The Mysterious Play

At its inception in 1997, i was not allowed to watch South Park. Being the Good Kid that i was, i never even tried. My mom said don't do it, so i didn't do it. That was the way of things in my youth. Yeah, i was weird.

One night, i was over at my friend Aaron's house with a couple other friends. We spent much of the afternoon with the PlayStation (the original PlayStation - get off my lawn you damn kids), but then it rolled around time for South Park to come on and everybody wanted to watch that. I was vehemently opposed at first, of course because my mom said no, but somehow they talked me into at least sitting down to watch the opening credits (i'm not kidding - they just wanted me to watch the credits with them). I was a little upset, i kept babbling incoherently about how my mom was going to find out that i had watched South Park and then my life was going to be over, or something.

As soon as the credits started, the doorbell rang. It was my mom. I'm not kidding, this totally happened. She had stopped by because i was on some medication at the time and i had forgotten to bring it with me. So, while everybody else was downstairs, asking each other, "Seriously? SERIOUSLY?," i casually asked my mom, "Hey, everybody else wants to watch South Park. Would it be ok if i watched it with them?" After a frustrated groan, she acceded to my request.

So, at the tender age of 13, having never seen an episode of Beavis and Butt-Head or The Simpsons or any such similar thing, watching Robert Smith of The Cure duke it out with Mecha-Streisand on Aaron's gigantic 32" TV pretty much changed my life.

Once South Park had become a fixture of my existence, little nuances of the show began to creep into my reality. I'm not sure who started this tradition - it was actually probably me - but we did this thing on our various Boy Scout camping expeditions where we would all suddenly emerge from our tents wearing just our boxers and run around for upwards of ten or fifteen minutes shouting "Beefcake! BEEFCAKE!!" I'm not sure why we thought this was a good idea but there were at least six of us that did this on a regular basis.

Well, one year at summer camp, 2000 i believe, we decided to escalate the beefcake situation. Summer camp is obviously a much larger situation than any of our other camping trips, because it is a week long and takes place at a facility which includes about ten other camp sites, each of which houses another troop from a completely different end of the state, or even from other states.

So Gay Eskimo, Zippo, Skippy-Bo Playdo, and i gathered together a Discman, some portable speakers, and a copy of The Bangles - Greatest Hits, stripped to our underoos and running shoes, and went out for a jog. We named this "Operation: Fugishi Yugi," which i am pretty sure is Japanese for "The Mysterious Play," due to the anime series. It may not mean that at all.

I guess some of the other troops didn't think that four teenage boys running around barely dressed blasting Walk Like An Egyptian on repeat at nearly midnight was as funny as our troop did.

Things were ok on our first lap around the campground. We got our expected response - a bunch of people looking up, asking themselves what the hell was wrong with kids these days. That was the kids asking themselves what the hell was wrong with kids these days. The adults were probably asking themselves if they were going to jail for bearing witness to this.

On the second lap, i think that the novelty had completely worn off of these people. And on the third lap, one of the other troops started to chase us.

After we'd gained some headway coming up near the front office of the campground, i turned off the music in hopes that our pursuers would lose track of us. However, without the music drawing us all together in the dark, we got separated. I sneaked up behind the archery range, which was very close to our troop's camp site, but the captain does not return home without his crew. The archery range was in a clearing, with a line of trees butted up against one side, which was opposite to the side where i was hiding. Our troop was nestled in just on the other side of those trees.

Not knowing where the rest of the guys were, i determined that the only way to rally them to my position was to turn the music back on and start running again. I booked it for our camp site. Well, it turned out that part of the opposition was waiting right inside the treeline. I was forced to turn back around and head into the dark forested area beside the administrative offices.

Gradually i picked up my cohorts as i ran. We made a reverse lap back around the way we'd originally came, and took the scenic route toward the secret back entrance to our site. We had the only site on the whole campground with two access points, but if you'd never camped at that site, you probably wouldn't know about the rear entrance. I was counting on this.

Somewhere near the Quartermaster, our few pursuers turned into a veritable horde. They became kind of like the mob in the old Frankenstein movies, and some were armed. Right as we were about to hit our secret entrance, somebody shoved a stick in my ass. I did not like it. Not at all.

Once the throng of irritated Boy Scouts had entered another camp site without permission (a huge violation of etiquette), things got a little out of hand. The ensuing riot took all of our adult Scoutmasters at least fifteen minutes to sort out and to remove all the intruders from our site. I don't know exactly how long, but i do know that i slipped into my tent and got all my clothes on well before the pandemonium stopped. I keep thinking that our fire cans came into play here, but i can't remember the exact circumstances - maybe they were getting thrown? For those who don't know, the fire cans are old coffee cans which are brightly painted and filled with water. You put two of them outside every tent, so that in the event of the tent catching on fire, you have something to fight it with. By the end of the week, there's a layer of dead bugs across the surface of the water thick enough that you often can't tell there's water in the can.

In the end, i don't think anything came of it. We weren't disciplined, i don't know if any of the other kids were but i suspect not. Hell, their adult leaders may not have ever found out that they were trespassing in our camp site. Nothing was ever mentioned at the campwide morning announcements. And for most, i think the incident passed into the recesses of their minds, never to be thought of again.

I think that pretty well put an end to the Beefcaking. Every now and then, at any sort of gathering, one of the four of us might mention that we should, "Commit Fugishi Yugi," as a joke i guess. Usually that would be Zippo. But it of course never happened again. Which is probably for the best.