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On Saturday my friend Huge and I were watching two young men play chess in the brand new student center of our old high school, which actually isn’t a high school. It’s a prep school – the kind of elite well-landscaped plot of brick and ivy that people write novels about. A lot of smart people go to Exeter, my alma mater, and these people apparently play chess on Saturday afternoons.
Huge and I are not smart people who play chess. If we were five years younger, still seniors, we would be playing lacrosse against Andover and hitting people with six-foot long pieces of titanium (our senior year, Huge and I started on defense together and we sat in the same corner of the locker room. We called our nook the Korner of Kill.)
“What will you give me,” I asked Huge, “to walk over to those kids, flip over their chess table, flex my biceps, and scream, ‘I’m a fucking legend here!’?”
“A hundred dollars,” Huge said. Huge is now an investment banker of some sort, and maybe a hundred dollars isn’t a big deal to an investment banker, but to me, it’s a HUUUUUGE deal, so for two minutes I stood and gazed at the chess players, wondering if I had it in me to flip their table.
I didn’t. Obviously. Because I’m not a meathead. Really. I’m not a meathead.
I’m sure a lot of people came to our 5th year reunion wanting to show their old classmates how they’d changed, or grown, or lost weight, or gained weight, or purchased an expensive wardrobe, or acquired a cool drug problem, and I suppose I was no different. For example, I wanted to show everyone what I’d learned in college – the facechug.
The facechug is a fusion of a headlock and a beer-drinking competition. The procedure is pretty complicated, but essentially you wrap your arm around somebody’s head and then chug a beer in his or her face. Actually, it’s not a very complicated procedure. But it always convinces the chuggee that
A) he or she has lost
B) you have won
C) he or she was involved in a competition
D) he or she isn’t even really a human being because would you facechug a human being? Probably not. You would only facechug an animal, like a moose or something, just to assert dominance and just so you could tell your friends that you facechugged a moose, which would be almost as impressive as the time you arm-wrestled a grizzly bear and were so psyched up on adrenaline that you not only won, but also ripped his arm off.
Most people, after getting facechugged, hate you. But something weird kept happening at the reunion… people liked it. The most common reaction was, “Hey! That was AWESOME! I can’t wait to do it to somebody else!” I was baffled. It was like hitting somebody in the ear with a baseball bat, then having them smile and ask to borrow the bat so they could hit a different friend in the temple.
Huge took to facechugging right away. He was so excited to facechug me on Friday night that he attempted to start chugging well before he had his arm wrapped all the way around my head, and he ended up throwing an entire coffee cup of whiskey on his chest. To make him feel better, we all threw whiskey on our own chests.
Clearly we’ve matured a lot since high school. That night, Friday, also featured Dods and Lawrence Greco-Roman wrestling on a Portsmouth sidewalk, followed by Lawrence crying because he lost. The night ended - or the next day began - at Bickford’s where we ordered a 5:30 a.m. breakfast and Dods and Scott ordered chicken fingers as an appetizer, which I thought was gross.
If there’s one thing boarding school teaches you, it’s homoeroticism, and that’s a lesson that you never really forget. I remember when I was a senior, Dods and I used to blast techno from our stereo, run across the hall to where all the freshmen hung out, and strip until we were naked. If my backspace button weren’t broken, I would definitely delete this paragraph.
Anyway, when you have three guys sharing two double beds in the Hampton Inn, things get sexy. Like on Saturday morning, when Huge woke me and Dods up because, like an idiot, he had indulged in a cup of coffee, we decided we should celebrate being awake with a double face-chug. Huge and I grabbed a couple of Bud Lights, facechugged each other, and then started laughing and spilling beer all over each other because we were wearing only boxer briefs so we must have looked like really gay meatheads, which is a rare breed of meathead.
Huge was laughing so hard that he fell to the floor, and he was still on all fours, giggling, when Dods yanked Huge’s arm through his legs and got him D-style. Back in our dorm, Webster Hall, we used to try to get each other D-style all the time. Basically you try to get someone on all fours, with their arm through their legs so they can’t move, and then you pretend to hump them in the butt. It’s a demeaning gesture. I guess it’s supposed to pay homage to the way dogs have sex with each other.
But Saturday wasn’t just about dusting off old moves. It was about innovation. For example, Huge broke new ground with his Double-Fisted One-Knee Slow Facechug, in which you wrap BOTH arms around the chugee, grab your drink with both hands, drop to one knee, and chug, but SLOWLY. This is especially dehumanizing for the chugee because they have to bend over and wait for you to finish.
I also initiated the practice of text messaging facechug warnings. For example, I sent a girl I dated my junior and senior year a text that said…
your about to get facechugged…
Seeing someone, in this case my ex-girlfriend, get excited because they’ve received a text message, then frown when they realize it’s from me, then turn in horror as they realize what’s about to happen, is a lot like watching one of those nature films in which a happy antelope is drinking water, drinking water, drinking water… then sensing an approaching lion!… but it’s too late because the lion has already pounced on the antelope like an outside linebacker sacking a quarterback from the blind side like a heat-seaking missile. Then the lion eats the antelope, and the linebacker celebrates and/or points at God, and the missile destroys a village of innocent peasants. This is what it feels like to facechug somebody.
At this point in the weekend it must have been abundantly clear to our classmates that we had used the five years since high school to become retarded. But HOW retarded? I decided it was time go for the MVP award. I’m not sure if there’s an official Most Valuable Player of most reunions, but I knew that if we had one, I wanted it. So I started chanting my nickname - Whitey - followed by MVP. The chant went, “Whi-TEY! M-V-P! Whi-TEY! M-V-P!” There’s really nothing like the experience of chanting your own name, followed by M-V-P, and watching former classmates turn away in disgust.
Perhaps we didn’t impress our classmates with any newfound maturity, but I realized something over the weekend - reunions aren’t about growing up, they’re about growing down, turning back the clocks, and acting like you’re in high school again. And I think I did it the right way.
How else would I have won the MVP award?
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