*THE LEGEND OF INDUCTION NIGHT*

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BY JUSTIN "BALD MONKEY" GERARD
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It is with a heavy heart that i am forced to relate to you the
unfortuanete events of yesterday, saturday, the 6th of september, the
year of 2003. I would not begin to recount the aweful events that
tranpired yesterday or send a copy of them to you, but for the fact that
it was ordered of me to do so, as a dying wish from one of our close
friends.
I feel personally responsible for the event in qeustion and will carry
the regret of this with me until i die. your best bet is to not read
this, because it is scary, and because it involves such unsavory topics
such as hamster juggling midgets, retarded goats, nekid people, a pirate
doctor and the back half of an elephant. plus its long. you have been
warned and there is nothing further that i can do to deter you from
reading this than i already have.

i must preface my story with this little remembered fact: Last year, on
induction saturday, Cory Godbey found himself shivering and wet, in a
hospital emergency room surrounded by four barefoot, sopping wet friends,
as he had his newly dislocated shoulder put back into socket.

it all begins yesterday at around 1:30, I had just come back from helping
the bjerks move all of their very personal belongings out of their former
abode.
which included such sundry things as I love lucy parafanalia, a Cult of
Macintosh Magazine collection, a washing machine full of midgets and 43
boxes of surplus military grade explosives and automatic weaponary. (do
not be fooled by the bjerks quaint little peasanty, humble, lumberjack
appearance and
demeanor, these guys have INVASION written all over them)
and it all ends in another emergency room, one year to the day...

and so begins: the Misadventures of Cory and the Invisible Butterflies.
(you can still turn back and i highly recommend you do)
After escaping the bjerk stronghold i went to pick up a few friends on
campus to go to Bald rock. It was
'Hillary-is-back-in-town-lets-do-something-stupid-day' and so, we
decided to go to Bald rock and a Llama farm. and by we, i mean Myself,
the venerable Ben Kammer, the unfortuanete Cory godbey, the
troublemaking, ner-do-well Hillary Hoagland and the good Gwen Egolf.
Everything is fine as we go to bald rock, other than the fact that we
spent at least 2/3rds of the time driving next to a man on a harley who
had unthinkingly long shoulder hair. Shoulder HAIR. it could have been
braided or in corn rows it was so long(this was not to be the wierdest of
the human zoo we were to see on this trip either). the hair seemed to
get longer in the wind, and was fast becomming distracting to the point
of nearly making me wreck. but it got me thinking, yknow, we ought to go
to a waterfall around here. and i know an awesome one, it could very
well be the best in south carolina i think....
anyway, we go to bald rock, and we proceed to do several stupid things,
like rolling tires down the face of the rock into the underbrush below,
where i think that it struck and killed a lumberjack and a couple who had
honeymooned there on the rock as well as destroyed the habitats of
several forest creatures who had taken up refuge there at the foot of the
cliff to capitalize on the alchoholic runoff from the rock that we judged
must be the case from the prolific amount of beer bottles that we found
strewn about.
I felt bad, but Kammer assured me that if the newlyweds really had
decided to take their honeymoon on bald rock, they were asking for
something of this nature to happen to them, and he didnt say anything at
all about the maimed lumberjack or the now-homeless, drunken forest
creatures.

In my memory I can still see Cory, skipping about on the rock, bounding
here and there and belowing like tarzan of the apes to the drunken and
applauding woodland creatures below. He was so happy then.

from bald rock we then pursued our second objective of stupid day, which
was to visit the Llama farm. unfortuanetly, we were dissapointed to
learn that the Llamas had all been killed in a recent midnight uprising
of the geese, who had had enough of the Llamas holier than though
approach to barnyard politics and their associated industrio-economic
policies taken during the first term of the last businessyear. This was
relayed to us by a retarded goat, whom the other barnyard animals had
taken cruel advantage of by strategicly placing a picture of another
angry challenging goat against the brick wall across the pen. Every
morning the goat would wake up and say, "wait just a hairy cheese minute!
that mangy vermin again?! Oi I'll show him this time!" and would
promptly charge into the faux-goated-brick-wall at top speed where he
would be rendered unconcious until next morning, where he would again
rise from his coma, and again show that other fiendish goat that he means
Texas business. by the time he had finished telling us this, cruel
hillary pointed out the other goat and we all watched in astonishment as
the deranged goat wheeled about and charged like an angry scottish woad
raider in defiance of british tyarnny. The other animals laughed at the
show. I should have seen this as the ill omen of the day and taken the
troop home at that point. but in my indescretion i was now fast
becomming more and more convinced that my friends should see this magical
tolkienesq waterfall. So i said to everyone, we shall sally forth and go
to this magical place, unless you tell me otherwise. There were muffled
reponeses from the back, something about lets go home, dont go to a
waterfall, lets get pizza and lets go shave a gerbil, which i all took to
mean, step on it cheif, find the waterfall or die trying.

