by Pat Conroy
“Harvey,” I said. “If you want to be mayor of Charleston or Yertle the Turtle you have my solemn support. But you’re not listening to me. I’m not going to be around. I don’t belong here. I’m getting out in the next couple of days. I’ve just got to get to a phone.”
“One more question, Lee.”
“Shoot, Harvey.”
“What’s a douchebag?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never heard of one, but a lot of people sure think I have a strong family resemblance to one.”
All was prelude. The first day was a dress rehearsal, for the most severe test of the plebe system did not officially begin until the second evening. They ran and taunted and hustled us through the second day. We had no time to ourselves, no time to think, no time to rest, no time to familiarize ourselves with the cramped, austere cells where we slept at night. We changed uniforms four times during the second day. They screamed at us, abused us, beat on our chests with their fists. They ran us from one end of campus to the other.
In the late afternoon, the fatigue had entered my bloodstream and my legs glowed with pain. The blood seemed to collect around my brain. I felt a strange giddiness in the heat as though at any time I might faint and my skull would break against the scorched concrete of the quadrangle. Plebes fainted often during the first week. It was a sign to the cadre that they were performing their duties well. The prestige of sergeants increased when one of their knobs hit the planet unconscious. The sun seemed to be in collusion with the cadre. The heat had a man-eating quality about it. With each uniform change, I could squeeze cupfuls of perspiration into the small sink by the door. There was a ubiquitous stink to the platoons of freshmen, and it was the first time I had ever prayed for rain.
At 1700 hours, we stood at attention on the quadrangle at the end of a forty-five-minute segment of practicing rifle manual. Blasingame, the company commander, shouted out a final command to us, a surprise one, when he said, “At ease, dumbheads.”
He continued to talk to us in a relaxed, intimate voice, friendly and void of menace. “Now, dumbheads. I know it’s been a long, hot, upsetting day for all of you. I want to give all of you a chance to rest before mess tonight. When I order you to your rooms, I’d like you to put on your bathrobes and just relax in your rooms. Write a letter home to your parents if you want to. Take a nap. Or go down to the shower room and take a nice refreshing shower. You gentlemen have put out for big R today and to show you my appreciation, I’m going to let you have this time to yourselves.”
His manner was so kindly and so brotherly that I felt like weeping out of pure human gratitude. This was the first time since I had entered the Gates of Legrand that an upperclassman had been anything but bestial to a group of freshmen. It was the first time a member of the cadre had spoken to us as though we had some standing, no matter how low, in the human community.
He continued in the same soothing voice, “Now go to your rooms, dumbheads. The cadre won’t bother you. We need time to rest, too. Just relax, turn on your radios, and take it easy.”
Then with a shout that echoed off the enclosed cement walls of the barracks, he screamed, “And you fucking scumbags better be back down on this quadrangle in thirty seconds, Now move it, waste-wads. Change your smelly uniforms and get back here on the double. We’re going for more PT”
The sixty of us thundered off the quadrangle, yelling as we went. I made it quickly to my room on the first division. Harvey came in right behind me as we began stripping off our wet uniforms and hurling them anywhere in our frantic haste to beat the thirty-second mark when they would begin chanting for us again. As I put on my Institute T-shirt and PT shorts, I noticed that a change had taken place in Harvey’s eyes; the confidence that had gleamed in his shining gray eyes the day before was under siege. He had not spoken a word since before breakfast that morning. As he stood naked before me looking for his gym shoes, I saw how painfully underdeveloped his body was and realized that the strenuous physical exertion of these first days was taking an inestimable toll on the Clearwater boy from Memphis.
“Are you all right, Harvey?” I asked as I tied the laces of my shoes.
“They’re not letting me eat at mess,” he said. “I’ve got to eat or I can’t stand this.”
“Whose mess are you on?”
“Mr. Fox’s.”
I reached into my press where my one suit of civilian clothes hung limply among the uniforms and pulled out a package of M&M Peanuts.
“I’m a fanatic about M&M Peanuts. Eat all you want, Harvey.”
He shoved a handful in his mouth.
“Five seconds, dumbheads,” a voice shouted from the gallery.
“Two seconds, scumbags.”
