writing from
Scars Publications

Audio/Video chapbooks cc&d magazine Down in the Dirt magazine books

 

Order this writing in the collection book
Life on the Edge

this huge volume is available for only $2395
Life on the Edge

This appears in a pre-2010 issue
of cc&d magazine.
Saddle-stitched issues are no longer
printed, but you can requesting it
“re-released” through amazon sale
as a 6" x 9" ISBN# book!
Email us for re-release to order.

cc&d v174

The Pledge

Pat Dixon

    Delta Iota Pi is not our fraternity’s real name, but during the past three years it just as well could be. Everybody on campus openly calls us the DIPs, including ourselves sometimes, and I have to admit that our last two groups of pledges brought together the biggest collection of social losers, nerds, fruit cakes, and all-around a-holes ever assembled in one frat house since this college first opened its doors sixty years ago. And, if we’re lucky, we can keep this title safely for the next three or four years.
    Like a lot of other private midwest colleges, our school has been on the brink of closing down since as far back as any of us can remember. This probably is why they began recruiting so many of us easterners who have never belonged to its founder’s faith and who never have to attend the mandatory chapel services.
    I won’t bother describing the campus or the town because I don’t want anybody to track down where we really are, but it turns out now that it’s lucky for us that they both are as sleepy-stupid as they’re sleepy-boring. My friend Tom Brown used to say, “The good news is, if the enemy ever capture these people, they’ll never get anything out of ’em.”
    The only non-brothers who ever come into our frat house now—except for Mother Wickersham, our housemother—are the fire inspectors and the dean of students, and all of them are suffering from old-timer’s disease and don’t suspect a thing. Or, rather, they probably suspect a lot of things about our majorly odd little brotherhood, but not, of course, the main thing.
    The doings that earned us the massively open contempt of our fellow students, Greeks and non-Greeks, males and (alas!) females, as well as most teachers, all administrators, and (less openly) many local merchants, are these: we have actively been recruiting our newest brothers from amongst the people that they consider the wretchedest refuse on campus. If a guy looks weak or geeky, we rush him. If he spends all his time locked inside his dorm room and is nicknamed “Portnoy,” we track him down and get him to pledge. If he has absolutely no friends, has never been on a single date in his whole life, and it seems like his parents left him here at this little college in hopes he’d never find his way back home, we beat a path to his little door and absolutely beg him on bended knees to join us.
    Not a single new jock or would-be stud or future B.M.O.C. ever gets invited to our rush parties. And no girls ever get asked up to our house—and at this point probably none of them would ever come here even if they were asked. As I say, sometimes even we call ourselves the DIPs, and the few of us who try to date usually have to drive to the city forty miles north of here where we’re not well known.
    This is my senior year, and I’ll be graduating in about four months—with high honors, to be truthful about it—if things keep going all right, that is. And I’m pleased to report that this year’s crop of pledges are the all-time dippiest bunch yet. Although the past three years have often been a real strain in many ways and I’ll be glad when I can leave here, I am pretty well pleased with what we’ve accomplished so far as a group—and I even like to take credit for at least some of the key policy decisions we’ve made. Of course, we aren’t out of the proverbial old woods yet, and probably we won’t be for at least three more years at the earliest, and of course the whole lug-nut thing can come tumbling in on us at almost any minute—possibly getting some of us sent to prison for a good chunk of time. Still, I’ve almost gotten used to living with our situation on a daily basis, and I usually don’t even worry about any aspect of it very much any more.
    This situation, as I call it, all started the night we had our last “normal” bunch of pledges here for a party. Mother Wickersham came down that night to our rec room for an hour or so to do her usual bit—smile and nod and mumble at the new guys—and we gave her some of the punch and cookies and let her see a few of the magic tricks before we helped her back to her little rooms on the first floor. Back in the old days we used to be grateful that she was mainly deaf and nearly always highly confused whenever we’d bring our dates in for the night, but now we consider her an even more valuable treasure.
