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A Bunch of Assholes

Patrick Fealey

    the girl was talking me upstairs, but i stuck with the pool table. i lied. i told her i had a girlfriend. it didn’t work. she was pitching her body, but i was sober enough to keep my focus. if there were pigs, as i had been told there were, she was the breed that nagged. i ignored her and she finally went away. i played pool and drank. some time later she was back. she had made herself more attractive. she was now talking with a real asshole, a brother i did not get along with.
    i requisitioned or appropriated but definitely snorted some coke from the refrigerator and got the idea to go looking to nail her. i would find her. i would take her. i was her first choice. i was blind drunk. the allegation later was that my cock went through a door. she was on the other guy. he looked to see my hard-on. she turned to look. it was me, the one she no longer wanted. the guy could not move fast enough and i got away.
    the next day, he wasn’t taking it as well as most would have, but this brother and i had never gotten along. he was a forceful jersey kid who boasted two things, himself, and himself, louder. i had disrespected him and he was a brother. i was a mere boarder and pledge. the house treasurer was okay about it. he and a few other brothers were amused, knew what a shit this brother was. others just said i was a primitive. the treasurer also said i would have to pay for the door my cock had split open. i did not remember doing anything, so it was hard to find money for the door. most of what i had was tied up in the refrigerator. i was not going to stop my war on the war on drugs just because of some fickle cunt. next night, the asshole was running the halls, poking his dick through the doorways, asking guys to sniff the asshole on his cock. you could smell her at ten feet.
    i lived in a fraternity. i’m not into organized group activities, but i pledged because i wanted to prolong what i was experiencing while living there as a boarder. as it turned out, i became a brother and then quit school. i never lived there as a brother. when i returned to school six months later, i avoided my own house because i wanted to get some credits and stay out of jail.
    it had all started near the end of one summer when i needed a place to live for september. i rented a room in this house because it was prominent. it sat high on a hill and had a pulse. i had been drinking at this house since freshman year and had heard some of the best live bands there, guys who played showcase gigs at cbgb and refused to be fucked over by labels. two of these bands played their very first gigs in this basement. the house had more parties than any other fraternity on campus. they were also bigger and louder, when desired. as an outsider, i got drunk and high but did not know the effects of living there, the allure of everyday decadence and its price.
    there were a few other boarders, all of us outsiders inside the big house, but we got to know the brothers and many of us pledged. it seemed logical. we were at home.
    the college president and his administration, the various boards of higher education, as well as most members of the greek system did not like our house. nothing good came from our house. they wanted us out. we were illegitimates, posing at students. when some big magazine chose the respected but dull university the number one party school in the country, it was bad press for the president and good press for us: our basement was the epicenter. of course, this good press shattered our exile, evaporated the last of their tolerance and complacence. we were ugly and we were in the open. partying in general was on the president’s agenda, but we had undercover agents and lawyers devoted to us. partying is a vague and very inclusive word, but at our house it wasn’t.
    a sorority which had not heard the story of our gang rape the year before asked for a “social” and ventured over. the girls left inside 20 minutes, wrote us a letter on 100% cotton stationery to complain about our noxious charisma, how they had expected to be treated like women, ladies, humans, not cursed as crustaceans. they expected an apology for our not providing the type of penis they were shopping for. we offered no apology. we couldn’t remember who they were.
    i pledged because i’d become friends with a few of the guys and life as a brother would be better than life as a boarder. i didn’t know that by the time I’d become a brother i’d be opening letters from the college of arts and sciences, informing me i’d pissed away two grade points. life as a pledge had been more difficult than life as a boarder. you were supposed to be included, feel a part of something, but i didn’t. the brothers saw this too. they almost booted me twice during pledging and hazed me and one other guy with extra intensity. i had a problem with the frat shit of frat. i had come to the house for the chemicals, not the camaraderie. i had a problem that was innate and not specific or intentional and it made me look like i couldn’t or wouldn’t stay inside my caste.
