This story was originally published on Thursday, September 08, 2005.
My Boy Scout troop, Troop 406, was a dumping ground for adolescent freaks. A lot of folks are surprised to find out that I am a certified Eagle Scout, I guess because I don’t go around tying knots and building fires at random. I was one of the few proud scouts in 406 that achieved that prestigious rank because most of the other kids weren’t there by choice. You might expect that they didn’t want to be there because they thought it was lame, or gay, or for nerds. But it was the total opposite. Their parents forced them into the program because they thought it would make them normal. The boys were so abnormal that they couldn’t handle being there.
Now “freak” is not a word I use lightly. You or someone you know might see some pale chick wearing a lot of black shiny clothing and say “That chick is a freak”. Or someone watching the Jenny Jones show might see a man dressed in woman’s clothing and say “He be a freak”. Those aren’t freaks though. Those are people that fall into a fashion culture or gender identity minority. They might be very different from me and you and your mom, but they still follow the trends of a fairly large group of people with similar interests.
The boys in my Boy Scout troop were freaks the way Michael Jackson is a freak. These were kids that were one-of-a-kind weird. You can scour the earth for years but you’ll never find another person that has the same crazy-ace speech impediment as this one kid, or the gag inducing stench of this other kid, or the general creepy mentally disturbed vibe that resonated from at least half of the group. In my years there I was threatened to be killed numerous times, a kid tried to stab me and all the other kids in the troop, and I had to hear more sobbing than you would in a nursery.
It was troop of freaks.
There were maybe four boys there that were just normal kids. But they were viscous. Kids love to pick on other kids who are going to react in an erratic way, and our campouts and meetings happened to be the World’s Fair of unpredictable behavior. I was the leader of the troop so I had to keep things from getting too far out of hand. I won’t say I protected the weird kids from everyone else, because really, that was our only source of entertainment. As shameful as it sounds, it’s funny to see a thirteen year old kid cry after hearing a ridiculous ghost story. It’s funny to see some crazy kid rage out and break a bunch of stuff because you called him “Mouse” one too many times. It feels good to laugh at some kid that pisses and craps his only pair of pants for the entire weekend. When you grow up you tend to pity those people and try to help them out, but that’s not the case when you’re a teenager. I just tried not to let things go to dangerous extremes.
One of the weirdest kids in my troop was Blakely. Blakely wasn’t one of the kids that wouldn’t shower, and he never threatened to kill anyone. He was just unbelievably socially awkward. It seemed like he knew how goofy he was so he tried to play it off as his comedic shtick. He was so easily provoked to tears or temper tantrums though that it was obvious that it wasn’t an act. He was kind of a chubby kid, with glasses and a voice like some Sesame Street character reject. He would proudly joke back at the kids who picked on him, but his comebacks were terrible. I think at one time he was suspended for sexually harassing one of his teachers, and I doubt he understood the meaning of what he said or motioned to her. He was most likely parroting his peer’s behavior. Anyways, you get the point. If my description isn’t fleshed out enough then just imagine the weirdest kid you went to junior high school with, and insert him in this story.
When you are hiking through the mountains and you have to take a S, you lean back against a tree, pull your britches down, and take a S. If you are with a large group however, and your camp is in a more permanent spot, you set up a latrine. Our latrine was just a floorless tent. We would dig a deep hole far out in the woods, place a folding chair with a built in toilet seat over the hole, and pitch the tent around the makeshift toilet for privacy. If you were smart you would hold in your dump the duration of the trip. The tent smelled like S. There were flies, and it was as hot as ten ball sacks inside the thing. At the end of the trip someone would have latrine duty. All you had to do was pack up the tent and the throne and fill up the poo hole with dirt. That’s all there was to it.
At the end of one particular trip I assigned Blakely to his first latrine duty. He had been a lazy F all weekend and I thought dealing with the stink pit would be punishment enough. It ended up being the worst punishment of his life.
As I was helping with the breakdown of the main campsite I heard some commotion out in the woods. There were several voices. Screaming? Crying? Laughing? I couldn’t tell, so I headed towards the voices to find out. As I got closer I could make out sentences. “Dig Deeper!”, “Now stir it up!”said the voices amidst hysterical laughter.
“But I don’t wanna”, I heard Blakely cry.
“That’s the way you have to do it. Now slap it with the shovel. Slap it! Harder!” the other boys responded.
When I got in view of what was happening it was too late to stop it, but in all honesty I don’t think I would have stopped it if I could. A crowd of about five boys had shown Blakely their own way of cleaning up the latrine. They convinced him, without physical force, with simple peer pressure, that to clean the poo hole he had to stir the poop around with his shovel, dig up the mud/poop mixture, and slap it repeatedly with the shovel as hard as he could.
Blakely stood in front of the latrine, filthy shovel in hand, tears streaming down his poop spattered face, sobbing obscenities at his troop mates. The boys rolled on the ground laughing gleefully. I gave them some BS scolding about not being where they were supposed to be and sent them back up hill to help break down camp. I explained to Blakely the sanitary way to clean the latrine as he glared back at me, pure hatred in his eyes. He muttered something like “ F you, I hope you go to GD hell”. I could tell that he thought I was laughing deep down inside. He was right.
Previously: The Sub
