The Lords of Discipline by Pat Conroy Page A

in opposite directions. He squeezed me until I gasped for oxygen. He kissed me on both cheeks. He picked me up again and threw me on my bunk. When finally I could speak, I was looking up at his strong, dark face, his white teeth flashing in a broad smile. After long separations, Mark’s greetings were a form of martial art.
    “Mark, it’s so good to see you,” I said.
    “How’d you live without me,” Will? And you start being nicer to us sweet Italian boys.”
    “Nice!” I yelped. “If it even looks Italian, I’m nice to it, man. I’m not stupid. I’m nice to grease bubbles, oil slicks, and lube jobs. They all remind me of two of my roommates. How’s your mother and father?”
    “Begged me to change roommates and sent their love. They want you and Tradd to crack down on my ass and make me study. By the way, where’s Pig and Tradd?”
    “Pig hasn’t shown,” I said, glancing at my watch.
    “If I know muscle beach, he’ll be rolling in two minutes after muster, wearing a track suit and a hard-on.”
    “You go on over to Tradd’s house, Mark. Abigail’s fixing dinner for all of us tonight. I’ll wait for Pig and bring him over later. I think Commerce would like someone to watch the baseball game with him. He’s been riding Tradd pretty hard again. But put your uniform on, son. You’re a senior now.”
    Mark picked me up again and crushed me against his powerful, hirsute chest. He kissed me again on both cheeks and with no self-consciousness at all looked into my eyes with benign tenderness and said, “I love you, Will.”
    My answer was a lesson in history and sociology and you could derive some of the major differences between Ireland and Italy by the emotional diffidence of my response. Both of us were unassailable proof that each of the tribes of Europe had imported their own separate fevers, predilections, and reveries into the capricious, turbulent consciousness of America. Our Europes were different; our Americas were different. Mark was emotional and sentimental beneath his scowling, brooding visage. I feared emotion, dreaded any commitment of spirit, and was helpless to translate the murmurings of the inarticulate lover I felt screaming from within. In a laugh-it-off, pretend-it-isn’t-serious, tight-assed parody of the Irish American, preserved like a scorpion in my emotional amber, I answered, “I think you’re a gaping asshole.” We had said the same thing and Mark left for dinner at the St. Croixs’ as I continued to wait for Pig.
    Pig. Dante Pignetti. I had heard upperclassmen say that there had never been a freshman like him in recent memory. He was the only member of my class who was not affected or scarred by the plebe system at all. In fact, throughout that first year, he gave intimations that he loved both its regularities and its aberrations. It was an act of orgasmic pleasure for him to do a pushup, a devotional of unutterable joy to do fifty. Once I had watched three juniors work on him for an hour, trying to break down his indefatigable stamina with a grueling, synchronized combination of running stairs, holding out an M-1 rifle, and pushups, but they never even began to crack Pig and eventually surrendered out of sheer boredom and a begrudging awe. But awe was not the right word. It was fear. If they had broken Dante Pignetti, I am sure that none of them would have slept soundly for the rest of the year, for he carried with him a legendary unpredictability and an awesome capacity for rage. His body was a work of art forged through arduous repetitive hours with weights. It was not the type of body I admired—the long fluid muscles of swimmers hold more esthetic appeal for me—but it had a magnetic, almost nuclear, tension. His upper torso was breathtaking, his chest muscles, his shoulders, all were simply extraordinary. He did not play football; his love affairs were with the weights, with boxing and wrestling, with karate, with all sports that hurt seriously.
    In the first