What the hell, Minnesota?

Doc's readers have praised this site's entertainment value. This post provides none.

Doc is just baffled. Where the fuck have we come from, if this is called progress? Was it so goddamn bad in the past? Was it that goddamn bad, that this world of entitled rapists and abusers and fuck-you douchebags can just run rampant and we think this is a better fucking world? How can we even begin to think we're better than we were? 

I'll come back to that. First some news. 

Minnesota Golden Gophers. Fuck sake fellas, come up with a new name. Now you're the Minnesota Turtleheads. Why not? Your football coach has one pokin' out. I'll get back to that too.

The Boys in the Boathouse

The Boys in the Boathouse

A Novel -- really, none of this ever happened -- by Dr. Frank Emfbo

Link to the whole book right here. 

Chapter 9 - Misogyphobia

The Boys in the Boathouse

A Novel -- really, none of this ever happened -- by Dr. Frank Emfbo

Except for this one chapter. Which is sadly, disgracefully, all true. 
Much as we wish otherwise.

Chapter Nine
Misogyphobia

Doctor Frank needs to take a chapter to vent. Doctor Frank is still a little pissed about this, and some say it’s all in the past and best forgotten and it’s wrong to bring it all up, but if you think that, then fuck you. Or stop reading.

Granted, it was a different day. The norms were different. We just did what everyone else did. Yeah, and Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. He wrote the Declaration of Independence, was a great man in his day. But with the hindsight of history, he still owned slaves, and that sucks. He just didn’t know it was wrong.

There were great men among us. Guys who would win Henley and be honored with the Purple Jackets of the Husky Hall of Fame. Guys who would serve their country loyally and honorably. Guys who would be lawyers, fighting for the rights of the oppressed.

Guys who would go on to be gynecologists, for God’s sake. But we were still assholes, damn near every one of us.

We had national champions sharing the facility with us. They just, by chance, didn’t have penises. We sneered at them. Bags. Hoggosauruses. Kraks. That last one, rhyming with quack, was hollered across the water when they rowed past. Krak, krak krak krak. Spewed at them when they hauled their boats off the docks.

I mean, shit, we showered, slept and ate like kings at the Connie, but all a woman had to do was finish practice and stop by the kitchen for a goddamn cup of hot water for her tea before her long walk back to her dorm for a shower. Krak, krak, krak. Doctor Frank was a goddamn part of it and Doctor Frank thought it was funny.

Misogyny was a word we’d never heard. If someone had accused Doctor Frank of misogyny at the time, he’d have said sure, I’d love a massage. Just make sure she’s naked and has big tits.

But Title Nine pushed us out of the Stone Age, directly in the middle of Doctor Frank’s era. We pushed back. We said hey, Title Nine says you have to smile and be nice to me. Right after calling them kraks. Real nice.

Funny what happens when you look a person in the eyes, though. Say a kind word. Listen to another human being, hear their opinions, dreams, and hurts. Maybe you weigh enough on the verbal abuse.

That goes double when you ask someone for a date. Suddenly, around Doctor Frank’s sophomore year, our guys were going out with kraks. But you better not say that to them. You better not holler krak on the water, not with that guy sitting behind you who’s dating one of those women. If you want to be an asshole at that time, you can tell him you heard she outpulled him on the erg.

Or it’s relegated to passive aggressive moves like the list of “official” krak terms that showed up on the bulletin board: Women’s crew workout was kraktice, their coach was the krakmaster, their team was the krakkru. And so on. Doctor Frank laughed at that too. To Doctor Frank and most of the guys, the kraks were still faceless, meaningless forms that took up space in our boathouse, on our docks, and on our water. And now they were creeping into our teammates’ love lives, which was even more aggravating.

The day after Doctor Frank got initiated into the VBC, the first class of women was initiated. This decree had come down from the Athletic Department. We insisted that, due to Title Nine, they all had to get naked and do the Hit Parade just like we did. Uh, no. They carried a boat about a mile in the dark. Did the swim. Got the lecture. At the time we thought it was fucked. Equal but not equal. We were assholes.

