Another Great Story From a Hemingway

Here is the way graduation day this morning at USC will work: At 8:30 sharp, students from the Class of ’96 will assemble in caps and gowns at Alumni Park, for a mass ceremony heralding their commencement. Then they will disseminate, breaking off to satellite ceremonies like the one at Founders Park scheduled for 10:30 a.m., where Dean Nancy Vickers, presiding on behalf of the College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, will be handed a diploma and announce a name:

“Arthur Hemingway Jr.”

At which point, Art Hemingway will rise.

It will take him some time. It will hold up the whole ceremony. Art can’t help that. His hand is misshapen. His leg is discolored and deformed. He will steady himself on the steering wheel of his golf cart, the one with all the stickers: “Support Oceanside Baseball.” “POWER 106.5.” “Nuke a Whale for Jesus.” Then he will snap open the legs of his metal walker, like a bridge player unfolding a card table.

And he will walk.

Ever so slowly, he will make his way to Dean Vickers to accept his own diploma, the one Art calls “my fake-me-out diploma,” because no student’s degree is technically authentic until it is confirmed that they have passed every requisite exam, paid every overdue bill. Art took his last astronomy test Tuesday. His dues, well, he surely has paid those.

So, everyone will have to be patient, no matter if the morning sunlight has gotten warmer, no matter if those mortarboards and robes have become uncomfortable, even with nothing but a T-shirt and gym shorts underneath. Art needs the extra time. His classmates will have to wait, because from the day he arrived on the USC campus to play football and earn a degree, it has taken him a very long time to get from that moment to this one.

Eighteen years.

Half his life.

Which is why a few more steps won’t hurt.

*

There is a story, “Hills Like White Elephants,” in which a valley near the river Ebro, in a remote part of northern Spain, looks from a distance to a young woman waiting at a train depot like pale elephants, crossing the countryside one by one in the sun.

After his father, a Marine master sergeant and military attache, was transferred to a post near Madrid temporarily, Art Jr. gazed out the window and called to his father: “Look! White elephants, like the story.”

He had begun to take an interest in Ernest Hemingway’s literature for obvious reasons. The family name itself was a curiosity to the Hemingways, who, while of American Samoan descent, could trace their family tree back to Northern Ireland, where the name had once appeared as “Hemin Way” on signposts and shops.

Asked why he ended up seeking an English degree, Art Jr. asks back: “Why do you think? Look at my name.”

He tracked the author’s trail from an Oak Park, Ill., birthplace to the World War I incident when Hemingway, serving as an ambulance driver in Italy, was badly wounded in action. Art Jr. could easily follow his namesake’s path from reading his work, the Paris years, the Cuba years, the correspondence from the Spanish Civil War and the descendants in Idaho who had to deal with Papa’s suicide by shotgun.

The concept of a tortured soul was something Art understood. When expectations go awry, how one copes makes all the difference, as when bitterness got the better of Art, when he lay motionless and warned his father to leave him alone. He remembers as though it were yesterday: “I would yell at him: ‘What do you want me to do? I can’t move, I can’t eat, I can’t type, I can’t do this, I can’t do that.’ My father didn’t like the word can’t. He hated that word.

“Now I hate it. It’s a terrible word.”

From the time the family settled in Oceanside there was a large Samoan community nearby for friendship and support, and Art Jr., always a happy-go-lucky kid anyway, found there was very little he couldn’t do. The way he played football, people there still talk about it. He was mainly a 6-foot-2, 225-pound blocking back in high school, but he could also carry the ball and rumble like a truck, averaging 8.9 yards whenever he touched it.

His coach, Chuck Hall, called him “the best blocking fullback I’ve ever coached or seen.” The collegiate coaches called also--on the phone, or at their door. Alabama’s Bear Bryant called. Michigan’s Bo Schembechler called. Notre Dame’s Dan Devine called. Hawaii, Colorado, Brigham Young. But with a vivid memory of watching Anthony Davis score touchdowns against Notre Dame, there wasn’t much selling that John Robinson needed to do when the USC coach came to the house.

Art knew what he wanted.

On a warm weekend in August, 1978, he reported for duty. Robinson already had the Trojans running two-a-day, even three-a-day, drills. The equipment manager issued him jersey No. 36, the one his Samoan blood-brother Mosi Tatupu had worn. Art quickly got acquainted with No. 33, Marcus Allen. His dorm roommate was Lynn Cain, the starting fullback, a senior. He figured USC must have big plans for him, to bunk a punk freshman with a senior.

He got hungry. Those workouts emptied him. He told Cain that he was going across the street for a burger.

At the hospital in Downey, where he woke up after four weeks in a coma, the first thing Art saw was his father. He knew nothing. How he got there. What had happened. He didn’t know about that 17-year-old kid, supposedly high on PCP, who stole a car in Compton, who sped through a red light, who panicked when the police siren sounded behind him, who drove up onto the sidewalk on Aug. 23, 1978, smashing into Art and sending him hurtling through the air.

