(This post originally appeared on Facebook, Christmas 2017)
So little story for y’all. This is going to be looong, so no worries if you pass over this and go on to the next post about a Dalmatian in Miami that learned to tap dance by watching YouTube videos or whatever is on FaceBook these days. And if you know of such a Dalmatian post, please, do share.
As a lot of you know but some of you may not, I was in an incredibly dark place coming into my freshman year at Illinois, and it only got worse once the year started. All I had to live for was the hope that college would show me that I really did belong on this planet, and wasn’t actually the cosmic mistake I always deep down believed I was. But any optimism I had that college was the answer to all my problems evaporated essentially immediately. I was struggling both academically and mentally from day one, and falling downward at an incredible and, frankly, terrifying rate. All at once, I was plucked out of my small town social scene and dropped into an environment dominated by strangers from a world I’d never been exposed to — I mean, y’all were from the city, and I was but a lowly townie. I’d been used to cruising through every class I’d ever taken, and now I was pre-med at one of the best institutions of higher learning on the face of this planet. I’d never had to make any attempts to balance my life around both school and social events — class was always the last thing I thought about since it didn’t matter what the test was on, A grades just availed themselves to me, seemingly by birthright. But that came to a halt pretty early on in some of my core classes. Fair to middling grades on early exams caused me to confront the reality that maybe I wasn’t cut out to be a doctor — the only thing I could ever imagine myself doing since, well, forever. Having the rug pulled out from under my dream vocation on top of everything else I was going through was almost too much. Hell, it WAS too much.
But I did find a reason to hope in one place. I was pledging a fraternity — which was in my mind my ticket to acceptance and honestly, self-worth. Nothing says “you matter” like the group of guys everyone on campus looks up to in admiration pointing their finger at you and saying “we choose you.” It sounds absolutely ridiculous to think back on, but it was truthfully the most important thing in the world to me back then. All aspects of my life could be deteriorating and collapsing around me like they were, but once pledgeship was over, none of that would matter. I would be in, and I would be free to live without the constant doubt of my worth.
And things actually got off to a good start. I hoodwinked these knuckleheads into thinking I was organized enough to “lead” them, and y’all elected me your pledge class president. Really, all I had done to demonstrate value was take the initiative to set up our car service for our first date event, Impromptu at Soma. I almost lost to a guy just because he had a blackberry that enabled him to answer emails out of pocket while I was rocking a free flip phone my ma had given me after she got a Razr (man, 2009 seems like the stone age now), but as Vin Diesel taught me, it doesn’t matter if you win by an inch or a mile, winning’s winning baby. So, I became the president of the ’13s class.
But any semblance of respect I allowed myself to have for earning the trust of my pledge class vanished much quicker than it had come. For those of you that don’t know, being a pledge class president is literally a meaningless title that ultimately bestows upon you the most reviled of responsibilities — being PCP meant that I was the one that had to yell at my class to get to the house for cleans when everyone was hungover and was responsible for collecting money from the boys for pregames and other events. I’ll never forget being told on a Wednesday that I needed to extract $200 from the ’13s by 5PM on Thursday, and fundamentally believing that the statue at Grainger had a better chance of miraculously coming to life and singing Yankee Doodle Dandy to passerbys while dancing the Charleston than I had of meeting that deadline. I mean, we were the brokest mothafuckas on Sesame Street, or at least that’s what y’all lead me to believe. Sometimes I had to threaten irreversible bodily harm to holdouts or front some of the cash myself, but y’all always came through for us at the 11th hour and we were able to slug flavored vodka to a soundtrack that closely resembled two Transformers having angry makeup sex in a gravel pit (read: 00’s era electronic music), and for that, I thank y’all.
Pledship was nothing like I thought it was going to be. Being the meticulous planner that I am, I had mentally prepared for the fraternity grind by reading every hazing horror story I could find. As a result, I fully expected to have to eat cat food off of a toilet set, spend three nights naked and alone under the front porch of the house, light myself on fire and say the entire Greek alphabet backwards twice before I was allowed to stop drop and roll, I mean, really crazy shit. But, joining a fraternity was my only path out of the all-consuming abyss, so I was willing to do any and all of it. But the pledging experience I was met with couldn’t have been further from that. All that was really required of me was to get to know the guys I’d be living and interacting with for the next four years decently well, and yeah, maybe occasionally make Dan Cohen a quesadilla and listen to him talk about how well developed his pecs were becoming these days, or attend a one-man lecture from Sul Ahmad about how to properly build and mount a wall shelf. On one hand, I kept waiting for the bottom to drop out and suddenly find myself hogtied in the trunk of a speeding Tahoe, bound for a clandestine hazing ritual site somewhere near the Missouri border, but slowly I started to realize that truly, everyone just wanted you to form what genuine connections with your new “brothers” you could while building some structure into your life.
