Then I saw Satch Washington, and my blood froze. Ellis Satch Washington was the most reviled black student on campus. He was no bigger than a finger snap, had skin the color of old pancake batter, and his thick wavy hair looked like it had been professionally relaxed and lightened. Last year he quickly climbed to the top of the Black Students Association’s most hated list when he declared in front of a standing-room-only crowd in Sanders Theatre that women and minorities had been given too many allowances in academia and needed to stop using their color and gender as an excuse for their shortcomings. It wasn’t that other minorities didn’t agree with some of Satch’s arguments, but what had sparked instant ire within our ranks was that he had made this proclamation in front of such a mixed audience, airing our dirty laundry right in front of the neoconservatives who were rolling in their seats with glee. Racial treason.
His pedigree was impeccable. His father had gone to Dartmouth, then on to Yale Law School, and was now one of the highest-ranking black judges in the federal appeals circuit. His mother graduated from Harvard, then went to business school at Wharton before joining Goldman Sachs, where she currently had some fancy job in their mergers and acquisitions division. It wasn’t that we were jealous of Satch. In fact, it was encouraging to the rest of us that a black family could achieve such greatness in their world. What rubbed people the wrong way, however, was that Satch did everything imaginable to deny his blackness. He didn’t have any black friends, only dated the palest, blondest white girls, and had officially lobbied the university to exclude him from any institutional accounting that included him in the black student tally. I stood there looking at him with that big phony smile and frosted hair, and couldn’t help but think how much I wanted to land a solid right across his thin jaw and watch him squirm on the ground in pain.
“Hey, Spenser, what’s up?” a voice called out.
I turned and found Duke McCallister approaching me from across the courtyard. He was the only member not wearing a tie, and he had a smile on his face like we were old friends. I had immediately liked Duke the night we met at the cocktail party, and I strongly suspected he had been my ally in getting me through the first cut and into the second round. We shook hands when he reached me.
“So, you ready for today?” he said.
“I guess,” I said. “I’m not really sure what to expect.”
“I felt the same way when I was a punchee. It’s pretty nerve-racking getting all these cryptic messages and no one’s really telling you what’s going on. I almost didn’t go to my outing until one of the members convinced me I’d have a good time.”
“Did you?”
“Let’s just say it was a lot different than I expected. But today I think we have a good group going with us. You’ll get a chance to meet more members and punchees. We tried to make it a mix of low-key guys like yourself and some of the party animals.”
He pointed to the crew standing around the keg. They were now doing keg stands, where the drinker places his hands on the keg and two others pull up his legs and hold them in the air so that he’s doing a headstand on the keg. The third person takes the tap and places it in the drinker’s mouth; then the fourth guy used his watch to time times how long the person can drink from the open tap without stopping. I had played the game once as a freshman and drank so much, they had to carry me to University Health Services. I quickly retired from the sport.
“How far is the place where we’re going?” I asked.
“Shouldn’t be more than forty-five minutes away,” Duke said. “We go there every year. It’s an unbelievable piece of property in the middle of nowhere. And there will be a little surprise for everyone.” He winked. “You’ll like it a lot.”
Another member called Duke over, but before he left, he told me that he had arranged to ride on the second bus with me. There would be a couple of drinkers in our group, but he assured me that it wouldn’t be too crazy. After Duke left, I looked up at the gigantic mansion. It was old, but well maintained. Every window, and I must’ve counted at least thirty, was covered inside by an impenetrable blue curtain. The exterior lighting fixtures were wrought-iron torches. I thought about what Dunhill had described the night he and Abbott had climbed the trellis above the fence. Both were still there. I noticed three small steps that led to the back door and kitchen. Was that the door Abbott used to enter the mansion? I walked into the center of the yard and looked up to the third floor. There were ten small windows just underneath the roofline, and I wondered at which window Moss Sampson stood watching Dunhill and Abbott that night.
My thoughts were suddenly interrupted by the sound of silverware clinking against glass. Graydon Brimmer, the club’s president, stood on top of a chair, calling for our attention. He unfolded a small sheet of paper in his hand.
“Cease and desist, you wild beasts,” he called out. “Woe to the man who speaketh while I have the stage.”
Raucous cheers erupted throughout the courtyard.
“Welcome to the Delphic courtyard,” Brimmer read aloud. “A place where boys are made into men, and men are made to bear their darkest secrets. Those of you gathered before me have successfully defeated the less fortunate and made it past the first round. Though your journey remains long and fraught with unpredictable peril, you are at least one step closer to lighting the legendary torches of the Gas.”
Wild applause sprang from the gathering and bounced off the brick walls like the sound of a herd of animals stampeding through the gates. Everyone raised their cups skyward and in unison downed the foaming beer.
