Eagle Scout The following ranks denote ...

Eagle Scout
The following ranks denote the path a young man takes in a journey from boyhood to young adulthood, while as a Boy Scout in the Boy Scouts of America, an independent youth organization in the United States.

The Rank of Boy Scout
Ten point five years. The belly rolls out like the shirt is watermelon-stuffed. The tennis shoes’ lips (Reebok high tops) flop while walking. Hair is a massive helmet, and should the head meet—as it often will—the points of rocks, the mesh of curls act as cushion against damage. Girls are closed eyelids and open-mouthed laughter. Baseball—the one thing that makes the little bells toll— has only just begun to grow real. These uniformed kids and their salutes, their hiking boots, sting of the ridicule already suffered. One more way to slowly die will only speed the process.

The Rank of Tenderfoot
The mud will cake along the shorts so that it resembles a butterfly’s wings. The watch will slip from the wrist—time itself—lost along the rocks’ sodden depths of a lagoon later to be poisoned. Oh, irony: a Boy Scout Camp under federal mandate for pollution control. The father will laugh and admonish, thinking, my god. The scoutmaster will smoke cigarettes and his sons—named Robert, Bob, Robert, and Bert—will pull at the skin of their necks making the red redder and the checked flannel will be a symbol of the scotch in the blood, the fear behind the eyes, the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
The Rank of Second Class
The hand reaches the crotch. Not of the oak once scrabbled up while playing G.I. Joe and Star Wars, but the crotch. The hand has still skinned no other skin besides its own, outside of handshakes, hugs, chicken— that which peels back before indulging in the thigh. The television in the parents’ bedroom skips from clear to static on sixteen, the Playboy Channel. This entices the hand crotchward. The hand learns things about gripping a pencil and scribbling irregularly the pages of a black and white speckled composition book.

The Rank of First Class
The Mexicans (see Mexicans, pg. 81) have decided that not only are Boy Scouts idiots, but since they consist almost entirely of white boys, they are also stupid. The clothes—outside of uniform—in turn, have taken a decidedly Z Cavaricci turn. The collared shirt buttons button to the neck. The black suede Playboy loafers slip on. The hair, thickly moussed each morning post-shower, sweeps back, the mullet curling at the nape. Squiggling in a collection of merely three hundred strands down the forehead, equally moussed, the squiggles creepily stiff as a pencil, or as a subliminal arrow.

The Rank of Star
An amazing thing has happened: The moths cocooned upon the oak branches have burst forth from their chrysalises and swirl the branches à la confetti. So, too, have the trousers ceased to be trousers and become pants. A crease along the thigh, down the ankle, becomes imperative. So is aftershave. Actual shaving happens only every fourth or fifth day, a routine never to be broken despite the scraggle of whiskers that weekly grow like billions of Jack’s bean stalks, like billions of Jacks, which are ubiquitous, as omnipresent as football players. The mind has become a hive of breasts and breasts.

The Rank of Life
The ranks are obsessive. Each higher rank lilts by, the future waving hello from the passenger window of a passing Dodge, or Chrysler. The Life Scout becomes a life scout at ten point five years. Later, it will be agreed that this was during the eleven point fifth year of life. The lashings have perfected, the two half-hitches, the sheepshank, the bowline (pronounced “Bow-lyn”). Pico Blanco—a mountain aptly topped white with quartz— remains ambitious. Ambition itself is a mountain. The mountain mountains up and the lungs suffer as much as the calves and balls and balls of feet. The rifles of the rifle range smoke and the smoke curls like a woman’s hips, or her tongue, or the hump of a mountain.

The Rank of Eagle
The girlfriend’s Russian accent has tits with nipples that, when hard, are exactly like a baby’s thumb between the fingers. This prompts the plants to strain and swell. Haircuts clip out the end of each bi-week. Under a weed haze the Little Sur River is a wisp of silver hair. The last rank is the door to a bar. The bar holds up a sign reading “We ID”. The ID is the same as the collective soul of the river. The girlfriend’s mouth claims the ID, the lips lipping around the D, closing up the I. This, ultimately, makes the girlfriend the enemy, and the bar a friend.