I was quickly assured that it was not, in fact, a religious party. Rather it was rush week, a two-week-long, alcohol-free series of events that were themed toward getting you to join a particular fraternity. Apparently the boys of Sigma Nu were recruiting me. Because Chris didn't attend CSUF, he couldn't join, but they said he was welcome to stay and eat burgers and hang out all he wanted. That was just fine with Chris.
The frat boys, whether I was being effervescent or not, completely kissed my and the other recruits' figurative asses. Their girls flirted with us, "the bros" all wanted to talk to us, and everybody was offering to get me more food and drink. I felt like a real member of society, someone who genuinely didn't have to worry about what other people thought. Even without kegs, it was nervously intoxicating.
While the other guys were a bit more normal and fratlike, Chris and I spent the majority of our time talking to a nerdy, chubby guy with atrocious teeth. He was completely obsessed with filming a shotfor-shot remake of
Back to the Future
entirely with Legos. My notion of fraternities was changing rapidly.
"Well," Chris said on the ride home, "if that guy can get into a frat, I don't think you'll have a problem."
I still didn't know if I was going to rush; it seemed like a major commitment for someone who was typically afraid of commitment. I'd at least told them that I would come to their next event, though. Something counter to my normal existence was exactly what I was seeking, but I was determined to take baby steps toward breaking out of my shell. Joining a fraternity seemed like a move in that direction.
* * *
Upon showing up at their next shindig, Anthony and two others took me aside and asked if I wanted to be one of them. Unhesitatingly, I said yes, my mouth having thrown the notion of baby steps right out the window. I didn't know if I could afford it; I didn't know if awkward ol' me would survive, but I refused to let my life be ruled by my fearful side. Crazy Jeff was taking back the reins, and he was determined to let the good times roll.
Over the next two weeks, I watched others join what would become my pledge class. I figured I was a pretty good judge of first impressions, so admittedly I was afraid of a few of the frat's choices. There was big Dan, a massively buff wrestler who dressed cool and partied with all the chicks who would never party with me. Carey, a young Asian kid; Jorge, a young Mexican kid; Ryan, a deaf guy; a black guy (Dave); and a couple of other odds and ends would come to constitute the class with the Greek letter designation of Beta Theta.
At twenty-two, I was the oldest of the bunch, and I felt like it. Particularly ostracizing was the fact that I was older than all but two of the active chapter. I'd committed, though, and quitting would have been more embarrassing than staying in, so I pressed on.
The night they initiated us as pledges into the Sigma Nu fraternity was also the night of my twenty-third birthday. I had become so excited about joining the fraternal ranks that I canceled the party my family was having for me up north in order to stand in a black buttondown shirt, tie, slacks, and a blindfold to endure a sobering initiation procedure that lasted well into the night.
After that night, the kindness from the actives came to an abrupt end, and a little role reversal began. We became their slaves, forced to do their bidding and be subservient to them in almost every way. It wasn't anything like the horror stories that I'd heard about fraternities, where pledge classes were made to do the elephant walk (each guy grabs the dick of the guy ahead of him and they march in procession), the limp biscuit (pledges circle jerk onto a KFC biscuit, last guy to cum eats the biscuit), or even the dangerous stuff that had resulted in the deaths of pledges at other houses (mass consumption of alcohol, water, and so on), but it was still brutally hard work. For every bad thing, there were two good ones, though, and that kept us pledges coming around.
We were to be the last chapter to see the Sigma Nu house in its "glory," before the onset of black mold on the walls of the ramshackle building necessitated Sigma Nu's move out of the suburbs and onto Frat Row.
