Chapter 24: Kappa Gamma Sigma

Despite my above average success with the ladies in junior high and high school, I saw very little action that first semester. Okay, to be honest - almost no action. It’s not that I wasn’t interested, because I certainly was. This was the longest dry spell in my life since I had lost my cherry for the second time with Shelley. However, I had several very large issues to deal with. The first was that as a freshman, my ranking on the social scale for the average girl ranked somewhere lower than whale shit. Even if I managed to hit up a girl at a Friday night dance at the Rat, when they learned I lived in the freshman dorms it was ‘see you later.’ Secondly, there were no girls to hit up. Like I said before, with a 14:1 ratio, the place was a total sausagefest.

Finally, there was my course load, which was heavy. After a few weeks of classes I knew two things. One, I was probably going to be able to accomplish my goal of a doctorate (or at least a master’s) in four years, and Two, I was not going to be valedictorian again, although I should be able to at least be in the top half of my class this time. That first semester I was taking around twenty-two credits - Differential Equations, Finite Math, Linear Algebra, Basic Algorithms, and Computer Science I (each four credits) and Military Science I (two credits). This was complicated by the fact that I’m a really good programmer, so I was already blowing through the programming course and my professor came to me to ask if I wanted to get both it and Computer Science II done in one semester. That would give me twenty-six credits, which some students only get in a year. At that rate, by the end of my freshman year, I was going to be a senior.

The only way I was going to have time for a girl was if one of them crawled under my desk and offered to give me a blowjob, and even then, I’d still end up multitasking!

Still, I didn’t spend the entire time buried in books or the library. I enjoyed my time at Rensselaer the first go-around, and I saw no reason not to now. I was just going to be a hell of a lot smarter about it, starting with partying. It was one thing to party on weekends, but there was no excuse for me to get stupid drunk and stoned in the middle of the week. I really blew Buddy’s mind in that regard. I never said anything to him about his smoking dope, but I didn’t join in. Then, the Friday night of Labor Day weekend, he gave me his perfunctory “Want a toke?” question and I said yes. He watched in utter amazement as I expertly rolled a fat joint, lit it, and smoked a fair bit before handing it to him.

“I thought you didn’t smoke pot?” he asked.

“Not on school nights,” I replied.

“What’s the difference?”

I just laughed. If Buddy didn’t know, I wasn’t going to be able to teach him in the time remaining until he flunked out. After that first week I had him totally pegged. Buddy was from a small town in Vermont, with just enough brains so that he was able to glide through high school without needing to crack a book, which got him mostly As and Bs, and a decent enough SAT score. What he totally failed to understand was that now he was playing in the big leagues, where everyone and their brother had managed to do that. He was now competing against guys like me, people who actually studied and went to class, and we were going to bury him.

By the end of the second week, I had a nice little rhythm going of studying like a madman until the end of classes Friday, and then getting a little bent on Friday night and Saturday. I scored a lid through Buddy and his connections, although I had to keep it under lock and key so that Buddy wouldn’t smoke it all up himself. I also kept the boozing under control, not out of some moralistic sense, but because I didn’t enjoy the hangovers. Most Friday or Saturday nights there would be a band playing down in the Rat. I would sometimes hit the Rat weeknights, too. It stayed open most nights until 11:00 or 12:00, for people looking for a place to study and grab a late meal. I started going down every few nights late to play pool. I had enjoyed it before but gave it up when I moved off campus.

So it went for another week. That Friday, Buddy managed to sleep through the first F-Test. Well, it wasn’t a shock; he had managed to sleep through every other 8:00 AM class he had signed up for. He even had the gall to complain that I didn’t wake him up, but I told him I wasn’t there, since I had my own classes to go to. Regardless, the sheer shock of the F-Test was finally sinking into my classmates, and a major party was planned down at the Rat that night. Lots of people were going to get stupid.

I had a beer in my room after class and then headed down to the Student Union, skipping out on whatever fresh hell the Dining Hall was preparing to serve up. I wasn’t quite hungry yet, so I wandered into the billiards room. All the tables were taken, so I found the one with the shortest line and plunked a quarter down on the table. The pool tables were coin operated. Once the balls went into the pockets, they fell into a track mechanism and would only be released by a quarter in the slot. Only the cue ball managed to escape this indignity, and I never figured out what magical method the table used to determine which ball was the cue ball. You placed a quarter on the edge of the table. When it was your turn, you put your quarter in and played for rights to the table with the previous owner. If you lost, the reigning owner of the table took on the next challenger. If you won, you were the new owner of the table.