    the brother behind the door i broke down, he headed the gang who wanted me out. we never got along or spoke before or after that night. my presence made him sick. this was acceptable, but unfortunately he was a junior with status and he was into authority. this is the true reason i went through his door. our dislike was a visceral and instant, an inextinguishable agitation. he caught up with me on the door a few days later, took me to the floor from behind when i could hardly stand. he tore out a piece if my scalp. aside from him, nobody gave a damn about the door. that said a lot. shit happened. funny shit. the treasurer was not negative, just asked for the money for a semester. i know that the brother considered me irresponsible, a slob, a chronic and amateur drunk, a faggot because i played trumpet and guitar, and worse, i was a strain of psychotic he suspected was a danger to his existence. i considered him soulless and from new jersey. his views were outvoted after i recited the history of ancient greece, provided lee iacocca’s eyeglass prescription, and correctly guessed the volume of the shit in alan shepard’s space suit. i was also required to nail two girls in a shopping cart on the streets of boston. i was allowed to stay, but my commitment remained in doubt.
    a chapter in new york city sent its pledges our way for some indoctrination and abuse its brothers were unable to deliver. we were also one of mit’s challenges, though to those fucks we were more spectacle than mentors. we did not make any efforts with them. despair spreads like fleas and they split at the sight of blood. they drove back to houses which respected the ideals of brotherhood, of truth, temperance, tolerance, connections, unity, study, community service and pine sol. our noise and odor threatened the legitimacy of the greek system, no place more than at the respected but dull university. we had an active and large greek system with a long history at the university and we were bringing it down. our house got the headlines, all of them in the police beat, but mostly our problem was word of mouth, people telling the truth. when the university president alluded to troubles, he was pointing to our degeneracy. when he proposed a dry campus, which he one day would achieve, he had his hands around our tap. that president died before he ever saw a university without greeks, but a greek system looking over its shoulder every night was satisfactory. anyhow, he tried. nobody could mind his own business. it was our tuition money and health, yet our brown shingled mansion was watched and eventually infiltrated. we knew about the undercover cops immediately. we were an irish house and we had friends, fans, customers on the police department. cops tipped us off to the cops. we were aware, if not alert. these spies were agents of the war on cocaine, the war on meisterbrau, the war on consensual underaged sex, the war for morality, the war on prostitution, the war on groundbreaking music, the war on dirty socks and cheese omelets, the war on horse dung, the war on our war on their obscene expectation that their needed to be a war. we were under surveillance by agents who dreamt of a campus where you could only find a beer in the police evidence locker.
    while the president plotted against alcohol and sex, we got fucked, certain that a dry campus was his fantasy. beer was more american than any law addressing it. the school was fine the way it was, as long as you were fucked up enough not to notice how dull and stifling it was. our ways were proven. our alumni wrote for the times and globe, cnn, flew into space, found the titanic, headed gigantic corporations. the agents did not see or appreciate the role of beer in learning, it’s place in the history of the exceptional. there was jealousy and hypocrisy behind the zeal with which the agents influenced and executed the ideas of the state, which said the elimination of beer would save the town and attract parents who could pay the sickeningly rising tuitions. in essence, a sterilization was underway and it started with our basement. i got out of the house the year before i left for a California university, where i surfed sober instead of pissing proteins. i was back and to work, out of the plastic factory and at a marine supply store. it should have been my junior year, but i was looking at two more years. this fact kept me sober and away from the house. i was uncomfortable there. dry, it seemed more like a bus station. i spent more time on the waves and more time reading books. i went to classes, not to parties. i had studied my lack of self-restraint and learned that i was one of the weakest guys i had ever known. I realized I was an alcoholic.
    i remember some of the girls. i wasn’t indiscriminate, but the brothers decided to call me “pigger” after seeing me with a few girls they wouldn’t admit to having fucked. if you were seen with one of these girls, you were a pigger. if you were not seen with one of them, the next morning you were bragging in the shower about an exploit. to me, they were essential girls to whom i did not have to lie, impress, convince. i did not have to work. lies, dumb conversation was too much to go through. talk was not a stage of familiarization. it was spontaneous. it was chemistry. these girls would have fucked other guys that night, just as i would have fucked other girls. our air was interchangeability. there were combinations out there. a pairing was not special, and there would be no life beyond the physical duration, but it was not all thoughtless and mechanized either. neither would fuck just anybody. we knew the somebody. we were familiar. most of the girls i brought to my room had better characters than i had. some had class. they knew what they were doing in bed. they came out of their clothes as beautifully as a new girlfriend. new is not superficial. it was very affecting. less deeply, more madly. by noon the next day you had reassured yourself that it had been just sex. it was just sex because it appeared painless. you felt intact, undamaged by the encounter. you were strong. this is how i felt, what i thought, and went with. i think now that i may have overlooked some of them. i doubted nights of vulnerability, sacrifice, openness. it was in the words before the word was in my cock. they were not lies. i did not conceal myself or my absence. love was not a bargaining tool. these moments were tuned for a kid who was shy and rough, an unsure kid who liked things silently in the open. i did not consider myself charming. i was honest and careless. my whores were not deluded or tyrannical. they were not sluts or cunts. they gave with equal honesty and carelessness. my girls gave themselves away to the one they were with, fully, carelessly, maybe foolishly. from beginning to end, they were romantics.