“My mother didn’t tell me it was going to be like this at all,” Harvey said.
“Neither did mine.”
“Where are you, maggot-shits? Get down here, people. Now, people. I don’t care if you run PT naked, dumbheads. I want you out of those rooms.”
Doors slammed all over the R Company area as freshmen sprinted down the stairs.
“Thanks for the M&M’s, Bill,” Harvey said, laying an exhausted head on my shoulder. “They’ve got to let me eat. I’ve always needed regular meals.”
“Harvey, you’ve got to pace yourself better. You look all washed out.”
“I’m dying,” he replied. “I’ve never done a pushup.”
“Get down here, scumbags.”
They took us on a two-mile run. We lapped the parade ground twice, circled the armory, passed the yacht basin, crossed the baseball field, and halted finally at the farthest perimeter of the campus by the edge of the salt marsh, which separated the grounds of the Institute from the Ashley River. On the run, some of my classmates had stumbled, faltered, dropped out from exhaustion, and lay moaning on the grass or on the pavement, surrounded by the flushed, hostile faces of several cadre members screaming for them to rise. They were being forced to rise, to run again, to catch up to the chanting, driven platoon, and to rejoin their classmates. To drop out was to betray your fellows, and the central theme of those first hours of plebe week was that no one had the right “to shit on his classmates.” It was the first and most basic law of the Corps.
The cadre broke off from us and drove the platoon of freshmen into the marsh itself. The long blades of Spartina grass sliced our bare legs, and the marsh was undermined by the immensity of our herded, desperate weight. We began to sink into the mud, first to our ankles, then to our knees. When we had gone far enough, they stood us at rigid attention and told us they would beat our asses bloody with their swords if we moved a single muscle. My shoes filled with water. I did not know why they had brought us to the marsh or why they watched us with such amused attention from their vantage points on dry land.
As I stood there, I realized that except for Harvey, I did not know the face of another classmate. They all looked the same to me, a race of bald, timorous zombies chanting a debased, newly minted language in a country alive with cruelty. As I waited in the marsh grass, the other plebes seemed repugnant to me, odious and contemptible. They looked too much like me, and their faces, like mine, were in pain. In their humiliation, they reminded me of what I had become.
The cadre began to cover each other with spray from aerosol cans. The hiss of the spray sounded like a colloquy of snakes in the parched summer grass. My tongue was swollen and I needed water. With the sun declining, in the stillness of the late afternoon in the Carolina lowcountry, we suddenly knew why we had ended the long run by being forced into the marsh. The first mosquito bit into my thigh. Instinctively, I made a move to kill it.
“Don’t you move, maggot,” Fox screamed at me.
Clouds of gnats and mosquitoes began to swarm before my eyes. I counted eight mosquitoes on the neck of the boy in front of me. Our coming had stirred an invisible empire of insects, and we had come as food for that empire. Soon I felt the insects biting me in a dozen places. It seemed as though the entire motio
nless platoon disappeared beneath an awful living drapery of tiny wings and feathery black legs. Around me, I began to hear the moans of freshmen about to break from the ordeal by insect. The mosquitoes fed deeply and leisurely, as though they had come upon a freshly slaughtered battalion with the blood still warm and fragrant in the quiet veins. Some of the upper-classmen were laughing so hard they were on their knees in the grass.
When I thought I could not endure another moment, Blasingame ordered us to hit the ground and we obeyed his order gratefully. My body entered the mud with a feeling of exquisite relief. We snaked our way back to the dry land on our bellies, fingering our way through the mud and marsh grass and destroying a large colony of fiddler crabs in our passage. The mud felt delicious and cool.
When we reached solid land again, they lined us up in long squads, laughing at our appearance. Now we were ludicrous, like actors in blackface. They assured us again and again that this ceremony in the marsh was simply an amusing preliminary, that the plebe system had not even begun. A freshman behind me began crying. Two of the cadre cut him out of the platoon and began racking him somewhere behind us. He was still crying when they ran us back to the barracks to face Hell Night. They wanted us showered and fresh for the real test. And as we ran, I could no longer control my terror. I could no longer pretend I was brave or calm or anything but afraid. Of the sixty mud-stained plebes who quick-timed back to fourth battalion, ten of us would be leaving the Institute the next morning. I was not the only freshman suffering from a severe crisis of nerves.
