The Barn

Chapter 11

Chip scored 58 points in their first playoff game. He kept up the flurry of points throughout the tournament, and in Columbus, in the arena where Ohio State played their games, his team won the Division IV state championship. In the final game, the opposing coach decided that, come hell or high water, he’d limit Chip’s scoring, and he had three of his players dog Chip all over the floor. Chip smiled and simply passed to open teammates, and they scored at will. The game was a walkover. The opposing coach was overheard telling someone, “Well, I showed that son of a bitch. He didn’t score 50 points on us!” When Chip heard about that, he just laughed.

I was at the game. I figured I could miss a class or two without any problem. I was doing well with my studies, and our team wasn’t playing that week. My college team would begin their own tournament run a week later.

Before I returned to school, I took an extra day off. Chip and I needed to talk. So, I returned home with him, and then we managed to get away from his adoring public and our families. I sat down alone with him. Where? Where else? In the barn. That’s where we were both comfortable. In public, anywhere in town, Chip was too well known, and we’d be interrupted if we tried to talk privately. I’d spoken to Roger’s dad, and he was happy to let us use the court whenever we wanted. Said we didn’t even need to ask. I’d figured that was probably true, but why not be safe instead of sorry? That was me to a tee.

“I’ve figured out how we can be together, at least for a time,” I told Chip when we were sitting against the wall, just the two of us. The barn smelled the same, looked the same. I’d left the lights off, so it was rather dim. I kind of liked it this way. It was like this when I first saw Chip.

“We’ll both have to make sacrifices. It won’t be like you expected your life to be. It can’t be. Not if you want us together, like I want us together. You have to decide which is more important, your basketball career or us.”

“I already told you.” Chip was using his obstinate voice. He didn’t use it often. I thought it cute when he did because it showed a side of him I rarely saw. But it was part of him, part of why he was so good on the court. When he made up his mind to do something, everyone else had better get out of the way if they knew what was good for them. “I need you. I need there to be an us. That’s what comes first.”

I nodded. “That’s what I figured you’d say. That’s what you’ve been telling me, and it’s what I want, too. I just want you to know, there will be sacrifices. But I did figure out how we could do it.”

“Yeaaaaah . . .  ?” There was sarcasm in his voice. Okay, so we’d been over this ground before. He was waiting—and not very patiently—for me to get on with it.

“All right. Here’s my plan. You ignore all the recruitment that’s been going on. All those great offers you’ve gotten. Full-ride offers. You turn them all down. What you do instead is accept a scholarship from the school I go to. Division II schools offer only a few full-ride scholarships, but you can get one. I spoke to my coach. I told him I knew a great player who was gay who was interested in coming to our school, and would he have a problem with that, or would the team? He said absolutely not, that two of the guys on the team now were a couple and that the rest of the team knew it. He said that’s why those two were playing Division II ball. They’d had the same worry Chip had had. Then he asked me if I was gay, and I told him I was. He smiled at me and said that even though he was an older coach, he believed people should have the freedom to be who they are.

“So, I outed you. And me. And told him you’d yet to make a decision, and if you chose to play elsewhere, I trusted him to be silent about you. Well, he was thrilled out of his mind, over the top about having a chance at you, and he has a scholarship waiting for you if you want it.

“So that’s taken care of. If you follow my plan, what you’ll do is play for his team, my team, for one year. If you’re as capable in college against Division II players as you were in high school, you’ll still be a hot item for Division I schools, so scholarships will still be offered. At that point, if you accept one of those, you can do so with an agreement with that school that I come along too on an academic scholarship and with a place on the coaching staff, even if it’s an unpaid one. You’d then be at a school of your dreams, and we’d still be together.”

He was looking at me, and it was easy to read his eyes. He’d been growing and was now as tall as I was. Not quite as sturdy because I’d been gaining weight, more than he had, but he was as tall. Where he’d really grown, and much more than I had, was in confidence. He was still the same boy I’d first met in every other way, still modest, polite, helpful, respectful and friendly, but he had an inner confidence now, one that came from the successes he’d had. One he’d earned. And that was what was in his eyes.