The present king of the table was a loud-mouthed sophomore, supported by his equally loud-mouthed friend. They were playing as a team, alternating turns with the cue ball. There was some degree of skill present, but only enough to whip on somebody who had never played pool before. They beat, barely, two freshmen in a row, and then it was my turn.

“Lookie, lookie, fresh meat!” crowed the first guy, a tall and skinny guy in an RPI t-shirt and faded jeans.

“Just leave the quarter with us, little boy,” added his partner, slightly shorter and heavier, who was wearing a Led Zeppelin sweatshirt and jeans.

I smiled. These assholes weren’t just marginal pool players, they were also half drunk. Another freshman had queued up behind me and laid down his quarter. I turned to him and said, “Give me ten minutes, and I’ll take care of you, too.” The freshman grinned as the two sophomores started loudly mouthing off.

“Hey, knock it off and keep it down!” The manager of the billiards room/bowling alley yelled at them. They looked at him and shrugged but still were ragging on me in a lower tone. I ignored them.

We were playing 8 Ball. Normally we would have seen how close to a full rebound we could get with just a cue ball to determine who got to break, but these two clowns said the rule was that the owner of the table got to break. I didn’t care to push it, and despite a truly vicious break shot, the tall and skinny guy couldn’t sink a ball. I took my cue and promptly sank the 2 ball. “I have solids,” I commented, and promptly ran the 1, 3, and 7 balls before scratching on the 6. The other guy managed to get both the 9 and 10 balls before scratching. I then ran the 6, 4, and 5 balls before calling, “8 ball, corner pocket.” I nailed it with a flourish.

“Thank you very much,” I said with a smile. I nodded to the other freshman to come up and take his place.

“Fuck you!” said the first sophomore. “What are you, a hustler?”

“Nobody hustles us!” said his friend.

They both puffed up their chests and tried to crowd me off the table, but I just stood there and kept my mouth shut. They got loud enough that the manager came over and threatened to throw them out.

“He’s cheating! He’s hustling us!” said the first guy.

“Yeah!” agreed his partner.

Not the sharpest tools in the shed. I was trying to figure out how a four-ball run was a hustle. I settled it by asking the freshman if he minded waiting another five minutes. He gave me a curious look and said it was okay by him.

I turned back to the manager. “I’ll make you a deal. I’ll take these two on again. I lose, it’s their table; I win, they get lost.”

He chewed their asses another minute and then washed his hands of them. I broke this time, ended up with stripes, and cleaned them out in another couple of runs. They started bitching and moaning again, but this time the manager just yelled at them and pointed them towards the door. They wandered out with no good grace.

I joked about it with the other freshman, who perked up when the two sophomores left but still couldn’t break me. I will admit, he had more talent than they did. Next in line were a pair of upper classmen. They were dressed in matching red and gold fraternity shirts, with the Greek letters Kappa Gamma Sigma on the front. “I bet you’re feeling all sorts of brave now, aren’t you!” said the first one, a guy roughly my height and weight.

“Yeah, he’s feeling like it’s his table now,” agreed the second guy, a little shorter than the first.

“It costs a quarter to find out,” I replied, with a smile.

“Oh my, somebody needs an asskicking,” commented the first fellow. He pulled out a quarter and flipped it through the air to me. “You’re on.” He fished a cue out of the rack, rolled it on the table to see if it was warped, and put it back. It took him another two tries to find one he liked.

He must have really liked it a lot. I got nothing on the break, and he ran the table. I glanced over at the manager, who was grinning at me. “Sonny, you’ve just been hustled.”

“I guess so.” I turned back to the frat boys. “I guess you’ve played before.”

That set them both to laughing. “They’re the frat champions.” The manager pointed at a plaque on the wall. There were a number of small brass plates, one for each year, and the current winners were James Easton and Rubin Goldstein, Kappa Gamma Sigma.

I shook my head. “You two are these guys?” I asked, tapping on the plaque. They howled in laughter again. “Okay, so who’s who?”

The guy who played me grinned and stuck out his hand. “I’m Jim Easton. This is Boris.” The other student put out his hand.

I gave him an odd look. “Boris? The sign says Rubin Goldstein.”

“That’s my nickname. Come on, let’s get a beer. I’m buying,” said the second guy.

“You’re on.” I hung up my cue and surrendered the table to the next pair of students. We left the billiards room and settled into a booth. Jim and I sat down, while Boris wandered off towards the counter. “You stood up to those clowns pretty well,” commented Jim.

“Nothing to it. They were too drunk to play anyway,” I answered.

