Not Even Not Zen 420: Biomythography - Note 132: The Earring, Part III

The Earring, Part III

A few weeks after I got my ear pierced I headed home for Thanksgiving. My mother met me as I walked up the drive to the front stoop. Her big smile twitched, for a moment.

"What’s that in your ear?" she asked on the porch.

"Oh yeah, the earring." I shifted my bags to get everything under one arm. I touched the gold stud. "Remember, I got one?"

It's hard to scowl and raise an eyebrow at the same time. She compromised on a skeptical frown. I had mentioned the piercing to my mother on a phone call but, apparently, she had put it out of her mind since then. After all, she couldn’t see it. Now she had to look and reevaluate. It took a second. She shrugged.

My father had the same warning. But he didn't seem to know what to say. He avoided looking at the earring for a while. As it turned out, he was taking the time to think of scathing remarks. He was pretty good at them, usually, but this time nothing he said was memorable. I recall him turning red-faced but there was not a thought he expressed that I hadn't expected.

The next day we had to drive to the Thanksgiving dinner at my grandmother’s. She lived on Shiley Street, in Annapolis. At the time, Annapolis was small. It supported a population of about 20,000 people. If you didn't stroll through the six blocks of downtown next to the bay, you wouldn't realize it was the Maryland state capital. The government offices consisted of a few colonial buildings that didn't look much different than the taverns, which were also colonial buildings. In contrast, the Naval Academy dominated the area. It took up more square acreage, more housing, and more dock space than any other business, including the state government. I think the Navy tried hard not to ignore the town, but it was so big and powerful and the town was so small. The Navy often made decisions as if the town were not there and the residents simply gritted their teeth.

Some of the Annapolis residents were still farmers. Most folks weren't, though, and so they lived in small, single homes bordering a river, a stream, or the Chesapeake Bay. They worked for the Navy, the phone company, or the state government. Some held the types of jobs necessary to support the local infrastructure, including the fishing industry, which to my childhood eyes seemed to mainly involve standing around talking about fish.

And Shiley Street, our destination, lay not far from Tolson Street, which was named after my Great Uncle Harry. So we had an extra connection. The town had decided to name an entire neighborhood of streets in East Annapolis after the local boys who had gone off to fight in World War II. They had survived D-Day together. Then they had also died together during the German counterstrike three days later. My grandmother took me on walks to show me the street and to talk about her brother. This tended to put things in perspective, although obviously not a perspective that prevented me from getting an earring.

In the neighborhood, my grandfather gardened an empty house plot. The neighbors seemed happy to let him have a half-acre farm that the absentee owner didn't know about, nor care. During our Thanksgivings, most of our produce — at least the green beans, lettuce, squash, radishes, and cucumbers — came from his garden harvest.

During my family's drive, I read books and played card games with my brothers. At my grandmother's front door, a few uncles noticed my earring. They had each prepared a one-liner about it, or it seemed, but not much more. They wouldn't get another chance for an hour, either, because my mother's extended family was too big for us to all occupy one table.

On the other hand, they would have time  to think.

At my grandma's, we had to sit by age groups. We had a long table for adults and a round table for children. Despite being in college, I had a perpetual place at the kids' table, which was technically about half filled with adults at this point. Within a few years, I would start to grow grateful for the young adults table, where the conversations grew interesting. Even early on, I could see the potential.

The younger folks had a different reaction to my earring. They shrugged. The younger girls weren't allowed earrings yet so they asked if it hurt to get one.  

Our meal itself was cooked in English family style, which meant all the vegetables were boiled. To this day, I still like boiled green beans. I'm fine with most boiled or canned vegetables, not that I get to eat them much anymore. Butter was our main spice. However, we had personal access to more exotic seasonings, if by exotic you mean salt.

After the meal, I met Uncle Mike as we marched from opposite tables to converge on the pumpkin pie. It was the one vegetable not boiled and we were pretty motivated by it.

“That's damn sissy,” he said, looking at the earring. He jostled my elbow and I did it right back. I knew the main reason Mike had graduated to the adult table was that he'd insisted on it. He also got married, which helped. He had a sort of twinkle in his eye as he tried to tease me, though, because at his core, he sort of liked any form of rebellion even when he didn't agree with it.

