Read Online King of the Mild Frontier by Chris Crutcher - Free Book Online

Patsy a dime. Tarter looked at his watch and shook his head in disgust. “You owe me a recess.” Back at my desk I stuck my nose in my social studies book, pretending to give a shit about the industrial revolution to avoid absorbing the humiliating hits from classmates I would gladly have humiliated had they been in my shoes. Silently I congratulated myself. Seventy seconds was by twelve seconds my personal best.
    Tarter may have unwittingly given me my first push toward Stotanism, but what prepared me best was undoubtedly my high-school C Club initiation. Jocks from Cascade High School have migrated far and wide over the years, some as far as Garden Valley and Horseshoe Bend to the South, and North all the way to Riggins and Grangeville, and we make our livings at wildly diverse minimum-wage jobs, but what all of us have in common is a colossal distaste for oysters and olives. That is not a coincidence.
    Often when I’m talking with groups of students in high or middle schools, I imagine they’re expecting me to recount how far I had to walk to school through ten-foot snowdrifts with fifty pounds of books, wearing nothing but flip-flops, uphill both ways; those things the geezers of my generation used to tell me about. When I started writing books aboutteenagers, I was thirty-five and needed to bridge only one generation to connect my adolescence with theirs. Now it’s two. What I say and believe is that humans of any generation are far more similar than we are different. True, if you were a drug abuser in Cascade, Idaho, in 1964, you’d pretty much have to do it with a case of beer; and if someone brought a gun to school, it was because he went hunting in the early morning and left the gun in the gun rack of his pickup, which disturbed no one because there were three or four other pickups in the parking lot similarly armed, and the thought of bringing those weapons inside to take care of business simply didn’t exist.
    An event of less than life-changing proportions might take two or three days to make the evening news (which lasted fifteen minutes), if it made it on at all. No Internet: The information highway was a single-lane logging road winding through steep mountains, dead-ending at some nameless “crick.” But all teens, then and now, are becoming, and that is the connector. We’re watching and considering and wondering what happens next; finding our places in the universe; entertaining beliefs that will become guideposts for our thoughts and actions for the rest of our lives. I rely on mutual agreement on that concept to boost my credibility when I’m standing before a group of teenagers.
    Which is why I never tell them about C Club initiation. They would say, “Die, old man! We are not the least bit similar. We are not the same species. Spock, are you out of your Vulcan mind?”
    See, earning an athletic letter at Cascade High School was a mixed blessing. To become a full-fledged letterman with all the rights and privileges thereof, you were required not only to letter but to join the C Club, which meant you must go through C Club initiation, after which you were eligible to pick a girl from the top row, though it didn’t guarantee you’d be on the top row when the eligible girls did their picking. Always an element of risk.
    To put the entire C Club experience into perspective, I need you to understand that the C Club sponsored one activity during the entire school year: a shotgun raffle. (Speaking of our similarities and differences, you show up at school with a plastic pistol no bigger than your fingernail from your old G.I. Joe set and get three days out-of-school suspension and a three-hundred-dollar psychological evaluation. My C Club raffled off a shotgun and handed it over to the winner in school, during school hours.) The income generated from ticket sales went into the price of next year’s shotgun. That’s it. Thank you, C Club, for making