strong. He survived. It was not as bad as Canada after his night with the lumberjacks.

  Ken MacDonald had been Mike Hoffmeister’s roommate. He was from the Bay Area, and everybody called him Mac. He was short and slight, with fiery red hair. He loved sports and liked to liked to kick around with a football, shoot hoops or take a little batting practice. He had not participated in organized athletics since his freshman year in high school, though.

  Mac’s father, Frank, was a motivated self-starter, a lone wolf who took care of business his own way. He had been a Marine fighter pilot, fitting the fighter jock profile of a rugged individualist. Frank had graduated from Notre Dame. Outside of his family, the two things that aroused his greatest passion were the Marine Corps and Notre Dame football.

  Frank had always harbored the hope that his son would follow in his footsteps, first to Notre Dame, and then into the cockpit of an F-16. Mac went to South Bend for his freshman year. But Mac was a different breed of cat. He liked warm weather, fun bars and beautiful women. None of these things could be found within 60 miles of the University of Notre Dame.

  He was not Rudy. After one year of purgatory in South Bend, Mac transferred to the University of Southern California. The old man was aghast. Not only was his kid leaving his beloved alma mater, he was transferring to the Irish’s biggest rival. For this privilege, he would be required to fork out 20 grand for tuition, books, room and board.

  Mac was just like Hoffmeister. The two of them were unlike anybody Stan had ever seen. True cards. Mac never went to class, either, except when he absolutely had to. In fact, he did not even live in Southern California!

  Mac’s friends in the Bay Area would see him on Wednesday nights at a bar called the Black Oak Saloon.

  “Hey, man,” they would say. “I thought you were going to SC.”

  “I am,” he replied.

  He virtually commuted from San Francisco to Los Angeles, driving all night to take a test, then driving right back. He and Stan went to the SC bars, then to Tommy’s on Beverly Boulevard. Like the Orginal Pantry on Figueroa, Tommy’s was an L.A. landmark, where USC students mixed with Latino gangbangers and inner city blacks to eats the nastiest, greasiest chili cheeseburgers ever invented.

  “You don’t eat a Tommy’s burger,” Brad once said. “You wear it.”

  Hoffmeister had once managed to drop his cheeseburger on the oily, unwashed sidewalk. Millions of feet had trampled that sidewalk. It had not received a semblance of a washing in eons, and like the song says, it never rains in Southern California. Hoffmeister had looked at the line, winding around the corner. It was always like that around two a.m. If he got back in line, it would be a 30-minute wait. He had taken a deep breath, bent over, scooped the remains of cheese, meat and chili, and scooped it onto the bun. Then he ate it.

  Mac and Stan had gone to Tommy’s after a party. Afterwards, Mac dropped him off at the Regal Trojan. Stan came in, and then realized he had left something in Mac’s car. Mac was staying at Steve Heslop’s apartment on Ellendale. He called him up. It was 3:30 a.m.

  “Yeah,” said Heslop, a left-handed pitcher from a town near Palm Springs.

  “Yo, Hes,” said Stan. “I gotta talk to Mac.”

  “He went to San Francisco,” said Heslop.

  “Oh, he must not have come in yet,” said Stan. “Have him call me.”

  “He’s been here,” said Heslop. “He’s come and gone.”

  “Whaddaya mean?” asked Stan.

  “He went to San Francisco,” said Heslop.

  “What are you talkin’ about?” asked Stan. “I just saw him a few minutes ago.”

  “Man,” said Heslop, “he came in, grabbed his coat and left for San Francisco five minutes ago.”

  That was Mac’s M.O. It did not matter how much he had to drink or how far he had to drive. He thought nothing of getting in his car and “commuting” between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

  Mac was an expert driver who was almost never pulled over. But he also knew ways to beat the system. He would keep gym clothes in his trunk. Before starting to drive, he would put the gym clothes on. Once he was pulled over by the C.H.P after a night of heavy drinking. Mac was a step ahead of the officer.

  “Where you comin’ from?” inquired the lawman.

