King of the Mild Frontier (6 page)

A traumatic ordeal that seemed to last a lifetime was actually over in a little more than seventy seconds. My hands weighed my arms down like anvils. “Get them up!” Tarter demanded. I pushed with all my might, but my
shoulders burned and gave out as my hands sank involuntarily to my sides. Bonnie looked at her watch and passed Patsy a dime. Tarter looked at his watch and shook his head in disgust. “You owe me a recess.” Back at my desk I stuck my nose in my social studies book, pretending to give a shit about the industrial revolution to avoid absorbing the humiliating hits from classmates I would gladly have humiliated had they been in my shoes. Silently I congratulated myself. Seventy seconds was by twelve seconds my personal best.

Tarter may have unwittingly given me my first push toward Stotanism, but what prepared me best was undoubtedly my high-school C Club initiation. Jocks from Cascade High School have migrated far and wide over the years, some as far as Garden Valley and Horseshoe Bend to the South, and North all the way to Riggins and Grangeville, and we make our livings at wildly diverse minimum-wage jobs, but what
all
of us have in common is a colossal distaste for oysters and olives. That is not a coincidence.

Often when I'm talking with groups of students in high or middle schools, I imagine they're expecting me to recount how far I had to walk to school through ten-foot snowdrifts with fifty pounds of books, wearing nothing but flip-flops, uphill both ways; those things the geezers of my generation used to tell
me
about. When I started writing books about
teenagers, I was thirty-five and needed to bridge only one generation to connect my adolescence with theirs. Now it's two. What I say and believe is that humans of any generation are far more similar than we are different. True, if you were a drug abuser in Cascade, Idaho, in 1964, you'd pretty much have to do it with a case of beer; and if someone brought a gun to school, it was because he went hunting in the early morning and left the gun in the gun rack of his pickup, which disturbed no one because there were three or four other pickups in the parking lot similarly armed, and the thought of bringing those weapons inside to take care of business simply didn't exist.

An event of less than life-changing proportions might take two or three days to make the evening news (which lasted fifteen minutes), if it made it on at all. No Internet: The information highway was a single-lane logging road winding through steep mountains, dead-ending at some nameless “crick.” But all teens, then and now, are
becoming,
and that is the connector. We're watching and considering and wondering what happens next; finding our places in the universe; entertaining beliefs that will become guideposts for our thoughts and actions for the rest of our lives. I rely on mutual agreement on that concept to boost my credibility when I'm standing before a group of teenagers.

Which is why I
never
tell them about C Club initiation. They would say, “Die, old man! We are not the
least
bit similar. We are not the same species. Spock, are you out of your Vulcan mind?”

See, earning an athletic letter at Cascade High School was a mixed blessing. To become a full-fledged letterman with all the rights and privileges thereof, you were required not only to letter but to join the C Club, which meant you must go through C Club initiation, after which you were eligible to pick a girl from the top row, though it didn't guarantee you'd be on the top row when the eligible girls did their picking. Always an element of risk.

To put the entire C Club experience into perspective, I need you to understand that the C Club sponsored
one
activity during the entire school year: a shotgun raffle. (Speaking of our similarities and differences,
you
show up at school with a plastic pistol no bigger than your fingernail from your old G.I. Joe set and get three days out-of-school suspension and a three-hundred-dollar psychological evaluation. My C Club raffled off a
shotgun
and handed it over to the winner
in school, during school hours.)
The income generated from ticket sales went into the price of next year's shotgun. That's it. Thank you, C Club, for making Cascade High School and the world a safer and better place. So while
we didn't have to do anything more than sell raffle tickets to our parents and siblings and extended families to
be
in the C Club, what we had to do to
get
into the C Club would earn a whole bunch of people—starting with the principal and the C Club faculty adviser—thirty years to life if it happened today.

The initiation was shrouded in secrecy, but stories about it leaked like stories out of the Clinton White House, which wasn't invented yet. They couldn't be true, they just
couldn't
be true.

They were true.

Each initiate was required to make a hardwood paddle, three-feet long with ten holes and beveled edges, an exact replica of the paddle hanging in the principal's office. That is equivalent to requiring the condemned man to supply rifles for the firing squad and polish the stocks. The best of the paddles, as judged by the school principal, would hang in the office, ready for use by the likes of Tarter and the myriad others who shared his mindset, for the remainder of the year.