At 2000 hours Hell Night began. They herded us into the large alcove room on the first division, dressed in our bathrobes, underwear, fatigue caps, and flip-flops. They had turned on the radiators in the room that morning and locked the windows. Outside in an airless, humid Charleston night, the temperature was ninety-eight degrees Fahrenheit. We could hear the hammering of the radiators furiously working out of season, and the heat in the room dazzled and staggered us simultaneously. Our collective stink after a minute in the room repelled even us. There was something tropical and malarial in the corrupt fragrance in the room.
As I entered, I heard a radio somewhere in the barracks loudly playing “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” I would never hear that song again without feeling the urgent movement of plebes being driven into that dark cell of heat and violence. I would never be able to appreciate the music of the Beatles, never be able to define my coming of age through their joyous lyrics, because of that one radio playing that one song as I moved into the alcove room for the opening ceremonies of Hell Night. The Beatles died for me at that very moment, long before they ripened into the definitive voice of my generation. For in some far more essential way, I was abandoning my membership in that generation by the mere act of entering that room.
Only two members of the cadre, both sophomore corporals, were responsible for herding us into that room, but they packed us in with remarkable economy. It was as though some cynical modern theologian had challenged them to stand sixty freshmen on the head of a pin.
“Tighter. Tighter, dumbheads,” they shouted. “Stick your dick into the asshole of the knob in front of you. Keep your eyes straight ahead. Tighter, people. Tighter.”
We stood in a moist, trembling rectangle of flesh. An immense psychological pressure, palpable and inchoate, was loose in that room. Panic blossomed in grotesque and lurid forms among the freshmen in the sinking half-light of a luminous and mysterious dusk. In the shimmering greenhouse of the alcove, we sweated and waited in melancholy silence for the entrance of the full cadre.
After fifteen minutes, they marched into the room in an immaculate single file, moving with such precision that they seemed otherworldly, superhuman. They were elite and slim and malignant. Their presence was an articulate tribute to the force and puissance of men united by indivisible will, by absolute conviction. They were dressed in freshly starched cotton uniforms. Their grooming was impeccable. They were what we aspired to be. Circling us, they stood at attention, wincing as they caught the smell of us.
I heard someone else enter the room. His footsteps echoed loudly as though he were goose-stepping into the alcove. There was malice in his approach. He mounted a table directly in front of the plebes. Behind me, a freshman breathed hotly on my neck. I could feel the buttocks of the boy in front of me pressed flat against my groin. My arms were pinned to my side by the pressure of arms on my right and my left. Sweat poured down my body, and my eyes burned with salt and fatigue. The atmosphere was so thick and overheated it was like breathing underwater.
The figure on the table was R Company’s first sergeant, Maccabee. He eyed us with contempt for several moments, then screamed out, “Sit down, dumbheads.”
In the crash that followed in blind obedience to that single command, I do not understand why bones were not broken or why someone was not seriously hurt. We landed together in a massive, disarranged pile. My right leg was draped over someone’s shoulder. Someone sat on my left arm. I was sitting astride another boy’s leg. But they let us writhe and maneuver like worms in a can until at last all of us could see the speaker, who stood rigidly on the table slapping his open palm with a swagger stick.
Then Maccabee began to speak in a deep, pitiless voice: “Gentlemen, I am your first sergeant and I want you to prepare for the ram.”
He slapped his swagger stick loudly against his open palm.
“It is my responsibility, gentlemen, to turn this pile of maggot-sperm into Institute men. From what I have seen already from this putrid mound of dogshit, I think I have been assigned a hopeless task. But with the help of this cadre and this swagger stick I’m going to do my best to make sure that Romeo Company remains the best goddam company in the Corps. To accomplish this, gentlemen, I’m going to jack this swagger stick up your foul assholes every time I get near you this year. I’m going to be a monster who screams at you during every waking moment. I’m going to be watching every single move you make this year, gentlemen. For tonight we begin the long agonizing journey that will transform you from worthless scumbags into full-fledged Institute men. The cadre has an awesome responsibility to uphold. We are responsible to all the men who wear the ring not to allow any diarrhea to survive the plebe system. No diarrhea, I repeat, gentlemen. No diarrhea will wear the ring. That is my personal vow to you.
