Longshot Page 9

  Cameron Diaz is so beautiful; I’d love to have her as a girlfriend. Women are so amazing, they’re the most beautiful things God ever created, and I’m so glad I’m not gay. But…

  And here is where it began:

  But what if I’m gay? Lance, you know you’re not gay. You’re attracted to Cameron Diaz, and she is a woman. Yes, she is attractive, but what if I’m gay and I don’t know it? Well, you don’t have to be gay. Well, what if I have no choice, and I for some reason do something “gay”? Well, it won’t be a problem, since you’re not attracted to men. Yes, but what if I slip, and…. What if, what if, what if….

  I can what-if myself to death. What-if became my nemesis. What-if was and still is the hardest opponent I face. And here is the key to understanding those who suffer from OCD: we know that these stupid obsessive thoughts are irrational, but we cannot stop thinking them. Even though I knew that my thoughts about being gay were irrational, I couldn’t stop worrying about it. I’d go through the whole dialogue every hour.

  I tried talking to Dad about it, and he got confused. He, too, was in transition, as we were still emerging from the shackles of our extreme conservative mind-set. With a worried look on his face, his Tourette’s causing a slight twitching, Dad asked, “Are you trying to say you’re attracted to other little boys?”

  This gross oversimplification of my question didn’t help in the least. That my father would even raise that question made me feel like I was doing something wrong. I was convinced I was going to hell—I seriously was. And I went into the bathroom and prayed, tears running down my cheeks, pleading for my soul.

  “Just stop thinking about it,” Dad said, as though I could turn it on and off like a switch.

  But I couldn’t. I had to think about it. I needed to, or else—…I never knew that answer, but I needed to. If I didn’t think about it, I might fall into complacency and suddenly become gay. I had to think about it. Telling me not to think about it was like asking an alcoholic to never have another drink. I just had to. If I didn’t think about it, something bad would happen, but I never knew what. I knew only that something bad would happen, even though nothing ever did.

  After the routine dialogue of what-if scenarios that I’d recite to calm my fears, I’d pray to God, this angry God, in fear of his hell: “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I don’t want to be gay. Please don’t be mad at me. I’m not gay, I like girls, please don’t let me be gay. Please take these thoughts away.”

  The compulsive praying and internal dialogue helped at first, as they would calm my anxiety for a good few hours, but over time the soothing effect of the compulsion lessened, to the point where I was praying every fifteen minutes to my broody God. I didn’t tell anyone, or dare to, after my little chitchat with Dad. I kept these thoughts and other obsessions to myself.

  Had basketball not come into my life shortly after these thoughts began, I’d have deteriorated dramatically. But thanks to basketball, I was able to calm my obsessive thoughts and shameful fears, or at least channel them, on the court. I was able to attach a new identity to basketball, hiding my personal demons on the hardwood.

  My obsessive thoughts didn’t go away when I began playing basketball, but at least I could now dwell on things I could have some semblance of control over. I could now obsess about a bad play, bad pass, or bad call and would stay up late at night pondering and replaying, saying, “What if….” I could obsess about basketball things and think about them without feeling guilty, as I got my mind off of “bad thoughts.”

  In a positive way, my obsession—my compulsion to play through scenarios of what I should’ve done on the court and what I’d do the next time—is part of what fueled me. My obsession demanded perfection, and it’s what drove me and motivated me to keep working and working, to constantly make up for the mistakes I made on the court. I was my own worst critic and always will be. No matter what negative thing anyone says of me on the court, I have already have said something much meaner to myself.

  I had always been worthless as an athlete. But that all began to change in my new setting, at Bryant Middle School. As I started eighth grade, I was five-foot-ten. I constantly got comments that I should start playing basketball—from kids at school and members of my new ward, and especially from the coach of the ward basketball team. I continued to grow. By December, I was six-three, and I was in a lot of physical pain, as my body was growing so fast.

