Tales from the Lost Semester - Volume 3

The Most Fun You’ll Never Want to Have Again

Everyone who has ever left the comforts of home to accept the Herculean challenge of making that first move out on their own understands what a frightening proposition this can be. For example, my brother Greg moved out of my dad and stepmom’s house when he was 19 (among other reasons, over a dispute as to whether he had the authority to hang Christmas lights in his room) – he didn’t go away to college, he moved to the South Side of Chicago, two blocks away from County lockup, which is much scarier of a situation than that of my own. For you see, I led what many would call a charmed life in my 18th year – assistant captain of the hockey team, good group of friends, steady supply of booze and pot, and admission into the great University of Illinois. Granted I initially chose Illinois not for the quality of its business program, but rather because of the three schools to which I applied and was accepted (U of I, Wisconsin, Michigan State), it was the cheapest. Way to plan for the future, big guy!

At any rate, as has happened to me so many times in my charmed life, I fell ass-backwards into a great situation. There was just one problem – Illinois was a BIG place, and I didn’t know much of anything about it. The only time I had seen campus was during my freshman orientation weekend – yes, you read that correctly, I made what was at the time the biggest decision of my young life sight unseen, with no testimonials as to what life was like in Champaign-Urbana. To make matters even more hilarious, I decided to apply to live in a dorm that as it turns out is the housing equivalent of committing social suicide due to its horrendous location on campus – only through intervention of my high school Physics teacher did I learn that the “Six Pack” of dorms was the place where all the “cool” kids lived, so I logically switched gears and requested housing in the Six Pack, because as everyone knows, high school Physics teachers know all there is to know about being cool. Young, dumb and full of…vigor – that was J in ’92.

Backasswards luck being my forte, the Six Pack did indeed turn out to be the place to be. And being the outgoing, supercool guy I am, I soon made plenty of friends on my dorm floor – many fine young men who had the same affinity for inebriation, game shows and skipping class that I had. We got busted drinking, inflicted damage to the floor lounge, wrote on my roommate after he passed out when he decided to play the Century Club (100 shots of beer in 100 minutes) the first time he ever drank, played Nintendo, smoked joints, set off fire alarms and had a blast doing it all. However, even though the 4th floor Hopkins Hall crew and I had a great time together, within hours of arriving on campus we all began to feel the inevitable pull of the omnipresent force that hangs over the University of Illinois: The Greek System.

When you arrive on the U of I campus as a freshmen male, as long as you demonstrate some semblance of social skills and you are not hideously ugly, you have a good shot and receiving offers to join any number of fraternities. If you do decide to take the plunge and join the Greek System, it is critical that you are aware that joining certain houses could hurl you into the downward spiral of a four year sausage fest – being that fraternities outnumbered sororities almost 2-to-1, if you had any math skills whatsoever (as I proved I did with my solid first semester C in Calculus) you’d figure out that there were some dudes who were being left out in the cold when social function time came around. Given that we’ve established how little I knew about Illinois when I arrived as a freshman, there was an obvious danger of me falling into this trap and being placed in a situation from which there was no escape – a situation that would be fatal to my chances of “scoring” with members of the fairer sex, something that, while I know I had raw ability in, I still seemed to lack the true, polished prowess to accomplish with regularity. This is where it’s good to have a friend who figured it out before you, someone whose head was in the right place and wanted the same good things for you. And that’s where Dirk comes in.

Approximately 24 hours after arriving on campus, I received a call from Dirk – he and I had known each other for quite some time through the wonderful institution that is Elmhurst YMCA Hockey. We played together through grade school, junior high and finally high school, where Dirk was a year ahead of me. Upon graduating, Dirk headed down to Champaign and hooked up with what would become my fraternity – for purposes of this series, they will be know as the MPB house (not the real initials, but whatever). So Dirk calls me and invites me to the MPB house to meet some of the dudes, have beers, whatever. The first plus in the whole situation was that the house was about a 4 minute walk from my dorm – nothing like pure convenience for a lazy college freshman. The second plus? The minute I walked into Dirk’s room, he handed me a beer and began the process of introducing me around. After meeting some cool gents, I ended up in Room 8 where I would at once meet the group that would become the key players in my college experience: Ox, Big O, Sadahara, Mayo, CS, Reggie Taco, Silky – they were all there and ready to welcome me with open arms (I later learned that this is what’s called being “rushed” by a fraternity, an appropriate term given some of the persistent behavior I observed from other houses). Upon walking into Room 8 and hanging out with this motley crew, I had an epiphany – my search for a fraternity was over before it had even started. I’m guessing the fact that there was a bowl, bong and joint simultaneously circulating around the room played a factor in my decision – just a hunch.

