Return to Animal House

It's Magic Monday at the Alpha Delta house and the brothers have been drinking since six a.m. They have worked their way through Sunrise-Service Hour (tequila sunrises), Cartoon Hour (Kool-Aid punch) and Lonely-Guy Hour (Thunderbird and Mad Dog, straight from the bottle). Now it's ten o'clock, and that means it's...Naked-in-the-Tube-Room Hour!

Seventy naked guys cram into the TV room, which is about as large as a small one-car garage. Beers are distributed by dick size--those with big ones get king cans of Bud; those with small cocks drink from shot glasses. The worst, most repellent, vile and disgusting porno tape available is popped into the VCR. The brothers keep checking one another out--anyone who gets a hard-on faces rigorous punishment. No one's quite sure what the punishment might be, since in the history of Magic Monday, no one has yet gotten a hard-on during Naked-in-the-Tube-Room Hour, but they keep checking anyway, just in case.

There's a knock on the door. It's the delivery guy from the pizza place--he steps inside and freezes. Good Lord, what has he walked in on here--a bunch of preverts or something? Oddly enough, despite the large number of guys present, no one has the money to pay for the pizza--because no one has any pockets. On the screen, the cast is urinating on one another, sodomizing dead animals, all sorts of neat stuff. "If you could wait till the end of this sequence," says the guy who made the order, "I'll run upstairs and get some money."

The pizza guy looks around, swallows and says, "Never mind. This one's a freebie." He makes the quickest getaway ever seen from a Dartmouth fraternity house.

•

Magic Monday is a tradition going back at least two decades at the AD house, or Adelphian Lodge, as its members affectionately call it. The hourly themes proliferate over the years: Volleyball-in-the-Living-Room Hour, with Beach Boys music and piña coladas; Ex-Athlete Hour, with Schlitz beer (because that's what washed-up old athletes drink); Blues Hour, when they listen to Elmore James and drink bourbon; Christmas Hour, when they chop down a tree, plant it in the living room, decorate it with condoms and panties and drink eggnog; and, finally, New Year's Hour, when they cut the tree up and burn it, drink champagne and sing Auld Lang Syne. It's a good time and an important annual event.

The common belief is that the first Magic Monday occurred the day John F. Kennedy was shot. After all, is it not carved on the pillar by the tap system in the basement, November 22, 1963--J.F.K. Dead--Eight Kegs? I could tell them different. You see, I was there on November 22, 1963. First, it was a Friday, not a Monday, and, second, what happened was less a celebration of surreality than a wake; though, actually, it was a pretty good time. No, the first Magic Monday occurred a few years later, when a brother named Don chanced to stay up drinking one Sunday night, and in the morning, the brothers were so impressed that they blew off classes for the day and joined him. But why muddy the underpinnings of a cherished Adelphian tradition? Myths are more fun than facts.

Let me tell you another AD tradition: the Night of the Seven Fires. This is the Hell Night that, in one form or another, has marked the transition of more than a half century's worth of AD pledges into brothers. The early Sixties version: You had to hike out to the snowy woods in the middle of the night and find, with the aid of a mimeographed map, the Seven Sacred Watch Fires. At each of these would be a complement of brothers waiting to demand demented acts of you. You had to drop trou and sit in the snow, consume impossible quantities of beer and wine and vomit repeatedly, sometimes on one another.

It was one of the greatest nights of my life.

This is difficult for some people to understand. Fraternity high-jinks are a most particular form of behavior and are regarded with neither sympathy nor affection by much of the world, especially mothers, police officers, campus administrators and other societal voices of moderation and control. It's hard to explain to those who have missed the fraternity experience how richly satisfying mooning or booting (that's Dart-talk for recreational vomiting) or eating your underwear can be. People just don't get it.

Which is why, about ten years after graduating, I decided to write a book about fraternity life in which I would present America with the straight skinny--the reverse value systems, the fascination with the repugnant, the cheerful flouting of authority. The book never found a publisher, but portions of it, converted to short stories, appeared in National Lampoon, where their popularity prompted editor Doug Kenney to propose that he, Harold Ramis and I write a movie based on them. The movie was Animal House.