“If I’m as capable? If?”

I laughed. “Well, it had to be said.”

He snorted. And I asked, “Well, is that what you want?”

He didn’t need to stop to think about it. It was only his future we were talking about. Only that. “Yeah. That sounds perfect to me. You’ve spoken so highly of that school, that campus, the coach, the team—but you’ve talked about the academics, too. You know I’m getting all A’s this year. I’m trying to match your GPA, and I think I will. I’m not just all about basketball. I’ve looked at your school online. I might want to be there for more than one year.”

“Oh, no. That’s not the plan. You’re going to make millions as a pro. Even if you only play a couple of years in the league—millions. Stay at a Division II school, your chances of being drafted are much less. You need to play against topnotch college competition to show your abilities. I’m not going to stand in the way of that.”

He gave me a disgusted look. “Didn’t you try that once before? Weren’t we both miserable? I’ll do what’s needed for both of us. I think you might have figured that out by now. We’ll take this step by step. What I want more than anything is for both of us to be together and both of us to be happy.”

The barn was a bad place to share any intimacy. A bad place to make out. But it was where we were, and it was private. We’d hear anyone walking up the stairs, and, well, we were young and in love, and that was where we were at that moment. We hadn’t been together that way often, not nearly often enough. If we took advantage of the barn right then, well, it seemed an appropriate place for it.

Epilogue

Life unfolds to the strains of its own sweet melody. We think we’re in control, a presumption that ignores the grand irony that plays out as directed by whoever is sitting in the catbird seat. I was the sort who didn’t live by impulse. I hated risk-taking. I liked to know what was beyond each bend in the road before I ventured around it. Life scoffs at people like that. Life’s an adventure, and I believe it’s meant to be that way. Where’s the adventure, the excitement, if you’ve read the last page of a book first? No, there’s little of the constant, the predictable, in life. So, if things didn’t work out as I’d planned them, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise.

Chip came to my school. As a freshman, he was the darling of NCAA Division II basketball. He wasn’t the scorer he was in high school because the players he faced now were taller and better, but he was still prolific, averaging over 30 points a game and adding double figures in assists. He also put on some muscle as he spent time in the weight room getting stronger and had the school nutritionist governing his diet. The Division I offers came pouring in as anticipated.

But he’d been perspicacious—he actually was academically inclined, and when he took an introductory course in philosophy, he was hooked. He loved it, loved the professor, and told me he wanted to stay and take more of those classes. I told him all the schools recruiting him would have the same courses, the same major. He said what they wouldn’t have was his professor or this campus. He said large-school philosophy courses would probably be taught by TAs, at least until his junior year and maybe even then. He was going to put off transferring at for another year—at least another year.

That was fine with me, although I thought it wasn’t what was best for his basketball career. For me, it meant another year helping our coach, our team. I was loving that. Having Chip on the team, a team that was already very good, meant we were having an unbeaten season. The coach was giving me more and more responsibility, and I was working with both the offense and defense now. I was more than happy. This was what I wanted to do with my life.

So at the end of Chip’s freshman year, my sophomore year, he told the coach he was staying at least one more year. And then, he decided at the end of that year, when he was a sophomore, he wasn’t leaving at all. He’d play his entire four years of eligibility there. I told him he was probably sacrificing millions of dollars. He said you couldn’t put a dollar value on happiness, and being on this campus, being with me, learning under his prof, not being the center of everyone’s attention as he’d been in high school—all those things and many more were priceless. He was happy. And content. And staying.

The fact he was gay was never a problem. Maybe if you were the top scorer in college basketball, including all divisions of play, and a nice guy, too, which was what Chip was, people tended to overlook something as trivial as your sexuality. Chip was a hero at the college, in the town, and we never heard one negative word.

