Why you have to go through hell and back (Part 2)

I’ve been putting off posting Part Two of Hell and Back because the entire episode makes me cringe with embarassment and a bit of regret and horror, but since  I’m usually true to my word, I’m just going to have to plow through with it. Given myself one hour and whatever’s written up ’til then I’m going to post and, uh… to hell with it.

It all had to do with the fact that 16 athletes all wanted to get a shot at eight open starting positions on the University of British Columbia‘s two eight-man rowing crews. The year was 1983, and we were all young, foolish and eager to please.

After nearly three months of strenuous training on and off the water, the day which until then had only been whispered about was finally upon us: Initiation Day.

The guys already on crew had set the day out before us. We met at a bare, concrete block changing room at the edge of a rugby field at the far side of campus and were given our instructions. We were split up into four groups of four and given a list of tasks to perform, with the warning that we were not allowed to talk to another group should we accidentally run into one. And no shirking! The organisers had watchers posted at designated locations and would know if we’d failed to do what we were told.

The tasks seemed to be designed either to bewilder or humiliate us, but little did we know the humiliation that was to follow once we returned at 6pm with tales to tell.

Among our tasks was: buy a jar of olives, a block of ice and dixie cups. What the hell are we supposed to do with them, we asked? No matter, just do it.

Oh, and streak – for those who forget, that means on a rainy Saturday afternoon in late November with the streets crowded with early Christmas shoppers, take off all your clothes and run from the Hotel Vancouver across the square and over the steps of the old courthouse to a van waiting on Howe Street.

For those who’ve done that sort of thing, no problem, but for us it was the ultimate in daring. We could be arrested! Kicked out of school! What would our PARENTS say?

That was thankfully the last task of the day before we headed back to the rugby pavilion to meet the other groups and begin part two of the initiation.

Each team had to designate an orator. As the mouthiest of the bunch, I was thrown up on a table and started to recount the day’s activities.

“Show us your joke, show us your joke, show us your joke!”

So I did. Pants down, cheering, laughter, beer bottles shaken and fizzed all over me.

Next up, we finally found out what the jar of olives, the blocks of ice and dixie cups were for.

Everyone had to strip naked and line up in four rows of four at one end of the room with an empty dixie cup on the floor in front of the first man. At the opposite end of the room one olive lay on each of the four blocks of ice.

Try to picture it: the place is cramped and sweaty, you’re standing naked on a concrete floor being sprayed with beer by a bunch of jerks standing on benches around the perimeter dressed in streetclothes and laughing their fool heads off, and then you’re made to walk the length of the room, squat over the block of ice, pick up the olive with your buttcheeks, keep them squeezed tight enough as you waddle back to the line, squat over the dixie cup, and drop it in. Miss, and you gotta do it again.

I can’t remember whether our group won or not or whether there was even a prize for the winner, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to send us all to hell and back. To throw us all through an experience we wouldn’t forget, either as individuals or as a group.

It was more than 15 years later not long after I’d moved to Germany that I was attempting to tell that story in my fractured German at a bar when someone leaned over and said, “that happened to me too!”

I was stunned. I’d been telling this story for years in Canada and Hong Kong, and nobody had ever said that. Here I was thinking this experience had been unique to us, that these fellows had been geniuses – evil and twisted, but still geniuses – to have devised something guaranteed to weld us together as a group like nothing else.

“We had to go through that during our year in the Bundeswehr – in the army. One guy threw up in the middle of it all because he couldn’t stand it. He was never part of the boys after that.”

© 2007 lettershometoyou

Why you have to go through hell and back. (Part 1)

I must be on a real truth and lies bent lately, but it keeps cropping up so often that I might as well run with it.

I was listening to an amazing podcast the other day which had a few stories that made me sit up and say, “No way! That can’t be true!”

Then I played it back again and realised these stories could very well be true, because I went through something similar – if not nearly so gory – my third year of university.

It was a one-day trip to hell and back.

The podcast has an interview an American writer who talks about how stories people tell him can be strung out to become a short story or even a novel.

He tells three:

“My first job was at the Freightliner truck assembly line in Portland. The first day my foreman tells me to go to the Finished Cab work area and fetch a squeegie sharpener, which was ours. So I went up there and the foreman there tore me a new asshole one, called me every obscene word you could think of, and then told me to go to Engine Buildup, and they tore me a new one, calling me every swear word around, and they sent me off to Rough Cab, who sent me off to Paint Booth, who sent me off to Wheel Buildup, then on to Radiator Hanging. And at the end of the day, the only thing I had learned was that there is no such thing as a squeegie sharpener, but I had also learned every area of the plant, and I had basically introduced myself to every foreman in the plant, and received the same abuse that everybody had received there the first day.

“I told that story, and a friend of mine – a pediatrician – said that on his residency, they wait until you’ve been on call for 36 hours, and you’ve really eaten nothing but Skittles out of the vending machine, and the moment you lay down on a gurney in the middle of the night for a 10-minute nap, they announce, “Dr. So-and-so to room such-and-such, Code Red, staff!”  And you go racing down through the hospital delirious, sleep-deprived. You hear this woman down the hall in a room screaming, and you reach the room and throw the door open. The patient’s room is draped in this odd way: all the fabric and screens are pulled. There’s a woman laying in bed naked, covered in blood screaming, and something hits you in the chest, and you instinctively catch this thing that has struck you, and the woman is screaming, “You Bastard! You bastard! You killed my baby! You killed my child!” And the thing that you’ve caught is a dead, naked, bloody baby. And the room is draped so nightmarishly, because every doctor on staff is hiding in that room, and the woman in bed naked is a nurse, and everyone who is there is there because it has been done to them, and they want to see it now done to you.