  “24-Hour Fitness,” Mac answered. He was sweaty and red-faced - just like he would look after an hour on the Stairmaster.

  “Oh,” said the officer, observing that Mac was wearing shorts, T-shirt, white socks and athletic shoes. “You take care, man.”

  “Knuckleheads,” was Mac’s assessment of people who went into police work.

  Mac was not a details guy. He majored in business at USC, but he was on the six-year track to graduation. He finally finished up at SC. He went back home, where he did little more than hang out at his parents, drink with his pals at the Black Oak Saloon, and sleep in until one in the afternoon every day. His Marine Corps father was in a constant state of consternation.

  Months passed, and Mac never received his diploma in the mail. He called SC, figuring they had the wrong address. When he finally got somebody who had access to his records, he was told that he had not graduated.

  “There’s several classes you have to pass before we can award you a B.S.,” said an advisor. Mac was not heartbroken. Instead of tackling a real job, he could loaf off for another semester of college. Mac consulted his dog-eared USC Business School catalogue, figuring out what classes he needed, and enrolled in them. He commuted to tests, just as he always had, mindful not to miss “Tequila Night” every Wednesday at the Black Oak Saloon.

  When the semester was over, he again waited for the diploma that never came. He called the counselor, who went over his transcripts and informed him that he had still not met all the requirements for graduation. It turned out that Mac was using a 1977 business school catalogue. The requirements had changed since that time. He never would graduate.

  Mac was as sharp as a tack, though. He was one of the world’s best test takers. A night owl who never studied prior to midnight on the eve of test day, he would pull all-nighters and go right into the test, acing them every time. He took this approach to professional tests, passing the N.A.S.D. Series 7 stockbrokers’ license, the insurance exam, the real estate test, and half a dozen other tests. He probably could have passed the bar or become an intern if he fancied it.

  That was not the half of it. Mac took most of these tests for other people, which was a felony. He never thought twice about it. He showed whatever I.D. his friends gave him, forged their signatures, and took tests for them. 15 or 20 people found themselves licensed to sell stocks, insurance, real estate and other things on the open market, courtesy of Ken MacDonald.

  Stan, now a junior, wanted to re-focus himself after two years of drunkenness and skirt chasing. He wanted to get something out of his education, and to live up to his potential on the baseball field.

  “It’s time for that ancient lunatic who reigns in the trees of the night to get off his branch,” he said.

  Like his father, Stan found himself enjoying the diversity of
USC. His frat was mostly white, but Stan found fraternity life to be boring and unsatisfying. The school had always attracted an ethnic mix because of its location on the Pacific Rim. By Stan’s time, they had made an effort to highlight this part of life at the University. The old elitism was a passé concept.

  His pals were on the baseball team or in the Five-oh. Baseball had opened his eyes. Growing up in Palos Verdes Estates, the only black guy was Billy Boswell. Boswell’s race was not what obsessed Stan. It was his greatness on the field. Boswell overshadowed him every step of the way. In four years at Rolling Hills, Stan had one black teammate, and he was a marginal player. There had been a couple of blacks on the basketball team when he first came to school, but none by his junior and senior years. The football team had one black kid, who transferred in as a junior. There were some Orientals and a few kids of Middle Eastern descent, but by and large he had known only white suburbia.

  Now, he had minority teammates. He knew a lot of black athletes who played football, basketball and ran track at SC. Stan was grateful that sports had put him in a position to befriend people from different backgrounds. Like his father before him, Stan chose not to study at Doheny, but at the “ethnic” library, at Von Kleinschmidt Center. It was there that students from the Middle East, Asia and the African Continent surrounded him. Charles Mansour was a black man from a prominent family in the Sudan. He was studying engineering at SC, because his family ran an oil exploration firm in his native land.

  Stan liked Charles and invited him to the Five-oh. That was where Charles got into trouble. Charles ordered pitchers of beer and drank right out of them, without pouring it into a glass. He did not hold his alcohol well and quickly became surly. Stan would sit with him until he started to get nasty. Then he would leave Charles to himself. He would stew in the dark corner. The drunker he got, the madder he got at the ills he perceived in society.

