The Lords of Discipline (27 page)

That night after taps, Bobby Bentley sneaked into the room of every freshman and thanked us for what we had done and begged us not to do it again. It would only cause trouble for us, he said. He wept when he came to our room and began thanking Tradd and me for the meaningless gesture. As I listened to him cry, his head against my mattress, I wanted to embrace him in the darkness and beg his forgiveness for having spit in his face. But as usual, I did nothing. Many times I would think of the proper thing to do but only rarely could I do it.

It was on December 16, five days before the Christmas break, as they herded us under the stairwell, we remembered hearing rumors that this was the night they were going to make sure that he did not return to the Institute after Christmas. But the cadre did not know that we, the freshmen, were ready for them. We had spent the whole day passing secret communiques among each other. We had planned to divert the attention of the cadre from Bentley to the rest of us, and it was surprising how quickly we adapted ourselves to strategies that disrupted and infuriated and sabotaged the designs and conspiracies of the cadre even if they were only temporary victories.

Again they forced Bobby Bentley out of the long line of plebes, stationing themselves at intervals along the line to make sure we did not follow him again. They made him face us, the thirty-seven against the one. His eyes were luminous with resignation, with the accumulated, embittering humiliation that was forced on him every single night of his life at the Institute. He met the helplessness of our collective gaze with the helplessness of his singular one.

Fox and Newman walked unhurriedly up to him. Silently they stood on each side of him, their mouths pressed close to his ears. When Blasingame gave the signal, they cut loose with screams that made all of us jump in the line. As always, urine poured out of Bobby Bentley’s pants, made a pool between his legs. We could hear the piss running on the cement.

Fox and Newman kept screaming, “Piss, piss, piss, piss, you fucking pussy.”

Then they stopped. They stopped when they heard it, when they heard us. You could tell the sound puzzled the cadre as the gallery went quiet. The sound they heard was the sound of the other thirty-seven freshmen pissing in their own pants, in affirmation of our allegiance to Bobby Bentley of Ocilla, Georgia. They heard the sound of urine running all along the gallery. I pissed for all I was worth. The urine was warm on my leg. It was the grandest piss I would ever piss in my life, the prince of pisses. All along the line of freshmen, puddles of urine formed by our shoes as we pissed together, in unison, an indivisible tribe, as brothers, as a class. It was a joyous piss, a sacramental piss, a transcendent one.

When Bobby Bentley saw what we were doing he began crying, no, not crying, he was screaming, he was coming apart, astonished and moved by our embracing of him, our championing of him. He raised his hands to us in thanks. Some of us cried to hear him; some of us cried when we saw him lift his hands in that melancholy inconsolable gesture of gratitude for the impure, overdue mercy of the formerly merciless.

The cadre recovered quickly and forced us to be face down in our own urine. They rubbed our noses in it, made us roll in it, soak it into our uniforms, rub it into our hair and faces until they were nauseated and repulsed by the stink of us all. We did pushups until we dropped exhausted against the cement and could not rise and felt their kicks and punches land on our backs and necks. Some of us were vomiting, then all of us were vomiting. And I tell you there was a shimmering beauty and an inexorable nobility to those thirty-seven boys who rolled in piss and vomit as an act of contrition toward Bobby Bentley.

The cadre was all over us, but in those moments we had stepped out of their range of control. As we rolled in urine and vomit, in that hideous, stinking baptism, we rolled together as a class for the first time, as though controlled by a single, invincible will, and on that night, they could not hurt us, could not touch us, could not even approach us in the ecstasy and amplitude of our solidarity.

On this night we had ceased being plebes and had united together into an inseparable, undefeatable band. My joy was the joy of the tribe; my love was the love of the group, roaring and brawling and singing out in a single defiant voice. It was the first night we had defeated the fourth class system. We were no longer plebes on that gallery We had become brothers, we had become men, revolutionaries, and there was nothing on that night they could do to stop us. The victory belonged to the class of 1967 and to Bobby Bentley of Ocilla, Georgia.

But at formation the next evening, the second battalion commander and the regimental executive officer walked up behind Bobby Bentley, whispered something to him, and led him out of the barracks in the darkness. He did not return for evening study period and was marked absent at the all-in check at taps. Nor did he appear the next day at reveille or at lunch. When we checked his room after mess that night, we found that someone had packed his luggage and taken his uniforms. The upperclassmen did not know exactly what happened, but they said he had required special attention. Two days before the Christmas break he withdrew from school and never came back to say good-bye. Some said he left because he felt ashamed that he had implicated his classmates in his predicament. But there was another rumor that sounded far more sinister. The senior next door intimated to Tradd and me that he suspected Bentley had become a project of a secret organization called The Ten. Since the R Company cadre had failed to remove Bentley from the Corps, The Ten had decided to move. No one could survive the attention of The Ten. That was the rumor, that was the legend, although the senior was quick to admit that no one really knew if The Ten existed or not.

