Against All Odds

by Scott Brown

  Larry, my mom, Leeann, and I used to go up to Salem, New Hampshire, to the track in Rockingham Park and watch the Thoroughbred races from the sprawling, raised grandstand above the dirt. Larry liked to go when it was sunny, when you could feel the heat from the sky sinking deep into your bones. I was Larry’s runner, from our seats to the betting window. He taught me how to read the race cards, which horses to bet on, and which to avoid. My job was to sprint with the card to the window, stand in line during the countdown of seconds to the starting pistol, and buy the tickets before the gates clanged open. When Larry won his bets, he would send me back to the windows to collect his winnings, and I got to keep 10 percent. He was a good bettor, a strategic one, careful and meticulous with his money, and there were a few afternoons when I’d walk away with $100 in my pocket, while Larry counted out $900 or $1,000. To this day, I can read between the lines on a race card because of him.

  Larry hired me and sometimes a couple of my friends to clear out his lot. I cut brush and carried it to the mulcher and cleared away rocks that were sticking out of the ground. I was strong and not afraid of working up a good sweat, of banging away with a shovel or a pickax. One summer when my mom was on welfare, I was eligible for the U.S. government’s Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) program, which provided jobs for low-income students. I did rugged work outside, painting fire hydrants and town benches, among other things. Another summer, the Wakefield Municipal Gas and Light Department hired me as a ditchdigger, burrowing into the ground so the department could lay cable or bury lines. At the June Circle lot, I hauled rocks and brush and cleared off the ledge so that workers could blast it big and wide enough to dig a cellar hole and lay the foundation. It took about a year to build the house. It was reddish brown brick on the bottom, with a brown-painted clapboard second floor. In the basement, Larry built a wet bar from one of the trees on the lot that had been cut down. I helped him sand it and stain it. And over the garage, he put in an in-law apartment for his mom.

  Larry had time to build a house, coach baseball, and go to the track because he did not have to work. He had been injured in an industrial explosion. The skin on his face and much of his upper body had been burned by heat and flame and had healed into scars. But what had borne the brunt of the blast’s force were his hands. There, the skin was a knotted mess of scars. The tips of his fingers, down to his knuckles, were gone, amputated in a single boom. When he opened his hands, there was nothing there but palms and stubs. After the accident, he received a big cash settlement, enough so that he did not have to work again. But inside, he was angry. And as each year passed, the anger festered. He was a solidly built man with a thick Boston accent; he dropped his r’s and hardened his a’s. He compensated for his physical flaws by being charming and witty, but that was largely for public consumption. In private, he was a different man.

  Not long after Larry moved into his new house, he married my mom. They had, I think, become reacquainted at a local baseball game, perhaps even one where I or one of my friends was playing. They had known each other in high school, my mother the pretty cheerleader and Larry the tough kid, in your face and a bit of a bruiser, skating at the edge of trouble even then.

  He married her and she married him even after Leeann and I had heard and seen them in the parking lot of our latest apartment, a cluster of squat garden apartments closer in to downtown. It was after a bitter cold snow; the plows had come through the parking lot, scraping and pushing the fallen flakes into high, slick mounds. We heard them from inside, upstairs, through the closed windows. They were screaming at each other, and then Larry began to hit my mom, beating her with his stub-fingered hands right up against a car in the parking lot. Leeann and I ran to them, shouting and screaming, adding our voices to the whacks and thuds and to the rising din. I pulled them apart. Leeann was crying. My mother was crying, and Larry was seething. But the next day, he apologized. He showed up on our doorstep with a fuzzy kitten and an armload of presents, charming and sweet-talking my mother, and within a couple of months, she was Judy McShane.

  From New Hampshire, Gram and Gramps asked her, “Are you sure?” before the wedding, but beyond that, they did not interfere, and so she made her choice again. We packed up and moved to June Circle, with its faux Colonial plaster walls and exposed beams and wallpapered bedrooms, a place more horrible than the house of The Exorcist, which I watched on the towering screen at the local drive-in.

