Chris Corcoran is the Devil!

I submitted this short story to Blackbird, an online literary journal from Virginia a few days back in the "Short Story" category of submission. I like the story and tweaked it for them some. Before this it was never submitted anywhere. Hope you like it. 

By Jim Purcell

A long time ago, in an era far, far away it was 1978: Jimmy Carter was president of the United States, Blondie was at the top of the charts with “Heart of Glass,” “Chips” was the No. 1 show on television and I lived at Admiral Farragut Academy, in Pine Beach, down in South Jersey.

The academy was a boarding school and its students ranged from those who were bright with a few rough spots to the kids of rich folks who were dumb as a bag of hammers but needed to go somewhere their parents’ money could do the talking and not their grades. I had sprouted four inches during the summer after my first year, when I had been a plebe,  and had no idea why my cadet uniforms were so tight and short from just a 3 or 4 months ago.

There were about 15 kids in my class and maybe 30 in my 8th Grade class; the same could be said for every class, ranging from the 5th Grade to the 12th Grade. Everyone in the 8th Grade was staying on the top deck of Farragut Hall, which was one of two main housing areas at the then-all boys military school.

There were any number of ways cadets were billeted. The way the academy ‘ powers that be’ chose to do it that year was to put some cadets in rooms ranging from single-occupant to four-person in rickety, ghost story-prone Farragut Hall. The other option was much newer cadet housing at DuPont Hall, which had a reliable heating system (something Farragut Hall could not boast).

Farragut Hall was well-known to cadets for two reasons: It had a great view of the Toms River and a real problem getting warm air or water during the winter. Old pipes in the place bucked and banged like an asthmatic 90-year-old man climbing up the Statue of Liberty. I was always very flexible when it came to living arrangements, though, by and large, and didn't mind a four-person room or being cold. I liked most of the people I went to school with. Sure, there was no privacy. But, at 12 years old, what is anyone going to do with privacy anyway?

I shared my four-person room with cadets Alfred Bibeault, Luciano Licursi and Chris Corcoran. Bibleault was a new guy, while Licursi and Corcoran had both been going to Farragut for a couple of years. After the long march of time, I can say aloud that Chris was considered an absolute genius by some of us kids, myself included. Among anyone in the school, let alone the Junior School, it was only Corcoran who figured-out and implemented a program of fermenting fruit juice and turning it into alcohol -- subsequently giving it or selling it away so kids might have their first glimpse into alcoholism. It wasn't wonderful tasting alcohol...but it was alcohol nonetheless.

The ‘wine’ concoction Corcoran created occasionally had a slight mildewy taste, but that even made it more authentic to some -- because actual drinks don’t taste good for the most part. No one would drink vodka or whiskey or any of that for anything other than to get lit. It’s not like that stuff tastes like Tang. Undeniably, though, there were batches Corcoran produced that tasted like the better part of a putrid sock (is there a better part of a putrid sock?). If Bartles & Jaymes ever sold a batch like one of Corcoran’s clinkers they wouldn’t have lived long enough to become successful. Still, it taught us to take the good with the bad, I suppose. It felt very grown-up to come home from school and extra-curriculars and toast over armpit-tasting cocktails.

Corcoran himself  was from Florida and athletic and blonde, the very stereotype of a laid-back, future surfer guy. He was easy to get along with, had a good sense of humor and absolutely avoided trouble or anyone who went near trouble at all (other than what trouble he made). Still, he became our class's rough equivalent of a 'moonshiner.'

Corcoran had found the perfect place to ferment the juice. As it turns out there were two large windows in our room that looked into a deserted  quad. So, the scene was unremarkable, at best, when someone looked out and saw the window across from them on the opposite side of the quad: that was it. And, I don't think any of us -- or the cadet or adult staff -- ever really bothered giving the exterior boxed-in area a look by so much as opening the window and looking down. Why would we anyway? The levels below the dorm were closed off and kind of scary looking. After all, the doors were sealed-up downstairs and it was very difficult to see anything wandering in and breaking a window in the lower quad or in anyone's room. Even a lone, deranged bird would have great difficulty breaking a window in the quad, because it wouldn't have the room to really build up a head of steam before it hit window glass in what would have to be a theoretical Kamikazi attack. So, there was nothing going on there...except darkened, plastic containers of fruit juice hanging out of my room's window, tied together with a thin, but strong, rope and lowered down in-between the outside of our room and the downstairs, close to the side of the building exterior (where no one had apparently inspected since the Lincoln Administration was in Washington). Maybe everyone had gotten so caught up with the South losing and everything that they had simply locked up the lower floors and left them vacant while singing their rendition of “Glory, Glory Hallelujah.”