But I’m not here to regale (i.e. bore) you with the details of my pledge semester – that’s a set of stories for another blog series. All you need to know is that it involved a lot of cleaning, a lot of push ups, a lot of drinking, a lot of smoking and not much class work. However, now you know how I happened upon my fraternity – I didn’t have to endure the full onslaught of the Rush process, I didn’t have to jump through hoops or work to get a bid to join up. I was just in from the start, which was nice considering that I had plenty of other things to occupy my mind at that time. For purposes of this story, the end of pledgeship leads us to the beginning – the “Alpha”, if you will – of the Lost Semester: the madness that is know simply as “Hell Week”, the details of which we were sworn to secrecy over – but who gives a shit about that, right? You want to know the sordid, creepy details, right? You want to marvel at the stupid shit I was willing to put myself through, right? Right, indeed.

During pledge semester, Hell Week was the event that dare not speak its name – I think the active members were terrified of driving off its potential members, lest they lose the new influx of housing and membership payments that were so desperately needed. Oh, that and the loss of all that brotherhood. Sure, we pledges all knew that hazing, while “officially” banned, was alive and well within the walls of the MPB house, but I don’t think any of us had a clue as to just how deep it went. At any rate, Hell Week really didn’t come up as a topic of conversation until the last line up of pledge semester. At this time, we were given detailed instructions of what to bring, what to wear, when to show up, etc. We were also given the tasks of developing “skits” for presentation during the week – the sole purpose of these skits was to dig up dirt on actives and rip them to shreds, and in turn, these scorned actives would implore the Sergeant at Arms to come down on us even harder. Ah, brotherhood!

Throughout the circles of the MPB house, Hell Week was constantly described as “the most fun you’ll never want to have again” – I don’t know about the fun part, but they flat out nailed the never again thing. The group I was to go through Hell Week with showed up a week before classes started in January – some houses held their Hell Week during the first week of class, but MPB was too smart for that as they knew that meant we had a chance to eat, sleep, shit and/or shower without their permission. The first few hours of my Hell Week Experience (beginning at noon on a Wednesday) were spent blindfolded and sitting Indian-style in our basement as classical music blared from oversized speakers and the occasional random individual walked through banging pots and pans as loudly as they could. Nothing says “eternal bond of friendship and brotherhood” like fucking with a bunch of blindfolded fools. After we were sufficiently rattled, the 15 of us who were submitting ourselves to this shit (among them CS, Pops and Mayo) were lined up and given the ground rules, which I now will share with you in the hopes that you begin to understand why I’m such a freak:

• The clothes you are wearing are the clothes you will wear all week – white T-shirt, jeans, gym shoes, white sailor cap (patience – explanation to follow…)
• No sleeping, unless we say you can
• No eating, unless we say you can
• No showering…period
• Sailor hat etiquette: In the basement, you wear it inside out, floppy style. On the first floor, you keep it in your back pocket (don’t want any nosy neighbors peering in wondering why a bunch of filthy zombies are wearing sailor hats). On the second and third floors, you wear them the conventional way. Fucked up shit.
• When you hear the extremely fucking loud siren, you get your ass to the basement and line up.
• When in the basement, you must walk backwards while bending down to grab your ankles (ah, homoeroticism!)
• When in the basement, line up in order of GPA (since we didn’t have our report cards, no fewer than 6 of us lied about our grades, giving us what appeared to be better positioning).
• Everyone sleeps and eats in the chapter room, which was about the size of your average living room. Imagine having 15 unshowered dudes in the same room, eating, sleeping, farting – it gave me great insight into Third World living, I can assure you.

Ah, brotherhood!

So now that the ground rules are set, what are we going to do to occupy our time? Well, the majority of our time was spent doing special fix-it project around the house, performing extreme cleaning to undo what had been done when all the actives trashed the house prior to leaving for the semester, shoveling snow and other odd jobs. Other times, we would be lined up, yelled at, and forced to perform acts of (no, not beastiality) rote memorization and recitation. Yes, you heard right – a vast majority of our time during Hell Week was used for the purposes of committing useless, meaningless phrases, poems and songs to memory and having the Sergeant come up with new and creative ways for us to recite them. Please don’t ask me to repeat them (they’re really lame) or how I actually still remember any of them, for I haven’t a clue. However, when you take 15 sleep-deprived 18 and 19-year-olds and ask them to recite these ridiculously obscure phrases, with each and every screw up leading to push ups, sit ups, wall sits, or some other form of physical exertion, the result is a maddening experiment in just how far you can push someone before they a) pass out, b) shit themselves, or c) fly off the handle. In addition to these fun times, we also were thrust into scavenger hunts, performing our skits and other mindless time-wasting, brotherhood building activities.

Now, had my state of mind been remotely lucid, I probably would have wondered why I was putting myself through this shit and thought about getting the hell out – my father-in-law pledged a fraternity his freshman year in college (back in the late ‘50s no less, when the REALLY fucked with you), and upon assignment of his first humiliating task (which I believe was to strip, get a drink of water in the basement, walk on all fours up to the third floor, and spit the water on a fire, and repeat until it went out), he performed one pass, picked up his shit and got the hell out of there. However, I had a lot invested at this point, my good friends were going through the same shit, and I was too tired, smelly and hungry to walk out into the cold by myself – in essence I was trapped. As a window to my madness, I’ll tell you that during the week, we were required to keep a journal describing our Hell Week experiences – being a mindless lackey I diligently kept my journal, pouring out the deepest, darkest thoughts that were rambling through my head at the time. A few years after graduation, I found the journal, read it, became extremely disturbed by what I read, and tore it to pieces – as a result, I am sad to report that I will not be able to provide you with verbatim quotes of what was running through my head, but rest assured – I was mentally broken down.

