We bought multiple sets of matching outfits because pledges always had to be dressed alike—khakis and button-downs and burgundy penny loafers and matching briefcases—everything exactly the same for all of us, even our underwear.
The Brothers gave us line names that said something about the way they saw us. Mine was Picasso because I could draw and paint. I didn’t know much about the actual Picasso, so I looked him up in the library. The name was more appropriate than any of us realized. Picasso once said, “Everything you can imagine is real.” I was living my life by this formulation, making real the self of my imagination. The only other name I remember is the one they gave Brandon: Butter, because they thought him soft. Whenever they said “Butter!” Brandon had to chime “Parkay,” like the margarine in the television commercial.
Chopper, we were told, had been particularly cruel in his hazing of previous lines, so many of the Brothers saw his little brother Brandon as a means of retribution. I didn’t know what it might mean for me, Chopper being my booster and all, but I figured it did not stand me in good stead.
During that time, the Brothers found out that I didn’t drink—never had—and they forced alcohol on me. Pledge Juice, they called it, cheap, mint-flavored liquor that went down hard. It took only a few swigs to loosen me, like my body was remembering something, an echo, or awakening to something, a birthright. The liquor left me lightheaded and Jell-O-kneed, like a loose-wallet man slinking out of a cathouse—feeling just right and all kinds of wrong. I now better understood how my father succumbed to it. It was a respite from worry, a rotgut way out, time deliriously spent, time unconcerned with the true costs to be paid later. I better understood the little lies that liquor told, lifting spirits and drowning sorrows while withholding the whole truth—that, in the end, it is the spirit in peril of drowning. Sorrows have gills.
The Brothers got a local woodworker to cut seventeen hand-sized pieces of wood in the shape of a scroll. Since I was Picasso, I led the painting of them—the fraternity’s Greek letters going down the middle and each pledge’s line number at the bottom.
After about four weeks, our debut day arrived. We gathered in a parking lot near the football practice field, all dressed alike. The Brothers tied the wooden scrolls we had painted around our necks with leather shoelaces. We were told never to take our scrolls off. We would need them, as well as our Brains, to “cross over” from pledge to full Brother, they told us. We were now official pledges.
They lined us up, put masks over our faces to extend the mystery until the very last moment, and gave us our instructions: “We better hear you muthafuckas singing on the other side of this damn campus!”
We marched, singing our pledge songs as loudly as we could, toward the girls’ dorms on the other side of campus. By the time we got to the first dorm, hundreds of girls had poured into the street, excited to see who had made the line. We could barely move, hemmed in as we were by the crush of the crowd. The Brothers removed our masks, and the girls screamed and pointed and catcalled at boys they knew. I heard one person complain, “What is the freshman class president doing on line? I didn’t know freshmen could pledge.”
We went from dorm to dorm, singing our songs and soaking up the adulation, until the Brothers led us back to the boys’ side of campus. The fun part of the evening had ended. Now it was time for the worst of it. They instructed us to meet them at a secluded, mud-holed oil field, across the interstate from a glass factory, three miles east of campus near the town of Simsboro.
We drove slowly to the field in a dreadful caravan, single file, the way cars follow a hearse with a coffin in its hollow. The other boys smoked weed and drank liquor, straight from the bottle, trying to make their bodies numb, fretting over an impending beating more extreme than we could imagine. Since I didn’t smoke or drink—other than when the Brothers forced me—I had nothing.
As we turned into the field, our hearts sank. The gravel crackled under the wheels and we fell quiet. There was a horde of restless Brothers, including Brothers from other schools, milling about in front of a row of parked cars. When they saw us, they started jumping and hooting, slapping on our cars, taunting us through the windows.
This was going to be bad.
We got out, and after a few formalities, it was on. As the oil field pump jacks bobbed up and down like giant metal birds pecking the ground, we were subjected to a brutal, unfettered, gladiator-style hazing session. We were all caught in a mind-spin of madness, doing what decades of Brothers defined as the right way to make new members.