Yeah, Farragut was pretty old -- you could practically hear flatulent, ghostly old men, huddled, coughing in the corner and bitching for you to stop making so much noise. The place was distinguished and spotless, top to bottom.  But it had an antique feeling, like when someone visited their grandparents’ house.

Our room was inspected many times and Corcoran's homemade hooch was always there, present with a thin rope attached around a nail inside the window pane. Meanwhile, Corcoran and the rest of us were always very cool during inspections: method acting at its best. I have no idea why, I was actually anxious kid. I think I was confident because Corcoran and Licursi were. They were there a year before me, I reasoned, so they must know the right thing in almost any situation.

The whole thing was both brilliant and devious to me -- two of the most important things for cadets of any kind through the ages to enjoy! The darkened plastic bottles (Corcoran explained later the fermenting process required a dark place) were outside, occasionally clunking into one another during bad weather, and producing Corcoran's wine cooler almost in plain sight. This was a closely guarded secret in our little community and such a secret required not only no one ratting Corcoran out to the cadre or the administration, but also for all his roommates to shut up and not tell anyone else. Even if we didn't rat on Corcoran, anyone else we told might have ratted him out. So, it was strictly a TOP SECRET project. And, since we were in a military academy, I equated the need for security for this project with the same need to keep a military secret in the real world, especially against the 'hated' Russians: 'The fortunes of lives hang in the balance here, we cannot be found out by cadre so we should arrange code words so we can talk about Corcoran’s still without talking about it,' I seriously told to my roommates, who rolled their eyes at the sentiment. Licursi responded, “Okay, Donald Duck, this is the Lone Ranger -- don’t be a dumbass, we’re not going all James Bond on this shit.” In that moment I knew I went a little nuts, but it was OK. When you’re around friends you can go a little nuts, figure it out and have a laugh. We all laughed at my nonsense and, in general, we laughed a lot. We had fun the way only kids can, regardless of any uniforms or marching, saluting or getting lectured about Navy stuff, old battles, as well as going to school, of course.

Licursi was a tough kid from the Bronx, in New York City. He had a dry sense of humor and was pretty much our unelected class leader. To me, Licursi kind of spoke like someone from the “Godfather” movies, but he was very cool and helped a lot of kids when they needed to bend someone’s ear. He also had the distinction of having the only chocolate “Reggie Bar” anyone ever heard of south of Central Jersey. Corcoran was just Corcoran. He never argued with anyone and never got into a fight I heard about. He had this shaggy blond hair, along with his younger brother, Sean, who was  in the 6th Grade at the school.

Bibeault was the son of a casino manager in Atlantic City. He was a rich kid with the worst case of Attention Deficit Disorder since “Odie,” the dog in the comic “Garfield.” But, he was awkward interacting with the guys. Not helping anything was that, at 12 years old, he was the better part of 6-feet tall. Being overly excited and at least 6 inches taller than everyone made him stand out a little.  He loosened up, though, despite being a plebe (first-year student).

I was a weirdo, who at this point in my life was telling everyone I going to be a Catholic priest when I graduated high school -- despite the fact I wasn’t even Catholic. Yet, as much as I had seen so far was that priests had cool uniforms, nice places to stay and never got crap from anyone. I thought it may be some kind of mortal sin to give a priest crap, which meant they had built-in clout. I was serious too but it was all that being nice to everyone all the time stuff that made me think this might get really old after a while. By the following summer, when I discovered girls, the priest plans were on a respirator.

At the academy, into the late summer and early fall the Toms River was still warm enough (and clean enough back then) to swim in. So, we’d bolt from class, get changed into swim trunks, and race down to a little dock in back of the school, then hurl ourselves into the water just as fast and hard as we could. Splash fights and water wrestling were favorite activities there: academy insurance company adjusters would have “ lost their shit,”as we used to say, if they knew about it. We were being kids, though, and did ‘being kids’ real well, I guess.

In a few months, each of us were moved to single- or two-person rooms for one reason or another. It stung a little. I mean, we just got done breaking each other in and making the place liveable. Meanwhile, four new guys moved into our old room (Who the hell did they think they were?). Interestingly enough, though,  Corcoran kept using the same room for the fermentation process -- without the current residents even being aware of it; they never bothered to open the window and look down. Priceless. They had no knowledge of the moonshining going on right next to them. It was better than watching Adam West’s “Batman” slip in unobserved into a super-villain’s lair.  I asked Corcoran what something like that was called and he said, "Plausible deniability. My Dad is totally into politics, so I learned about it on television with all that Nixon stuff when I was little."

