THE CURRENT PERIOD in which we’re living is probably the worst time in history to be a man. Just my luck. We had it absolutely made for thousands of years. Cave men did a little hunting now and then, but that was about it, and they ruled their women and their roosts with clubs. If the wife, or whatever cave men called their mates in those days, got a little out of hand, a gentle tap on the head did wonders in readjusting her attitude.
Later, when men became more civilized and learned how much fun it was to fight wars, they all got together on horseback and went and sacked other countries. They raped and pillaged and generally had high times.
Throughout most of history, men stuck together and did manly things and talked about manly things. In an attempt to sustain their elite and separate status over women, they formed male-only clubs, such as the Jaycees. The Supreme Court ruled recently that the Jaycees no longer can exclude women from their membership; that’s an indication of how much slippage there has been in the area of male domination.
Some men today feel as though they should apologize for their fathers’ attitudes toward women, and many of us have been made to feel woefully inadequate in the face of the rising force of feminism, which seems dedicated to telling men everything that is unacceptable about us.
The litany of our alleged failures is long.
Women are quick to inform us that we are lousy in bed and that we don’t know how to satisfy them sexually. There is a feminist joke which says it all. A feminist asks a man, “What does a woman say when she has been totally and completely and incredibly satisfied sexually?”
The man walks into her little trap and answers politely, so he won’t spoil her joke, “I don’t know.”
“I didn’t think you would,” returns the feminist, and once again the man is made to feel like a fool.
Think of all the other complaints today’s women have with men: We work too hard, we’re too ambitious, we drink too much, we aren’t sensitive enough, and we care more about watching a stupid ball game on television than we do about spending “quality time” (a new eighties term) with them. We sexually harass women in the work environment (formerly known as the “office”), we choose which woman is to be promoted within the firm based on breast size rather than professional ability (That made sense for several hundred years. It’s difficult to change overnight), and we refuse to pay women salaries equal to those men get for doing the same job — which isn’t fair, of course, but it also isn’t fair that men have to shave before they go to work every day, and women don’t.
Not only have the Jaycees lost their ability to exclude women, but it is almost impossible to keep women out of any location formerly reserved for men only. (Location, nothing! Women are even wearing men’s underwear these days, and one smart-aleck feminist was quoted as saying, “It’s only fair. Men have been trying to get in ours for years,” which is a really blatant sexist remark if you think about it. I’m glad I don’t have to resort to such a low grade of humor to get my points across.)
I am a former sportswriter. When I was covering sports, all press box tickets included the warning, “No women allowed in press box.”
This wasn’t because sportswriters didn’t want women around when they were busy covering ball games; it was because the people who ran the press boxes knew that sportswriters in general are people who never let work get in the way of a good time. Were women not excluded from the press boxes, there wouldn’t be room for everybody to sit down, what with all the writers and the cocktail waitresses they had met the night before.
Excluding women from the press box is against all sorts of laws these days, however, so even if a male writer did bring a cocktail waitress to the game with him, she probably would have to stand, because all the extra seats have been taken up by female sportswriters.
I must make another confession here. I’m certain there are many females eminently qualified to cover and report on sporting events, but I still would rather read a male’s report, because I am not convinced, and never will be convinced, that women fully understand the subtleties and nuances of certain athletic events.
Okay, so allow women to cover tennis matches. Tennis is a very simple game. The person who hits the last winning shot wins the match. Professional tennis players like John McEnroe and Chris Evert are always complaining that the press is more interested in their private lives than in their tennis. That’s because tennis, although loads of fun to play (I’m an incurable participant in the sport, myself. I have no talent for the game, but playing all afternoon certainly makes the evening beer taste better), is not that interesting to read about. I had much rather know why Chris dumped John than why she won’t change her tactics and play serve-and-volley against Martina Navratilova. I already know why she won’t come to the net against Martina: She’s afraid that big ol’ girl will knock her head off with a topspin forehand.
