Dirty Rush

Imagine a fraternity house just like those that are portrayed in the movies. Take away the cleanliness. Replace the expensive furniture with cheaper versions. Decrease the level of superiority. That is a good approximation of KOK prior to our tenure in its ranks. Even a better one after we became members.

Pledge term began with Sink Night. On the evening we were to “sink” our bids, we were led one by one to the basement. On our way down, passing through the dark foyer, we had to keep our heads lowered as all the brothers of the house, consecutively shouting “Shake my fucking hand,” revealed the secret handshake. Pinkies were involved.

Down in the basement, strobe lights flashing, brothers screaming, rock music blaring, each of us had to waddle across the room and take a seat around a group of brothers in the middle. We watched nervously as they filled a hollow, plastic half of a swan, probably once a lawn ornament, with at least 11, 12, 13 cups of beer. They asked if one of us had the guts to chug it all. Whoever made the attempt, I can’t remember now, sucked almost eight beers through the beak of that swan before, I remember clearly, spewing throw-up everywhere. The plastic swan was refilled with beer. The house president drank the whole thing.

Next, each of us had to jump, one after the other, into a small baby pool filled with twenty inches of water. Remember, it was winter in New Hampshire. We were given a 40-ounce bottle of malt liquor as well as an order: “Drink it or wear it!” So, while some of us chugged the beer, while others poured it on their head, the brother in charge of the proceedings bequeathed to each of us a pledge name. Bam-Bam, Fozzie, Cletus, Double-Down, and Bink. Guess which of those was mine.

The next day, on the phone with my father, I told him my pledge name. He paused for a moment, then whispered, “Did you just say clitoris?”

♦◊♦

We were assigned big brothers. Mine was a year younger than me. Despite the good nature of the relationship—big brother as mentor and therapist, little brother as protégé and patient—he was in no position to rescue me from the horrors that lay ahead.

Everyone had heard the stories. Some mentioned what their third cousin twice removed or great uncle on their mother’s side had told them about the Elephant Walk, a ritual in which pledges strip naked and crawl around a room with one thumb stuck in the ass of the guy ahead of them. A break in the chain of pledges required ten seconds of thumb-sucking.

Others described how their neighbor’s stepbrother’s friends had, as pledges, been blindfolded right after seeing a homeless man enter the room, were told to lower their pants, and had a fleshy cylinder six inches long rubbed against their ass cheeks. (The cylinders of meat were later revealed to be hot dogs.) How could I not be afraid?

In meetings, we were corralled into the Die Room in the basement of the house, where the game of Beer Die was played during parties. The room had the décor of a hunting lodge—fake wood siding for walls, cheap beer cans piled in every corner, long benches on which to sit—but its purpose was to be a sweat lodge. We purified ourselves with copious amounts of Pabst Blue Ribbon, learned Irish drinking songs, and sanctified our pledge jerseys in smoke from Marlboro Lights. The place reeked of dude.

The older members requested our presence by chanting, “Whale shit! Whale shit!” and stomping their feet. We were led waddling out by our pledge trainers until we formed a circle in the center of the room. And there we were introduced to a game called Dome.

♦◊♦

In Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, the film on which, nominally, the game is based, the protagonist is forced to enter a giant, half-shell arena and fight an opponent to the death. “Two men enter,” chants the audience of the fight, “one man leaves.”

In Dome, a game played not only by Dartmouth fraternities but also by its sororities, a trash can is situated between two people, one of whom has challenged the other, usually by taking off his shirt. Dozens of 10-ounce cups full of Keystone Light or Bud Heavy are placed on a table next to the contestants. An official with a stopwatch stands to one side of the match. Each contestant is required to chug a cup of beer within either 20 or 30 seconds, depending on his skill level: first beer, second beer, third beer, so on and so forth, ad nauseam. Literally. First person to vomit loses the match.

The winner, in order to stay sober enough so that he can get drunk after the meeting, “pulls the trigger,” sticking a finger down his throat until he pukes what he chugged during the Dome. I won the game once, but couldn’t make myself vomit. I spent the remainder of the night so drunk I sounded like Mr. Burns from The Simpsons.

