My High School football team was big on pranks, practical jokes, and hazing. It was technically against the rules, but the coach looked the other way as long as Nobody Gets Hurt rule was followed, since hazing has been a Badger tradition since he had been on our same football team thirty years before!

I won't say exactly what high school I'm talking about, but this was a few years ago; and it will probably be obvious that we're talking about a cold, Northern-Midwest country township area where people fart in the Sporting Goods section at Walmart, eat brats, date fat girls, watch football, and make their own fun since there ain't that much to do.

The rules had been laid down from the school disctrict Superintendent: NO HAZING on the football team. The year before, two seniors nicknamed Fletch and Biscuit took a waffle iron from home, heated it up in the locker room, unplugged it, and mashed it into the big white wet butt of a freshman just out of the shower. I didn't see it happen (I was talking to an assistant coach) but we all heard the scream, and then the "You've Been Pranked!" team chant. The poor kid went home to his mama and tried to tough it out; but she wound up taking him to the ER in the middle of the night where the story goes that some Indian Doctor took one look at it and called in a cosmetic surgeon, because there was a significant burn.

Rumor had it the kid's stepdad built him some kind of rigged-up hammock to squat-poop Sumo Wrestler Style while his butt healed. He still gets called Waffle to this day.

Anyways, the hazing ban made my day since I hadn't been hazed yet, and I was one of the so-called star seniors on the team. But after the first game another kid got hazed when a dead racoon was duct taped to his muffler and actually caught on fire at a stoplight downtown. It became a minor sensation in the local paper the next week. The coach heard about it on Monday, laughed, and the hazing ban was apparently over and all bets were off. So, I started to worry again.

The next week a buddy of mine on our offensive line asked me if I wanted to be on the Saturday morning maintenance crew. Football games were on Friday nights, and Saturday there was a crew that cleaned up, picked up trash, hauled things away, etc. He said it was a flat fifty bucks for what was supposed to be five hours of work but really only took around three hours. That was easy date night money, which was always on Saturdays, so I agreed.

I arrived on time, and they gave me the worst job right away picking up trash and cleaning up the Women's rest room. I swear I couldnt believe it! I thought women were always prim and proper, but the crapper stall was filthy! There was toilet paper everywhere, poop on the seat, some orange grunge in the sink, and tampons in the trash. Some hooligan had written "Badgers Have Both Sex Organs" which I didn't quite understand then but made me laugh anyway.

When I came out of the Women's restroom the other three guys had loaded the huge plastic Porta-Potty onto a trailer. They told me it had to be secured with a four-way rope tie, which we did, then it had to be cleaned inside, which they said I had to do. I got my stuff, starting spraying the walls with windex, and then the three guys shoved me back, slammed the plastic door shut and jimmied something into the door lock. I realized I was being hazed.

"VERY FUNNY." I called out. I wasn't too worried because there was an air vent at the top, but it still smelled like somebody had hosed out a monkey cage with a pressure washer that was squirting out nursing home vomit.

I sat down on the pot and said, "OK, I guess it was my time anyway." I then waited for them to let me out. It at that point that I heard the pickup truck sputter to life and my buddy Brandon say, "You're screwed!" through the door. The trailer lurch forward. We were going for a little ride. I squatted on the floor of the crapper like some illegal alien in a Motel Six parking lot, and then Brandon slammed on the brakes of the pickup... and fifty-nine gallons of a stanky, sulphurous muck came up from the deep and plastered my face, eyeballs, tongue, and hair with a monstrous bacterial volcanic hosedown.

I suddenly realized that I'd stuck my face directly in front of the port hole but then the truck started up again and we were moving. Horrified, I wiped the crap out of my eyes and tried to slam the toilet lid down only to discover -there was no lid! There was only a toilet seat and a flimsy one at that!

Getting slightly calmer now, I finally used my head and simply sat down on the pot. I took off my shirt and tried to rid my pie hole of any loose dookie and forced myself to not get too angry. Yet.

The boys decided to have a little fun and began an impromptu sightseeing tour of our downtown area, slamming on the brakes every couple minutes in the hopes that a a parade of dopplar would rain down on my head again. I felt whatever was left come splashing up on my hindquarters whenever that happened, but it wasn't so bad.

After what seemed like an hour - but was really about ten minutes - I felt the truck stop. Brandon said to me through the potty, "Now don't get all mad. We were just having a little fun. I'm gonna' let you out now, but you gotta' promise you're gonna' be calm and not start a fight."

I didn't say a word. I just sat on the pot. I felt them unjimmy the door and I calmly got up; and when I opened the door, I discovered that the trailer was sitting in the middle of town right in front of the town green. I never looked back as I walked across the green and into the Luncheonette, where I asked to use the phone; then, I called my mom. When I was done on the phone every one of the twenty people in the restaurant were staring at me, and one little girl pointed at me and said, "Daddy, that man don't smell too good."

I went outside and sat on a curb and every car (I know just about everybody in town anyway) slowed down and either rubbernecked to a crawl or tooted their horn and started laughing. My mother pulled up in front of me and exlaimed, "Now what in the tarnation Have you gotten yourself into this time?" I got in the car and she started to laugh, which always makes me laugh, and we laughed all the way home.

After I got showered she forced me to drive with her to one of those medical clinics where the doctor gave me a shot of some kind of antibiotic. Coach heard about the prank Monday morning, but what he didn't know was that payback was going to violate the new team rules and involve several elements, including social and sexual humiliation, cruel and unusual punishment, psychological warfare, and old-fashioned physical agony.

Stay tuned for my second installment, "When Brandon Met Smelly".