Social change is uncanny. Only a happy few enlightened people can see it coming and know it’s right. They’ll even fight for it, winning one heart and one mind at a time. Others fight against it, never giving up, never letting go of the roots of a dying age, even after the tree is long filled with termites and dropping its dead branches around their heads.

Some people deny any change is needed, and decide for themselves when it must be over and adequate. Title Nine in the 1970s was like the Obama election. Like hey, we got us a black president, so can’t you see there’s no more racism, what do you people want? Just like that, Title Nine gave us equality. What more do they want?

How about an attitude adjustment? There’s still crew – and women’s crew. Like crew means men’s crew and women’s crew isn’t really crew. Like men’s crew was the only crew for all those years, so it must still be the only real crew, and we’re just patting our little girls on the head by giving them some pretty boats to play with. Like it’s still 1918, when for a few brief years there was a women’s crew program at the UW, and they were scored on their outfits and their ability to carry the boat properly and put it on the water all pretty.

Doctor Frank believes with the benefit of hindsight that Title Nine may have been the best damn thing that ever happened to our world. Enforcement and interpretations have been clunky and ugly, but forty years later, parents can raise kids who play sports on equal footing regardless of gender, and get to reap the joy, fulfillment, and confidence that they bring, whether it’s a couple seasons of tee ball or an NCAA scholarship.

Think about that for a minute. Think of a world where an accident of birth, a goddamn sexual appendage, determined whether you could earn acceptance and find your dreams on a ball field or in a boat. No penis, you don’t play. That was the world Doctor Frank and his classmates were born into, and we were dragged kicking and screaming into a far better world all these years later.

If you’d called our attitude a phobia, we’d have laughed at you. We’re not scared, they’re just kraks. But count on it. We were damn scared that a woman might actually be a better athlete. That her crew might come home with a medal. It frightened the hell out of us, and the only moment we were able to let go was when we actually slowed down and treated them like equals.

Homophobia, we’d never heard of either. That would have been ridiculous, being afraid of a gay man. Gay men were all weak. Pussies. We had a weightlifting chart in the locker room showing how much each guy could leg press, lat pull, squat, dead lift, clean and jerk. Guys who missed a session went on the “Queers, fags, sliders” board.

Once again, we’d never met a gay man. Or so we claimed… as far as any of us knew, we’d never looked a gay man in the eyes and seen his nature, his strength. If a guy had bench pressed 250 for ten reps, pulled a top erg and run a hundred flights of stairs, then told us he was gay, we might have grown up. But we never got that evidence handed to us, probably because any gay guys in our midst heard all the bullshit and never said anything. Regardless of where they stood with muscles and tenacity.

Then came Vic. We never knew if Vic was gay, but we all wanted him to be, because he was small, effeminate, and a little flamboyant, an easy target of shit flippers. Doctor Frank, then a junior, first met Vic, a brand new gruntie, in the hallway at the crewhouse and assumed he was a coxswain. A little black dude maybe five-eight, one forty. Good to meet you, just lose about twenty and you’ll be awesome. What, you’re a rower? OK, gain ten and pull hard and you’re a lightweight.

In his ongoing wall of denial, to this day Doctor Frank will insist that the crap we gave Vic was not due to his race. His alleged yet unproven sexual orientation. Or his effeminate manner. That there was no homophobia involved. Doctor Frank will insist that Vic’s place in Husky lore was due only to the size of his cock. And Vic’s happy willingness to let us gawk at it.

Doctor Frank may well be full of shit. He may well be just covering, embarrassed about how he felt back then, about how hard he laughed when all the crap went down. Because it was all fucking wrong. But Doctor Frank will tell you that on that final day, it was all about the little guy with the massive erection. That day when Vic’s classmates corralled him for a lake shot, that day when they carried him naked to the front lawn of the crewhouse, right out there in public on that sunny spring afternoon, and swung him by arms and legs, face down, above the grass. The day when they kept swinging him so his unit dragged along the grass. And got bigger. And he was smiling. And it kept getting bigger. I mean, he was a foot off the ground and the head was rubbing in the long grass.