  Mike Stowe was a 6-9 black basketball player at SC. Charles could not stand Stowe or the other black athletes at school. He could not understand why they got special treatment while he had to bust his tail. Charles had seen devastation in Africa; starvation, wars, riots, ethnic cleansing, famine, and all the other horrors of the Third World. The Communists had come and gone, to be replaced by the warlords. He knew how lucky he was to get an excellent education, and the opportunity to rise above those circumstances was not lost on him.

  These American blacks were an abomination to him. They were on scholarship to play sports, but ditched class and treated school like a joke. What a tragedy, to treat education in such a way! Furthermore, beautiful girls threw themselves at them. They were unsophisticated, illiterate baboons, as far as he was concerned. Yet he labored in obscurity while they were accorded status because they could run or shoot a ball through a hoop. The white boys fawned over them and catered to them.

  Does nobody see what I see? Charles asked himself.

  “These blacks in America are such a waste,” Charles told Stan. “If not for sports, they do not hold jobs. They treat their women like whores. Do they not know how few of them will play sports for money? Do they not see the value of education?”

  “Well,” said Stan, playing devil’s advocate, “what about slavery? Are they not owed something after what happened to their ancestors?”

  “Such foolishness,” said Charles. “How are they owed something for that which did not happen to them? It was not always Europeans who enslaved them. It was blacks in Africa. Believe me, I know this.”

  Stan realized that bringing Charles into the 502 Club was not such a great idea. He knew that the more he drank, the more likely he was to get into a confrontation. Mike Stowe exacerbated that confrontation.

  “Yo, homes,” Stowe called out to Charles.

  “Are you speaking to me?” asked Charles.

  “Who the fuck else am I speaking to, homey,” said Stowe. He looked at his pals, muttering, “Motherfucker.”

  “What did you say?” asked Charles.

  “Oh, no,” said Stan.

  “I said, ‘motherfucker,’ motherfucker,” said Stowe.

  “My mother is a woman of honor in my country,” said Charles.

  “Oh, is she a ‘woman of honor’ in Zoo-zoo land?” mocked Stowe. “Well, my mother is a woman of honor at a hunnerd `n’ first `n’ Wilmington.”

  Charles stared at Stowe. Stowe made a circular motion with his hands.

  “You are my asshole,” he said.

  Then Stowe made a long, distended motion with his hands.

  “You are my peee-nis,” he said to Charles.

  Charles stared at the laughing Stowe. His crew was laughing at Charles, as was Stowe’s girlfriend, a lovely black girl. Charles addressed the girl.

  “You are a whore,” he said to her. “A beautiful whore, but a whore, nevertheless.”

  Stowe then lunged at Charles, but Stan, who knew this was coming, managed to step in.

  “Hey, Mike,” said Stan, “he’s drunk. Let it go.”

  Stan then grabbed Charles and marched him towards the door.

  “That was fun, Charles,” he said, “but play time’s over for tonight.”

  “Keep your African friends outta here,” yelled Bernie as Stan was exiting with Charles. “Damn troublemakers.”

  Charles was never allowed in the 502 Club again.

  Rebecca would re-appear on occasion like a thief in the night, whenever she needed some tender lovemaking and a little respect. Stan was happy to provide that for her. She was hanging out with drug dealers, who used her for sex. She always made sure to get herself cleaned up whenever she saw Stan. She respected his athletic career and All-American persona. Rebecca never wanted Stan to see her when she was strung out. Stan knew what was going on, but his influence was limited.

  Her rich daddy saw to it that she had plenty of money to spend. He had to have known it was being spent on drugs and alcohol, but he preferred to live in denial. She got her money via a trust fund administered by a white shoe bank on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills.

