Call Me Ted Read Free Page B

lights-out violation, I knew I’d be up for demerits and that he would ask for my name to put it in the records. At military schools like McCallie they call you by your last name followed by your first initial. So, for example, with my formal name being “Robert,” I’d be “Turner, R.” It was too early in the year for him to know all our names, so I decided to have some fun with him. “Who’s responsible for the light on in this room?” the professor barked outside my door. “Edison, T.” was my wise-guy response.
    Sure enough, when the demerits were posted the next morning on the bulletin board, my room had two demerits listed under “Edison, T”!
    Bad as I was, I managed to make a few friends, mostly guys who were willing to join me doing all kinds of stupid things to pass the time and to stir up a little trouble. We’d put small containers of water on the top of an open door and leave it cracked so when someone came zipping in the water would fall on his head. We’d fold paper in a certain way so you could inflate it like a little balloon, fill it up with water, and throw it out a third story window at students heading home from the mess hall. By the time they figured out what had hit them you’d pull your head back in and run like the devil so they couldn’t find you when they came tearing up the stairs.
    When I noticed that one of the trees on campus was jammed full with a family of squirrels, I got an idea for some mischief and found a willing accomplice in my roommate. I grabbed my laundry bag and shinnied up the side of the tree to a hole about twenty feet up. Several minutes before, I’d seen the squirrels enter the tree through that hole, so I knew they were in there. I covered the hole with the opening of the bag while below my buddy knelt down with a can of Kiwi shoe polish. We always had plenty of Kiwi on hand and through some previous foul play I’d discovered that it was not only good for shining shoes, it also burned well and put out thick black smoke in the process. My accomplice slid the lighted can into the hole toward the base of the tree, and our plan worked.
    Whiffs of smoke rose up the tree and BAM! BAM! BAM!—three squirrels shot into my bag at about ninety miles an hour—they almost knocked me off the tree. Somehow I was able to hang on and tighten the drawstring so I could lower it down to my roommate. The squirrels inside were going crazy and it was funny watching them try to punch their way out. We ran back to the dorm with the bag of squirrels and let them go on the third floor, where they took off and ran around like mad. It took about half an hour for our startled dorm-mates to get the windows open and shoo them out.
    The mischief making was fun, but McCallie was a tough school whose administrators were determined to make gentlemen out of us. Their disciplinary system was elaborate but the bottom line was you got demerits for different offenses and were only allowed up to ten per week. These were very public, and as with my lights out violation, were posted next to everybody’s name on the dormitory bulletin board. For anyone racking up more than ten, punishment was reserved for Saturdays. Students who steered clear of punishment were given four hours of freedom every Saturday afternoon from 1:00 to 5:00, and would often hitchhike downtown to hang out or go to the movies.
    But if you had more than ten demerits by 1:00 on Saturday, you had to walk laps around the “bullring,” our name for the track, and the punishment was one quarter mile lap for each demerit over ten. That doesn’t sound like much but I got into trouble so frequently that it wasn’t hard for me to rack up as many as fifty marks in a week. That’s forty laps, or ten miles! The laps took forever because you couldn’t run—they made you maintain a walk’s pace. Needless to say, ten-mile walks kept me away from the movies and all the fun the other guys were having. But they were all part of my program