    i kept my actual girlfriends away from the whores and also from the brothers. they were too lady-like to bring into that den. the brothers would have pounced and had a whore connected me to a girlfriend, their jealousy would have left me with nothing. lizzy, heather, liz, susan. these girls were beautiful and they were normal. only once did one of them enter that house and that was during thanksgiving break, liz. she didn’t like it. she is a doctor now in Chicago (OBGYN). three of these girls were bitches from rich families who i endured for the sex, one for sex and conversation. these girls were kept ignorant of the whores because they would have dumped me. either that or they would have cut me off and wanted to talk about them. the one-nighter whores might have been jealous of the girlfriends and the other whores. some whores knew of the other whores and at least suspected there was a more serious pussy out there. it was silent. understandings. those absences. they had their own secrets, like cindy, who i’ll get to soon.. i was honest when i said there was no main pussy, no the pussy. anyhow, these whores were not whores, they were “real whores” and when a real whore gets jealous it makes you sadder, it does not make you duck. real whores spoil you. a serious girlfriend, heather was a sweet girl, but a little dull. she was from anaheim. a music major, drums. she exploded into tears when i dumped her. it was over the phone. she was at work, the bawling receptionist i wanted to shake off the line. i treated them all well up until the last second. there were too many last seconds to live with, but I endured the fact that i was an asshole. i would have regrets later, when I realized I had ditched more than one perfect woman.
    cindy was not a whore or a slut or a lady and she has stayed with me. cindy was a tall blonde whose face was scarred by acne. she was a punk rocker. some could not embrace her, though her laugh was big and kind. she was sharp in bed, as sensual as i have known. if i met her today i would ask her out because i now know how rare she was and maybe i would want to marry her. what did i do then? i came and passed out. i waited in the morning, faked sleep until she left. when i realized i needed a second day, i got it. but a third day was too serious. while i was out avoiding her, she brought cookies to the room. the cookies did it. i called her and that was the end. i liked her, but i did not want her coming over with cookies. she didn’t fit there, not if she was going to turn from whore to cunt, come around during the day wanting to hold my hand. a girlfriend who was a whore was a liability. i ignored her. i saw her once not long after we had hooked up. she was in the pool room with her girlfriend. there were a few of us watching the game. i felt bad, but cold enough. i watched the game. she stayed late, back from the table, uninterested in the game. she was there with a purpose, but i didn’t go over or bump into her. i never spoke to her. the guy with me didn’t know about cindy and me but he was looking at her. he wouldn’t shut up about her. her body. i remember her body, but i am remembering things i did not even know. she was not what i had thought, but when are they? i am surrounded by strangers again.
