King of the Mild Frontier (5 page)

Like many high-school gymnasiums, McCall's is built at one end of the school, with the inside entrance doors right at the end of that sideline. If I were to keep running straight, I'd run out into the school hall, where the drill team is lined up ready for their postgame performance and where concessions are sold. At least I don't do that.

I'm chugging for the baseline, ready to make my cut. I glance at the electronic scoreboard mounted just above the entrance to see I have plenty of time, get ready to make my cut, glance again at the entrance…

…and through that entrance walks Gerry Greene. She's carrying a Coke and a hot dog, talking with a friend…looking like Stella Stevens.

And I stop. This is a sighting.

My miscue lasts only a few seconds. Somewhere in the back of my consciousness is a roar (which turns out to be the entire Cascade contingent screaming, “Turn around, you jerk!”) and I snap to at the same moment the ball
pops!
off the back of my head and straight up into the bleachers. My false teeth spurt out of my mouth like a slap shot and skid to a stop at Gerry Greene's feet. I recognize her expression from back when the Cascade softball players got their first look at my batted-out face. She says, “Ugh” and steps around my teeth. Coach's hand grips the back of my jersey, and I'm scrambling for my teeth because I
know
where I'm spending the final minute of
this
game and do not want to be gumming it.

If you look through past issues of the school newspaper or the
Cascade News,
you will find no record of my participation in the 1962–63 basketball season. I finished with no statistics: not a point or a rebound, not an assist or a foul. But I did declare, and publicly insist to this very day, that on the night of the McCall game in January of 1963, I had a Coke and a hot dog with Gerry Greene.

JUST AFTER CHRISTMAS VACATION
of my senior year in high school, Chuck Steensland, my U.S. Government teacher and the senior-class counselor, caught me in the hall. “Crutcher,” he said, “where are you going to school?”

“I'm
in
school.”

“I mean college.”

“Actually,” I said, “I haven't thought a lot about it.”

“No time like the present,” he said.

I thought I had a lot more time, that you showed up the day college started, like I'd been doing for the past twelve years. I said that.

Steensland took me by the arm. “Allow me to show you our library,” he said, in obvious reference to the fact I had avoided that particular room for the past four years like a vampire avoids sunlight. Once inside he introduced me to the librarian, which he thought was pretty funny, and led me to a shelf containing a short row of college catalogs.

“Look through these,” he said. “Maybe you'll see something interesting. I'll be over here by the door, to make sure you don't escape.” Steensland was a first-year assistant football coach, with arms about the size of my head.

“I'll be right here if you need me,” I said.

I noticed most of the catalogs had one thing in common: They were either dark blue and white or black and white. Eastern Washington's was red and white. So I went there.

Little did I know that one well-thought-out decision would set me on the path to my athletic apex, where, among other things, I would be crowned a Stotan. I had tried my hand at competitive swimming during a couple of high-school summers, with pretty much the same degree of success I had experienced in other sports. Paula Whitson's dad had started a small team when someone down in Boise happened to get a look at her almost-perfect stroke and told him she had Olympic potential. When word spread through town that Paula would be swimming, Johnny Weissmuller
became my new personal hero and I developed an obsessive crush on the sport. Cascade's pool, fed by hot springs, was nineteen yards, seven inches long, too shallow at one end to flip a turn (even if any of us had known how) with no black line on the bottom to follow. I did not have Paula Whitson's perfect stroke (nor much of her attention) and finished far out of contention each time I actually entered a meet. But Eastern had a fledgling team with too few bodies to swim two relays, and when one of the team members saw me swim from one end of the pool to the other without stopping, he recruited me. It turned out that, with a little coaching and a lot of yards logged, this was my sport.

Actually, my Stotan roots run deep. I didn't even hear the term until I was a junior at Eastern, but when I look back I realize I was chosen from my earliest days.

A Stotan is a cross between a Stoic and a Spartan: simply put, a tough guy who shows no pain. The term was coined by Australian track coach Percy Cerruty in describing Herb Elliot, the world-record holder in the mile run from the late fifties and early sixties. Percy stated in an article for
Sports Illustrated
that Herb was the toughest athlete he'd ever coached; that Herb would routinely run the rest of the Australian national track team into the ground, then tear off his clothes and run over sand dune after sand dune in his
single-minded quest to become the best miler in the world and dominate his event in the 1960 Olympics. He did just that. Herb Elliot was a madman.

My college swimming coach happened to pick up that by then ancient
Sports Illustrated
one afternoon in 1966, and by the time we eight unsuspecting mermen wannabes showed for workout, he had translated the Stotan concept from land to water. From the moment I learned about him, I wanted to poke out Herb Elliot's eyes with a sharp, smoldering stick.