As an initiate you spent initiation day wearing your clothes inside out and backward, underpants on the outside. Tight fit. You ran errands for lettermen and the girls they wanted to impress, carrying their books, addressing them as
royalty. At the end of the day the student body was called into the gymnasium so the lettermen could run you through more humiliating exercises, singing dumb songs, proposing to unsuspecting girls, playing Cuckoo—in which one initiate would kneel on top of a table with a wet, knotted towel and another would kneel underneath. Both were blindfolded. The one on the bottom was to stick his head out and yell, “Cuckoo! Cuckoo!” and the guy on top would swing the towel at the sound. If the guy on top missed, meet Mr. Hardwood Paddle. If the guy on the bottom got hit, meet Mr. Hardwood Paddle. Us Ramblers knew how to have fun.

In truth we actually welcomed this part of the festivities, because we had at least an inkling of what was to come when the sun went down. At the end of the school day, Ron Hall, the C Club president, gathered us together to instruct us to be at the gym at seven o'clock sharp, and be sure to take a
good
shower.

If your local library advertises my presence at Live at the Library and I don't show, it's because I've disappeared into the Witness Protection program, since as we entered the gymnasium that evening, we each signed an oath never to reveal the specifics of the upcoming event. They didn't threaten death and dismemberment (not necessarily in that order) for anyone breaking this oath; they
promised
it.

 

The gym doors slam shut. I have been dreading this since sixth grade, when I first heard the high-school kids at my dad's service station talking about it. I have particularly dreaded it since the beginning of this year, because I finally won a starting position on the football team, which meant there was no way around it. Some of my classmates lettered as sophomores; they get to deliver the torment, adding to my humiliation.

We leave our clothes in our lockers, stand naked in a line while President Hall reminds us of the sanctity of the event; when we walk out of here, we'll be men. Several mason jars filled with gray, oversized, slimy oysters sit on a table by the stage. The lettermen remove them from the jars, handing us one each. They're slick, they tell us, they'll go down easy. The paddles are cocked behind our bare butts. Just swallow those babies right down. But wait! These are awfully expensive oysters, they might want them back. They tie strings around one end of each oyster, wait till we swallow, then
pull them back.

As anyone who has ever undergone any procedure whose name ends in -oscopy knows, the Master of the Universe did a marvelous job engineering the human body. There are bones and muscles by the score we don't even notice most of the time, until we try to use them in some
way for which they're not designed. Like BACKWARD!!! Raw oysters are bad enough, but raw oysters on the way back up tickle the very edges of the imagination.

You couldn't send a Mars probe to the edges of my imagination from where we go next: the Olive Race.

Seven naked letterboys line up across one end of the gym on their hands and knees next to seven naked letterboys'
shoes,
staring downcourt at seven black, unpitted olives. At the sound of the cap pistol, we crawl to the other end,
sit on the olives and pick them up!!!!!!!!!,
stand and run, cheeks tight, back the length of the gym, to drop the olives into the shoes.

And the last guy has to eat one of the olives, selected at random.

Up until this point in my life I have choked a number of times in spectacular fashion, from the Fourth of July bike race to kissing a baseball bat in lieu of kissing Paula Whitson, but if I choke now I choke twice, once in the race and once on the olive, and thanks to my grandfather Glen and my mother, I'm running dead last.

Neither my grandfather nor my mother has a butt, and their posterioral DNA ran straight down the generational pike to me. To put it crudely: For those of us in that strain of the family, our butt cracks are simply the vortex of our
legs. There is none of the cushy excess essential to picking up an olive. I watch in dismay as one after another olive disappears into these lard asses, and I'm getting almost zero purchase. I'm half the basketball court behind when I finally get a good grip and begin waddling toward my shoe, watching my conquerors squat carefully and drop those little black nuggets one by one into their waiting footwear. Only Leonard Irwin hasn't finished, and he's squatting as I cross the free-throw line. He releases as I reach my shoe and smiles up at me as if to say, “Crutcher, you poor buttless bastard.” Only there is a God and He is a wrathful God and Leonard Irwin has done something
way
worse in his life than I have, because Leonard Irwin
misses his shoe.