Brimmer waited for the noise to settle before continuing. “Today we will test the endurance of your wills as well as the endurance of your livers. You shall fight the elements of nature as you battle the duplicity of your fellow man. You’ve been divided into three groups, which are your assigned teams for the rest of the day. Do not take these assignments lightly, as those who stand shoulder-to-shoulder with you will either help lead you to victory or cause your inglorious demise. As in war, you are only as strong as your weakest man, so find that slimy bastard, beat the shit out of him, and make him commit his life to your survival.” The courtyard filled again with laughter. “This will make a big difference at the end of the day when the competition is over, and the prizes are awarded,” Brimmer continued. “So, bond well, ye faithful punchees of the Gas—and march on to lands unknown and battles yet to be won.”
By the time Brimmer’s speech had ended, everyone had been poured a fresh cup of beer, and the first drink song of the day blasted up from the Delphic courtyard and into the languid Cambridge morning.
Drink beer, drink beer.
Oh, come drink beer with me.
For I don’t give a damn for any old man,
Who won’t drink beer with me.
Bring out the old golden goblet
With the Delphic torches on it,
And we’ll all kill another keg of beer!
For it’s not for knowledge that we come to this great college,
But to raise hell while we’re here.
Raise hell while we’re there.
Raise hell while we’re everywhere.
Oh, we’ll drink, drink, drink to the old Gas,
And we will raise our glasses high;
And we’ll drink to the beloved torches,
And we’ll be loyal till we die.
Oh, how we love our sacred brotherhood,
And we will laud it to the sky;
And when the day is done, we’ll drink one more pass,
To that mansion on old Linden, venerable home of the Gas!
Our bags had already been loaded onto the bus by the time we filed out of the courtyard. Guys pushed and pulled, horsing around in anticipation of the long day ahead of us. Gallons of alcohol had already been consumed, and it was only eight o’clock in the morning.
The bus driver, Franco, was a short man with a hairy mustache, thick forearms, and a floppy French cap that fell halfway down the side of his face. Two
extra seat cushions propped him high enough so that he could see over the wheel, and a cigar stub was jammed into the corner of his mouth. I took a seat closer to the front as I noticed most of the hardy drinkers had made their way to the back. Duke sat next to me, and after the last of the five kegs was loaded, the buses began to roll out of Cambridge.
We weren’t five minutes into the trip before the kegs started flowing, the drink songs kept coming, and the jokes got raunchier. None of it seemed to bother Franco, who bounced on his elevated seat with his bulging forearms spread across the wide wheel. There was a bus in front of us and one behind—three yellow school buses loaded with ninety future presidents, Supreme Court justices, and Fortune 500 CEOs already wasted on cheap beer and hard alcohol, heading out to the country for a day of drinking and games, freed from the rigors of Harvard life, and now a chance to be ordinary teenagers swollen with testosterone.
The buses finally turned off the highway and onto the wide streets of rural Massachusetts. We were only twenty minutes into the trip, but the dramatic change of scenery made it seem like we had traveled thousands of miles out of Cambridge. The colorful foliage marked the changing of the seasons as we passed through quaint towns with their weather-beaten shingled houses and tidy lawns. Innocent children frolicked with their dogs, jumping into piles of leaves while parents gazed from a distance as they tended to matters about the house.
There were no taxi drivers or city buses or subway platforms. Instead the roads were owned by station wagons with wood side paneling, weathered Volvos and pickup trucks with hardened mud stuck between worn tire treads and U.S. flag stickers peeling off the back window. Cardboard signs hanging on large maples advertised cold apple cider and freshly baked pies. I got lost in the rustic New England landscape a world away from the urban sprawl of Chicago and other cities where concrete buildings clawed the skyline and children played on fractured blacktops.
The buses abruptly pulled to a stop along the side of the road. “Bladder run!” someone yelled from the back of the bus. There was a sudden commotion as the emergency door opened and bodies began flying out the back of the bus. I had to go as well, but I looked out the window at the small houses and their manicured yards and couldn’t bring myself to do it. But there they stood, at least thirty of them, in broad daylight, shoulder-to-shoulder with their backs to the road facing a tiny yellow house. I could see the arcs of urine from my vantage point and dared to imagine the view from inside the house. One of the members ran onto the yard with a big, fancy camera and started snapping pictures, and the future leaders of the world stood there, hands on their swords as they posed in midstream. I wondered how many promising political careers could be ruined were these photos to reemerge years later.
After the fertilization of the lawn had ended and the high fives had been slapped, everyone boarded the buses, and we rolled again along the empty roads. The alcohol had finally taken effect and the vomiting began, sometimes between the seats, at other times out the windows onto passing cars. After another ten minutes, we pulled onto a narrow dirt road that ambled across acres and acres of fertile farmland and dense woods in all directions. Eventually an enormous white farmhouse with shiny black shutters and tall brick chimneys came into view. A nearby silver milk silo looked like a rocket sitting on a launch pad. The bus slowed, and we pulled onto the driveway, which ran to the back of the house and into a freshly cut field. We parked in front of a boxy red barn that was almost as big as the house.