“Mostly girls like it," I replied. "Guys think it’s queer, of course.”

“Of course. Don't you worry about that?”

I grunted but I knew he was looking for words so I added, “Why would I care what guys think?”

He accepted that summary. Like most of my relatives, he already knew what I thought of their opinions. I suppose it’s a lesson in laying the proper groundwork.  

“Have you got in any fights over it yet?” He clearly looked forward to them.

“Not yet.” We both laughed.

"You will," he promised. And he was right. We both knew it was coming.
 

Not Even Not Zen 419: Biomythography - Note 132: The Earring, Part II

The Earring, Part II

I woke feeling like I'd been kicked in the brainstem. But I felt like that every time I spent the weekend partying with friends. My world had returned to three dimensions (plus or minus a half) before I slept. My arms and legs rose with me, under my control about as much as they usually were. Most of my cognitive functions reported for duty. That was enough.

Even though Adam and I were in pretty decent shape for a Sunday, we decided to take the bus to the mall rather than drive. We had money in our pockets. We had seen a fancy-ish cigarette lighter Adam wanted to buy. And we knew the jewelry store kiosk manager would gladly shoot holes in our ears. 

We hadn't counted on her young assistant.  

The kiosk manager herself was probably in her late twenties, professional, and the kind of person who had done this eight thousand times. Her assistant, however, looked seventeen with the eager, slightly terrified expression of someone being given responsibility for the first time. She stood maybe five foot seven with brunette hair in a pony tail, nice jewelry, and an expensive shirt. She smiled longingly at my ear while holding her ear-piercing gun. It was brass colored and looked like a cross between a stapler and a nail gun.

"Who's first?" the manager asked cheerfully, as though we were volunteering for a fun carnival game.

Adam and I engaged in the time-honored male tradition of determining our actions through a complex series of facial expressions and half-gestures. The ladies stepped between us and started to speak. 

"There are two of you," Adam pointed out, raising a finger.

"Both at the same time, then," the manager concluded. 

Her young assistant led me to a chair. After a conference with her boss, the assistant returned. She told me her name and that this was her "first time with a guy." I laughed because I thought she was making a joke. She adjusted the light. She touched my jaw to put my head in the position she wanted. With hardly any fumbling, she loaded a gold stud into the gun.

"Just a second." She strode over to where her boss was working on Adam. I could hear they were making sure the pointy side of the stud was facing the right way and all that, just a young woman making sure she was doing things right. 

When she returned, she played with my left earlobe for a moment. She leaned close and I got a reassuring whiff of her perfume, which wasn't too heavy and didn't smell like I'd be allergic to it. A sigh escaped her lips. She raised the gun.

"Oh, you're really thick," she said. 

"Ha ha," I allowed, thinking again it might be a joke. 

But no, she disappeared. I blinked under the interrogation-room style of lamp. A moment later, her boss came to my side. The older woman watched as her assistant squeezed my too-thick earlobe between the barrel and the backing of her stapler. 

"Hold still," she said. It's a popular thing for people to tell you before they cause pain in a humorous way. 

She pulled the trigger. I felt a brief, sharp pinch, as if I'd been snapped by a rubber band. Now I was a man with an earring. When I blinked, Adam was already standing. I don't know for sure but I think his experience was roughly identical. Maybe one of us winced more gracefully than the other. 

"Don't pull out the earring," the manager said, launching into a speech she had given to countless young girls, and now to us. "Don't substitute another earring. Don't try to put a safety pin in its place."

Adam gave me a meaningful look.

"Clean your ear with alcohol every evening for a week," she continued. "Turn the post every day."

Her assistant stepped back and examined her handiwork. She put her hands on her hips and delivered her professional assessment, "You look good."

Like a barber showing off a haircut, the manager turned us so we could observe our new fashion statements in a mirror attached to the kiosk. I hadn't thought we would look any better or worse with earrings. I figured we'd look the same but with small shiny things stuck in our heads. In fact, we did look a little better. We approximated the style of the too-well-dressed guys around our college campuses. Chances were that some young women were going to like this. Adam grinned. His folks were going to have opinions but, at the moment, they didn't matter. For the rest of the trip, he didn't even worry about his folks back home.