My father was a World War II B-17 bomber pilot, noted for requiring pinpoint accuracy from his bombardier, and some of
that
DNA must have also come my way down the pike. For once someone else can be the bawlbaby, because I hear that olive drop directly onto the inside heel of my Chuck Taylor Converse All Star tennis shoe and roll toward the toe, and I know Leonard Irwin, and not I, has a one-way ticket for Gag City.

The rest of the initiation consists of events that, were I to describe them, could keep me high on the banned-books list for years to come. Suffice it to say that we learn two new
games, Choo-Choo I and Choo-Choo II, and another very inventive activity involving a bucket of bolts, a string, and an appendage that is not an arm or a leg. By the end of the festivities, I have only budding tufts of hair on my head (having visited the C Club barber shop) and budding blisters on my butt. The final humiliation includes the substitution of Tabasco sauce for Preparation H.

When we are showered and back in our street clothes, we sit in the bleachers, strangely euphoric for having survived. President Hall again brings out our signed confidentiality oaths and impresses upon us the importance of keeping this sacred coming-of-age ritual private.

That was 1962. I believe I am the first to squeal.

IN THIRD GRADE I TOLD MY
classmates that our coal furnace wasn't hot, that you could crawl inside when it was burning full blast and freeze. Because I wouldn't give it up, I got a bloody nose and a trip to the office, where they stuffed cotton into my nostrils and asked where I'd gotten such an interesting notion. It wasn't a notion, I said back, ready to defend my truth if need be; my dad told me.

My dad was a guy you
believed.
He was nearly six feet, five inches tall and weighed around 230. His I.Q. was once measured at 180, though he was quick to say that was an inaccurate measurement because he had read so much more
imagination raced me toward the sun. “You'd melt,” he said. “You know, there are some conversations we should probably keep at home. What do you think?”

“How do I know which ones?”

“Well, if you're even close to getting a bloody nose, that's one of the conversations.” Not long after receiving that note, my father took to introducing me as Lever. Nature's simplest tool. My sister was quite taken with that moniker. She calls me that to this day.

The school principal wanted my dad to stop giving me lessons my mind wasn't old enough to wrap around, but that was never to be. He just looked for simpler situations. In early December of that same year, he and Taylor Bowlden loaded my brother and me into the back of our jeep to hunt down a Christmas tree. In those days no red-blooded Idaho male would be caught dead buying a Christmas tree from a pile in front of a store, or even cutting one from a Christmas-tree farm, which, if it was invented yet, certainly hadn't worked its way to our part of the country. If you were under the age of eighty-five and had a fake tree, you could legally be cut up for Christmas decorations. The jeep was an army model with a canvas top over the cab and an open back. Neither my father nor Taylor Bowlden subscribed to the notion that children should be coddled, kept warm and
safe. They subscribed to the notion that adults get the goodies because they've been alive longer. So my brother and I sat in the freezing open back of the jeep while they sat in the covered cab with a heater and a small flask of whiskey.

We lived in the Rocky Mountains. There were trees two blocks from my house that could have stood in nicely as Christmas trees in a pinch, but hunting for the perfect tree was like hunting for the perfect five-point buck elk, only you didn't have to shoot it. The farther you drove to get it, the more of a fer-real Christmas dude you were, and we spent from eleven Sunday morning until four thirty Sunday afternoon tracking the elusive perfect tree. By the time we arrived back home, my
colon
was frozen and my hands were numb as bricks. I was shaking so hard my voice sounded like I'd swallowed a vibrator. Taylor Bowlden watched us from the toasty cab as we jumped out of the back of the jeep and stumbled into the house on numb feet and said, “That'll toughen those youngsters up.” Taylor Bowlden would have been the recipient of the same one-finger salute Bob Gardner got back on that fateful Fourth of July, but I'd have had to break the rest of my fingers off to deliver it.

I ran into the bathroom and began running hot water into the sink. Crutch passed in the outside hall and saw the steam rising, stepped in, and stopped me a split second
before I could plunge my icy fingers in. He drained the sink and ran cold water. My eyes widened like a window thrown open on a sunny day, and up popped bawlbaby. I had seen my father as insensitive but never as a brutal torturer. “They're already cold!” I screamed at him.