Now, I'm aware that a lot of people thought that Delta Tau Chi in Animal House was somehow based on their fraternity. Sorry, guys--now it can be told--the house that launched the legend was AD at Dartmouth. And although, to the best of my recollection, no one at Dartmouth ever put Fizzies in the swimming pool or offed a horse in the dean's office, someone did once boot on the dean (and his wife), and there was, in a house today known as the Tabard, a mermaid with goldfish-bowl breasts, and, in the AD house, there were guys named Otter, Flounder and Pinto, and a "Sex Room," and numerous black R&B bands that played Shout and Louie, Louie. There was also a guy named Turnip, who placed a phone call to a dead Smithie, identifying himself as her boyfriend. Unlike Otter in the movie, he didn't get himself and his fellow road-trippers dates with her roommate and friends. In fact, that idea had never occurred to Turnip--he'd made the call out of sheer joy of sickness.

"Sickness Is Health, Blackness Is Truth, Drinking Is Strength." That was the house creed, and we tried to live up to it. Pledges were taught power booting. If you drank enough beer and jumped up and down a few times, it was no big deal to boot your height--the trick was in keeping a tight stream and hitting the target, a photo of Connie Francis, say, tacked to the basement wall. There was a fellow who used to snooze atop the bar, naked but for a beer cup over his dong. When a lady would enter the basement, he would tip his cup. We built lews snow statues, got laid in a hearse parked out back, pledged a dead raccoon and once mooned the governor of New Hampshire. We had fun.

But how much fun, I wondered, were they having up at Dartmouth today? After all, it was the Eighties now, the era of AIDS, religious fundamentalism and the conservative backlash against the indulgent Sixties and Seventies. What was more, to those of us alumni who followed the news out of Dartmouth, it often seemed as if the college had declared war on its fraternity system.

The opening gun was fired in 1978. An English professor, James A. Epperson, circulated a petition among the faculty to have fraternities abolished for "interfering with college life and the health and well-being of students." The real stunner came when the faculty voted 67--16 in favor of the proposal. Obviously, there was serious resentment harbored against the fraternities at Dartmouth.

To a degree, fraternities were under serious scrutiny nationwide. College faculties had always tended to view them as elitist, sexist, racist, anti-intellectual and overly involved with alcohol. Now, in the Eighties, with their ranks swelled with veterans of the Sixties--who by and large hated fraternities--they were on the attack. At many schools, especially the smaller, private ones in the Northeast, boards of trustees formed study committees. In 1983, Amherst and Colby abolished fraternities outright. Gettysburg came close to doing the same, and at Middlebury, there's a continuing controversy over the fate of their fraternity system. Indeed, aspects of Greek life have been under some form of study at approximately a third of the 650 colleges where fraternities exist.

At the same time, though, fraternities have never been more popular. On the rebound from their Vietnam-era doldrums, undergraduate fraternities grew in membership from 230,000 in 1980 to more than 400,000 in 1986. This was widely regarded as a reflection of the return to establishment values and conservatism on campus, though it may have had more to do with the resurgent desire of college men to raise hell and have fun with their buddies, which, after all, is what fraternities are all about. In any case, it seems unlikely that larger schools, such as USC or the University of Illinois, will ever do away with them--they're simply too popular among both students and alumni.

Meanwhile, back at Dartmouth, the proposal to abolish the houses was ultimately voted down by the board of trustees, but there did ensue a period of crackdown that resulted in many houses' being put on probation and given shape-up-or-ship-out ultimatums. Then, in 1983, came the instituting of "minimum standards" for fraternities and sororities. Since this program called for, among other things, expensive renovations to the deteriorating houses, most of which had been built in the Twenties, it was widely perceived as an attempt to do away with the fraternities by breaking them financially.

Then, in 1987, the board of trustees released a Residential Life Statement (continued on page 150) return to animal house(continued from page 106) calling for a reduction in the fraternity system's dominance of social life on campus, and shortly after that, the Hanover police conducted their notorious undercover sting operation, deputizing an 18-year-old girl and sending her, with an out-of-town policeman posing as her boyfriend, on a round of fraternities during the big spring party weekend known as Green Key. Naturally, she was served beer, and eight fraternities and two sororities faced the possibility of criminal charges for serving alcohol to a minor. The college got them off the hook, but it made it clear that next time, the houses would be on their own. This had a chilling effect on the admission of nonmember guests to parties.

Finally, in 1988, the administration announced that starting with the class of 1993, rush would be delayed until sophomore year. Since this would decrease fraternite membership--and their already pinched treasuries--by 25 percent, there was bitter resistance to the measure, all the more so because it was a dictate from on high that ignored heavy student opposition.

After all this, you had to wonder if fraternity life at Dartmouth was any fun at all any more. Specifically, I was curious to see how the boys were doing at the house that had inspired Animal House. I decided to find out.