There were thirty-seven of us from R Company who had survived until Christmas. Six of us would decide not to return after the holidays. We began the cold season with thirty-one plebes and the worst of the system behind us.

Chapter Eighteen

T
hese, then, are the memories of my nine long months as a plebe. In the barracks I learned much of what there was to know about my times, my unconscionable century. I grew accustomed to a climate of outrage and atrocity. I knew well the vernacular of suffering, and all the language and canons of the Institute had dissolved in my bloodstream. I understood the system by January, and I acquiesced to its laws by remaining. I was beginning to feel I had lived my whole life in enemy country. I felt they were killing off all that was good about me, but I didn’t know what to do about it. I would do anything but quit.

So I retreated within myself. I tried to measure the magnitude of the felonies committed in the name of discipline and tradition, but I could not assign a value to the ruin of boys. I knew about the terrorism of the human spirit and understood that ruthless, immoral forces had planted alien flags in my soul. The plebe system gave cruelty a good name, disguised sadism in the severe raiment of duty. There was a field of energy to the cadres meanness. I felt the puissance and evil of their thoughtless, callow maggotry. I would never forgive them. At the Institute, you had one year of terror and three of recovery, but I never recovered. I only learned the utter fatuity of resistance. Something in the eyes of plebes changed from the month of September to the month of June. Something in my eyes changed for all time.

All these crimes and dismemberments my friends and classmates find diminished and neutralized in memory. There is merit in forgetfulness. It is one of the gentlest forms of healing—and one of the most dangerous. But I am a prisoner of memory, and I have needed to clear out the debris of that year for many years. The year had too much to do with the kind of men my classmates and I became and the kind we did not become. Not one of my classmates will agree with many of my observations or conclusions about the system. They will say I was embittered, and I was. They will say that I did not belong there, and they will be right. They will say that I am trying to hurt the Institute, and they will be right again. But they are not prisoners of these memories as I am. I am describing the apprenticeship of a passionate dissenter. I am describing my education and the path that led me to manhood.

W
hat was monstrous in September was normal by January. I returned to winter darkness, to icy winds along the gallery, to basketball games, and midterm exams. There were sweat parties every night after mess, abuse when we ate our food, hazing, sadness. Once again we endured the humiliations of the system, only by now we were veterans. Each time we walked into the barracks it was an act of singular courage. Each time we left our rooms we chanced an unpleasant encounter on the galleries. Some of us made it; some of us did not. It made very little difference which in the long run, but I was curious about the nature of both the survivors and the quitters.

Three more R Company freshmen left in January. They discovered at mess one morning that Lawrence Masters was allergic to tomato juice. At mess, you never made the mistake of admitting you did not like a certain food. I had refused to take any spinach when it was passed to me during the first month of school. I ate four plates of spinach when the cadre realized I loathed it. I developed a canny appetite for all food after that, but an allergy was a different thing. No plebe had yet offered that excuse. Fox forced Masters to drink eleven glasses of tomato juice. Masters was at Roper Hospital for two days in intensive care. For a time, they thought he might die. He did not, but he never returned to R Company.

Albie Boles was ranked fifth in the class on the first semester rank sheets. He performed well militarily and academically and seemed to be one of those kids who navigated through the plebe system unscathed. At three in the morning one Thursday, Albie woke the entire barracks screaming, “Help me! Help me! Please help me!” He was dreaming, but he began to have the same dream every night. In the dream, the cadre members would surround him, armed with icepicks and butcher knives, then move toward him, smiling as they came. Each night he woke up screaming out the same words. During the day, he was an exemplary freshman, but each night, the cadre approached closer and closer and his appeals for help became more desperate and unhinged. His screams were unnerving, and they finally forced him to take a medical discharge.

I witnessed the breaking of Howie Snyders. He was standing across from me during a sweat party after church one Sunday. We were forced to hold our M-1 rifles out at arm’s length while the cadre kept watch and threatened us if we dropped the rifles. Eventually, if you held the rifle out long enough, you lost control of the muscles in your upper arms no matter how strong you were. The weak boys could not hold the rifle out very long, just as they could not do pushups very long or run very far. Howie Snyders was always dropping his M-1 to the pavement and always receiving demerits for gross abuse of government property.