Our house lost it’s social calendar almost instantly, but that really didn’t matter to me at the time. I was too in my own head to worry about meeting girls or making a name for myself, or anything at all, really. I was just trying to get through each day, one at a time, anyway that I could. However, there was one event that no governing body on Earth could strip away from us — and that was winter formal. As a pledge class, it would be our sacred and noble charge to decorate the house from basement to roof and floor to ceiling in enough Christmas lights and wrapping paper to make Clark Griswold want to give us a lesson in moderation. It was a point of pride in our house that without fail, year after year, we had the best decorations. Anyone that said those AGR guys upstaged us were jealous, dishonest individuals and should be treated like the rotten people they no doubt must be. The mythology surrounding formal rivaled a Tolkien novel — we were constantly fed stories and legends that we were expected to surpass so that we could carve our names into the annals of Sigma Rho history. It seemed impossible — how were we supposed to find a thirty foot Christmas tree, create a pully system to dangle the smaller guys out the windows so they could frame them in white lights at a perfect ninety degree right angle, recreate the entrance to Narnia with chicken wire and pine branches, all while the expectation was that we’d be blind drunk on Mad Dog 20/20 and constantly defending our work from marauding bands of seniors hell-bent on undoing every painstaking second of effort we’d put into the set up? I thought “there’s no fucking way we can pull this off,” but what choice did we have? This is the Navy Seals, you wash out here and you might as well drop out because you won’t be able to show your face on campus after such a terrible disgrace.
So almost every opportunity was taken to instill in us the imperative nature of formal setup — “what’s your plan for the house?” “how will you pull this off?” “who’s risking their lives to climb this forty foot tree so the lights go all the way to the top? I want to see them from my third-floor window while I’m yelling at you that you’ll never be a Beta.” As Cato the Elder ended every oration with “Carthage must be destroyed,” the Betas opened and closed any dialogue with “don’t you fucking dare fuck up formal set up for me.” So the stakes were commensurately high, and the anticipation, monumental.
I’ll never forget what happened next. After the first night of formal set up, wherein the ’13s just put on an absolute masterclass in exterior illumination, to the point where some older guys were actually seriously considering not laying waste to our handiwork, I started to think that we might pull off the damn thing. That next afternoon, I got a text on the old clamshell poverty cell phone to “gather your class and get to the house, immediately.” My heart sank through my body and onto the floor — there was no way this wasn’t catastrophic. So, we circled the wagons and met on the first floor of the house. It was then that my worst fears played out in real time: Nationals was pulling our charter. Turns out, us boys had been keeping it just a little too real, and Beta Theta Pi was now finished with our shit. It sounds so incredibly stupid to say this today, but in that moment, I would have rather been told that I had inoperable brain cancer than hear those words. Joining the house and inheriting the life of acceptance and value that was the implicit promise driving the whole proccess to earn those three dumb letters was literally the only thing that was getting me out of bed in the morning and through every day. It was, for all intents and purposes, a death sentence for me. To say I was devastated would show a grossly inept command of the English language. Van Gogh didn’t know pain like this.
We were told that we had been relieved of our obligation to decorate for formal, for the house was not, and never would be, our future home. Collectively, we looked around at each other and said, well, fuck that, we committed to putting on this most hallowed of events, we’re seeing this damn thing through till the police come with bear mace to evict us from this house. Or at least, the other guys shared that moment. I was wholy preoccupied with finally allowing myself to wonder what it would feel like to shrug off this mortal coil and meet my destiny, at last. But like the mustering of the revolutionary militia, I was quickly distracted by my new conscription into the recently created Fully Rogue chapter of Beta Theta Pi. No longer bound by the constraints of such an arbitrary shackle as “a charter” or “rules of any kind,” the situation rapidly escalated. I was handed a warm Keystone Light and instructed to hurl it against the wall of our kitchen, really fucking hard. To this day, I know of no better nor more immediate remedy for depression than the above prescription. It comes with my highest recommendation.