So it’s okay with me if women cover tennis, and they can cover golf, too. If tennis is boring to read about, golf is a sleeping pill. Women can also report on other sports that encourage dozing, such as marathon races, bowling, swimming, gymnastics, ice skating, track, field, and soccer. In fact, women can even cover pro basketball and it won’t bother me, because pro basketball is simple, too. The team with the biggest black man usually wins ... unless it happens to be the Boston Celtics, who have Larry Bird (the only white man in the last twenty years who doesn’t suffer from the dreaded “white man’s disease,” which causes slowness afoot and the inability to jump very high).
What I strongly object to is women covering football and baseball, because they’ve never played either sport. Men are born with the innate ability to understand the blitz in football and the hit-and-run in baseball. Women may learn the basics of these sports, but I daresay few really watch anything more than how cute the football players’ butts look in those tight pants, or how baseball players spend an inordinate amount of time scratching their privates and adjusting certain necessary athletic equipment that’s worn under the uniform.
In fact, that may be the crux of the problem: Women cannot achieve credibility as sports reporters with men because we know they’ve never worn a jock strap. And if they have, I don’t want to read an inside look at the problems of the Atlanta Braves’ pitching staff written by some woman who obviously has problems of her own.
If women winning their way into press boxes wasn’t enough (and it wasn’t), women later insisted that they also be allowed to go into the locker rooms in order to hear the pearls of wisdom that players dispatch to the press following the games. I speak from authority here, because for many years it was my job to go into dressing rooms and to be the recipient of these pearls.
Players say things like: “Well, you know, I, you know, caught the, you know, ball, and then, you know, I ran, you know, just as fast, you know, as I, you know, could, and I, you know, would like to, you know, give, you know, God the credit, you know, for, you know, making me, you know, a, you know, rich superstar.”
While the players are, you know, treating the press to these marvelous exhibitions of their ability to express themselves, you know, they normally are quite naked. I’m not certain what it is about ball players, but they like to sit around naked a lot, dangling their participles at whomever happens by to speak with them.
When women first attempted to enter players’ locker rooms, authorities tried to block them. But a court order here and a court order there, and suddenly post-game dressing rooms, with the players sitting in front of their lockers and all sorts of women running around with notepads, looked like a Saturday afternoon flea market.
When women no longer could be kept out of dressing rooms, most players were forced to put on bathrobes. I have noticed over the past few years that athletes do not seem nearly as dedicated and don’t hustle and give their all as much as they once did. This could be due to the fact that they no longer can look forward to sitting around naked after games.
“I mean, you know, before these, you know, broads started, you know, coming in here, you know, asking a lot of, you know, questions, and looking, you know, at us like we were, you know, just big hunks of, you know, meat, we could, you know, relax after the, you know, game. Man, we could, you know, sit here without no, you know, clothes on, and sort of, you know, mellow out and, you know, think about next year’s, you know, contract. You know what I mean?”
I know exactly what they mean. Men enjoy and relish the companionship of other men. They simply need to be off with other men occasionally, with no women around, so they can feel comfortable expressing their thoughts and frustrations and can pass gas without having to apologize for it. (Incidentally, that’s how the Jaycees originally grew to be such a large and popular organization. I think women are going to be terribly disappointed when they join the Jaycees and find out that it was nothing more than a bunch of guys getting together once a week to have some lunch and talk about raising money for charities and passing gas in peace.)
Men learn some of the most important lessons in life from hanging around with other men. Let’s take baseball, for instance. Baseball is a man’s game. Women get more involved with football because it’s played only once a week and there’s a lot of pageantry involved, but women think baseball is dull.
“Why doesn’t somebody do something?” they ask when the tension has reached the cutting edge in a baseball game. Meanwhile, the manager in the dugout is flashing signals to the third-base coach, who relays them to the batter; the catcher is trying to keep the runner on second base from stealing his signal to the pitcher; and the pitcher is signaling a pick-off attempt to the shortstop. And she asks why doesn’t somebody do something.