The night air was punctuated by the swats of paddles and sticks and two-by-fours, by slaps of hands on flesh, by groans of pain and by shouts of “Come on, muthafucka!” from Brothers who lost themselves in the frenzy.
This is how legends were made. The Brothers who were most inventive, brutal, or relentless were called Massive Hazers. Some Brothers revered them; others thought their behavior unseemly.
The session may have lasted half an hour, though it felt like forever. When it was over, we got back in our cars and drove away—a few bleeding, most covered in mud, everyone exhausted. I could feel the puff of my lip, the place where it had split, and I could taste the blood leaking from it, that strange metallic taste like sucking on a penny. But I smiled with a perverse pride. We all did. They told us this was as bad as it got, and we had survived. But they lied. It would get worse.
9
Hell Week
After about three weeks of marching and singing and bonding and beatings, including one more trip to the oil field, it was time for Hell Week, the last week of pledging. We were told that this would be the week without rules. And, since there were no rules, many of my line brothers took to hiding from the Brothers all day.
But I couldn’t hide. I had a math class just before lunch with Joshua, our assistant dean of pledges. He made me walk with him every day from class to “the Spot,” a stretch of sidewalk in front of the cafeteria onto which the Brothers had painted the fraternity’s crest, and where the Brothers gathered at mealtimes to pose and preen like roosters atop a hen house. It’s also where we line brothers were made to stand and sing and dance and kowtow and perform any other act of public humiliation the Brothers could imagine.
That day, as Joshua and I turned the corner by the cafeteria, my heart sank. None of my line brothers were there, only three of the Massive Hazers: Malik, his roommate Calvin, and Sean, a Brother who had pledged on the same line as Kaboom. Malik, the most notorious of them, was the kind of boy who talked the way one might expect the devil to talk: saying menacing things with a smile, his eyes always a little bloodshot, as if he had been drinking even when he hadn’t, looking like he wanted to help you and hurt you at the same time.
“Come on, Blow, let’s take a ride.” Malik opened the door of his car. “The coupe seats twenty,” he always joked, room for him, his roommate, and all my line brothers. I thought for sure that once I got into that car, I would be taken for a beating, but I couldn’t refuse. I got in. So did Malik, Calvin, Sean, and Joshua. “Let’s find some of your line brothers, Blow,” Malik said with that sinister smile. “I know you know where they are.”
It became clear to me then that they didn’t really want to bother me anymore. During the pledge period I’d taken my share of punishment and hadn’t flinched or cried or broken from pain. I worked hard and learned quickly. I volunteered for extra tasks and helped my line brothers finish theirs. Some Brothers even called me Super Pledge. Now they were most interested in targeting the line brothers they thought hadn’t taken their fair share of punishment, those in danger of “skating into the bond,” or those still prone to display weakness.
I knew that some of my line brothers were probably at one of the “safe houses” we had established while pledging, but I refused to take Malik there. I told him that I didn’t know where the others were. He told me that we were going to ride around until I took him to someone. So I told him to drive me to my dorm, where, as they already knew, two
of my line brothers—Marlon and Dexter—lived.
First I went to Marlon’s room. He was the boy right in front of me on the line, number 12. He was a pudgy boy, fidgety and quick to sweat.
With the Brothers standing behind me, looking over my shoulder, I gave the secret knock, one my line brothers and I had devised. If you heard this knock, you were not supposed to open the door. It meant that the pledge doing the knocking was with Brothers.
But Marlon opened the door, in his underwear. The Brothers rushed him, demanding that he get dressed. I stood there dumbfounded. Why had he opened the door? I had used the secret knock. He didn’t have to get caught. Then again, Marlon wasn’t the sharpest boy. Truth was, he seemed the kind of guy who didn’t know cat shit from candy.
Next we were off to Dexter’s room, one floor down. Dexter was shorter, number 7 in line, who looked like an old man and talked like a preacher. This time I used the secret knock more obviously. But, again to my surprise, Dexter responded, “Who is it?”
