I was definitely feeling the beer, and I wasn’t surprised when Jim said, “It’s time for dinner. You want to come back to the house with us for dinner.”
“It’s got to be better than whatever the mystery meal is at the dining hall,” added Boris. He got his nickname from playing chess like Boris Spassky last year. He also looked like a Russian, with a round face and slightly Tatar eyes.
“That’s got to be the truth!” I agreed. I grabbed my jacket and followed them outside.
Boris had the world’s ugliest and most decrepit Chevy Impala, which looked like it was held together by twine and bubblegum. “Behold, the Galactic Derelict!” commented Jim. We climbed inside, and I tried not to think about what I might actually be sitting on. At least it didn’t squish. The engine started with some difficulty, and it knocked and rattled the entire trip to the frat house. Worse was the fact that not one of us was really in shape to drive, but we made it the mile to Kegs.
“Welcome to Kappa Gamma Sigma!” said Boris as we climbed out of his junker.
“Home sweet home!” added Easton.
We were parked behind a couple of houses on Burdette, surrounded by a chain link fence, and with a swimming pool in the back yard behind one of them. The house and grounds were both large and lived in, with a comfortable feel to it and both nice and dump-like aspects. “Which home is it?” I asked.
“It’s both buildings,” answered Boris.
Jim said, “The frat house is actually two houses.” He pointed to the larger of the two houses, a rambling three story Federalist monstrosity. “That’s the main house. The other one is Grogan’s, which only has bedrooms. The main house is where we have the kitchen and dining room and living room and shit.”
“It has the bar, too. Come on, let’s get a beer,” finished Boris.
I followed them inside to find a beer keg tapped and set on a folding table in the front room of the main house, in what was known as the living room. I was handed a beer and told to make myself comfortable. I saw a surprising number of people I knew. First, I ran into Stew Sokoloff. He was a junior in my Finite Math class, and looked shocked to discover he was taking classes with a freshman. Stew was a math major and wanted to become an actuary with an insurance company. We talked about the upcoming test for a few minutes, and then I noticed several guys from ROTC. I started talking to several of the guys and figured out what was happening.
I had been invited over for an informal rush party kegger. A fraternity is a living organism, and every year the seniors would graduate and move away. The brothers needed to recruit, or ‘rush’, enough freshmen to make up for this loss. Since you couldn’t just run an ad in the newspaper (“Wanted: RPI freshman to join deviate social fraternity and live in filth and squalor. Must be heterosexual alcoholic drug fiend. Be prepared to show proof of being able to pay a hefty bar tab. Call now! Operators are standing by!”) it was necessary to hold various parties and keggers to introduce freshmen to the fraternity lifestyle. Further, sophomores and juniors would be told to meet freshmen and invite them back to the frat to attend these parties. It’s sort of like luring a four year old into a darkened van with candy and toys, only with beer and without the grisly ending.
For the freshmen, it’s a chance to load up on free beer and, in effect, audition for the brothers. The brothers use this time to see if any of these little assholes have what it takes to become Keggers and if they could stand living with them for a year or two. All this occurs during the first semester. At the end of the semester, the freshmen selected would be formally invited to ‘pledge’ the fraternity, and announce their intention of joining the frat. Pledges gained several privileges, including the right to hang around, automatic invites to all parties and functions, free meals on weekends, and getting to run up a bar tab. On the other hand, they get used for scut labor by the brothers. Towards the end of the spring semester they would go through ‘Hell Week’, a week long ordeal of abuse and hazing. At the end of the week they would be initiated into the fraternity and become full members, entitled to live in the house the following year. It is a ritual that goes back to the 19th century with fraternities, and probably thousands of years with equivalent organizations around the world. Hammurabi and the Babylonian Army probably had a similar system of recruitment.
I quickly ran across Bruno Cowling and Joe Bradley, another couple of freshmen in ROTC, and chatted with them about what brought them here. It turned out they had been invited by a couple of the older brothers in ROTC. I nodded in understanding. I had been chatted up by a guy in Crows (Alpha Chi Rho) about coming out to their house. Since Kegs and Crows were the two ROTC houses, I suspected every freshman cadet who wasn’t a total hose job was going to be invited to one or both houses for a visit. That was when I looked around and started counting noses. About two-thirds of the brothers were in Army, Navy, or Air Force ROTC. To be fair, they looked about as degenerate as the non-military brothers.
I had another couple of beers before the Friday night meal of burgers and fries. I looked in the kitchen and saw it was only one step away from a Health Department shutdown, but the food still tasted better than the dining hall. I kept wandering, and at one point walked over to Grogans’ with Boris and looked around. The main house consisted of a living room, a formal room (same as the living room but cleaner), and the kitchen/pantry/dining areas. Upstairs were two more floors of residential rooms and a big communal bathroom. Grogans’, the house next door, had been bought in the late Fifties from a family named the Grogans when the frat outgrew the main house. There was nothing in there but two floors of residential rooms and a couple of bathrooms.
Kappa Gamma Sigma was one of 24 fraternities on campus. There were no sororities yet, since there were no girls. Greek life, as it was called, was a major element at Rensselaer. No matter what the antics of the frats were, RPI didn’t have enough dorm space to hold the 750 to 800 students in the frats, and Troy didn’t have enough apartments to hold them either. They added up to almost a quarter or more of the undergraduate student body.
There were all sorts of different frats. Tau Kappa Epsilon, ‘Teke’, was the frat for the football team. Lambda Pi was a nerd frat, and with a nickname like ‘Lambie Pies’, heavily ridiculed. ‘Castle’, Pi Kappa Phi, actually owned a Victorian era frat house down in the middle of Troy that was so authentic that every year or two a movie company would come in from Hollywood and shoot a movie there (hence the nickname Castle.) Kegs and Crows were the two military frats, though non-ROTC guys were allowed in as well.
Dad hadn’t wanted me to join a fraternity before, not that he ever got a vote. He did tell me that if I moved off campus, he wouldn’t pay my room or board anywhere else. My father’s animus towards fraternities always confused me; he had been in Delta Upsilon at the University of Pennsylvania. Then again, he told me once that they didn’t have a frat house. They met once a month in a rented room at a hotel. My bet was they would have their meeting and then use the room to get liquored up and bring in a few hookers. Hey, it was the 1940s and times were different. Now he didn’t want anything to do with fraternities.
Most of the freshmen wandered back down Burdette to the dorms somewhere after 11. I got there just in time to find Buddy floating in on a cloud of pot smoke, followed by a small group of guys from down the hall. I crashed on top of my bed and slept through whatever they were planning to do.
I woke late the next morning, to find Buddy staring at me from where he was sitting on his bed, lighting up a bong. “So you do know how to party!” he crowed.
Oh, I knew how to party. I felt it throughout every bone of my body. Maybe this frat business wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. My tongue felt like somebody had been hiking on it. I rolled out of bed and flipped Buddy the bird, which set him to laughing, and grabbed my toilet kit and a towel. I stumbled off to the bathrooms at the end of the hall and took a long hot shower and then shaved. I simply wrapped the towel around my waist and stumbled back down the hallway to our room, carrying my used clothes in my hand.