The paramedics assessed the damage quickly: Severe head and internal injuries, a broken leg. He was comatose in an intensive-care ward for 28 days, during which time doctors told Art Sr. that it was pretty much in God’s hands.

So he went to his church.

The soft-spoken Sgt. Hemingway, on leave from Camp Pendleton, drove to Oceanside to visit the First Samoan Assembly of God and asked his pastor, Pita Leasau, to call on his son.

The pastor did, and told Art Sr. to trust in God.

“It’s hopeless,” the soldier replied.

“He created him,” the pastor said, pointing to the boy in the bed. “He can do anything.”

Parishioners offered their support. Many of them fasted for three days. They knelt in prayer and meditation.

Art Sr. sat on his son’s bedside, in Room 267 of a hospital on Hope Street.

Art Jr.’s eyelashes fluttered.

He blinked.

“Hi, Dad,” he said.

*

There is a story, “In Another Country,” in which a young man in Italy is receiving treatment in a hospital, much as the author himself once had. Once a football player, now wounded in the war, he tries to bend his knee, but is frustrated because he cannot. The doctor looks at him and says: “That will all pass. You are a fortunate young man. You will play football again like a champion.”

Art Hemingway Jr., his speech slurred, his body bent after 22 operations, including brain surgery twice, continues to attend as many USC football games as he can, seated in the Coliseum tunnel in his golf cart. He still feels part of the team, still eats at the training table. Thirty-six is his age now, not his number.

He didn’t know what to do with himself upon leaving the hospital, 18 years ago. He snapped at his father and says: “I was blaming everybody, my dad, my girlfriend, God. It took me a long time to look inward.

“I kept trying to find my inspiration. Most of my life, I had known exactly what I wanted to do. I was always active. There were places I expected to go, things I intended to do. That all changed. Going back to college, that was a challenge, especially if anybody said: ‘I don’t think you can compete.’ That was a challenge I had to answer, the same way I once had to answer a 250-pound lineman coming at me.”

Immobilized, inconsolable, he missed being part of a USC team that went 23-1-1 over the next two seasons, winning two Rose Bowls.

Years passed.

Hemingway tried to occupy himself. He couldn’t drive a car because his reflexes were too slow. Taxicabs were cumbersome and expensive. His weight fluctuated, all the way down to 160 pounds in the hospital, all the way above 300 pounds during his post-surgical depression. For nearly a dozen years, Art struggled to find that inspiration.

Ron Orr had one. A former swimmer, now USC’s senior assistant athletic director, Orr had been a teammate of Mike Nyeholt, a three-time All-American who became paralyzed from the waist down after a motorcycle flipped. A fund-raising event was organized called “Swim for Mike,” but when Nyeholt himself turned up to take part, its name was changed to “Swim With Mike.”

It became an annual event, raising nearly $1.5 million--including $190,000 this year alone--for a fund for physically challenged athletes.

“Art Hemingway was just the kind of person for whom this program was designed,” says Orr, who helped arrange a scholarship and convenient campus apartment. “He’s smart, he’s willing, he’s got so much to offer. All he needed was a little push to get started.”

Returning to school at age 30, Art explored various avenues. He considered a law degree, so he could become a handicap consultant. He wants to write for the local paper. He wants to go to grad school and study political science.

Last summer, Art made a solemn promise, just before his father died of a heart attack at 64.

“I swore to my dad I would get my degree, if it’s the last thing I ever do. I would do it for him and I would do it for me.”

He motors around campus, from class to class. Because typing or handwriting is virtually impossible, he dictates into a tape recorder, or gets assistance. Fred Stroock, assistant athletic director for academic services, says of Hemingway: “This is someone who has been extremely diligent from the first day he got here. His grade-point average is now over 3.0. He never misses a class. He turns in all his work. Obviously, Arthur gets extended time on tests and other considerations, which we’re only too glad to provide. In every way, he has been a model student.”

Hemingway enjoys reading Hemingway, although, being Hawaiian-born, he also has a penchant for James Michener. He likes studying astronomy, because: “Who can tell what’s in the stars? Look what happened to me.”

He knows where he is going now.

It wasn’t always that way.

There was this girl, from Italy, beautiful, dark hair, voluptuous, like someone right out of a story. Art couldn’t take his eyes off her. From the first time he spotted her on campus, several years ago, he was struck by her beauty.

One morning, she strolled by, in a short summer dress. Art gazed at her, much the same way he once did the rolling hills of Spain. He couldn’t take his eyes off her.

He drove his golf cart into a tree.

“Hey, what can I tell you?” he says. “I’m a typical college student.”

Life taught him how it felt, to have and have not. Today, it is not only there for him, it is within walking distance.