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I wrote down the coach’s name, Bernie Carrier, in a little flip notebook I carried in a back pocket. For good measure, I wrote down the seven tennis players in 1975 and 1976. It probably wouldn’t be useful, but since I was there, why not?
Coach Carrier would be in his seventies. I wondered how to find out more about him. Where did he live? How could I find him? It was almost lunch time. A bell went off and I could hear movement outside. Then, almost immediately, boys began to scurry into the locker room. I peeked around the corner to see if there were any teachers in their offices. There weren’t.
On my way out, I stopped an extremely tall teenager.
“Can you point me to the administration building?”
The boy literally pointed. South and east, I think. I got lost anyway. When I finally found the administration building about forty-five minutes later, I ended up face-to-face with an assistant principal named Gloria Whigham. She was nearly sixty and wore a very stern look that made me worry I might get detention for the questions I was there to ask.
“I’m doing a piece for theDowney Daily Newslooking at the growth of tennis as a high school sport. Would you be able to put me in touch with Bernie Carrier?”
She flinched when I said his name. I had a hunch she might. “We don’t give out faculty information. Past or present.”
“Okay, what about alumni?” I pulled out my little pad and began reading names.
She stopped me after three. “We don’t give out information on students either. Past or present.”
“I know this is a big ask, but could you maybe give my number to them? I’m looking to talk to either a coach or players from a winning team from the seventies. Bernie Carrier would be perfect.”
Again she flinched, and looked away this time.
“If you could maybe give him my number? And maybe a few of the players. That way you haven’t broken any rules.”
She stayed silent.
“How about I write my number down for you. I flipped to a new page in my notebook and wrote out my name,Downey Daily Newsand my phone number. The way she held it between two fingers made me wonder if she thought it was radioactive.
19
April 15, 1996
Monday afternoon
Iwas pretty sure Karen wouldn’t be in at all, which meant I could go back to the office but there wouldn’t be anyone there to help me search Lexis/Nexis. I knew better than to attempt it on my own. Karen kept the password taped to the bottom of her center desk drawer, but I was too afraid of turning her PC into a smoldering, molten pile of junk. People—mostly Ronnie—assure me that’s not possible. That you can’t just hit a few wrong keys and destroy a computer. I didn’t believe them.
I decided I’d go old school and went to the library. The Long Beach Main Library was a concrete structure sunk into the ground with lawns running up its sides and onto the roof. If you’re the kind of person who just loves a good bomb shelter, this is the library for you. To find the reference area, you have to go even deeper into the ground. Tucked in the back, I asked the reference librarian if they hadThe Press-Telegramon fiche.
“We do but we only have from nineteen fifty-two until nineteen eighty-eight.”
“All right. You have an index?”
She showed me to a low table with a dozen thick books, black and well-used. I sat down and pulled over the volume labeled C-D. I looked up Bernie Carrier’s name and found that there were dozens upon dozens of dates listed. They covered several years, tending to focus on the months of May and June. There were no listings after 1978.
I pulled a sampling of dates in 1974, then went back to the reference desk and asked for the appropriate fiche. It took a few minutes, but the reference librarian eventually came back with about twenty brilliant blue fiche sheets in a tray. She nodded toward a room behind me. I walked over and let myself in. There were three projection machines on a long table. I sat down at the furthest one. There was an instruction sheet taped to the table. I’d done this before, but it had been a long time. I slipped the fiche sheet between two plates of glass. I pushed it into place and the glass clamped down on the sheet.
I scanned through the newspaper projected onto the screen. I had to adjust to moving in the opposite direction from the one I wanted to go in. It was obvious this was done with enlarging mirrors. After spinning around for a minute or two, I figured out that one fiche sheet covered one day’s edition of the paper, given that there was enough space on the four by five sheet to put 80-100 tiny pages. That made it easier, all I had to do was find the sports section.
I read through thirteen or fourteen articles about the Downey Boys’ Tennis Team without finding anything of interest. At first, the articles were small, including the final scores, the names of the coaches and where the games were played. As the season progressed, individual players were mentioned—the Michaels brothers several times—and projections about the possible season outcome. There was a time when it looked like the Downey team could win statewide. The final three articles included team photos. None of the photos were the same as the one I’d seen at the high school; these were taken by the newspaper.
I was able to blow up the article to get a better look at the photos, but they still weren’t that great. For a quarter I could get a copy of whatever was on the machine’s screen. I took copies of the articles with photographs, then went back to the reference desk. I returned the fiche I’d borrowed, then asked for the dates in 1975. I also requested five dollars in quarters.
Back at the fiche machine, I skimmed through another season of tennis. This time there were only two team photos. I made copies. There were a few other dates I could have checked out, but I decided to find an empty table and look over the photographs I now had. I knew what I was looking for. Larry had said that Pete wasn’t a virgin. It made sense to look at his teammates as potential boyfriends.
Spreading out the photos, I looked for relationships between the boys. In each of the photos, Pete and Paulie Michaels were posed next to each other. Mostly the other boys looked at the camera and smiled. Except in two the photos, one of the other boys, the same boy was looking at Coach Carrier.
Skimming the captions, I saw that the boy’s name was John Hazeltine. There were a lot of reasons why John might be looking at his coach in two of the photos. Coach Carrier might have said something that bothered him. No, that wasn’t it. The look on John’s face wasn’t annoyance. It was intense, positive… reverence maybe? Or—
Then I wondered if John was looking at the coach at all. In each of the photos with John looking that way, the coach was standing there with his hand on Pete’s shoulder. Was he actually looking at Pete? Or was he looking at Pete because Coach Carrier was touching him?