The house we moved into there was more like four condos mashed together. It had been trashed by its previous occupants, a frat that had been kicked off campus before my time, but it was so much more in line with what I thought a frat house should look like. If I was going to be a frat boy and have the frat boy experience, I wanted a goddamn proper frat house. Otherwise the fraternity would just seem like a bunch of friends that I paid for. The house on Frat Row gave us legitimacy and new lifeblood. If I was worried about having a proper frat experience, though, the rest of the row allayed my fears. Like in a Motley Crue video, scantily clad vixens trolled up and down the block looking for the best party while dudes manned BBQs on the front lawns of fellow houses. Empty alcohol jugs littered the span between the street and the front doors of frat houses, and a cacophony of sounds blared out from cracked windows held alive by arcing lines of duct tape. Most of the houses had switched to Plexiglas in their window frames, though, which was a telling sign all its own.
As I wandered the length of the street, scarcely able to believe my senses, a streaker passed by, greeting me with a cordial, casual hello. He was pursued by a gaggle of his frat mates who were taunting him for getting shut out while playing Madden on Xbox. Farther down the block, people were throwing rocks at passing cars, and four men were on a rooftop trying to slingshot water balloons onto the soccer field.
Many of the fraternities had attracted an untamed element seeking a wild lifestyle, and the myriad apartment houses running adjacent to Frat Row were teeming with uninhibited and unruly hedonists. Someone at another frat house even got shot (not fatally) the week we moved in.
It was truly the last vestiges of the Old West, and I had arrived smack-dab in the middle of it. Standing there in the midst of pulsing stereos, beneath trees littered with dangling sneakers, surrounded by scores of drunken party seekers, I knew that I was about to embark on a very different existence. Ricky Moses would have been proud.
I realized quickly that Sigma Nu was different from the rest. Whereas other fraternities on the row had a singular "look" to them— the Pi Kapps were the white, asshole jocks; the Phi Sigs were the stoners; Delta Chi, where Kevin Costner had once been a member, was all Mexican wannabe thugs now; the Sig Eps were all homosexuals or metrosexuals.
But Sigma Nu, I realized, was the catchall fraternity, the melting pot. We had everyone from gay guys to black guys to jocks to stoners, and yes, a whole bunch of nerds. We were the Animal House fraternity; while the other frats were eagerly participating in spirit events, shit like which house could cheer the loudest, Sigma Nus hung out on their couch drinking beers. I liked that; to me that was as it should have been. Sure the other frats gave us shit, but we didn't care. Mostly.
I had a different fraternal experience than most of my class. Being older, I was not expected to kiss as much ass as my younger pledge bros, and the actives were always looking to be entertained by one of my ribald porn-shop adventure stories. Looking back, I can think of no greater preparation for my life in crime scene cleaning.
Between scrubbing up vomit from those too drunk to clean themselves and seeing unwashed dishes lie unclaimed in the sink while festering with spores and single-cell life, I'd become immune to the wretchedness of humanity. All too frequently, people would miss the toilet—both numbers one and two, and you either accepted that as a facet of frat living or you got the hell out of there. But I couldn't leave…I had friends.
As the semester wore on, I cared more and more about the guys in my pledge class. I didn't think it was possible for me to consider a bunch of younger strangers my band of brothers, but Jesus, they must have put something in the water. We went on a "pledge retreat" where we spent two nights in the woods camping.
The first night it was only the pledges and Anthony, the active member in charge of our pledge class. We spent the evening around a fire, freezing our balls off high in the late-fall mountain woods, just completely shooting the shit and being honest about our biggest secrets. Some of the guys were very truthful, breaking down into tears while telling about their family issues or the challenges in life that they had to overcome.
Big Dan the wrestler surprised me with the revelation that the rest of his family were dwarves. I didn't know if I really believed him, considering he was a big, buff wrestler, but he said it in the "circle of truth" (that's my name for it; I swear to God they never called it that!), and I had to accept his word. When the pledge class asked me to lay some truth about myself on them, I chose instead to use humor as a defense mechanism. If I made 'em all laugh, they'd forget they asked me a serious question. Brotherhood or not, I wasn't ready for that level of commitment.