That night is such a blur but cogent elements always jump out at me when reminiscing: tearing a mattress from some poor sap’s bed (probably Peter Piekarcyk) and riding it down our spiral staircase with Yousef Ahmed and like 9 other people, picking up Kevin Tosi so Nate Mcguire could freely and violently pummel his legs with impunity, weeping uncontrolably with a super senior who had thrown a full cup of Burnettes vodka in my face like 36 hours prior, and the indelible Tyler Miller writing a modified version of our founder’s paragraph in permanent marker on the wall of our kitchen — a paragraph that told the story of how our class came together and would continue that way, rather than the origin story of some long dead Miami of Ohio students who we were duty bound to canonize because they put greek letters on their nerdy little Classics study group fucking forever ago. I revisit that paragraph often, and while it’s melodramatic and fatalistic as all hell, it really does remind me of how I think we all felt at the time. That night, as I lay in bed hammered drunk on boxed wine sobbing my eyes out, I texted every older guy in the house who had told me I would never be enough to make it through pledgeship telling them what an honor and a privilege it was to have had the chance to earn their respect and brotherhood. While I wasn’t able to screenshot their responses (again, 2009 poverty phone), I’ll never forget the replies I got: That it had all been a lie, a joke. That they respected us after all. That we would have made it through. That we were worth it. That I was worth it.
The next few days were legitimately some of the best of my life. Gone were the formalities and pretenses of my class trying to make a name for itself, replaced with the comraderie and shared acceptance of a terminal fate only really experienced by passengers on a sinking cruise ship laden with every vice known to man who also happen to be complete goddamn maniacs, who are evaluating the situation not as a cause for panic but as one last chance to violently rage, which they’re going to be doing right up until the last one of them takes that first breath of sea water and disappears under the surface of the North Atlantic. Every brother who had been taking a claw hammer to our constructed wooden entranceway a few nights ago was now handing me lights to string and making sure I was damaging the dragon’s hoard of light beer we had amassed to the best of my God-given ability. I just cannot accurately describe how fun, validating, and sad those days and nights were. I had the absolute best possible imaginable four years of fraternity life in those few days. I barely remember formal, but I’ll never forget what led up to it.
The good news is, this story has the happiest of endings and is still being written. Rather than disband, our class chartered our own house — a pirate ship of our own making, with all the best parts of Beta, just maybe with less electronic music, and in a smaller house. Free of a large portion of my mental encumberment, my grades improved dramatically to the point where medical school appeared an inevitability as opposed to a dream crushed under the leaden weight of reality. I sought out and received mentorship from some incredibly brilliant people who inspired me to live up to the potential I now realized I had. That next year, I met and began dating truly one of the most incredible human beings I’ve ever had the fortunes of crossing paths with — a girl I owe much of my life and happiness to and to whom I will forever remain in debt. My life instantly became amazing as soon as she entered it and showed me how good it can be to live. Our little renegade fraternity recruited pledge class after pledge class of the very best guys Illinois has to offer — I’m still dumbfounded how well that turned out, and Tom Chen deserves most of the credit. His ability to sell kids on the fraternity dream when we had no house, no name, no social calendar was actually goddamn incredible, and it’s no question due to him being one of the most socially competent and profoundly intelligent guys I know.
Since graduation, my life hasn’t exactly been a straight line towards success, including some truly bleak times that old friends and new shepherded me through, but holy shit, what a ride it’s been and promises to continue to be. None of it would be possible without that first year at Illinois and the guys who I was with, and had the privilege, as corny as it sounds, to call brothers. And every Christmas as I decorate for the holiday, as I’m doing now in preparation for our Christmas party in a few hours, I’m transported back to where it all started to turn around for me: That week of formal so very long ago. I remember where I was, what it felt like to only transact in despair and misery, and then how it all just stopped mattering once I realized that the only thing I needed to live for or have hope in was myself. Y’all gave me the permission to believe that, each and every one of you. Thank you.
Of course, I would be remiss if I didn’t also mention the love and support I have always received from my parents and sisters who have always done everything they can to help me. But they have their own story, which I’ll probably post soon.
Tragically, fraternities are in the news a lot these days for damaging or ending their member’s lives, like what happened at Penn State this year. But at least one life has been saved just by their mere existence — my own.
If you’ve read this far, I’m impressed. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for listening to me. I hope to hear your story one day. Merry Christmas, and remember, no matter how badly you may want to, you’ll never be a Beta.