  They held tryouts for the Bryant basketball team, and I made it, but only because I was tall.

  Let me be frank: I sucked. I couldn’t dribble to save my life. I shot the ball before ever looking at the hoop. I couldn’t time a layup. And if I did, I always jumped off my right foot to shoot with my right hand, which is just awkward. But every so often I pulled something out of my pocket and hit a miracle shot, then nonchalantly jogged back to the other end like I was a badass, knowing full well that the shot had been pure luck but managing to somehow convince others I had skill. Confidence is the name of the game.

  Basketball didn’t come naturally to me. The biggest challenge for me was simply being able to balance my overly large head on my rail-thin body. I was like Don Carlos de Austria, among the last of the Spanish Hapsburgs, who fell off a window ledge one night while trying to sneak out for some romping fun. His head was so large that it distorted his center of gravity, causing his fall. I could make it down to the other end of the floor, but that was about it. I was a clumsy giraffe.

  I also suffered, and still suffer, from asthma, and it was never much fun to have my bronchial tubes constricting my airways, so I tended to stay away from sports. But an inhaler changed that, or at least made it easier. I always thought the other kids were having as hard a time breathing as I was, but then our longtime family doctor finally informed me that I was usually breathing for two, such was the pressure that I had to fight in my airways.

  Not only was I now on the Bryant team, but I was also on a popular Junior Jazz rec-league team, named after our local professional team. I also played church ball, not only for the deacons’ team, which was my age group, but also for the teachers’ group, and then the priests’. I was on five teams. The Bryant team played Wednesday nights, and church ball was on Thursday, and then there was the Saturday rec team. Lots of games, but very little practice, so I really never got better. Strangely, I went from never having played organized sports to having them define my week.

  I wasn’t anything special, as was evidenced in a deacons’-team game. I got an offensive rebound and quickly put it back up, and missed it; and reached up and grabbed it again, and missed it again; and grabbed it again, and missed it again…eight times in a row. I was so much taller than all the other kids, who were just jumping beside me trying to outreach me. I just stood there, nearly flatfooted, and played yo-yo with this ball that refused to go in. On the eighth try, when I missed it one more time, I gave up and yelled out in frustration, letting the ball bounce past me as the other team grabbed it and went the other way. I just stared at the rim that had defied me.

  Although I sucked, I was on good teams, well-coached teams that won. Since we won, it was fun enough to keep me interested and not too frustrated with my uncoordinated body.

  It soon became clear that I was up against more than my uncoordinated body. In my second official game we were battling a tough opponent in a nail-biter that was coming down to the last minute. We were tired and bloody, doing anything we could to pull out the victory.

  An opponent was fouled. As he stepped up to the free-throw line, we raised our hands in the air, not waving or moving them. This was the rage back in the mid-nineties—to hold your arms up when you were the defensive team at the foul line, hoping that it might distract the shooter. It never did a lick of good, though. The only thing that’s going to psyche out a foul shooter is himself.

  The player shot it and missed. But the ref blew his whistle and gave him the ball back. He signaled that two shots remained instead of one, giving the kid a do-over. I didn’t know e
nough about basketball and all its rules to understand what was going on. The kid shot his free throw again, but before the ball even hit the rim, the ref blew his whistle, pointed at me, and called a technical foul.

  I raised my hands in confusion: What did I do? The ref was turned away from me, so I couldn’t see what he was saying. A teammate came up to me and pulled me down, to speak into my ear: “Put your arms down.”

  “Oh.” But it was too late, with the technical foul adding two more free throws on top of the original still left to be taken. The kid hit all four free throws to seal the victory. I felt terrible and walked out of the gym to find a safe corner to cry in. I had cost the team the game because I had not heard the warning.

  Afterward, my father went up to the ref and said, “Excuse me, sir. What was the technical about?”