In addition to that, the hit-and-run is completely lost on most women, and no woman on earth, even an exceptionally smart one, can comprehend the infield fly rule and why baseball simply wouldn’t work very well without it.
I played baseball from the time I was five until I was eighteen, and I learned all sorts of manly things that I probably couldn’t have learned anywhere else. I learned to cuss, for instance.
There are different curse words for different baseball situations. Let’s say you’ve just led off the game at the plate and the pitcher has struck you out. When you return, bat in hand, to the dugout, the other players always inquire, “What’s he got?”, meaning, Is the pitcher talented?
Baseball, a macho sport, is very competitive by nature. No man who has just struck out to start a game is about to give the pitcher any credit, so he always answers the above question by declaring, “The sonofabitch ain’t got a thing.”
“Come on!” the other players then beseech the second batter, “base hit him. The sonofabitch ain’t got a thing.”
There are also appropriate curse words to use when the umpire has called you out and you’re convinced you were safe; when you make an error and allow two unearned runs to score; when the manager did not pencil your name into the starting lineup; and when the sonofabitch who didn’t have a thing has struck you out for the fourth straight time. I’m making every attempt to keep this a fairly-clean book, however, so please use your imagination to figure out which cuss words fit which of the previously-listed situations.
I also learned a lot of clichés playing baseball — clichés that could be used later in life as well, but clichés that women never understand.
There was “can of corn,” for example. When somebody lofts a lazy fly ball to the outfield, the cliché everybody uses is, “can of corn.” That means it’s a simple out. Later, when another man asks you, “Think you’re going to score with Roxanne Smitherington tonight?”, you can boast, “Can of corn,” meaning, turn out the lights, the party’s over.
“Caught looking” is a cliché used when a batter looks at a third strike without swinging. When a man knows his wife is running around on him and doesn’t do anything to stop the illicit relationship (such as attempting to beat the other man over the head with a fungo bat) and his wife eventually ditches him for the other man, he is said to have been “caught looking.”
“It’ll look like a line drive in the box score in the morning,” is another great baseball cliché. It also may be adapted to a sexual situation. In baseball, “It’ll look like a line drive in the box score in the morning” means you have reached base safely, but you haven’t hit the ball very hard. I once hit a ball off the end of my bat. It landed on the rightfield foul line spinning like a top.
The ball spun under the concession stand, and by the time the right fielder retrieved it, I was on third base with a triple. In the box score that ran in the weekly paper, however, there was a “1” by my name under the hit column. For all anybody who wasn’t at the game knew, I had knocked the cover off the ball.
Now, for the sex part. Let’s say a man is out with his girl and he wants to fondle her breasts. At first, she won’t allow it, but then she says she’ll let him feel a little, but she won’t take off her blouse.
She asks, “Is that enough for you?”
And if he has played baseball at some point in his life, he answers, “Sweetheart, it’ll look like a line drive in the box score in the morning.” That means, wait ’til you hear how he describes what happened to his pals when he runs into them the next morning.
* * *
Playing baseball also brings men closer together. Men who play baseball together, like men who fight wars together, always have a common bond between them.
When we were ten, Danny Thompson and I went to the county seat of Newnan to try out for Little League baseball. This was official, bonafide Little League, with new balls and bats and uniforms and smooth infields with lights and grown men to coach.
We had played the game before, but only in Danny’s yard or over at the school playground, where there was always only one bat and one tattered ball, with electrical tape around it, that would get lost in the high weeds three or four times an hour, forcing the game to halt for a search.
And there were never enough gloves or players to go around. We played four-on-four or, at best, five-on-five. You left the glove you were wearing in the field when it came your time to bat, and since we never had enough players to have a rightfielder, if you hit the ball to rightfield, God forbid, you were out.
I wanted desperately to make the Little League team in Newnan. I was shaking in my Keds the afternoon Danny’s father drove us for our first tryout.
