"For Christ's sake, use your head"

Oddly, the quality, and sometimes quantity, of my playing time at practice was directly related to the frequency of my having "treatment". After recent treatment sessions Garvey seemed much more encouraging, ready with praise, and supportive. If I hadn't seen him in a while, his criticisms, name-calling, and belittling could be withering. In hindsight, I now wonder if I was placed in situations in which I would be more likely to succeed or fail based on the degree to which I acquiesced off the court.

Regardless, as the time since my last treatment lengthened, my game, my confidence, and my self-esteem were suffering. He repeatedly told me I was not strong enough and a step too slow. He would never allude to the treatment in public but the implications were clear: to achieve my goal I needed what only he could do for me, and to do otherwise was sheer stupidity. One of Garvey's tools of manipulation was to appeal to your intelligence, or if you didn't do as he wanted, lack thereof. On many occasions he said to me, "Jack, for such a smart kid, you make a lot of stupid decisions. Use your head. For Christ's sake, use your head." Evidently, in his mind, or more importantly in my own, I needed to link, irrefutably, avoidance of therapy with being a damn fool. I knew I wasn't stupid and I knew I was no fool, but I was too young to understand Garvey's ability to manipulate the situation and his ability to manipulate me to not only choose to submit to the treatment but to have to come to him and ask for it. And ask for it I did.

During one of my more recent trips to Garvey's residence he had told me that besides my lack of strength I also had a genetic trait, which he had noticed in other members of my family, that made me a step or two slower than I should be. He said that my protruding buttocks was symptomatic of a problem that caused my hips to lock up. "Jack, do you know the difference between 'quickness' and 'speed'? You're not terribly fast but you're OK once you get going. What we need to work on are those hips and your quickness, that first step." Oddly enough, he said my body and my problem were common in Blacks. (I wasn't mentally agile enough at the time to ask why, if that was the case, the African-americans that I was playing on the playground and those I watched on TV didn't seem slow or hip-locked at all.) He said that the exercise we performed, when I got on top of him and I rotated my hips, would "unlock" this problem. Yet another compelling reason for more "treatment".

As bizarre as this had all become, in my mind, I still blindly trusted him. I think my first real doubts about what we were doing up in his bedroom came when during one of our sessions, while I was naked on top of him dutifully rotating my hips, he told me to stick my tongue in his mouth and move it back and forth, and around in a circle. He said it would help raise my body temperature faster, facilitating the draining of my sinuses. He pulled the topsheet and blanket more completely up over the top of us as if to reinforce the need for heat. I was reluctant but I did as he said. The sour smell of coffee was on his breath and it tasted worse. His abrasive stubble grated against the skin around my mouth. I had no idea what I was doing. I mechanically moved my tongue back and forth inside his mouth and my drool began to pool where our mouths met and roll down his face. At one point he reached for the sleeve of his t-shirt and wiped his mouth clean. All the while I was still gyrating my hips.

I lost myself in the rhythmic nature of my movements and tried not to think about what was transpiring. I didn't want to think about what he was doing. The answers were not in my experience vocabulary. I was so young I hadn't even really thought about sex. It held no interest for me. Everything I knew was from one-liners the older guys bandied about the lockerroom, and that presented more questions and confusion than information. In lockerrooms everyone pretends to know more than they actually do. The lockerroom is about false bravado not the dissemination of any remotely accurate information. I waited for Garvey to say enough was enough, and eventually, he did. As usual he rolled me on to my left side and moved on to my sinuses. As had become the rule, this was followed by more upper body wrestling, which now included him wrapping his legs around mine and locking his legs at his ankles to make my escape more difficult. And this was followed by the flexibility exercises which entailed Garvey yanking and tugging as he pulled my hands behind my back and pushed against my shoulders attempting to touch my fingertips to the base of my skull.

For the first time Garvey asked me if I would like to shower before I dressed. From that day forward, he would invariably ask and I would always decline. Even though I had yet to sort out much of what was going on or how I felt about it, I knew all I wanted to do was get the hell out of there. I dressed, we got into his car, he drove to my neighborhood and dropped me off in front of my house.

I needed to think. The problem was I didn't know the questions let alone the answers. I did know something wasn't right. I was miserable. Life was miserable. I hated it and I hated myself. Although I couldn't put it into words yet, my heart, my soul, something inside me felt terribly wrong. Deeply scared. Deeply troubled. Deeply wrong. Something about Garvey was wrong. "Use your head, Jack. For Christ's sake, use your head."

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