King of the Mild Frontier by Chris Crutcher Page A

building, and back in through the opposite door into the ingeniously named Torture Lane, where you sprinted twenty-five yards, pulled yourself out of the pool, racked off ten push-ups, sprinted another twenty-five, racked off another ten, sprinted another twenty-five…until he got tired. After bear-walking that far in the snow, your hands felt as if you’d grabbed a fistful of bumblebees when they hit the water.
    Our afternoons were spent bundled in sleeping bags on our mattresses in Dumbo’s fifty-five-degree apartment, cursing the day Herb Elliot was born and screaming in alphabetical order the names of the STDs we hoped Coach’s wife had contracted at the hands of wimpy, sensitive lovers and antiwar protesters.
    We survived. Because we hung together, we survived. Nearly twenty years later when I brought my rendition of that time into my book, I did not characterize Coach as Attila the Coach but toned down the description of the training so it would appear choreographed to bring us rightto the edge of our potential. Such is fiction. In truth, anyone who allowed himself to go through Stotan Week had earned himself a bona fide mental health diagnosis.
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    But you don’t fall for this Stotan stuff unless you’ve been groomed for it; Stotans don’t materialize out of thin air. There is brainwashing that must occur first, torturous abuse. It was the future Stotan part of me who stood on my pedals, middle finger in rigid salute, cursing the heavens and Bob Gardner as my bicycle sank deeper and deeper into the mud. It was the Stotan part of me who squared off with Jon Probst (who worked with me at my dad’s service station) when I was a freshman in high school and he was a junior, two years older, thirty pounds heavier and infinitely stronger, for a one-for-one shoulder punch-out. The object was to make the other guy quit. I’d punch his shoulder as hard as I could, leaving my arm numb from wrist to elbow. He’d smile and punch my shoulder so hard I got whiplash. I’d smile and punch him again. His next one would move me over six inches, and I’d ask if that was really all the harder he could hit and unload on him one more time. My punches were little more than an annoyance; his were realigning my skeleton. But in the end he’d stop because if he hit me one more time he’d have to find a place to hidemy body. He’d go back to work and I’d go clean the restrooms, careful not to come out until there was no more evidence of tears.
    I had learned back in sixth grade there is more than one way to be tough. By then I had been working at my dad’s service station for almost two years, and the fact that I had found the key to the candy-bar machine was making itself evident in my body design, which was fast beginning to resemble a pink marshmallow Christmas tree. Narrow at the shoulders and broad at the hip, still waiting for my first real muscle, I might as well have just inserted those candy bars under the skin around my waist like a camouflaged money belt. You could call me many things, but rugged wasn’t one of them. Enter Mr. Sandy Tarter, sixth-grade concentration-camp warden.
    Up until sixth grade, I had a clean record, if you exclude the day in fifth grade when I asked the teacher why the skin under her arms jiggled so much when she wrote on the chalkboard. (Interesting how, after that, she began locking her elbow to her side while she wrote on the board.)
    Mr. Tarter was my class’s first male teacher. That could have been a good thing, but Tarter wasn’t just any male. Calling Sandy Tarter a no-nonsense kind of guy would be like calling our current differences with Al Qaeda a slightmisunderstanding. Tarter was the reverend down at the Valley Bible Center, an Old Testament kind of dude who believed in original sin, which meant you had already done the bad thing for which you should be punished with swift and sure precision. For Tarter, the rod not