The city kids from Newnan looked so much bigger than I felt, and some even wore regulation caps and baseball shoes with rubber cleats. We had heard that Newnan had a lot of rich people, but we didn’t know they were that rich. Every kid had his own glove.
I got cut the first day, but Danny made the team. It broke my heart. I was ashamed that he had made the team and I hadn’t, and I missed him those summer afternoons when he was in Newnan playing official Little League baseball and I was stuck at home swatting rocks with a broomstick out in the gravel driveway.
A summer later, however, I got a break. Of all the wonderful things that ever could have happened, the Baptist church in Moreland decided to sponsor a boys’ baseball team, and it would play teams from other Baptist churches around the county.
Of course, I was a Methodist at the time, but I was fully willing to become a Baptist in order to make the team.
Before I could go through with my plan to switch denominations, however, the Baptist deacons voted to allow any boy in town who could run, hit, catch, and pitch to play on the team, thus saving me a dunking in the Baptist pool which always seemed to be covered with green scum, water bugs, and an occasional dragonfly.
We even were provided uniforms and new bats and new balls, and such was the excitement around town that several members of the team even received new gloves from their parents. I did, too, but the story isn’t that simple.
My stepfather, H.B., had been a permanent member of our household for approximately a year when the Baptist church started its baseball team. He and I were not getting on together. My real father had been a pushover, but H.B. insisted on regular chores, on regular bedtimes, and on cleaning my plate, even if we were having liver.
In contrast to my father, H.B. knew little of sport. He attempted one afternoon to play catch with me, but I quickly noticed that he threw the ball with far too much wrist. “You never played baseball?” I asked him.
“Never had time,” he answered. “There isn’t time for anything else but work on a tobacco farm.”
I wasn’t impressed. With my childlike reasoning, I even lost some respect for the man. I think he sensed that.
I had a baseball glove, but it was old and the rawhide strings that held it together were falling loose all about it. I came home from the first practice with the Moreland team in tears. I had seem all my teammates sporting new gloves. I cried in my mother’s arms.
“Maybe you’ll get a new glove for your birthday,” she suggested.
A lot of help she was. My birthday wasn’t until October.
I knew what sort of glove I wanted. I had seen it at the hardware store in Newnan. It was a fielder’s glove with a deep pocket, and it was autographed by Pee Wee Reese of the Dodgers. It cost thirteen dollars. I often went to sleep dreaming of that glove.
A couple of days after my tearful scene with my mother, she told me that H.B. wanted to see me in their bedroom. I presumed the worst. He had something for me to do that would involve wheelbarrows and digging around in the dirt.
I walked into the bedroom as he was putting on his tie. “Look in the sack on the bed,” he said to me.
I picked up the sack and looked inside. It was a new baseball glove, but it wasn’t the glove I had wanted, the glove I had dreamed about. I had never even heard of the bush-leaguer who had lent his name to it.
“That what you wanted?” H.B. said.
“I wanted a Pee Wee Reese glove,” I answered.
“Who is Pee Wee Reese?” he asked.
That settled it. The man was totally without portfolio when it came to baseball. I threw the glove down and ran to my room crying.
I’m not certain when I realized that I had done something wrong. Perhaps it was in the night sometime, when I recalled the look on my stepfather’s face as he watched me peer into the sack.
He had made the move. He had known that his lack of baseball expertise had disappointed and frustrated me, so he had tried to surprise me with the new glove. He had reached out to me, but I had been ungrateful.
I never got over that awful thing I did to my stepfather — it grieves me even now — but I did attempt to make amends. I told him I was sorry. I even tried the glove. It wasn’t that bad a glove. The first game we played, H.B. came. I pitched and we won. After the game, he said, “You have a nice fastball.”
It is amazing what bonds baseball can develop between men ... and between boys and men.
