Chapter 44: Diagnoses, Fraternal and Personal

Marilyn and I spent Friday evening and Saturday morning living on room service and screwing our brains out, with me apologizing and her punching me in between. By lunchtime Saturday she had gotten the mad out, and we went from makeup sex to regular hot monkey love sex. There was a massive change in attitude, though. We were much more serious about each other, and it was something I had noticed the first time as well. It was like we were no longer kids and girlfriend/boyfriend. Now we were adults, and we were committed to each other, even if we were only twenty or twenty-one at the time. Saturday, we dressed, and I took her down to the mall and into a jewelry store where we looked at engagement rings. I hadn’t even asked her formally, but she looked at several and was sized for the ring, and I made a fifty percent deposit. I would return in a month, finish payment, and she would be my fiancée. We would make the formal announcement at Christmas, when I would visit the family and ask her father’s permission.

At that point I drove back to Troy. Once I got back in the house, I ran across Bruno.

“Sorry, Bruno, your reign is over.” I told him.

“Well, hail to the chief and all that,” he replied.

I had done one radical thing that spring which I had never even contemplated before, certainly not on my first go-around. I ran for Chancellor. Chancellor, the equal to the President of a frat, is an odd position. You have to chair the various meetings and ride herd on a fractious bunch of college guys, and some guys simply aren’t cut out for it. There are also some routine ornamental things, like reports to the national organization and to the college, and monthly meetings with the Inter-Fraternity Council. Some guys are good at it, and some aren’t. To win the job, it takes a certain degree of respect from the brothers. As a dope smoking asshole on the first ride through, it hadn’t even been an option. Now I had a certain degree of respect, what with doing the doctorate and cooking and the military thing. We were no longer a military frat; since the Viet Nam War was over and the draft ended, ROTC was plummeting, and my class was the last in the frat to have anybody in ROTC. Still, I had a degree of respect because of it.

I wanted to run because of what I saw developing around the house. We needed leadership. The house was splitting into three separate groups and had been for a year now. The first group was the Dregs, short for Dregs of Humanity. These guys were mostly older brothers, a year or two ahead of my class, with a heavy proportion of ROTC and a propensity for heavy drinking, and they lived in Grogans’. Their enemies were the Heads, short for Potheads, the pot-smoking bunch around the house, mostly in the Main House. The third group was everybody else, growing sick and tired of the nonsense.

Originally, I had been one of the Heads. This was a large group, but by our senior year the numbers were down significantly. Ricky Holloway had graduated and moved out, and despite being a Head, had been enormously respected by everyone, even the Dregs. Both Pabst and Schlitz had graduated and left, and Homer Simpson was going to be gone by Christmas. I was not a Head this time, although it was known that I still smoked an occasional joint.

I tried to defuse what I saw as a growing situation during my sophomore year by blackballing a guy named Kevin Farnsworth. He was a nice and funny kid a year behind us, who had gotten into the frat on my first run. Once in he proved incredibly divisive. He was a major doper, and after the end of his sophomore year had flunked out. Unlike the average guy who flunked out and moved back to East Asshole, Tennessee, Kevin was a local boy, from Albany. He could come over whenever he wanted. He became a major drug dealer, and supplied most of the Heads, and had no compunctions about giving the Dregs a ration of shit whenever he saw them. This time I blackballed him, and he stopped coming around. It defused things, but only somewhat.

Another time, last spring, a couple of the Dregs, Bill Swayzack and Hank “the Hammer” Hotaling, decided that one of the sophomores needed to ‘ride the wild surf.’ They were drunk, and this kid came through, Matt Lincoln, who was kind of small and quiet and had been known to have a toke or two with the Heads. The Main House bathroom had two toilets sitting next to each other without any kind of a barrier between them. To ride the wild surf, two guys grabbed the victim and lifted him up off the floor, and then dangled his feet in the toilets. A third guy would stand next to the toilets, and on the signal, would flush them simultaneously. For extra insult, you made the victim give the signal - “Surf’s up!”

When Bill and the Hammer saw Matt, they started yakking about riding the surf. Matt didn’t know what they were up to, and he sat down in the living room to watch television. By the time he figured it out, they were already heading towards him. I moved in between them. “The surf is not up,” I told them.

“Fuck you, Buckman, the surf is up,” answered the Hammer.

“Nobody’s riding the surf today.”

“Maybe you’d like to ride the surf?” asked Bill.

I just smiled. “If you think you can make me, feel free to try.” I could see Matt trying to slip out to the side, and I shifted a little more. “Get lost,” I told him. He scooted out through the arch and went upstairs. He roomed diagonally across from Joe and me. Bill tried to move and intercept him, but I just stayed between them.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” he demanded.

“The surf is out,” I repeated. At that point, a few other guys came in the room and told us to knock it off. I just gave a gracious smile and went into the kitchen, and Bill and the Hammer grumbled and went over to Grogans’.

The Dregs were as numerous as ever, and without me or Kevin in the Heads, they outnumbered the Heads almost 2:1. Most of the Dregs were crones, grad students hanging around a fifth year, and a couple were guys who flunked out and stuck around anyway, rooming with us while their buddies finished school. The only Dreg in our class was Bruno, and he was running for Chancellor, too. Previously he had won the election and become Chancellor but had been a weak leader.

Bruno got a fair number of votes, but with me running as an Independent, he didn’t get enough. My platform was simple. We had problems, the house needed a leader, and it needed a leader not in any particular group. That was me, not Bruno. Vote Buckman, for a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage! I won. I immediately threw my support behind Bruno for Minister, the Vice-Chancellor, and he was voted in unanimously.

His slogan as Minister was “Only a heartbeat away!”

In general, being Chancellor wasn’t that big a deal. You ran the house meetings, mediated squabbles, and prayed that the important positions had brothers who knew what the fuck they were doing and had some people to back them up. Nobody cared a whole lot if the Social Committee Chairman got drunk and passed out. If the House Manager was away for the weekend in January and the furnace died, everybody cared!

So far, it hadn’t been a problem. I just hoped we’d get through the year without the Heads and Dregs fucking things up. By next year they would all have graduated anyway.

Otherwise, the year went along nicely. During Work Week we had the vote for Master Chef, and I won. This was a purely honorary title and was given to one of the designated Sunday cooks, usually a senior, but not always. Ricky Holloway had held it for the last two years. You got to kibitz with the regular cook and the Steward, but otherwise it meant nothing. You were not allowed to nominate yourself and weren’t present for the voting. Still, it was nice to be noticed.

My doctoral studies had moved along nicely, and I had a framework for the calculations which meshed neatly. With any luck at all, I would be writing the dissertation by the Christmas break and be able to graduate with my PhD on schedule. Marilyn and I continued seeing each other every few weeks, although we started a new technique; she would drive south, and I would drive north, and we would meet up in Lake George and spend the weekend there.

I found myself a shrink in the fall. Dad mailed me the report from Hamilton’s shrink. I got it when I made it back to Kegs. It was about a dozen pages long and made absolutely no sense to me. It only made sense to another shrink. I couldn’t even look it up on the Internet since nobody had gotten around to inventing it yet. Eventually I just tucked it in my drawer and went about my business.

Midway through the semester I got to thinking about it again. RPI didn’t have any medical or pre-medical program, so I couldn’t find a friendly teacher to quiz. Maybe Professor Rhineburg knew somebody I could ask, or at least know where to start. I hit him up one day in his office when he was alone.

“Excuse me, Professor, got a moment?”

“Sure, Carl, what’s up?”

I sat down across from him. “Do you know any psychiatrists?”

“Why? Finally starting to go crazy around here?” he joked.