“It’s us, scrub. Open the door!” one of the Brothers yelled. “Scrub” was what they called all pledges, a derision that robbed the pledge of all worth. Dexter said nothing and did nothing. Now I was angry. Dexter shouldn’t have answered, but now that he had, he needed to open the door. “Dexter, they know you’re in there!” I yelled. Dexter didn’t make a sound.
“So, he just gone leave y’all hanging,” Malik said, shaking his head in disappointment, the way he always seemed to do when talking about us pledges. “See, that’s the problem: y’all boys ain’t been pledged right. Come on, let’s go.”
We walked back downstairs and got in the car, and the four Brothers drove Marlon and me to an isolated gravel road running past an expanse of standing water just off campus. There was a cardboard box in the middle of the road. Malik stopped the car. The Brothers got out and inspected the box, then called for us to get out and look. The box was filled with kittens. Marlon and I stood over the box, waiting.
Then one of the Brothers said, “Y’all have a choice. You can get your asses beat or you can throw that box of kittens in that water with that dead dog.” I turned to examine the water, and indeed the carcass of a dog was rotting in it. “So what’s up? What’s the answer? Snap it off.”
Pledges were always supposed to speak in unison—one voice, one answer. Whoever was the lowest line number among any group snapped his fingers so that all the pledges could begin speaking at the same time. Marlon was ahead of me on the line, so he had to snap for us to speak.
Snap.
“Yes,” Marlon said. “No,” I said at the same time.
“What?” the Brothers barked. Now they were angry. Differing answers were not allowed. “Y’all muthafuckas better figure this shit out!”
Marlon and I turned to look at each other, both of us confused and a bit upset with the other. We huddled. “What are you doing, Marlon? We can’t drown those kittens,” I said. “Blow, it’s those fucking cats or us,” Marlon huffed. Before we could settle our disagreement, the Brothers demanded a new answer, one answer.
Marlon snapped. “Yes,” he said again. “No,” I said again. Again we huddled. Again he snapped. Again we delivered the discordant responses.
The Brothers, frustrated, placed the box in my hands. “Blow, since you keep saying no, either throw the kittens in the water or you walk in there with that damn dog yourself,” one of them said.
I looked down into the box full of helpless trembles, faint mewing, and the same sad eyes as the kitten in the picture above Uncle Paul’s bed, and I turned and started walking toward the water. There was no way that I was going to drown those kittens, beating or no. And besides, I had seen so many dead things in my life that the dog didn’t bother me one bit. I would wade into the water and hold the box of kittens up out of it.
As I was about to take my first step into the water, the Brothers yelled, “Stop!” Then, “This was a test. Blow, you passed. Marlon, you failed. Get in the car.” I put the box down by the side of the road and went back to the car.
I now suspected that the Brothers had probably placed the box of kittens in the road before we supposedly happened upon it. I wondered whether the Brothers would circle back to get them. Or would they be able to climb out of the box? How long could they survive if no one returned for them?
As I worried about the kittens, the car pulled into a cemetery far off the highway. We all got out. The Brothers got their paddles out of the trunk. As they made me drink Pledge Juice, they savagely beat Marlon. My anger at Marlon’s cowardice—his willingness to drown the kittens to save himself—quickly dissolved into empathy and unease. He didn’t deserve this, no matter his mistake. I tried repeatedly to intercede, to take some of the blows for him, as we had been taught to do, but the Brothers wouldn’t allow it.
Marlon took more blows that day than I’d ever seen another person take—the beating pushing far beyond making a point or toughening a pledge and into something truly maleficent. In the middle of the beating, Calvin blurted out, “I like this shit more than sex!” The other Brothers turned in disbelief and laughed at him for the sadistic implication of the remark. He insisted he was joking. I wasn’t so sure. When they were done—short of breath and drenched in sweat and cruelty—Marlon could barely stand without using my shoulder for support.
