by Todd Gregory
Table of Contents
Synopsis
By the Author
Wicked Frat Boy Ways
About the Author
Books Available From Bold Strokes Books
Wicked Frat Boy Ways
Seniors and fraternity brothers at Beta Kappa, Brandon Benson and Phil Connor begin playing a manipulative game of love and seduction with increasingly higher stakes, without a care about the damage they leave in their wake. But the primary problem with the seduction game is sometimes the players’ emotions can get involved…but it’s too late to turn back from the destructive path.
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Wicked Frat Boy Ways
© 2017 By Todd Gregory. All Rights Reserved.
ISBN 13: 978-1-62639-672-2
This Electronic book is published by
Bold Strokes Books, Inc.
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Valley Falls, NY 12185
First Edition: May 2017
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Credits
Editor: Stacia Seaman
Production Design: Stacia Seaman
Cover Design By Melody Pond
By the Author
Every Frat Boy Wants It
Games Frat Boys Play
Need
Wicked Frat Boy Ways
Promises in Every Star
(short story collection)
Anthologies as editor:
His Underwear
Rough Trade
Blood Sacraments
Wings
Sweat
Raising Hell
Anything for a Dollar
PHIL I stopped listening to him a couple of minutes ago. It doesn’t matter. He just wants someone to listen to him drivel on and on.
He won’t notice, either, that all I do is smile and nod, my eyes as wide open as I can make them without worrying about them popping out, and all I am saying is “oh” or “really” with the right, interested inflection when I can tell by his tone that some noise from me is required for him to keep talking. He’s probably the most conceited and self-absorbed alumnus I’ve met, and that is saying something, since I’ve never met any alumnus who isn’t a boring drone who stays involved with the house because they think it was the best time of their life, and being active in the alumni association somehow makes them still a part of the brotherhood.
I prefer the ones who just write a check when they get a fundraising letter and never come around.
I mean, I get it. When you’re putting in sixty hours a week at some high-stress job and then coming home to a bunch of spoiled kids and a trophy wife who spends all your money faster than you can make it and your own mortality is staring you in the eye, you miss your days in college living at the Beta Kappa house when you didn’t have an asshole boss and your phone wasn’t blowing up all the time with needy asshole clients who act like you’re their own personal slave and all you had to do was show up for class and study every once in a while and you spent most of the rest of your time drinking and smoking pot and snorting coke and fucking every girl you could get so wasted she couldn’t say no or stop you from taking their clothes off and doing what you wanted. How many times have I had to listen to some alumnus whose body has gone to seed, who’s gone bald, and whose best days are long behind him relive the debaucheries of his youth, getting that sad faraway look in his eyes as he thinks back fondly to that time before he had to be at the office all day only to come home to some bitch of a wife and deal with assholes all the fucking time, remembering when they didn’t have to deal with all the horseshit they have to put up with to get the damned paycheck to keep up the front that they’re living the American fucking dream?
It’s pathetic, really.
It’s just another reason I am glad I am gay.
Take Rubin Monterro, for example. He’s the classic example of the Beta Kappa alumnus. He’s got a glass of the expensive Scotch I keep in the president’s office for when the rich bastards come by to play big shot and make me grovel for donation money. Rubin is not just any alumnus, he’s president of the damned alumni association for our chapter, and he’s driven all the way up here to San Felice from Beverly Hills for something. He usually comes up once a month to check on things, hang out, drink some Scotch, and ogle some of the Little Sisters or sorority girls—he especially likes to drive up during Little Sister Rush week.
His monthly visit—and I do consider it to be the same fucking thing as a period—was just last week, so I wasn’t expecting him today. He caught me off guard when he called this morning and said he was heading up for a visit. I’ve been waiting now for twenty minutes for him to get to the point. He wants something, something is up—I don’t know which, but it’s fucking irritating as hell that he won’t just get to the goddamned point.
My cheeks are starting to ache from the phony smile.
It’s ironic, though—calling him was on my to-do list for today. Well, he was about four numbers down on the list of people I was going to call, but since he’s here I might as well ask him first. He always makes me sweat for the money. He always writes the check, but he likes to make me feel like a whore before he does.
That’s why he’s the last one I will call out of the five I can always count on for an emergency donation.
This time will be different because he wants something from me, from the house. This isn’t a social call.
I just have to wait for him to get to the point.
He will eventually, if I should live so long.
And when I know what he wants—I’ll ask for the money.
It’s all part of the game the chapter president has to play: Suck Up to the Alumni.
It’s a small price to pay for the perks of being president.
