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By Root 405 0

battalion that we were at war with Japan. I was in the front row, and he looked at me and told me I was sitting in the very same seat where my father had been sitting when the battalion was informed of America’s entry into the First World War. Since my father had gone on from Shattuck to become a lieutenant in the artillery, I suspect the Tuba expected and certainly hoped I’d receive a commission. Occasionally he or one of the masters would say something like, “Marlon, if you ever stop being a smart-ass, you might make a good officer.” But I wouldn’t have lasted a nanosecond in a uniform. All my life I have questioned why I should do something. My first response always is, Why should I? Reasonable arguments can change my mind, but I won’t do something if I don’t agree. I have never been able to snap to and salute, and that’s what they ordered you to do at Shattuck.

Still, I have wonderful, warm memories of breaking the rules—of pranks, high jinks, teasing the masters and assorted silliness that almost made being there worth it.

Once the war started, many of the younger masters went into the army, and we had to deal with whatever faculty the management of the school could scrape together. As a group they were mostly tired older men who were no match for the cadets. By nature, adolescent boys, especially when they organize as a group, can be a diabolical force, testing adults to the limit and pushing those limits to the extreme, and that’s what we did.

I had discovered that a hair tonic called Vitalis contained alcohol and that if you touched a match to it, it glowed spectacularly for a few seconds in a stunning electric blue flame.

After this discovery, in the middle of the night I’d take a bottle of Vitalis down two flights of stairs, squirting it on the floor and walls until I came to the doorway of one of the boys I didn’t like, then return to the safety of my room and set the Vitalis afire. The flame raced down the stairs, leaving behind a glorious fiery ribbon.

Another time, a bunch of us got together and poured Vitalis over the transom of a master who was terrified by this wild, savage group of boys who would never relent once they saw a grain of weakness in a master. We scared him nearly to death, and we could hear him beating the flames out with his clothes. It didn’t cause any damage, merely an eerie blue flame.

I was also responsible for one of the great unsolved mysteries in the history of Shattuck. Besides being easily startled, I have, again, never been able to stand loud noises, although admittedly it is selective: I can listen for hours to music played so loud that other people have to leave the room. But most loud noises—especially sounds associated with authority—annoy me. The bell in the tower at Shattuck constantly bonged every fifteen minutes—on the hour, quarter hour, half hour, three-quarter hour—ordering us to go to class, eat, sleep, get in formation or report for a drill. It was the voice of authority and I hated it. At some point I decided I simply couldn’t bear it any longer and climbed into the tower late one night—an act that alone made me subject to immediate dismissal—intending to sabotage the mechanism that made the bell ring. But I discovered that the only way I could silence the bell was to steal the clapper; it must have weighed 150 pounds, but I decided to take it. I waited until the bell tolled at the quarter hour, nearly deafening myself, leaned over, unhooked the clapper, hoisted it on my shoulders and made my way down the stairs to the ground. It was spring, the night was flooded with moonlight and I felt glorious. I lugged the clapper a couple of hundred yards and buried it, where it is to this day. Anybody with a metal detector could find it. As I covered the clapper in the grave I’d dug for it, I smirked and chuckled in a way that only an adolescent could smirk and chuckle. The next morning the school was wonderfully quiet. The masters gathered outside the tower, looked up, shook their heads and tried to figure out what had happened. I could hardly contain my laughter at everyone