A few days later, as I was getting some sleep in my dorm room—a rare occurrence during Hell Week—the phone rang. Groggy and without thinking, I answered it. That was a no-no. Answering a phone could get you in big trouble.
It was Marlon. “Blow, come get us! We at Malik’s crib!”
“Aiight.”
Damn, I thought. Why was he calling me? How did he get caught, again?
I threw on some clothes and drove over, expecting him and whichever line brothers he was with to be waiting and ready to jump into the car. But when I pulled up I saw no one, just a bunch of Brothers’ cars. I knew immediately that it was a group hazing session.
Impulse said to turn and leave; honor said otherwise.
I walked up to the door. I could hear the yelling, the thwops, the commotion, the loud music that was not able to drown it all out. My heart sank.
I knocked on the door. Everyone got quiet.
“Who is it?!”
“Blow.”
Calvin opened the door with a scowl, his chest heaving, his breath short. The air inside was humid and rank from the smell of sweaty bodies and all-but-broken ones. He grabbed me and snatched me inside. As we passed through the living room I could see DJ Mardi Gras on my right, being forced to drink his own vomit from a blender because he had thrown up the original concoction he’d been given back into the container. On my left, a boy named Don was stretched out on the sofa, half conscious, convulsing like a sprayed roach, being fanned. He had taken so many “cymbals” that his ears were bleeding. Cymbals was what the Brothers called boxing your ears with the slap of open hands as hard as they could, like they were crashing cymbals.
This was crazy. It was a nest of Massive Hazers. Situations like this were so much worse than the chapter-sanctioned hazing sessions at the oil field, where the Massive Hazers were somewhat constrained by more moderate Brothers. At the oil field, the chapter officers’ unofficial job was to make sure that no one got severely injured, so the home chapter wouldn’t get in serious trouble. But no officers were present on nights like this.
When I got to the back of the room I saw Nash. Oh no, I thought.
“Come on, scrub. Bend that ass ova,” Nash said, directing me into the cut for a paddling.
Oh no, I thought again. My wallet was in my back pocket. That was a mistake pledges were taught never to make. The Brothers took wallets. I tried to sneak it out and into my front pocket, but Nash noticed. “Wait a minute. Give me that. Hell, yeah,” he said.
His eyes darted around the room, and he grabbed me, Dexter, and Marlon and ushered us outside and into my car. Nash flipped through my wallet, pocketed the lone twenty, and then took out my bank card
. “Let’s go to the bank, Blow.” I searched for a lie to protect my bank account, which had quite a bit of money in it, from unspent scholarship funds and work-study pay.
“Big Brother, that card is on my mother’s account, and she’s watching it. She knows I’m on line. If I take money out, she’s going to know something is up.”
Nash frowned and stared at me from under his bushy brows, knowing that I was probably lying but unwilling to risk creating a problem with the college or the national fraternity this late in the pledge period.
“Aiight then, let’s go. You gone buy me some beer and somethin’ to eat.”
We went to the largest grocery store in town and did some shopping. I paid. We got our bags, got back in the car, and drove to Nash’s house, a small, rundown trailer in the back row of a poorly maintained trailer park. When we pulled up to the trailer Nash said, “Where’s Brandon? I want him!”
All the Brothers wanted Brandon—apart from the payback for his older brother’s cruel treatment of previous pledges, Brandon was full of excuses and always found ways to be safely away from the group.
“We don’t know, Big Brother.”
We took the groceries inside, then Nash said, “Aiight, Blow and Dexter, you go find Brandon. Marlon, you stay here. You ain’t goin’ nowhere till I get Brandon.”
By now the sky was turning the pastel colors of morning, heralding the rising sun. Dexter and I had no idea where Brandon was. But this time I was earnestly searching. I wanted to find Brandon and force him into the car. I figured that boys like Marlon had taken more than enough beatings, and Brandon had avoided many. If I had to deliver Brandon to save Marlon that morning, I intended to do it.
Fire Shut Up in My Bones Page 19