My sister saw what he was about to do and went screaming for our mother.

“Remember when I told you about the sun and the furnace?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, this is that same lesson.”

“I got a bloody nose.”

“Not from me you didn't. I will guarantee you, young man, that if you stick your hands into hot water when they're that cold, you're going to be crying a lot harder than you're crying right now.”

I had long ago sharpened my radar for the term “young man.” More often than not it prefaced or followed a warning, but under every circumstance it signified truth.

He eased my hands into the cold water. I swear to God I thought he was a magician. I had watched him refill that sink with freezing water, yet it warmed my hands like the kind of mittens they should obviously have bought me before dragging me into the freezing winter to go hunt
Christmas trees from the back of a jeep.

“Nothing's really cold or hot,” he said. “It's all about the temperature of your hands compared to the temperature of the water. Everything's relative.”

When the letter from the principal arrived, asking him to explain to me that the water that came out of the cold tap in our sink really was cold and that I had barely escaped another nosebleed defending the antithesis to that, he resumed introducing me as Lever.

My dad's problem was simply impatience with child development. The next time that lesson presented itself, I had relativity down cold.

Everyone in our high school looked forward to their Senior Sneak. It wasn't really a sneak, because the administration knew about it in advance and even provided buses and chaperones. Seniors got a day and a half off from school, which, coupled with a weekend, allowed three days and three blissful nights at the Bar D Dude Ranch outside Pendleton, Oregon. The boys came back with stories of sexual conquests in the bunkhouse, in the rowboat, on horseback, and in the baggage compartment of the bus on the return trip. The girls came home with stories of elbowing the boys in the side of the head as they attempted to grope them in the bunkhouse, in the rowboat,
on their horses; stories they must certainly have later filed under the comprehensive title “Boys/Men Are Pigs.”

It was traditional for the juniors to try to prevent the Sneak, but usually the seniors left suddenly under the cloak of a fire drill or late at night, and in recorded memory no one could remember the seniors even being slowed down. By my junior year I knew I was without the requisite talents to make myself remembered and revered at Cascade High in any of the conventional, acceptable ways, so the Sneak presented the kind of challenge that made my teeth itch.

I began searching for ways to disable the bus. Though I had worked at my father's service station since the age of nine, my automotive prowess included little more than the ability to fill a vehicle with gas, check the oil, water, and fan belt, fix flats, lube, and change the oil. I also had just enough common sense to know that if I caused physical harm to that bus, our principal, Mr. Evans, would break at least two of his hardwood paddles over my butt.

I suppose I could blame my father; in fact, he's not alive anymore, so I will. It was he who told me that one of his college buddies had spread Limburger cheese on the manifold of Crutch's car right before he and my mother took off on their honeymoon. They drove more than three hundred miles with the windows rolled down, every bit as cold as I'd
been in the back of that jeep, and delaying the evening's festivities two or three hours while they huddled in bed thawing out their hormones. If a little Limburger cheese in the right place could slow the adrenaline flow of two virginal honeymooners (hey, they were my
parents
) for a couple of hours, a
lot
of Limburger cheese should slow down a classroom of seniors headed off to create new Rambler sexual myths.

I purchased the cheese from a local pusher sworn to silence and placed it in a locked room behind the furnace where you could freeze if you crawled in, but where Limburger cheese could slowly warm to a moldy stench over the month and a half before the Sneak was to take place. I brought a couple of other classmates in on my plan, and we began scheming to get the putrid cargo aboard the right bus at precisely the right moment. There were three to choose from: two newer thirty-passenger buses and an older forty-five-passenger one. We ruled out the big one because there were only thirteen seniors and the school would need that one to transport grade schoolers. The other two were identical, so we simply needed to keep our eyes and ears open for clues.

About a week and a half before D-Day, one of those buddies, Rick Calendar, a tall, gangly blond kid I'd known since before first grade, called me out of the room during
study hall and handed me a small, clear vial half-filled with a pea-soup-looking substance.

I took the vial. “What is it?”

“Smell it.”

His expression told me that was a bad idea.

“What is it?