Howie also wore his fear too openly. He had a luckless, timorous face like a hamster’s. The upperclassmen could smell his fear. It was as pungent to them as the smell of fish about to turn. They were attracted to this terror; it stimulated their own cruelty. On this particular Sunday, Howie had dropped his rifle five consecutive times and he had drawn the company of three upperclassmen. When he put out the rifle the sixth time, something terrible happened to Howie Snyders. I had seen freshmen come apart before, but I had never seen anything like this. Something attacked his nervous system like a virulent toxin. His entire body went into convulsions and he lay moaning on the gallery as though he was having an epileptic fit. His eyes rolled back in his head, saliva ran from his mouth, tears streamed from his eyes, and he bounced across the concrete like a beached fish. The cadre began chanting above him, “Die, die, die, die.” But one of them—Wentworth, the company exec, I think, but it really doesn’t matter—put a broomstick in his mouth to make sure he would not swallow his tongue. It was not epilepsy and the doctors insisted that there was no physical dysfunction responsible for those symptoms. But Howie started to display the same symptoms during every sweat party on the galleries, until one night he was honorably discharged after biting off a piece of his tongue. Newman claimed the piece of Howie’s tongue as a souvenir and preserved it in formaldehyde and displayed it proudly on his desk.

In February, Tradd and I moved into the fourth division alcove room with Mark Santoro and Dante Pignetti. It was an arrangement I had considered for a long time. I had noticed that during sweat parties the upperclassmen treated Pig and Mark differently than they treated the rest of us. I wanted to align my destiny and that of Tradd with the two strongest boys in our class, the only two whom the cadre feared physically. In the company boxing competition, Pig and Mark had destroyed several members of the senior class before Captain Mudge issued a memorandum declaring freshmen ineligible for the competition. Still, the point had been made, and I heard the cadres voices change as they approached Pig and Mark on the galleries. If I could not frighten men physically myself, I wanted to establish solid allegiances with those who could. Pig and Mark were having trouble academically and I suggested that Tradd and I could help them in their course work. They could help us by keeping people like Fox and Newman out of our rooms during evening study period. We met at Big John’s bar down on East Bay Street and agreed to the arrangement. We sat at the bar and told each other about ourselves and drank a pitcher of cold beer. It was my first beer on tap and I always associate the taste of draught beer with the faces of my three roommates. We talked about the plebe system and about the cadre. I had not laughed so hard since I had come to the Institute. Nor had I felt so safe.

I began to feel easier in the tenor and pace of those winter days. I played on the best freshman basketball team in the history of the Institute. There were seven of us in September, but by March only two of us remained, Reuben Clapsaddle and I. The others were victims of the plebe system and had left to display their talents at other colleges. I had begun to enjoy my classes and the silence of the library, with its dusty stacks and the smiling, perfumed woman who checked out books. On weekends, I explored the superb handsome streets of Charleston and watched the great freighters unloading their fragrant cargoes along the wharves. I decided that even though I had chosen the wrong school I had chosen the right city. I had no doubts then, and none now, that I spent four years in the loveliest city on the continent and that some indelible mark of civilization, some passionate intimacy with form and beauty, would remain with me always if only I were vigilant enough, if only I were resolute in my intention to assimilate the resonances and intimations of that exquisite city. I hungered for culture, yet had no idea what culture was or how to go about obtaining it or how I would know it once I had it in my grasp. I joined the Ballet Society and the Dock Street Theater. I attended performances with Tradd and his mother, Abigail, and afterward would listen to them discuss the performances. I would memorize what they had said and write letters to my mother telling her exactly the same thing, knowing that she would be pleased that her son was not only becoming a man but a cultured man as well. During intermission at the Dock Street Theater, Abigail, Tradd, and I would sit on the jostling board in the moon-brindled courtyard and Abigail would tell us about plays she had acted in at the same theater before she had married Commerce. Afterward we would walk back to the St. Croix mansion, the city unbearably lovely in the moonlight, and sometimes we would drink coffee at her sister’s house on the curve of Church Street. Tradd and I would walk on each side of her, each of us holding one of Abigail’s hands, and she would tell us stories of her childhood, of her trips to Europe, and her voice was shy in the darkness. There would be the smell of crushed narcissus on the sidewalk and lights shining from the night tables of second-story windows. We would pass by Catfish Row and the shop of Elizabeth O’Neill Verner, with her soft watercolors of her native city framed in the windows. We would walk in the cold, the collars of our uniform overcoats pulled high against our necks, and pass Terrell’s dress shop and the house where Washington slept and the one where Dubose Hayward wrote and the one where Ed and Kitty Holt, Tradd’s cousins, lived. It was the way I wanted college to be and I knew that I was absorbing something valuable though I did not know quite how. The refinement and dignity of those nights sustained me through the long nights in the barracks. I thought this was the education I desired and that in Tradd’s mother I had found a woman who embodied every quality of grace and intelligence and virtue that I would look for in a wife. In Tradd, I thought I had found the gentleness and integrity that I always required in my best friends and seldom displayed myself. And by enlisting Pig and Mark, I was adding strength and virility to the composition of the room. And though I did not know it then, I was gaining two of the finest, most loyal friends I would ever have.