What I remember most fondly from our first meetings, however, was not doming, but the reporting of fraternity news. In order of placement throughout the room, the president would call out each brother’s name, and if not saying pass, each guy would tell a story about himself, another brother, or another brother and himself. So-and-so might have hooked up with that ugly girl from Theta. What’s-his-name might have taken a road trip to Montreal last week with what’s-his-face. You-know-who might have might have gotten a job offer from Goldman Sachs.

If the story involved himself, the brother would take a beer, and if the story involved someone else, the brother would give a beer. We were cowboys warming our heels on a fire somewhere in the sagebrush plains of the West. We were kindergartners taking turns at show-and-tell, holding up a toy in front of the dusty blackboard.

Pledges had to wait till last for their turn. I don’t think I ever told a story. All I remember thinking is, One day this will be mine.

♦◊♦

Being a Dartmouth student and not drinking was like being an astronaut and not liking Tang. But not all of our hazing tasks involved the consumption of alcohol. Periodically throughout pledge term, we had to perform “Feats of Strength,” assignments that took their toll on our bodies rather than our sobriety.

One night each of us was required to drink a gallon of whole milk in 30 minutes. The immediate result was three trash cans full of white froth already curdling with stomach acid. One day each of us was required to eat an extra-large bag of marshmallows. The eventual purging of liquid fluff was so violent it burst a blood vessel in somebody’s eyeball.

Another task mandatory for all of us involved memorizing the fraternity’s code of gentlemanly conduct. Over the ten weeks of pledge term, we were given three opportunities to recite the code verbatim, the first under circumstances that made it impossible; the subsequent two were progressively easier. Imagine trying to recite a 300-word speech, without error, while lying shirtless on a block of ice and, with a flashlight in your eyes, having water slowly poured on your head.

In the second opportunity, we had to stand in our boxers while the brothers pelted us with eggs and flour, screaming obscenities. The irony—This was how we were taught to be gentlemen?—distracted the English majors among us.

All of us, however, managed to pass the test on our third attempt. Fully clothed, warm, and not distracted, we were given the time it took a match to burn. Keep in mind I am from Mississippi. Our nature is to speak slowly. That occasion I sounded like the Micro-Machine Man.

Despite those rituals, much of pledge term was far less torturous. Why else would we have so readily volunteered to join the cause? The rank of pledge in our collegiate hierarchy—ridiculous it may have been, true, but so are most institutions—was much better than that of non-pledge. We had to mop beer from the floors and swab puke from the toilets, but we were looked after by the brothers and had our run of the house. A cog in the machine is still a part of the machine.

On the nights KOK threw its parties, though we periodically had to exchange the kegs, all of us were given higher regard by the women in attendance than most of us had ever been given throughout our short, bookish, pathetic, sad lives in college.

♦◊♦

I was a vain person then. If you take a long, hard look in the mirror, you might discover that you too have once been the kind of person who likes taking a long looks in the mirror. The arrogance I had developed to counter my low self-esteem could scarcely endure being rejected by a single woman.

One night, flirting with a girl wearing a dress made entirely of Saran Wrap, I played up the remnants of my accent and I played down my lack of sophistication—two charcteristic maneuvers of a Southern rapscallion.

Cellophane Girl agreed to “check out” the poolroom upstairs with me. She asked me if I remembered her name, and I blurted out “Caroline”—a complete guess. But she kissed me anyway. Then I blacked out.

I woke up alone. On the floor of the poolroom lay wads of torn plastic like what’s left of a birthday party after the child has opened all his toys, and on the base of my penis hung the broken ring of a condom like what’s left on a water tap after a child has filled a balloon for too long. The girl was nowhere to be found, and neither were my clothes.

The next day, I learned Caroline had woken an hour before me and, seeing pieces of her “dress” scattered about the room, put on my shirt, my boxer shorts, and my pants. She sneaked out of the house and went to the food court. People kept staring at her, whispering and giggling, but she did not know why. At the cash register, carrying her heaping plate of eggs, Caroline realized she had mistakenly put on my boxers over my pants.

The story made the rounds not only at my fraternity and her sorority but also throughout the entire campus. Brothers ordered me to tell it at least a dozen times. During the rest of pledge term, the story of “Snowden and the Saran Wrap” became so legendary I got high-fives whenever I walked into the poolroom. “You took it off with your teeth?”

Page three: Hell Night.