And I told that story in Paris last year. And after, a man came up and says: I’m a veterinarian, and it’s incredibly hard to get into the Academy of Veterinary Science in Paris.  I had to apply for six years, and once you’re in, your peer group, your mentors and advisors, they hold this big party for you, and you get very drunk.   And if you don’t pass out, they put something in your wine so that you do pass out. And while you’re unconscious, they take off all of your clothes, and they bunch you up really, really tight, and they very methodically sew you – surture you – inside the belly of a dead horse.

 You wake up cold and suffocating inside this tight, dark stinking place, and you’re sick and you’re sore and you’re cold, but you can hear them out there in the darkness around this thing, so they start shouting, “Join us! Fight for it! Come out! Fight your way out! Be one of us!” And so you have to fight your way out of this thing, you don’t even know what it is, and the moment you squeeze out they say, “Now you’re a veterinarian. Now you are one of us.”

I leave it up to you to decide whether these are true or not. But as an old editor said to me once, half in jest: why let the truth get in the way of a good story?

So to get to my own hell-and-back story: what do a jar of olives, a few blocks of ice, Dixie Cups, a Polaroid camera, a tape recorder have in common?  I invite you to return over the next couple of days to find out.

All for now,

Ian

PS:  To anyone from the CBC should you stumble upon this: please don’t go off all copyright lawyer on me. After all, I am referring to your Definitely Not The Opera podcast in the best of light, even if I do transcribe a small piece of it verbatim. I’d thought of paraphrasing, but the impact would have been lost, and I need the stories to put Part 2 into context.

PS: My iPod crashed in the meantime and DNTO has since taken down the podcast, but if anybody recognises who the author of the above might be, please drop me a line.

© 2007 lettershometoyou

Time before Tuesday: when we thought punk rock ruled the world

Something I hope to publish on every Tuesday to illustrate some time which came before and thank christ will never come again. This is all inspired by an email out of nowhere a few weeks ago from a former classmate inviting me to a 30-year High School reunion which I won’t be able to attend.

I went through a punk phase my first year of university.

We were a tight group of five living on the same dorm floor. We couldn’t get enough of the garbled, barking lyrics and fawk-you delivery local guys like Joey Shithead and the DOAs, the Pointed Sticks and of course the Clash and the Sex Pistols were throwing our way. We were actually on what was supposed to be a quiet floor reserved for the studious and reserved, but our disco-addicted downstairs neighbours got so fed up with us they called out the Campus Quasi-Cops to shut us down on more then one occasion, slamming the main power switch off usually at the high point of our screaming parties.

Another time those downstairs doorknobs were having yet another lame-o mixer and for some reason had invited along a man who later went on to become UBC President. Oh yeah, I remember now: sick of living midst hospital grey, they had painted their corridor in some sort of Dark Side of the Moon album cover motif, and our man in the suit was along to cut the ribbon. Gag. We were all ready for it, timing a gigawatt blast of DOA’s Disco Sucks down the stairwell just as they were half-way through another sloppy string of Heart of Glass, YMCA and Stayin’ Alive. Ah, but they were ready with plans of their own, leading Our Man in the Suit up the stairs through our wall of total harmonic distortion. He was really into it though, and pogoed along with the rest of us. I have scoured the online archives of The Ubyssey trying to find the picture of him I know is out there, but to no avail.

The live concerts were the highlight of course. On concert nights we’d all pile into somebody’s car the bus and head downtown to some dive I think was called The Windmill. Our arrival was usually greeted with a mixture of shock and derision. Shock because none of us had the guts to shave his head or gel it into anything even remotely resembling a Mohawk, derision because we were obviously just a bunch of dabbling KAWledge kids / punk wannabes who must have come off as if the only safety pins anywhere near our skin were still keeping our diapers together.

The concerts were – no surprise – very loud and sometimes violent places to be. The music was so distorted and the lyrics so incomprehensible, it was only fitting that everyone start slam-dancing, flailing, spitting at the band and swearing. If you weren’t prepared to go around with someone else’s gob in your hair, shove your neighbour or hork a loogie at the bass player, you might as well have stayed home.

Sometimes fights would break out, but they wouldn’t last long. I almost got into one myself after one of our group played a trick on me. Reaching past two punked-out women who were standing right behind me, he grabbed my ass and goosed me so hard I nearly did a pogo jump onto the stage. I turned around with a snarl and my fists clenched only to come face-o-face with both of them, who gave me this whadda YOU lookin’ at look before I saw my friend right behind them looking off into space and trying too hard to act like he didn’t know what was going on.

I like to think of that time as my contribution to that youthful tradition every generation has to go through of dressing funny, talking weird, and having music our parents think is just noise. Now that I’m pushing 50 and entering my early curmudgeon years, I can say the spirit lives on.

My parents used to call it load of crap. That’s not far from what I now call it:

Rap.

© 2007 lettershometoyou