“
Smell
it.”

I carefully unscrewed the cap, put it to my nose, and nearly snapped my head off my spine pulling away. If that smell were an explosive, it would be an atomic bomb, a hydrogen bomb, and a cobalt bomb strapped together and detonated over a puppy farm.

Calendar smiled. “Mink scent,” he said. “Boy mink gets a whiff of that and starts combing his fur and preening his whiskers. Time to get
frisky
.”

I wasn't aware mink wore gas masks to have sex.

There was an invitational track meet down in Boise, a good two-and-a-half hours away by school bus, the night before the seniors were to take off, and we got back to Cascade around midnight. Our intelligence told us they'd be leaving early, before any service stations opened, so we were sure they wouldn't be using the track bus. That left the other small bus as the target of our olfactory ambush. Larry Logue, the third accomplice, attempted to hide in the
school shop where the buses were parked, but Coach herded everyone out before he locked it up tight.

I slept fitfully on the couch, rose at about two, and descended to the furnace room. Even with the cheese in a closed container the entire room reeked, and my stomach turned over as I hustled back up the stairs toward fresh air.

It took forever to get into the shop where the targeted bus was parked. All doors were locked tight, and in the end we had to boost Calendar to a high window ledge so he could reach through a hole that had been broken out by a baseball. We were a good two hours behind schedule when that was finally accomplished. Our plan had been to put a dab of mink scent into each of several small plastic pill cups, unscrew the heat vents, and place the cups carefully inside, but we were now painfully short on time, and as a dim glow spread across the eastern horizon we knew we were only a few minutes from the seniors showing and giving us a mink-scent lunch, so we simply poured it through the grates of the side heater vents, spread the Limburger cheese around under the dashboard, and choking and gagging and holding our breath, ran way faster than any of us had run during the track meet the night before.

Fifteen minutes later we watched from a safe distance from behind a parked pickup across the street as the seniors
showed up ready for their myth-making trip to the Bar D, boarded with the most titillating of sexual hopes, and streamed off that bus like lemmings. It was four hours before a service station opened so they could gas and service the other bus, and though we didn't stop the Sneak, we gave it a significant delay—a victory for the class Principal Evans had, on more than one occasion, called a “nothing” class.

And here's the lesson in relativity. In the stifling, musky atmosphere of mink scent, a whiff of putrid, three-month-old Limburger cheese smelled like the sweetest of perfumes. The furnace isn't hot, if you go to the sun first. Freezing cold tap water isn't cold, if your hands have been subjected to the bitter elements for five hours ahead of time. And moldy warm Limburger cheese doesn't smell bad at all in the presence of a dark green potion from Hell.

Let me tell you what was bad, and I don't have a relative point to make this good: Principal Evans's reaction after he had to drive that bus three blocks to the Texaco service station to have it reamed out. (You will notice he did not drive it to Morris and Crutcher's Phillips 66 service station, and don't think I didn't consider that. Had we had the school contract that year, I certainly would have thought of a better place to dump my mink scent,
because bringing that bus into my own arena would have brought new meaning to the term “friendly fire.”)

When Evans finally was able to speak of this incident rationally, somewhere around our tenth reunion, he told us how he drove the bus a block at a time with his head out the driver's-side window, stopping three times to run off the bus and gasp for the kind of air that wouldn't enflame a young buck mink into running down the road after him, hoping to get lucky.

Once again I became famous, for being the ringleader of the group that ended Senior Sneaks for the Cascade Ramblers once and forever; a bit of an overreaction, I thought, on Mr. Evans's part, but of course I didn't have to drive the bus. (The following year, through much charm and groveling, we were able to talk him into “one more last chance.”)

In the end, the lesson taught me in the physical world by my father and Limburger cheese and mink scent extended into virtually every corner of my universe and made it possible for me to work in, and tell stories about, a world where searing pain and mind-numbing heroism flow side by side. They intermix and overlap, guiding me away from black-and-white judgments that might come back to haunt and humble me. No one is pretty; no one is ugly. There is no Jesus without
Judas, no Martin Luther King, Jr., without the Klan; no Ali without Joe Frazier; no freedom without tyranny. No wisdom exists that does not include perspective. Relativity is the greatest gift.