About men; about cold beer, willing women, hazing, conformity - about fraternities

Washington Monthly, Nov, 1988 by Jason DeParle

The origin of these poetics remains obscure, and the racial implications registered only faintly. I doubt I knew where Nairobi was and certainly had no idea who the Watusi were. I probably did know that one of the brothers was called "the dumbest white man on earth," and I later learned that another had been denounced for his plan to bring a black date to a party. But at the time I was happy enough to be bobbing skyward in a crowd of well-wishers. From there on, fraternity life went straight downhill.

The next time I saw my new brothers, a few nights later, we were assembled in a classroom for the first of our weekly pledge meetings. 'Air raid! !" someone screamed. "On your backs you shit-sucking morons!" Responding to these heated exhortations, the 15 or so of us pledges lay on the floor making rat-a-tat-tat sounds while firing our anti-air guns at the imaginary enemy"They're gone you shitheads. Get up! Give me twenty." Down we dropped for push-ups. "Get that smile off your face, pledge. Is something funny?" This pseudo-military introduction carried on for a half-hour or so until the brothers departed in a wake of beer cans and insults.

Like much fraternity life, this scene seemed scripted, and I didn't pay it great attention until a few days later when I ran across the member of the fraternity I had liked best, a soft-spoken junior whose sincerity had set him apart from the rowdy crowd. His assurances had soothed some of the doubts I'd brought to fraternity life; our friendship had seemed a model of what frat bonds could be. But when I said hello, he sneered back, "Hey pledge," and walked away. The betrayal stung. Could this pledge stuff be for real?

By archival accident, my pledge book has survived and serves as an instructive reminder of fraternity life. Each page contains a brother's name, home town, major, graduation date, and girlfriend, an assemblage of facts we pressed into memory and one collectively referred to as a brother's "shit." "Know my shit," a number of them admonished me.

Each page also contained a task or two. Some were quaintly chivalrous. "Make a very nice Valentine's Day card for my sister Mary and have all the pledges sign it," one brother asked. A few invited me to dinner. Another said "grovel at the wheels of my car." The official Delta Tau Delta motto-recently "declassified," the past president said, so it's okay to share it with you-is"To Labor for the beautiful and the good." Some of the other suggested labors:

"Butt fuck a quad dog," ordered one brother, now a rising star in academic medicine.

"Go buy a pack of Trojans," ordered another, "present them to my roommate with a short essay explaining their use, how to put them on, and give a short demonstration and explain why he doesn't need them."

These were some of the best kind of assignments, since unlik"shampoo my rug" you didn't really have to do them. You just had to engage in a semester of witty repartee concerning the delay. But the brother who told me to "come by, get high, and be mellow" expected me to show. So did the brothers who, on several occasions, had me drink 12 beers in two hours. So, too, did the brothers who had me take a bong hit for each of the dozen or so verses of a Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes song while memorizing it. Other pledge tasks involved unearthing jewels of Delt lore, like guessing which sorority girl was involved in the Case of the Missing Skirt and identifying the brother caught masturbating with a water massage.