Flight of Passage: A True Story Read Online Free PDF Page B

freshman again.
    Of course, I could never comply with a request like that without adding some highly individualistic statement of my own. Besides, it was a beautiful, sunny morning, with the smell of crisp, dried leaves in the air and yellow and pink chrysanthemums shining in the courthouse beds across the road. Autumn weather inspired me. Why be an anonymous freshman, I thought, when I could go for broke and hang out a “total” bare-ass moon?
    So, that’s how I handled it. Unbuckling my belt, unzipping my fly and pulling my Fruit of the Loom briefs all the way down to my knees, I stepped out onto Route 24 and bent over with my butt facing the road, exposing a full bare-ass moon to traffic. The seniors howled with delight.
    Nobody riding by in traffic seemed to care very much until this incredibly haggard old woman with saggy jowls and breasts screeched to a halt in her VW Bug. Jowls and breasts swaying, she leaned over, rolled down the window on the passenger side and screamed out.
    “Young man, you’re exposing yourself. Stop that!”
    The Del boys loved that, and they all began to shout and cheer. For good measure, I gave the old lady another vigorous shake of my ass.
    “Stop that! You’re exposing yourself!”
    When I wouldn’t stop, the old lady squealed off in the VW, pulled to a stop at a pay phone, and called the cops. We heard the siren of a police cruiser just as our bus pulled up to the stop. By this time I had my pants buttoned back up and the old lady had run up from the corner. Jabbing a liver-spotted finger in my face, she pointed me out to the cops and demanded that I be “strung up” for exposure. To assure her that I’d be dealt with firmly, the cops placed me in handcuffs, stuffed me into the cruiser and we drove off for the station with the harridan in the VW following behind.
    Down at the police station, it was the usual bogus routine. Most of the cops in that town were Catholic school dropouts, and most of the prosecutors were Catholic school graduates, and nobody got very excited about a Delbarton kid mooning traffic during Freshman Initiation Week. The police sergeant politely took down the lady’s story on a yellow complaint sheet, thanked her for her trouble, and assured her that the department would “be in touch.” As soon as the old bag left the police station the sergeant tossed the complaint form in a wastebasket and told one of the cops to drive me up to school.
    It was a first for Delbarton. No student had ever been delivered to the monks in a police cruiser, and this caused quite a stir when we pulled up in front of Trinity Hall. As I stepped out of the cruiser and thanked the officer for the ride in fine Eddy Haskell style, students started leaning out of the classroom windows and cheering. Even a couple of priests were leaning out over the sills, smiling as they smoked their pipes. A bunch of students tore up their notebooks for confetti and threw it down for the ticker-tape parade effect.
    “Nice ass Buck!”
    “Way to go!”
    “Fucking-A! Great moon!”
    What the hell, I thought. It was the same old story for me. Fuck up, be a hero. I dropped my book bag and threw my arms over my head like a boxer to acknowledge the applause of my fellow students, and there were more cheers.
    My brother usually drove up to school with a friend, and he wasn’t at the bus stop that morning. But news of the mooning incident had traveled rapidly around school. When classes changed that morning, Kern came running down the hall toward me, all doe-eyed and worried.
    “Rink! Jeez, what happened? Are you all right?”
    “Kern. It’s not a big deal, okay? Everybody’s cheering for me.”
    “No way Rink. You’re screwed. The priests are going to nail you for this. You’ll get tons of detention.”
    But Kern had it all wrong. He’d been in so little trouble himself he didn’t know the first thing about the disciplinary system. In the first place, the mooning incident had occurred while I