  Stan drove Rebecca to the bank. Parking on Wilshire is expensive or sketchy, at best. Stan decided to stay in the car while Rebecca went in the bank. Sitting there in the hot sun, he decided to amuse himself with some musical accompaniment. He pulled out a cassette of The Doors' first album, and started playing "The End". Loud, with the windows wide open.

  Suddenly, a longhaired man with a shaggy moustache appeared, sticking his face in the car.

  "Are you looking for me?" said the man.

  Stan recognized him. He was Danny Sugarman, the one-time Doors' office helper, and later their manager after Morrison died. He had survived the drugs and craziness of the 1960s and '70s to write "No One Here gets Out Alive" and "Wonderland Avenue".

  "Uh, no," Stan manage to say.

  "Do you know who I am?" asked Sugarman.

  "Yeah, I do," said Stan.

  Sugarman, it turns out, had an appointment at an address on Wilshire, but he could not find it. He had heard "The End" and thought it was a siren song trying to draw him to it like a modern Ulysses.

  Stan was a junior in the Spring of 1985. Over at UCLA, Billy went ballistic. He was a consensus First Team All-American quarterback on UCLA's Rose Bowl-winning football team, and again The Sporting News, Baseball America and Collegiate Baseball named him as the National College Player of the Year in baseball. He won his second consecutive Golden Spikes award, and was generally accepted as the finest college athlete ever. He was favorably compared with multi-sport superstars like Jim Thorpe of Carlyle, Ernie Nevers of Stanford, Jackie Jensen of California, John Elway of Stanford, Bo Jackson of Auburn, and Deion Sanders of Florida State. There was no question that he was the best college baseball player of all time. The Bruins again won the national title in baseball.

  Stan was a First Team All-Pac-10 selection on the mound. He compiled a sterling 10-3 record with a 3.02 earned run average, but he could not stop the Bruins or Boswell. Two of his losses came at their hands.


  In the Fall of his junior year, Stan took a journalism class and noticed a tall, pretty, voluptuous blonde. She was attractive, but there seemed to be something a little different about her. She appeared to have a head on her shoulders. Shortly thereafter, he was hanging out with his pals at a USC football game at the Coliseum. The pretty SC cheerleaders were doing their thing. The tall blonde from his class caught Stan’s eye.

  She's a cheerleader, Stan noted to himself.

  After that, Stan saw her around, in class, on campus, and at the Five-oh. She was a sophomore, and dated a member of the football team. One night at the Five-oh, she was hanging out with one of her male pals. She was the kind of girl who made friends with guys because she did not trust other women.

  The other guy was a gay dance student. He slicked his hair with grease and had a 1950s-style ducktail in the back. He wore wire-rimmed glasses and “flood” blue jeans, and was the spitting image of rock icon Jerry Lee Lewis.

  “Yo, Jerry Lee,” Stan yelled at the guy.

  “Jerry Lee” earned extra money working as a grocery clerk at the nearby 32nd Street Market. Stan had seen him there, and always called him “Jerry Lee.”

  “Hey, asshole,” said the girl, “don’t you have anything better to do than hassle people?”

  “I can handle myself,” “Jerry Lee” told the girl.

  “Hey,” said Stan, “I’m not hassling anybody. I just think he looks like Jerry Lee Lewis.”

  Stan extended his hands to the guy.

  “I’m Stan Taylor,” he said.

  “Aaron Albee,” he said.

  “Good to meet you, Aaron,” said Stan. “I didn’t mean to hassle you, man. You’ve seen me at the Three-two Market. Why don’tcha introduce me to your friend?”

  “Karen,” he said, “this is Stan Taylor.”

  “I know who you are,” said Karen. “You're in my journalism class, and you're the best pitcher in the Pac-10 Conference."

  "Are you a baseball fan?" he asked her.

  "I love all sports," she said, "but football's my favorite."

  “I apologize if you think I was hassling your friend,” said Stan. “I was just havin’ a little fun.”

  “No problem,” she replied, smiling.

  Stan stayed away from the subject of her being a cheerleader or dating a football player. Her knowledge of sports was impressive, and not just for a girl. She was a football fanatic of unbelievable intensity. She described the intricacies of a "true red dog blitz."

