The Great Bolles AT&T Caper - a short story by Ron Clark Ball

         

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CALL ME A TENTH grader.  I was at the Bolles School that year. It was late April and a little over a month of the school year remained at the once-upon-a-time San Jose Hilton, considered then to be the South’s finest prep school. Perhaps it still is to this day. 

              The school had evolved from a roaring twenties Mediterranean style resort on the North Florida Saint Johns River to a nineteen seventies elite prep school of one thousand co-ed students, one hundred of which were wayward borders - all boys. A few borders were the "Ishmaels" of prep schools, wanderers having toured most of the east coast's academies before landing at Bolles. The campus, which included multiple of everything, football fields, swimming pools, tennis courts, and even ski boats, was funded by alumni pockets seemingly endless in their depth. Some kids even drove their boats to school from Ortega, a tract of affluence along the river that should properly be pronounced with the drawn out lockjaw accent of Long Island North Shore. "Ortaaygah."

            My roommate was a tall skinny kid from North Carolina and although new to Bolles that year he was a legacy, his two older brothers having graduated from our school. A year older than me, his name was Keith Kerfoot Dickson. With a name right out of Dickens or Twain, he was a prankster fitting of the tag and loved to get the laugh. He once lit a fart with a lighter while sitting on a beanbag chair, the consequences of the resulting explosion causing his beanpole legs to kick straight up as if they alone had been cocked and fired. I fell into thirty minutes of gut-wrenching non-stop laughter as he danced a painful jig around our dorm room, all the while fanning the business end of his behind. I'll never forget that blue flame.

           Another time he decided to finish what he deemed was an incomplete job of painting the school's water tower, a decision that ended up being a problem for him.  The initial operation had been conducted at night. "Night Ops" is what the military called it, complete with lookouts to alert "the team" of two, one being this writer, when the coast was clear and the school's guard was out of sight. “Out of sight” in the case of the night watchman, Chief Carney, probably consisted of a chair, television, and some single malt to polish off over the next several hours until he fell into a drunken Irish slumber.

          The team, dressed in all black, faces smudged with shoe polish, wool watch caps pulled down to our eyebrows, successfully scaled the hundred feet of rickety and rusted ladder to paint something stupid on the top of the water tower. The six-foot high letters read "FINA," painted with black spray paint in outlined capital letters. "FINA" was something clever - a latent point to all those that read it. The meaning was so deep in fact that its significance has been lost to history. The problem for Keith wasn't the meaning however, or that the letters were in outline, something he sought to correct. The problem was that he decided to do it on a Sunday; Sunday morning - in broad daylight.

           "Dickson, come down before you get caught," I yelled to Keith from the second floor dorm window closest to the water tower. He flipped me a bird as he approached the mid way point of the climb up the ladder.

           "Come on Dickson - don't be stupid. Get down before you're caught," I yelled again, hoping he would regain some sense of reason. He shot me another bird. It was useless.

           "He's already caught," came the deep, unmistakable voice of the dean of students from behind me. I never even turned around. I knew this was not going to end well.

           Within a minute Dean Talbert along with his wife Mrs. Talbert, were at the base of the water tower where their car was parked, and dressed in their Sunday finest. Their destination that morning of course was church, but there was only one little problem to take care of first – the boy on the water tower.

           "Dickson," the dean barked. "Get down."

           Now on the catwalk that circled the water containment area and busily filling in the letters with black spray paint, Keith was becoming irritated at the constant “Yabba Dabba Do” to stop work, so he crouched and hung a moon over the ladder rail. Mrs. Talbert got the full face.

           "Dickson, I said get down and that means now," the dean continued.

           Realizing the voice below was coming from someone much older than a high school sophomore, Keith figured he better duck out of sight. “I’ll lay flat on this grated catwalk,” he decided.  For that stunt, Keith got some time off from school so he built a couple of speed bumps on the school’s property.

           In spite of all that, and there were many other pranks as well, we had almost managed to finish that school year without being tossed out - expelled. That is, until that spring when a maintenance crew had discovered a phone line running through an outside wall into a third floor dorm room that happened to be ours.

