Open: An Autobiography

We’re walking from Cambridge to 7-Eleven and I can’t hold it in any longer. The guilt is eating away at me. We’re each wearing headphones plugged into Perry’s Walkman, listening to Prince. Purple Rain. I tap Perry on the shoulder and tell him to take off his headphones.

What’s up?

I don’t know how to say this.

He stares.

What is it?

Perry. I broke our pact.

No.

I had a beer in Australia.

Just one?

Four.

Four!

I look down.

He thinks. He stares off at the mountains. Well, he says, we make choices in life, Andre, and you’ve made yours. I guess that leaves me on my own.

But a few minutes later, he’s curious. He asks how the beers tasted, and again I can’t lie. I tell him they were great. I apologize again, but there’s no point in pretending to be remorseful.

Perry’s right - I had a choice, for once, and I made it. Sure, I wish I hadn’t broken our pact, but I can’t feel bad about finally exercising free will.

Perry frowns like a father. Not like my father, or his father, but like a TV father. He looks as if he should be wearing a cardigan sweater and smoking a pipe. I realize that the pact Perry and I made, at its root, was a promise to become each other’s fathers. To raise each other. I apologize once more, and I realize how much I missed Perry while I was gone. I make another pact, with myself, that I won’t leave home again.

MY FATHER ACCOSTS ME IN THE KITCHEN. He says we need to talk. I wonder if he heard about the beer.

He tells me to sit at the table. He sits across from me. An unfinished Norman Rockwell separates us. He describes a story he caught recently on 60 Minutes. It was all about a tennis boarding school on the west coast of Florida, near Tampa Bay. The first school of its kind, my father says. A boot camp for young tennis players, it’s run by a former paratrooper named Nick Bollettieri.

So?

So - you’re going there.

What!

You’re not getting any better here in Las Vegas. You’ve beaten all the local boys. You’ve beaten all the boys in the West. Andre, you’ve beaten all the players at the local college! I have nothing left to teach you.

My father doesn’t say the words, but it’s obvious: he’s determined to do things differently with me. He doesn’t want to repeat the mistakes he made with my siblings. He ruined their games by holding on too long, too tight, and in the process he ruined his relationship with them. Things got so bad with Rita that she’s recently run off with Pancho Gonzalez, the tennis legend, who’s at least thirty years her senior. My father doesn’t want to limit me, or break me, or ruin me. So he’s banishing me. He’s sending me away, partly to protect me from himself.

Andre, he says, you’ve got to eat, sleep, and drink tennis. It’s the only way you’re going to be number one.

I already eat, sleep, and drink tennis.

But he wants me to do my eating, sleeping, and drinking elsewhere.

How much does this tennis academy cost?

About $12,000 a year.

We can’t afford that.

You’re only going for three months. That’s $3,000.

We can’t afford that either.

It’s an investment. In you. We’ll find a way.

I don’t want to go.

I can see from my father’s face it’s settled. End of story.

I try to look on the bright side. It’s only three months. I can take anything for three months.

Also, how bad could it be? Maybe it will be like Australia. Maybe it will be fun. Maybe there will be unforeseen benefits. Maybe it will feel like playing for a team.

What about school? I ask. I’m in the middle of seventh grade.

There’s a school in the next town, my father says. You’ll go in the morning, for half a day, then play tennis all afternoon and into the night.

Sounds grueling. A short time later my mother tells me that the 60 Minutes report was actually an exposé on this Bollettieri character, who was in essence running a tennis sweatshop that employed child labor.

THEY GIVE A GOODBYE PARTY for me at Cambridge. Mr. Fong looks glum, Perry looks suicidal, my father looks uncertain. We stand around eating cake. We play tennis with the balloons, then pop them with pins. Everyone pats me on the back and says what a blast I’m going to have.

I know, I say. Can’t wait to mix it up with those Florida kids.

The lie sounds like a deliberate miss, like a ball off the wooden rim of my racket.

As the day of my departure draws closer, I don’t sleep well. I wake up thrashing, sweating, twisted up in the sheets. I can’t eat. All at once the concept of homesickness makes perfect sense. I don’t want to leave my home, my siblings, my mother, my best friend. Despite the tension of my home, the occasional terror, I’d give anything to stay. For all the pain my father has caused me, the one constant has been his presence. He’s always been there, at my back, and now he won’t be. I feel abandoned. I thought the one thing I wanted was to be free of him, and now that he’s sending me away, I’m heartbroken.