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Tipping the scales

An hour later my teammates and I were in the locker room circled around Trevor Windgate, who was on a scale, hands on hips and wearing only a burgundy pair of silk bikini briefs. If it had been two-hundred years earlier he might have been a Mandingo at a slave auction. Team trainer Danny Fazlow slid the scale’s metal weights forth and back until balance was achieved. “Two hundred twenty-three pounds” Fazlow said. “You’ve arrived just as advertised.” When the weigh-in ceremony ended I went my locker to get ready for practice. Next to me was last year’s starting guard, LeVoy Wiggin. Wiggin raised an arm and applied a fresh layer of scented Red Zone deodorant. “You ever stop to think life might not be worth living?” he asked. “Odd way to start a conversation,” I said. “What better way to start one on a day like this? I’m the disappearing man. In fact, as of today I’m officially invisible. You won’t see me because I’m hidden behind the gigantic shadow of
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Death comes calling for Jeremiah Croft

One of the most controversial events of Marciano family life was sister Maria’s decision to marry. It wasn’t the act of marriage itself, but who she married that caused a family crisis. Maria’s attraction to men the size and strength of Hercules sent her hurtling towards the altar with a sizable Sicilian named Shekko Lombardi. My brother-in-law’s style with everyone he brushed up against was purely confrontational. That didn’t matter to Maria, who liked her men big, strong, bellicose and chauvinistic. Nothing refreshed my sister’s sexual passions more urgently than being physically dominated by the male of the species. That domination took forms ranging from general manhandling to being forced to participate in unusual bedroom acts still outlawed in several southern U.S. states. Despite its fetishes, the marriage sailed along, both partners getting what they wanted. It tripped over just one crisis, a suspected affair. Shekko was making a routine rummage through Maria’s pu
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Unspoken agreements

It was an unspoken agreement among the 30,000 residents of Sedona to never speak ill of their community. Bad things happened to people who said bad things about Sedona. It was, after all, a land considered sacred by the Native Americans that once populated area. No one would have lived in Sedona at all if the sluggish National Park Service had acted more quickly or had been more lavishly funded by the United States Congress. With its amazing array of soaring red rock formations, it should have been a national park. By the time this dawned on the people running the National Park Service, too much of the territory was already in the hands of private landowners and the agency didn’t have a large enough checkbook to buy them out and turn the red rocks into a national preserve. Over the years Sedona flourished on its own accord and turned into a community dominated by five groups: retirees, tourists, real estate agents, artists and those who believed in the New Age (a movement charac
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Wanda Rappaport and the moist haze

Just two days before classes started, Trevor Windgate pulled into campus amid fanfare never before known to Lewis & Clark. A small convoy of three black SUVs with smoked windows and omni-directional high-frequency antennas rolled onto campus and were parked at egotistical angles. Windgate climbed out of the rear seat of the middle vehicle. He was accompanied by the school’s athletic director and the basketball team’s head coach. From the other vehicles came four men, all wearing dark suits and shades on an overcast day. There were coiled wires coming out of their ears and they occasionally mumbled into their cuff links. That, and their immutably stern faces, gave observers the unmistakable impression that Trevor Windgate was already under protection of professional bodyguards. Former U.S. Secret Service agents, if I had to guess. It was all part of the pomp and stagecraft orchestrated by the Athletic Department to make sure its improbable new recruit wouldn’t have any regrets about
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Another diva in the making

Fiona “Ginger” Marciano, the first conceived of their six children, was born with the glamour gene. From her earliest day Ginger sought the limelight and yearned to be rich and famous beyond definition. It was part of a syndrome common to first-born children who are showered with unprecedented quantities of attention. It created an emotional addiction that required constant feeding, yet could never be satiated. She became a devotee of the fake-it-until-you-make-it motivational movement. She felt perfectly natural pretending to be something she was not. “Don’t be who you are,” she told her younger sisters, “be who you want to be.” Ginger did exactly that, carrying herself like a Hollywood starlet, believing life wasn’t really worth living unless it was done in the limelight. Her every stride, her every glance, facial expression and movement was done under the gaze of imaginary motion picture cameras. Ginger fancied herself being watched by millions. She patte
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On the cusp of something astonishing

This is a story of Lolita Firestone and Miles Zusman, a woman who finds her place in life, and a man lost within his own fraudulent storyline. It is the tale of Lolita Firestone’s historic rise to becoming the world’s most powerful person, though the retelling of the extraordinary chain of events that bewitched those around her could not have been told without the cooperation of her constant companion and Boswell, one Miles Zusman. Nor would it have ever come to pass if not for its geographic pinpoint in the dead-center of the State of Arizona in a small city called Sedona, a town that many years ago was named after a young woman named Sedona Schnebly, wife of T.C. Schnebly, who together built a large two-story home that also served as the area's first hotel and general store. Lolita was a struggling Hollywood actress on the cusp of something astonishing. Miles was an aspiring politician who was preparing himself to run for a seat in the A
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Trevor Windgate has arrived

Trevor Windgate was the first McDonald’s All American high school basketball player to enroll at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. They recruited Windgate for his perimeter shooting. By mid-way through his junior year he would become the greatest scorer in the history of the Northwest Conference. Marketers anticipated his turning pro, joining an NBA franchise and becoming an endorsement machine. It was only a matter of time before he would have athletic shoes named after him and lend his visage and imprimatur to web portals, colognes, energy bars, over-priced automobiles and globally distributed electrolyte drinks. Tens of millions of dollars a year were assumed. It would become an odd footnote that one of the nation’s very best high school athletes would choose to attend a tiny, obscure institution of higher learning named after western explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, a school that only came to fame after it was disclosed that former presidential para
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