           For most of the year we had successfully operated the first unauthorized Baby Bell long distance service in the south, at least the first one for Bolles boarders not wanting to use the lobby pay phones. But now the jig was up, and we were nabbed red handed with our fingers on the dial so to speak.

            It had all started several months earlier, on a dark winteresque by Jacksonville standards, weekend evening. Recalling our typical school night, we contemplated the fact that we had only thirty minutes between the end of mandatory study hall and “lights out." We'd grown weary of sprinting the length of a dorm hallway, and then down three flights of stairs, only to wait in a queue five deep to finally get barely ten seconds for a phone call to the girl that went to "that" public school. It was a real bummer of a situation and something had to be done about it.

         Honing in on my MacGyver skills and aptitude for the inventive, I figured out that all we needed to do was splice into one of the phone lines conveniently located just beneath the windowsill of our room. After drilling a hole through the ancient walls of Bolles, while perched precariously on a ledge a few floors up, I connected the phone line to an old dial-up phone, the kind used in those black and white film noir movies with Robert Mitchum when the phone numbers began with "Klondike." I removed the bells, lest we be had. We were in business.

The operation was moving right along for a time, and we were raking in a little extra coin charging fellow boarders a quarter here and there to call girlfriends back in their respective hometowns. Things were humming right along, that is, until the phone bill arrived. 

We weren't spliced into the school WATS line after all. But we had known that after listening to a few incoming calls. It turned out that we had spliced into a line that belonged to a contractor of the school - the kitchen service company. The manager of the kitchen service got the phone bill and must have bit his lip clean through by the time he hit the tenth page of what normally would have been a two page bill. Ten pages was only half of the statement.

It didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to sleuth out who the new “Ma Bell” on the block was, but it wasn't the phone bill that landed us in front of the headmaster, at least not at first. It was a Bolles School gym bag with the initials "BFD." The gym bag was filled with food, mostly cereal - Sugar Puffs, Fruit Loops, Cornflakes and such. Oh, and there were a bunch of milks as well - the school size kind, just eight ounces. Some of them were chocolate. The food had come from the kitchen, the same kitchen run by the same manager that went ballistic over a five hundred dollar phone bill.

The kitchen had been a favorite midnight attraction for me and Keith, and a few other members of the Bolles Swimming Team. After four hours of work out in the pool every day, the three meals provide for us at the dorm just wasn't cutting it. Something was bound to give, and that something was entry into the kitchen's walk-in fridge when we were supposed to be sleeping. 

At around 1:00 AM or so, when Chief Carney should be blissfully nursing his single malt, we would draw straws and the lucky winners would use the old hotel's empty elevator shaft to reach the crawl space under the building. From there, we would navigate our way through a labyrinth of tunnels until we were directly beneath the floor of the kitchen looking seven feet up at a kitchen drainage grating. It was classic B and E. 

               Flashlights and gym bags in hand, we'd pop the two by two cast iron grating open, scramble up through the "half a man" hole and raid the kitchen for any and everything that could be stuffed into the bag.  Unfortunately one night we ran into trouble. As it turned out, Carney had orders to make sweeps of the kitchen every hour. The orders had come straight from the top. There had been a discrepancy in food inventory lately - things just vanishing that couldn't be accounted for. And the quantity of food lost in inventory was excessive including two apple pies on one occasion alone, the deep-dish kind grandma made so deliciously.  Four pies had been baked specifically for a Bolles Board of Trustees dinner. Two disappeared, but were still enjoyed. Half of the wealthy contributors to the rich Bolles endowment never got their entire desert. Instead the pie was on the headmaster's red face.  The perfect storm had begun. 

"BFD" stood for "Bruce Fairchild Dickson," but the night the lights came on in the kitchen, when it happened that I was closer to the manhole than I was to the gym bag of cereals and milks, "BFD" stood for "Big Fuckin' Deal - that bag is staying right where it is and I'm out of here." 

               Kitchen lights brightly lit the scene followed by the sound of jingling keys dancing from the belt of Chief Carney. I was holding my breath while hiding in back of a toaster, the industrial stand-up kind. A few moments later he limped his way right passed me and I exhaled. The gym bag was in my visage, and so was the manhole. Carney had missed me completely, but was headed straight towards the goodies. "Time to go," was my new, revised plan of action, and I wasted no time executing the new plan.

