--IV--
"An epic true story exhibiting youthful imagination at it's finest..."
Dedicated to <> (1994-IVever)
by Colin Sullivan
This is the story of four boys who became friends and eventually went on to
conquer the world. They are the comedic, the foolish, the silent, and the
determined. They are the four food groups that you never learned about in health
class. They are the four fingers on the hand of Fate. They are the four best years
of your life. They are the four, the proud, and the silly. They are, and always
will be, the IV...the IV against the world.
There we were: a week before our freshman year of high school. Shane and I
stood outside the rear lobby of the school, awaiting our destiny and our first
cross-country running practice. We had been friends since Mrs. Fenton's fourth-
grade class--ever since the day she threw a math book at my head. To this day, I
don't think either of us knows exactly how we ended up together. I always have
been quite a talker, even when there is nothing to say, I usually managed to create
something. Whereas Shane abnormally quiet, so silent in fact, that he was actually
held back in kindergarten because of it. His lack of sound and my overuse of it
made us an unusual pair, but that fact was not on our minds at the moment. What
did fill our tiny freshman craniums that day was missing soccer tryouts, and being
forced to look toward cross-country running(x-c) for salvation from after-school
boredom. Little did we know that if we had declined to participate there would
have been no IV and no tales of future world domination. Luckily, we relied on,
Shane's older brother, Chad's suggestion, and Shane and I showed up for the first
day of high school x-c practice. We stood outside in the warm September air,
awaiting our mandatory introduction to the coach.
I turned to behold a sight that sobered my thoughts, and Shane's, too, I
suspect. There, tromping toward us, was a man--a titanic man. As he strolled over
to us he cast a shadow over our quivering little frames. His eyes were yellow like
a tiger's, and with each step he took I could feel the earth shake with fear. His
forearms were bigger than my waist, and he displayed a shirt that read, "Real
distance runners eat raw meat, run naked, and sleep in the snow."
"Nice to meet you boys," boomed the voice of the creature later known to us
as Coach Jon Hoek. "What brings you here today?"
"We missed soccer tryouts and we had nothing else to do," I exclaimed
proudly.
"Well, do you want to run, or do you want to play soccer?" asked the Jolly
Green Coach. He crossed his arms and paused for a second, his yellow corneas
boring holes into my Lilliputian physique.
"Run, I guess," I said in that especially unsure-of-myself way that only a
freshman can understand.
He stared for a second more and then told us to go inside and sit down on the
carpet. Naturally, when we entered those glass doors we saw where we were to sit--
in the corner with the other munchkin freshmen. As Shane( who still hadn't uttered
so much as a grunt) and I plopped down on the rough brown carpeting duct-taped to
the floor, we scanned the area for signs of intelligent life. That's when I first
met Dan Yousey, another cross-country neophyte, and a future member of our
mischievous quartet. Back then Danny Boy was a pudgy kid, but the number of push-
ups he would complete over the next four years would render his baby fat only a
forgotten fable. His hair resembled a blond toupee, he sported some sort of black
eighties-rock-n-roll T-shirt, and I could see his cellulite oozing over the edge of
his fake Umbro shorts.
He was a freshman, and just like us, he had left his junior high sport,
football, to be a part of Queensbury's elite running force. He was German, and
that became a jumping off point for future speculation by myself and others that he
was in fact a Nazi. This theory was supported by the later introduction of his
mother Anna, who came straight from Germany. Mrs. Yousey would provide the IV with
many meals consisting of her famous meatballs and sweet-cake, which Dan had a hard
time sharing at first. After a simple introduction, Shane, Dan, and I were one
step closer our undiscovered destiny as members of the IV. It was then that the
door creaked open and the final puzzle piece slipped into place.
AJ Charpentier was his name--short for Albert John, but later suggested to be
an abbreviation of Ass Jockey. He was the missing link, the fourth member of our
future troop of terror. He looked as if he had just finished with his job in the
cornfield, frightening away the crows. He was a couple of inches taller than Shane
and I, and about the same size as Dan, yet still dwarfed by Mr. Hoek's gargantuan
form. He had midnight black hair that we would later find out could grow to such
an inhuman dimension that it would almost transform him into the long-lost son of
Ike Turner. It spilled out of the side of a long sky-blue gnome's hat that
traveled from his head to the vicinity of his waist, where it hung as his eternal
baby-blue symbol of non-conformity. He was never voluntarily able to straighten
out the pinkie finger on his right hand, and that's when I decided that there was
something strange about him. As we matured, AJ busily played games with his knee
fat, composed snappy jingles about his naval, and generally tried to keep most of
his thought patterns below a third-grade level. When he laughed he sounded like a
hyena, and so he went on to become the Pan of our group, always causing mischief.
