My Losing Season

by Pat Conroy

  “We don’t rack ass. We don’t buck for rank. And we’re not military dicks,” Hough said.

  “Wait a minute,” LaBianco said. “Are you boys bucking for rank?”

  Bob Patterson surprised me by saying, “Yes, sir. I’m bucking for rank.”

  “What about you, Conroy?” Keyser asked.

  “No, sir. I want to be like you guys, sir,” I said, sealing my identity in R Company for all time.

  “Yep, we got us some good slaves,” Jimbo Plunkett said. “One’s a dick. One’s a human being.”

  And, in time, good slaves did Bob Patterson and I become. First we had to learn how to sweep a floor that would satisfy the antiseptic fanaticism of a surly corporal, and clean a sink where bacteria feared to grow. We had to master the mystery of spit-shined shoes and polished brass. Bob and I learned the Citadel way of folding underwear and socks in clean white sheets of paper. We became the sworn enemies of lint and dust and disorder of all kinds. It took us a month to master the domestic arts of being a plebe, but by the end of the year, I could get a job as a manservant in a Henry James novel.

  The mess hall was central to the plebes’ worst nightmare during my time at The Citadel. It was at the dining table that cruelty found its proving ground among the cadre. The six weeks I spent with R Company at mess before the basketball season began were desperate. I learned many ways to break a man during my time as a plebe, but none were as effective as starvation. For thirty minutes the cadre could harass us up close as we sat braced and rigid on the outer six inches of our chairs. We learned to fill their water and milk glasses as soon as we sat down. They tested us on our proficiency at plebe knowledge. I still know all the company commanders from that year, and their names make up a fearful litany of Satan’s lieutenants that I bring as cargo with me.

  The Monday after Hell Week was the first time I caught up with my fellow freshmen basketball players. All six of them were in the same state of shock when I met them. We looked like survivors of a death march, and our glazed eyes gave the locker room a hushed, funereal aura. Coach Paul Brandenberg, the freshman coach, introduced me to my teammates.

  “Hey, Pat. We lost you in the crowd somehow. It’s taken a week of red tape to get you over to the gym. What happened to your train?”

  “It was five hours late, Coach,” I said.

  “How’d you do the first week?”

  “Never had so much fun, Coach,” I said, and heard Bill Taflinger laugh.

  “Told you he was funny,” Bill said, coming over to shake hands with me.

  Coach Brandenberg said, “This is Danny Mohr, Pat. One of the best players out of North Carolina last year. He’s from Wilmington, a southern boy like you.”

  “I used to live at Camp Lejeune and Cherry Point, Danny,” I said.

  “Another southern boy, Donnie Biggs of Macon,” Coach Brandenberg said.

  “I was born in Atlanta,” I said to the six-six forward who was built as well as any boy I’ve ever seen. Donnie was so depressed that he could barely look up to greet me.

  “You guys are the first three boys we’ve ever recruited from the South in this basketball program,” the coach said.

  “Lucky us, huh, Donnie?” I said to the big man from Macon.

  When we dressed and went out to the main court to shoot around, I noticed right away that I was the smallest man on the team by four inches. As I watched the five scholarship boys making jump shots from around the perimeter, I felt the first attack of panic set in. These guys were not just better basketball players than I was, I was not good enough to be a manager in their league. When we played a three-on-three half-court game later that afternoon, the difference became even more apparent to me. Jim Halpin, who I learned led the Catholic League of Philadelphia in scoring his senior year, was a six-foot-two-inch guard who covered me like a film of sweat on defense and had the quickest, most accurate jump shot I’d ever seen. Taflinger, the other guard, at six three kept posting me up down low, using his height and long arms to score at will.

  That Friday before practice I sought out Paul Brandenberg and told him, “Coach, I’m not good enough to play on this team.”

  “Who says so?”

  “I do, Coach. I’ve never seen guys this good. Taflinger scores on me every time he gets the ball. Halpin takes the ball away from me every time I dribble.”

