The Monthly Rag

A nice guy named Tom was the lead editor of the sports page back then in ’91. Tom could take a list of stats and a stack of horseshit and turn them into a beautiful two column piece on a moment’s notice if he had to, and this was one of those special times that he had to. Although he covered quickly the blank area left by my yanked wrestling article, it was certainly no surprise that the entire ordeal went frowned upon by the council elders, and it would be agreed unanimously that my short career at the paper would indeed remain such. I left the class to resume a fairly normal struggle with other high school duties, feeling pretty much like a total failure for getting booted from an elective course.

Strangely, it didn’t take long for other questioning worker ants still holding positions to also lose interest, screw up bad enough, or quit. One by one they abandoned their posts, many of them contacting and regrouping outside the lines, sharing their stories amongst themselves. My soon-to-be collaborator, a fine and very funny fellow named Andrew, became close to me as he himself left the paper, and we began to spend a great deal of our social life together. That summer our friendship would cement firmly into place, and the seeds of what was to spawn forth would begin their germination.

September came again to the coast, and the cycle of a frenzied curriculum repeated. My grades had slipped up something major during the previous sophomore year, largely because of my disorder, which combined with some stressful situations at home made for a difficult amalgamation. It had even taken some independent study work to pass and slip through the cracks, and it seemed I was quite lucky to be seeing my junior year at all. Now I was in a slightly better place, at least emotionally, and hoped to start things anew. Feeling the itch to write again, I went to the Howl staff and asked about retaining a spot back on the columnist level. To my utter astonishment, I was turned down outright, just as it was then promptly explained to me that I was unreliable as a worker. Until I showed marked improvement in my other studies, they assured I would be denied a seat at their exclusive feast.

Outrageous! This was an elective class, and I was barred from it. Whatever confidence I had managed to build up over the past ten months, trying to get my life together at home and in school, shattered. Looking back, I think I lost faith right there in everything. I suddenly hated authority with new unbridled passion. I wanted to scream and condemn the entire establishment for treating me like some delinquint reject. Sitting in the quad soon afterward with Andrew, listening to Led Zeppelin remasters on his discman, a curse escaped my lips in a moment of rage-induced clarity.

“We’ll just have to make our own, then.”

At the time, I didn’t think it was anything more than an idle threat. And then the days and weeks stretched on, and the idea became more enticing and glorious while we plotted and schemed. We discussed things to write, how to put it together, when to give it out behind the scenes. They wanted a trouble maker…by God were they going to get one. All we needed was a name, but over an episode of Ren & Stimpy a short time later, a title, as well a never ending source of controversy, came into blessed existence.

The very first edition of The Monthly Rag was put together late September/ early October of 1992. The program of choice at the time was Aldus PageMaker, back in its early incantation days. Andrew and I would write and lay out pieces during “alone moments” in our computer class (usually when a certain instructor was distracted), then print sheets out and at last staple them together. We also hired the services of another friend named Jason, who had been an acquaintance of mine since the sixth grade, and who also shared a liking for our particular brand of humor. He wrote up a great report of an actual incident that had happened right near the snack shack one cold morning on campus; a rousing cat fight between two very feisty female students. The kicker to the tale was that a faculty member had jumped in to stop this melee, just before abandoning his patience and throwing one of the lucky combatants by her face into an iron awning pole. Quite the moment of brutality, it was. Naturally, since the Rag had been there, we were sure to be bringing the cool news to the masses.

Assuming a set of adopted pseudonyms (and honestly, in hindsight, I think it had more to do with it fitting the content rather than trying to hide ourselves) we stitched together our master copy and gave it a cursory once over. All was well and good, we thought. Cheap, sleazy, hand made tabloid goodness–ready for consumption. The question now was how were we going to make all the copies.

To print quantities of paper in that volume, one had to rely on the services of a laserprinter; an at the time expensive piece of hardware which resided, well guarded, in the heart of the enemy’s lair. There was no way of trying to sneak this one off in our present condition, banned and branded as we were. An alternative, desperate option was in dire need.

It came to us in the form of whisper…a murmur of direction that generated from a source that was inside but one that would later defect entirely to us. A columnist on the Howl staff still, our dear Matthew, who heard about our tiny revolution in progress and decided that double agent was to his fancy, dropped us a helpful hint. Through another contact, he sent us the information–a thermofax ditto machine lay for the taking in one of the classrooms, and all that was needed was the right person with the right rank to gain access. With his liaison, Matt offered to be our man.

So for a few days we tried to hook up, but it never quite happened. We all seemed to be in the wrong places at the wrong times, and since I didn’t know Matt directly, approaching him was a bit intimidating (dude was a big guy with a braid of hair hanging down from behind like Rip Torn in The Beastmaster). Finally, after realizing that time was running out and that action needed to be quickly taken, I upped my motivational speaking (read: BULLSHIT) skills and went to the class myself. I didn’t know the teacher. I didn’t know anything about the machine that was there, either, but I lied like the best damn crank addict out there and said I’d been sent by higher brass for duplication. Apparently, I was convincing. She even gave me a student who knew how to run the thermofax, and there I was, keeping a straight face as twenty-five full issues came rolling off the makeshift press.

In the long run, it would be that lie that would finally nail me to the wall, but at the time I considered it a necessary sacrifice. After stapling together all the pages, Andrew and I took half of the stack each and passed them out. We selected people we thought were game for our type of written shenanigans, along with girls we had crushes on (sadly), and it wasn’t long before we were bone dry on reserves of our debut publication. That was that. We had a laugh, went back to our normal ways, and for a few days just kind of forgot about the whole thing.

Then on the following Monday, I got the infamous little pink slip sent to me in class:

PLEASE REPORT TO THE OFFICE IMMEDIATELY.

All right, then. I was no stranger to reprimand and detention–let them do their best. How bad could it possibly be?

Approximately twenty minutes or so later, and for the duration of about a week, the entire Fort Bragg High administration lost its goddamned mind right in front of me.

CONTINUE TO PART 3