  “That kid was ignoring me. I warned him, but he arrogantly kept doing what I asked him not to do, which was holding his hands up while the other team was shooting a free throw. All he had to do was put his hands down.”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” my father said as he held out my large hearing aids in the palm of his hand. “That’s my son, and he is deaf.”

  The haughty and stern visage of the official turned ashen: “Oh, shit.”

  That eighth-grade year, when we finally moved into the new house on 1300 East in downtown Salt Lake, we still had to honor the lease for the main-floor apartment, and so the seven of us lived in the upper apartment and the basement. Vanessa and I ended up sharing the living room—yes, the living room. We were cramped. Court had the dark and broody basement all to himself. I was too claustrophobic to want anything to do with it and its low ceilings.

  When I graduated from Bryant, I had the choice of attending one of two high schools, East or West, since we lived in a neutral zone in the school district. Court attended East, which was much closer to us and had more middle-class kids like me, but for foolish reasons, I decided to attend West High.

  I attended West only my freshman year. I broke my foot at the beginning of the basketball season and barely managed to play a few weeks at the end of the season. I was garbage. But I did make an important discovery during that year. During a game a kid tussled with me for a rebound and accidentally head-butted me in the ear. By this time, I no longer had the tubed hearing aids that wrapped around the earlobes and rested there; instead, I had smaller ones that, although they were still visible, had the mechanism itself fitted within the ear frame.

  The force of the head butt shattered my hearing aid and cut up the inside of my ear canal. Several smaller fractured pieces were jiggling around in my ear. I had to go to the hospital, where they probed my ear with long, cold rods. Even though my ear canals are less sensitive than most people’s, having become accustomed to having plastic or rubber shoved down them to a very uncomfortable depth just for the hearing aids themselves, it still hurts when people shove a rod down my ear. The only thing that would hurt worse than having a hearing aid explode in your ear, I imagine, would be having a contact lens shattered in your eye.

  Since then, I have never played a game with my hearing aids in. Practice, yes; but in a game it’s different. The surrounding sounds from the crowd and speakers during a game actually serve as an amplifier, pushing the immediate sounds toward my ear (for example, my teammates’ or coaches’ voices). When I wear my hearing aids during a game, the sound is so loud that they actually shut down, overwhelmed by the magnitude and the quantity of different sources of noise.

  I don’t like wearing hearing aids in practice, but I do, so I can hear and communicate with my team. Aside from the fact that the echoes of a gym mess with the microphone in your hearing aids, you also have the issue of sweat damaging the machinery itself or frying the battery.

  When you wear hearing aids while exercising, sweat will crawl into your ear canal, tickling your ear as it winds its way against the plastic tube of the hearing aid. You cannot simply reach up and scratch your ear canal. Instead, you have to take out the hearing aid with your sweaty hands and try to not mess up the battery with said sweaty hands, and then scratch your ear and put the hearing aid back in.

  When the sweat gets in behind your hearing aids, it tickles but also creates a sort of pressure chamber, like when you’re in a plane or underwater, and you have to adjust your jaws to pop the pressure. This whole process triggers your yawn reflexes and makes you want to yawn like you’ll never be able to yawn again. But I always try to refrain from doing so as a coach may mistake me for being disinterested, take it personally, and make the rest of practice miserable.

  During my freshman year at West, the lawsuit with Uncle Saul and the AUB came to a head, and it made it to court in the fall of 1996. It was heartbreaking to see Uncle Saul and Grammy sitting on the other side of the aisle from us. Several of Dad’s brothers testified against Dad, telling stories and saying how much was owed to them, and how Dad had cheated them out of money and never paid them back. Luckily, Dad was a meticulous record keeper and kept track of all of his finances, even through all the poverty. When we grabbed the photo albums as we quickly packed up and fled that summer to Grandma Rip’s, Dad grabbed his records. In court, Jeff got up and showed the brothers who testified against Dad the receipts of the claimed missing payments. Embarrassedly, one by one they blinked and said, “I must have forgotten.”

