Two weeks ago I talked about going back to Ohio State to purge my feelings of hatred and revenge against the academic Establishment that had so crippled my spirit as a young man. Another part of that experience, twenty years ago, was my brief and hardly salutary encounter with fraternity life.
As I said earlier, we are like the chambered nautilus: a snail that has a shell made up of small vaults. It moves from chamber to chamber as it matures, until finally it leaves its shell and dies. But throughout its life it literally carries its past on its back. Each of us is a nautilus: we never really rid ourselves of the adolescent spurs that drove us to become the people, the “adults” we are today. Whether it was living up to your parents’ hopes or fears about your final fate, or getting over a crushing defeat in a love affair, or recouping from a cataclysmic financial setback…whatever it is, long long after the validity or the need of the original situation has been dissipated…still we play to that vanished audience. We carry our past on our backs.
But occasionally, as it was with my return to OSU to speak before the very Establishment that had valued me as less than rubbish, the Wheel turns and we find ourselves in one of those pivot-points of our existence, a point in space and time where things become very clear, where the trembling moment becomes a scenario, and we realize just how far we’ve come, how divorced in fact we’ve become from the vestigial fears and motivations that still haunt us.
One such was in relation to my fraternity days, even as brief, even as traumatic as they were.
I was hardly the fraternity boy type. I was out of a small Ohio town, I was poor, I was unmannered and awkward and covered these flaws with an arrogance and berserkness that, finally, came off as rank obnoxiousness. But my Mother subscribed to most of the myths and forms of what she thought it took to be a social animal, and she wanted very much that I join a frat. “To make good connections for the future.” I won’t even dwell on the foolishness and speciousness of that proposition.
Nonetheless, at that stage of life where many paths are tried in hopes of finding the main route, I was rushed by three or four fraternities at State, and finally pledged Zeta Beta Tau.
ZBT is a national fraternity, with strong chapters at the Big Ten universities. It is a Jewish fraternity, and at Ohio State it was reflective of what I find to be most offensive in the moneyed Jewish community. It was a Shaker Heights mentality fraternity, with the emphases on social position, material manifestations of position—most prominently the fire-engine-red Cadillac convertible—on a Sunday morning you could see all the scungy pledges out Turtle-waxing the actives’ trashwagons—and the membership demonstrated acute attitudes of anti-gentile feeling, outrageous sexism (with special attention given to goyishe sorority girls, especially the stunning ladies of Delta Delta Delta, who were the most amazing gathering of incredible beauties on the campus), and the no-neck disrespect for intellectualism I’ve found rampant among Hollywood producers, many of whom are ex-frat men.
It was not, to be precise, the most enriching setting in which to place the rough jewel of my personality.
But I pledged. My reasons were a need to belong to something, to anything at that point, to bulwark my fears against being adrift on a monster campus with a population of over 38,000 students…and to satisfy my Mother. You all know what that’s about. I had been on my own since I’d been thirteen, and I was in no respect a momma’s boy or even notably strong on family relationships. But I felt a need to do something for her, to say thank you and pay some dues. In an inarticulate way, joining ZBT assuaged that need.
For their part, they pledged me on the most indefensible grounds imaginable. First, I was working on the Ohio State Sundial, the humor magazine (which at that time was one of the leading college humor magazines in the nation), and though the chapter was heavy on members who had money, or who were affiliated with the football team, or whose fathers could contribute Scotty freezers for beer busts, they needed to insure their standing on the campus both scholastically and in the area of student activities. I was only a freshman, but already I was writing for the Sundial, and everyone knew what clever, witty people those Sundial bohemians were…so, ergo, I had to be a heavyweight in the grade department, thereby aiding them in pulling up the house average lowered by the Cro-Magnons or the scions of wealthy families. (Little did they realize what a downer I was to be in that department: lowest grades in the history of the school.)
The other reason they pledged me was a peculiar talent I’ve always had…that of being able to “read” people from their walk or speech or mannerisms…a kind of primitive body language thing that is in no way ESP or occult or…I’ll talk about that in another column some time, but for the nonce let it suffice that one manifestation of that talent was, and is, the ability to tell if a woman is a virgin or not. I always had that “talent” (if such it can be called) and it never seemed like a big deal to me; just something I knew. But they thought it was very rare metal, trace element stuff, a valuable property. So they pledged me.
Right from the git-go, I was less than a satisfactory pledge. I’d been on my own, making my own living since I was thirteen years old, and I was used to a degree of personal freedom and personal pride that did not square with the essentially demeaning, dehumanizing, disgusting treatment accorded pledges by actives. Some brain damage case from Sandusky would come up to me, extend his Bass Weejuns and tell me to polish them, and I’d look confused and bemused and annoyed and say, “Do what?” And when he’d repeat the order—never request, always order—I would politely suggest he remove the pennies from the slots on the shoes and jam the leathers up his ass, horizontally.
This made for some small pique on the part of the ZBT super-structure.
They attempted to break my spirit (to what end I have never understood, but then I’ve never been able really to perceive what valuefraternities had from the outset, save as enclaves to buffer the timorous and snobbish from having to rub elbows with the common herd). Their attempts to whip me into shape were doomed, of course. Nothing worked. Not the thousand chickenshit barbs to which I was heir, not the hell sessions late at night, not the ugly pranks, not the crummy errands I was ordered to run, not the unveiled attacks on my coarse and hardly fraternal manners, not even the night one winter when a BMOC named Gene Somethingorother demanded milk (during a meat meal at which milk was omitted as a weak-wristed gesture toward keeping kosher), and shrieked for me to go get it, when he knew there was none in the entire house; and I slipped and slid through the snow to the Protestant fraternity house next down the line; and brought the dumb fucker a ten-gallon can and dumped it on him at the head of his table. No, I was a hard punk to break.
