The American College of Switzerland Zoo. James E. Henderson
Once I got my wits back, I headed toward our frat house and Wilds. Did I have a story! I found Wilds in his room.
“You won’t believe this!” I said.
“Stallone decked Lopez,” he interrupted.
“How…?”
“Cliff’s been telling everyone.”
“Wilds, you wouldn’t believe his hands. I didn’t see them move!”
“Golden Gloves.”
“What?”
“Cliff said he was Golden Gloves champ in Philadelphia.”
“What’s Golden Gloves?”
“Don’t know, maybe it’s basic training for inner city thugs!”
“Whoa, quiet! Your sense of humor is going to get us both killed!”
“Then maybe it’s like Little League for boxers! They didn’t have it in my hometown.”
“But Wilds, his hands…” and I went on to tell the story as best I could describe it.
Stallone was a God after that, a powerful, vengeful God! Freshmen and sophomores alike showed him deference. No one showed him less than total respect. Well, almost no one. Actually, I heard that the next day Cliff started joking around and telling Stallone “Look out, I know karate!” That ended a little less violently. Stallone pantsed him and held him up by his ankles while Bernd ran, got his camera and took pictures. I didn’t see that episode, but I saw the photo when it was developed, and a severely edited version of it ended up in the yearbook.
To say the next party was a dud would be an understatement, but a few of us had a great time. It was Wilds’ birthday, and he bought a keg and took it to his room. He invited all his frat brothers for a Saturday afternoon bash! Only Gil and I showed up. The three of us sat alone for a time trying to figure out how to tap the keg. It was a large wooden keg with wood plugs and a metal beer spigot that needed to be driven into one of the plugs, and we didn’t have a hammer or a clue how to do it!
I ran down to the parlor, reminded several people in there about the party, and borrowed a steel weight from Stallone’s barbells. Back in his room Wilds decided to do the honors and slammed the spigot with the weight into the plug. It didn’t seat, and beer started shooting out of the hole in the end of the keg. At first we tried jamming the spigot in, but it wouldn’t stay; then we gave up and started drinking the beer as it geysered from the keg.
Soon we were ankle deep in the beer that covered Wilds’ floor and seeped under the doors onto his balcony. Gil had sealed the door to the hall with Wilds’ towel. We began scooping up beer off the floor with mugs, drinking it, and then throwing mug-loads at each other. Wilds slipped while running from Gil, fell face-first into the pool, and slid over to the balcony doors. Then seeing the beer seeping under the doors, Wilds got the idea of opening them, which he immediately followed up on. The beer flowed out of the room, across the balcony, and over the side. Now, Switzerland is known for its spectacular waterfalls, but this may have been the country’s first beer falls as it cascaded majestically from the fourth floor onto the parlor balcony and off to the ground below. There may only have been three of us at Wilds’ birthday – but a great time was had by all! I will add that Wilds’ room never smelled the same again. That stale beer had soaked into everything! Only the cold of winter offered any relief from the odor.
Chapter Eleven
Fall Sports
Our college and the American high school had lost their sports director when John Harlin had fallen from the Eiger, so students were encouraged to fill in the void. With students as the instructors, most sports before ski season were a joke. Although it was one place where money didn’t really matter, except possibly what kind of equipment you had. Stallone had managed to wangle the position of basketball coach. I didn’t do basketball, too short, but the guys seemed to enjoy what were basically pickup scrimmages. Also Kaeti said that Stallone was a very good coach for the girls. He was a focused instructor and held the girls to very high standards. Somehow I got the feeling that Kaeti wasn’t telling the whole story. I heard from Gil that illegal use of hands took on new meaning when coach Stallone joined in on the girls’ scrimmages! Not that he saw anyone complaining.
I had a brief – very brief – moment as soccer coach. Actually, I found a field complete with goals in my wanderings in the lower, flatter part of the village, and I took the trains to Montreux to buy a soccer ball with my own money. I talked with Stallone about it, and he said he had always wanted to try goalie. So one day after school we gathered several other willing participants and headed to the field. At first I showed off, juggling the ball with my feet, knees, and head; then I kicked it back and forth with the other guys while Stallone lined in the goal. One or two shots from the others, which Stallone fielded easily; then it was my turn. I picked my favorite spot-shot; the outside right corner of the box to the top left corner of the goal. I dribbled to the right and drove a hooking shot toward the goal with the outside of my right foot. Stallone made an amazing dive and almost got to the ball, but it dropped just past his hands, through the upper corner, and bounced down the hill behind him. He fell on his side and rolled to his feet. “Nice!” he said, but as he turned to retrieve the ball we noticed that it had started bouncing higher and further down the slope behind the goal. “Oh geez!” he shouted as we both started running after it. Stallone was maybe ten strides down the slope and I was barely off the field when the ball landed on a large rock and bounded behind a thin row of trees out of sight. Stallone stopped, but I raced to the trees and jumped onto a large boulder to see over the edge. The field beyond was very steep, and the ball was nowhere in sight. No wonder I hadn’t seen the locals playing soccer here! Stallone and I talked briefly about getting nets, but I admitted that the shot was a little lucky and that I didn’t always hit the goal. Therefore, we would have to net that whole end of the field. So much for soccer on an Alp! I hoped that some lucky valley kid enjoyed my new ball.
One sport that was not a joke was mountain climbing. Bernd was the instructor since the actual instructor had been killed in a fall. We had ropes and a carabineer or two but not much else. Bernd claimed that free climb is the only way to climb. As he delicately put it, “Artificial climbing with pitons and such was for pussies.” On the other hand, it could be that all the climbing equipment had been owned by the former sports director. Anyway, I borrowed climbing boots that had a steel shank that kept the sole from bending. They were tough to walk in, but they allowed me to set my toe on a ½ inch wide ledge on a rock face and have a relatively sturdy platform to stand on while I moved my hands. Spider free-climbed to the top and set up a belay, or safety rope, for us amateurs. Bernd taught us to keep three points of contact at all times: two hands and a foot while you moved the other foot, or two feet and a hand while you moved the other hand. We took a relatively easy way up and were rewarded with a rappel down.
I guess that I need to explain that statement because rappelling is scary as crap when you first try it and Bernd was old school when it came to rappelling. You wrap the rope around your body; first between your legs, then up the left side to the front, over your left shoulder, around your back, and under your right arm to your right hand. It is a twisted configuration, but it seems to work. The friction of the rope as it runs across your body slows your descent. However, it gets a little warm in the crotch if you descend too quickly. Needless to say, I took to wearing lederhosen, or German leather shorts, after my first class. A full thickness of cowhide, rather than jeans, to protect the family jewels seemed eminently practical. The scariest part of rappelling is lowering your body backwards over the top edge of a cliff and trying to stand horizontally on the cliff face with the ground forty feet below. Logically, you knew that the belay rope would catch you if you messed up, but leaning over backwards on a cliff face was frightening. I was sure my gymnastics helped me some, but my basic distrust of someone else holding my life in his hands, to say nothing of the real climbing instructor’s recent crash and burn, scared me to death! I made it over the edge – but it wasn’t pretty. The gloves were too large for my hands, and the little finger of the left glove actually got caught between the rope and the cliff edge. As I jerked