“Uh huh. You too?”
He nodded. “Can you talk now?”
I looked out the window at the sunlit parking lot. “It’s after dawn. I can talk.”
“What was it like?”
“If I tell you I have to kill you.”
Frank grinned at that. “Same here! Back to Kegs tonight?”
“Yeah. Back to Teke?” He nodded. “I think it’s party time,” I told him.
Frank grinned some more. “I think you’re right!”
Actually I knew that was the plan; I had been through it all before. What the freshmen didn’t know, however, was just how much Hell Week took out of the brotherhood. They only saw the endless abuse and chores, but they failed to understand that it took a lot out of the brothers to make it work out right. The Hell Master spent as much time awake as the pledges. There always had to be brothers around to supervise the work details and drive the pledges to their tasks and scavenger hunt. Considerable care was taken in choosing the Hell Master and his minions, and several other juniors and seniors were assigned the task of protecting the pledges in case somebody hazed them too much.
That’s not to say the brothers didn’t enjoy it immensely. They delighted in coming up with weird shit to spook us. On the walk back to Kegs that evening, the only topic of conversation was the ceremony. What was with the peas? Why was the knife upside down? What was with the chanting? Was there some deep and mystical meaning to it all? Or were the brothers just fucking with our heads? We would be kept in the dark until next year, at which point we would discover we were being fucked with, and now got to give it to the next bunch of dummies.
When we got to Kegs, the place was totally lit up, and a keg was sitting in the formal room and was already tapped. We were promptly stripped of our good clothes and handed red and yellow (’magenta and gold’) tee shirts with some sort of individualized words on them. Mine read ‘I’m an asshole!’ because of my statement at the trial. Leo’s read ‘Leo the Neo’. Tony’s was the best. It read ‘Huh?’ He really was a moron.
A few minutes later the girls started coming in. Even Marilyn showed up, having been given a ride by a few other girls. We all got really lit with a beer bash that night. I can’t even remember how I got back to the dorm, since I wasn’t even in shape to walk, and somebody must have given Marilyn a lift home, too. My head was pounding the next morning.
One aspect of the ceremonial nonsense was explained right away, and was the only part that was important at all. This was the order in which we were called forth and lined up and signed onto the rolls, and that was our ritual order. That was determined during the final house meeting before the induction, and was accomplished by pulling names out of a hat. This was the order in which brothers were inducted, and a lower number was better. We were about to join into the merriment known as Room Roulette.
Nobody had ever really asked how rooms were assigned at the frat house, but with the seniors graduating in a few weeks and fifteen new brothers moving in next year, the subject had to be brought up. A couple of weeks after joining, room roulette started, and would run for the next two weeks. It would end at midnight on the Saturday two weeks before graduation. This year it would be very, very important. The house was going to be crammed full next year.
Grogans’ was a residential only house. It had 4 rooms on the first floor and 3 on the second, each of which could hold 2 brothers, so it could hold 14 brothers. Grogans’ was relatively quiet, in that all the parties were held in the main house, along with all meetings and meals. The main house was where all the action was, and was quite a bit larger. The most prestigious location was on the second floor above the formal and living rooms, known as the Landing. There were 4 large rooms there which held 2 brothers each. The next best spot was the Third Floor location, above the Landing, with another 4 rooms for 2 brothers apiece. Finally, on the second floor, in the section over the kitchen, pantry, and dining room was the Mezzanine, with 4 smaller and odd shaped rooms, all designated as doubles. That gave us 19 rooms total designated as doubles, capable of holding 38 brothers.
Then there were two rooms designated as singles, because they weren’t much more than upholstered closets, and if the health department ever found out we used them, we’d be shut down. One was a third floor Garret over the kitchen with a ceiling too low to be legal. Also, there was the Underground Railroad room on the landing. The main house went back to the 1850s (the courthouse burned down about that time, so we don’t really know how old it was) and at one point had been a stop on the Underground Railroad that hustled escaped slaves from the South up to Canada. There was a trap door in the floor and a false floor to hide people, and a ladder and tunnel down to below the basement. It was closed up long ago, but it originally connected with Troy’s sewers and went down to the river.
Finally, one of the rooms on the first floor of Grogans’ had originally been the living room when it was a private house, and was absolutely monstrous. This room was known as the Triple, because you could room three guys in there easily. Final maximum count — 41 brothers.
That was the supply side of the equation. On the demand side, we had 15 incoming sophomores, 8 sophomores staying on as juniors, and 12 juniors becoming seniors, plus 2 seniors staying on as grad students. Total — 37 residents. We were going to be crammed in!
For room roulette, the House Manager put up two large maps on the bulletin board, showing each floor of both the main house and Grogans’, with rooms laid out, and covered by Plexiglas, with a grease pencil tied to a string. You would write your name on a room, but it all depended on following the Byzantine rules:
Squatter’s Rights — If you were already living in a room, you could stay there the following year without being kicked out. Doubles Beat Singles — Two guys ranked higher than one guy. Lower Ritual Number — When deciding which two brothers to pick, the lowest ritual number won. Crones Should Die! — Graduating seniors who stick around become known as crones, and lost all ritual number rights. You ended up with some real gamesmanship and political shit going on! Squatter’s rights were very important, but if one of the two residents of a room graduated, the remaining resident would lose precedence to an incoming double unless he picked a new roommate. This resulted in the most desirable rooms, such as the triple or the black light room, invariably being passed down generation to generation, with upper classmen leaving and younger members moving in. If two sophomores decided to bunk together, it was very important that one of them have a low ritual number, since the lowest number counted. In our class, I was number 13, about as bad as it could get. I wasn’t even sure I would rank high enough to get a closet!
Over the years you had all sorts of fun and games. Often, two upper class guys would put their names on a room just to fuck with everybody else’s heads, and then switch around later. During room roulette it wasn’t uncommon to have potential residents knock on a door and come in, to start looking over whether they wanted to move in, just like people walking through homes with a real estate agent! Further, there were always cascading effects. If a couple of people selected a room with a name already on it, that they had a better number for, those people would now find a different room and kick them out, and so on and so forth. It was major food for gossip for two weeks, and usually went right down to the wire!
My ritual number was so lousy I was probably going to end up living on the porch. I needed to hook up with a guy who was higher up the food chain. I was friends with several upper classmen, but the best candidate, Marty Adrianopolis, was staying with his current roommate in their double in Grogans’. Likewise, while Ricky Holloway was a good friend, as the doper supreme, with squatters’ rights over the black light room, he selected Jack Dawson, another major league pothead, as the inheritor of the tradition. Like I had done before, I hit up Joe Bradley, who was number 3 in our class. Linking up, we could call the shots over most of the other sophomores.