Instead, I worried for him. It was a correct concern, as it turned out, but also slightly misplaced.
 

Not Even Not Zen 418: Biomythography - Note 132: The Earring, Part I

The Earring

or

Piercing My Flesh to Support Friends and Spite Relatives 

In 1982, men didn’t get piercings. Only girls did. Never mind that poking holes in your skin is otherwise kind of a tough-guy thing. Girls did it; therefore, guys didn't. 

On my college campus, which was a few years ahead of other colleges in social trends, some gay men got earrings. A few extra-good-looking straight men got them, too. The straight men wore them differently and it was always just the one. I didn't belong in either camp, so I ignored the trend and concentrated on writing my term papers. (And I started considering tattoos.)

One day in the fall, a friend drove seven hours to my college dorm bearing what he called "mind-altering substances." He also had a request: that we go get our ears pierced. Now, you might ask yourself: "Why would someone drive four hundred miles to another state to get an earring?" This is an excellent question and it suggests you grew up in an era when people pierced things willy-nilly including the willy and probably a nilly or two but I don’t want to go on about that here.

I and my friend, who I will call "Adam" to protect his identity, did not grow up in such an era. We grew up in the "hey, that guy wants to kill you for being different" era. Wearing a collared shirt would get you in a fight in the parking lot. (Most of the fights were anticlimactic, fists only, weapons also being considered unmanly.)

"Come on," Adam explained. "You were already talking about it."

Adam's logic, as he revealed over the span of an hour or so, went like this:

1. He wanted an earring
2. He did not want it done in our hometown
3. Therefore, he had traveled far
4. But first, we needed to get extremely stoned

It made more sense after we had started on step four. I was not clear on whether the substances were meant to provide courage or whether he wanted to get stoned and having a stud pushed through his bloody earlobe was the excuse. Either way made sense after we repeated step four.

"Where can we go?" he asked. 

"There's a place in the mall." Young college women had taken me to the mall in South Hadley. I'd even bought them earrings at two of the four jewelry stores there. That is, I'd spent money in the places a college student could afford. 

"I don't think you should drive." He rose and tested his balance. His hand shot out to the doorframe. "I don't think I want to, either."

"We'll take the bus." My words sounded confident but I knew we'd have to find the bus stop. Plus we'd have to recognize when to leave the bus after we got on. That would be up to me. The world looked fuzzy, like it did when I was breathing laughing gas in a dentist's office. I wasn't sure I was competent to ride.

"How much?" He glared at me for a few seconds before I figured out he meant money. 

"Buses around here are free," I pointed out. Part of me felt like pointing out I had already pointed this out. So I did.

"Oh, you goddamn hippies." He nodded, remembering. Then he had another smoke.

We staggered our way across campus with only a half-dozen stops along the way to lean against buildings. The path was a straight line I walked every morning but I managed to get us distracted and almost lost.

"Adam," I said when the bus arrived.

"What?" 

"The world has flattened." The news irritated me to have to announce. It would have alarmed me more if I'd been capable of feeling a normal sense of alarm.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, everything is two dimensional now." I'd always had perfect distance judgement before. Now, when I reached for the handle of the bus door, I missed. 

"That's a new one," he said as he clambered on. In my stated of flattened reality, I closed one eye, figuring it would help, and managed to step aboard by ignoring what I saw and paying more attention to the pieces of bus I could feel. 

To our fellow passengers, I imagine we resembled two people attempting to operate human bodies via remote control with a slight delay in the signal. Certainly, there was a young woman who expressed concern. Others expressed their amusement. Adam conducted a possibly coherent conversation with someone, a long-haired woman, I think. For my part, I concentrated on not minding my lack of depth perception. My sudden awareness of my brain bouncing in its cranial fluid made up for it anyway. That was a sensation I didn't normally have. Despite the distractions, I didn't forget to pull the rope for our stop. We reached our destination correctly and on time, an achievement on par for us with assembling IKEA furniture while wearing oven mitts. 

Every few minutes, even as we got off the bus at the mall, I reminded myself we were going to the mall. Even with the doors of the mall in my sight, I needed the reminders.