We walked onto the pool deck to see, scrawled on the blackboard at the far side of the pool,
Looking for a Few Good Men.
We pretended not to see, but Coach, the G. Gordon Liddy, the Bobby Knight of swim coaches, directed our attention to the fact that he needed volunteers for Stotan Week. We asked what was Stotan Week, and he said show up the first week of Christmas vacation and we'd find out. Oh, no, we said, we don't volunteer for something before we know what it is.

It was ritual to end each workout with twenty twenty-five-yard sprints. On Stotan sign-up day we were up to fifty when, as team captain, I finally gasped, “How many of these are we going to do?”

When there were six names on the Stotan volunteer
sheet over by the table, he thought we might call it a night. Did I mention Coach had recently returned from two years in Army Airborne? The man knew how to get his volunteers.

Eastern Washington State College closed up tighter than a fat man's underpants over Christmas vacation. No dorms, no dinner. No problem. One of our number, Dumbo Banger, the self-described first authentic hippie of EWSC, lived in a condemned apartment above the Beehive Tavern in downtown Cheney, Washington, which he rented for nine dollars a month. The apartment had no electricity save for a single-plug extension cord running out the window, along the side of the building, which plugged in behind the bar downstairs, giving Dumbo access to electricity for one electrical appliance at a time and leaving him in the constant dilemma of choosing light or heat. The only furniture in this palatial suite was a single bed with, crumpled at the foot, sheets that hadn't been washed since the Truman Administration. The true meaning of “hippie,” we were to discover, was “unwashed.” The day Dumbo moved in, he had purchased a brand-new seat belt from the NAPA auto-parts store across the street and mounted it on the toilet. If you went into the bathroom in Dumbo's place and he didn't hear that familiar click, he pounded on the door until he heard you strap yourself in. Liability, he said, in case you
blasted off. The toilet alone got Dumbo a starring role as Lionel Serbousek in my book
Stotan!

So the rest of us dropped our mattresses out of our seventh-story dorm windows into the back of a borrowed pickup, toted them off to Dumbo's palatial suite, and holed up for Stotan Week, which went like this: Be on the deck in your tank suit at eight o'clock each morning. Work out until noon. Experience
not one minute's
rest. The preferred (read, “required”) method for initial entry into the water each day was to march out to the end of the one-meter diving board, execute a military about-face, fold your hands across your stomach, and fall backward, body rigid. Piking your body before entry cost you fifty push-ups. Failing to yell
“Stotan!”
as you fell cost you fifty push-ups. You always volunteered to go first, to avoid the sound of your buddies' backs slapping on the water, increasing your anxiety in anticipation of your own doing the same. Coach wore his black-belted karate
gi
to let us know if we tried to escape he'd simply kick us back into the water. He carried an oversized battery-powered megaphone, through which he delivered all instructions at maximum decibels. If a Stotan were to miss a time standard on a swim or break down during any of the hundreds of drills, Coach would position the bell of the megaphone next to that Stotan's ear and question his gender in very unflattering
terms. During intervals in the interval-training swims we were racking off push-ups and sit-ups and dips, or (his favorite) bear-walking—down on all fours—around the twenty-five-foot-square deck, the surface of which was so rough your hands began bleeding after fifteen yards; then out the door, over an eighteen-inch snowbank, around the building, and back in through the opposite door into the ingeniously named Torture Lane, where you sprinted twenty-five yards, pulled yourself out of the pool, racked off ten push-ups, sprinted another twenty-five, racked off another ten, sprinted another twenty-five…until he got tired. After bear-walking that far in the snow, your hands felt as if you'd grabbed a fistful of bumblebees when they hit the water.

Our afternoons were spent bundled in sleeping bags on our mattresses in Dumbo's fifty-five-degree apartment, cursing the day Herb Elliot was born and screaming in alphabetical order the names of the STDs we hoped Coach's wife had contracted at the hands of wimpy, sensitive lovers and antiwar protesters.

We survived. Because we hung together, we survived. Nearly twenty years later when I brought my rendition of that time into my book, I did not characterize Coach as Attila the Coach but toned down the description of the training so it would appear choreographed to bring us right
to the edge of our potential. Such is fiction. In truth, anyone who allowed himself to go through Stotan Week had earned himself a bona fide mental health diagnosis.