As we got deeper and deeper into the throngs of Hell Week, we were assigned more tasks, given more things to memorize, and fucked with more times than I care to admit. Later in the stages of the game, our Sergeant announced that one of the neophytes had to volunteer to serve as “Fuckface” for the remainder of the ordeal. For the most part, none of us had a fucking clue what this meant – however, having friends on the inside helped yours truly, as Sadahara had pulled me aside earlier in the week and told me, “J, I’m not messing with you here – when they ask for volunteers to be Fuckface, do yourself a favor and volunteer!” Given the fact that we developed a good friendship (despite the oh-so-awkward active-pledge dynamic), I put my trust in what he had to say, and when the call was made for volunteers to be Fuckface, I was the only one to step forward…

Man, was I ever glad I did. Turns out that being Fuckface meant that you no longer had to listen to anything that the Sergeant said. You didn’t have to line up or clean the house. You got to eat, sleep, shower, and shit whenever you felt like it. You could come in during line ups and ridicule whoever you wanted, and they couldn’t do a damn thing about it. There was just one problem – I was so frazzled, so warped by the whole experience that I actually felt guilty over my new title! I felt like I was letting everyone else down by being Fuckface. I was an absolute fucking mess, man. Sure, I showered (it felt GREAT). And yes, I ate a ton that afternoon. And of course I took a nice, fat nap. But I still wasn’t right in the head over letting down my “brothers”. Maybe that’s why I thought that if I were to strip down to nothing but my skivvies and ride a bike through the basement, this act of hilarity would generate goodwill and a few laughs among my peers – my God, did I just type that or think it? Yes, it’s true, I could not escape the peer pressure inflicted on me the by the numerous actives that convinced me this would be the most hilarious and meaningful thing I could do. Looking back, if they would have convinced me that squatting in the basement and taking a dump in our Sergeant’s bowl of rice were the way to get laughs, I probably would have done it. And yes, it’s a wonder I can even look at myself in the mirror any more. Needless to say, my fellow mates were all so frazzled at that point that they were paralyzed with the inability to laugh. Either that or it just wasn’t that funny.

They say all good things come to an end, and MPB Hell Week was no exception. The bullshit described above spanned from Wednesday afternoon until Sunday evening, which was the night of our one final all night brotherhood building session. This exercise in camaraderie and friendship involved, among other things, flooding our weight room, kneeling for hours on a concrete floor, reciting a phrase about how great the MPB house was about 600 times, getting warm and cold water dumped on you, and participating in fun events like Alka Seltzer races (two Hell Week participants kneeled in front of each other, filled their mouths with water, put a tablet of Alka Seltzer in there and “competed” to see who could go the longest without spitting – needless to say, I spit mine out immediately because, well, the concept was retarded). After going through these motions the entire night, we were furloughed for a few hours and required to come back for one more day of “initiation”, which was really nothing more than a day of even more homoeroticism (i.e. wearing a toga and blindfold), sitting in our community showers (as they ran, of course), listening to horrible music played at full blast (i.e. Madonna’s Like a Prayer was played about 4,000 times) and learning obscure fraternity secrets. On a completely unrelated, totally coincidental note, I now own nothing with my fraternity letters on it and severed all ties with my fraternal organization (save for my remaining friends). Odd how these things work out, isn’t it?

The final tally: Six days, five nights, eight meals, seven total hours of sleep, hundreds of push-ups, thousands of recitations, several laughs, and one mentally broken down freshman. After it was all over, I went out with Dirk and Mayo for what turned out to be the best fucking cheeseburger ever, came home and ordered a pizza, got stoned and celebrated my first night ever in Room 23 with a solid 14 hours of shut-eye.

I hope the nine of you realize that I am risking life and limb by sharing my Hell Week escapades – there are probably several nimrods out there from the MPB house who would blow their fucking stack if they heard that someone was giving away deep, dark fraternity secrets. To those people I say: Piss off. It was 13 years ago, the house is dead so there’s no one to tip off, and looking back, we went through some of the lamest, gayest shit just to prove we could be friends with everyone who had gone through it before us, which of course made it essential that everyone else after them go through it as well. What a crock of shit. The good thing is that there is a very excellent chance that anyone who would be offended by the release of these secrets will never, ever come across this blog – I want readers, but not that badly…

All that being said, I regret nothing – even though Hell Week traumatized me for the remainder of the Lost Semester, this experience is one I would never give back, one I’ll always remember, and remains the most fun I’ll never want to have again.

Until next time…