Every day after parade, Mark, Tradd, and I went fishing for sea bass with Commerce in the tidal rivers around Kiowah and Seabrook Island. On Tuesday, I was badly sunburned and Abigail rubbed vinegar on my back and shoulders when we returned. She cooked the fish in a white wine and cream sauce after we had cleaned them on the back porch. We had drinks on the verandah after dinner, and Commerce told long stories of spearfishing in the Virgin Islands and fishing for piranha on the Amazon River. Abigail and I would swing on the porch swing, Mark would sit on the banister, and Tradd and Commerce would rock in the white wicker chairs as Commerce recounted in exact detail his memories of lost voyages away from Charleston. We drank our gin and tonics slowly and listened to the insects in the gardens and Commerce’s voice as it navigated the seas of the world.
In our room after taps, the four of us began lying awake and telling each other the stories of our lives. We spoke of our fears and ambitions, our insecurities and disappointments. We were no longer in class, no longer exhausted by the plebe system, and for the first time we began to share the intimacies that come with long, leisurely hours of reminiscence. We vowed that our brotherhood, our four-sided union, would be sacred and eternal, and that ours was a friendship that would be stronger and more inviolate even than our allegiance to our class.
On the night before we were recognized, Pig took a pocket knife and we cut the veins of our wrists. We mingled our blood and made those awkward vows of friendship that, with boys, always come easier in symbolic sentimental gestures than in language. Our room shimmered in those last sweltering days with the joy of companionship.
“Now we’re like Indians,” Pig said, pressing a handkerchief to his wrist. “Now we’re like fucking Indians, and we’ll hunt buffalo together for the rest of our lives, paisans. For the rest of our lives.”
Tradd told us that he had never had three close friends in his whole life, that he had always found it difficult and painful to make friends. He thanked us again and again in darkness when we could not see his face. Haltingly and movingly, he thanked us every night of our last memorable week as knobs.
On Thursday before graduation, the freshmen were bracing loosely on the quadrangle during noon formation. For weeks there had been little malice or threat on the faces of the upperclassmen, and we no longer feared the barracks. Final exams had milked the last drops of venom from the plebe system.
But on this day, they came at us again. They were swarming for a last time, screaming, pounding our chests, making us hit the quadrangle for pushups, forcing us to run in place, shouting the old familiar obscenities in our ears. For a half-hour, we sweated and recited plebe knowledge on the quadrangle until Blasingame issued an order to halt.
I rose up sweating, and Maccabee was in front of me.
“At ease, dumbhead,” he said. “Let your chin out.”
“Pardon me, sir?”
“I’m not a ‘sir’ anymore. My name’s Frank,” he said, smiling and extending his hand.
I shook his hand and said, “My name is Will, Frank.”
“You and I are going over to Gene’s Lounge tonight, Will. You and I are going to do some serious drinking.”
“Sure, Mr. Maccabee, I mean, Frank,” I said. “Sure. I’d like that.”
And I tell you that at that moment, they had me. I almost wept. I don’t know to this day if it was gratitude or relief or pride, but I know that they had me, and I almost broke down and cried in front of Frank Maccabee.
Soon upperclassmen began coming up, smiling at me, slapping me on the back, and calling me by my name for the first time. I learned the importance of naming that day, how a name can change your perception of both yourself and the universe.
“Hello, George. My name’s Will.”
“Hello, Larry. Will.”
“Hello, Dan. Call me Will.”
“Hello, D. J. My first name is Will.”
Blasingame walked up to me and recited, laughing, “ ‘The dreams of youth are pleasant dreams of women, whiskey, and the sea.’ You gauldy knob, my name’s Philip.”
“Hi, Philip,” I said, shaking his hand. “My name’s Will.”
Then Fox came up to me.
He was not smiling and his approach still intimidated me. He looked at me, sneering insolently with his cruel mouth. He knew he walked among freshmen who despised him with only the gift of his first name to offer.