Doctor Frank will tell you that it wasn’t about the little black kid we all thought was a fag. It was simply about the guy with the huge cock. And that’s why we laughed so hard. That’s why we cheered so loud when Vic and his classmates came around the corner to the boat docks, Vic with a twelve-inch woody and a massive electric smile on his face and his classmates afraid to touch him to carry him down for the lake shot. He could have run and they’d never have tried to catch him.

Doctor Frank’s crew buddies were in on the joke and laughed at it then but they know otherwise now. They know it was a travesty. That nobody should be treated that way just because he’s a little different, whether that difference is his love life, his skin color, his dick size. Or her choice of a sport.

Doctor Frank has wondered over the years. What became of Vic? What was going on behind that goofy painted-on smile? What kind of pain was he in, to tolerate all the shit and pretend it never bothered him?

But that’s the way we were, and we can’t deny it or forget about it. We can be grateful that we live in a better world now, all these years removed, still far from perfect, but better thanks to the brave souls who have insisted that it be so.

Chapter 4 - We Go Naked?

The Boys in the Boathouse

A Novel -- really, none of this ever happened -- by Dr. Frank Emfbo

Chapter Four

What? We Go Naked?

After two months of hazing and abuse to start a freshman year, there’s a natural need for some release. In fact, the annual Skip n Go Naked dance was the first time the varsity pukes even treated us grunties like we were semi human. Not equal. Just like we had faces and names.

The poster went up on the bulletin board around the end of October.

Skip N Go Naked

Featuring, in a return engagement, the one and only Raoul at the punch bowl

Saturday, November 10

7pm

Be there or be square

Another show up and throw up event

Music by Self Abuse

We stood there looking at the scribbled message below. “Grunties, get your dates. We want a shot at ‘em.”

Silver stood in the crowd, mumbling. It got louder and barely coherent but he couldn’t lose that Jersey accent. The more pissed off Silver ever got, the more the accent came out. Guys gave him all kinds of shit about going for oiss cream, and drinking enough woota. But we stayed the fuck out of his way when he was pissed. Backwoods Puget Sounders just didn’t understand guys who were wound that tight.

“Wot the fooak. Some fooka go afta my gull, I fookin killum. Speshly if we already naked.”

Duly noted.

As the event got closer, hints came out.

Our “social chairman” was a guy named Brugley. Turns out he was a decent dude, for a varsity guy. Arranged all the exchanges with sororities, which gave each of us a chance to give a hot chick a one on one tour of the deepest depths of the boathouse.

“Oh, really, the room of pain? What do you do in here?”

So Brugley comes in to dinner one night, just a week before the dance. He wants to make an announcement. He stands up on a chair to make sure we can all see him.

Brugley is buck ass naked.

“Hey all you grunties. Get a date and get ready for this dance. We got Raoul at the punch bowl. And for all you grunties who don’t know what a pussy looks like, here you go.”

Brugley grabs cock and balls, parts his thighs and shoves his junk in between. Squeezes his thighs together again and stands there staring at us. Stone faced. Of course we’re all falling out of our chairs laughing, but Brugley doesn’t change his expression until the guy sitting next to him douses his crotch with ice water. That ended the evening show.

We were all miles from our mothers and we acted like it. Nobody around to calm our pranks and keep some level of propriety. Our three cooks, Pat, Vera, and Francis, must have been saints. Such sweet ladies, keeping us happy and fed. We looked out for them like they took care of us. The guy called Hubbard got a job in the kitchen and once told a football player he was going to come around the counter and shove a serving fork up his ass if he called Francis a bitch again. Tense moment, with both teams watching the action. The guy backed off.

Francis never said much, just smiled at everyone and cooked huge piles of food to keep us going. Pat was bubbly and happy every morning. Rumor was she chewed a mouthful of betel nuts before work every day. Along with slapping steaming omelettes on our plates and hollering good morning whether we felt like hearing it or not, she monitored the huge eight-slice toaster at the end of the counter. Forty years later you can shout “toast up!” to a crew guy and he’ll laugh remembering Pat.

Vera had a daughter our age. She brought her around one time. Beautiful girl. She never came back.

All three tried to get their work done, turn the cleanup over to one of the guys who worked in the kitchen, and get the hell out before guys like Brugley started walking around naked and shouting about pussies. 