So they slipped into high gear.
During mid-term week, during which I was having problems studying, during which I was coming to the realization that I was a lousy student, they came at me with pranks that tested my patience sorely.
I would study till three or four in the morning, then crawl wearily into my bunk-bed to get a few hours’ sleep till my first class and/or mid-term test. No sooner had I crashed, than one of their number would come and roust my exhausted ass from slumber…to clean the garbage shed down behind the house.
The first night it happened, I was too exhausted even to argue. In my pajamas I half-fell down the three flights of fire escape stairs on the side of the ZBT house, and shoveled orange peels and eggshells into garbage cans, and swept the metal walls and slab floor clean. It took about an hour, the active assigned to the ordeal supervising my efforts, heaven forfend I should miss a milk carton or blob of spaghetti. When I’d finished, he let me go back to bed.
The next day, I slept through my biology mid-term.
The following night, they did it again. I’d studied till around midnight, then collapsed. Fifteen minutes after I’d dropped off…fully dressed…lights still burning…another active came to roust me.
Comatose, I stumbled ahead of him, down the third floor corridor to the fire door at the end of the hall. I pushed open the door and stood on the landing, chilled by the December wind. In December, Ohio is not a terribly hospitable environment. I started down the stairs, and stumbled. The active shoved me. “Get your ass in gear!” That was his second mistake.
He was wearing a jacket and tie. I half-turned, reached over my shoulder, and grabbed the tie. I jerked him forward sharply and he sailed past me, went over the fire escape railing, and fell three floors through the roof of the garbage shed.
I went back to bed.
That incident, coupled with one other, melded to bring about my expulsion from ZBT during my first quarter at Ohio State. I never went active.
They called me down to the office of the President of the fraternity, and there they sat (in jackets and ties): the President, the Vice-President, the Treasurer, the Recording Secretary and the Strawboss of Pledges, or whatever dumb title it was that he held with such honor. And they suggested I move out at once. My behavior, they said, was something less than fraternal. They cited the two big incidents that had happily driven them to this expulsion. And, though he was grievously wounded, they told me, the noble active who had done the Brodie off the fire escape was prepared not to sue me for assault and battery, if I’d get the hell out within the hour and keep my mouth shut about the whole thing. Apparently, the garbage had cushioned the clown’s impact, and they’d prevailed on him not to have me wiped out…in the good name of Zeta Beta Tomatah.
So I moved out, following the route taken by Don Epstein, who had pledged with me briefly. I’ll tell you about Don next week. About how we lived in the same rooming house at Ohio State, and about the special tragedy that Don Epstein came to represent to me.
But that’s next week. Right now, I’ll finish the fraternity story, and make the point how the Wheel turns, and how we sometimes are accorded the luxury of knowing the moment when the past is dead and we need not lug it around with us like a millstone.
That moment came five years ago, in 1969, fifteen years after the morning in the office of the President of the Nu Chapter of Zeta Beta Tau; the morning during which one of those grand officials of that grand Greek organization told me I was, strictly between us, a bum, a creep, a hick, and a guy who was destined for the toilet.
Fifteen years later, that noble Greek called me, here in Los Angeles. Said he was in town for a convention. Said he was with his wife. Said he’d followed my career. Said he was proud to have been such a close friend of mine. Said he wanted to drop by and strike up acquaintances. Said he might be moving to Los Angeles. Said a lot of bullshit.
I confess to the cheap desire. I wanted to flaunt my success. I invited him and his wife to drop by.
When he arrived, his first words as he stepped through the inlaid-wood art treasure by Mabel and Milon Hutchinson that serves as my door were, “Damn! It’s good to see one of our guys has made it so big!” My gorge became buoyant.
It was a ghastly few hours. He was the same age as I, thirty-five, and he looked fifty. He had “made the right connections” in the fraternity. He had married the daughter of the boss and moved into the company, they had 3.6 children, he was in debt up to his ass, and she tried to proposition me as I showed her around the house, telling me what a wimp he was. I advised her that no matter what a loser her old man was, she wasn’t about to make any points with me by badrapping him. For his part, he could not take his eyes off my lady friend, who was polite to him, but had the eerie feeling he might shed his skin and slither after her at any moment. My visitors were a pair who deserved each other.
Finally, they left, and with the same feeling of release I mentioned two weeks ago when I talked about having returned to Ohio State to lecture at the school that had bounced me, I felt free at last, free at last, gawd a’mighty, free at last.
It was very clear that the Wheel had come around, and what I’d believed about the insular and debilitating nature of fraternities had served me in good stead. I had gone my own way, and I was a happy (though flawed, even as you and you and you) individual, doing what I wanted to do, living the life that enriched me. And there was no need to seek any cheap revenge on that poor sonofabitch: there was nothing I could do to him half as terrible as what his own false gods, cheap goals and debased ideals had done to him. Time had taken care of him in a way I’d have had to be a monster to attempt.
But he was an object lesson. From that moment on, I never felt hatred for the time I spent in ZBT. I wouldn’t mention it now, save to add a penultimate brick of memory in the final monument to my school days, occasioned by that final purge at OSU early last month. I mention it for that reason, and to tell you that you’re grown up now, you’re a different human being…you’re free. Honest you are.
So smile, hey!