“There are sixty of you in this room tonight. When your class graduates in four years, there will be only twenty survivors from this room. Most of you will leave the first year. Some of you will not measure up academically; some of you will leave for honor violations; and some of you”—he paused dramatically—“will leave tonight.
“I will tell you what we, the cadre, expect from you. We expect—as you were—we demand absolute unquestioning obedience from you at all times. If you hesitate, if you question, if you refuse, then the full fury of this cadre will descend upon you in terrible force, and together we will drive you out of this school in forty-eight hours. No knob can withstand the power and the fury of the brotherhood when it is directed at him alone. Your only chance for survival is to band together in a tight, impregnable brotherhood of your own, to protect each other, to care for each other, and to lean on each other from this day forward until the day you graduate.
“As for myself,” he continued, his cold eyes loathing us, “I would like to see every single one of you abortions pack your bags tonight and run home to your mother’s skirts. This is the worst looking bunch of knobs that has entered the Institute in twenty years. But, gentlemen, I assure you that if you make it through the plebe system of Romeo Company, you could walk through the Gates of Hell and think you were entering Paradise instead. When you scumbags return to your rooms tonight, if you have enough strength left in your puny bodies to pick up a pen, I want you to write a letter to your mother and give her your love. Then I want you to write a letter to your girl friend and give her your heart. Then I want you to get down on your knees, say a prayer to God, and give him your soul.”
Then he
screamed, “Because, shitheads, as of this very moment, your asses belong to Maccabee!” Saliva ran from his mouth to his chin. He was beating the swagger stick furiously into his palm as though his left hand was boneless, nerveless tissue.
“Look up, dumbheads!” he commanded, his voice breaking with anger. Our necks moved simultaneously and we stared at the ceiling of the room. The sweat changed directions and began to flow into our ears.
“Do you see the hand of God coming down from heaven to help you, scumbags? Do you see the heavenly host coming to your rescue? No, dumbheads. You don’t see anything. Because there’s nothing to see, maggot-shits. No power on heaven or earth can help you now. You are beyond all help. You belong to me and me alone and I want each one of you to know that I’m a fucking maniac. I am stark raving mad and if it were up to me, if the fucking Commandant’s Department would let me have my way, I’d pump this room full of DDT and let all of you die like the roach turds you really are. I’ve been insane for so long, criminally insane, douchebags, psychotically out of my fucking tree, that it gives me kind of a warm feeling all over when I think about sticking my swagger stick up your fucking asses and have it come out all slick with your blood and intestines. But the reason you don’t see the hand of God coming out of the heavens to help deliver you from this fucking madman first sergeant who’s in control of your destiny is that God has ceased to exist for any of you. He doesn’t care a fucking thing for a single one of you. He’s dead for you all. Your new God is your first sergeant, the great god Maccabee. Look at me now, dumbheads. Stare into the crazy wild eyeballs of your new God. I am your God and you will obey my commandments or I’ll jack it up your filthy asses.
“Here is your new bible,” he said, holding aloft a copy of the Blue Book, which contained the rules and regulations of the Institute. “And here is what your new, insane, knob-destroying God thinks of your old Bible.”
He threw his swagger stick to the floor and drew his long sword from his shining scabbard. Upon the wooden table by his feet lay a thick black Bible. He plunged his sword into the Bible with a deep, savage thrust, then lifted the skewered book aloft and held it high above his head. The Bible had been soaked in lighter fluid. With his free hand he lit a match, touched it to the book, which exploded into flames. The pure bright sacrilegious fire illuminated the grinning faces of the cadre, who had turned their faces toward the macabre light. The first sergeant moaned as he watched the thin leaves burn in sequence from Genesis to Kings, from Revelations toward Mark. Ash floated up to the ceiling in glowing black fragments. The freshmen watched. We had come to a place where a twenty-year-old boy roared out his own divinity, and the Bible was put to the sword and the torch to illustrate the preeminence of discipline. We were entering into the dark country of the plebe system now, and we were entering it afraid.
