Ninety-nine McClellan band kids had been dropped off that August afternoon with their instruments at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway. About equally divided between sophomores, juniors and seniors (McClellan was a three year high school), we were there to learn our new halftime show for the fall. As it turned out, I was going to learn a little extra.
We were facing a week with five hours per day of marching in the broiling Arkansas humidity. Only the very stupidest could stand at the very gates of Hell, nostril hairs singeing with every breath, and imagine it would be exciting and fun. Of course, I’m speaking of me.
The previous year, the first evening of marching camp unexpectedly devolved into aerobic exercise. Like the annual running of the bulls in Pamplona, the freshman boys fled before the seniors, who were determined to welcome us in that ancient and time-honored way; purely sadistic torture.
The preferred technique was to hold a sophomore flat on his back, pull up his shirt, and slap his stomach with manic glee until it glowed rosy red. Arkansas was then, as now, the tastefully oversized silver buckle in America’s Bible Belt. Had we thought to suggest that such hazing seemed slightly homoerotic, we might have remained unmolested by all those good Southern Baptist seniors. I can imagine their reactions had someone under their careful ministrations rolled their eyes and moaned, “Oh, baby, keep it up! Just like that! Oh, yay-yes!”
My friend John Robinson sported an astonishing profusion of curly blond hair. He could grow a moustache at an age before most boys’ testicles dropped. His wooly chest, which John cavalierly displayed with several extra undone buttons on his shirt, put one in mind of a baritone-playing Norse gorilla in Levis.
The seniors had made special plans for proud, hirsute John. While pinning him down, they mercilessly slathered his chest with Nair, an odorous and mildly toxic foam used to dissolve unwanted body hair. John struggled and protested for the full five minutes required for the depilatory to work its magic, but when he was released, his hair remained completely intact. At least for that evening, John was our hero simply because the Nair could not deforest his manly pectoral thatch!
That earlier year, I had spent the evening in hiding, perched in a barn-sized air conditioning unit. The enormous machinery’s droning hum offered two benefits; it was calming in a Zen-like way, and it drowned out the pitiable screams of my fellow prey.
Happily for me, this year I was neither sophomore nor senior, and the primal hunt proceeded without me.
I had a lot of friends in the band, many of whom fell into three distinct categories. I spent the most time with the “science kids,” Mark Cook, Tim Teague, Carra Bussa and Mark Griffin. We threw all night chess parties, where we drank Dr. Pepper and Coca-Cola from brandy snifters. We loved science fiction almost as much as pizza, don’t forget the extra cheese, thank you very much. To top it off, we formed our own German band consisting of trumpet, tenor saxophone and three trombones, and we played such crowd pleasers as “Ach du lieber Augustine.” We were real, you know, chick magnets.
My second gang was the “cool kids,” Susan West, Holly Anderson, David Stebbins and Kenny Trantham. They were the brainy bunch, sharper and far more dedicated than me, and were justifiably acknowledged as teachers’ favorites. I’m not sure how I got included in this group, since most teachers regarded me on par with gum stuck in their bangs.
The third classification of my colleagues was the most beguiling, the most tempting, the most excitingly dangerous to a naturally nebbish lad like me. This cohort, the “crazy kids,” was really a loose conglomeration of fellows with a common joie de vivre. Among them I counted Andy McGee and Richard Manson, Billy “Wild Bill” Pearrow, Randy Motley and Buddy Presley. A certain fire in their blood elevated them to a slightly risky level, and I, self-restrained to the point of dormancy, relied on them to drag me out of my somnambulant safe zone.
Randy, Billy and Buddy snagged me after dinner that first night at band camp and ushered me into their room. Before my astonished gaze, like magicians releasing doves from under a handkerchief, they unveiled hefty bottles of rum and whiskey. These jugs were large enough to pickle the entire brass section with plenty left over to get the flute section pleasantly cross-eyed as well.
