My Audacious Crabwalk

This is the true story of a group of Ohio college friends who wanted to be cool like the fraternity students. We were friends who met in high school and college. We all came from working class families, so weren’t upper crust, but we had good hearts and we knew how to have fun. Although we were a ragtag bunch of five misfits, we ended up having one of the best intermural co-ed softball teams at the college. While others showed up with sponsored uniforms, we showed up in mismatched T-shirts and shorts. We beat most of the elite teams. We were hoping to get lucky with the girls on the team, but we were so dorky that we didn’t get to first base.

Our college football team was horrible at the time, but we were the kind of friends who went to the games to support the marching band and then left after the legendary halftime show.

In our college apartment, we had a sliding glass window. As we were on the ground floor, we used it as our ingress and egress rather than using the door. We thought it made us seem cooler.

We remained jealous of the fraternities and sororities, so we decided to create our own. We called it: Epsilon Mu Omicron. EMO. You may be thinking that we were a bunch of goth punks, but at the time, the acronym EMO was a slang term for a flaccid penis. We were really cool now!

Once the EMOs had formed, we had to have a hazing ritual like all the proper fraternities and sororities did. The five of us buddies decided that is would be fair if each of us got to choose a challenge for the others.

My friend, Mark K., was the first to be issued his obstacle, chosen by our other buddy, Jason. Based on a Monte Python skit, in front of others, he had to kneel on a college path, grab a handful of gravel, and rub it into his hair while announcing loudly, “And for lunch, he kneels down beside the road, and rubs gravel on his head.” When he did it (yes, he did,) the girls who witnessed it were slack-jawed and the rest of us were nearby, rolling on the ground, guffawing. We were proving beyond the shadow of a doubt that we were the coolest fraternity on campus.

My friend, Jim, was the next hazing victim. The other Mark, Mark V., chose his assignment. To demonstrate how completely random and non-intellectual the challenges were, Jim was told to try to sell popcorn to everyone who passed by our apartment building for a period of two hours. He got off easy.

It was my turn to find out what Mark K. had in store for me. Next to our apartment building, was a conservative church. People were constantly coming and going, which lead us to nickname it “Sex Church," as we suspected that the goings-on were less than holy (talk about a happy minister!?) My fellow EMOs said that to be a true EMO, I had to crabwalk naked around Sex Church. Without too much delay, I shed my clothing and went out the window on a cool, spring afternoon. I began to crabwalk, chuckling as I dangled awkwardly. As I rounded the corner approaching the front of the church, an elderly woman in a skirt suit was heading for the front door. She stopped dead in her tracks, staring with eyes wide open and a look of shock. Undaunted, I kept on scooting by. I made it back to the apartment and went through the window having completed my challenge. I was now officially an EMO.

Although at the time it was an embarrassing experience, it is now a fond and frivolous memory of my college days.