It was a little tricky hoisting the bottles up and getting them out in a bag, but Licursi, Bibeault or me would usually divert the news kids’ attention or Corcoran went all Ninja and stealthy. This didn’t make any of us “Robin,” though. The uniform with the skivvies pretty much was a deal breaker for us guys.

However, running cover for Corcoran did give us an excuse to get innovative. Once Licursi ducked his head into their room and yelled “FIRE DRILL!” Another time, Bibeault stole one of the kids’ wallets right in front of their eyes and made them give chase to him. Meanwhile,  I brought some shiny garland left over from Christmas to the news guys’ room, when Corcoran needed to get in, and shook it at the door while I yelled, “Look, something shiny!” and raced down the hall with them chasing me. I got the idea from Mr. Langford, our English teacher, who had talked recently about how people and dogs weren’t all that different in a lot of ways. The family dog at my parent’s house, he was named “Bullet” by my dumbass brother, would have gone nuts if I dangled garland at him. I guessed it was the same for kids and tried it out. It works.

Gradually, Corcoran befriended the new inhabitants of our room so he had a regular cause to be there. I don’t know how -- honestly. None of them spoke English and I hadn’t heard Corcoran do so much as pronounce “burrito” right. Yet he did. Since doors were kept open anyway, if he were caught in the room with no one there, Corcoran would just say he was waiting for someone; truly, an evil genius. I think he even legitimately learned some Spanish to get by, but I’m not 100 percent on that one. Sure, it was against the rules to wait in someone’s room when they were not there. But, it was far from a hanging offense. Usually, a member of the cadet cadre or adult staff would just tell the waiting cadet they couldn’t wait there and to wait somewhere else. Corcoran also had a laundry bag with him, usually, when he went to the room for his hauls and had gotten pretty good at getting his bottles up or down really fast.

In fact, Corcoran, who might have been taken as vacuous because of his laid-back manner of speech and demeanor, was a closet intellectual: amazingly smart and very quiet about it. He had my vote for 'most likely to own the world' after school days.

Before we moved out and went to other rooms on the same floor, though, Corcoran had tried another idea. Basking in our admiration from the whole fermented fruit juice thing, he came into the room on a rainy Saturday afternoon, when we were all there and sleeping or reading. He hurried in and dragged the empty garbage can from the hall into the center of the floor. OK, he had our attention. Then he told us he had something cool that would make us feel great. Bibeault speculated, “This is usually the speech someone gets before they start drugs, isn’t it? I don’t know if I want to start drugs now or later, in high-school,” he said seriously. Corcoran looked at him and broke into laughter, then said: “Dumbass.” Then, he withdrew from his pocket a can of Copenhagen snuff, pride of the U.S. Tobacco Company. Almost made the stuff feel patriotic. I discovered the nationalistic tobacco container held a kind of chewing tobacco called “snuff.”

"Guys! I found the most incredible shit! Get this, you put some of this between your cheek and gum -- don't swallow! -- and then spit it out," Corcoran said.

Licursi was the first one to comment: "Why the hell would we do that?"

I chimed in, ‘Why spit? I never heard of just spitting for its own sake. I know camels do that.’

“Yeah, I heard that too...about the camels and spitting and stuff. I heard it --,” Bibeault said and was interrupted by a smiling look from Licursi.

“I don’t know about any camel shit or spitting camels or any other kind of goddamn camels, but I want to hear a little about this,” Licursi said in his thick New York accent.

Corcoran explained that, as the tobacco rested in someone's cheek, the snuff mingles with saliva and mouth tissue to transfer nicotine to the bloodstream. Corcoran immediately transformed from empty headed surfer guy to Professor Tobacco Wizard on a dime. He said the transfer was quick and very powerful and that this combination would result in us "getting high."

Everyone was doubtful, but Corcoran was the class evil scientist. If science has taught us nothing, it has stated the need to venture forward and try new things. So, Licursi said, "Alright, let's give it a try."

We all placed a chair next to the garbage can and took a pinch of snuff, some of us more than a pinch. While we were doing that, Corcoran said, "OK, let's try to fill up the garbage can with tobacco juice we spit out."

‘Why? What’s the point in that?’ I asked.

“Because no one has done this before here!” he responded.

“How do you know it’s never been done here?” Licursi said.

Corcoran laughed and was ready for the question. “There is nothing in the Cadet Handbook about chewing tobacco, no one tells us we can’t do it but they won’t let anyone smoke, and there hasn’t been a memorial built for it -- and everything around here that is OK has a damn memorial with a nameplate. So, it hasn’t been done. We’re like astronauts here, guys,” he said.

