Jim Gavin: Middle Men: Stories

After practice Tully asked why I had transferred. Anticipating this question, I had prepared a lie. “I got in a fight with a coach,” I said.

“Did he try and rape you or something?”

“No.”

“So the sex was consensual?”

“Don’t listen to him,” said Overton, laughing and pushing Tully out of the way.

Weaver asked about some of Trinity’s players, guys with big local reps who were going to Pac-10 schools. I lied again, saying that before I left, I was also getting recruited.

“Serious?” said Weaver.

“Nobody good,” I said, with preening modesty. “Fresno State. UC Santa Barbara. Places like that.”

“I’m going to Cypress Junior College,” said Tully. “My stepmom went there, so I’m a legacy.”

I quickly changed my shirt, hoping no one would notice my weird concave chest.

“What’s wrong with your chest?” said Tully.

“Nothing,” I said. “It’s just like that.”

Everyone was staring. Pham switched from Rec Specs to glasses.

“My cousin’s got the same thing,” said Weaver. “It’s all pushed in.”

“It looks like somebody dropped a bowling ball on your chest,” said Tully.

More than humiliation, I felt stunned by the cold accuracy of his description. That’s exactly what my chest looked like.

My mom was waiting for me in the gym parking lot. She worked the perfume counter at Montgomery Ward and she was still in her nice clothes. My three little brothers were in the back of the minivan. They spent their lives getting dragged to all my practices and games. My mom turned on KOST-FM and we all sat in silence, listening to Barry Manilow. Just before the Los Coyotes Diagonal, I heard thumping bass and saw Tully cruising alongside us in a burgundy Chevette. Overton was slumped in the passenger seat, with his leg out the window resting on the side mirror. They were both drinking forties. At a light they pulled up alongside us and put down their bottles. My mom turned and noticed them.

“Those guys are on your team,” she said.

“I know.”

“Well, say hi!”

I stared straight ahead.

“What’s the matter with you?” She started waving and yelling out the window, as if her life depended on this minor social occasion. “Hey! I’m Pat’s mom!”

“Hello, Mrs. Higginbottom!” said Tully.

“Linehan!” she said. “We’re the Linehans!”

“I’ll see you at the regatta, Mrs. Higginbottom!”

My mom looked at me. “What the hell is he talking about?”

The light changed and Tully accelerated past us. Before getting home, we stopped for gas. My mom believed that gas was somehow cheaper five dollars at a time, which meant we were always stopping for gas. I pumped while she stood next to me, smoking a Winston Gold and squinting into the four o’clock haze. She was still baffled by the Mrs. Higginbottom business.

“Was that little shit making fun of me?”

• • •

We lived in a leafy neighborhood near the Long Beach Airport. When we got home, my dad was up on a ladder in the driveway, putting a new net on the basket. He used to be an electrician, but ten years ago he started teaching at a vocational school. At first it was for extra money, but after a string of knee and back surgeries, most of them the result of his continued participation in a men’s basketball league, he happily started teaching full-time. He worked with apprentice electricians, helping them get ready for their journeyman exams. Since the school closed in January, he had been looking for contract work, but new construction had slowed down and he was having a hard time “getting back in the game.” My mom didn’t think he was looking hard enough. They had frequent arguments on this point. As we came up the driveway, he climbed down the ladder on his bad knees, wincing in pain, to make my mom feel bad for being such a tyrant. She walked past him without saying a word.

“Good practice?” he said.

I nodded. We had a real father-son thing going. Before dinner, I worked on my ball-handling. On the back patio I had set up an old full-length mirror and I spent an hour in front of it, trying to shake my reflection. My mom called me inside and we ate Costco lasagna, a bottomless pit of goo that had lasted for three days. After dinner, my dad came outside with a beer and watched me shoot my requisite two hundred jumpers. Twenty years ago he had been a second-team all-league selection at Mayfair High School. Now, he finished his beer, dropped the can on the lawn, and signaled for the ball. After missing his bank shot, he picked up the empty can and walked back inside. My little brothers had to rebound for me — it was on their chore wheel. Everything in the Linehan household revolved around the development of my midrange game. Even after my exile from Trinity, we were all operating under the assumption that I would eventually fill out and earn a scholarship somewhere. My mom kept assuring me that I was a “late bloomer.” When I finished my drills, I granted my brothers use of the ball and went inside to watch tape. In 1986, I recorded the Big East Tournament final between St. John’s and Syracuse, and since then I had watched it approximately seven million times, studying Pearl Washington’s exquisite crossover.

After everyone went to bed, I put on another tape, an illicit Cinemax movie I managed to record just before the cable company cut off our service. The story dealt with the tribulations of an heiress. Most of her personal conflicts were resolved in poorly lit drawing rooms, among hirsute Europeans. The nonpenetrative frolicking didn’t serve as masturbation material because I didn’t masturbate. Ever. I’d just sit there, piously erect, a disciplined connoisseur of nipple and thatch. Even by apostolic standards, my repression was freakishly quaint, but I also remember enjoying these long passages of dreamy adoration. I’ve since read of Gnostic heretics in Asia Minor who, in abhorrence of their own bodies, sought a higher form of pleasure through the practice of coitus reservatus . Maybe that’s what I had going on. Whatever the case, it meant that I was fifteen and still having wet dreams. At night I would sneak into the backyard and bury my soiled boxers in the trash can.

• • •

Coach Boyd handed out our summer schedule. First we had our rinky-dink Catholic league, and then the big tournament in Ventura. With a note of apology in his voice, he told me that St. Polycarp was in the same round-robin bracket as Trinity Prep.

“Will that be weird for you, Pat?”

“No,” I said, feeling my stomach drop.

“Their loss is our gain,” said Coach Boyd. “That’s the way I look at it.”

Before he took over in the spring, Coach Boyd had been a substitute teacher at St. Polycarp, and a volunteer assistant coach. During that first week, he kept arriving late to practice. He blamed his Volkswagen Thing, which had a tricky ignition. “You have to get it just right,” he told us, jiggling an imaginary key.

I expected him to install some sort of offense, but every day he just rolled the ball out. “This summer,” he said, “I want you guys to play free.” I didn’t want freedom. I wanted guys to run their lanes. I wanted to come off a pick with a second and third option. We had several “Big Wallys”—my dad’s term for big, clumsy white guys. Tully wasn’t a Big Wally, but he was the laziest guy I ever played with. This killed me, because he was actually pretty good. Now and then he’d drop step and dunk on someone, but otherwise he rarely made it below the three-point line on either end. Coach Boyd yelled at him a few times, and made us all run for his sins, but it didn’t make a difference. I dove for a loose ball once and Tully started clapping.

“You’re a coach’s dream, Higginbottom!”