  The rapport and attraction was instant. Her full name was Karen Morton. She was from Arcadia, and was an A student majoring in journalism. Stan had managed to get his major switched from communications to film. He never could have gotten into SC's film school originally, but by now he had taken many film classes, fulfilled all the requirements for the major, and had earned his way in. He discussed film with Karen, and was amazed at how knowledgeable she was.

  Rebecca had dropped out of school and again was out of sight. She had never really been his girlfriend. She had flitted in and out of his life, providing a night of wild sexual release, followed by weeks of frustration. Stan was beginning to think about his future, and what he wanted out of life. He was beginning to think he might actually graduate from college. He liked the study of film, but was intimidated by Hollywood. He liked to study movies in school, but the idea of competing as a screenwriter or director with all the other wanna-be’s seemed to be a long shot. His grades were improving. He was toning down his partying, and he had a good future in baseball. He was coming around to the idea of following in his father’s footsteps and attending law school once he graduated. He could do that in the off-seasons while pursuing a pro baseball career.

  A girl like Karen fit in with his plans. He could never bring somebody like Rebecca to the house. What kind of scene would that be? A party girl practically falling out of her dress! Probably drunk, or high! Karen was stable, safe and respectable.

  At first, Karen was going out with the football player and seeing Stan on the side. Stan pursued her. He showed interest in her, and respected her. He was smarter than most of the football players she knew at SC, and she liked that about him. She had dated several football players since high school, and always felt like an ornament with them. Karen was too smart to feel like an ornament. Stan was the first athlete who ever treated her like an equal. She fell for him.

  Karen was the first girl that Stan ever brought to see his parents. They loved her immediately, and were relieved to see that Stan had somebody. They had little clue what Stan's "love life" had been. They had heard snippets of information as a result of the John Bruk "kidnapping" incident, but Stan sugarcoated that period of his life. He had not dared tell them about Rebecca. Karen made Stan feel like he had arrived.

  The June, 1985 draft saw Billy Boswell again drafted number one in the entire nation, this time by the New York Yankees. George Steinbrenner went through unusual orchestrations to arrange for his team to get that pick. He gave up three All-Star caliber stars to the San Francisco Giants in a move that is relatively common in pro football, but rare in baseball. $3 million later, Boswell was a Yankee.

  For one week, while Billy was starring at Omaha, his agent hammered out the details of the agreement in personal negotiations with Steinbrenner in New York. On Sunday afternoon, he led UCLA to the National Championship. After celebrating with his team, Billy showered, packed his bags and flew to New York. The rest of his team flew back to Los Angeles. When Billy arrived at Yankee Stadium, he signed the contract. An enormous New York media throng attended the press conference that followed.

  Billy never played in the minor leagues. The next night, a Monday, Billy started in center field and batted in the clean-up slot for the Yankees against Oakland. A capacity crowd showed up to see his debut at Yankee Stadium. In the first inning, as if the baseball gods had ordained such a thing just for his personal destiny, the Yankees loaded the bases for Boswell’s first at-bat.

  Billy worked the count to 3-and-2. He sent the pay-off pitch deep into the right field seats for a grand slam home run that sent the Yankee fans into hysterics. New York fans have seen it all, and they are as cynical as they come. Billy Boswell was beyond even their jaded expectations. He had them falling all over themselves.

  Throughout June and July, Billy eclipsed all previous rookie performances. He was the greatest new sensation anybody had ever seen. He slammed an unbelievable 15 home runs and was hitting .404 at the All-Star break. Other players had come out of the June draft and straight to the Major Leagues. None had ever made the All-Star team, until Billy. None have done it since.

  Billy tailed off a little down the stretch, but he still finished with 20 home runs and a .333 average. He was named to The Sporting News American League All-Star Team and the Associated Press Major League All-Star Team. Billy won a Gold Glove and was named American League Rookie of the Year.