“My name’s Gardiner, dumbhead,” he said, extending his hand to me.
I did not take his hand. I slapped it away.
Then I looked into his narrow eyes and said coldly, “My name’s Mr. McLean to you, Fox. And it’s going to be Mr. McLean for your whole life.”
“It was just the system, McLean, you little baby,” he said angrily. “It wasn’t anything personal. It was just the system and I was just doing my job.”
“Let’s just say I don’t like your system and I didn’t like the way you did your job.”
“You just remember that I’ll be a senior next year, you little shoe-licker. I’ll jack it up your ass every time there’s a room inspection. I’ll get my classmates to shit on you so many times, you won’t know what hit you. We’ll run you out of here on excess demerits in a month.”
“I’ll see you at the company party, Fox,” I answered. “If you have the guts to show, which I seriously doubt.”
“I’ll beat the living shit out of you, McLean,” he said loudly.
“There’s going to be twenty-eight guys to beat, Fox.”
“I’ll see you on the beach, McLean. What a pussy! I should have run you out the first week of school.”
“You’re going to wish you did when I’m sitting on top of that ugly nose of yours.”
“Rack your goddam chin in, dumbhead,” he ordered. “If you won’t let me recognize you, then you’re still a knob to me. Rack that beady chin in, scumbag.”
“Go fuck yourself, Fox.”
The genius of the Institute lay in its complete mastery of all rites of passage, both great and small. They set aside one day at the very end of the year for all the companies to throw a beer party on the beach for a day of swimming and drinking, when the freshmen could challenge the upperclassmen to fights, thus allowing them to expend any unresolved frustrations and antagonisms of the year. Usually, these were good-natured wrestling matches in the sand, the freshmen testing their new-won manhood against the cadre who had conducted that severe nine-month test. It marked the first time the two groups fraternized together under official sanction. It was the first public occasion when the freshmen gathered together as first-class citizens of the realm, with all their rights intact and all their papers in order.
R Company assembled on the north end of the Isle of Palms. A keg of beer was set up between the beach and the stunted, wind-tortured vegetation that grew on the low sand dunes near the road.
The plebes huddled together in their bathing suits, drinking the cold beer and appraising the much larger group of upperclassmen. I looked at my classmates with admiration. Our bodies were hard and tempered. We could do pushups all night long and there was a healthy, vigorous glow to our group, an essential vitality as we prepared ourselves for the fracas. Twenty-eight had survived the long march of the plebe year. Thirty-two of our classmates had dropped out along the way and we, the survivors, considered them our inferiors. We had filled out in a year, but we still carried aggrieved mementoes of the journey. We whispered to each other as we began making our choices for when we would rush the upperclassmen.
Not that the upperclassmen were worried by our aggressive presence. They were veterans of company parties and their strategies. They had nothing to fear from us. There were more of them. They were older and stronger and more wily. But we had the bitter residue of humiliation and anger on our side. And I had my eye on Fox as he hung back in a crowd of classmates.
I lit a cigarette and began puffing on it as I drank one quick beer after another. I was neither a drinker nor a smoker nor a fighter, but I had planned to be all three on
this day. I had awaited the company party the way an azalea awaited the spring. I watched as Fox broke loose from his group and ambled over to the beer keg to replenish his beer.
I walked up behind him slowly, making no overt or hostile movement, moving easily as though I simply wanted another beer. Fox did not see me coming though I saw the other upperclassmen noting my approach. The fight would begin soon and we all felt its imminence in the air.
I put my cigarette out on Fox’s bare back. I ground it into his spine.
He screamed and turned. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing, McLean?”
“Sorry, Fox,” I apologized. “I mistook you for an ashtray. Everyone makes mistakes.”
“I’m not going to forget this next year, maggot,” he said, his hand gingerly touching the wound on his back.
“Next year,” I said, “there ain’t gonna be enough of you left next year to feed a Venus fly trap.”