Years later, Buddy informed me that my memory was somewhat muddled by subsequent events, and that it was vodka and bourbon rather than rum and whisky. That is likely true as I did not know the difference or even care because it all tasted like Esso High Octane to me. Either combination would have ensured that the evening’s undertaking followed in the footsteps of Wile E. Coyote, with unintended and slightly disastrous results.
Unfamiliar with my burning intellectual curiosity about the effects of alcohol on human consciousness, they naïvely invited me to have a little tipple. Before they knew it, I was upending a bottle, the amber liquid bubbling down my gullet. With a few startled expletives, they wrestled the bottle from my hands, but too late! Stage one of the great experiment was underway. Inspired by Neil Armstrong, I was one giant leap on my way to a lunar rendezvous.
Several periods of time sneakily passed without my knowledge or consent, and soon I was striding up and down the hallway, Groucho Marx style. Heedlessly mixing pop culture references, I was laughing like a mad scientist after too many hits of nitrous oxide.
Before long, I threw up. A truly spectacular multimedia event according to those unlucky enough to witness it, my non-Olympic hurling lasted about four days, subjectively speaking. I’m told the judges were suitably impressed with both my form and endurance.
At some point, I was standing in the shower, held up by unknown hands, marveling stupidly at the steam billowing around me. From somewhere outside my unfocused vision, Andy invoked his nickname for me with doleful empathy, exclaiming “oh, shit, Shirley!”
While my innards were twisting the night away, Billy and Buddy got locked out of their room. They had left the room guarded by Randy, now rendered incapable of mastering any mechanism as devilishly complicated as a door knob by virtue of having passed out on the bed.
Limply standing in line for breakfast the next morning, I entered the final phase of my scientific research, the hangover. My head throbbed like the dying heart of the last mastodon, run through by a Neolithic javelin and awaiting a swift coup de grâce (mastodons love ze pretentious French metaphors, bien sûr)!
I struggled to not sink to my knees as we inched closer to the cafeteria serving area. Rather than just propping me up, my inconsiderate friends kept speaking to me. I did not know where they found the strength to talk so loudly, as even my vocal chords ached. Surely during the night I had been thrown from the roof and lay awaiting an ambulance, only to be run over like saxophone-wielding road kill?
If I live a thousand years, I will never forget the sheer horror, the utterly tactile revulsion I felt encountering row upon row of greasy breakfast sausages staring up at me. I swear I could hear the little swine laughing contemptuously at my nauseated discomfort! Or perhaps that was just the drummers doing monkey imitations for the flag line.
The rest of that first day of marching camp was spent learning and reviewing basic march steps. Our marching style, called “ankle-knee”, was as unnatural as broccoli flavored ice cream. To master it, we had to lift one foot and balance on the other while our stance was checked for perfection, again and again and again. Forget differential equations! Prolonged balancing on one foot with an epic hangover is really hard!
We also learned left and right faces, and, most horrific of all, the about face. Spin, rest, spin, rest, spin. Had he witnessed this diabolical torment, Satan himself would have felt so sorry for me that he would have sent flowers and a nice box of chocolate.
Thinking it odd how hangovers seemed funny on TV, I realized it was only funny to the other, non-hungover characters, but that realization came too late to save me. I regretted my inadvertent masochism, and I concluded that it was most sincerely not the thing for me.
Throughout the day I wondered, is it possible to die just from wishing? On one hand, I felt as ready for death as I might ever be, but I had hoped to make it to first base with a real, live girl before shucking off my mortal coil. I credit anticipation of exposure to an actual three dimensional female breast or, even better, two of them, with keeping me alive that day.
Other questions I pondered as minutes passed like a procession of giant tortoises on quaaludes:
Discounting any possibility of moderation, who in their right mind would drink booze realizing such misery was a consequence? Did people not grasp the cause and effect nature?
Why, oh why, would one undergo such tribulations to briefly metamorphose into a witless, albeit happy, ninny? Did they relish a fling with insensibility?
As a chronically starchy white guy, was I doomed to projectile barfing and a throbbing cranium every time I wanted to unselfconsciously dance with girls?
And to think, people went to college for this.
