The Regulars
This doesn’t end well. It doesn’t beginning or middle well, either.
The Sigma Nu house is, on occasion, home to a festival atmosphere. Every so often its members will pony up enough money to bring in a band (always local, of course), or to buy enough drinks for a mixer, or to entertain alumni for a few hours before the actual party gets underway. Some of those nights vaguely resemble the idea that people who are not in college have of the wild bacchanals people in college supposedly attend. Tonight is not one of those nights.
The first warning sign we see is upon approaching the house at roughly half past eleven. There’s no one immediately outside the front door, or sitting on the porch around the corner. Taking stock of our environment, we see that every other house on the row looks similarly abandoned, save for the distant noise of chatter behind the houses beyond our no man’s land. On most nights we would take the shortcut around the house and make a beeline immediately for those signs of intelligent life like moths drawn to ringtone rap and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
In this scenario, however, we step inside first. As per usual, we find some people playing cards on one side of the room (Texas Hold ‘Em and Blackjack seem most common). This being Sigma Nu, there’s no guarantee that a single one of them will be of the female persuasion. The card players are friendly enough, and chuckle when we approach them and say, “What are y’all playing, and why does the fact that [Jimmie] has a king, a jack, a two, etc. matter?” It’s a game we routinely play, almost a ritual, but it tends to break the ice and gets us primed for what awaits us downstairs.
On the other side of the room someone is playing a videogame, and we should acknowledge that the only videogames allowed (the “cool” ones) are those that came out prior to the turn of our current century. Normally it’s not just one lonesome soul—it’s two lonesome souls, playing something together on the Nintendo 64. They are enrapt in their game, in their scattered outbursts or dead-eyed focus, and have little time for us passers by. We might be lucky enough to receive a blank stare or two from them, but this is clearly not for us.
Walking down the corridor to the stairwell, then, we would normally be greeted by the sounds of thumping bass. The walls siphon off the noise just enough so that tension builds up in us as we approach the door, approach the chaos that looms before us. But this is, of course, not one of those nights. We are greeted instead, nine times out of the ten we make this walk, by the shock of seeing someone (generally referred to by experts on these situations as “terrible drunk”) eying us numbly from a side room as he takes a break from looking through the contents of a refrigerator. Smiling awkwardly, we choose our battles and don’t engage him in conversation. We could go on a brief tour upstairs, but since we have neither the time nor the means to recreate the atmosphere of a bad Phish concert, it is downstairs we go.
By the time we open the heavy security door, the normal sense of foreboding has abandoned us. It is the scene behind the door that reveals why: people are dancing in the dirty, red-tinted room beyond us, but it is at this point that we realize that tonight is a night for the regulars. Only fifteen people or so are in the basement adjacent to us, all fraternity brothers and pledges and their respective (or prospective) girlfriends or dates. The pledges outnumber the rest of the group, but are by virtue of their social standing nomadic. There is no one for them to talk to (besides pledges, that is, and they certainly don’t want to be stuck doing that), so they amble around the room and talk drunkenly over the ambient noise to brothers and visitors, noise being the best way to describe what passes for music at a frat party.
Let us take a moment to illustrate one of these pledges. Between the salad days of rush, where all manner of fulfilled dreams are promised to the more desirable candidates, and the hell-week before initiation, is the long and tedious purgatory of pledgeship. This process is theoretically a crucible, culling the weak from the pledge class. One candidate for culling is a pledge we’ll call John, even if he is more of a Chad or a Paul Joseph. He is extremely broad-shouldered and has a face not unlike a collapsed lung, which is topped by a mane of blond hair. We surmise that he is no stranger to gelling his hair, in keeping with an unfathomable number of people at these events. He is wearing the so-called “uniform” of khakis, boat shoes, and a Polo shirt found at every fraternity party in the known universe (we might think that Alpha Centauri would be too cold for a Polo with periwinkle stripes, but we’d be wrong).
John is, like his fellow pledges, a wanderer. He ambles around, Solo cup in hand, making small talk and laughing his obnoxiously loud laugh to smatterings of uncomfortable fraternity brothers. Although he would normally fear that he was no good at it, he’ll stop and flirt clumsily with those girls unlucky enough to find themselves trapped between him and the staircase. Then a song he knows will come on the stereo, and he’ll look to the elevated stage, which has allegedly hosted bands, but can now only boast a fraternity brother and his date.