* * *
It has been nearly thirty years, but I remember the Moreland Baptist lineup as vividly as ever: Danny Thompson played first; Bobby Entrekin was at second; Wayne Moore, the coach’s son, was at shortstop; Danny Boswell played third; Dudley Stamps caught; Charlie Moore was in the outfield with Mike Murphy and Eddie Estes. I pitched.
Pete Moore, “Mr. Pete” to us, was the coach. He was a short, heavy-set man of great baseball wisdom and patience. Perhaps his greatest move was to devise a plan to save our supply of new baseballs.
The problem was this: We played our home games on the Moreland School playground field. There was a wire backstop behind home plate, but it wasn’t much of one. Foul balls went over and through the backstop and usually landed inside a birddog pen directly behind the field.
Given the opportunity, birddogs will chew a baseball right down to the cork in a matter of seconds.
After the birddogs had chewed up enough foul balls to threaten possible cancellation of the rest of the season, Mr. Pete decided to station team reserves in the pen to retrieve the baseballs before the dogs could get to them. We called that position, naturally enough, “birddog.”
That’s how Eddie Estes, who later became one of the all-time great Moreland Baptist outfielders, learned to play the game. Eddie was two years younger than the rest of us. He was also a thin child but quick as a cat. And Eddie was persistent. He came to every practice and to every game, even though he never could break into a lineup made up of older boys. That was before Mr. Pete put Eddie at “birddog.”
Every game, when the rest of us would head out onto the field to take our positions, Eddie would go the other way and crawl inside the birddog pen behind the backstop. The training he got fighting birddogs for foul balls eventually made him into a defensive whiz.
He made the starting lineup the next season in centerfield. We were playing rival Grantville, as I recall, and I was pitching. The game reached the late innings tied.
Grantville had runners on with its slugger, one of the Massengale boys, at bat. What little curve ball I had, I hung to the Massengale boy.
The ball shot toward centerfield. Eddie turned his back toward the infield and ran. There was no fence, only a gully and a dirt road that was the centerfield boundary. A few steps before he reached the gully and the road, little Eddie jumped into the air and flung his glove skyward. When he came down, he tumbled into the gully out of sight.
He quickly emerged from the muddy pit, scratched and bleeding, but the ball was in his glove. The umpire called Massengale out. We won the game.
Mr. Pete embraced little Eddie when he returned to the bench. Mays robbing Wertz in the ’54 Series hadn’t been as dramatic.
“Eddie,” said Mr. Pete, “that was one of the best catches I have ever seen.”
“I was afraid not to catch it, Mr. Pete,” Eddie responded.
Mr. Pete asked him why.
“I was afraid that if I didn’t, you’d put me back at ‘birddog.’”
* * *
There are instances now, of course, of girls actually playing Little League baseball. If she can go to her right and hit line drives, then I suppose it would be terribly unfair to keep her off the team. But I’m still old-fashioned enough that I’d be shocked if I heard a nine-year-old girl, who had just struck out to start the game, come back to the dugout and tell her teammates, “The sonofabitch ain’t got a thing.”
What concerns me even more is, I’m not certain how many boys are playing baseball today. It seems to me that too many of them are playing soccer.
I dislike soccer immensely. It’s a dull sport and it is not American. They play it mostly in those weird countries where the government changes hands every two or three days, supporting my suspicion that soccer is also a game that encourages political upheaval and anarchy.
All a person needs to play soccer is wind enough to run up and down a field for several hours and agility enough to bounce a ball off his head. Anybody can learn to run up and down a field for several hours, and I’ve watched seals in the circus bounce balls off their heads. On the other hand, I’ve never seen a soccer player who could dive underwater and come back with a dead fish in his mouth.
Kids are playing soccer all over America today, but are there any great soccer clichés? Of course not. People are too busy running up and down the field to think of any. As I explained before, in baseball there’s all sorts of time to sit around in the dugout and think of clever things to say, like when an opposing player makes a stupid error and you say, “Nice move, Ex-Lax.”