Everything about AJ was wild and he would certainly prove to be a useful ally in
the IV's inevitable conquest of civilization.
Now there were four, the verbose, the unspoken, the unbreakable, and the
fool. Although the tetrad was complete, we would soon find out that there was much
yet to be learned. Our friendship stemmed from the time that we spent together on
and off the athletic battlefield. Shane, AJ, Dan, and I were cast into numerous
classes together over the four years. We all had Coach Hoek for English class, and
coincidentally all received A's. We all managed to keep permanent positions on the
honor roll for 16 quarters, and sometimes even strayed onto the Principal's list
now and again (Dan ruled over that domain). Shane was a scientist, I was an
English guy, Dan did well all around, and AJ majored in kleptomania with a minor in
stick-figure art. Over the years, all the faculty and student body came to know
the IV, and most even tolerated us. Still, it was not our studies that connected
us, but rather our passion for running.
There was a sport for every season, and the sports were always fun when the
IV were together. Cross-country running (x-c), was the original stitch in the robe
of friendship that we all wore, and so we were always truest to that. By sophomore
year we were thrust into a position of leadership when most of us made the varsity
team. Running became our instrument and in x-c we made incredible symphonies. We
held up our undefeated tradition to advance our record to 56-0 in our league, and
triumphed over our foothills council for nine straight years. We also managed to
maintain and pass on the stories and traditions that had been handed down to us by
past harriers: there was the annual hanging of the gargantuan yellow Q (for
Queensbury High) tarp over the rock face at the Manhattan X-C Invitational, the
symbolic running of the John Joyce trail, (dedicated to the memory of a fellow
runner, who had died in a car accident when we were still in junior high), the mad
dashes through Potter's Woods, the stream runs through Halfway brook, and the 200
pound water-heater, graciously decorated with the school colors and our own
creative slogans such as "Boys Rule". That piece of abstract artwork was
mysteriously deposited in the backyard of our girls' coach, Pat Sweeney, the man we
called Captain Spandex because his entire running garb clung to him like wallpaper.
On the last day of practice, I found a yin-yang ring embedded in the soft grass
that I had tread upon on warm-up runs for four long years. The ying-yang itself
became a symbol of the four. The ying and the yang are total opposites, yet they
exist as one. The black and the white can exist independently of one another, but
they choose not to. Instead they flow together and form a symbol of friendship and
togetherness, much like the unspoken bond that exists between the four of us. The
ring formed a perfect ribbon around my pinkie, and remains there today as a
constant reminder of how the IV flowed as one on the battlegrounds of Queensbury.
In the winter we had X-C Skiing. Shane, Dan, and I were immediate converts,
but AJ stayed with wrestling until senior year, when he decided that getting his
face slammed into the ground on a regular basis was not as much fun as it was
cracked up to be. We skied our way to victory over the years and ended up taking
our council several times. We succeeded in finding a Hell on earth, located in a
place known as Rockwood forest, and became aquatinted with the stickiest substance
known to man-Klister (imagine a concoction made 50% peanut butter, 50% crazy glue,
that you apply to your `traditional' x-c skis, to provide kick in extremely warm
weather.) We were led by another great coach named Underwood, whose name we
corrected to "Underdog". I can still recall loading up Dan's forest-green Jeep
Wrangler and setting out for road-trips to hidden ski areas high in the Adirondack
mountains. Dan would crown his melon with a blaring orange hat that scared the
deer (and the girls) away, and Shane would always end up slapping his hands
together in an effort to relieve the temporary numbness in his hands. I recall
dining at that little pizza shop in Day, a town which displayed a holy plastic
nativity scene in the town square all year round. Senior year we finished the
worst season we'd ever had, but our record was blocked out by the sound of laughter
and heavy metal music that rang like a victory trumpet on the last bus ride home.
Each spring brought track season, and that meant a long-awaited return to
running. Often when the snow was thawing, we would run laps around the Elementary
School parking lot coughing from the cold air that chilled our lungs. When it got
warmer, all but Dan dreaded Thursday's speed workouts, and every other Monday we
would trek up and over our local ski mountain in a grueling 2000-foot hill workout.
