The sacred rite of initiation begins in the back seat of a dusty Ford pickup on an otherwise ordinary Thursday night in Waco. My escorts, in their typically half-baked way, forgot the bandanna they’d planned to blindfold me with, so they’ve improvised, mummifying my head in a cream-colored bath towel. The driver, a chipper twenty-year-old junior at Baylor University, insists I have nothing to worry about. “It’s gonna be sick,” he says.For reasons we’ll get to soon enough, let’s call him Evel. He’s a big lug of a kid, a gangly six-foot-four film major with an almost cartoonishly chiseled chin and platinum-blond hair parted straight down the middle, like a prime meridian atop his head. One of his roommates calls him a human propeller hat,…