    fall semester at humboldt state i received a letter from bob, my buddy from all the way back to high school. he had joined the fraternity the semester after i’d moved out. with the letter was a newspaper clipping. the house had finally been raided by the agents. the school had shut us down and booted us off campus. the house was emptied. agents had seized a stockpile of morphine and pharmaceuticals, as well as $20,000 in cocaine and a xerox copy machine, which we had stolen from the university library one night – a most astonishing feat of stealth, muscle, magic, and balls - also accomplished with beer. bob was there when the agents descended and he said they tried to impound his motorcycle as “evidence.” they assumed it was stolen. it was parked on the side porch and bob argued that the porch did not fall under the warrant, which targeted specific things inside the house. the honda was not in-side the house, but was sitting on it and out of it and was not stolen. the morphine and coke allowed agents to do what they had been hoping to do for years: imprison young people. two brothers, one a post-graduate pharmacist and former president, went to prison. the house was shut down with no protest from our national chapter, which had owned the building since the 1930s. their lack of support was a most damning silence. we were, in their eyes, the most fucked-up assholes to live in that house in 56 years. they kept the property. the brothers moved out, lived and met off campus, banished for what would be 14 years. an underground brotherhood, a fraternity less seen, talked about, but remembered, though less and less. the university put $175,000 into the old house to make it inhabitable and then designated it the new multi-cultural center. african american groups had offices and classes there. meetings were held in the living room where we had once held our bitch sessions, showed hard-core porn, and where morrissey’s horse took a dump one homecoming weekend. maybe six years after the eviction i was back in that house as a reporter, there to interview the director of the multi-cultural program about african american history month. they had removed our greek letters from the outside, but the sun had saved them. the shingles on the front of the house were weathered and bleached a sandy color, but the letters showed a deep brown. the agents could not kill us. inside, the place was recognizable by some wall angles and the location of the main stairs. the living room looked like it could have been itself, long wood floors and a fieldstone fireplace. there were a few people meeting in there, a small class. the place was beautiful. i interviewed the director in his new office, which occupied the space of two former rooms. one of the rooms had been the room of joe morrissey, the most successful drunk in the drunkest house at the alleged no. 1 party school in the country. think about that. morrissey also had the biggest stereo anyone had ever seen outside a 1,500 seat concert hall. it took four guys to move one speaker. morrissey had quit school well before i got there. he had become an ironworker and just kept living where he had eight taps in his house. Morrissey’s mustache was red, thick, freed. hungover, he looked perturbed, like every day was the same hangover.
    one stride we had made as a house came when we accepted a black pledge, the first in half a century. but he quit.
    morrissey had been at the house when i was a freshman, trying to get into parties. he was a lax doorman and when i was underage we always hoped to find him at the door, beer and cigarette in hand, greeting and not resisting us. so there was a continuity, it was reassuring to live in the same house. despite his age, he never approached a father figure, nor a big brother. he was closer to a 32-year-old grandfather. he had bright blue eyes, thick auburn hair and a way which seemed from someplace else. i never asked where he was from. morrissey boarded a horse at a stable nearby and would bring it over to watch porn. he owned a suit which he never wore, but too often put on.
    morrissey quit lunch after 20 martinis and drove back to campus with some guys in the bed of his pick-up. he splashed onto the lawn of our neighbors, a fraternity infested with italian weightlifters and jocks who wore oxfords and short hair. under their serious clothes, arms bulged like hormonally altered cantaloupes. they were more a cloister than a house and their parties were small and infrequent socials. they hazed in winter. the pledges’ knees froze to the ground. morrissey was tearing donuts into their lawn when he lost control of his truck and hit one of the fine white pillars which supported the front of the mansion. the pillar broke loose and fell flat. the roof dropped. and those weightlifters came out like hornets. they pulled morrissey from his truck and beat him the way 20 narcissistic jocks would beat up one drunk irish guy. our guys in the back of the truck escaped and were never called cowards. the next night, after waiting to sober up, morrissey came home. looking at him made me sick. his head was purple, swollen, torn. most of his head. sober, he turned himself in to police, who had been to the house looking for him. his truck was towed and the brothers next door spent the next few months on their front lawn, buzzing about their now asymmetrical nest. the bar where morrissey had downed his martinis was a regular spot for all us teenagers, and the owner, perhaps out of fear for his own roof, had a party to help morrissey raise money to pay for the damage. it was a big party and i met a sweet blonde from virginia. her father was in charge of an aircraft carrier. she came home with me and while she was riding my cock i noticed the human forms above leaning into the skylight. i gave them two thumbs up and they went away. i went out with her for two months. she had too much humility and never complained about me. it got dull. for the remainder of the semester, people coming in the main entrance to the university gawked at the fallen pillar.