an hour later, after several wrong turns and being doggedly pursued by an
angry old man in a monte carlo I was about to give up, and should have,
but didnt. Like a deranged captain Ahab, I was GOING to find my white
whale. I absolutely had to find this waterfall, even if it meant our own
destruction. eventually the trees parted and I found the right road and
parked by a grave yard, behind which, a path led to the waterfall.
another ill-omen, which i hazardously ignored. whilst i was busy locking
up the car, the troop was frollicking through the graveyard. I look up
to see Kammer and Gwen doing cartwheels over some poor families lot,
while cory and hillary did raindances.
and I thought, those apes, we're done for now, and so i yelled, "get
outta there you bunch of apes! or something aweful is going to happen to
someone innocent like cory" It was the third and final omen. after
this, the angels gave up on signs realizing that in my current state of
maniacal dementia nothing could save me from my own twisted will.

It was here that i led the troop down a winding path, deep deep into the
forest, through glade and thicket, and down a severly steep cliff, and
there after a mile or mores hike, we staired down into the most pristine
body of water on the planet. A slice of heaven that had fallen to earth.
The most amazing place on the entire eastern seaboard. It was a cleft
between two huge towering walls of ivy covered rock into which a
waterfall plunged. creepers and vines, mosses and flowers and a beautful
canopy surrounded us on all sides. The water fell into a shallow pool
which was about 40 feet wide with a sandy bottom with perfectly clear
water. Tolkein himself couldnt have imagined it better.

and what is the first thing we all do in the midst of such beauty and
splendor? we act like apes and start a splashing contest which quickly
dissolves into a wrestling match. soon we are all sandy and completely
soaked. I for one, had 3 pounds of the sand from the basin in my pants.
not cool. It was here that the fateful moment occurrred, i can remember
it now as it constantly replays itself in matrix slow motion through my
mind. Cory pushes Hillary in a playful way, like a young wolf cub
nipping at another cub. And Hillary, misunderstanding the friendly
gesture as an act of open war, retaliates, but skips past the mere act of
pushing and goes straight for some kind of wild steven segall manuevre
which didnt work as well as she intended on the unstable sandy surface
and she and cory end up crashing headlong into the sand below.

there was a stillness and a silence.

Then Cory popped right up and says to me. my shoulder is out of joint,
to which i laugh and say with a dumb grin, "oh yeah, so uh, is back in
joint now or what?" and he says, "no, thats why i said it was out of
joint." the dumb grin faded, and i started to say something but stopped.
I have had my shoulder out of joint before. So i figure i can probably
just pop this little feller right back in for him like im some kind of
trained professional. So i get cory to sit down delicatly and carefully
and i then jump up and down on him like an insane monkey. I thought for
a minute i was getting somewhere when cory says he thinks i dislocated
his other arm too. so i decide we gotta get this man to the hospital.
hillary, at this point was still in kamikazee mode and was off beating up
whatever she could find. Kammer had hidden as best he could behind gwen
who had done her best to avoid the unruly fray. an unfortuanete troop of
hamster juggling midgets had come along at this point from somewhere
downstream, and it all happened so fast that i can hardly remember, but
as i recall Hillary quickly beat them all up too, the last i saw of them
was them yelling "Ai-Karumba!" and disapeering back down stream in a
blur of panicked hamsters and foliage and foaming water.