  “No one’s ever taught you how to play defense, Pat,” he said. “We’ll teach you that. That move Halpin has—he flicks the ball away by going behind you when you dribble. That’s a big-city move. You only see it in the Northeast. Especially in Philly. We’re going to have to break Jim of that habit. The refs down here have never seen it. They’ll call a foul on him every time.”

  “Jimmy hasn’t fouled me yet,” I said. “I can’t figure out what he’s doing. I dribble by him, he ducks behind me and flicks the ball out of bounds.”

  “Try this,” Coach Brandenberg said. “The second you go by Halpin, do a crossover dribble. Just change hands.”

  That afternoon with Jim Halpin guarding me again, I took my coach’s advice and switched hands on the dribble the instant I flashed by him. He kept slapping the hand where the ball had been and I was sailing through the lane for a layup. In the far corner of the gym I watched Coach Brandenberg observing the game in secret, since it was against NCAA rules for coaches to oversee practices until October 15. Smoking a cigarette, he pointed at me and nodded his head in approval. Good coaching is good teaching and nothing else. I saw him walk behind the bleachers to his office.

  That Sunday I went over to Mark Clark Hall to place a collect call to my family in Omaha. I flooded with emotion when I heard the phone ring in another strange house I barely knew. Though I’d tried to hide my disappointment, it had hurt my feelings that I was the only freshman I saw on the day the plebes reported who arrived without his parents. I heard the operator say, “Collect call from a Mr. Pat Conroy. Will you accept charges?”

  I exploded with rage when my mother said, “No. Sorry, operator, but we don’t know any Pat Conroy.”

  Slamming the phone down, I immediately made another collect call and when the operator spoke I said, “Accept the damn phone call, Mom.”

  With great reluctance she did. “Don’t make this a habit, young man. You know this family isn’t made of money. How’s your first couple of weeks in college going? You having a ball?”

  I began weeping and couldn’t stop. I’d suffered a mild breakdown of spirit and character as I lost a grip on all the words I’d planned to say to my mother. For thirty seconds I sobbed until I could gain control. “Mom, you sent me to a torture chamber,” I gasped out finally.

  “Well, it’ll be good for you. It’ll make a man out of you.”

  “It’ll make a man like Dad out of me,” I snapped back.

  “Just how bad is it?” Mom asked. “Give me an example.”

  “It’s worse than Dad—that’s how bad it is. I’d much rather be living with Dad than going to this school.”

  After a long pause, my mother said, “Oh, my God.”

  Then my father took the phone, and I heard his despised, mocking voice. “It sounds like my little baby boy’s having some boo-hoo time with Mommy. If baby boy wants to do some whining he can talk to Daddy-poo.”

  “I don’t like The Citadel, Dad,” I said, controlling the quaver in my voice. “I’m thinking about coming home.”

  I heard my father’s laughter, then the hardening of his voice as he asked, “Where’s home, son? You no longer have a home.” He hung up before I could talk to my brothers or sisters.

  IN COLONEL JOHN DOYLE’S ENGLISH CLASS, I was one of forty plebes who sat in exhaustion as he told us what he expected of us in English 101. Colonel Doyle was fastidious and cultivated. He twinkled when he spoke to us in an elegant accent from the midlands of Virginia. He passed out a piece of paper and asked us to list every novel we’d read in high school. Taking the assignment seriously, I was listing my fortieth novel when I became aware of a stran
ge murmuring. I looked up to see my classmates staring at me with hostility. For ten minutes, I’d been the only cadet in the class still adding to his list, and they didn’t appreciate my show-offy gesture at all. I put my pencil down quickly, and Colonel Doyle asked that we pass up the papers.

  At the next class Colonel Doyle asked us to write an essay on any topic to give him some idea about our skills in the use of the English language. “Take your time. Write carefully about a subject that has meaning for you.”

  Before I began, I studied Colonel Doyle’s face, which registered a kindly sensibility as opposed to the cult of masculinity I was facing each day in the barracks. His voice sounded like silk polishing ivory as he warned us to watch for the dangle of participles and the gentlemanly agreement of verbs. He had a face and a manner I trusted, and I began to write. Colonel John Doyle never forgot the inflammatory essay I wrote for him in that heat-dazed English class in 1963.

