The Boo

by Pat Conroy

  Like many kids from tough neighborhoods, Larry knew the ins and outs of street fighting and gang warfare well. His gang ruled “the turf” of his home town and much of its success was due to Larry’s affinity for smashing the noses and splintering the jaws of rival gang members who ventured into forbidden territory. Football rescued him from the gang. He made the delightful discovery that football was a socially acceptable form of head hunting. So he began to remove limbs, gouge out eyes, and kick out the teeth of any lineman intrepid enough to challenge his charge across the line for the opposing quarterback. His prowess on the football field brought him to The Citadel.

  Any boy weaned on the streets with a big city gang is going to have certain basic problems in adjusting to the regimen of Citadel life. Larry thought it stupid to follow every rule of The Blue Book, so he refused to adhere to some of them. This brought him in direct contact with The Boo, who ruled the turf around the Commandant’s Department. Larry first gained fame the summer between his freshman and sophomore year. He drove in Lesesne Gate one night and decided it was ridiculous to drive all the way around the parade ground. He had learned in physics class that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. Adhering to this principle, he jumped the curb by the library and drove his car across the parade ground to first battalion. It was not a bad idea except he failed to notice the shadow of The Boo in the sallyport. The Boo ranted at Latini for a good thirty minutes. The legend had started.

  Then Larry went on a motorcycle kick. The sight of a Citadel cadet on a motorcycle roaring across the Cooper River Bridge in dress uniform was strange indeed. The cadet image seemed a bit ludicrous when Larry pulled up to a stop light, revved his motor, then sped off to a party at the Isle of Palms. On one occasion he became the talk of the town. Larry took his girl to a Citadel Hop on his motorcycle. He arrived at her house resplendent in his full dress uniform, silk gloves on his hands, and a new shine on his inspection shoes. His girl bounced out of the house wearing a full length formal, blew her tolerant father a kiss, consoled her weeping mother, and climbed up behind Larry. They zoomed off into the night. Puzzled motorists stared after them. People waved. Some blew their horns. Larry and his girl kept going, oblivious to the ripple they were causing as they passed by. They roared onto The Citadel campus, the big Harley sputtering defiantly. Larry rode up to the door of the armory, offered his arm to his beloved, and marched into the prom like he owned the State of Rhode Island. Some cadets who witnessed the scene felt Larry would make a better member of the Hell’s Angels than the Corps of Cadets. Of course, Larry didn’t give a damn.

  It is important to remember Larry’s background. It explains many things about a particular incident in the spring of 1966. On this night, something snapped in Larry. The dark side of Larry Latini was unleashed upon a trembling world. Some atavistic impulse triggered Larry into action and gave The Citadel one of her more memorable nights. It started with a rumor. A group of Charleston hoods had beaten up Rick Clifford, Larry’s roommate, while Rick was playing pool at The Ark. The rumor further specified that these were the same hoods who had lead-piped a couple of cadets the summer before and left them bleeding in an uptown alley. Though the rumor was false, Larry did not realize it. In the code of the Gang, each member was a brother. If one brother was beaten, then someone had to pay. He left the barracks on the run. A contingent of “B” Company jocks and weight lifters followed him. They wanted to see the molars fly.

  He entered The Ark and looked quickly around. Clifford wasn’t there. “They must have hidden the body,” Larry said to himself, possibly remembering some cardinal rule of his gang days. Larry spotted a suspicious looking group in the back of the bar, playing pool, and minding their own business. They looked guilty to Larry. Some unfortunate greaser made a spurious remark to Larry. He caught the first fist of the evening. He flew across the pool table and landed under the legs of a pinball machine. The boy spit a tooth out of his bleeding mouth. Meanwhile, Larry had taken on the rest of the pool players. His fists pounded anyone who came into range. No method prevailed in his quixotic annihilation of those who had wronged his roommate. Teeth clattered on the floor. Blood spewed from four noses. The hoods bounced cue balls off Latini’s head. They swung cue sticks at his body. This just served to fan his wrath. One foolish lad shouted to Latini that he was nothing but a “Goddam wop.” Larry ran up to him, stuck two fingers between his teeth and cheeks, and ripped as hard as he could. The boy’s lips were split open in two places. No other challenger appeared. Nor did anyone else mention Larry’s Italian heritage. Satisfied that he had avenged his roommate sufficiently, Larry returned to the barracks. Several days later he received a bill for $173. This was the combined doctor bill of all the boys he mauled at The Ark.