  Stan was drafted by the Oakland A's, but in a very disappointing position. He was sure that he would be accorded prospect's status and drafted in the first five rounds. Instead, he went in the 17th with Oakland. The scuttlebutt was that he had partied too much in college. Stan never really found out who told whom what, or what they knew. He was paranoid that his “kidnapping” incident had gotten out, although the papers had never printed anything. His “hooker in room” debacle had been publicized. Stan thought it was incongruous that he should be penalized for being a party kid. Yes, he had gotten wild, but he still thought of himself as the dedicated guy who practiced baseball with his father in Palos Verdes. He had made noticeable gains in the weight room. His low draft status, however, served as a wake-up call to him.

  Dan again negotiated, but Stan felt that he would give USC his senior year instead of turning pro. He again went to Alaska, where he was 12-1 with a 2.37 ERA and led the Goldpanners to the NBC title at Wichita. Stan’s strong Summer performance served notice that the Major League clubs had missed out by drafting him so low. Some scouts at Wichita expre
ssed to him that they were “dumbfounded” that he had not gone until the 17th round.

  “Where were you when it came to arguing on my behalf?” Stan told them. He was now up to 6-6, 235 pounds. He looked like a tanned Greek god. His stomach was ripped with six-pack abs. His arms were sinewy with veins popping against the skin. He shoulders were husky, and his legs spiked with bulk. He bench pressed “three wheels,” which is well over 300 pounds and considered the barometer of great strength. The day he weighed in at 235, he called Jesse Pentilla and thanked him for his prediction back when he had been 6-2, 135.

  In the late Summer of 1985, after returning from the NBC, Stan was staying at his folks' house when Brad Cooper returned from Europe. Brad had stayed alive in various Continental capitols by playing the guitar in train stations, doing some modeling, and a little acting in the English theatre scene in Paris. Something happened to him over there. He looked like a tanned demi-god. His features had formed into angular cheekbones, he had grown another inch or two, and he was now a very impressive sight.

  More importantly, he had grown as a man. Brad learned to speak fluent French, and read everything he could get his hands. He was the spiritual descendant of the Lost Generation that had inspired artists like him to move to Paris since the 1920s.

  At dinner, Brad wowed Shirley with his intellect and good looks. He demonstrated great political knowledge, too. Brad now understood world affairs with a global perspective. He got into a detailed discussion with Dan regarding the Cold War, America's objectives in Europe, and the changing face of U.S. politics, via the Reagan Revolution. Brad’s father was a Republican. Jeff and Darren were staunch conservatives. Brad, however, was beginning to lean toward the left. His Catholicism was replaced by a belief in God, but not in Christ. His European perspective had changed his view of a market-based society. He had the goods to back up his arguments and views.

  Dan sat there, talking with Brad while drinking red wine. Stan sat mute. He was completely awed by his friend. The intellectual divide between the two was enormous. The more impressive Brad sounded, the less Stan had to say.

  A couple of hours passed.

  "How come you're such a stupidkid?" Dan suddenly said to silent Stan. It was the same old Dan. Drunk, red-faced, and virulent. His point was to embarrass his son in front of his peer. He succeeded perfectly.

  "You don't know a Goddamn thing about what's happening in the world," Dan continued. "What the hell are you gonna do in the real world? You don't know you're ass from a hole in the ground. You haven’t the foggiest idea what's going on, you just play baseball and go along like some kind of asshole. You better shape up, mister. You can't compete for anything in this world."

  Stan just sat red-faced. Brad was embarrassed and felt for his friend, but could say nothing. The next day, Brad and Stan went down to the pier. The things Dan had said were the topic of discussion.

  "When did you become so worldly?" Stan asked Brad.

  Brad went on to tell Stan that he agreed with Dan.

  "You're intelligent and have potential," he said, "but the only thing you care about is baseball. Decisions are being made. Either you participate in the discussion and have some choice in the matter, or have your decisions made for you by somebody who knows more than you. Start off by reading the L.A. Times. On the second page they have a news summary. Just read that page and get a grasp on what's happening in the world."

