Chapter 37: Sophomore Year

Sophomore year is an interesting year for most students, in that this is their first really independent year, at least academically speaking. Not in lifestyle, of course, since that occurs freshman year. Freshman year is a huge change for the average college student. For the vast majority that are now living away from home for the first time, this is a massive culture shock. They are now treated as adults and need to learn discipline quickly. Mommy and Daddy are no longer going to be there to hold their hands, and they will have to adjust to a foreign environment and meet new people and assume new responsibilities. More than a few students bomb out at this; Marilyn and Buddy were just two examples. Buddy was obviously more extreme, but Marilyn didn’t have the discipline needed to study away from home. She needed a structured environment.

A lot of students don’t survive freshman year. Those that do find that sophomore year is more interesting. For most college students, not just at RPI but at almost any college, freshmen are interchangeable parts. All engineers need to take a couple of semesters of basic engineering before they can specialize. All chemists need to take basic chemistry so they can have the proper language. All liberal arts majors need to take some basic English courses, so they can learn to write. RPI was more extreme than most, but not by much.

Almost all colleges understand this, and to some degree or other try to help their students cope and adapt. They have tutors and help offices and at RPI the structured nature of freshman courses (everybody does the same classes) helps. That doesn’t affect the fact that more than a few students are simply too immature to be on their own, and will simply spend their time fucking off, like Buddy.

Sophomore year is when you start to specialize. At this point the classes become smaller and more intimate. Gone are the days when five hundred students crammed into Chemistry 1 classes. Now you get lectures for thirty Organic Chemistry students. Different disciplines will have different requirements, so electrical engineers won’t need to take hydraulic engineering courses, and so forth. Make friends with these guys, because they’re going to be with you for the next three years!

The classes also become tougher, and it’s very easy for the professors to spot the students sleeping through class, since it won’t be in a giant lecture hall. There will be another cut on students who somehow managed to fake their way through freshman classes and now must take it up a notch. Likewise, at this point a lot of students start moving off campus and have to face those challenges as well. While some colleges insist that everybody live on campus, most colleges simply don’t have the dorm space to do that. At RPI fully one in four students live in frats, and just about as many live in apartments in town. The school simply does not have enough rooms for all students.

As I settled back into full time life at Kegs, I could see some of these dynamics working already. Joe and I had meshed nicely. He was a relatively quiet guy, who didn’t drink much and never even looked at drugs. He didn’t chase women around very much, and in fact kept that part of his life quiet. That being said, I never once had a warning bell from my gay-dar, and I suspected he had some action going back home. Home was in suburban New Jersey, a place I had once lived in for a few years and never much cottoned to. Joe had a good sense of humor, in a quirky and understated sort of fashion, and was a decent magician. He did card tricks with the most awful stage manner, but you could never see how he made those cards appear or disappear! He was a hard core Catholic.

We made it through September fine, and then I did that first weekend at Marilyn’s the first weekend of October. She visited two weekends later, and as I promised Joe, he had plenty of advance warning. We were already working on a calendar - I would visit Marilyn the beginning of November, she would visit a week or two later, I would visit her for Thanksgiving, and that would be it. December we would go bonkers for finals, and then we would have the winter break. We’d worry about the 1975 schedule then. I wanted to keep things under control this time around and be a better roommate. Joe was a decent guy, and I always felt guilty about being an asshole with him. I knew he didn’t like my being a doper and one time Marilyn and I went to bed while he was still in the sack himself, and that really offended him.

I could already see what was happening with some of my incoming brothers. Andy Kowalchuk was a big-time pot smoker, which I knew now but not on the first trip through. He got me into pot big time back then, but I kept it much more low key now. Still, he got Bill Keswick, a chemistry major, to design a hash oil still and steal some lab gear to run it. This turned out to be an amusing weekend project for the two of them. Jerry Modanowicz was proving to be an asshole, but since he had moved into the glorified closet that was one end of the Underground Railroad, he didn’t have any roommates to worry about. The Cisco Kid was back, uglier and stupider than ever, having barely managed to keep his grades high enough to come back. Within two weeks he had already broken one chair when he sat in it, and I knew it was the first of many to come.

Joe was a math major, and was taking sophomore level math classes, but he didn’t need all that much help from me, and rarely asked. He thought my working on a doctorate was a little strange, but it wasn’t that odd. In fact, despite being a real animal house and a nest of dopers and drunks, Kegs had a surprising number of geniuses living there. A lot of the upperclassmen were in five-year engineering master’s programs. Both Pabst and Schlitz, the Beer Buddies, would graduate with electrical engineering degrees (pure math) in three years, and Homer Simpson would get out in four years with a master’s in computer science. Joe would graduate in four years with two bachelor’s degrees, math and economics, and then defer his military duty while he went to Wharton on his own dime and get both an MBA and a master’s in operations research (also pure math) in two years. My doing a doctorate in four years was not at all out of the question.