And I lowered my head and charged Fox, taking him down hard into the sand. I was punching as we hit the ground. Fox was kicking and grabbing at my hair. And the melee was on.
The two opposing groups charged at each other in a reckless, heedless assault, and there were no holds barred. There were fist fights and eye-gougings and ear-pullings. There were gang tackles, kicks to the groin, and hair-pullings. Four of them knocked me off Fox in the first furious charge. I found myself buried under a moving, grunting, angry pile of flesh.
I could not move. Maccabee and Wentworth had pinned my arms and someone was punching my stomach. I saw Pig and Mark working together, methodically cutting down anyone who moved within their range of operation. Tradd charged the group who had rendered me immobile and knocked off the guy who was hitting me in the stomach. It was Newman.
Newman took a swing at Tradd. It missed, but it was also a serious error of judgment. Pig and Mark both slammed into Newman from behind. Newman whirled, keeping his balance, and without looking threw a wild punch that landed on Mark’s nose. There was a sudden violent flurry of punches and Newman was on his knees, the blood dripping from his face, slowly discoloring the sand.
The brawl lasted an hour. It was exhausting and enervating and deliciously pleasurable. I fought with every single person I despised and I licked most of them. I felt powerful and liberated on that beach. Pig, Mark, Tradd, and I began fighting as a team, moving from fracas to fracas, as the combatants spread out across the beach. We poured beer over Maccabees head, stole Blasingame’s bathing suit, and watched his naked behind sprint toward the cover of the sand dunes. Maccabee counterattacked with his classmates, spread-eagled me in the sand, and poured beer over my head and face until Pig could break through their line of defense. I had a wonderful time.
Then I saw Fox sitting astride Jim Massengale near the oceans edge. I broke loose and was in a full sprint when I hit the miserable son of a bitch. I was on him before he got up. Every freshman in the class had challenged him and he could barely lift his arms to ward me off. I dragged him by the foot to the water’s edge. When we reached the surf up to my knees, I dropped down and held his head under water. At intervals, I let him up to breathe. The space between the intervals grew longer and it gave me immense and furious pleasure to see his mouth open in a terrified quest for oxygen. He was desperate and afraid beneath me, and his body began to kick and flounder in panic. I heard a shout from the beach, and eight of Fox’s classmates ran toward us. Pig threw a body block that felled two of them. Mark tackled one of them from behind, but the others knocked me off Fox and began dunking me under the water. They did it playfully. None of them realized 1 had been planning to murder Fox in the Atlantic Ocean.
The fighting grew sporadic and passionless. Upperclassmen and freshmen were walking arm in arm down the beach and singing songs up by the beer keg. Boys were shaking hands all over the beach. Maccabee put his arm around my neck and kissed me drunkenly on the cheek.
“I’m going to pour you a beer, Will,” he said, “if I’ve got the fucking strength, which I doubt.”
Frank Maccabee was drawing me a beer when Fox tapped me on the shoulder.
“I’m going to buy you a beer later on, Will. It’s time that we recognized each other. My name is Gardiner and you gave me some licking today,” he said, extending his hand in a gesture of reconciliation and the burying of hatchets.
I smiled, took his hand, and said very sweetly, “Don’t you ever call me Will again, you cocksucker.”
I shook his hand firmly with my right hand and hit him in the mouth with a punch I had readied since September. His teeth broke through his lower lip. The second punch caught him in the cheekbone. I went down with a shot to the left temple delivered by Quigley who was standing on my blind side. Mark crumpled Quigley with a punch to the back of his head and the afternoon had turned ugly again.
On the ground Fox looked up at me and said, “I’m going to run you out on demerits next year, McLean. Me and my classmates are going to get you out by first semester. I promise you that.”
“Hey, Fox,” I said, rubbing my temple as I got another beer. “I know how the system works now. You try to run me out of school and I’m going to take a little stroll over to the Bear’s office and tell him that you’re married. We’ll leave hand in hand.”
“You can’t do that, Will,” Maccabee said.