In baseball, you not only have to be able to run, but you also have to learn to bat and to catch and to throw and to slide and to spit. All baseball players spit. I doubt they ever spit in soccer, except when they fall down and get a mouthful of grass.
Once I was in London and, because there was nothing better to do, I switched on the BBC and watched the English soccer (they call it football, which is ridiculous) championship game. (After you’ve walked through Harrod’s and been over to Buckingham Palace, London can be even more boring than soccer.)
One side would kick the ball down to the end of the field, and then the other team would kick it back. I’ve seen more excitement at county fair pick-up-the-duck games. The crowd, a hundred thousand or so, sang during the entire game. They apparently were just as bored as I was.
The players kicked the ball around for a couple of hours, and finally it hit a guy who wasn’t looking in the back of the head and went into the goal. After much running and kicking, the guys in green finally had themselves a soccer championship by the score of 1-0.
I’m afraid that when today’s young soccer players become adults, they’re going to be terribly boring people and perhaps even a little fuzzy from having soccer balls bounce off their heads for so many years.
What really worries me, however, is the great number of today’s youth who don’t play baseball or soccer. They’re in shopping malls playing those damned video games. They’re all going to grow up, I fear, to have big buglike eyes from staring into too many video screens. Just listening to the infernal beeping noises those games make is enough to drive kids goofy. And trying to shoot down all those asteroids in a matter of seconds also will make a child extremely nervous and frustrated, and they may all wind up with the same bad case of the shakes overworked air controllers get.
We played indoor games when I was a kid, too, but we played educational games like rotation pool and nine-ball, which teach a youngster such important lessons as how to put reverse English on the cue ball while squinting through the smoke coming out of the cigarette he’s holding in his mouth at the time.
There weren’t any women allowed in pool halls, either, which offered further opportunity for male development. Girls today walk into video game arcades big as you please, and there’s even a female version of “Pac-Man” — “Ms. Pac-Man,” if you will.
I haven’t checked to see, but if there’s still a Boy’s Life magazine, it probably carries advertisements for feminine hygiene spray these days.
* * *
One of the few remaining all-male holdouts is college fraternities. So far, women have been content to remain in their sororities. Belonging to a fraternity offers all sorts of opportunities for companionship with other men without women around. You can drink beer together and play cards together and think up nasty Homecoming floats together, and the older brothers will be available to keep you abreast of the proper way to conduct yourself as a young gentleman on campus.
I pledged Sigma Pi fraternity my freshman year at the University of Georgia. They were a great bunch of guys, the frat house was a beautiful old Southern mansion, and it was the only fraternity that offered me a bid.
Fraternity rush in my day was helpful to a young man, because it gave him the opportunity to test his fragile male ego, and it supported his theory that the more macho he acted, the better chance he had of making other young men like him.
Basically, rush worked like this: You walked into a large house filled with strangers. You had worn your best suit — your only suit, in my case — and you had doused yourself heavily with Old Spice, which your father wore. You went around shaking hands with members of the fraternity you happened to be visiting.
If your father had been a member of the fraternity and also was wealthy, you didn’t have a lot to worry about. You probably could have managed a bid wearing pajamas and flip-flops. If you had no such legacy, then it was important that you did everything possible to make a good impression on the brothers.
“The most important thing,” I had been told, “is to make certain you squeeze hard when you shake hands.”
Nothing, of course, gives a man away like a soft handshake. Girls and wimps and nerds have handshakes that feel like you’ve just grasped a recently-departed grouper. Real men, the kind of men you would want in your fraternity, squeeze your hand firmly. Strength of grip was second only to size of genitalia in determining manhood. All this likely dates back to the days of the cave men, when they ran around naked and choked each other.
Each time I was extended a hand during rush, I made certain that I offered a firm shake in return. By the time I walked into my third fraternity house, my hand felt like a beer truck had run over it. I continued to squeeze firmly anyway, doing my best to ignore the pain and taking a certain amount of comfort in the fact that it was the handshake, not the aforementioned first measure of manhood, that was being checked.