•

I enter the lodge with trepidation. What am I going to find, 25 years and all those regulatory institutions later? A skeleton crew of intimidated weenies, sipping oolong and discussing Proust?

But no. The first thing that hits me is the smell. It's the same smell; it hasn't changed in two and a half decades! Mainly beer, with certain miscellaneous nuances. The place looks pretty much the same, too. A bit more wrecked-up, maybe, but it's the same tube room, the same tap system and, running the perimeter of the basement, the same beloved AD gutter (today known as "the gorf"). In the erstwhile basement bathroom--converted to a broom closet a few years back after a brother tore out the toilet to mix a punch in it--I can still make out the carved names of brothers from my era: Y. Bags, Lapes, Snot, Mag F. Pie, Hydrant, Dump Truck....

Having recently concluded a very successful rush, the house has nearly 100 members, and it looks as though most of them are here tonight. They seem a little cool; I wonder if I'm welcome. Or maybe it's just a generational style--they don't make a big deal of things. There are so many of them, though, more than twice the number we had! The living room is like a subway car! And, God, how'd they get to be so young?

I have brought with me, on video cassette, an assemblage of eight-millimeter movies taken back in my era. As I show the old flicks--glimpses of forgotten snow statues, of the brothers cavorting on the lawn, of parties and our great perennial R&B band Lonnie Youngblood and the Redcoats--pledges are periodically sent to "run a rack." They return with lengths of plank covered with brimming beer cups, so that the brothers may indulge their taste for malt beverage. As the tape proceeds, the crowd especially appreciates the sequence in which several old ADs eat the shirt of Bert Rowley, '61, off his back. When the show concludes, they signify their appreciation with a round of snaps and sing a friendly (albeit obscene) song to me. Then one of them hands me a full 12-ounce beer cup, and I see all these faces looking at me with expectation.

Good God, I think, can I still chug one of these things? Well, it takes a little longer than it used to, but, yes, I can! All right--still got my chops! The Ads cheer, the ice is broken. We repair to the basement, where fine music is played, multifarious brews are demolished and laughter fills the room. Sometimes, it occurs to me, despite the passage of much time, the essence of things remains the same.

•

I stay at Dartmouth for ten days. I check out the sororities, the coed houses and, in addition to Alpha Delta, several "mainstream" houses. I go to parties, drink off kegs, hang out in small groups in fraternity rooms, doing a little herb and getting philosophical. I find out two things.

First, fraternity life at Dartmouth is a lot more complicated than it used to be. Parties must be registered; you have to fill out a form at the campus police station before five p.m. on weekdays and noon on weekends. Since a party is defined as any time you go on tap, that means that you can no longer drink a keg without registering with the police. Furthermore, since the sting operation, the houses have had to post guards at all entrances to their tap rooms during parties to check I.D.s and make sure no underage nonmembers slip in. In addition, house presidents and social chairmen, aware that they risk $25,000 fines and even jail sentences if persons drunk on their beer crack up a car, say, take great care to prevent such drunks from departing, at least with their car eys. Meanwhile, there's the ongoing paranoia that Dean Wormer--likeauthority figures are out to get them, that any time now, fraternity life as they know it will be banished forever, the way the samurai were abolished in Japan in the 1870s.

That's a pretty tough row to hoe, compared with the relatively laissez-faire early Sixties. But the second thing I notice is that, despite the many modern complications, the peculiar Dartmouth genius for having fun is undiminished. And although much is different at the Big Green, what's more interesting is how much has stayed the same.

Take the AD house. We had nicknames, they have nicknames; the house currently contains the likes of Goon, Chubber, Turd, Hedgehog, Cowpie, Merkin, Mule, Gator and, in a nice link with the past, a new Snot. We had a house lexicon; they have a house lexicon. In 1962, we invested much of our neologistical energy on descriptives for throwing up--there was "power booting," "spray booting," "nose booting," "sick booting" and the "Technicolor yawn," the last of these resulting from the preboot consumption of food colorings. We also spoke of "wind tunnels" (when your date breaks wind while your head's up her skirt), "reltneys" (hard-ons so big they stretch your skin until your head flips backward) and "hooded hogs" (uncircumcised penises). The current ADs have two great terms for an uncircumcised penis--"turtleneck" and "covered wagon." Also from today's vocabulary: Dorky people are known as "lunch meats." Drinking is "hooking." "Sweet!" is an expression of approval. ("Hey, we just went on tap." "Sweet!") Smoking a bong is "pulling a tube." Doing mushroom is " 'shrooming." A "chode" is a dick that's wider than it is long. "Piling" and "strapping" are fucking. And a "spank sock" is the thing you keep by your bed to beat off into.