  It was the start of a revolution for Stan. After that, he made a point of reading the entire newspaper, not just the sports section. He purposely read the front section first. He read the editorials, the business section, the lifestyles section, and the entertainment section. He started watching the news and reading Time magazine.

  Stan threw hard in baseball. His fastball was consistently clocking in at 90 MPH-plus. He had rebounded from his sophomore year, and while he was no teetotaler, he was in much better control of his life. He was making decent grades in school and making a name for himself at the film school. His newfound quest for knowledge helped his academic performance in school. Few athletes major in film at SC. The demands of writing scripts and producing student films often prohibit athletes because of the time-constraints. Stan had developed enough discipline to work it out, and his professors gave him some leeway.

  Dan again recommended that he sign, just as he had after his senior year at Rolling Hills. Dan again declined to turn pro. Not having signed with the A's, Stan entered his senior year at USC in the Fall of 1985. For the first time in his life, he was entering a new season in which Billy Boswell would not be his greatest rival. In his entire senior year, he never saw Rebecca, either. He settled down with Karen, and felt that he was in love with her. She was practical yet fun loving, and wild about sports.

  Stan's drinking curtailed tremendously, and he was on pace to graduate on time. He put together a fine season, winning 12 games, and was named Pac-10 Pitcher of the Year. The Trojans did not play well, however, and were also-rans.

  The smarter choices that Stan made at this point in his life could be summed up in an event that occurred near the end of his senior year. Many of Stan's teammates lived at a place called the Hoover House, near campus. This included pitchers Robby Rand and Brick Simms. The Hoover House was the scene of debauchery above and beyond the usual college order. The daughter of a prominent coach had gotten drunk there and had sex with numerous guys before passing out.

  His friends were starting to give him a hard time about not going out anymore, saying he was “pussy whipped.” With Karen at home in Arcadia, Stan and the boys went to the 502 Club. There, they met up with two girls who knew Robby, a legendary ladies man. The girls were beautiful and hot to trot. Robby's gal was older and more obviously sexual. Her younger friend looked like a Playboy centerfold. Everybody got drunk, and since there were about eight guys and two girls, group sex seemed a possibility, as it always was at the Hoover House.

  Everybody went back to the Hoover House. Robby and his gal went to his room. The guys waited a little while, and then came in to observe the girl blowing Robbie. Robby was famous for the size of his unit, and had come to be known as "Robbie Wad" after the famous porn character “Johnny Wad” Holmes. The guys were cheering Robby while the girl fellated him, and she just smiled as if she was in Heaven. One future Hall of Fame ball player who was in the room used the knob end of an aluminum baseball bat to gently probe the girl's ass while she blew Robby. When he came, everybody cheered.

  Now, it was on to Brick's room. Brick was operating in a more covert manner, with the lights low. The guys went to his window, which was at floor level, and were easily able to observe him having sex with the girl.

  Eventually, Brick achieved orgasm, the guys repaired to the front room, and Brick came out.

  "Well, I'm done," he said. "Whose next?

  It was not made clear whether the girl was requesting sex with other men. Bruno stepped forward without hesitation. He took his clothes off and entered the dark room, and with a muffled voice said, "Turn over." He proceeded to have anal sex with the girl, who moaned with pleasure. At this point, she thought she was getting a repeat performance from Brick. Therefore, she must have thought Brick to be quite the stud, especially considering that Bruno was known as The Girthmaster because of the size and width of his rod.

  Bruno gave the girl all she could handle, pulled out, and came on her back. He left the room, and now it was decided that Stan, "Horace" to his buddies, was next. The girl was a freak, as far as the guys were concerned. Many girls had been banged in this very apartment over the past couple of years. This was just another in the line of succession.

  Stan thought about Karen, but he still wanted to go in. He wondered if the girl still thought that she was only having sex with Brick. Surely she must know by now she was having a “train” pulled on her. He dressed down to his underwear, but in the end made the decision not to do it. He took some heat from his pals, but felt that if he had, he would have been found out and the girl might hav
e called the authorities.