“Yeah...true,” Licursi said. We all laughed at Corcoran’s bullshit logic.

I don't know why that sounded intriguing at the time, but it was a boring enough Saturday to do something stupid. It just happened.

So, the four of us talked and joked with each other as we chewed this snuff tobacco. At first it was awesome! It made us each feel really high and good. It was a friendly feeling that was very nice. Sure, the taste was terrible -- but the effect was good. If there was a Nobel Prize for science, we would have conferred it immediately upon Corcoran, without delay. There would be additional accolades from the fine people at Winston-Salem for turning three new people onto a potentially life-long habit: Is there a ‘downside’? Not from where I was standing.

‘How does he come up with this stuff?’ I asked myself. Bibeault immediately started talking about his father after he took a ‘dip’ from the little tin. This wasn’t out of the ordinary, Bibeault was always talking about his father. He quoted his father more than Jesus did his back in the day. This is despite the fact hardly anyone in school talked about their parents. What would we say, ‘Yeah, I’m their favorite, which is why I am in a boarding, all boys military academy before high school.’ Not so much.

Hearing about parents was right there with hearing about dentistry or the history of the urinal. This was our place where we could be us, not someone else’s kid. Licursi was talking a lot with his hands -- that was different. Corcoran just sort of sat there and listened to everyone else looking mellow. Meanwhile, I gave my reasons why New York Mets pitcher Tom Seaver was the best big league hurler ever -- especially better than the Yankees’ “Catfish” Hunter. This sparked a quick, caustic response from Licursi, because he loved the Yanks and was sure “...the Mets suck. They sucked since they began and they sucked through the World Series in ‘69 even though they won it.  Tom ‘Shit Face’ Seaver is a big deal only because he sucks a little less than everyone else on the team!”

‘Well, Catfish Hunter is a girl -- everyone knows that! And, he throws like one!’

“Tom Seaver is a butt pirate who sells his Mom’s old underwear door-to-door!”

‘You bought them!’

“You did the sniff test!”

I defended, ‘Shouldn’t you wait until the Yankees start playing in a men’s league before you go talking like that!?’ Everyone broke up with that one, even Licursi. I made that joke up right there and having been boring people with it for almost 40 years ever since. It was only really funny that one time, I admit, but I have been waiting for it to draw a laugh ever since.

Corcoran was the first, however, to spit out all of the tobacco he had after choking on it. He washed his mouth out with a soda he had squirreled away, spat the vile liquid into the garbage can, and went to bed unceremoniously. Not long after that, in succession, Licursi and Bibeault did the same thing, leaving me the sole survivor of the 'Great Experiment.' I wasn't feeling all that good myself, though. The room was spinning. I swallowed some of the tobacco trying to get it out of my mouth and caught the sight and smell of the venomous waste of all that spitting at the bottom of the trash container.

Looking into the garbage can, we hadn't managed to fill it all the way up with spit but we managed to create quite a bit at the bottom. It sloshed back and forth, lolling about in a sickening wave of thick grossness, which could easily make someone heave -- or kill animals outright by the smell.  I looked down into it and ended up puking into the can with a lovely sound. If I looked in a mirror at that point my reflection would have been green. I washed out my mouth with an orange drink I had in my footlocker and was in the process of crawling back to into bed for some much-needed sleep. The other guys were out like a light and I was going to get there too.

Well, it was Saturday and no one was there and so, when Corcoran came in and started all this, none of us thought to close the door. Before I managed to get back into bed, a cadet petty officer third class, his last name was Kelly, walked into our room out of nowhere and went to the trash can. He lived on the other side of the hall. It being a weekend, him and his roommate, another 10th grader and cadet petty officer, Joe Van Fleet, would have been a lock to be home on pass and not on campus. I guess it wouldn’t have been a lock this weekend.

"Hey, you guys don't get a personal trash can! This is for everyone on this side of the wing, not just you guys" said Kelly to me, as the only conscious person in the room. I nodded and said I was sorry. The teen-aged petty officer quickly inspected the can and then took note of the most vile concoction ever spewed  at the bottom of it.

"What the hell is this!?" Kelly barked. I really didn’t want to explain. I was too far along with nausea for all that.

I thought, 'How can these guys be sleeping through this? They're awake...jerks, assmunchers.' I told Kelly we were playing a kind of game and I would get one of the other guys to help me take it out after I woke up.

Not good enough. I knew what was coming somehow.

"You're going to get your ass down here right now, and bring this downstairs and empty this shit onto the grass outside is what you're doing!" he said. “Them you’re going to wash this can out and put a bag in it!”