  In the beginning, the fighting was just between Larry and my mom. I stayed out of the way. To me, battling was what married people did; fighting came with the new house and the wedding ring. But Larry also drank and my mom periodically drank. That changed everything. Sometime after those first few months, their fights turned vicious. And alcohol lubricated nearly every one.

  Because he didn’t have a job, Larry was around the house much of the time. He liked puttering around and doing yard work, and he liked coaching baseball. He taught many of my friends, including my buddy Mike Quinn and also Bobby Moore, the intricacies of the game in the big diamond across from the high school gym and the running track. But there was always something sharp-edged about him, something coarse and rude. His moods and his emotions could shift without warning. I got to be as adept at reading Larry as a farmer is at reading the weather, season after season, scanning the horizon for the first signs of whatever new front is coming. I would come through the door and ask him, “Hey, how ya doing? What are you up to?” and I could tell just by looking, by the tilt of his head, just what kind of an evening was waiting. Sometimes he could be pleasant, but then the simplest question would be met by “Why the fuck do you care? I’m doing whatever I’m doing.” I would say, “Oh, OK,” and then retreat to my room or some other part of the house or even head back out to a basketball court or to a friend’s. If I got as close as three or four feet, I could smell the alcohol, the bitter, wafting scent of scotch or beer puffing out in small clouds with his breath. And he would look straight at me, with a gleam in his eye, as if to say, “Let’s play. Here we go.” His jaw would clench, the scars drawing tight against his skin, and he would begin to light into me.

  Living in that brown-and-red Colonial house was like walking on eggshells all the time. I couldn’t turn the stereo up, couldn’t come home late, couldn’t eat certain things. Each week, it seemed there was some new “Larry rule,” something else that I couldn’t do. It was a combination of fear and intimidation, the way sometimes he would sit in his home office, counting his bonds. He would take out the papers and say, “This one’s worth $50,000, this one is worth $100,000,” trying to impress me and knowing that most weeks, I barely had $10 to my name. I was babysitting for Coach Lane and others, knocking on doors to mow lawns, anything to make some extra cash, while he was at home, counting his stacks of bonds.

  He chipped away slowly, layer upon layer, until we were all left terrified in his home, in the house whose land I had helped clear, whose walls I had helped to paint, whose wet bar I had helped carry in with my own hands. It was Dan Sullivan again, but it was Dan Sullivan night after night, Dan Sullivan able to inflict the most searing kind of pain. Larry wasn’t just a brawler, blindly lashing out, flailing away, lucky to hit something; he was a planner, a street fighter. He knew the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of his opponents as well as he knew the horses on the race card. He studied and he read them.

  It was at night mostly when the confrontations came. I would be in my room when I would hear the first sounds. A door would slam; there would be banging, pounding, and yelling. Then the screaming and the crashing. It was always in the middle of the hallway, upstairs, second floor, right in front of the brown tile bathroom. And he would be going after my mom. She would lock herself behind a door, and I would come charging out of my room, maybe twenty feet away. And Larry would be waiting. He was five foot ten, but he was strong, with a thick neck and muscled torso. He seemed to delight in taking me on. We would grapple, wrestle, bang against each othe
r, throw each other up against the wall, slam a head, a shoulder, an elbow to see who would wince first from the pain. And then he would uncoil his most lethal weapon, his hands.

  He would jab at my eyes, my face, my neck, my stomach, my ribs, ramming me with those spare little points, the sawed-off stumps of his fingers that were nothing more than skin-covered bone. He never had to make a fist; the remains of his fingers might have had almost no sensation, but they were brutal in their efficiency, in their ability to maim and bruise deep beneath the surface of the skin.

  Sometimes he was in the hallway, but other times he had wedged his way into the bathroom with my mom. The door would be locked, and I’d be banging, daring him to come out, anything to get him away from her and to take me on. Suddenly, the door would swing open, and he would be right in my face, now daring me, arms on me, grabbing me by the throat, pushing and pounding. And as he did it, he’d say, “You’ll still have to go to sleep tonight. When this is over, you’ll have to go to sleep. And when you’re asleep, I’ll take you out. That’s when I’ll come in.”

