Barry Ellis; Norma, Frances, & Eileen

Barry Ellis

          The expat haole teachers at what was then Inarajan High School were, of course, a hodgepodge of misfits, zealots, adventurers, surfers, and so forth. One fellow, however, stands out in my mind as being truly bizarre, a teacher of Spanish and English named Barry Ellis.

          Barry was a converted Catholic, which was helpful on Guam, where the Spanish-style Church is suffocatingly powerful, and a committed celibate, which — and I obtained this information from an impeccable source — even the Inarajan parish priest wasn’t.

          He told me that before he’d become a Catholic he’d been a, well, y’know, a nothing. Yes, I did know. He took it seriously. He became extraordinarily fond of me rather quickly, because he thought my witticisms witty, but then became aghast when I told one of my more blunt God jokes, and informed me that God could forgive any sin except blasphemy, and that no matter how much good I did for the rest of my life for penance, he knew that I was forever damned. That didn’t mean, however, that we couldn’t still be friends.

          He was largish, but not as tall as me, and softish-looking: kind of narrow in the shoulders and kind of wide at the hips. He had a chubby face and a naughty smile, and lived in a small apartment in a high-rise building in Guam’s urban centre of Tamuning, which was a bit of a commute to and from Inarajan.

          He knew Spanish from having lived in, of all places, Panama, and had tales to tell about his time there, mostly about personal relationships and status. He’d enjoyed being called Don Barry.

          He sometimes told me about his mother. She had, he told me, been unbearably dominant, possessive, controlling, and even abusive. I felt a connection with him right there.

          She’d made him wear hot clothes in the summer and to stand for long periods in one place when he’d been naughty. She’d also used food as a weapon, which may have been why he never, ever ate anything coloured green, getting his fresh-produce nourishment from fruits and vegetables of other colours. As horrid as she had apparently been, he’d still adored her, and had stayed with her, pampering her whims and submitting to her domination, well into his adulthood.

          Somehow, then, his commitment to celibacy wasn’t surprising. From what he told me I doubt if his mother would have approved of him at all if he’d chosen otherwise. Maybe, however, it was because he was both swishy as hell and believed the Church’s teaching that homosexuality is a most horrendous sin.

          He was also, unsurprisingly, a devoted fan of Liberace, and was devastated when he found out that his idol was dying from AIDS, which in the mid-1980s still Meant Only One Thing to most people. He couldn’t believe that Liberace could have been homosexual. It seemed impossible to him. Liberace, after all, had doted upon his mother!

          Although the kids at Inarajan had a way of torturing teachers who they thought deserved it, they tended to give Barry a fairly easy time of it, which I thought was strange, but nice. Maybe because he was so gentle and inoffensive and would have made too easy a target. I don’t know.

          I lost touch with Barry when I left Guam. I haven’t been able to find him on the internet. As with most of the haole teachers at Inarajan, he could be just about anywhere.

Norma, Frances, Eileen, & Inarajan Girls’ Basketball 1986

          I’d developed a liking for coaching basketball when I’d been at Wrenn in San Antonio, and had learnt enough about its technical aspects for it to fascinate me. I sorta considered it to be like choreographing a ballet with half of those dancing at any one time trying to disrupt what those under my direction were trying to do. I also enjoyed the challenge of putting a group of distinct individuals together into a cohesive team that utilised their individual skills communally.

          When I started teaching at Inarajan High School I pre-empted the school custodian, who had been coaching the girls’ team, as teachers had priority. Coaches on Guam received payment for the time and effort involved. In money. He kept the boys’ team. I managed to put together a team that at their best were remarkable, I thought, for a rural school on a remote island. Most of the girls bought into the system I tried to sculpt for their abilities, and at their best they played with devastating precision.

          That ‘at their best’ bit covers a lot of ground. They were, after all, adolescent girls deeply engrained in the fabric of their particular culture and their chosen places within it. We played our matches on Wednesdays and Fridays. We won most of our Wednesday games and, if I remember correctly, lost all of the Friday ones.

          Norma was the team leader. She was just medium height, but her strength, reflexes, mental speed, and aggression made her play much larger. When she ripped down a defensive rebound and took off on the dribble for a coast-to-coast it would have been a brave girl indeed to get in her way, and few did. She was lethal penetrating to the basket from the wing, and in additional to her bruising rebounding averaged about 30 points per game on Wednesdays.

          Fridays were a different story. Throughout the rest of the year, Norma would meet up with her friends on the beach on Friday after school and put away a couple of six-packs, and she saw no reason to change this just because she was supposed to play power forward at seven-thirty on Friday during basketball season.

          Norma with a belly full of beer was an entirely different basketball team. For one thing, she kept signalling me to sub her off so she could go pee. Often. Instead of her Wednesday-evening disciplined position play she’d be all over the court, colliding with her teammates and leaving big holes on defence. Her shooting wasn’t worth shit.

          Her natural aggression, however, spilled over the top; she kept trying to start fights. It became almost a ritual for the school principal to summon me into his office on Monday mornings, where I’d have to plead on behalf of the team not to kick her off – and the team always did line up solidly in her support. Of course, sometimes my pleas were to no avail and he’d force me to suspend her for the game the following Wednesday, such as after she’d got into the face of one of the nuns attending our game against Our Lady and called her a “fuckin bitch”.

          Frances, our starting centre, was the tallest girl on the team, a bit taller than me, even. I don’t think that she’d ever played basketball before, but she was intelligent and a quick learner. She pulled down even more rebounds than Norma and mastered everything I taught her about playing defence; she delighted in blocking several shots every game. She just didn’t want to handle the ball, which meant that she was quick with her outlet passes, but useful on offence strictly as a decoy and rebounder. One time one of her teammates actually threw her a pass. She threw it right back, shouting, “Don’t throw it to me!”

          Her problem with Fridays was her boyfriend, who wanted to go out with her on all weekend evenings and had no time for her to play basketball instead. Guam, after all, has a male-dominated, exaggeratedly macho culture, and Frances was indeed a fine-looking young woman.

          With Frances missing on most Fridays, Eileen had a chance to get in some court time. Eileen was somebody to whom I could relate, being far from a natural athlete and the possessor of a self-effacing personality, undoubtedly coloured somewhat by her being the team’s Fat Girl.

          Anyway, one Wednesday we went to play the number-one team on the island, JFK High, which is located in the most urbanised, multicultural part of Guam. The JFK girls came onto the court as if they’d won the game before it started, but my team came on like a typhoon with the high-pressure, trapping defence and breakaway offence we’d practiced. We ran out to big lead.

          Then, in the second half, our defensive aggression built us up some foul trouble, and one by one our starters began to foul out, letting JFK claw themselves back into the game, especially after Frances fouled out. Then, with about eight seconds left in the game they made a basket that put them in front for the first time – by one point.

          Norma, who somehow hadn’t fouled out, scooped up the ball and threw a half-court inbounds pass to one of the subs, who threw another half-court pass to Eileen, who made the winning basket with one second left. I don’t think I’ve ever seen more ecstatic happiness on a person’s face than on hers at that moment. It didn’t matter that she’d been there because she hadn’t made it back on defence the play before. Her reserve disappeared and she, leading her mates, shouted and sang nonstop on the long bus ride to the other end of the island.

          She’s a middle-aged woman now, probably a grandmother. I wonder if she ever reflects back on that moment and relives the joy. I think she might.