There was something else I had been warned about when I went through rush. If you are included in a group that is taken on a tour of the plumbing system of the fraternity house, that particular fraternity probably doesn’t want you even to be seen on its property, much less want you to be a member.
The first house I visited was SAE. From various sources, I had learned that SAE was a very prestigious fraternity and that girls from the spiffier sororities loved to date SAE’s. The SAE house was nice. I especially enjoyed seeing how the water pipes in the basement were insulated so they wouldn’t freeze during the wintertime.
Next, I went to Sigma Nu. They didn’t show me the pipes, but they did herd me over into a corner with two exchange students and a kid with a case of terminal acne.
I didn’t do any better at Phi Delta Theta, either. One of the brothers took me and two other rushees — one of whom wore thick glasses and stuttered and the other who was wearing white socks — back to the kitchen and left us with the cooks, who were peeling potatoes.
I thought I might do much better at Kappa Sig. My first cousin happened to be chapter president. When I finally was able to corner him, however, he not only disavowed our kinship, he also swore — in a very loud voice so his brothers could hear him — that he had never seen nor heard of me before. My keen deductive senses alerted me to the fact that I might as well write off any future as a Kappa Sig.
At the Kappa Alpha house, they sang “Dixie” and told stories about Robert E. Lee. The brothers there treated me like a direct descendant of William T. Sherman. I got the pipe treatment again at Sigma Chi, and at ATO they asked me to wait out on the porch until the bus came back to pick up the rushees.
I was close to giving up on any chance at becoming a fraternity man when I walked up the stone pathway to the Sigma Pi house, an impressive antebellum structure with large white columns and rocking chairs on the front porch. To my utter surprise, the brothers never mentioned one word about the Sigma Pi plumbing system and they seemed generally interested in me and what I had to say.
They showed me the party room and the jukebox, and they took me downstairs to something called the “Boom-Boom Room,” which featured a sawdust floor, booths in which to sit, and all varieties of neon beer signs. This, I determined, was where the brothers of Sigma Pi brought their dates.
“This is probably where you bring your dates,” I said knowingly to the brother giving me the tour. I might have been fresh out of high school, but I wasn’t a complete dummy.
“Good thinking,” said my guide. “Now, let’s go over here to the toilet and see if you can figure out what we do there.”
I figured I was dead after that. But, to my complete surprise, I was invited back to Sigma Pi the very next night, and when the bids went out, they offered me one. I was elated but also quite concerned. If nobody else wanted me, why would Sigma Pi, and did I really want to be a member of a fraternity that would accept the likes of me? My ego was in shambles, again.
I asked a friend, who had just accepted a bid from Phi Delt, what I should do.
“Take it,” he said, “before they change their minds.”
I pledged Sigma Pi and was later initiated and eventually became totally content with my membership. At my fraternity, we had a rigid code regarding responsible, manly behavior. I’ll just hit a few high spots.
—AT A PARTY: Never throw up on your date. If you feel like you must throw up, go outside and do it in the parking lot. We’ll make the pledges clean it up the next morning.
Never attempt to climb onto the bandstand and sing with the band until everybody is bad drunk and won’t notice you making a total fool of yourself.
If you think you have the opportunity to engage in amorous activity with your date, do not take her to any of the upstairs bedrooms. We do not want coeds to see the scummy conditions in which we live.
If you have to go to the bathroom, do not go on the shrubbery outside the fraternity house. Shrubbery is too expensive to replace. Go on the tires of somebody you don’t like.
—AT FRATERNITY HOUSE DINNERS: If you do not like a certain dish, such as asparagus stalks, do not hurl it at members sitting at another table. Also, do not spit English peas at tablemates and do not drink directly from the syrup container.
—WHEN PARENTS VISIT: Hide all booze, 8mm skinflicks, condoms, love dolls, firearms and explosives, poker chips, dead animals, roach collections for Saturday night roach races, and any stolen goods.