  I described every single thing I could remember about Hell Week, leaving nothing out. I gave Colonel Doyle a cook’s tour of The Citadel seen through a knob’s eyes when the details were still fresh and pulsing. Taking him through sweat parties in the shower rooms, I told him of doing so many pushups I couldn’t even reach up to remove a field cap from my head. I wrote of being marched in a platoon of knobs down to the marsh’s edge where the gnats and mosquitoes feasted on us, and we weren’t allowed to move a muscle to drive them away. I bore witness to the starvation that took place every day at mess and the indefensible cruelty the cadre displayed to ugly boys or pimpled ones or the skinny and fat boys whose faces burned with shame at the ferocity of the abuse. The barracks were a place where young boys’ souls went to die, and I questioned how a man of his disposition and kindness could take such an active part in such inhumanity. At the end of my essay I had an anonymous plebe walk out onto the middle of the quad at 0300 hours and excrete solemnly in the moonlight air as a revolutionary act to express his utter contempt for The Citadel’s out-of-control plebe system. I signed my name with a flourish, and after the papers were handed forward I considered the possibility that I’d just performed a reckless, even suicidal act. My college career hung in the balance of my instincts concerning John Doyle’s character.

  At the beginning of the next class, he handed out the marked and corrected essays, and the room filled with the murmurous discontent of plebes. Doyle was notorious for his rigorous standards and tough grading, and he had flunked four-fifths of the class for their initial performance on the art of the essay. To my infinite relief, he had awarded me an A, but made an appointment for me in his office at 1400 hours the next Friday. “You seem to be having some problems adjusting to the plebe system, Mr. Conroy,” he wrote with an economy of both phrasing and emotion that would become familiar to me.

  On Friday afternoon, I sat beside Colonel Doyle’s desk as he studied the list of the novels I’d itemized for him at the beginning of his class.

  “You are widely read, Mr. Conroy,” he said.

  “My mother’s read everything,” I said. “She passed that on to my sister and me.”

  “You listed more novels than all the rest of your class. Are you unhappy here?”

  “I hate this place,” I said.

  “This essay you wrote . . . you were testing me, weren’t you, Mr. Conroy?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean, sir.”

  “You knew I could have you thrown out of college if I turned this paper over to the commandant,” Colonel Doyle said.

  “Yes, sir, I think I knew that.”

  “I gave you an A instead,” he said. “I hope I passed your test.”

  “With flying colors, sir,” I said.

  “I’m sorry you’re having such a difficult time at The Citadel,” he said. “But I’d like you to know the young men who graduate from this college are the finest men I’ve ever met. A Citadel man is quite the work of art. Your time will be well spent here.”

  “If I stay that long, sir.”

  “You’ll stay,” he said.

  “How do you know, sir?”

  “Your essay,” Colonel Doyle said. “The plebe system can’t touch the spirit of that boy.”

  OUR COACHES HADN’T THE FOGGIEST NOTIONS of what we were going through in the barracks when we left them at the Armory each night. Nor could they have done a single thing about it had they known. My teammates were as tough and strong as any boys in America yet every one of them had trouble surviving the fury of that system. It was not the physical rigor that came near to breaking us, it was the psychological harassment that was a part of those murderous days under the Charleston sun. I stayed at the point of mental breakdown for the entire nine months. I found I was an oversensitive, touchy boy trapped in a milieu where sensitivity won no merit badges and touchiness itself was a capital crime. Very early, I learned that the cadre admired a good attitude, so I tried to bring a boundless enthusiasm to whatever indignity they required. When my first sergeant asked me to do fifty pushups, I dropped to the ground and began pumping them out as though he had flung me a fistful of hundred-dollar bills. It was the boys who flashed anger or irritation that attracted the malignant attention of the upperclassmen hungry for rank. “Racking ass” was an art form among the cadre, and the best among them could break a weak boy in an hour or less. The cadre tried to dismantle me and succeeded every night, but I didn’t reveal that coming-apart to them. I disguised myself as a tough guy, a jock, and time seemed to crawl on its hands and knees. I prayed that the year pass quickly and it slowed to a snail’s pace. I begged my mother to let me leave. I planned a hundred versions of my escape. In darkness I told Bob Patterson that the end was nearing for me and that he needed to think about getting another roommate.