The next night all the actives came up and surprised us, bringing a shit ton of alcohol and giving all us "newbs" nicknames. No longer were we Jeff, Ryan, Carey, Nick, Dave, Chris, Neil, Jorge, Dan, Kevin, Justin, and Adam. We were forever in the annals of fratdom to be called: Beast (I'm a big, hairy motherfucker), 9-Ball (Ryan, the deaf kid, shot pool), and Binary (Carey, the Asian, was a computer guy).
Then there were Hippo Banger (Nick was a Jungle Cruise guide at Disneyland), Deluxe (Dave looked exactly like that character in the old Coke commercials), Shaggy (he looked like Shaggy from
Scooby
Doo
), Bubbles (who knows? Neil was given his nickname by a gay guy), and Burrito (or some Mexican name).
Finally, there were Donkey Kong (Dan was a big, ape-looking, buff-ass wrestler), Spacey (Kevin was an airhead), Batboy (Justin looked like Christian Bale), and Deuce (Adam played poker). They weren't the cleverest of nicknames, but we had busted our asses to earn them. After we got our nicknames, the whole group got royally plastered. Someone even shit in his sleeping bag. I was home.
Coming back from the retreat, I was riding with 9-Ball and Donkey Kong when the brakes on 9-Ball's Pontiac went out coming down a mountain. I had just drifted off to some much-needed hangover sleep when I felt a hard jerk, and suddenly we were facing oncoming traffic.
We all screamed, and 9-Ball jerked the wheel again, carrying us over to the side of the road, where he used the emergency brake to screech us to a stop. Shaken and stirred, we called for a tow truck to take us down the mountain. Donkey Kong offered to have his brother come pick us up, and since we were several hours away from home and several hours from having new brakes installed on the Pontiac, we agreed.
Forty-five minutes later, the smallest car I'd ever seen came squealing into the parking lot, and the hardest, least friendly looking dwarf I'd ever seen in my life exited the driver's seat. He cussed out the lot of us, especially Donkey Kong, about inconveniencing him. Then he told us, especially Donkey Kong, how proud he was of us for joining the right fraternity. His name was Ernie, and he was a Sigma Nu from Fresno. Of course, out there they called him Napoleon.
"Don't call me a midget," Ernie warned as he drove us, cramped in his tiny car, back to his parents' house. "That's like calling a black guy a nigger." Nobody had called him a midget or a nigger, so continued silence seemed like a good plan.
We arrived at Donkey Kong's house only to find that his father was even smaller than Ernie, and their mom was smaller than all of them.
Donkey Kong wasn't lying.
I had never been around dwarves before, and it was a truly unique feeling to be hanging out in their presence. Consider it the ignorant side of me, but I was actually shocked to see that they lived just like us normal folks, their house even being normal-size, but they had to use stepladders to get everything down from the cupboards. This was before the glut of exploitative dwarf shows on The Learning Channel, mind you.
When feeding time came around, I was served tiny chicken wings, mini pizza slices, and other hors d'oeuvres that were small in my hands but looked like a full-size meal in theirs. The experience was mental overload for an ignorant son of a bitch like me, and I have since decided that if I could only replay one memory over and over again in my head for an eternity, that would be it.
As the pledge period progressed, the actives became harder and harder on us about knowing the history of the fraternity and the importance of the symbols associated with our local and national chapters. We learned them, but not like we should have, apparently, and we paid for it.
One night the actives called us before them in suits and made us take a written test. I had instilled myself as the class clown from the get-go, and as a beloved member of the pledge class, I didn't take the test seriously. Any answer I didn't know became a joke answer. Once again I figured if I couldn't be honest, I'd make 'em laugh.
After the test, we were summoned back before them and retested verbally, each of the actives ripping us down for not knowing the answers. I, in particular, took a good amount of screaming and anger, and though I kept a stiff lip and endured the abuse, I felt like I'd been bitten by a beloved childhood pet. It was humiliating to be spurned by the guys you called friends. They called that night Candidate Review, C.R. for short. I realized that if I was going to get in, it was going to be honesty that got me there.