Since we are not hopeless cynics, we understand that the two people dancing ever-so-closely on the stage are priming themselves for a walk back to the girl’s dorm, a passionate kiss goodnight, and then the going of their separate ways. John, however, is not completely cognizant of this. Through a combination of his own maladjusted sense of social norms and his possibly inebriated state, he hops up on the stage with the germ of a plan in his brain. Originally having the good taste to pretend to groove to himself, he slowly and deliberately moves backwards, forming what can only be described as a co-ed sandwich between the date and the two boys.
Taking John’s example to heart, the other pledges jump up onstage like lemmings, rapidly ruining the original fraternity brother’s chance at that goodnight kiss. Having quickly apprised himself of the situation, the brother quickly hops off of the stage, his date attached, and books it outside. Meanwhile, the pledges do not seem to have realized that there are no girls on stage with them, and continue to dance with the lack of rhythm and grace one would predict from both teenagers and the possibly inebriated. Heading up the pack is our man John, who despite the passing disappointment of missing his shot with the girl who was on stage (he was just a few minutes away, too, as he could attest) is grinning wildly. Like everyone else at the house tonight, we guess he must be having fun.
We make our way out the double doors to the gathering of people outside, who outnumber three to one those inside the house itself. Once outside, we realize that we are being slowly and involuntarily anaesthetized by the scene, by the odorless vapors of restlessness and listlessness penetrating our lowered defenses. Our hearing is limited by the steadily increasing volume of the stereo within the house and the constant chatter, like a packed cafeteria, without it. Our vision is limited by the cloudy night, illuminated only by the dull red leaking out from the basement and the occasional revelation of headlights from the street below. Our sense of smell is overcome by the atmosphere of cigarette smoke choking the space around us, a haze broken only by the orangey scent wafting from a passerby Chi O’s screwdriver. Combined with the smoke, it smells like an industrial solution, like Goo Gone. In summer, we are covered in a thin film of sweat from the humidity and the density of the gathering; in winter, the biting wind is our only respite from numbness.
When we look across the row, we see the same scene repeated at every house, crowds of people milling about in ever-shifting clusters, inert objects carried by their own momentum. Here, there are the theater kids, many of whom are members of the fraternity itself, cramming as much satisfaction as possible into their break from the rigors of rehearsal. They are considerate, but like so many others at this point in the night, not much for a prolonged conversation. Though a rarity here, there are also the athletes, generally football and baseball players, who tend to travel in very tight, very loud herds. They serve as one of the only examples found in nature of a pack consisting entirely of alpha males. There are also, of course, the fraternity brothers themselves, would-be hosts who instinctively sequester themselves into little sleeper cells of fellow brothers, building up the courage to talk to their guests.
Towards the fringes of the party we find a would-be hipster, trying to draw attention to himself with a uniform of his own: jeans that are entirely too tight, an ironic t-shirt, a pair of Chuck Taylors. He’s leaning in toward two girls, smiles on all their faces. He’s talking at a seemingly unsustainable pace, burning through his arsenal of jokes like a Roman candle. The girls are entertained, but only superficially, a fact revealed when one of them says that the hipster is “cracking [her] up,” a subtle but firm notice to our charming friend that he’s wasting his time and his Pabst Blue Ribbon-fouled breath. Soon enough they’ll meander away, leaving our friend to do his walk of shame back to his theater friends and to wonder if the Smiths ever wrote a song about this particular feeling.
There are the whirling dervishes here on the outskirts, too, disconnected from anybody else in particular, although just about everyone knows them on sight. There is the roving drunk, never a member of the fraternity, who is frantically searching for someone to procure him more booze. Though thoroughly engrossed in his mission, he’s generally harmless. Very frequently his sense of desperation, along with the demands of his metabolism, transforms him into the terrible drunk fellow we saw on the corridor to the stairwell; it’s really just a matter of when you catch him. His counterpart is the lonely drunk girl, usually a tagalong to a begrudging friend, a better-adjusted attendee of the party who has since disappeared into the crowd. Depending on the night, the lonely drunk girl will be gregarious, becoming much too friendly much too fast with some unsuspecting bystander, or she will be crying on one of the couches behind the party proper. On the crying nights, we tend to see one of the nomads, someone like John, comfort her, to give them both a respite from loneliness. We don’t know what, exactly, to feel when we see that.
At the very back of the party, towards the end of the night, we find the burnouts sitting on the staircases leading to the back street behind the house. They are generally on the verge of passing out, although some have dispensed with the pleasantries and are already completely gone. In theory, they are waiting to be picked up by friends and dropped off at their rooms to drool on their pillowcases or mistake closets for bathrooms. In practice, though, those friends are never guaranteed to come. Luckily, the burnouts have someone to stay with: each other. Like all the regulars, they’d prefer a thousand nights they can’t remember to a single night alone.
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