Really? Really -- no one is going to lend a hand here? I knew they were awake.

I asked, 'Are you sure this can't wait until someone else is awake to help me? This thing is pretty heavy and it's disgusting on top of that.’ I also tried to tell him my back had been aching and maybe it’s too much.

Kelly was firm. “You’re 11 years old, for Christ’s sake, how bad could it be? So, I’ll take the chance -- get this downstairs now.”

I grabbed the trash can and waddled outside and down the black, metal staircase to ground level; ironically, next to the chow hall. I have never been so sickened. I put the sloshing trash can down momentarily on the upstairs landing just so I could puke into it again -- but all that came up this time was bile.

Unable to puke anymore, I dry-heaved once or twice as I brought the trash can to ground level. The only thing I could puke at this point was my lungs or intestines. I dumped out the hellish soup into the grass and then rinsed the can out with a green hose not so far away. I washed the lingering puke and tobacco off my mouth and face and then drank some water from the hose too. It stayed on my stomach and made me feel a little better. These days, people buy bottled water by the tons. Back then, we had something a lot like that -- but it was a garden hose -- and we didn’t pay anything for it and it was the best-tasting water ever.

Then, I brought the trash can upstairs and placed it back where it belonged and put a trash bag in it (which did not always happened). Kelly was gone also, satisfied I did what he said.

Finally, I headed back to bed. En route to my rack, I said out-loud. ‘You guys suck!’ There was muffled giggling to be heard. Of course they didn’t suck. They got one over on me, but that’s what we lived for. There was always another day to get revenge. So much for killing some time on a Saturday, though.

It is for sure that Corcoran was not the Devil (at least I think not). He was, however, a precocious, inquisitive, bright youngster who was adventurous and a leader. Sometimes, adventure meant great things, and other times -- not so much. This was just one of those latter times. In the end, though, it just went to show that all of us just have to take the good with the bad. In this case, the bad was really, really bad...and sickening and bad. But, even then, I knew it would make one heck of a story one day.

I never found out what happened to Licursi or Corcoran when they grew up. I did, however, find out about Bibeault. I talked to another ex-classmate online a few years ago and he said Bibeault put some money behind this little  company some friends of his were making in the 1980s -- if they had asked me I would have laughed them out of the building. First off, I would have thought, ‘Who uses the Internet all that much? This thing will never catch on.’ And, why would anyone want to go to a “virtual casino” when they could go to a real one instead? Waitresses do not wear skimpy uniforms online, I would have affirmed. As it turns out, though, the company got white hot in the early 1990s and just kept getting bigger and bigger. Today, Bibeault is a gazillionaire who never married, owns houses all over the world and hasn’t worked a day since like 1992. I have never quite forgiven him for being crazy successful.

I went into the Army after high school, then got out and went to college and became a journalist in New Jersey. I married and divorced but have two amazing and beautiful daughters out of the deal. You remember that priest thing and me? Well, I went so far as to go through investigation of the process of becoming a priest while in college, under the supervision of a really nice older Jesuit. After months of struggling with the celibacy thing, Father Norman said we could cut through all of this right now, after so much hashing for months. “I need you to do something -- go out with every fine young lady you want or will have you or you will never, ever be able to figure out if you can do without a woman. Check that box, son!” So, I saw if I could do without female companionship and discovered I couldn’t. The guy knew what he was doing; some people were not meant for celibacy.

At Farragut, sometimes people thought kids weren’t really kids there because they basically lived like they were in the Navy. I challenge that: Kids can find a way to be kids anytime, anywhere if they really want to do it. We did.

What had been Farragut was sold and paved under for condominiums during the 1990s. I went back to visit, but too late. All that was left was the football field.

I actually met one of my classmates in the 8th Grade at the Veterans Administration, in 2013 -- Joe Van Fleet, Kelly’s old roommate. We cut up and laughed like we were kids for an hour over lunch and then he told me the gossip he knew and I told him what I knew about old classmates. He said something to me as we started to head off in our separate ways. The former Coast Guard warrant officer immediately reminded me of his younger self when he said, “Being grown-up sucks.” What he said touched me and I agreed, ‘Yeah, it sure does, Joey. I sure could use another dip in the Toms River.’

In youth, the summers are always golden and orange, many kids make a ton of noise and laugh about anything and the sound of the ice cream truck was more important than Dr. Jonas Salk’s vaccine against polio. I always thought that if someone did it right as being a kid that there was always something good to remember when you got older; it turns out that was pretty much true. I really do wish there hadn’t been quite so much vomiting involved with whatever life lesson this was supposed to teach me: ‘If at first you don’t succeed with a dumb idea: Stop!’

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