One could always count on joking and stretching on the infield after every
practice, and we would cover the length of the field in our longest strides. We
managed to fit in those memorable unauthorized activities such as the numerous
times I managed to climb to the top of the uprights on the goal-posts, and in turn
enhance my vocabulary with a slew of colorful new words loudly provided to me by
the coaches. We always took time out for fun, like the times right after it rained
and the pole-vault pit would become a slip and slide for the entire guy's team
(minus the pole-vaulters, who didn't believe in using the vault pit for anything
other than vaulting). I can still remember the first time I broke a five-minute
mile, and the day Shane almost stole the foothills crown in a record breaking two-
mile performance. I can still see Dan with his etched stone-face glare that
frightened his opponents. I'll certainly never forget the cheers from the crowd,
as AJ and I landed in the steeplechase's watery pit. At our last track meet ever,
water spilled from the heavens for hours, and just when we thought the day was
done, a rainbow appeared and stretched across the vast field of dampened athletes.
Our official title, the IV, was coined sometime in our junior year and the
bond of friendship between us continued to grow stronger with the passing of time.
Being drug- and alcohol-free, we busied ourselves with other enjoyable activities,
such as scaling the local water-tower and breaking into the school's courtyard and
camping there overnight. We had no idea that these seemingly routine activities
were actually orchestrated by a higher power to hone our skills for the IV's
imminent take over of the world.
The water-tower was a little over 300 feet tall and climbing it was no easy
task. To tackle the blue behemoth we first used Dan's car for transportation,
because the jeep was small and would be easily concealed in the bushes nearby.
After the covert parking job, we had the problem of reaching the 15-foot-high
platform which was obviously placed at that height to discourage sane people from
attempting any effortless ascent of it. Needless to say, neither obstacles nor
sanity discouraged us. We used a rope with a metal hook to grapple the platform.
After ducking several roaming headlights from the nearby road and creating several
resonating drum solos by bouncing the metal hook off of the metal tower, we finally
hooked the corner of the platform. Then we scrambled up the rope, and barely
keeping our ninja-like composure, we all scrunched onto the tiny platform. Since
the platform was only constructed for two people, AJ and I took to the task of
hanging off the sides while Dan and Shane picked their brains for the easiest way
to penetrate the locked door that led to the ladder. We thanked ourselves for
being flimsy runners that day, because we ended up having to remove various
clothing items to squeeze through the miniature hole in the side of the ladder
cage. Once the squeeze-play was accomplished the rest was smooth sailing and we
reached the top with no problem, where we performed various victory dances,
including Dan's devastating one-armed pushups. We basked in the glow of the
moonlit sky, and reminisced over old stories of our high school days. Finally, we
vandalized our mark on society when we scrolled our initials, the date, and our
familiar IV-crest on the cold metal surface.
The most crowning achievement to the IV's pre-domination, and a tale that
will surely echo through the hallowed halls of Queensbury for years hence, is the
raid on the courtyard. Dressed in camouflage garb and sporting different colored
berets (procured on Dan's trip to France), the IV, with a little help from their
friends, set out one faithful night to sack the heavily guarded fortress of the
Queensbury courtyard. The plan was to somehow break into the school's central
courtyard unnoticed, set up camp overnight, and leave a lasting impression on the
students and faculty of Queensbury High School without getting arrested. The
problem was that the school courtyard was enclosed on all sides by the school
itself, which contains halls crawling with motion sensors and Big Ron--the fearsome
Janitor of Death. We worked out a strategy where we would travel up and over the
roof and inconspicuously drop down into the courtyard. Now any real team of
specialists--like the A-Team--would have obtained the school's schematics, figured
out the quickest way over, and built some sort of complex catapult device to propel
themselves over. Due to limited brain-power, limited funding, and the fact that we
didn't have Mr. T to help us, we just guessed at the location of the courtyard and
used AJ's dad's collapsible aluminum ladder. The two friends that accompanied us
happened to be in the top ten in our class. We figured that if we were to get in
serious trouble, the school were also going to have to nail some of Queensbury's
finest, and crucifying two members of the top ten would not have looked good on the
school record.
We hid the perpetrating vehicle, Eric's red Cherokee, in a nearby
neighborhood and slunk across the rear fields of the fortress. We moved as swiftly
as we could through the shadows carrying an aluminum ladder, a tent, individual
clothes, and a video camera--for purposes of either self-incrimination or a shot at
the 10,000 dollar jackpot on America's Funniest Home Videos. We unfolded the
ladder in a blind corner and tried not to make too much noise when ascending, but
our silent upsurge failed due to the fact that none of us could keep from laughing.
The idea of having a video camera pointed at us while we were attempting to be
commandos, increased the hilarity of the scene. After the lot of us were perched
upon the roof, we hauled the ladder up and proceeded towards the courtyard.