I let my mind wander a bit as he keeps talking, gesturing, the Scotch swirling around inside the glass. I notice the bottle of Scotch sitting on my desk is about half-empty, so I make a mental note to give Joe Altamura a call. He’s an alumnus, too, and owns a string of liquor stores up and down the California coast, from Eureka down to San Diego. San Felice has two of them, one near the campus and the other up in the hills where the rich people live. Joe always gives us kegs at cost and will donate cases of the good stuff we need to keep on hand for when some alumnus like Rubin comes by that I’ll have to schmooze and suck up to and work for a donation.
Joe gets it. He was president when he was an undergraduate. He remembers what dicks alumni can be.
Even though they know the chapter isn’t swimming in cash at the best of times, we can’t give any of our distinguished and respected alumni cheap booze before asking them for money.
I never ask Joe for money. Free liquor and cheap kegs are more than enough.
Sometimes he’ll send us a check without being asked. He gets it.
Rubin doesn’t get it. He was never chapter president. It’s not hard to guess why, either.
He was probably a douchebag then, too.
Let me make a game out of this. So, what’s the over / under for him getting to the damned point?
I look at him. At least another five m
inutes.
Rubin Monterro is a big-deal entertainment lawyer. At least, he thinks he is. And like every lawyer I’ve ever met, he loves an audience. He knows, as chapter president, I have to listen to the alumni association president as long as he wants me to, which makes me loathe him even more. Now he’s dropping names of his big important clients. Every time he drops a name I look appropriately impressed and say “wow” and “cool” when he stops to breathe.
I fucking hate playing games. But that’s what I signed up for when I ran for president.
And I am good at playing games.
That’s how I got elected in the first fucking place.
Middle-class boys from Santa Rosa don’t get elected president of Gamma Rho chapter of Beta Kappa fraternity at the University of California–San Felice without being good at playing games.
“You have such an interesting life, Brother Rubin,” I say in my sincerest voice when he takes a drink. “All those celebrities!”
“They’re just people, Phil,” he says with a wink. “Neurotic, crazy people with a lot of talent and money, but still—people.”
I laugh, because he wants me to.
He holds his glass out, and I splash some more Scotch into it.
I know more about Rubin Monterro than his current wife probably does—and for the record, she is the second Mrs. Monterro, former Heather Brady, Playboy centerfold and aspiring starlet who appeared in slasher movies and was usually killed after showing her enormous, not-enhanced-by-a-surgeon breasts. The first Mrs. Monterro’s name was Lisabeth. She has custody of their two children and lives in Malibu. She came from money, of course, helped Rubin get a leg up in the business.
The divorce was her idea. She now has a live-in lesbian lover who still works as a tennis pro.
Rubin’s parents were immigrants from Mexico who scrimped and saved for him to go to college. He was a scholarship student here and had to work all the way through college. I’ve never quite figured out how he wound up as a brother of Beta Kappa. It may have been a diversity thing—when I look at the chapter composites from when he was a brother here, he was the only Hispanic face and there was a black brother, too. He went from here to Stanford Law and used his fraternity connections to get a job with a big entertainment law firm. He made partner in five years and is now the managing partner.
And he’s president of the alumni association.
I look at him and wonder what it was like for him when he was a brother here, working when all his lily-white spoiled rich-boy brothers had trust funds and credit cards and never had to worry about where the next six-pack was coming from.
I sometimes wonder if that’s why he’s such a dick as a president of the alumni, if he’s somehow trying to get even with the brothers who treated him like the help when he was an undergrad.
I’ve done my homework on him, but he hasn’t done his on me.
I know that he has three brothers and two sisters, all of them blue collar. I know he helps them out financially but they aren’t welcome at his home in the Hollywood Hills—there aren’t family holiday parties there, and his kids don’t mix with their cousins. All of those nieces and nephews are blue collar, too.
I wish I could just tell him that I’m not some spoiled rich kid, too.
But that’s not the game we’re playing.
He wouldn’t appreciate me knowing about his background any more than he’d respect me for mine.
If anything, he’d hate me for it, make my life a living hell.
And I need him to write us a check for a new air-conditioning system because the current one was installed back during the Reagan years when Rubin was an undergraduate and it’s starting to go on the blink, and the hot Latino guy who came by to check on it on Monday said it was on its last legs and could go at any moment and it’s fucking July in San Felice.
The a / c guy was hot.
I definitely need to get laid tonight.
I tune Rubin back in just in time for some more name-dropping about who he had lunch with last week and who he’s going to see at the party he’s going to at “George’s”—I guess I’m supposed to assume he means Clooney and make the appropriate awed noise, because name-dropping assholes like Rubin Monterro always assume that everyone is as awed by A-list celebrity names.
It’s all I can do not to yawn. I don’t give a rat’s ass about celebrities.
Unless they’re writing me a check, I don’t want to hear it.