               With that fateful decision I dove into the open "half a man" hole without being seen, although most certainly heard, half falling and half clambering down the seven foot drop to the crawl space below, leaving the blue and orange bag behind. "BFD," I thought with relief of having made my escape.

"Major Lanquist would you please send Mr. Ball to the headmaster's office," the shrill, high pitched voice of Mrs. Pritchett blared from the speaker on the wall of biology class the following morning. "Oooh," the majority of the class sang in harmony at the announcement.

Keith was alone in the headmaster's office and sitting crossed legged in a chair facing a massive mahogany desk. A blue and orange Bolles vinyl gym bag with the initials "BFD" written on the outside of the bag and filled with cereal and milk was placed exactly in the center of the desk.  The Bolles mascot, a bulldog, was stenciled on the outside of the bag too, and staring at Keith with a jutted canine lower jaw. Keith had a smirk on his face that curved into a smile as I entered the room. I robotically sat in the chair next to him. The headmaster followed shortly and shut the door.

               As far as we were concerned the headmaster was to Bolles as Captain Ahab was to the Pequod. The fortyish academic adjusted his glasses, and then clenched his hands together, slowly placing his forefingers on pursed lips. "This obviously belongs to you Mr. Dickson," the headmaster stated with certainty nodding at the bag.

"Not really," Keith replied smugly, his crossed foot nervously wagging on the other knee. Poker would not be in his future.

"Meaning?" the headmaster questioned with raised eyebrows, fingers still on his lips. 
               "Yeah, well that was my brother's bag and he gave it to me when he graduated but it was stolen - um - out of the room, I don't know - about..." Keith replied looking at me as he paused before continuing. "Three months ago I guess," he finished with a flurry and a shrug. Eying Keith's eggbeater foot speeding up I concluded his believability factor with the headmaster was waning. 
            "Was that plausible?" I thought to myself.  I felt my heart rate begin to accelerate. Maybe we should just come clean - the old "when you're in a hole, don't keep digging." Nevertheless I nodded in agreement, hoping that they hadn't dusted the bag for finger prints before bringing us in.
             "And I suppose that you, either one of you, do not have any idea how this bag came to be found in the kitchen, filled with this," the headmaster said lifting a cereal and a milk. Now my heart rate was in overdrive. We both shook our heads. The emphatic denial apparently worked and we walked straight out of the headmaster's office within five minutes of arriving.

"They don't have a damn thing on us," Keith proclaimed as we made our way to the auditorium to watch "To Kill A Mockingbird" with the rest of the student body. "Deny, deny and deny," Keith coached. But we had forgotten about the phone when others hadn't. We sat down and tried to enjoy the old black and white classic with out of sync audio. Gregory Peck's Oscar winning performance and that plain, dreary little girl with freckles couldn't take my mind off that damn "BFD" Bolles gym bag. What would Atticus Finch say?

The crack Bolles maintenance crew had long since identified the guilty room, and the headmaster was simply planning for our next visit to his office when he would lance us with his harpoon of evidence. Soon they had yanked us out of the movie and the next thing you know, the two junior Alexander Graham Bells found themselves sitting outside the headmaster’s office awaiting the inevitable. "Deny, deny and deny" didn't work very well when looking at a phone bill that had your home number on it. Yet Keith continued to claim that it must be some kind of error,  or that he must have been framed. Amnesia?

              "What is it then Mr. Dickson? Were you framed or is it an error?" the headmaster asked, sitting back in his chair. He had a slight smile of satisfaction on his face.

              "Both," Keith exclaimed as he stared at the bill. "I didn't make any of these."  The calls were blatant, several in question lasting two hours or more - and all to Cam his girlfriend. It got worse. Two thirds of the calls on the bill were to Keith's hometown and he happened to be one of only two students at Bolles out of one thousand that hailed from Charlotte. Of course I had my share of calls but for some reason I wasn't the focus of the questioning. Guilt must have been written all over my face. Our "Deny" plan had certainly run its course and we were "kitchen" toast.