So as the day got closer we all wondered what Raoul was going to cook up at the punchbowl. Something about vodka, all kinds of magical stuff that makes clothes fall off. We all dreamed of a dance floor full of naked drunken women. None of us had any idea what we’d do if that happened.

Most guys had enough respect for their dates to take them out for a nice dinner before the dance. Like, say, at the dorm cafeteria.

“Hey, um, it's been nice looking at you for two months in History 101. You mind coming to a dance on Saturday night? By the way what’s your name?”

And so it went. Upperclassmen all confident and swaggering with their women on their arms. Grunties with no idea what to expect. The crewhouse dining room decorated for the occasion with… nothing. Tables and chairs removed and a band setting up in one corner. And in another corner… Raoul at the punch bowl.

The punch bowl was a garbage can, which he insisted he’d scrubbed that afternoon. His stirring spoon was a broken oar, its White Blade of Washington swirling some deadly mixture that couldn’t be identified in the dim light. But damn, everyone wanted some. Raoul happily scooped pitchers full of the brew and handed them out, sweet young couples pouring paper cups for themselves, sipping, tasting, smiling, waving to Raoul and chugging them down. Oh boy, it’s gonna be a great night.

As the night progressed and inhibitions relaxed, word went around that all grunties were required to be on the crewhouse deck at exactly midnight. Meanwhile nobody got naked. At least not in public. But somehow the crowd thinned after a few rounds of drink, footsteps wandered down hallways to rooms, doors were locked, and prearranged symbols left outside for roommates.

The clock ticked away. Something big was going to happen, something we needed to see. Rumors started about a mass orgy on the center dock. Someone was screwing with us. But we slipped away and watched anyway. By 11:50pm the railing was jammed with drunk and rowdy partiers.

“Hey, who’s that?” Someone pointed at a motorboat, slowly making its way into the launch house with its motor barely idling. No lights, a couple big dudes in it. We couldn’t see shit in the shadows.

Union Bay sits on the west side of Lake Washington, a muddy, weed-infested backwater that nearly turned into high priced flatland when the lake was lowered in 1916 by the construction of the Montlake Cut. But there it remained, ten feet deep and a mile wide, at the bottom end of Ravenna Creek.

In the sixty years since, the bay collected a confusing mix of aquatic junk. Up until the sixties, the land next to the crewhouse ad bordering Union Bay was used as the city dump, huge bulldozers plying the swamp, their drivers hoping not to sink into the peat like all the trash did for years. That shit is still there today, rancid stench seeping up through parking lots, ball fields, and a “natural area”, which cracks up anyone who remembers the dump.

Lily pads, milfoil, and peat die off and sink to the bottom of the bay in early fall. By November, the decomposing stuff starts taking on oxygen and huge floating mud islands start surfacing. Some are just innocuous puddles of weeds. Others are a hundred feet across and solid enough to stop a boat. No damage, just a coxswain yelling “fuck!” and everyone calling him a dumb shit.

Whoever was in that darkened boat, they’d decided to do something about the biggest mud island in the bay. Waiting for nature to take it back down, like it always did by mid winter, was out of the question and way less entertaining. As we all stood there wondering what the hell was going to happen, tick tick tick it got closer to midnight.

A couple guys turned away as the last minute ticked down. Another cup of drink, another attempt to get that sweet pretty young girl back to the room, or denial that this wasn’t just another varsity trick to fuck with the grunties, whatever. They took their dates and went back inside.

They totally missed it.

A mile away, a blinding flash lit up the whole bay. For a half second we could see the houses on the shore of Laurelhurst like it was daytime, then everything went black.

It was like a camera flash at first, just the white light then nothing. A “whoa!” went up from the crowd, then someone remembered sound travels a lot slower, and hollered “wait for it!”

We felt it before we heard it. The girls who had politely been offered the view at the rail felt like they’d been hit with a sledgehammer. An instant later, the explosion shook the windows and rattled our brains.

