The Boo (23 page)

ME AND THE BOO

I just missed being selected regimental commander my senior year at The Citadel. Only five hundred cadets had a better chance of being chosen. Jim Probsdorfer, a glittering example of military virtue, edged me out in a fiercely contested battle. To help sooth my ruffled feathers, I was offered a position of command and responsibility as a senior private in the third squad, second platoon of Romeo Company. I accepted the job with the poker face and jutting jaw of the defeated soldier.

From the very beginning of my tenure at The Citadel, I never qualified in anyone’s mind as a model cadet. Nor did anyone prophesy that my name would one day be compared to Hannibal’s or Napoleon’s in discussions about military strategists. I never learned to clean a rifle, never cured the odd, bouncing walk that cost “R” Company several parades, and never felt comfortable in the uniform other cadets wore like a pelt. The shock of “hell night,” when I stood terrified before the onslaught of a world gone mad, when the cadre shrieked and brutalized the eight squads of freshmen offered to them, never left me. To see plebe after plebe fall to the quadrangle, sweating hideously, unconscious and numb, bothered my frail sensibilities. To see arms go limp from pushups, legs grow useless from running in place, and voices grow hoarse from screaming puzzled me. To see the hooked noses and bloodshot eyes of upperclassmen pressed against my face, their fetid breath hot against my neck and ears, their mouths cruel and twisted beneath the glare of the barracks lights, terrified me. The shock of this one long night of tolerated sadism ended any love affair I might have had with the plebe system. My goal in life from that moment was to somehow escape from being sucked into the delusion that screaming lunatics with stripes on their shoulders and bars on their hats were even remotely connected with leadership. Nor did I believe the confines of the fourth battalion represented the world as it was or as it should be. My Citadelian personality was forged on the second night of my college career when after an hour of intense, magnified racking, a bugle blew mercifully and I took one step toward my room, fell to my knees, crawled to my bed, and spent a sleepless night wondering how the fates had plotted against me and how in God’s name the furies had managed to bring me under this vindictive jurisdiction.

It was a hell of a beginning, but traumatic enough to force me to develop theories of survival which were to serve me well until the day of my graduation. The 720 day theory of grayness was my first project. The color gray dominated the entire landscape of the college. Gray walls, gray uniforms, gray buildings, gray food in the mess hall, gray expressions on the faces of antiquated professors who delivered gray lectures in cobweb voices—the grayness of concealment became the clothing I assumed, and with this weapon I was able to pass through the portals of Lesesne Gate with remarkable unremarkability. I blended in, assumed a cloak of anonymity, tried to straddle the line beside the abyss, and hoped to escape the scarred outlook I saw daily in the faces of young men who had already been through the system.

I stayed away from
The Boo.
I have already described the initial moment his voice rent the harmony and comradery of the Isle of Palms outing. As administrator of discipline and grand inquisitor for the Commandant’s Department, I reasoned there was no necessity to upset the equilibrium I tried so hard to maintain by joking with
The Boo.
In my initial paranoia, everyone who inhabited the nether regions of Bond Hall, everyone who weighed and measured demerits, and everyone who had any connection with discipline or punishment was anathema. This was the myopic freshmen universe I had created around me. So we moved in different circles and my footwork in avoiding him gradually grew more skillful. Had certain things happened the way they should have happened, we never would have crossed swords, nor would our horns have locked in combat, nor would we have become friends. But in the final days of my junior year, I had become gray enough, in my opinion, to risk adding a dash of color to my bland exterior. The mollusk emerged from his shell for a brief excursion into notoriety. It was the failure of this excursion that brought me before
The Boo,
the high tribunal of justice who caught me not in my clothes of gray, but in my robes of bright crimson.

It began innocently enough. I was a member of the
Shako,
the campus literary magazine whose primary objective often seemed to be the death of literature rather than the creation of it. Regardless of the merits of the magazine, Jeff Benton, the editor in chief, appointed me poetry editor at the end of my junior year. The position seemed innocuous enough to coexist with the theory of grayness. Everything seemed fine until one sultry April afternoon a surreptitious knock interrupted a daily nap. My roommate stopped lifting weights and ushered a rather cadaverous senior, with nervous hands and quick, black eyes, into the room. He walked to my bed, shot a backward glance at the door, looked at my roommate and said, “Can we trust him?” Since Mike had returned to his weights, I told the stranger he had nothing to fear from anyone in room 4428. “I have a poem. I want you to read it.” “OK,” I said, flashing the effervescent wit which always stood me in such good stead. I read the poem quickly. Compared to the poetry I was receiving from other cadets, his offering ranked as a minor masterpiece. “Good. We’ll print it in the graduation issue.” “You don’t see it,” he said. “See what,” I answered. Then I saw it. The poem I held in my hands was a tersely written, non-rhyming iambic grenade. If you took the initial letter from the seventeen lines, the words “Webb and Tucker suck” slapped you in the face. General Tucker and Colonel Webb reigned as the arch-villains in cadet life at that particular moment in history, and the thought of twisting a secret blade into their backs without their knowledge appealed to me immensely. “Mum is the word, my fine lad,” I said, patting his back. He smiled gratefully and disappeared into the silent afternoon. Mike had just finished his ritualistic twenty bench presses and was starting his squat thrusts when our visitor departed.

The staff’s enthusiasm matched my own. Jeff and Rick Campbell, his chief assistant, discussed the pros and cons of putting the poem into the first issue we were to produce as a staff, but cries of freedom of the press and musty quotes from Horace Greeley carried the day. The poem went in. Like the conspirators against Caesar, we vowed absolute secrecy and like those conspirators we had little insight into the part we played in our own downfall.