A middle-aged man wearing a cowboy hat, jeans, boots, and an oversized apron met us. “Welcome to Milgorn Farm,” he said. He was a big, jolly man with a wide neck, heavy beard, and smile that wrapped around his meaty face. “My name is John Milgorn, class of ’59,” he said. Everyone chimed their greetings. Those standing near him reached out and shook his hand. “The food is on the spit,” he said. “You all go out and enjoy yourselves, and everything will be ready in a couple of hours. The place is yours. And I had some of the boys saddle up the horses, if you want to ride the property. Just be careful of Zeus, the black quarter horse. He’s been a little cranky lately.” He tipped his ten-gallon hat and strolled over to the barbecue pit, which was surrounded by a circle of linen-covered tables and comfortable lawn furniture.
I looked at the gigantic tractor trailers and the clusters of cows that speckled the undulating hills. I had never been on a real farm. I was surprised that a Harvard graduate actually owned and worked a farm, as I always imagined Harvard alumni in fancy office buildings, gated estates, and exclusive country clubs. But not to be disappointed, I soon spotted the Mercedes-Benz and Jaguar parked on the other side of the barn. Even the graduates living off the grid seemed to enjoy the material trappings of success.
We changed out of our blazers and khakis and threw on heavy sweats and sneakers. Some guys started tossing a football while others kicked an old soccer ball. The drinkers made a beeline to the kegs and began pouring pitchers of frothing beer. The sun was still absent from the sky, but the crisp air started to warm, as did the spirits on the field.
Brimmer stood on a folding ladder to use a bullhorn to announce the first competition. “Time to get the games going,” he said. “Football first. Divide up into your teams. The members will give each of you a team shirt. Group one is with me. We’re the red team. The second group is blue, and the third is white. Rules are simple. My team will play the blue team first; then the white will play the winner. We’ll keep rotating till everyone has played the other teams at least twice. Whoever has the best record at the end of the four games will be declared the winner and receive the first prize, to be announced after the game. Each game will be twelve minutes long, two time-outs per team, and ties will be broken by a coin toss.”
For the next hour we battered each other, and a game that was only supposed to be touch turned into full-contact with lots of crushing blows and heavy tackling. I decided to play wide receiver to avoid contact during most plays. I figured Coach wouldn’t exactly do cartwheels if I showed up to practice on Monday with a broken arm or twisted ankle. Jon Carderro, a punchee who played tennis and lived in Leverett House, shared my injury concerns and chose a position that also prevented him from being trampled. The games started out competitive and surprisingly organized, but as the alcohol began settling in and the testosterone levels rose, it became less a game of football and more an uncontrolled mash to kill the person holding the football. The rules changed every other minute, depending who was in possession of the ball and how loudly he yelled. There was a lot of tumbling and cursing and bloodied knees as we ran wildly over the enormous field. I was doing well until I caught a touchdown pass and someone came from behind and leveled me. That was the last thing I remembered before looking up and seeing what looked like thousands of eyes staring down on me and someone yelling, “Give the man some room!” They carried me off the field, but my team fought on, and we won the game by a last-minute catch in the end zone.
The white team and their bunch of bruisers finished one game better than my team and were declared the winners. We watched as they were taken to the other side of the barn, stripped, then hosed down by two of the members, who then provided them with fresh towels, clean underwear, new T-shirts, and shorts.
“Come with me,” Duke said.
We started out toward the front of the property, but before we reached the road, he looped around the perimeter and headed toward a hill behind the football field.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“I’m going to show you the prize they just won.”
We cut across a small stream, clipped our way through a dense patch of trees, and trekked around a long oval horse run. When we reached a clearing between two hills, he said, “There it is over there.”
I looked but still didn’t see anything. “What am I looking for?” I said.
“See that little house over there behind the fence?” he said.
It might’ve been little by his standards, but for me it was rather large. It was buil
t out of stone with a wooden porch that wrapped entirely around it. There were three large windows on the first floor and several more above them. Smoke billowed out of the long chimney. I thought I saw someone moving in one of the windows, but we were too far away for me to be sure.
“Let’s get closer,” he said.
He didn’t want us to be seen, so we jogged over another hill and completed a semicircle until we were about fifty yards away from the house but still hidden in the woods. When we had settled into our best viewing positions, I immediately saw the prize. There must’ve been a dozen of them from what I could see. Most of them were either tall blondes or shapely brunettes. There was one black girl who had a body that looked like it had been cut from rock. None of them were wearing clothes as they walked around in their heels, touching each other’s hair and dabbing on makeup. My heart was beating so fast that my stomach started to hurt.
“Not too bad a prize, right?” Duke said.
I was too shocked to answer with anything other than a nod.
“Milgorn is the best,” Duke went on. “He lets us ship them here every year for the outing. Most of them are from Boston, but I heard this year they have a couple of girls who just moved here from the Soviet Union.”
I could see the white team coming over a hill. They looked fresh and unsuspecting. Two members led the charge. Why in the hell hadn’t my team played harder?
The Ancient Nine Page 12
