King of the Mild Frontier by Chris Crutcher

eyes with a sharp, smoldering stick.
    We walked onto the pool deck to see, scrawled on the blackboard at the far side of the pool, Looking for a Few Good Men. We pretended not to see, but Coach, the G. Gordon Liddy, the Bobby Knight of swim coaches, directed our attention to the fact that he needed volunteers for Stotan Week. We asked what was Stotan Week, and he said show up the first week of Christmas vacation and we’d find out. Oh, no, we said, we don’t volunteer for something before we know what it is.
    It was ritual to end each workout with twenty twenty-five-yard sprints. On Stotan sign-up day we were up to fifty when, as team captain, I finally gasped, “How many of these are we going to do?”
    When there were six names on the Stotan volunteersheet over by the table, he thought we might call it a night. Did I mention Coach had recently returned from two years in Army Airborne? The man knew how to get his volunteers.
    Eastern Washington State College closed up tighter than a fat man’s underpants over Christmas vacation. No dorms, no dinner. No problem. One of our number, Dumbo Banger, the self-described first authentic hippie of EWSC, lived in a condemned apartment above the Beehive Tavern in downtown Cheney, Washington, which he rented for nine dollars a month. The apartment had no electricity save for a single-plug extension cord running out the window, along the side of the building, which plugged in behind the bar downstairs, giving Dumbo access to electricity for one electrical appliance at a time and leaving him in the constant dilemma of choosing light or heat. The only furniture in this palatial suite was a single bed with, crumpled at the foot, sheets that hadn’t been washed since the Truman Administration. The true meaning of “hippie,” we were to discover, was “unwashed.” The day Dumbo moved in, he had purchased a brand-new seat belt from the NAPA auto-parts store across the street and mounted it on the toilet. If you went into the bathroom in Dumbo’s place and he didn’t hear that familiar click, he pounded on the door until he heard you strap yourself in. Liability, he said, in case youblasted off. The toilet alone got Dumbo a starring role as Lionel Serbousek in my book Stotan!
    So the rest of us dropped our mattresses out of our seventh-story dorm windows into the back of a borrowed pickup, toted them off to Dumbo’s palatial suite, and holed up for Stotan Week, which went like this: Be on the deck in your tank suit at eight o’clock each morning. Work out until noon. Experience not one minute’s rest. The preferred (read, “required”) method for initial entry into the water each day was to march out to the end of the one-meter diving board, execute a military about-face, fold your hands across your stomach, and fall backward, body rigid. Piking your body before entry cost you fifty push-ups. Failing to yell “Stotan!” as you fell cost you fifty push-ups. You always volunteered to go first, to avoid the sound of your buddies’ backs slapping on the water, increasing your anxiety in anticipation of your own doing the same. Coach wore his black-belted karate gi to let us know if we tried to escape he’d simply kick us back into the water. He carried an oversized battery-powered megaphone, through which he delivered all instructions at maximum decibels. If a Stotan were to miss a time standard on a swim or break down during any of the hundreds of drills, Coach would position the bell of the megaphone next to that Stotan’s ear and question his gender in very unflatteringterms. During intervals in the interval-training swims we were racking off push-ups and sit-ups and dips, or (his favorite) bear-walking—down on all fours—around the twenty-five-foot-square deck, the surface of which was so rough your hands began bleeding after fifteen yards; then out the door, over an eighteen-inch snowbank, around the