Inside, we spent a lot of time looking at lava lamps, reading paperback books, and entertaining ourselves with window shopping. Eventually, we managed to find the kiosk in the center of the mall. The woman running it raised her eyebrows at hearing we wanted to get piercings. Adam asked sensible questions. I asked about putting in a safety pin instead of a gold post. 

"I wouldn't advise that," she told me. 

"Because it's not sanitary?" I guessed because I wanted the safety pin and wasn't worried about germs.

"Some people have metal allergies," she responded. "Let's make sure you don't have any before you go doing something like that, first."

The idea made me pause. My body responded to a lot of things with high-powered allergies. Maybe I should rely on an expert, or so I guessed, especially when I hadn't been bothered to acquire any information before this. The lady led Adam and I through our best choices from her shop. We picked out a pair of gold studs to split. We were cheap about it but the gold was affordable even for college students. They had been designed to be extra strong as starters. As I checked out even cheaper possibilities, Adam chatted up the shop lady about appointments. 

"I didn't know we needed appointments," I remarked as I turned to them.

"You totally don't need appointments," the lady told us, speaking mostly to Adam.

"We're making them anyway," he insisted. 

"Okay." She shrugged. "Tomorrow, one o'clock."
 

Not Even Not Zen 417: Biomythography - Note 131: The Great McFamine

The Great McFamine of 1981

I am not saying that the human body contains a sophisticated alert system designed to warn you when you're about to do something stupid with your finances. However, I am saying if such a system exists, mine wasn't functional in 1981.

This was the year I attended the University of Maryland full time while working at fast food restaurants, which is kind of like saying I decided to go on a hike and then strapped a refrigerator to my back. And then I met a couple other hikers carrying refrigerators, too. 

I was paying for my classes out of savings. I was paying for my rent out of savings. I was doing the opposite of responsible living. My financial masterstroke was something later generations won't or can't understand. I ran up a monumental phone bill. Yes, this was a phone bill that cost approximately eight months' worth of rent.

You might reasonably ask: "What could you possibly have been doing on the phone that would cost that much?" The answer is: I was listening to my girlfriend break up with me. And I was hard of listening, so she had to repeat herself a lot. It cost me money. But of course I paid the bill, because that's what responsible adults do. A much, much more responsible adult would have bought a decent used car instead but I don't remember thinking about it. (I was seventeen and everyone told me it wasn't allowed anyway.)

I paid my tuition, paid my bills, bought a textbook, paid my rent in cash, and hiked to the bank to see how I'd done.

I had five dollars left.

This was not five dollars in spending money. Not five dollars until payday. I had five dollars and twenty-five cents TOTAL when five dollars was the absolute minimum the bank would allow before they closed the account and presumably repossessed my shoelaces. 

Okay, so I was young (seventeen, remember) when I got myself into this situation. But I wasn't clueless. At least, I wasn't totally clueless for a teenager, when the bar is low. I had a plan. Two weeks before, I'd ditched my Roy Rogers gig where the managers were stingy with food. Instead, I picked up extra burger flipping duties at McDonald's. During my shifts there, I could eat and drink for free. It was a foolproof plan.

Life can be very, very foolish, though, more than we budget for in our foolproof plans. 

First, the McDonald's payroll system broke down.

This was not the entire payroll system for all McDonald's restaurants everywhere, which would would be a failure with a certain dramatic grandeur to it. No, just the area payroll system broke and about a third of us didn't get our checks. Naturally, I was in the problem third. 

My manager reassured me the check would be coming by 'the middle of the week' and anyway, he knew I'd already paid rent so I'd be fine. I nodded and said yeah, because admitting I had no money for food seemed like a humiliating detail. 

The main thing was, I had my McDonald's shifts. I didn't have to admit anything to anybody, yet.

Here's where I should mention I had experience with fasting. At twelve, I'd fasted for a day (that's twenty-four hours for you cheaters, not dawn to dusk). Later, I'd made it two whole days with just drinking water. Then I succeeded at three days, although I got shivering cold at around the 70-hour mark. Finally, at sixteen, I'd conducted a four-day fast that left me not only shivering but feeling vaguely nauseous, as if my body was trying to express something profound but only had a limited emotional vocabulary.

The previous fasts had been formative experiences. I thought I was good at fasting. I thought I understood it. Fasting and I had reached a gentleman's agreement about how things worked.