    we had a student from cal-state northridge come out first semester. graham was a member of the cal-state northridge chapter. we called him grimace because he smiled so quick that he really never could stop smiling. he even smiled in his sleep, drunk and covered in shaving cream. a very laid back guy and one of the nicest in the house, though too goofy to confide in. he was constantly baited and always fooled. he believed everything. he smiled at everything. i guess he was insane, but this never occurred to us. he had come east with some personal goals. he wanted to ride a bicycle across rhode island so he could say he had ridden a bike across a state. which he did, a 40-mile-wide grin. he was stopped by state troopers for riding on i-95, but they let him go when he explained what he was doing. the grimace. his other goal was snow. he wanted to see snow. he had never seen snow. he never shut up asking when the snow would come. he started in september, when flowers were still in bloom. he wanted to know when and how much snow he would get to see. he waved about his farmer’s almanac and asked us to confirm snowfall statistics. we couldn’t recall the previous year’s snowfall, so we made up shit to calm his nerves. he believed us. after three months of his escalating anticipation, a decent storm hit, maybe 6 inches of packable powder. grimace ran out onto the front lawn. he danced in circles with his palms up, grinning with flakes in his hair. those of us watching could not stand his euphoria. we didn’t think he was getting a complete education on the subject. he would be escaping west just as the new england winter got blowing. he would be back in southern california, telling his brothers that snow was not that bad, that it was actually fun and very beautiful. that would be in three weeks. three weeks of winter was not very long. we contemplated his palm trees and came up with tough love. somebody found some rope. we moved off the porch to join grimace in his snow dance, which he was performing before a jam of cars leaving the university. we surrounded him. three of us tackled him and another tied his hands behind him. he would have put up a fight if he had known. we dragged him to a telephone pole, bound him to it with circles of rope. the rope was tight around his middle. he laughed, looked worried, smiled. he misjudged our severity. he was facing the commuters. he had on his usual, a thin, short-sleeved shirt, with no t-shirt. hairy chest. you want snow? this is snow. it fell and accumulated in his black hair and went down his shirt while we pelted his body and legs and head with snowballs. tears came out of his face. he was a sensitive guy, grimace, and while he whimpered, passersby looked over at the execution in horror. of course, no one got out of his car to help grimace. it was just a fraternity joke. we left him out there and went inside to drink. occasionally someone would open the front door to see if he was still tied to the pole, upright and moving. he was. but he was hanging lower each time we checked. less moving grimace, more white ice. hundreds of students inched past in stop-and-go traffic gawking at grimace hanging from the telephone pole. they were coming and going and i guess didn’t know how long he had been like this. i guess it occurred to none of them that grimace was resembling the crucifixion. eventually, death occurred to some of us and we went out and took him down. he had to let us help him walk in. grimace was not smiling. we had performed a miracle. we had changed a man. we had taught him. snow is hate.
    fourteen years after the bust, the national chapter had finally persuaded the respected but dull university to give our house a second chance. this was accomplished with money and rhetoric. the criminals and degenerates were long gone (now movers in the fortune 500 or dead). it was a new generation of young men now and they should not be associated with the decadents who were in the house when they were in kindergarten. there would be a new fraternity, one with morals and polished floors, a higher g.p.a. and positive participation within the greek system and university community. the return was inevitable, if not promised. the university relented after a few “donations” and allowed our heirs to re-occupy the beautiful mansion. the national chapter had agreed to pay for the restoration the school had made, which by then was near a quarter-million dollars. i thought that pretty loyal of them and wondered why we had not been thrown some cash for carpets when I lived there. anyhow, the national chapter could do this because it was rich. it was rich because alumni gave money. alumni gave money because they were successful and looked fondly upon their time spent drinking beer.
    on their first night back in the house, the young brothers threw a huge celebration party. they knew the history of their ancestors, knew why they had been marooned down the line and were hostile. they understood the reasons behind the punishment and saw that the punishment had exceeded the crimes. That night, the young brothers walked around the house pouring gasoline out of cans. satisfied with the stench, a match was lit and the fire department invited. agents rushed to the scene. what the fuck? but there was no “what the fuck?” it was revenge. backed by every law enforcement agency in the state, as well as the fire marshal’s conclusion that it was arson, the office of university affairs pointed to the charred and smoldering acre and said, once again, out. this time the national chapter agreed to sell the property to the university. the frat surrendered its hill. it was all over. some quiet administrative and accounting people moved in and have only been disturbed by an occasional copy of penthouse, addressed to some long lost asshole who is in the world now, scaring up a living, same positions, same orders, same goals.

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