We did weird things to our pledges; they do weird things to their pledges. In my day, as a sort of nod to AD's past (it started life in 1843 as a literary society), the pledges had to compose and present papers to the brothers with titles such as "My Sensations at Birth" and "How to Use Afterbirth in a Garden Salad." After one fellow--Seal--left a notebook containing his pledge paper ("The Last Time I Sucked My Father's Cock") at Smith, where it fell into the hands of the dean, we got in a bit of trouble and the practice was discontinued. And then, of course, there was boot training and the Night of the Seven Fires.

These days, the pledge period is shorter than it used to be but correspondingly more intense. The threatened punishment for pledging infractions is the "Rack of Gnarl"--as many as a dozen 12-ounce cups containing a mixture of catsup, soy sauce, dog food, mouthwash and whatever other unappetizing liquid or semiliquid substances happen to be on hand. You're supposed to drink every cup and, sorry, it's bad form to boot too soon.

One thing you must know for this next pledging story--the ADs have always been big on dogs. It's still true today. In the current Alpha Delta composite, there are pictures of no fewer than four of them, including one that's deceased. So, OK; one of the current pledging practices is that if the pledges can take over the house and prevent a single brother from coming inside for 24 hours, they don't have to go through Hell Night. Well, a few years ago, the pledges managed to take over the house, throw out the brothers and actually held the place for 12 hours. The brothers were getting worried. No pledge class had ever pulled off what that one seemed on the way to pulling off; how would the brothers ever live it down? Then one of them had an idea. They grabbed one of the house dogs, taped him up, wrapped him in a rug and hurled him through a living-room window. That was it--the takeover was ended, the pledges had to go through an even worse Hell Night than usual to compensate for the inconvenience they'd caused everyone. For, you see, in AD, the dogs are considered brothers.

There are some interesting hazing stunts at other houses, too. One fraternity drops its pledges a few miles out of town, naked, with an ax. The point is to get back to campus. Ever try hitchhiking naked with an ax? The pledges of another fraternity must participate in an event called Boot-on-Your-Brother Night. The kicker is, you can't change your clothes for 24 hours afterward; you have to wear them to bed, to class, to meals....

A last pledging story: Some brothers in one house drove a pledge to New York City, divested him of his clothes and money and left him there to make his way back to Hanover. The pledge found a dime in the street and called the Dartmouth Club, where he made contact with a sympathetic alum who'd been through some of the same shit himself. The guy set the pledge up with fine new clothes and plenty of bucks, the pledge flew back to Dartmouth, and when the exhausted brothers finally made their return to the fraternity, they found the pledge, resplendent in his new duds, waiting on the front porch with a glass of champagne for each of them.

Of course, one thing about Dartmouth that is different today is that between then and now, the Sixties happened. And so now, in addition to the standard types from my day--stoic jock, cool stud, conservative zealot--you have introspective hippies, crazed psychedelic pranksters and fire-breathing radicals. You tend to find these folks, when they join a Greek society at all, in a couple of the coed houses, where they believe that, rather than changing members to fit the house, you change the house to fit the members. You also dispense with a lot of the hazing and hierarchy--things are more communal. You are also, by definition, nonsexist. But what I love about these folks is that although they're Sixties, they're Dartmouth, too. Each year, one of these houses holds something called a Decadent Decathlon, which includes 12 events: Keg Throwing for Distance, the Tap Suck, and so forth. One of the events perfectly symbolizes the Dartmouth-Sixties fusion--the Bong Chug. In this event, you must take a full hit from a bong, chug a beer, and only then do you get to exhale.

There are other differences. Although there are three fraternities and two sororities that are predominantly black, the mainstream houses seem genuinely unconcerned about their racial or ethnic composition, which is a nice change from my day. The AD house has black brothers, Hispanic brothers, Jewish brothers, even a Moslem brother. It's not a big deal.

Also not a big deal is sex. I mean, they like it and everything, but it's more or less taken for granted. There were stories about getting laid on a pool table, and in the 1902 Room at Baker Library, and even in bed, but, as I say, these were no big deal. In the early Sixties, of course, sex was a very big deal. But that was before coeducation and the sexual revolution. With greater availability comes a blasé attitude, I suppose. But it's odd how things turn around--in 1962, as far as the deans were concerned, drinking was no big deal, but if you and your date were caught with your pants down, you were in deep shit. Today, they couldn't care less what you do sexually, as long as it's consensual and you're being careful about AIDS--but drinking infractions can get you in serious trouble.