    The magician we hired was the basic cause of the problem. A half dozen of the older brothers had seen him perform in a small nightclub in a city about fifty miles south of here, and he’d seemed like a really sharp guy, so they asked him if he ever did frat parties. His answer was yes, and his price was right.
    The Great Cardoza is what he called himself then, and he did a lot of those really neat looking tricks that you can see in the thick magic catalogues. For instance, he “produced” a bright red lacy bra right out of Mother W.’s sleeve and then changed it into a bright red silk scarf before she had a chance to see clearly what it was. We thought he was pretty tactful, too, like when he was blindfolded with putty covering his eyes and some idiot held up a condom and asked him to identify what it was. Cardoza just grinned a little and said, “The vibrations in my finger tips tell me that you’re holding up some type of protective equipment—yes, it protects people from all sorts of horrible, disgusting diseases as well as the consequences of indiscrete behavior,” and then he quickly answered another brother’s questions about a gold watch hanging on a gold chain while Mother W. was mumbling, “What was that? I didn’t see what he was holding up. What was it?”
    During the refreshments intermission, we let her think the show was totally over so she’d just go upstairs to bed and we could start the real fun. At the nightclub, the brothers had seen Cardoza hypnotize volunteers from the audience, and after hearing what sorts of things he could do, we all agreed that that kind of thing would make a majorly positive impression on the new group of pledges.
    After Mother W. was out of the rec room, the first thing Cardoza did was hypnotize a pledge, making him think he was as stiff as a two-by-four so he could be laid out straight across a couple of high-backed chairs with only his neck and ankles resting on the tops of them. Then he had the kid stand back up and “feel rested,” and he told him that, after he woke up and heard the words “fat chance,” he would not be able to see anybody’s clothes, his own included, until the words “slim chance” were said.
    Cardoza told the kid to wake up feeling alert and rested, thanked him, and told him to sit back down. The kid laughed as he sat down, saying, “I guess some people just can’t be hypnotized after all!” Cardoza pretended to ignore him and said to the frat bar tender, “I’d like some real German beer, but I guess there’s a fat chance I’ll be able to have any tonight.” At those words, the kid jumped up as if he’d been jabbed by a knitting needle in the butt. He held his hands over his crotch and looked at the rest of us in a highly nervous and suspicious manner—and we all just howled with laughter at him and reached our hands out towards him, poking his shoulders and arms and asking what was wrong. The kid ran over to a far corner and held a large sofa cushion in front of himself, while Cardoza made all kinds of double-entendre remarks about the “gay” time we were all going to be having. Then, as the kid edged towards the stairs with a hockey stick held up to brain anyone who touched him, Cardoza said, “Well, maybe there’s a slim chance I’ll try to hypnotize somebody else, assuming anyone is brave enough.” At that point the kid with the hockey stick relaxed, threw the cushion at one of us, and started to laugh. We all thought it was pretty funny, but at least three-forths of us were sure it had been faked—that the Great Cardoza had set it up in advance with the kid—though we still wondered how the kid could have stayed straight across those two chairs.
    Anyway, one of our pledges was a big Army vet we’d nicknamed Babe, and he was the good sport who volunteered to be next. Cardoza hypnotized him quickly and then regressed him backwards mentally to when he was fourteen. It was a gut-buster to see this six-foot-four, 260-pounder reliving his first hot date, getting all aroused and nervous at the same time. Next Cardoza regressed him to age seven, and it was also funny seeing Babe relive getting chewed out after school by his old second-grade teacher for hitting a littler kid. Well, sort of funny, until Babe started to cry and blubbered that he wouldn’t do it ever again if the teacher would please just let him go home to his aunt’s and not keep him any later. Next Cardoza told Babe that when he awoke he would be like a three-month-old baby and would act like one until Cardoza told him it was “time to rise and shine.”
    I think there was probably some sort of Catch-22 built into these instructions. Being an infant in his mind, it seems that Babe had no idea about words grown-ups can use and what they might mean. Cardoza told us later that he’d never had anything like this ever happen before—and had never heard of it happening to anyone else.