 

But you don't fall for this Stotan stuff unless you've been groomed for it; Stotans don't materialize out of thin air. There is brainwashing that must occur first, torturous abuse. It was the future Stotan part of me who stood on my pedals, middle finger in rigid salute, cursing the heavens and Bob Gardner as my bicycle sank deeper and deeper into the mud. It was the Stotan part of me who squared off with Jon Probst (who worked with me at my dad's service station) when I was a freshman in high school and he was a junior, two years older, thirty pounds heavier and infinitely stronger, for a one-for-one shoulder punch-out. The object was to make the other guy quit. I'd punch his shoulder as hard as I could, leaving my arm numb from wrist to elbow. He'd smile and punch my shoulder so hard I got whiplash. I'd smile and punch him again. His next one would move me over six inches, and I'd ask if that was
really
all the harder he could hit and unload on him one more time. My punches were little more than an annoyance; his were realigning my skeleton. But in the end he'd stop because if he hit me one more time he'd have to find a place to hide
my body. He'd go back to work and I'd go clean the restrooms, careful not to come out until there was no more evidence of tears.

I had learned back in sixth grade there is more than one way to be tough. By then I had been working at my dad's service station for almost two years, and the fact that I had found the key to the candy-bar machine was making itself evident in my body design, which was fast beginning to resemble a pink marshmallow Christmas tree. Narrow at the shoulders and broad at the hip, still waiting for my first real muscle, I might as well have just inserted those candy bars under the skin around my waist like a camouflaged money belt. You could call me many things, but rugged wasn't one of them. Enter Mr. Sandy Tarter, sixth-grade concentration-camp warden.

Up until sixth grade, I had a clean record, if you exclude the day in fifth grade when I asked the teacher why the skin under her arms jiggled so much when she wrote on the chalkboard. (Interesting how, after that, she began locking her elbow to her side while she wrote on the board.)

Mr. Tarter was my class's first male teacher. That could have been a good thing, but Tarter wasn't just any male. Calling Sandy Tarter a no-nonsense kind of guy would be like calling our current differences with Al Qaeda a slight
misunderstanding. Tarter was the reverend down at the Valley Bible Center, an Old Testament kind of dude who believed in original sin, which meant you had already done the bad thing for which you should be punished with swift and sure precision. For Tarter, the rod not to be spared was the three-foot, ten-hole hardwood paddle with the beveled edges hanging in the principal's office, and he'd bring it in contact with your butt cheeks at the slightest provocation. In a classroom discussion about our home lives one day, Gene Hamlin said his mother spanked him and his brother every morning because she knew they didn't have it in them to go through the day performing a deserving deed, and Tarter said, “Your mother is an astute woman, Mr. Hamlin. I suggest you ask her to join the P.T.A. and spread the word to some other mothers in this town who may be a little lax, judging from their children's behavior.” He paused and scanned the room. “You know who you are.”

If you were to commit the misdemeanor of speaking out of turn in Tarter's class, he would likely as not order you to stand in front of the class, arms at a ninety-degree angle to your body, palms up (kind of a crucifixion position, minus the cross) until he said you could put them down. If you complained or if the original crime was closer to a felony, say passing a note or chewing gum or sneaking a SweeTART
from your front pocket to your mouth just as you pretended to cough, he would place a book in each of those outstretched arms. If you complained further, he added books. (No wonder I didn't like books.)

What I liked about Tarter was his capacity to reduce us all to bawlbabies, making me decidedly more comfortable with my peers. He is the example I use to this day when pointing out the constitutional wisdom of separation of church and state. Up until the day before Easter break, my punishments in the crucifixion position had always been with other kids, so the humiliation factor was diminished by numbers. But on that day I committed some solo crime and was asked (read, “commanded”) to stand before my classmates at the front of the room alone, arms extended.

In the fully developed emotionally healthy human being, the concept “There but for the grace of God” is one that invites compassion: observing that person caught doing what you didn't get caught doing and offering silent support. In the fully developed eleven- or twelve-year-old, who is at best a forty-percent-developed human being, that concept is translated into “There but for the grace of God…Ha! Ha! Ha!” A titter ran through the classroom, stifled when Tarter shot his you-want-to-be-next? look across the room. Patsy Cantrell and Bonnie Heavrin, ranch girls who were known
to bet on
anything,
passed a note back and forth which, I was sure contained their estimates of how long I would last, plus the amount of the wager. Neither was Paula Whitson to me, but Bonnie was beginning to develop breasts, transforming her automatically into someone you didn't want laughing at you.

I decided my class was about to witness ruggedness in the form of tenacity heretofore unimagined. I fixed my eyes on a spot above their heads, extended my arms as if I were suffering the children to come unto me, and dug in. I sang the lyrics to “Hang Down Your Head, Tom Dooley” in my head, called up what I could remember of
Horton Hatches the Egg.
I tried to recite the alphabet backward, getting all the way to X. Rivulets of perspiration followed one another down the cottage cheese of my torso, slowing at the love handles, then speeding up again to soak into the elastic of my undershorts. Darkness moved in from the sides. I stared directly into Bonnie Heavrin's eyes, taunting myself with the threat of humiliation. I stared at her chest. She made a fist and I closed my eyes.