The cheer was nearly as deafening as the explosion itself. We all wanted to know who did it. But the boys in the boat had ditched the hell out of there. Like smart ones should. You never know how the cops might find out. We drifted back inside to the dance. It was damn cold out there but worth the chill. Holy crap.

The last young couple to leave the deck decided it was a good place for a little kissy gropy feely. They stayed out there, ignored in the dark. Blowing stuff up made them hot. Five minutes later, all hands inside of loosening clothes attempting the old inebriated squishy squishy right there on the crewhouse deck, they were lit up by another light in their faces. This was no flash. It stayed there in their eyes.

Belts, buttons and zippers got cinched back up quick. Over the thump of the band inside, the couple could hear the rhythm of the helicopter’s blades.

On alert, the crowd filtered back out to the deck. A hundred pairs of hands waved at the pilot. We seemed innocent enough. He flew off to search the bay for the culprit.

------------------

There’s a Doctor Silver out there who just might owe his medical inspiration to that Skip n Go Naked dance. He was settling into bed after taking his date home on a long walk up to her dorm and back. It might have been three in the morning when there was a knock on his door.

“God damn, man, I need some help here,” said a classmate.

“Fook. Wootsa mitta?”

“Aw, man, there we were, this sweet woman and me, in my bed. We were drunk. We were naked…”

“Git to da fookin point. So fa you jist tellin ivveryone ilse’s story.”

“So she doesn’t want to have sex but she’s happy to give me the hand job. She’s pretty excited too, and gripping damn tight. It felt good so I wasn’t complaining.”

“Aw shit. I know woot’s coomin.”

“Yeah man. When it was over I went to get her a towel. I was already thinking oh shit, that hurts a little. She told me she needed to go home, so we kissed some more and got dressed. Christ, man, it hurt like hell just getting my boxers back on. Then I came back here and went to take a piss. That was the first time I saw it in the light.”

“Limmee see it.”

“What, show you my cock right here in the hallway?”

“Yeeah. How you expict any help othawise? Drop fookin trou or I’m going back to da rack.”

How this discussion didn’t wake up all of Grunt Row that night is a mystery. But the word got around. Doctor Silver looked over the damage. He speculated that those blistas might need lancing. Then he cracked up at the shocked look on his buddy’s face.

“Just fookin witcha. Stay heah. I’ll be back.”

Silver returned with a can of baby powder, shook it into the guy’s shorts, and stuck it in his hand.

“Heah. That’s yoaz. Buy me anootha. Now git the fook to bid.”

That Silver’s now a gynecologist is no big surprise.

----------------------------

Doctor Frank ran into Raoul many years after all this went down. They laughed and told stories over beers, mostly centering around the philosophy of Dik. Raoul got the philosophy of Dik every day, sometimes twice a day, for four years plus. He could recite stories and lessons that lowly rowers like Doctor Frank never heard. Then the shocking moment came.

“Jeez, Raoul, you brewed a mean Skip n Go Naked at that punchbowl every year. All that vodka really fucked us up. What a great time. A gallon of vodka, five gallons of beer and five gallons of lemonade. That’s some powerful stuff.”

Raoul finally confessed. All these years of believing, including one massive party at Doctor Frank’s own house ten years after college which got totally out of hand from following that damn recipe.The legend fell apart.

“You dumbshits would have torn the place apart if I stuck with that recipe and served you that much vodka. So here’s what I did. I mixed up the first batch with that recipe, yes I did. Then when it started to get low, someone would shout ‘Raoul, better mix up another batch!’ and I’d get all enthused and yell back ‘Yeah baby, I’m on it! Gotta get more vodka!’

“Then I’d take those two empty half gallon bottles, make a big show of unlocking the kitchen door and shouting ‘I’ll toss these and get more!’ and lock myself into the kitchen. I’d be laughing my ass off, standing at that big industrial kitchen sink refilling those jugs.

“Two full half gallon vodka bottles in my hands, I’d parade back out of the kitchen waving them in the air and the place would go nuts. ‘Yeah! More vodka!’ and I’d dump all that water, mix it with the beer and lemonade, and everyone would be all excited at how much vodka they and their dates were drinking.

“Just goes to show you, Thorsness was right. ‘We may be big, but we’re dumb…”