I just want him to get to the point so I can ask him to write the check and send him back on his merry way to LA.
The sooner the better. I glance over at the clock. Joey will be back from the pool in about twenty minutes.
His dick is always hard when he’s finished with practice.
There’s no bigger crime than wasting a big hard dick.
I don’t like to commit crimes.
Rubin is still talking.
“Come on, come on,” I say to myself.
We do have the money to pay for the new air-conditioning system, but the house’s cash flow is always hit and miss during the summer, and I’d rather get an alumnus to write a check to pay for it. There’s barely enough money in the checking account to pay for the kegs for the Baby Bash party next week. If I ask Dr. Strickland to authorize a cash transfer from our reserves to pay for the air-conditioning system, he’ll make me cancel the party. And he sure as hell won’t transfer money from the reserve fund to pay for a party.
Asshole. I glance at Rubin. I wonder if Rubin feels about Dr. Strickland the way I do? Maybe we could get him replaced as comptroller…
Which means sucking up to Rubin even harder.
The party has to happen. It’s a tradition. We’ve been throwing it for over thirty years.
Canceling the party is not how I want to start my presidency.
Get to the point, get to the point, get to the point.
He needs something from me—if he would just get to the fucking point already.
As he keeps blathering on, I wonder what he looks like naked.
He looks good now, but he was stunning in the composites, even with college-boy acne and bad 80s hair. He’s wearing a tailored suit and he doesn’t have a paunch, but I’ve never seen him in jeans or a T-shirt. His shoulders are pretty broad and his waist isn’t small, but his shoulders are definitely wider. He’s a Hollywood player, though, so he probably goes to a trainer three times a week and gets a weekly massage and probably plays cutthroat tennis on the weekends. I bet he took lessons for years, too—he didn’t learn how to play tennis in the barrio. He’s smart, always has been smart, and did what he had to do to reinvent himself.
You’d never know now he came from nothing just by looking at him.
You got to respect that.
Even if he is an asshole.
I glance down at his legs. The pants are tight in the legs, and the legs are pretty thick and hard. His shirt hugs nice pecs. He shouldn’t wear his hair slicked back the way he does, though—it makes him look like a gangster, like he’s Mafia or something. Maybe that’s the look he’s going for, something from The Godfather or Goodfellas or one of those other old movies people his age get hard over, spaghetti operas. He’s still handsome, too. Not quite the looker he was when he was in college—I bet the girls used to drop their pants for him all the time.
He probably still gets a lot of action.
He’s shifting uncomfortably and takes another big drink.
Here it comes, at long last.
Finally.
I give him my undivided attention.
“And so my nephew is transferring here,” he says. He mops sweat off his forehead.
That’s it? His nephew?
I scan my memory. He has several nieces and nephews. I wonder which one it is.
I try not to laugh, or even smile.
He drove all the way up from LA to tell me his nephew is enrolling here?
His nephew must be a total loser.
“And he’s going to pledge B
eta Kappa, of course,” I reply smoothly, which I know is what he wants to hear. “He does want to pledge, doesn’t he?”
Alumni are even more generous with their money when a relative is living in the house.
And Rubin is the only Monterro with money.
“Well, I want him to, but he’s—he’s not really sold on the whole fraternity experience.” Rubin Monterro looks uncomfortable now. “I’ve talked to him about it, of course.”
I somehow manage to keep my face impassive, but I want to laugh in his face.
Oh, yeah, the nephew is totally some kind of dork or troll, a complete loser.
Rubin thinks we won’t give him a bid even though he’s a legacy, which pretty much makes the bid a formality.
“I’ll send him a friend request on Facebook,” I say, reaching for the bottle to pour more Scotch in his glass.
“He isn’t on Facebook.”
That stops me. I don’t even know what to say to that. I steal a glance at Rubin. His forehead is wet with sweat now, even though I have the air conditioner on high.
We are sitting in the president’s office, which has a window unit as well as the central air. Since the central air has been on the blink I turned on the window unit, and it’s cold. I’m wearing a Beta Kappa T-shirt and a pair of jeans and am kind of wishing I’d put on a sweater. I wonder if I can go into my suite and get one.
“He’s not?” I say finally.
“He—he isn’t on social media.”
Everyone is on social media. Something must be seriously wrong with him.
I resist the urge to ask if he eats paste. Instead, I put the cap back on the bottle and say noncommittally, “He isn’t?” I smile. “Good for him. Social media can be such a time suck.”
I’m making myself nauseous.
Rubin gives me a weird look and wipes his forehead again with his sleeve. “I know, I know, it’s weird, I have kids, you know.” He exhales and pulls out his cell phone. He fiddles with it for a moment, then turns it around so I can see the screen. “That’s him. Ricky.”