  Uncle Saul was the hardest. There he was, my uncle Saul, whom I loved and adored, the one I had passed many Sundays with playing softball in the park. It was painful to see him up there, as Jeff then turned the tables and produced files showing that Saul still owed my father a great deal of money, not only for the home Dad had built and Saul currently lived in, but for other services and appliances as well. A refrigerator had become a sticky topic, as silly as that may seem. But when emotions are high and irrationality rules the day, silverware can seem paramount.

  Jeff grilled Uncle Saul. Humiliated him. When he was done, and the brothers’ attorney had begun to perspire from his continual refrain of “I object,” the judge called for a recess. I had not been able to watch the rest of Uncle Saul’s testimony. I began to sob so hard that I had to pull my shirt up to my mouth and bite it, hiding my head beneath the bench. Had it not been so traumatic, I might have enjoyed seeing Jeff grill Uncle Saul, making him the scapegoat, the one that all the AUB would blame when they lost the lawsuit—which they ultimately did.

  But it was one of my most scarring memories. When the judge left for his chambers, Uncle Saul was escorted from the stand. He was shaking, barely able to walk. His face was red with anger and rage, and his eyes were dripping tears. “Liars! Your Dad is a liar! I did so much for all of you!” Uncle Saul screamed at us as the bailiff ushered him out.

  We heard Uncle Saul sobbing in the bathroom down the hall: “I hate this! I didn’t want to do this! Why! Why!” He had been a pawn. His sense of duty to the memory of his father had led him to destroy his relationship with us and his brother. He was angry. He was angry at the AUB, but he was more angry at Dad for not just being a “good boy” and complying—even though Saul, in his heart of hearts, knew the AUB was wrong.

  After three weeks, the trial came to a close. Jeff had done a superb job. However, the judge threw in his bid for the presidency of Switzerland as he read out the verdict, which was completely neutral, saying the house was ours to sell and we were free to move on, thus effectively making the place on 1300 East our new home. But our countersuit to cover legal fees and expenses wasn’t granted. Both sides lost. Uncle Saul and Dad lost the most.

  Even Jeff Swinton lost, in that it was a long time before he made any money on our case. He had to borrow heavily to stay afloat himself through the whole trial. He truly invested in us, and he earned every penny he made on that case.

  But the important thing was that we were free to move on. Once the AUB had achieved what they wanted, they left us alone. It was pretty much “out of sight, out of mind.” We never showed our faces at Group events again. We simply began a new life.
r />   Part Two

  High School Hoops

  10

  I transferred to East High School, which Court attended. A week before school started, I arrived at 7 a.m. in the East High weight room. The basketball players were doing their squats and hang-cleans, lifts I had never seen before, and they were all in attendance together, laughing and mocking and taunting in good fun. I soon learned that Coach Kerry Rupp ran a tight, organized ship of dedication and attendance.

  This was all new to me, as West High had nothing of the sort. There was no organized off-season team routine. During the summer you simply went home, enjoyed vacation, and then came back to school, and then you maybe played some pickup for preseason training. But at East there were weight sessions and skill development—things I desperately needed.

  On that first day, after sheepishly lifting weights, I looked about at all the seniors and juniors who were united with purpose following their loss in the state-championship game the season before. The assistant coach, Coach Cowan, took me up to the gym to get a quick assessment of my skill level. It didn’t take him long to realize that I sucked. He knew I wasn’t ready to contribute to varsity.

  I was handed to Coach Gardner, the sophomore basketball coach. Once the season started, I had to wake up at five every morning to go to sophomore practice, which started at five thirty. Never once did anyone in my family have to wake me; it was that important to me. I wanted to be good at something. I wanted to make my own mark in my family of high achievers. I slept with the clock radio on my pillow, turning up the volume to max, letting it erupt full blast when the alarm went off every morning at five. I made sure there was no chance I might not hear the alarm and sleep through practice.