Oh, but I was wrong.

On Friday after my shift, I looked in the fridge. My remaining food supply consisted of: one tangerine, two slices of white bread, and the dregs of a jar of mayonnaise my roommates considered empty but which I, in my creative approach to defining the word "food," did not.

By Saturday night, I would be eating my last meal, a mayonnaise sandwich. This is the kind of stuff that should make you reflect on the choices that brought you to this point, although in my case, many of my relevant choices involved listening to lengthy phone calls about feelings while someone in the AT&T offices gently but firmly kept track of my time.

When I rose on Saturday morning, I ate my tangerine and walked to work. There, I checked our posted schedule and discovered my manager had removed me from the first half of the week. Well, this was new information. I had no shifts on Sunday through Wednesday. Therefore, I would have no food after my Saturday morning double.

On Saturday night, I ate my mayonnaise sandwich, knowing there would be no more food until Thursday at the earliest, or until my paycheck arrived, whichever came first. 

Sunday: didn't eat. There was no point in calling about the paychecks because no one would try to start fixing the problem until Monday. I spent the day trying to achieve the right frame of mind for my fast. (A little late, since I'd already started.)

Monday: didn't eat. After a couple of calls, I got a manager who told me the payroll office was cutting checks and they would probably come in on Wednesday. The management didn't need more staff today. I thanked him and did not mention I was currently conducting an unplanned experiment. When I finished it, I would discover the difference between fasting and simply going hungry.

Tuesday: didn't eat. I couldn't resist calling McDonald's to see if they needed help or if the paychecks had arrived. They didn't and they hadn't. I began to understand why my previous fasting experiences, conducted with planning and purpose, had felt so different from this one. This was not a spiritual journey, really. This one was more of a hostage situation conducted by a broken printer and a courier service.

Wednesday: I dropped by my restaurant and the manager was surprised to see me. However, the paychecks had just come in. This coincidence was due to me thinking hard about the pay couriers' schedule.

"We're in a rush right now," my manager said, stating the obvious. He was running a pack of fries and two rolls of register receipt paper between the kitchen and the front counter when I caught him. "I can't get your paycheck out of the envelope until we hit a slow spot."

I waited like a person who has not eaten for four days waits, which is to say with calm, energy-conserving focus at a table where I could see the size of the customer lines. After a while, the lines diminished. The manager noticed me and invited me to the back of the restaurant. In his office, he rifled through the contents of the pay envelope. He found mine in the bag, to my relief. When he  handed it over, the clock on the wall told me it was at four in the afternoon.

I had plenty of time to hike to a bank. Inside, the branch office smelled of stale air and dust but I knew I reeked of cooking grease, which was worse. The teller frowned at my request but his bank had promised up front to cash paychecks, so he had to do it. He doled out a partial cashback for me, deposited the rest of my trivial money, and handed me my transaction statement. He did everything with a slight air of disgust. He could smell the fast food air on me. Then, with the wad of green bills in my hand, I hiked a mile up the road to the Safeway.

Since I was feeling budget conscious, I bought soup and bread. Those were the cheapest things I could get plus I knew I was breaking a fast and had to do it carefully. For dinner that night, after waiting half an hour to pass so I would make it to four full days of fasting, I ate tomato soup with toast. It was a ceremony I planned with care and conducted with reverence. I suspected it might be the first time in my life I liked tomato soup.

I was right. It was.

EPILOGUE: Were there any life lessons here? Maybe.

I told myself I should fast, under the circumstances. And I fooled myself into it pretty well. Still, it is hard to fool yourself completely. Every morning, I woke up wishing I had food. I would take a half hour or so to get into the mindset of going without. I've done single-day fasts since but I've never decided to go three or four days, not anymore.

Even food you hate will taste amazing after you go without any for long enough. That makes sense to everyone, I suspect, but there's a difference when you actually do it. 

In theory, I was taking college classes. I probably attended my Creative Writing sessions. I may have skipped French. At any rate, I mostly don't remember my classes for the week except for my hour of singing. The Chapel Chorus class was my least important one. But for me, it was the most welcome.

Also, as an obvious lesson, you should probably not spend eight months' rent listening to someone break up with you over the phone. It's not the stupidest decision a teenager ever made but I had to learn from it that running out of money has real consequences. Besides, paying up front for my classes and paying the rest of my bills did more to wipe me out than the phone company did. 