“Drunks like to fight.”

I shrugged. “Well, I wasn’t born with this nose.” I gave a lousy impersonation of John Wayne: “A man’s got to do what a man’s go to do!”

Boris came back with a pitcher of beer and three plastic cups. “What’s a man go to do?”

Jim said, “He was about to tell us how he busted his nose.”

I grinned. “My girlfriend’s parents came home early.”

Both Jim and Boris grinned wildly at that. “And were you being naughty?” asked Boris.

“Extremely. They kicked the shit out of me.”

“They?” asked Jim.

I gave them the condensed version of what happened, which led to howls of laughter and a lot of beer drinking. They asked for my name and what classes I was in and were surprised when I told them I wasn’t in any of the freshman classes. That discussion took us through the first pitcher of beer. Jim paid for the second, and we continued to talk for another half hour.

I was feeling the beer, and I wasn’t surprised when Jim said, “It’s time for dinner. You want to come back to the house with us for dinner.”

“It’s got to be better than whatever the mystery meal is at the dining hall,” added Boris. He got his nickname from playing chess like Boris Spassky last year. He also looked like a Russian, with a round face and slightly Tatar eyes.

“That’s got to be the truth!” I agreed. I grabbed my jacket and followed them outside.

Boris had the world’s ugliest and most decrepit Chevy Impala, which looked like it was held together by twine and bubblegum. “Behold, the Galactic Derelict!” commented Jim. We climbed inside, and I tried not to think about what I might be sitting on. At least it didn’t squish. The engine started with difficulty, and it knocked and rattled the entire trip to the frat house. Worse was the fact that not one of us was really in shape to drive, but we made it the mile to Kegs.

“Welcome to Kappa Gamma Sigma!” said Boris as we climbed out of his junker.

“Home sweet home!” added Easton.

We parked behind a couple of houses on Burdette, surrounded by a chain link fence, and with a swimming pool in the back yard behind one of them. The house and grounds were both large and lived in, with a comfortable feel to it and both nice and dump-like aspects. “Which home is it?” I asked.

“It’s both buildings,” answered Boris.

Jim said, “The frat house is actually two houses.” He pointed to the larger of the two houses, a rambling three story Federalist monstrosity. “That’s the main house. The other one is Grogan’s, which only has bedrooms. The main house is where we have the kitchen and dining room and living room and shit.”

“It has the bar, too. Come on, let’s get a beer,” finished Boris.

I followed them inside to find a beer keg tapped and set on a folding table in the front room of the main house, in what was known as the living room. I was handed a beer and told to make myself comfortable. I saw a surprising number of people I knew. First, I ran into Stew Sokoloff. He was a junior in my Finite Math class and looked shocked to discover he was taking classes with a freshman. Stew was a math major and wanted to become an actuary with an insurance company. We talked about the upcoming test for a few minutes, and then I noticed several guys from ROTC. I started talking to several of the guys and figured out what was happening.

I had been invited for an informal rush party kegger. A fraternity is a living organism, and every year the seniors would graduate and move away. The brothers needed to recruit, or ‘rush’, enough freshmen to make up for this loss. Since you couldn’t just run an ad in the newspaper (“Wanted: RPI freshman to join deviate social fraternity and live in filth and squalor. Must be heterosexual alcoholic drug fiend. Be prepared to show proof of being able to pay a hefty bar tab. Call now! Operators are standing by!” ) it was necessary to hold various parties and keggers to introduce freshmen to the fraternity lifestyle. Further, sophomores and juniors would be told to meet freshmen and invite them back to the frat to attend these parties. It’s like luring a four-year-old into a darkened van with candy and toys, only with beer and without the grisly ending.

For the freshmen, it’s a chance to load up on free beer and, in effect, audition for the brothers. The brothers use this time to see if any of these little assholes have what it takes to become Keggers and if they could stand living with them for a year or two. All this occurs during the first semester. At the end of the semester, the freshmen selected would be formally invited to ‘pledge’ the fraternity and announce their intention of joining the frat. Pledges gained several privileges, including the right to hang around, automatic invites to all parties and functions, free meals on weekends, and getting to run up a bar tab. On the other hand, they get used for scut labor by the brothers. Towards the end of the spring semester, they would go through ‘Hell Week’, a weeklong ordeal of abuse and hazing. At the end of the week, they would be initiated into the fraternity and become full members, entitled to live in the house the following year. It is a ritual that goes back to the 19^th century with fraternities, and probably thousands of years with equivalent organizations around the world. Hammurabi and the Babylonian Army probably had a similar system of recruitment.