  Boo stormed into The Ark the very next day. The story of Latini mopping up half the refuse of Charleston on The Ark’s floor dominated conversation around The Citadel. The image of the cadet as scholar, soldier, and gentleman was hard pressed to include the cadet as bar-fighter or hood-pounder. Boo walked up to the owner of The Ark and asked to speak to him.

  “I’m Courvoisie of The Citadel. I heard one of my lambs got into a fight here last night. I just wanted to tell you if any cadet ever gets in a fight down here again or if one of my boys gets hurt in any way, I am going to put this place off limits to cadets and post guards around it to make sure nobody comes here. Do you understand me, Sir?”

  “Yes, Sir, Colonel.” The owner understood perfectly.

  Larry Latini graduated with his class. To do this, he curtailed his career as an all-southern conference tackle. He quit football his senior year in order to study. On graduation day he brought Colonel Courvoisie a gift. It was a charcoal portrait of The Boo done by Latini’s sister.

  “Thanks for everything, Colonel. I wanted to get you something nice, so my sister did this.”

  “Latini, only God and I know what a bum you really are.” Both of them smiled.

  THE SCOWL ON MONK’S FACE

  Nobody messed with Monk. This was an unwritten law in the early sixties around the first battalion. Monk was an Irishman; a surly, brusque graduate of an Irish ghetto in the Bronx. When aroused to the full fever-pitch of his anger, Monk was a formidable and dangerous adversary. He smiled infrequently. The few friends he made at The Citadel became aware of a distance in Monk, some impenetrable wall he erected to separate his friends from even the slightest awareness of his past. And it was this same past that provided the clue to the burden and the scowl Monk always dragged with him. For a long time, Monk walked the campus in silence, rebuffed overtures at friendship, projected a dark and irredeemable personality to the world he passed. It took a while, but Monk finally told a few close friends his story.

  Monk’s grandparents had been driven to America when the great famine had decimated the potato crop in Ireland. They made the best of their misfortune. Monk’s grandfather prospered in the New World. A ruthless determination and adamant refusal to buckle under to the pressure of competitors had netted the family a considerable fortune. A new noun, millionaire, described Monk’s grandfather and grandpa liked the sound of it. Like many of the Irish patriarchs who immigrated to America in the late nineteenth century, he was fiercely protective and possessive of his children. All of his children followed his directives to the last syllable. All of them married the proper spouses and entered the proper professions. All except one. Monk’s mother embarked on a destiny not supervised by the stern visage of her father. She fell in love with a handsome Irish face and strong calloused hands and lips that drank beer from a laborer’s bench. She fell in love with a factory worker named Mike. A nice guy without money, without a future, and without the approval or respect of his girl friend’s father. They were married.

  The full fury of the family was vented against both of them. The girl had committed the unpardonable sin of falling in love without the approval of her father. A family council was held under the auspices of the wronged patriarch. Monk’s mother a
nd father were banished from the family circle.

  Mike and his wife fared poorly. He lost one job after another while his wife suffered under the humiliation and disdain of the family who rejected and ignored her. The family, with collective solidarity, refused to acknowledge the presence of their former member. Cinderella had chosen her impoverished prince and the kingdom she betrayed would never be opened to her again. Mike, possibly because of the grave pressures exerted on him, or because he bore the full responsibility of his wife’s exile, turned to the bottle. Poverty of the cruelest kind entered their lives and the lives of their children, who appeared almost yearly at regular intervals.