Marilyn showed up two weeks later in the middle of the afternoon on Friday, while Bradley was taking a rare late afternoon Friday class. We quickly tore upstairs and snuck in a quickie before he got back, although we giggled when he came back from class and found us sitting there pretending to study. Marilyn had already met Joe (he was my second in the duel with Ghormley) as well as the rest of the brothers, and settled right in. There were always a few girlfriends around the house, some serious and some not. We did not live a chaste lifestyle. It was more of a desperately horny lifestyle!

The best example of this was a fellow about five years ahead of us who made a name for himself and the fraternity at every college campus in the area. He combined the finest traits of nerdly math wizardry and terminal horniness. He figured that an average brother would meet, over the course of a semester, ten to twenty girls at various parties. They would end up getting one or two of them in the sack, a closing ratio of roughly ten percent. So therefore, apply good old-fashioned Yankee ingenuity to the problem. He would hit on 100 to 200 girls a semester! If it had two X chromosomes, he would buy her a drink at a party, quite bluntly say that he was only interested in one thing and ask if she was interested in it also. If so, they could leave together. On the downside, he got his face slapped a whole shitload of times, had drinks dumped on his head even more, and earned a major reputation as a first-grade creep. On the plus side, he figured his ratio held true, and he got laid a lot! It took us years to live his reputation down!

By strange happenstance, we were having a party Saturday night, the first big one of the semester. It wasn’t Halloween, which was the following week, but we were celebrating Oktoberfest, so we had a couple of kegs going. Next weekend we’d get even sillier. That afternoon, Marty and I and Marilyn set up the bars, much like I had done with Marty last year when I met Marilyn. It was looking like I was a junior member of the Social Committee, or maybe they had just figured out I was a lush. Joe was spending the night in the triple with Bruno and Lynchburg, and with any luck, Marilyn and I could spend some quality time alone before the party that afternoon.

We had finished setting up the bars and were relaxing in the living room when another couple of guys, juniors, came in and plopped down on the couch. They were starting to argue about learning and education, which Marilyn found amusing, since she was an education major. Meanwhile, they got totally off the first topic and started arguing about what the most important thing they learned in high school was. That was when I chimed in. “Hey, I learned everything I ever needed to know back when I was five years old. Everything else is just BS.”

“Like what?” sneered Jim Easton.

“Well, I learned to play well with others and to share my toys when I was five. Didn’t you learn that, too?”

That got a good laugh from everybody there, including Easton. “That’s true. It didn’t take, but I do remember learning that.”

“Everything else important is from that time, too. Don’t you remember being told to watch both ways before you cross the street? Five years old!”

Everybody nodded, and they started tossing around stuff like, ‘Don’t run with scissors.’, ‘Don’t cheat.’, ‘Nobody likes a tattletale.’, and so forth.

I nudged Marilyn in the side and said, “Here’s a good one. Always take a nap every day.” Marilyn turned bright red at that, especially when Marty asked if I needed a nap.

“Maybe,” I agreed. “Besides, I always remember what I learned on Romper Room.”

That got people reminiscing about Romper Room. Marilyn got attention when she announced, “I was on Romper Room!”

“Really? You and Miss Sally?”

“It was Miss Nancy in Utica.”

I nodded. Romper Room was a franchise operation, and every town and station in those days, back before you had nationwide broadcasting like that, had their own hostess. “Well, I learned a very important lesson from Miss Sally.”

“What?” she asked, falling into my trap.

“Be a Do-Bee and eat your honey!”

Oh my God but the place roared at that, and Marilyn turned beet red and squealed as she ran out of the room. I raced after her and caught her and carried her up to my room. I was a Do-Bee!

Marilyn put up with quite a few jokes the rest of the weekend, but we left the party early and had our own party upstairs. Sunday morning, after a nice bout of early morning loving, we hit the bathroom early. The procedure was that you could lock the main bath on the second-floor hall from the inside, and then clean up together. Sometimes, if the traffic was heavy, a girl would simply barge in and hop into the shower, and then peel off her robe and hang it up by sticking her arm out through the curtain. That I saw more than once in my time there.

Sunday morning, I had to get up early anyway, since I was cooking. Not just cooking myself and Marilyn some Sunday breakfast. No, I was cooking Sunday Supper for the entire fraternity! I was confident of my abilities in preparing a nice intimate meal for two, or a delicious family sized meal, but this was the first time in either life that I would cook a professional meal for a large group of people on a budget. I was a little nervous.

Normally we had a cook who came in at about 11:00 and worked until 6:00, Monday through Friday. She made a simple lunch, sandwiches and soup, that sort of thing, and then made dinner. The Kitchen Steward was in charge of ordering everything needed, overseeing the budget, and running the assigned labor. All the brothers acted as waiters and dishwashers in rotation. Saturday, we did the same, but Mrs. Clarity simply prepped the meal ahead of time. We simply warmed it up.

