My Losing Season by Pat Conroy Page B

innocent enough. Chris and Tim and I laughed when we saw the poor kid walking toward the stage trailing his seat number behind him.
    The evening had turned so tedious that no one expected the guffaws and explosive laughter that broke through the audience when this kid walked across the stage with a white tail fluttering around his buttocks. All the Jesuits’ love of control collapsed when the absurd little practical joke caught the audience by surprise. The young man shot the audience a Chaplinesque look of bewilderment, the laughter increasing when Father McHale said something about his unauthorized tail piece. The boy looked behind him and saw nothing and kept spinning around until Father McHale ripped it off and dangled it before the embarrassed boy’s eyes. Father McHale then barked at us to settle down, and the rest of the awards ceremony moved with swiftness. I received my two junior varsity letters for football and basketball and felt great pride as I examined them after returning to my seat.
    When Father McHale offered final congratulations and dismissed us, I joined the slow procession of boys who drifted down the center aisle to join our fathers in the back of the theater. Moving slowly with the other student athletes up the carpeted rise toward the milling fathers, I was talking to a boy on my left when I received a stunning backhand across my right jaw that sent me crashing to the floor. The blow was delivered with such force that I did not know if I was going to be able to rise, but a furor had taken hold of the men above me. There was shouting and pushing and obscenities. Slowly, I rose off my knees and stood up on unsteady legs, disoriented, humiliated, and confused by where the blow had come from and why. “Are you okay, Pat?” a father asked me, and I smiled and nodded my head, knowing for the first time that any Gonzaga father knew my name. The second backhand caught me on the left jaw, harder than the first, and I went down to the floor again. Then a free-for-all began.
    I looked up from the floor and saw my father being tossed around like a Raggedy Ann doll. Gonzaga was a tough, ethnic, inner-city school and many of our fathers were blue-collar, working-class men—big Irishmen, Poles, and Italians—who were making their hard way in America. They had no idea who my father was and did not care. They saw a stranger knock a Gonzaga boy to his knees and came roaring to my defense. Someone punched my father in the back of the head; if I’d known who that man was I’d have sent him brownies every Valentine’s Day. I struggled to my feet, grabbed my father’s arm, and led him through that angry mob of men, getting him safely to the parking lot and into his car.
    It was in this car and on this night that my father took me apart. He gave me a beating like none other I would receive in my childhood. “It was you who taped that number on that kid’s ass!” he yelled.
    â€œNo, it wasn’t, Dad. It was another kid. I swear I didn’t do it.” His fist landed so hard on my forehead that I thought the back of my head would go through the passenger-side window. Again, he punched my face and I covered up as he began raining blows all over my body. He beat me until he grew tired of it. “You shouldn’t have laughed,” he said. Then he started the car and drove home to Annandale, and I never came out of my rolled-up crouch until he sent my mother out to the car to get me. She had to peel my arms and hands away from my head. I was hysterical when I heard her voice, and Mom screamed when she saw my face. She refused to let me go to school for the next few days and would not let me show myself to my brothers and sisters. I ate in my room and caught up with my homework and wondered if a son ever hated a father as much as I hated mine.
    Ten days before graduation, Father Anthony McHale summoned me to his office. I had come to know McHale only slightly, but