  Monk was the first born child. His formative years were hungry years. The streets served as the training ground for his youth, where the quick fist and the quick foot were the two most important elements of survival. Monk had both. He left a string of bloody noses down the long row of houses on his street and arrived home sporting the same on many occasions.

  When he was twelve years old his mother was taken to the hospital. Two days later she was dead. It happened so quickly that her family had no time to make reparations or amends. They had no time to accept her back into the fold with outstretched and forgiving arms. She had died without the courtesy of allowing her family to say they were sorry. The funeral was thick with flowers and voices raised in grief. Monk’s father was an outcast, a pariah at the funeral of his own wife. Naturally, the great family decided in a sober-faced council that the children could not continue to live with their father. So Monk and the kids moved from the sinister alleys of the Bronx to the elegant mansions inhabited by New York’s most affluent society. Monk suddenly found himself thrust into a world of silk and linen, where no one cursed or wrote on the bathroom walls, where no one fought or bloodied anyone’s nose, and where no one put their elbows on the table or sneezed without covering their mouths. He attended a respectable private school, was tutored in etiquette by a lemon-faced aunt, and walked through the corridors of his grandfather’s house with the gnawing thought that every step he took was a betrayal of his father. The scowl on Monk’s face was becoming pronounced.

  He was sent to The Citadel where, it was thought, the discipline and Spartan existence would make him appreciative and grateful for the luxuries his grandfather’s house provided. The plebe system barely challenged the boy who had fought in the slums of the Irish tenement sections of New York. His body, hard and sinuous, adapted easily to the rigors of nightly sweat parties and mental harassment. But the plebe system did nothing to alleviate the bitterness which was becoming the key element in the composition of Monk’s personality. His classmates were aloof and more than a little wary of the mirthless Irishman. A year passed before Monk came to trust anyone enough to tell them his story. He told it to few people. They were his friends. The words surfaced bitterly. “Whenever I go home to New York I walk into that goddam big house and listen to my grandfather tell me what a son of a bitch my father was. I just eat my food and listen without saying anything. The next day I go out looking for my Dad. I go from bar to bar in the places I know he hangs out. Eventually, I find him all dirty and drunk and I say, ‘Dad, you want to go out for dinner?’ ‘Sure, Monk,’ he says to me. ‘I could sure use a good meal!’ I take him up to a hotel room I’ve rented for him, let him take a good bath, all hot and everything. Then I take him out for a steak dinner. Neither one of us talks much. Just sit there and grin every once in a while. I want to tell him things and I know he wants to tell me things, but mostly we just eat and look at each other or talk about baseball. After the meal, I take him back to the hotel and put him to bed. He drops off to sleep almost immediately. I put a twenty into his pocket. Then I leave. It kills me to know that he’s always wandering around. Always wandering around. Never doing nothing. Just moving around all the time.”

  One of Monk’s friends told Colonel Courvoisie the story. The Boo had become friendly with Monk while the latter was walking tours in the second battalion sallyport and had wondered what chip rested so securely on Monk’s shoulder. The Boo would gently banter the frowning Irishman as Monk paced back and forth with his rifle on his shoulder. Monk would chide back and the two soon found themselves stopping to chat whenever they met on campus. Boo signed several weekend passes for Monk and a few other favors cemented a friendship which would last for two years.

  It is difficult to describe Boo’s relationship to cadets in cases like this. With Monk as with many other cadets, it seems probable that The Boo represented the father-image that Monk so desperately needed: a warm, yet stern figure who was a blend of warmth and strength in equal proportions, and who asked nothing in return for his interest and regard for you. As The Boo has said on occasion, “Many boys are sent to The Citadel because their parents had failed them somewhere along the line. Because the parents realize their failure, they figure that The Citadel can do the job for them. Some of them feel that discipline will compensate for the lack of love. More than our share of kids come from broken homes or from parents who just didn’t give a damn.”