Breakfasts were usually cereal or toast or eggs, which were free, or you could do yogurt, which had a signing sheet on the fridge, where you marked down what you took, and it was added to your bar bill at the end of the month. That’s how I learned to do omelets, studying under Ricky in the middle of the night when we had the munchies.

Sunday was different. We only had one meal, a big meal, at 1:00. You scrounged for yourself Sunday night. This was usually a big roast of some sort, veggies, potatoes, dessert, etc. We had these things at other meals, but Sunday was supposed to be bigger and better. We would also have more people in attendance. Girlfriends were usually around, and we often brought pledges and potential pledges in for meals. The cook was one of the brothers, from a list of three or four brothers who had demonstrated superior kitchen skills over the years. They got paid $10 for a Sunday meal. I had been a Steward once, but I had never been a cook.

I didn’t have an unlimited budget, and I didn’t have unlimited manpower. I had me and Marilyn, after I promised to split my fee with her. She was generally hopeless in a kitchen, but I would supervise her and use her for the scutwork. I just wouldn’t tell her that. I had been assigned a beef roast, and Arnie, the current Steward, had gone over my menu. I promised him roast beef, canned green beans, potatoes, gravy, rolls, and my choice of either Jell-O and Foo (a non-dairy whipped topping that we made from a powder) or ton cake (it’s bigger than a pound cake), which was nothing more than a sheet cake with some baker’s sugar sprinkled on it.

So that was the menu, but it didn’t mean I couldn’t improvise. We started early, and I had Marilyn help with mixing the ingredients for the ton cake and pour it into a baking tray. Marilyn, for all her being a lousy cook, is a perfectly adequate baker. As soon as the cake was in one side of the double oven, I had her make some dough for biscuits. Again, this can be pretty simple, but we needed 50-60. Meanwhile, I quickly washed three dozen potatoes and set them on a tray and put them into the other side of the oven.

Just because we were doing meat and potatoes, it didn’t mean we were doing something boring. I remember reading Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, and there is a passage about the fall of communism. It basically goes that not everybody has equal abilities. A good cook can turn apples, sugar, and flour into a tasty treat, a great chef can take the same ingredients and turn out a brilliant confection, and a lousy hack can turn them into an inedible mess. I was going for something special today. These weren’t just going to be baked potatoes; I was going to make double baked potatoes! You bake the potatoes until done, remove them from the oven, and cut them in half lengthwise. Then you carefully scoop out the potato from the skins and save the empty skins. The potatoes get mixed up with some milk and butter and chives, into a creamy mashed potato filling, get spooned back into the potatoes, and then rebaked. It takes a little longer, but it’s very nice.

While the potatoes were baking and Marilyn was working on the biscuits, I was preparing the roast beast. I was going for a horseradish crusting. You slit some pockets into the roast and then dredge the roast in flour and place it in the roasting pan. Next you prepare a paste of melted butter, horseradish, parsley, and lemon juice that you pour into the pockets and then cover the outside of the roast with. Then you roast as normal. Very tasty!

For gravy, I was taking some standard canned gravy, but modifying it by adding some beef bouillon, garlic, and horseradish. For my veggies, I was using canned green beans, which I had to use since I couldn’t budget for fresh and didn’t have the time to prepare them anyway. I was tempted to bake a green bean casserole, but instead settled for adding some chopped onions and cilantro to the pot while they were warming up.

By noon everything was cooking along nicely. The real trick to cooking is not the individual dishes, but the timing required to bring it all together at once. Some items, like the dessert, can be prepared ahead of time without worry. Others can be cooked and then kept warm for a bit longer, like the potatoes. The meat needed to be ready about fifteen minutes early, so I could carve it in time to be served on the dot at 1:00. The biscuits and the gravy needed to be ready without any delay. By half past twelve Arnie was marshalling the waiters and starting to prepare everything for serving. The kitchen smelled fabulous; Marilyn and I looked like we had been dragged through a knothole!

By 12:45 the tables were set, and people were starting to congregate. I was slicing roast beast as fast as my little fingers could go. On my own I used an electric carving knife, but here I used a big chef’s knife. Meanwhile Arnie had the main counter lined with serving plates and bowls, and he and Marilyn were slopping beans and biscuits and gravy out. At five minutes of, cries of “Food! Food!” were sounding in the dining room, and we could hear the thumping of fists on the tables. I just grinned at the others as we started portioning out the roast beef onto serving plates. We got done with about ninety seconds to spare, by which time the hue and cry was thunderous. I looked at my watch as the grinning waiters picked up their plates, and as the second hand hit the twelve, I flashed my hand down and sent them on their way. I leaned back against the counter and grinned at Marilyn. “Some fun, huh?”

She gave me an exhausted look. “I think I need a raise!”

“I’d make a smartass comment about the type of raise you’re going to get, but I’m too tired,” I admitted. I pushed her towards the dining room, where I had reserved her a seat near the kitchen, next to my roommate. “Sit. Eat. Rest!”