The magazine with the “secret” poem emerged from the press two days before graduation. How the word leaked out no one will ever know. But when the magazine hit the post office boxes, about three hundred sniggering, knee-slapping cadets were there waiting to read the latest screw the cadets had inserted into the heart of the Commandant’s Department. Rumor has it that a copy of the magazine with the poem circled was delivered to General Harris fifteen minutes after its circulation. Tac Officers read it to each other over cups of coffee in the canteen minutes after it emerged from the post office. Guffaws boomed out of the pool hall; laughter broke the silence of the library and cadets raced from the barracks to pick up their copy of the contraband poem. Jeff Benton said later that he spent much of that day praying, while Rick Campbell merely contemplated the feasibility of suicide. I studied the theory of grayness and wondered what in the hell had happened.

Thus it came to pass that I would meet
The Boo
under his own rules, in territory alien to me. That night at supper looking up from a plate of hot dogs and sauerkraut, I saw him enter the South Mess Hall. He did not joke with anyone around him. He hunted big game. Near hysteria, I tried to hide behind a pile of sauerkraut which would have dwarfed a small mountain, but when a look of satanic pleasure crossed his face, I knew the reconnaissance mission was over. And here is how it was on a lost day in May when I faced
The Boo
as Assistant Commandant for the first time.

“Bum, don’t say a single word. Start writing and remember Clemson isn’t really such a bad place.” Then he slapped a piece of paper in front of me. “I want to know everything, Bubba. Your soul is black. Give me names, dates, addresses, and the wedding anniversary of your parents.” “Colonel, you seem to think I’ve done something wrong,” I answered, my voice cracking only slightly. “I have three ERW’s, Conroy, and your guilty name stinks on all three of them.” “But, Colonel, I have been a model cadet in my three years here.” “You have been a bum. You dazzled me with your footwork for a couple of years but I’ve got your gonads tacked to my desk now and remember, you bum, they’ve got a great ROTC Program at Clemson.” “Colonel, I hope this misunderstanding will not hurt my chances for Regimental Commander.” “It’ll be cleared up when you walk out of here with your bags packed,”
Boo
answered. “You don’t think I have a chance, Colonel?” I was grasping for straws by this time. “You don’t have a preacher’s chance in hell, Bubba. The only chance you’ve got is for the earth to open and swallow you up before our eyes. Now start writing.”

I wrote the most nebulous, general, non-implicating ERW ever written. The rights of man and the Bill of Rights figured heavily in my denunciation of a system which did not allow a flavoring of good ole, apple-pie obscenity once in a while. Whatever I wrote, however, remains lost in some impregnable recess of memory which no man shall ever uncover. What sticks in my mind is the blitzkrieg attack
The Boo
had launched against me in a matter of seconds. The attack left me reeling and stunned, and put me at a crossroads in my Citadel career which led, it seemed, to my eminent departure from the school. The blitzkrieg came in classic Courvoisie fashion: the sudden appearance at the doorway, the eyes swinging over the startled cadets like the beam of a lighthouse across restless waters, the moment of truth when the eyes rested on the proper victim, the quick thrust of the big guns aimed with careful precision at the selected target, and the stern command learned in other wars from other leaders for unconditional surrender.

The Courvoisie weapons of attack were not spared. His eyes were like laser beams, the stentorian voice broke like thunder off the mounds of sauerkraut around me. He was absolutely certain that he had researched his case so thoroughly, collected so much damaging evidence, and prepared such an airtight case that the only task remaining was to pin the struggling butterfly into the display case he reserved in his museum of infamous cadets.

And his cigar. Dark, nauseous cigars almost always dripped out of
The Boo’s
mouth as he made his appointed rounds. Whenever he chewed a cadet out, he used these cigars with diabolical cunning. He never reprimanded a cadet with his cigar more than an inch or two away from the victim’s face. As he ranted about the infraction of divine law, he puffed furiously on his cigar. The cadet, traumatized by the voice and frozen by the severity of the moment, had as his main concern the glowing red ash of
The Boo’s
cigar which threatened to make a cinder of any nose or eye it touched. As
The Boo
left the mess hall that night and friends swarmed around me to offer consolation, my most immediate thought or the one I can remember now most vividly, was gratitude
The Boo’s
cigar did not burn a third nostril into my face.

That night I called my mother and told her to start sending off for college catalogues. In something akin to despair, she wondered how we were to break the news to my father who was stationed in Viet Nam at the time. Dad, like many Citadel fathers, thought the school was created by a special act of God. To tell him I had been given the boot would be like telling him I was the illegitimate son of a communist drug peddler. Mom put up a stiff upper lip, then let me know in definite terms that I had learned no profane language in her household.

The next day the
Shako
staff met at
The Boo’s
office en masse. The gathering had all the trappings of an Irish Wake. None of us smiled, none of us, that is, except
The Boo.
With few exceptions all of us were reasonably well adjusted cadets and his pleasure at catching all of us in one large sweep of the dragnet was obvious. He smiled contentedly, puffing as always on a wet, nauseous cigar butt. He then interrogated each of us on the respective parts we had played in the conspiracy. When we left the office, each of us commented on his remarkable ability to pinpoint guilt and ferret out the truth no matter how deeply it lay hidden. His one statement to me, “Bubba, no need to ask you anything. You’re in it so deep, Clemson may not take you.” My fate seemingly sealed, I awaited the judgment of General Harris and his council of advisors. I waited and waited. School ended and still I heard nothing. None of the staff had been notified of anything. I went to Colonel Courvoisie’s house in the middle of the summer and asked him what the story was.