    We all had a meeting later that night and decided we would have to solve this problem ourselves. Otherwise Cardoza would most likely be arrested, and then the dean would probably take our frat charter away and maybe suspend some of us as examples to the rest of the college, or some crud like that. Then, if we ever got re-chartered, we’d have to live in one of the dorms the way a couple of other suspended frats have had to do.
    Well, since Babe was then twenty-three and he had no living relatives except his old aunt that had raised him till he left home at fifteen, we thought we’d just take a chance that nobody would come looking for him. After a week we sent some typed post cards to his teachers and the registrar saying that he was going to be living in a commune in Colorado and wanted to withdraw from college, at least for a while. Two of the frat brothers drove west for about eight hours and mailed the cards from some place called Goodland, Kansas.
    The rest of us got to work meanwhile down in the basement and partitioned off and sound-proofed a narrow secret little bedroom as best we could. We even have some trick paneling over its door. Around this same time, Cardoza spent three weeks putting out discreet questions to other hypnotists to try to figure out what might help. And during the first four months Cardoza came down here about fifteen times to try to re-hypnotize Babe—but he had no luck. Then, sad to say, Cardoza got himself creamed by some New Yorkers on the interstate and was totaled from the waist down. So after that we were on our own.
    Anyhow, we have been taking turns playing with and cleaning up after our twenty-six-year-old, six-foot-four infant who eats like an elephant and poops like a bull moose. Or vice versa. Our master plan is to keep this up until Babe reaches age six or seven inside his head again, and then, hopefully, we’ll get him re-hypnotized and brought back to adulthood. Of course he’ll be instructed to forget all about staying in our frat house basement for all those years. He’ll probably be told to remember hitting his head while living in Colorado, or something like that. If Cardoza is still alive then, maybe we’ll take ol’ Babe in a van up to his house to do it. If we can’t do it that way, one of us will just have to take a shot at hypnotizing him ourselves here. Lord knows, we’ll have plenty of time to learn how.
    Till then, our frat will keep pledging the geekiest social misfits in the college every year. Mainly, we’ve found that they’re a kind of double protection for our problem child. And they can also understand why that is so and can then even feel proud of their special value in this unique situation. Not only are they loyal and trustworthy out of a warped g.d. kind of gratitude that somebody would want them to join a group—they also just naturally help to keep most other people from wanting to come near our frat house. Right?
    I’ll admit that at first it was hard for me—a B.M.O.C. wannabe—to get used to some of “them,” and I was more than a little worried at first about our frat’s deteriorating status in general and my own personal reputation in particular. Mother W. made it clear that she was also bent quite massively out of shape about most of our pledge choices, and even now she keeps to her rooms most of the time and mumbles a lot more than she ever used to about how she’d like to quit. Still, she manages to find a few of these new guys each year who activate her old dried-up maternal instinct in some little way or other. And the one really weird thing is that scholastically we’ve become the top frat in the whole college—which further helps to keep us ostracized.
    Assuming that we do succeed—mainly due, of course, to my unknown future brothers who right this very moment are being treated like infected leper crap in their high school classrooms and just about everywhere else—it will be interesting to see where we go from there as a fraternity. My own belief is that our redirected brotherhood will have enough momentum and esprit de corps by that time to keep itself going with the same selection criteria we’ve had to adopt for this special period of emergency. I know we’d never write these criteria into the by-laws, and our name will never officially be changed to Delta Iota Pi—but even if these things did happen, I’d still be proud to come back here for my fifth, tenth, and twentieth reunions to meet the old-timers and to get to know the current crop of DIPs. From my personal experience over the past three years, I’ve found that they usually have a lot more inside of them than most of the popular pretty people I’ve met.



Scars Publications


Copyright of written pieces remain with the author, who has allowed it to be shown through Scars Publications and Design.Web site © Scars Publications and Design. All rights reserved. No material may be reprinted without express permission from the author.




Problems with this page? Then deal with it...