  Earlier, hanging out with Bruk and Brady, he would have dove right in, consequences be damned. Some years later, Stan would read a legal case about a guy who had sex with a girl under the auspices of being somebody else, and got convicted of rape for his effort. This girl was beautiful, but not worth that kind of aggravation.

  The 1986 draft saw Stan go in the sixth round by the St. Louis Cardinals. He was still disappointed that he was not a higher selection. His draft status was a mystery to him. He had the kind of size and potential that should have made him a major prospect. He had pitched great ball against the best college and Summer competition for four years. He had cleaned up his act off the field and made himself into a legitimate student. But he quickly put those questions behind him. After eschewing professional ball twice, it was time to get out there and prove himself once and for all.

  Stan signed the contract for a $65,000 bonus. The night before he was to fly to Johnson City, Tennessee to report to the Cardinals’ Summer Class A team, he had dinner with his parents and Karen at a fancy steak house on the Redondo Beach Pier.

  It should have been the happiest day of his life, but Stan was totally stressed about playing pro ball. He had been waiting for this since he was a little kid and it was now or never. In the middle of dinner, Stan excused himself, walked out to the pier, bent over the railing, and threw up into the Pacific Ocean. That was not the half of it. This would prove to be a day of great magnitude in his life.

  That night, Stan took Karen to bed, and she started to cry.

  "What's wrong?" Stan asked.

  Karen would not say.

  "Come on," pleaded Stan. "Tell me, please."

  "Stan I'm pregnant," blurted Karen.

  A million thoughts raced through Stan's head.

  "I sure hope I'm the father," he said.

  "You are," she assured him. "There's no doubt about that. It was you and me at your room at school on graduation day."

  That had been the second Friday in May. It had been very hot. Stan had sweated it out in his cap 'n' gown, to get his diploma from the film school.

  "So let's get married," Stan said.

  Karen started to cry.

  "What, you don't wanna marry me?" Stan asked, smiling.

  "Stan, I'm a bitch who’s made everybody's life who’s ever been involved with me miserable," she told him.

  "Well, I don't see that," said Stan, and he really meant it. He could not understand what Karen was talking about. She was alluding to some truth in her life, something before Stan perhaps. But Stan was young, pliable and cocky enough to think that he was different. If she had indeed been a “bitch” with everybody else, he had changed that. At 22, people think like that.

  "Marry me," he pleaded again.

  "I'm not ready for kids," she said.

  "You're not saying what I think you're saying?" he asked.

  Karen started to cry even more.

  "I was pregnant my senior year of high school," she said. "But I aborted." She was crying steadily.

  “I was raped,” she said.

  “What?” said Stan, astonished.

  “It was a boy I knew in high school,” she went on. “We were at the fair. It just happened. We were messing around and it went too far. I wanted to say no, but I liked him and didn’t wanna make him mad at me, so I let him.”

  That doesn’t sound like rape, thought Stan, but he had more important issues to deal with.

  "That's not right," Stan said weakly, "but it wasn't my kid, and if I have anything to say about it, my kid's not gonna become an abortion."

  Stan had chosen Christianity a little over four years prior to this day. He had only gone to church about 15 times since then. He had eagerly participated in sexual activities worthy of Caligula's Rome. But he knew in his heart that abortion was the killing of an innocent, living baby. Since that baby was his, he felt the animal instinct to protect it. It was like the few times he had gotten his back up enough to throw a punch, like in junior high or in his freshman year with John Dinuba. He felt the courage now that he had felt when he had gotten in Rico's and Fingers' faces during Babe Ruth League.

  "It's your body," he said, "and the choice should be yours -.”

  "Oh, great," Karen said, as if she wanted nothing to do with making that kind of decision.

  "But I'll never support an abortion," he continued. "It may be your decision, but don’t expect my blessings if you abort. Not if I have anything to do with it. I'll raise it, I'll support it, but I won't kill my baby."

  So, that was it. Stan and Karen decided then and there to get married.