A Boyhood of Abuse, a Warning to Others

He was a college instructor and a part-time grammar-school basketball coach and knew how to manipulate kids. He drew them in with the patience of a cat stalking its prey. When he knew they were vulnerable, he leaped.

Chuck Rosenthal sits in my office and talks about the man and about six years of sexual abuse at his hands. He won’t name him, he said, and he’s not going to sue anyone, because relief--not vengeance or money--is what he’s seeking. He wants to warn others about the smiles that conceal the true nature of tigers, and he wants his soul back.

Rosenthal is 50 now and a successful novelist. He teaches creative writing at Loyola Marymount College and lives not far from me in the Santa Monica Mountains. I’ve known him for years as a steady, no-nonsense kind of guy, part of a circle of writers who reside in the tree-shrouded canyons.

I wasn’t ready for what he told me.

Rosenthal was a grade-school student, a 13-year-old who desperately wanted to play basketball. He lived in a small, blue-collar town in Pennsylvania where sports was about the most important thing on anyone’s mind.

The coach I’ll call Mr. Ex was a balding, pot-bellied, ebullient man who later became president of a small college. He was friends with all the big-shots in town, including the mayor. He was also a skillful sexual predator.

At first, Mr. Ex told Rosenthal that he wasn’t good enough to play on the basketball team, but graciously offered to help get him into shape. That’s where it began.

“He was full of high praise and heated condemnation,” Rosenthal said of the coach as we sat talking on a soft spring day. “If you didn’t perform well at basketball, he’d take you into a storage room, pull down your pants and hit you with his hand.” He paused, remembering. “It was a slow process to physical transgression.”

Slow indeed.

Rosenthal loved athletics. Even in grammar school he played football and was on the swimming team. Today he stands at 6 foot, 1 inch, and is as trim as any athlete.

It was important for him to play on the basketball team and important for him to be the best. Mr. Ex offered him a chance at both. He flattered Rosenthal with special attention that included massages in his apartment and, later, gifts--all the while lecturing him on the value of honor and loyalty.

That first time he ordered Rosenthal to strip for a massage, the boy objected. Mr. Ex exploded and told him to get out, his career in basketball was over.

“I wanted to play basketball, so I let him,” Rosenthal said. “I was a kid. What did I know?”

From there, it progressed to a manipulation of his genitals, always for reasons of releasing his muscle tension. He was doing the same, Rosenthal said, to other students too, but they never talked about it with one another, aside from veiled references to “weird things” Mr. Ex would do. Rosenthal felt he couldn’t tell his parents, and they never found out. The terrible secret would stay locked in his heart for years.

Rosenthal was 14 when he admitted to himself that he was having sex with his basketball coach. He tells me about it in a matter-of-fact tone, missing nothing, opening up to me in detail, as he had promised he would.

“I didn’t know what to do,” he said, pausing momentarily as though I might offer a solution or ridicule him or not believe. “He was buying me clothes and taking me on trips. He helped get work for both my mom and dad. He even got my sister into college.”

Mr. Ex also gave him liquor at 14, a habit, Rosenthal admits, that led to an addiction, not only to booze but also to drugs. It lasted for years and precipitated a behavior that at times seemed suicidal, including a jump from a 20-foot tower.

When the “game” turned to sex, Rosenthal said, he imagined himself being a woman yielding to a man, rather than a young boy being raped by a predator.

“I kept going back to him,” he said, in obvious anguish. “I thought I loved him, and he convinced me I needed him.”

Rosenthal quit seeing Mr. Ex when he was 19, after learning that his younger brother, also a basketball player, was receiving “special treatment” from the coach. They quit at the same time.

After years of counseling, a failed marriage and God knows how much inner torment, Rosenthal left Pennsylvania and settled here. He is married to a poet, Gail Bronsky, and has told her everything. The marriage, he said, saved him.

One can wonder why it took so long for him to be rid of the man who had so utterly defiled him. Conflicting emotions kept him there, seduced by the hypnotic power of a Svengali who knew how to bide his time, and how to give and take in the proportions that would empower him while weakening his prey.

The coach mixed pleasure, shame and guilt to seduce the boy, said Dr. Penelope Trickett, a USC expert on the impact of sexual abuse on children. A victim’s thinking becomes distorted, she said, and he disassociates himself from the abuse. “It’s as if he’s watching what’s going on and not actually participating.”

The coach, Rosenthal said, is old and sick now, and he is leaving him to die with whatever peace his conscience will allow. He is a threat to no one anymore. Rosenthal is talking about it as a warning to others, and as a way too, I suppose, of quelling the demons that emerge in the stillest hours of the mind’s night.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. He’s at al.martinez@latimes.com.