  In that house, amid my poster-covered walls, I became a chronically light sleeper, listening for the first telltale bang or slam, listening for the click of the doorknob or Larry’s feet. I started sleeping with my door locked and a heavy wooden baseball bat tucked away in my room, for protection. And I slept with my basketball.

  My mother, when we fought when I was younger, had repeatedly threatened to break my sports trophies. She knew the quickest way to get me to back down was to head for the hard-won basketball, baseball, and track awards that I kept in an ever-expanding display in my room. Larry threatened to break something else: my hands.

  He told me he would break my hands so that I couldn’t shoot, so that my basketball career would be ruined. He could do it too, with a knife, a bat, a metal shovel from the garage, or just the full force of his body against my own. That was the threat he held over me, all those years, the threat of hurting my hands. Because I knew that if I couldn’t play basketball, I would never, ever get out of there. My ability to shoot was my only hope, my only plan of salvation.

  By high school, I realized that I was good enough to get a scholarship, and a scholarship would take me away to college. Without a scholarship, without that money, I would have no chance to go on to anything. And I knew too that I had to get out. Every time Larry fought with my mother—every time he backed her into a room, and I had to come to the rescue, with Leeann standing in the hall in her little nightgown, screaming and crying, and my mother holding her back, away from the two males locked in mortal combat outside that bathroom—every time, I was afraid that as I got bigger, as I got stronger and he got slightly older, as I got quicker, during the next fight he might employ his street smarts and find something else that could be used as a weapon. Or that I might lose all control and really hurt him, or worse. When we fought, I held back. We would never fight to anything other than a draw.

  Larry liked to taunt me when we fought, “Come on, come on, hit me, you chickenshit kid. I know the cops. They are friends of mine. What do you think the headline will read? ‘High School Basketball Star Arrested for Hitting Stepfather’? The cops are friends of mine.” And I thought he was telling the truth. I didn’t realize that he didn’t know many cops, or that the ones he did know hated him. I was certain that if I ever really hurt him, I would go to jail, and everything that I had worked for would be ruined. That was always in the back of my mind, and it scared me too, every bit as much as his vow to break my hands.

  The worst of it was, when it was over, when the alcohol or the hangover had worn off and life had resumed at June Circle, oftentimes my mother would pretend that nothing had happened. She’d ignore it, the way she ignored the marks on her skin or on mine. Sometimes, she’d say, “I’m sorry,” or, “We shouldn’t have to go through this,” or, “I’ll take care of it.” At times, I almost believed her, but then nothing would change. Larry could make all the promises he wanted, but not one of them mattered after he had a few belts of scotch or a vodka tonic in his hands. You could smell the fear in our house. We never quite knew when Larry would blow, and we were consumed with the waiting.

  I understand now why my mother stayed. I understand that she was a woman who had scraped by on and off welfare, in tough, low-paying jobs. I know that she thought she needed the security and stability of a man, that she had no real profession, no true identity of her own, that nearly all her friends were married and mostly happy and she wanted to be like them. I understand every rationalization, all the bargains she made with herself, the excuses, the compromises. And everyone else looked the other way. My dad was in Western Massachusetts. I rarely saw him. My grandparents were in New Hampshire, growing old. I wasn’t going to call them. People knew that Larry was a jerk, that he went around bad-mouthing me. My teammates and my coaches saw me arrive wired at practices or at games after our confrontations. They knew small bits of what was happening from what I said to them. Larry liked to go after me around game time or track and field time. He liked to rattle me before a meet, a practice, a date, or a game. He knew my schedule, and he planned his battles. But no one intervened. Even Larry’s mother, who lived with us in the apartment over the garage and heard everything, ventured out only once or twice to implore him and my mother to calm down. Later, when the police came, all that happened was that both sides were encouraged to cool off, as if that would be the end. And my mother and Larry would take a temporary breather, while I waited for it to start up again.