One thing that definitely has not changed is the high quality of partying at Dartmouth fraternities. In the early Sixties, parties were mainly free-form, though I do remember Phi Gamma's Fiji Islands Parties and a real good End-of-the-World Party during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Strange alcoholic concoctions with names such as fogcutters, or gin and juice, or purple Jesus punch were served, and people got even more blown out than usual.

The AD house, it was generally conceded, threw the best parties. We introduced R&B music to campus with such luminaries as the Flamingos, the Five Royales, Red Prysock, Joey Dee and the Starliters, the Crystals, and Little Anthony and the Imperials. And the brothers put on behavior displays that foresaw performance art by two decades. The moment in Animal House when John Belushi pours mustard on himself was inspired by Seal--the fellow whose pledge paper so amused the dean of Smith--who at one party covered himself with yellow mustard and crawled about on hands and knees on the dance floor, biting dates' asses and shouting, "I'm the Mustard Man, I'm the goddamned Mustard Man." Another time, Doberman or Dump Truck or Troll or someone skied down the stairs naked, just as the band went into Shout.

Nowadays, theme parties are the rage. One house has something called the Party Without a Cause; everyone dresses as James Dean and Natalie Wood. Theta Delta Chi throws a Louie Lobster Party, wherein the guys wear lobster costumes, and there's a live lobster crawling around in the punch. Gods and Goddesses, another Theta Delt party, involves everyone dressing as Zeus or Aphrodite--it's basically a toga party. SAE is known for its annual Saigon Party (recently renamed Welcome to the Jungle), in which the house is filled with trees and live monkeys. And Alpha Chi Alpha throws Beach Parties, for which vast quantities of sand are trucked in and dumped all over the house.

The Medieval Banquet, a joint party thrown most years by the Alpha Chis and Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority, started life as a Fifties Party, but one year, the guys showed up dressed in the fashion of 1050, and it stayed that way; the celebrants go as wenches, serfs, knights, and so forth, sit around big tables and eat with their hands. King Arthur and Guinevere order people to chug and the party always turns into a huge food fight, with tankards of ale poured on people's heads, roast turkeys flying through the air and everyone soaked and ripped to the gills by 9:30.

Now, at the AD house, they're not too big on theme parties. The more usual thing is get a deejay, invite a bunch of people over, order a lot of kegs and see what happens. But each spring, during Green Key Weekend....

•

Saturday, my last day; tomorrow it's back to the freeways and smog and mortgages and the diaper changings of real life. Turns out the ADs have their major annual party this afternoon on the front lawn. They have this terrific funk band on the porch, wailing away, and the yard is packed with partyers. But I'm not dancing--I'm feeling grumpy about having to go home tomorrow and, hell, a little burned out from trying to keep up with these 20-year-olds all week.

Thanks to last night's killer rain, much of the yard is a mud puddle today. After a while, predictably enough, the brothers decide to do a little mud diving. In fact, half the guys in the house quickly join in, as do many of the dates and friends and onlookers, and suddenly, it looks like Return of the Mud Monsters out there. And then--uh-oh--I spot seven or eight beslimed pledges headed straight for me with crazed, demented smiles.

Well, I don't feel like going in any mud, that's for sure. Later for that, Jack. I put on my most persuasive smile. "Come on, you guys, let's just forget it, OK?" They blithely ignore me; I barely have time to toss my wallet and shades to my amused wife (who has been egging them on), and then I'm being carried across the yard by all these guys--Donk and Oddjob and Mulch and Scurvy and Snot II and Toast and Remus and Spock--and they find a particularly juicy mudhole...and plop me into it!

And--whaddaya know?--it's great! Suddenly, I'm not tired and I'm not grumpy--it's as if I've just had a burst of adrenaline. And, man, I'm dancing my ass off, exchanging high fives and whooping like a maniac, and it all comes back, that total party feeling, where time is suspended and you're in an eternal, fun-filled now. This is it--the thing people join fraternities for--one of those peak bacchanalian moments that know no equal. My sense of closeness and connection with these boogieing mud maniacs could not be greater, and I feel more in touch with the me I like most than I have in months.

Ah, fraternities.

Sweet.