               As expected, the headmaster was not impressed.  "Is that so?" The only thing left to decide now was our fate. Would we be expelled?

        The teacher’s lounge rumor mill had filtered down to the general student population with incredible speed, and the whole school was soon buzzing with gossip. Vegas odds favored the dreaded “Suspended for the rest of the year,” at 1 to 2. Even odds had us being expelled. Adam and Eve had been expelled from the Garden of Eden for biting the apple. We couldn't possibly have done something worthy of such a fate. Or could we?

          We had fallen this far, two guiltier than sin, wire-tapping pranksters; metaphorically expecting anything from an awful tarring and feathering, to being keelhauled, or burned at the stake, and all were light sentences compared to what our dads would do to us if we were kicked out of Bolles.  “AT&T wants to press felony charges,” we were told by the headmaster.

           “Oh shit,” I thought, severely depressed at the prospect of going from Bolles to Boys Town.

            But suddenly there he was, the genial Coach Stopyra bounding into the administration office and peering right at us with that grin of his – the famous thick, mustachioed smile from ear to ear. A Chicago Polish type guy cut out of the Ditka mold, only warmhearted, Coach Stop, as we called him, was one member of the faculty that happened to be very cool, and that we referred to as "coach," because besides being assistant headmaster, that's exactly what he was – a coach. He was beaming with delight.                        
             

That was it. It was now confirmed. We weren’t going to be boiled in oil, or drawn and quartered after all. Coach Stop had intervened with the powers that be, and we were going to be saved from the wrath of our father’s fury. The amazing Stopyra had performed yet another counseling miracle. The school year was salvaged and our future secure. Keith and I both breathed a sigh of relief as Coach Stop began to speak.            

              When I think about what I heard next, and well, quite frankly I couldn’t believe my own ears at the time. It was as if our amiable assistant headmaster was actually praising us. Maybe there was even going to be an award, I had thought. 

“Boys,” He began with a laugh. “I just came over here straight from the teacher’s lounge and they are all in hysterics over there...”

“That’s just fantastic,” I thought to myself.  The faculty thinks that it’s just some brilliant sophomoric prank. We were off the hook. No suspension for the rest of the year, as it was rumored. It was simply just another example of Bolles schooling and ingenuity at its finest, and the teachers were proud of their wards - in fact, damn proud.

             I could feel tears of joy welling up inside. Coach Stopyra continued, “The faculty thinks that you two are superb. The fact that you set up your own telephone operation - boys, I got to hand it to you - that was something that we have never, ever seen here before, and will probably never, ever see again." He was shaking his head as his grin widened. I was flabbergasted.

            The visualization of the ceremony was there before me, a dreamscape no doubt. We would be in the McGehee Auditorium, standing on the stage in front of the entire student body of the Bolles School. Suddenly, they would announce the award. Perhaps it would be an award for achievement in science, or maybe espionage. And Coach Stopyra would be standing there, just off stage; smiling, and winking while giving us a big thumbs up.

Snapping out of my delusional state, but yet still feeling somewhat foolishly relieved as I looked at Keith, and he at me, we began to chuckle along with Coach Stopyra.

            "God must be laughing his ass off," I thought. The three of us certainly were laughing our ass off, and marveling at the brilliance of it all. What fine examples Keith and I were of the excellence of Bolles.  It was a schooling that even G. Gordon Liddy could endorse. I was so relieved - nearly in a state of euphoria.

            “Wow, Coach Stop,” I said. “So, the faculty thinks it’s great? Everything is okay, and we’re not going to be suspended for the rest of the year?”

              With that question, and just as only Coach Stopyra could do - deliver really bad news with a grin and a certain twinkle in his eye that made it seem like it wasn't so bad after all, he said with a little laugh, ”Ah boys, that was a great scam indeed - and pretty damn ingenious I might add too - but unfortunately, everything is not hunky dory.  You two are both going to be suspended.” A frown replaced the smile before he turned, and started to walk away, only to suddenly pause for a moment, and while looking back at us, the grin now returning, he slyly added, “… but only for the rest of the year.” 

               Keith Kerfoot Dickson never returned to Bolles ever again. Call him Ishmael. 

Penned in the fall of 1986 by Ron Clark Ball