_I wish there had been a moment in my young life, twenty-three years ago, when I could’ve thought to myself, “What I think I’ll do now is join a college fraternity.” Because if so, there might’ve been a moment when I could as easily have said, “No. I believe I won’t join a college fraternity. I’m not that kind of fellow.”

What I did back then was not give either possibility a thought. I simply joined. Pledged. Sigma Chi. Tom Selleck and Dave Letterman’s bunch—the famous one with the sentimental song and the pretty sweetheart who later becomes your wife.

For a certain kind of boy (a guy with standards he can't understand) at a certain tender age, fraternity is simply a given. For this kind of boy conformity is a godsend. And I was that kind of boy.

In the long run, of course, fraternities have more or less the ethical dimension of a new hairstyle or a soft-drink flavor or a dance step you learn to perfection, then forget about entirely. And I don’t feel particularly sorry to have been a member, since I’m suspicious of revising my past, and dislike the idea that anything I did and can remember so vividly was completely worthless. But still, I would like to have chosen to join, to have back those “decisions” I made by not deciding. Nothing, after all, is as venerable as nervy volition exerted in early age.

Like all conformists, we did not think of ourselves as conformists. We were men. Individuals and individualists. We knew what we knew. We prized life’s lonelier roads, we were hard guys to convince of things. Stiletto-eyed, serious, even grave. The fraternity meant to solidify these things and add some others “fairness, decency, good manners.” We winked, nodded, nested chins in our palms when listening, wrinkled our brows, clinched Winstons in our teeth, dealt a fair hand. We meant something, and we knew it.

Yet we also knew how to let down the gates for a good time when the right times came. We knew how to treat a woman. How to confide. We were easy in the company of men. We knew where to draw the line. Imagine our surprise, then, at finding an entire group of other guys who felt as we did about practically everything.

Independents, those sallow fellows who did not join fraternities, who stayed in the dorm and sculled around the shallows of organized social life—blazerless—suffered, we felt, the mark of undesirability and championed a mean, cast-out status. Loneliness, unprotectedness were features of that bad idea. Independence did not have the novelty it would come to have. Then, it only meant left out, which it does still. But none of us had stomachs for that.

Our bunch had standards, but to be initiated to Sigma Chi, Michigan State, 1963, you were still required to pick up a stuffed olive off the chapter-room floor using nothing but the naked cheeks of your behind, and, while many “actives” watched and cheered, deliver the olive to a small, waiting Dixie Cup. You still had to sit six hours straight on the hard edge of a hard chair, knees together, blindfolded, while someone played Ravel’s Bolero, fortissimo, directly into your ears. You had to do many, many, many painful push- ups. You had to let the older boys scream obscenities and insults in your face, blow cigar smoke in your eyes, and breathe on you until they were tired of it. You had to tramp out into the frozen Michigan night in search of nothing less than a white cross—the fraternity’s sacred emblem—which, of course, wasn’t there. You had to bray like a donkey, buzz like a fly, bleat like a goat, be scorned, scourged, ridiculed, and insulted until they let you join them. It must have seemed like a good idea.

Exacting decisions had already been made about the people who weren't being initiated. We were, after all, chiefly in the excluding business. This guy had “the breath of death”; this guy had “bad choppers.” This guy “had the handshake of a fish.” We didn’t want Jews, blacks, Orientals, gays, women, big fatties, or cripples. Yo Yo Ma couldn’t have been a Sigma Chi. Neither could Steven Spielberg or Justice Marshall. 

We did want “face men,” jocks, wild guys, rich guys, guys with class, guys with sisters, guys with “nice threads,” “real characters,” guys willing to make fools of themselves and others. Guys who didn’t think this was all bullshit. Good guys, in other words.

I’ve never seen the movie Animal House. But from the previews I’ve concluded Sigma Chi, in my day, was like that more or less. We called ourselves by animal names—the Pigeon, the Pig, the Guppie, the Armadillo, the Whale (there were also vegetables—the Eggplant, the Rutabaga, the Tomato, the Carrot, the Root). We put people’s heads in toilets. We lighted our farts. We dropped our trousers in public. We drank and pissed on things. We danced. We shouted. We groped. We gave the finger. We got sick. We wore coats and ties. We were men and knew no bottom line.

A good question to ask of all this, I suppose, is: “Were we friends, all of us?” And the answer would have to be—not that much, if friendships are things meant to last a long time. I remember detesting some of my brothers, mocking others, lying to them, pitying them, bird-dogging their sweethearts. One boy, now a veterinarian, I sucker-punched at a party, reshaping one of his nostrils forever—I forget precisely why. By the time I’d been in a year, I was already certain I didn’t belong (though neither did I want out), so that I became, for a while, aloof with superiority. These guys were just children, I decided, Gothics to be brought along for amusement, on earth for me to observe. This, I think, is also what conformists do.

What I learned from being a Sigma Chi, though, is enough to make me not regret it. I learned that an experience need not be ennobling or noble for good to come out of it. This, after all, is the alma mater of comedy.

I learned that even from a brotherhood one could get free, as some did, though it wasn’t easy: there was red tape. Soul-searching. Hard feelings. You needed to renounce more than a moment, a scene, a situation. I learned, in fact, that life itself could be thought of as just a series of alliances entered into for a time and a goal, and abandonable without prejudice. All this, I think, is instructive of the value of institutions both good and bad.

I also learned that buffoonery, prejudice, treachery, resentment, pettiness—all the poorer instincts—can often go hand in glove with demonstations of friendship and companionability, and that those impulses are not necessarily even alien, but are merely humors within the larger human dramaturgy. We must decide which humor will dominate. Many times, in those days, I asked myself, “Can I do this, think this, say this, and still be your brother?” And the answer was almost alway yes.

Is all this then, I wonder, what the fraternity meant us to learn? Is this what the grip meant? The secrets? In hoc signo vinces? Maybe. But I doubt it. The fraternity had something else in mind, I think, something nobler-sounding, but that in a complex, importance-seeking world, wouldn’t work; that would turn us into Babbitts and later Meursaults. We were phonies, poseurs, bores, jokemasters, stupids, preposterous boys who wore our importance like uniforms but signified nothing—me not the least of them. And in truth if I learned anything at all, it might’ve been that I did not have to stay exactly that way forever.