Not Even Not Zen 416: Biomythography - Note 129: Kicked Out of Boy Scouts

How I Got Kicked Out of the Boy Scouts

I want to be clear about something right up front: I was an excellent Boy Scout, if by that we mean I had mastered the essential skills of tying knots, setting fires, and eating s'mores.

In my younger years with the Cub Scouts and Webelos I had earned every single badge and the Arrow of Light, too, the very first in our troop history. I had written essays about atheism to fulfill my Religion badge requirements. I also did the required volunteer charity work, though I should note that "required volunteering" is a suspect term like "jumbo shrimp" or "easily cancellable service subscription."

In retrospect, those were enlightened times. I endured concerned questioning from a den mother and two different scoutmasters — one who wore office clothes (the "I Just Came From My Accounting Job" look), and another who wore an olive green scout shirt (the "I Take Scouting Seriously" look). Each wanted to make absolutely certain I was sincere in my atheism. They had to verify I wasn't just a lazy churchgoer trying to game the system, because apparently a thing worse than not believing in a God is trying to get out of a badge requirement. The Boy Scouts had their priorities.

After passing my theological exams, I went on to thrive in the Boy Scouts. I had fun crabbing on the Eastern Shore. (Crabbing means catching angry crustaceans with string and chicken necks. It's like fishing, but more likely to result in the overall sense that nature is disgusting.) I learned that a pot with three crabs does not need a lid and a troop of boys does not need free time or they will resort to pranks.

I even became a minor celebrity at the Boy Scout Jamboree, winning the archery contest and racking up various other minor successes. But apparently the Jamboree was the last hurrah for our old Boy Scout leader, who had the good sense to treat religion like a reasonable person treats a wasps' nest: acknowledging it exists, maintaining a respectful distance, and resisting the urge to poke it with a stick.

Enter: The New Guy

We then entered a bold new era led by a scoutmaster who was less pragmatic and more evangelical. I hadn’t known many like him. He had the kind of religious fervor usually associated with people who stand at airport terminals handing out pamphlets and giving everyone soulful, sad-eyed stares.

Our new leader wanted to start each meeting with a religious observance he had written himself. And when I say "written himself," I mean he had crafted a speech so profoundly, magnificently awkward it made a lot of the boys laugh. Out loud. Immediately.

They laughed so hard, we never quite heard the end of the speech. It remained forever a mystery. However, it contained a reference to "woodies," by which our scoutmaster meant cars, "rosy cheeks," by which our scoutmaster meant he didn't understand twelve year old boys, a reference to being "gay and carefree," a reminder to be "square and true," and the "stout-hearted breasts of brave, young men," by which he again meant he didn't understand what boys find hilarious.

I didn't understand why some of the phrases like, "we will make everything tight" got guffaws from the older scouts but I knew the trite phrases were outdated. I chuckled along in frozen horror, the way you might laugh if you saw someone slip on a banana peel but then realized they were about to fall down an escalator.

He announced — and it's revealing when you think about the bold confidence this required — that he wanted someone to give a big, dramatic reading of his religious masterpiece.

The boys were so openly, enthusiastically opposed to this idea that even the scoutmaster himself realized he had a rebellion on his hands. He pivoted. Instead of asking who wanted to read it (since the answer was clearly "nobody, not even for money"), he decided to hold a contest. The losing troop would get the honor — and I'm using that word very loosely here — of reading his speech aloud. 

Let me repeat that: We were now battling for the right NOT to have to read The Religious Essay.

Even now, this strikes me as a profoundly weird thing for a scout leader to allow to happen. How could he not feel embarrassed by everyone's reactions to his literary masterwork? But I suppose he was protected from shame by his religious certainty, which must have been like an invisible force field that deflects self-awareness.

At the time, I thought he might not be very bright. With the benefit of hindsight and my own adventures in raising children — during which I have learned that adults are morally just children who can reach high shelves — I am now absolutely certain that he did not understand people and probably not puppies who chew slippers, puzzles with more than 100 pieces, or himself.

