pigeon
This is Vee and Schulte, and we didn’t say shit about anyone!
We were camped out in the dust around the OK Corral. We had guns. We had hurled little sacks of flour at each other — a primitive form of laser tag. The atmosphere was raucous, glaring, summery; it exuded a “The day is hot; the Capulets, abroad; And if we meet we shall not ’scape a brawl” type of vibe.
But every Boy Scout outing had its own kind of raw, serrated edge. This particular one was Old West themed, so the baseline proto-militaristic subtextually homoerotic chimp show was tuned toward a cornball swagger, a folksy 1950s cap-gun and hat-festooned parody of boyhood rites of passage.
The day’s activities were done. I had survived them. Some of them were sort of fun, though there was always drama. Who teamed up with whom. Who sneered out of the right side of their face. Who could decode what was serious and what you were supposed to laugh off casually. Yes we had adult males around, but they were filtered by some unconscious code; those aspects of their presence that under normal circumstances would have offered psychic protection or social mediation might as well have been Lord-of-the-Flies distant. Short of a literal state emergency (which we had one time — different pigeon!), there was an unarticulated but palpable sense that we were on our own.
So it was night, and the tents were arrayed across the field, many still glowing from within. At night was when the weaving began.
Yes, boys are weavers too. The patterns they delineate are every bit as subtle and complex as the finest brocatelle. The grid of pup tents formed the warp, the restless wanderers among us formed the weft.
Vee and I were tent-mates. This was a comfortably long time before the dissolution of our friendship, but even so, I must have had a quiet, nascent sense that he was doing me a favor. We had returned to our tent earlier than some. Would he have been out among the crisscrossing riffraff if not for some feeling of responsibility for me? I truly don’t know.
In the flimsy privacy of our tent, we may have joked and talked shit about some people.
In the Boy Scout troop’s thriving underground economy of raw physical threats, the main currency unit was an offer to kick someone’s ass. I’m gonna kick your ass. So and so said he was gonna kick so and so’s ass. I bet I could kick his ass. He got his ass kicked. The first time I heard this terminology, I thought they were literally talking about applying one’s boot to someone else’s literal buttocks. What’s so impressive about that? It seemed comical. Surely this can’t be how people fight. Well, it wasn’t, but at least in those parts in those days, how my classmates and troopmates usually ended up fighting was just via the synecdochic threat. Actual physical contact was, as often as not, not required. Sometimes it was required, to be sure. Without real blood, there can be no gold standard in the hard currency of ass-kicking (and therefore there would be no Boy Scouts).
The turbulent gyre of the night lumbered on. Voices were here and there calling out, sounding the distances between potential combatants. Vee and I were surprised — well, he seemed genuinely surprised; I really wasn’t, because I remembered what we had been talking about earlier, and was maybe more aware of how voices carry through ripstop on a hot still night — to hear our tent become the target of a gauntlet thrown. Someone had taken offense at something they had heard emanating from our tent!
“Come out here so we can kick your ass!”
I tensed up. Adrenaline ran, mouth dried up, the focus of my solar plexus narrowed, sharpened, keened and shimmered brightly. I said nothing, not knowing what I would say nor even how to begin saying it really, being fully the opposite of ready to mobilize defenses. I genuinely just wanted to be left alone.
Vee, I think, for the most part, wanted the same, though probably for different reasons, but he, without hesitation, spoke up — for both of us. “Hey! This is Vee and Schulte, and we didn’t say shit about anyone!”
Never mind that we probably, technically, had said some shit about someone; if we had, it hadn’t been serious, certainly with no intent to incite a skirmish. Astonishingly, his proclamation proved sufficient. The wolves back off, loped away to find some other quarter of the little prairie village of tents in which to sniff out trouble and fresh meat.
Compact, taut, tan, vibrating with a higher order of energy, a good-humored rage simmering just below the surface — those are some of the ways I remember Vee. Being around him, I often felt gawky and gangly by comparison. He had a sort of immature, outlaw power that drew me to him. Being that age, in those days, in that context, and being who I was at the time, I wasn’t able to revel in the fact that he had just taken care of me — protected me. Such a notion wasn’t allowed on the table of conscious recognition. The price would have been too high to pay. Far more expensive than a strap of ass-kickings.
But now? Belatedly? I guess I can revel in it a little bit. It feels kinda good, tbh.
It wasn’t until I was in college that I had a real date with a guy, who took me to dinner at the best restaurant in Columbia, MO; bought me flowers, wine, the whole bit — I felt taken care of — and it felt really good, too. Revelatory, even. Why’d it take so long? Again — partly the times, partly just me.
It all feels like a long time ago, now. But back then, it was just the present moment.
And so is this.