If you have any books, spread them around your room, and if somebody’s parents ask your major and you can’t remember, say you’re undecided between pre-med and animal husbandry.
—PROPER ATTIRE: Never wear socks with your Weejuns.
—IN CLASS: If it is absolutely necessary that you go, sit in the back of the classroom and do not ask any questions, so when you don’t come back for another two weeks, perhaps the professor won’t notice that you’re missing.
If you thought you had a copy of the exam the night before, but then the professor hands you a test that has questions you’ve never even heard of, pretend to have some sort of fit and maybe they’ll take you to the infirmary.
—WHEN ARRESTED: Never indicate you were part of a conspiracy involving other members of the fraternity. We are a loyal brotherhood and will make the pledges fork over enough money for your bail.
My fraternity brothers were a rather diverse lot. I had one brother who rose to the presidency of the Interfraternity Council, a rare and prestigous honor. I had another who pilfered wallets. We called him “Robin Hood.”
I had fraternity brothers who majored in pre-Law and pre-Med. I had others who majored in Bubber’s Bait Shop and threw up on the sawdust floor in the Boom-Boom Room. I had a fraternity brother known as “Odd-Job” because of his physical likeness to the Oriental goon who was an aide to Dr. No in the James Bond movie of the same name. I was frightened of Odd-Job, especially after I saw what he did to another fraternity brother’s stereo.
It was an otherwise quiet evening on the second floor of the house where Odd-Job, for the first time in his collegiate career, actually had decided to study. This was difficult for him, however, because his roommate, who was known as “Seaweed” because his father had been a famous Marine war hero, was playing Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs’s “Wooley Bully” over and over again on his stereo. Several times, Odd-Job had informed Seaweed that if he didn’t quit playing the record he would tear Seaweed into small pieces and let God sort them out.
Seaweed was a stubborn person, however. Also, a stupid one. When Odd-Job had finally had enough of Seaweed and “Wooley Bully,” he walked over to the stereo, took the record off, and began biting it into tiny pieces, spitting out the pieces directly at the startled Seaweed. Odd-Job then picked up the stereo, ripped the plug out of the wall, and threw it out the second story window, rendering it a crumpled mass of electronic innards. He had Seaweed, himself, halfway out the window when cooler heads informed Odd-Job that if he murdered Seaweed, Dean Tate probably would put us on social probation and we couldn’t have a party for the entire fall quarter.
“Then, you live, swine,” said Odd-Job to Seaweed. He then went back to memorizing the Emily Dickinson poem he had been assigned in English Lit class.
* * *
Belonging to a college fraternity, as playing baseball had done, provided me with wonderful memories, lifelong friends, and even the opportunity to see racial harmony at its best.
As near as I can remember, a white band never set foot in the Sigma Pi house party room between the years of 1964 and 1968. White bands simply couldn’t make a party come alive and turn into a raging inferno of dancing and screaming the way a black band could.
The civil rights movement was at its peak in the early sixties, but when the music was good and the beer was cold, everybody in the party room was in it together.
It was a start to the sort of feelings that eventually led Ray Charles and George Jones to record an album together; that is the very essence of racial harmony, and music was the medium.
Fortunately, this discussion can end on a further positive note. Kids today may be playing a lot of soccer when they should be playing baseball, but I hear that fraternities and the Greek system, much maligned in the seventies, are making a comeback on college campuses. I even hear that the kids are out of Army fatigues and back into Weejuns and khakis, and that many of them are now shunning drugs for beer.
These are good signs, my fellow Americans, good signs, indeed. Not all elements of modern life have gone to hell and rust.
Now, if somebody would just tell me where I could get the sort of French fries that God intended, the kind that are cut fresh in the kitchen and have never been frozen, I might even be able to see a small, twinkling of light at the end of this tunnel. “God Save the French Fry!” Won’t somebody hear my plaintive cry in the wilderness of gastronomic silliness?