  “We’re not like that, Conroy,” my quiet roommate would say.

  “Like what, Patter-knob,” I said, using the nickname the seniors next door had given him.

  “We’re not quitters. Just the way we were raised.”

  “I want to be a quitter,” I said.

  “Then quit,” Bob said. “You talk about it every night.”

  “You know what would really help me get through this year?”

  “What?”

  “I need you to develop a much better personality. You’re a quiet guy, Bob, and I hate quiet guys. I like guys with fabulous personalities, chatterboxes, guys with diarrhea of the mouth. Open up to me. Tell great jokes.”

  “Fuck you, Conroy. Go to sleep,” Patter-knob would say, half asleep. His solidness got me through that year, the good-natured competence he brought to the smallest tasks as well as his refusal to take cruelty seriously.

  My only glimpse of normal life in the barracks came each morning when I cleaned the room of my four senior privates next door. I made their beds, swept their floors, folded their laundry, straightened their personal items in the four presses, cleaned their sink, and took out their trash. I became efficient and grew to enjoy the easy camaraderie of the four privates who seemed uncorrupted by the lust for rank displayed by most of the cadre.

  My freshman basketball team was a superb collection of athletes and we played superbly together. We lost a single game to Clemson that we should’ve won running away, but we ran most of the other teams out of the gym. Don Biggs was a force of nature under the boards; he was aggressive and well-coached and I loved the way he and Mohr always looked for the cutoff man on the wing when they pulled a rebound off the boards. Craig Fisher and Taflinger were terrific forwards and Jim Halpin was the best shooting guard I’d ever seen. Our team averaged over ninety points a game and developed such a good reputation in the Corps that we started to draw crowds for the freshman games, a rarity.

  Coach Brandenberg was laconic and soft-spoken, and devotion to him came easily. His joy in the company of boys spilled out of him, and we would’ve torn the gym down and salted the earth for him had he ordered us to do so. We hungered for his praise, which he was generous with. We ran the floor for him as though our uniforms were on fire. We emb
arrassed teams because we wanted our coach to look so marvelously gifted. We fast-broke teams from one end of South Carolina to another, making our college proud in the process.

  But the plebe system reached hard into the ranks of my freshman team. When Don Biggs scored twenty-five points against Clemson, he was met by a half-dozen of his cadre when he returned to the barracks. They gave him his own special sweat party so he wouldn’t be in any danger of getting a swelled head. It happened to Taflinger and Fisher after the Davidson game, and Halpin and Mohr after the Furman game. Halpin had scored thirty-two points against Furman and I’d never seen a human being bring that hot a hand to a basketball court. I spent the night feeding Halpin as we ran the pick-and-roll. Coming off me in a flash, Halpin’d be up in the air with a snakelike quickness impossible to defend against, making sixteen out of eighteen jump shots. A Company gave Halpin his own individualized sweat party when he returned to the barracks. The cadre made sure they sullied a freshman athlete’s night when he brought glory to the playing fields of The Citadel.

  Because I was the only basketball player in Romeo Company, I had a contingent waiting for me after every game that year. They’d halt me under the stairwell and make me run the stairs or do pushups until I dropped. I had scored twenty-four points against the Davidson freshmen, and it enraged the cadre that my name was mentioned in the morning paper.

  “You missed three sweat parties, douche bag,” my squad sergeant said. “Hit it for fifty, dumbhead.”

  “You feel bad about shitting on your classmates, abortion?” someone shouted above me as I pumped out my pushups.

  “Sir yes sir!” I shouted.

  “They had PT, a parade, SMI, and you were out gallivanting about with the other jocks eating ice-cream sundaes. Isn’t that right, Conroy? Pop off.”

  “Sir no sir,” I said, rising to my feet and bracing in front of them for the inevitable, “Give me another fifty, Conroy.”

  “You think you’re better than your classmates, don’t you, wad-waste? Pop off.”

  “Sir no sir.”