  I took it out on the court. Every bit of anger, I unleashed on the varnished floors. I ran faster, I worked harder, I rebounded better. I’d be more aggressive on defense. The court and one inflatable ball were going to take me out of here. That was my promise to myself, day after day. Some summers I played as many as 180 games, 3 to 4 games a day, five to seven days a week, 17 to 28 games a week for the entire summer. Plus the drills. I scraped together the cash for mini camps too—camps like Dave Cowens, John Havlicek, Nelson/Sanders, Calvin Murphy, and New England Basketball, often going with my teammates. These were the places where the best players in New England came together each summer. There was nothing I didn’t do or wouldn’t do to work on my game.

  Coach Lane saw it. He’d say, “Whatever you got—Brownie, whatever you’re thinking, you just keep thinking that. You just keep working. Love it.” And he’d ask, “Why doesn’t everybody be like Brown over there? Hustling, diving, scrapping?” But those kids didn’t have what I did. They didn’t have Dan Sullivan or even a bloody playground fight with the Fotinos to prepare them for the battles in Larry’s house. They didn’t have the accumulated weight of dozens of junior high games when I would be scanning the stands for my dad’s face, wondering if he was actually coming. When I thought he might show up, I never had my best game because I was so worried about whether he would actually be there. And the couple of times he did come, I overplayed trying to impress him and I’d get out of my groove. But gradually, I taught myself to tune it out, to ignore everything.

  And these other kids on the team weren’t breaking into school just to shoot for a few hours in the gym.

  For years, from junior high on, when there were snow days, I’d hitchhike or walk a mile and a half to the high school or one of the other schools and walk around the school building, trying each window, pushing against the rims until I found a loose one, a place where someone had forgotten to twist the lock. I’d pry the window open, shimmy in over the sill, and head for the gym. There, it was warm and I could shoot for hours in the quiet of the room. I’d practice my whole routine of drills, foul shots, getting the ball with the basket behind me, then fake right, shoot left, and put it in the basket off the backboard. I taught myself to score from the corners, even how to shoot when I dropped to my knees. Eventually, after one of the coaches found me, he gave me a key, so that I could get in through the regular school doors. “Just lock up when you leave,” he said.

 
Before each game, I had a ritual. I would listen to music full blast, David Bowie, Queen, and Aerosmith. Bowie and Aerosmith were my favorites before games. I’d always wear a certain kind of clothes, certain socks, certain sneakers, until I had a bad game and convinced myself that they didn’t work and that I needed different ones. On my feet, I wore red Converse high-tops. Everyone else wore white sneakers, but I wore red, and I wore them so hard and so long that they had holes all the way down to the rubber. To keep them going, I’d put pads inside and tape them up with bands of sticky white athletic tape or gray duct tape. And in the gym, before every game, I’d stand in a corner and warm up with the ball. I’d revolve it around my body, behind my back, through my legs, passing it from right to left, left to right, until it was a blur in my hands. I’d dribble it around and under, rise up to shoot, and pass it from hand to hand. I wanted to feel the ball until it was almost an organic part of my body, until every move I made could be done with a basketball in my hands. I’d visualize myself at the basket, where I’d stand, the precise moment when I’d pull my wrist back and let it flex forward with just the right amount of spring. I’d go over the scouting report one more time. I would be thinking: Who do I have to guard? Is he lefty? Is he righty? How does he play? What does he do? I stood in that corner and I thought a couple of moves ahead.

  My coaches taught me to do that, and any team that played us knew that they were in for a real game. We were a very physical team; we excelled at the pick-and-roll, blocking the other team’s guard and then breaking away to pivot toward the basket so that our players had a clear shot. We were ferocious on defense. The moment the ball went up, we were trained to immediately find our man on the opposing team and box him out. We ran the traps and we ran our plays, but no matter how well prepared we were, there was always a jolt of anxiety running around the gym before each and every game. We were always wondering: How could we beat this team? I thrived on that, on the burst of adrenaline.