“Oh, I won’t, Frank.” I smiled. “Unless I have to. And I’m sure I won’t. I’m absolutely positive I won’t.”
And I threw my beer into Fox’s face as I left to join my classmates.
The freshmen built a fire on that beach and we sat around it telling stories about our plebe year. Already it was becoming history and even beginning to assume the fantastic shapes and distortions of mythology. It was memory now and memory was different for each one of us. I listened as Pig described how the four of us had gone down to Fox’s room and beaten him senseless beneath the blanket at three o’clock in the morning. I listened as Alexander told how he couldn’t wait for the new class of freshmen to arrive so he could make their lives as miserable as ours had been. Jim Massengale described Hell Night, and all of us laughed until we were rolling in the sand. Tradd imitated Maccabee delivering the speech on Hell Night.
I grabbed a bottle of bourbon from Murray Seivers and filled my paper cup with it.
“Easy, tiger,” Mark warned. “Some things don’t mix.”
I left the fire and walked out to where the waves were breaking over my feet. I took a drink of the bourbon and stared out toward the ocean and remembered a chemistry class from first semester. The professor had given me an unknown chemical during a lab and told me to perform a series of set experiments to discover the identity of the chemical. Instead, I began to pour chemicals at random into the test tube the professor had set before me. The mixture changed colors twice and the changes were radical, extraordinary. Then I added another chemical, which was not marked, which itself was an unknown, though it was a colorless liquid without any volatile characteristics of its own. But when I began putting this liquid into the test tube drop by drop, I had created something terrible and violent. Smoke poured from the tube and the mixture began to spurt volcanically and crawl over the lip of the tube and spill onto the marble desk. The teacher ran up to me and with a long clamp angrily poured my creation down the drain and flunked me on that day’s lab assignment. I remembered that moment often and wondered what mystery or metaphor of chemistry I had stumbled upon, what fierce, accidental power I had unleashed. As I stood on the beach with the noise of my classmates behind me, I thought that I must always search for the remarkable combinations, add unknowns, mix things that were clearly marked with things beyond marking. I would leave the simulated test and enter into forbidden territory. I would look for that moment when I would begin to pour alone and in wonder. I would always try to seize that moment and to accept its challenge. I wanted to become the seeker, the aroused and passionate explorer, and. it was better to go at it knowing nothing at all, always choosing the unmarked bottle, always choosing your own
unproven method, armed with nothing but faith and a belief in astonishment. And if by accident, I could make a volcano in a single test tube, then what could I do with all the strange, magnificent elements of the world with its infinity of unknowns, with the swarm of man, with civilization, with language?
Mark was right, I said to myself, drinking the bourbon. Some things don’t mix. Some things don’t mix at all, but sometimes in life you have to take the risk.
Before I walked back to my friends and classmates, before I returned to the fires as an upperclassman, as a sophomore, I made a vow to myself, a vow to the guerrilla in the hills, a vow to the poet who was about to enter the confused and dazzling city of memory.
I said this to myself and I meant it:
I will not be like them. I will not be like them.
I shall bear witness against them.
Part III
THE WEARING OF THE RING
SEPTEMBER 1966—JANUARY 1967
Chapter Twenty-two
It did not rain during the month of September. The trees of the city took on a desperate, haunted look; the bitter sunlight of Charleston tortured the groves and drained the secret gardens, and the city itself seemed to resonate with a silent vegetable terror during that long dry season. Outside the barracks windows, the leaves when wind-blown crackled like thousands of errant wasps colliding in midair. The scorched lawn of autumn took on a look of savage thirst, and even the parade ground, that most tended and pampered of meadows, had an undermined greenness about it. The automatic sprinklers worked through the day and almost never ceased working through the night. The drought seemed an appropriate symbol for how I felt after the suicide of Poteete. Or perhaps I only noticed weather then, when my spirit was dry and brittle, and like the land itself was in terrible need of storm and change and deliverance.