Although we treaded lightly, the weathered-tarp roofing cracked and crunched below
our feet, and it sounded as if God was eating an enormous bag of potato chips (with
ridges). We finally reached the courtyard, and in one of the smoothest maneuvers
of the entire night, AJ and I lowered the ladder silently to the ground. The
ladder dropping was a scene replayed many times over in the near future, as AJ and
I admired our video-taped handiwork. We dropped into the courtyard and set up camp
in the darkest corner, under the lip of the roof. Once again, a victory dance
ensued. The rest of the night was spent ducking the occasional roaming janitor,
talking about who our one phone call would be to if we got arrested, and trying to
preserve a friend's contacts in a Gatorade cap so they wouldn't dry out his eyes
when he slept.
As the sun broke over the horizon that next morning, we woke to voices
outside our tent. We could see the distinct shadows of overweight balding men with
brooms prodding at the tent as if it were an alien creature. We waited until they
had gone to emerge from our nylon cocoon, and then dressed for a morning game of
ultimate Frisbee. Within an hour, the school was reanimated from its midnight
slumber, and the news of our feat was quickly distributed through the high school
grapevine. Soon the entire school was buzzing about the great Queensburian raid,
and the principal even stopped in to congratulate us on a job well done. Our work
was finished, so we packed up our things and trudged out to join the rest of our
class for our senior cruise across Lake George. We signed many autographs that
day.
If the exploits of the IV up to this point have seemed a tad far-fetched and
you believe me to be contorting reality as if it is Silly Putty, then read no
further. Somewhere in between work and play, running and laughing, water-towers
and courtyards we managed to squeeze in a plan to rule the world. It is a self-
proclaimed prophecy of world domination that came about while brainstorming in a
coffee shop one lazy Saturday afternoon. Our thoughts flowed like the bottomless
cups of java that we nursed. We made it as realistic as possible and eventually
started to believe it. Therefore, in light of my strong belief, I will be so bold
as to proclaim that the prophecy will-and-must come true, so if you read this and
either fail to believe it or try to prevent it then you will most surely be
destroyed. If destruction does not come about today, then it will; when the sun
rises in the West and sets in the East, when the water in the toilet flushes
clockwise in the Western Hemisphere, when the Fox network produces a quality
sitcom, and the entire global population pays homage to the new rulers of the
world "the IV" Muhahahahahahahahahahahahaha!
Now it was graduation day. It seemed as if it was only yesterday that I
stumbled nervous and wide-eyed into the bustling halls of Queensbury High. In the
background I could hear the names of my fellow classmates echoing off the padded
walls of the blue gymnasium. Something was wrong, there was a name missing Dan
Yousey. That pudgy little kid that I met just four years hence was no longer a
little kid, or pudgy for that matter. He had been accepted to the United States
Air Force Academy and the US government didn't care if Dan was going to miss the
only opportunity he would ever have to graduate from high school. Dan was 3000
miles away, probably being verbally abused by a drill sergeant, and for the first
time in our young lives the IV were separated. Then it hit me-- I, too, was
growing up. In a few months I would be stripped of my senior title, and magically
devolved into a whiny, sniveling freshman at St. Lawrence University. I looked up
and caught the eyes of AJ and Shane. I could read their distressed faces: where
did the time go? Where were the water-towers; where were the x-c meets; where was
Dan? The IV were not little boys anymore; they were young men.
When the principal called my name I marched slowly across the rubbery gym
floor, up the ramp, and to the small-wooden podium. As my hands touched the
diploma I felt a thousand tiny pins prickling my skin all at once. Suddenly, I
could see it all. A rush of cool air invaded the otherwise stuffy gymnasium, and I
stepped down from the podium. I flipped my tassel to the right side and returned
to my seat. Minutes later the valedictorian started speaking, but I never did hear
anything that she said that day. Her soft voice was drowned out by a chorus of
Chariots of Fire that played in my head. I turned around and peered out the door
into the lobby. The same lobby that, a little over four years ago, had forged an
unbreakable bond between four freshman. I strained my eyes to see the figure of a
small boy. His scrawny body was topped with a curly-blonde mop. He sat stretching
on the shaggy-brown carpet, which was still duct-taped to the floor. Suddenly, he
scrambled to his feet and looked around, searching for something. Just then, three
blurs sped by him, slapping him on the back as they flew out the glass doors and
across the parking lot. The boy broke into stride, but he paused and turned right
before the glass doors. He turned around and peered straight through my eyes into
my soul. He was me. He winked and then broke free of the building, flying into
the parking lot to meet his three companions. The four of them ran as one--each
step, each breath, each swing of their arms, each bulge of their muscles--one. As
my Chariots of Fire died out, the sound of our principal announcing `the class of
1997' mixed with screams of triumph. I watched as the four familiar silhouettes
sprinted off toward the future, growing smaller and smaller, until they
disappeared. IV-ever.
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