I turn back to cory and tell him Cory, i have good news and i have bad
news, the bad news is that your arm is out of joint and that we have to
take you to the hospital which is an hour from here threw an impossibly
hard hike and a gutwrenching drive back the good news is that we-
... ok there is no good news.
At this point, cory makes an unbelievable louis and clark expedtion back
up the mountain dragging a limp right arm over the rough terrain while
navigating the terrain like a spider with only 3 limbs where the rest of
us struggled with 4. after an ardous mile hike back we reach the car,
cory is now in a stupor and is shivering and moaning about yaks or
something, and hillary is now back to her normal peace loving self and is
aghast at what her alternate steven segall ego has done to poor cory.
so anyway, i step on it and drive at 180 miles an hour all the way back
to travelers rest, hitting every single bump and rock and pothole and
curb and water buffalo that i could find along the way and slowing down
only once, when wGwen pointed out a boiled peanut stand in Travelers
Rest, where the back half of an elephant was standing. and i said, "my
thats odd, the back half of an elephant right here in trav- AH! THATS
NOT AN ELEPHANT!! THATS A, A PERSON!!!" and sure enough, it was, it was
the hugest person i had ever seen in my entire life. literally the size
of an elephant's flank. and it was looming over the boiled peanut stand
like some horrific steven king poltergiest pachederm. and ben kammer got
on top of the car and shouted through cupped hands, "PUT THE PEANUTS
DOWN!! NOW!! PUT EM DOWN!! YES, YOU, BACK AWAY! to no avail, as in my
rear view mirror i could see her lift the peanut stand from its trailor
park foundations and eat it, clerk and all. Cory monas and i step on it
again.
after a few more minutes of super high speed travel (that to cory felt
was like riding in an old pinto with square wheels through a mine field)
we arrived at the hospital. they fired cory into a wheelchair and ziiped
him right into the back, and then they shooed us out.
we are all still soaking wet and sandy from the waterbattle and the sand
is just beginning to drive me absolutely crazy, like wearing really tight
smelly sandpaper. so i finally become desperate and go into the hospital
bathroom and do the nekid-bohemian-sand-dance in there to get rid of the
sand. i left all 3 pounds of sand and a frog on the floor and came back
out and told everyone in the lobby what i had done and that i no longer
had sand in my pants. My 3 companions looked at me in disgust for a
moment and then went back and did the same dance in the bathroom too.
and after that some random old guy did it too. but im kind of sure that
he didnt have any sand in his pants and that he was just kind of wierd.
at this point they tell us that we can come back in to see cory. so we
all hop back there and stand around him in an irionical way. that said
to all of us: we skipped out on rush induction night to save cory from
any threat of this happening again, but here he is again, sitting here in
a hospital gown, wet with an iv in his arm, a dislocated shoulder, and 4
barefoot wet friends standing around him, JUST LIKE LAST YEAR.
at this point i look over to the sink and see his clothes there, he
notices that i noticed them and looks sheepish. so to cover the awkward
air he says, "yeah, uh, they said i had to take off my clothes, but um, i
cant cuzza my arm, um so i said, do i have to? and they said yeah,
they're wet arent they? and i said um yeah, uh, even the little grey
ones? and they said, they're wet arent they?" he looked sheepish again
so i changed the subject, to the hole in his arm and the drops of blood
on the floor, "looks like the stuck you in the wrong spot, eh?", and he
said, "yeh, the nurse hit an artery on accident," and he pointed at the
ceiling where it spelled in blood "YEEEOW!! THATS AN ARTERY!!!!!!!"
at this point i took the doctor aside and asked how he was and what was
gonna happen, the doc tells me he is gonna die, or at least lose his
legs, and i said, What? its just a dislocated arm! and the doc says,
oh, you mean him. right, yeah, we just pumped him full of valium and
we'll put that arm back in soon. when kammer heard about the valium he
wasted little time in taking advantage of that situation, goading cory
into telling us all stories about yaks, midgets and what he would do if
given a half mile of rubber hose, a nine iron and a water buffalo. It
was priceless. And Cory doesnt even remember the swinging from the
cieling or trying to swim on his bed with the lampshade on his head.

the doctors, who looked suspiciously like pirates, then shooed us all out
again, and we all told cory they were going to shave him bald now and
left chuckling to ourselves. once in the lobby again, we realized we
were freezing because we are still wet and dont have any clothes to
change into, and so we go outside and begin to do all sorts of
ill-advised things out there to keep warm, proving to the entire hospital
staff that there was a good reason that our friends was here and that we
have absolutely no discretion. at about 8 the doctors finally say that
our friend is ok and they assured me that he has not been shaven nor his
legs removed. And cory, began to tell us all stories, he said, " I was
just sitting here thinking of those thin kinds of clouds that you can
kind of see through when i saw a butterfly on my bedsheet and said
heeeello but it wasnt a butterfly it was my bedsheet that only looked
like a butterfly so thats wierd i was saying hello to my bedsheet. It
was then that i knew that we must call his mom, so i bravely took the
phone, dialed cory's mother and handed the phone to gwen like a true
hero.

we had spent 4 freezing hours in the lobby there by this point and i had
heard every single misadventure that had occurred that day in TR. and i
realized that in the end, we werent that wierd. we were just in
Travelers Rest. and in a moment we would see a boiled peanut stand clerk
come crawling in claiming that the back end of an elephant tried to eat
him and the confused hospital staff wonder at how to file that or what
insurance does for that sort of thing. then gwen came back and said,
"she is on her way." i then went outside to face the music. my sins had
found me out. seconds later in a stormcloud of fire and smoke and
lightning arrived corys mother. and here our adventure draws to a close
as I tell her to the best of my ability that her son is fine, they have
not shaven him bald, nor taken his legs, and that this whole misadventure
had nothing to do with hillary and that she has not been studying steven
segall movies and beating up midgets and press board artists and that
next year, we are going to lock him, in a padded room, with a straight
jacket on, for the duration of Society Induction Night.

let this be a lesson to all. never start any day, with rifling the
Bjerks personal belongings.
i am now convinced that i unwittingly tampered with John bjerks press
author voodoo doll and it backfired on me. i wont make that mistake
again next year on induction night. thats for sure.

ps. pass this along to whoever could stomach its length, topic, or
tone, i lost my address book, so many people who should have gotten this
trauma inducing letter wont unless you make them live through what you
have lived through in reading this.
pss. add whatever footnotes necessary as this is only what my memory
has brought to my immediate attention.
psss. i blame all indescretions in the writing of this email on surplus
valium and the bjerks.

Posted by hill at December 9, 2003 09:24 AM