  Monk came to The Boo in his office many times just to talk. The Boo listened and gave advice. They laughed and talked of many things. Monk never told The Boo about his father; Boo never asked Monk to tell him. But he did complain bitterly about his aunt who never let up on him, never relented in her criticism, and never withdrew the pressure she felt was her duty to levy upon him.

  During his senior year the pressure became extremely intense. Monk told The Boo that he didn’t know how much longer he could take her harping and bitching. The next day, the aforementioned aunt received a phone call from Lt. Colonel T. N. Courvoisie. “Madame, this is Courvoisie, The Citadel. I just wanted to call and tell you Monk is a good boy. You are putting a little too much pressure on him right now. Graduation is coming up and he needs to concentrate on getting out of The Citadel. He can’t be thinking about what you’re telling him and what his professors are telling him at the same time. So, Madame, I just wanted to call and let you know your nephew is doing fine at The Citadel, but needs to know that you love and support him. If you need anything, please feel free to call me.” The aunt uttered a few respectful “Yes Sirs,” but she had not said, “Go to hell,” or, “It’s none of your business.” In the beginning of the book, the stentorian voice of The Boo was discussed at length. In person, it can freeze hummingbirds in mid-flight, but on the telephone it is something else indeed, something almost god-like in its power to transfix and to control. Boo’s humanity is expressed in person by gentle modulations of the great voice or a sudden softness of the large, playful eyes. He is almost incapable of gentleness on the telephone. Call him at The Citadel sometimes, and imagine you are Moses talking to the Burning Bush. It is not difficult. Monk’s aunt let the pressure off Monk.

  Monk did not graduate with his class. He went to summer school to get enough quality points to satisfy The Citadel’s requirements for the diploma. He is making the Air Force a career.

  CHRISTMAS

  Each Christmas since 1965 The Boo has sent out three or four hundred copies of his annual Christmas message to his departed lambs. Every cadet who keeps in touch with him receives this Christmas greeting from The Boo. The letter is written in the typical Courvoisie style, without flourish and without pretense of literary merit. Within the letter are the standard Courvoisie jokes, the esoteric pitch of Corps humor, which the uninitiated find boring, but the ex-cadet finds hilarious. The letters are newsy and short. They often mention the more infamous senior privates, five-year men and muscle-headed jocks. They tell of Citadel trends, changes in personnel, and shifts of emphasis within the disciplinary system. In essence, these letters keep many alumni in touch with The Citadel that ordinarily would hear nothing from the school. One cadet who received the Christmas greeting wrote The Boo and told him it was the first time he had heard from The Citadel in eight years. Several ex-cadets have joined the alumni association after reading the letter. Since most alumni who attended the school when the
shadow of The Boo covered the campus, remember themselves as lambs and bums, the letter is a very personal and intimate reminder of their college days. The school is there. The Boo is alive and well. The Corps is changing; the school is changing, but The Boo is there, thinking long thoughts, and believing in the worth and value of the graduates …. and the school.

  ’65

  Dear

  I can’t tell you how happy it makes the old Boo to hear from his former “little lambs.” How is the cold cruel world? I bet they don’t love you and treat you so kindly as we did.

  Now for a little gossip. Summer school went pretty well. I only had to ship two this past year, for stealing and both from well to do families. I am quite proud that our Honor System works in the summer time as they were both turned in by cadets.

  We started the year off with 70 more cadets than we had beds, so we were quite crowded. The upperclasses have taken the inconvenience in good grace and we have lost only about 75 cadets as of the Christmas furlough.

  As you know the football team did not win many. But I want you to know that you can be proud of them. They fought 11 the way. The University of South Carolina had to appeal to heir team at half time to beat The Citadel for a dying Carolina football player. West Virginia and George Washington were ever the same after our cadets hit them. I could name, name after name of outstanding cadets on the squad, good in academics, cadet rank and fighting football players, very few bums and they were only minor. Charlie McDonald always needing a haircut and Wilbur Fallow always needing a shoe shine. That Wilbur is one helleva football player.