Tough Day for the Army: Stories

Not Schmitty

60 Not Schmitty Here we are in the house weight room, though it is not really the weight room because it is the boiler room, the place where the boiler is, the boiler that heats the house we live in together as brothers. It is an old house. And at night, in the cold months, the boiler clangs and clanks, which tells us that it is working at least. It is a fraternity house, not a frat house. Do you call your mother a “mutt?” Your country a . . . you get the idea. Everyone who has ever lived in the house, living or dead, is a brother. This is how it has worked, always. The boiler room is where we also decided to lift weights because there was room for benches and barbells and it’s important to exercise so we look good. We don’t say virile because if we said that word it would sound gay, but that’s essentially what’s going on. We have an image to maintain, after all, a good one. Masculine virtue, emphasis on the masculine. When you say our letters there are associations, positive ones, and there’s a certain duty to nurture what our other brothers before us have built. Schmitty is the obvious choice for what we have planned, the reason we are in the weight room/boiler room. And what we have planned is to waterboard Schmitty. We can’t remember whose idea it was. Inside the house we are either alone or in packs of three or more, never two, because if two of us are seen coming out of a room together, we will say something like, What were you two faggots up to in there? 61 We always laugh at that. To react otherwise means we were definitely up to some faggoty shit, because why would we be so pissed if we weren’t 69-ing each other like a couple of complete homos? Which is to say we were in a group of at least three and more likely five or more when we said, You know what we should do? We should do that waterboarding shit. To the pledges. And then, after a couple seconds’ thought, we replied, That really would be badass, waterboarding our pledges. We shared a chorus of yeah and totally, and we took out our phones and googled waterboarding videos, and as we watched them we realized that this idea was even better than first thought because that shit is really badass. We wouldn’t even need to have rush anymore because waterboarding sells itself. Everyone will know that we are the fraternity so badass that people are willing to be waterboarded to belong. That is so fucked up, we said. And also fuckingtabulously badass. We knew that someone had to try it first, to make sure we knew how to do it, because experience tells us the quickest way to shut down a chapter is to kill a pledge. We decided on Schmitty, who is just now complaining a little about the ropes lashing him to the decline weight bench being too tight. We decided on Schmitty because Schmitty is tough, and also loves the house. Schmitty already has our letters branded on his ass, which is cool, not faggoty, even though all of us were staring at Schmitty’s naked, rather muscular butt when it happened. The branding was way badass. It was the kind of thing we talked about doing all the time, but Schmitty was the only one who agreed to it, and not only did Schmitty go through with it, but even as a couple of us blew chunks at the smell of Schmitty’s ass flesh burning, Schmitty just growled like a motherfucking animal until it was done, and sometimes during chapter meetings—which are secret, so we’re not supposed to tell this—when we say something that Schmitty 62 agrees with, he drops his pants and flashes the brand and the debate is ended. Schmitty was the obvious choice for those reasons, and also because he was already in the weight room on the very decline bench to which he is now strapped. The bench is in the decline position in order for Schmitty to work the lower portion of his pectoral muscles, and also because when you waterboard someone you place a cloth over their nose and mouth and then...