Was on the last page of
Atlanta magazine - thought I'd post it.
Double Secret Probation
The brunette grandmother across the table from me at Willie Rae's in Marietta is asking if I remember the night we slid naked together down the rocks in the Oconee River.
"No," I said. "Are you sure it was me?"
"Yes, I'm sure," she said. "But it wasn't a sex thing. We just didn't want to get our clothes wet. And it was pitch-black dark so we have never actually seen each other naked."
"Oh," I said, hating that I couldn't even remember what I couldn't see.
My friend has a much better memory than I do. We dated a few times when we were students at the University of Georgia and have become good friends over the years. She is in her third marriage. I have only been married once, unless you count that common-law thing a few years back.
My friend, who now runs a business in Cobb County, is asking if I've seen the 25th anniversary DVD of National Lampoon's Animal House. It reminds her of our college years, when she was a member of a "real lady-like" sorority and I was a brother in one of the classic animal-house fraternities at UGA, Alpha Tau Omega.
Animal House, as far as I'm concerned, is a documentary. I played Bluto, the John Belushi role, in real life for a couple of years in the 1960s. Some people still like to remind me of the embarrassing fact that on hot days, when I'd been drinking, I would strip off all my clothes and climb into the fraternity's ice machine to cool off. I was fined after one of the brothers from South Georgia shouted at a chapter meeting, "I can't even drink a glass of sweet tea without worrying if your fat butt has been sitting on the ice!"
At one point, my behavior became so unruly that the legendary dean of men, William Tate, banned me from the fraternity for three months and forced me to move from the animal house into a dorm populated mostly by students of veterinary medicine.
Much of our behavior in those days was completely insane. My friend recalls two boys in the fraternity named Bubba and Crockett who paid $50 for an old car, sawed off the roof, filled the back seat with dirt and drove it around town. It seemed to make perfect sense at the time.
One night, at a party at the frat house, my friend Larry Hornsby, who would later become a successful lawyer in Orlando, ran up and shouted, "Fat Brad Sargent has gone mad! He's got to be stopped!"
Sargent, a burly ex-football player who had transferred from Purdue, was roaming around on the roof of the big Colonial-style extension of the house. He saw us pointing at him and jumped from the roof to the patio, about 12 feet, like a flying Viking. Hornsby and I scattered as Sargent landed where we had been standing. He growled at us and ran off into the house like the Incredible Hulk. Last I heard, Sargent ran a successful business in California.
While a lot of the guys were hard-working, serious sorts who became doctors and lawyers, some of us drank around the clock. Some took amphetamines to study. And some were among the early experimenters in psychedelic drugs on campus. This was at a time when young men were being drafted right out of high school to serve in the Vietnam War. We developed a clash of cultures that pitted the anti-war, pro-drugs crowd against the more straight-laced traditional boozers. I tended to side with the former while continuing to drink with the latter.
When one of the backwoods brothers took LSD and washed it down with moonshine distilled in nearby Walton County, I asked him: "Jimmy, what do you see?" "Wavy cows," he said.
On a recent visit to Athens, I stopped to take a look at the old frat house at 130 River Road, just a few hundred yards from UGA's mammoth football stadium.
Fall semester was underway, and in my day boys would have been drinking beer, yelling and horsing around. The jukebox would have been blaring soul music. Pledges would have been doing chores and the upperclassmen would have been criticizing their work.
But all was ghostly silent. Windows were shattered or boarded up. Wooden trim had rotted. Grass had given way to weeds that stood six feet tall. The place was barren, empty and forlorn. The university had posted "No Trespassing" signs on the doors. An empty bottle of Jack Daniels, black label, rested in the weeds near the front steps.
I walked across the patio where I saw the Swingin' Medallions play "Double Shot (of My Baby's Love)" when it was on the charts in 1966. I was wearing madras slacks and drinking big milkshake cups of beer that day, and I'll bet half the campus crashed the party. Today the ATO house is abandoned and out of business. The fraternity was expelled from campus three years ago because a road trip, one of the time-honored pranks of an animal house, went terribly wrong. Ben Grantham, who was 20 and a sophomore from St. Simons Island, was blindfolded and handcuffed by pledges who put him in the back of a sport utility vehicle. They were pursued by a carload of brothers. The SUV sped up, hit gravel and wrecked. Grantham was thrown from the SUV and killed.
Four boys in the SUV were put on probation and given community service. Officials said neither Grantham nor the driver had been drinking, but the foolishness still proved fatal. The university formally disbanded the ATO chapter at UGA and took over the house.
At the end of Animal House, the epilogue tells us that the Belushi character was elected to the U.S. Senate. But in real life, John Belushi died of a drug overdose. As for me, I continued drinking in animal-house style until I was 35 years old.
My fraternity epilogue also includes some sad stories. Two of my fraternity brothers were killed in alcohol-related car wrecks. Another, a sweet-spirited diabetic, drank until he lost his legs, went blind and died. Another was a heavy-drinking depressive who shot himself. Another got involved with drugs and became one of Atlanta's earliest victims of AIDS.
A few years ago, I met with one of my old frat brothers who called me because he heard I was sober. He had continued drinking fraternity-style until his late 40s and was trying to put together a few days of sobriety while selling cars. I've since lost track of him.
I often wonder if he made it.
Some boys at UGA are re-colonizing the fraternity, forming a new ATO chapter on campus. But if they succeed, they won't live in the haunted old house on River Road. An engineer's study said it would cost too much to bring the house up to code. Things will never be the same, and that's not all bad. Fraternities are wising up to the dangers-and liabilities-of binge drinking. Wherever the reborn fraternity is located, national ATO leaders said, it will be in an alcohol-free house.
Whether Bluto likes it or not.
Threaded Mode