King of the Mild Frontier: An Ill-Advised Autobiography Read online

  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 m
ore 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.

  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 loca
l 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.