College is different from high school. People in the town where we were located might have idolized Chip, but at the school, he was simply another student. A lot of college students put their focus on their studies and their own futures. So, among a lot of Chip’s peers, he wasn’t even noticed. Yeah, he was certainly a star on campus, but didn’t get the hoopla or even the recognitions he had in high school. And that was fine with him. He’d never needed that. He never felt comfortable with it.

When Chip graduated—I already had, a year earlier—I had a job. Our team’s coach retired and worked it out with the school’s Athletic Director so the reins were handed to me. Chip had been accepted into the school’s graduate program, and his professor told him he’d be offered a teaching job at the school when he had his doctorate. He said he’d be near retirement then, and his professorship would be open, and Chip almost certainly would get it. I wasn’t the only one there who saw the merits of my guy.

So, we remained at that school, and we’re still there. Chip’s final basketball game, which we won, was the Division II championship game. We’d won five in a row, four with Chip playing. He was drafted by an NBA team. He turned them down. He said being with me full time, teaching philosophy, watching me coach, helping out when he could, was the future he wanted.

I’ve been offered jobs at Division I schools, prestigious and highly paid jobs. I followed Chip’s lead, choosing happiness and the known over dollars and uncertainty.

When we went home to visit his and my parents, we’d visit the barn. There often were kids from Roger’s dad’s congregation there, playing a game. Sometimes, they’d invite us to play, Chip on one side, me on the other. Chip was consistent: he never took a shot. He set up the kids on his team to shoot. And he’d block me off the boards, the bastard! Who taught him how to do that, I ask you?

What the kids seemed to like best were the rest periods, sitting against the wall outside, drinking the bottled water that Roger’s dad always kept available for them in that old refrigerator. Chip was still famous in that town, and they loved talking to him; I was sort of a hanger-on. We talked about our lives. We talked about games we’d played in the barn. A few times, one of the kids would tell us he was gay. No one seemed to feel the need to hide that fact any longer.

Both our sets of parents told us they’d suspected, back when we were keeping our love a secret. They were proud of us for taking happiness over money.

We never ran across Tim when we came home. I learned from Roger that he’d left town quite soon after that pep rally and never returned. We did see Jimmy, Roger, Carl and Phil occasionally. Other than Roger, they were all happy, all married. Roger was in law school. He’d decided he preferred that to pharmacy work.

We loved the campus, the atmosphere there, and never wanted to leave. It felt like home now. We bought a farmhouse on the outskirts of the city and drove in to campus every day. We worked with college kids, me in the gym and weight room and one classroom: I was teaching the course in coaching my mentor had taught; Chip had his own classroom. He had a lot of girls signing up for his classes; I was sure it wasn’t because of their love of Kierkgaard or Schopenhauer. He was simply handsome, and the girls noticed. He’d lost his youthful beauty, but it had been replaced by a more mature handsomeness. Some boys signed up, too, hoping he’d talk basketball to them, or, maybe, the gay ones just to gaze at him with bedroom eyes and wishes. Eventually, I knew, few would even remember he’d played basketball at a level only a handful achieve.

We ate lunch in the student union, walking across campus to get there. It was a life that was perfect for us both.

We have a son now. His name is Spencer and he’s six. We got him when he was two. You have any idea how cute a kid is at two? Well, double it for four and again when he’s six. The kid was irrepressible and the love of our lives.

As I sit here, writing all this down, there’s a lot of banging coming from outside. Some yelling, too. The yelling, that’s all Spencer. He hasn’t learned the equanimity that Chip and I share, his temper still needs refining, but he’ll do that. I can see him already trying to copy us, picking up little gestures and mannerisms from each of us. But for now, he still yells when he gets frustrated.

Chip set up an eight-foot high rim and backboard in the backyard. He’s teaching Spencer how to shoot using a three-quarter size ball which isn’t too heavy for Spencer. The yelling comes when Spencer misses. He hates to miss. And he doesn’t all that often. Takes after his father.

The banging? Well, that was my fault. It’s coming from all the hammering going on. I hired a contractor, and he’s in the early stage of restoring the barn—it was a kind of small, two-story one, that came with the house.

THE END