But sometimes the Boy Scouts can't be choosy. They need warm bodies with driver's licenses. Someone who seems to have good intentions, no matter what his other drawbacks — poor judgment, questionable writing ability, the social awareness of a moose trying to mate with a rail fence — those good intentions might still be the best they can do.

The Great Athletic Competition to Avoid Public Humiliation

And so began a series of contests. Multiple contests. An Olympic-level cavalcade of contests, all designed to determine who would be forced to read this speech that nobody wanted to read.

Now, here's where I should mention something important: the other boys in my troop were not, generally speaking, what you would call "good athletes." I was better. Not Olympic-caliber or anything, just better than the average bunch of guys who had chosen to spend their free time learning about knots and earning badges.

I also fought harder, because I had seen the speech. I knew what was at stake. I won the sack race. I ran first in the relay race, powered by my purest fear of public speaking. I pitched curves in wiffleball that would have made a major league pitcher weep with envy. I hit a home run because my terror gave me strength plus the ball got lost in the leaves under a car.  

I scored all the goals in crab soccer, which is a game where you walk around on your hands and feet facing up like a crab, and honestly, the fact that we were playing it at all should have been a warning sign that things had gone terribly wrong. And yet somehow the teams kept playing until my team, despite our heroic efforts, finally lost the third tiebreaker activity.

This meant we had to pick someone from our troop to read the speech.

It was so spectacularly, magnificently bad that I outright refused. Just flat-out said no, not something I had done since throwing a temper tantrum (and getting beaten for it) when I was four. This led the troop to pick me anyway, because I was the youngest available. I still refused.

So they finally picked some other poor schmuck, and I felt genuinely bad for him, the way you feel bad for someone who's been selected for jury duty on a murder trial in which the murder suspect has already declared he's going to kill everyone “who’s gone against him” in revenge.

The Quiet, Quiet Incident

When the time finally came for the reading, we all gathered around with the grim determination of people about to witness a terrible but unavoidable public torture session at the stocks. The designated reader began. Almost immediately, one of the scouts started to giggle at some phrase like "our brave parts" or another innocently over-hokey, noble-sounding expression that absolutely did not land the way the scoutmaster had intended.

I was standing next to this kid, and I immediately started snorting — not because I wanted to, but because suppressed laughter has to come out somewhere, and my body decided "through the nose” was how we were going to go. I was suppressing so hard, my ears were whistling. 

The sounds I made were so ridiculous, the previously giggling scout couldn't suppress his laughter. And then others nearby started laughing because we were funny, which is how these things work. Laughter is contagious, like yawning, or panic, or unvaccinated children.

There's something about trying to hold in laughter that makes it worse. 

Within seconds, we became a brass band of nose-honkers, stifled chortlers, and choking donkeys. Bursts of sound erupted from our group like popcorn bangs in a microwave. The senior boy in our troop resisted but that only led to him to make noises like a dying goose. Next to us, the other troop of boys caught fire with forbidden humor, too, and they tried to contain their laughs but as a result they sounded like someone kicking a pile of Scottish bagpipes. 

Kids turned colors as we tried to calm ourselves. We gave our honest effort with "stout-hearted breasts of brave, young men" but we made the mistake of looking at each other, right in the eye. That was bad. When your friend looks ridiculous generally, he doesn’t look any less funny when he’s turning purple. We could not have been worse-behaved if we had applauded the speech using armpit farts. 

The Aftermath

I was kicked out of the Boy Scouts immediately. This was partly due to my being an atheist but also because I wouldn't apologize and blamed the scoutmaster for the laughter right to his face. (I don't remember the blaming part but a couple scouts approached me very quietly about it later, so maybe.)

The most unforgivable sin had to be making fun of what the scoutmaster had written.

Looking back, I regret nothing. Well, almost. I do feel bad for the one kid who had to actually try to read the speech while thirty boys giggled and drooled and spilled things and snorted. I think we mostly didn't look at the speaker, at least. We weren't making fun of him and we all tried not to make fun of each other as we turned colors.

I learned some valuable lessons from my time in the Boy Scouts: how to tie a half hitch knot, how to start a fire without matches, and how religious certainty combined with poor writing can create a situation so awkward that it becomes impossible not to laugh.

Scouting teaches us good stuff. These are all skills that have served me well in life.