Confessions of a Class Clown, Part Deux

So, with high school over, the big wide world of college awaited. I have to say that my four years at Syracuse University were four of the most fun years I have ever experienced. Ably abetted by a fraternity house full of brothers as well as copious amounts of alcoholic beverages, those four years flew by. Some of them flew quickly because I have no memories of them.

My freshman year (1970) was the first time in the university’s history that first semester freshmen were allowed to rush and pledge fraternities. I really had no intention of joining one, but a couple of the guys at Acacia Fraternity were so nice (and were also in Air Force ROTC) that I made the commitment. By comparison, we were actually a fairly tame fraternity. (Let me get this out of the way right now. Despite what anyone who happens to be the mother of my wife may say to the contrary, we were not the model for the Delta Tau Chi fraternity in Animal House. Okay, we DID have an annual Night on the Nile party where we all wore what amounted to togas. And several years earlier, a couple of the guys led a cow into the bell tower of one of the campus buildings and left it there. But we were never on double secret probation, to our knowledge. And we never wrecked the Homecoming Parade.)

One of the joy’s of pledging a fraternity is what is generically called Hell Week. We called it Initiation Week because unlike some other frats, there was no physical torture involved. Okay, the pledges were kept in a state of sleep deprivation which has been characterized as torture by the UN. And pushups were rather liberally distributed. But there was no paddling or hitting; just a lot of yelling and bracing against the wall when an initiated brother passed by.

One thing that pledges were not allowed to do was laugh because Initiation Week was a solemn occasion. So every time I got caught laughing or smiling, I explained myself by saying, “I’m solemning, sir.” The pledge trainer and his roommate had a room that happened to have a brass door knocker. One of my pledge brothers and I needed to speak with said pledge trainer, so rather than simply knock on the door, I banged with the door knocker. When our pledge trainer asked what we were doing, I said, “We’re playing with your knocker, sir.” My pledge brother and I promptly lost it and the two of us fell down in fits of laughter. Our pledge trainer opened the door, looked at the two of us and just shook his head and shut the door without awarding any swift and terrible retribution. (My pledge brother became my closest frat brother and my roommate and we were later groomsmen in each others’ weddings.)

During Initiation Week, the pledges were required to wear ties and jackets and, at all times, have with them their pledge paddle, their membership manual and their local membership supplement. If the pledge happened to “lose” any of these things, he was given a larger, heavier (and far less useful) substitute. You may ask how one “loses” their materials. Well, it was a phenomenon known as the “Theta Chi Chameleon.” Theta Chi was the frat behind ours. The chameleon was an evil member of Theta Chi who could look astonishingly identical to any of our brothers. It HAD to be the chameleon because no brother would treat any other member, brother or pledge, in a bad manner. Honest. It was the Theta Chi Chameleon. Honest.

Anyway, in one particular pledge class two years after mine, I was very friendly with one of the pledges. (He and I later became roommates and we were also groomsmen in each others’ weddings. In fact, the night before my wedding, I slept with him. No, you dirty-minded people, I mean we shared the double bed in the motel where the bunch of us stayed the night before.) Anyway, the Theta Chi Chameleon impersonated me four times to steal his pledge materials. Can you imagine? My favorite pledge and the Chameleon chose ME to impersonate. By the end of Initiation Week, he was carrying two pencils (less useful substitutes for the written material) and a highway sign (that had been liberated several years earlier by another brother) that was about six feet square for his pledge paddle.

Once a semester, our Little Sisters (of whom my wife was one) would throw a 5:00 AM TGIF party. Because there was a combination lock on the door of the frat house, they needed a brother in on it to get in and set up. Because Joy could not have gotten out of bed without my knowing, I was the de facto choice for inside man. This one Friday was a spectacular success with whiskey sours, mai-tais and Bloody Marys. Coincidentally, Friday was also uniform day for ROTC students. Now, my fraternity big brother never made it to class because he over-served himself. I was just drunk when I went to my ROTC class. This was the year I had The Major who did not particularly approve of me. During class, he asked me a question and I slurred out the correct answer. The following conversation ensued:

The Major: Mr. Gutis. Are you drunk?

Mr. Gutis: Oh, yes sir.

The Major: At this hour?

Mr. Gutis: Oh no, sir, I was drunk by 6 AM.

Well, he reported me to the colonel. Now, the colonel was a good ole boy from North Carolina who had flown bombers his whole career. He knew I wanted to fly B-52s and the colonel really liked me. He called me into his office and asked me to explain myself. I told him exactly what had happened. He looked me up and down, thought for a second and then said, “Real fine. Keep up the good work.” I saluted and left.

Our house was directly across the street from the primary women’s freshman dorm. On the third floor of my fraternity, there was an amazing array of optical devices because it took many of the girls quite a while to recognize that there was a frat full of healthy, red-blooded, young men across the street from them and they left their blinds open. There was also a birch tree in front that blocked the view of many rooms. The summer that I had to go to AFROTC field training in Plattsburgh, New York, I drove through Syracuse on my way home and spent a few days. There were always a couple guys who stayed there year round so I had company. As fate would have it, one night, we had acquired some alcoholic beverages and we, shall we say, over-served ourselves. At some point, I said, “We’ve talked about it. No one’s around on campus. Let’s cut the tree down.” The initial guffaws quickly led to a steely determination. Have you ever noticed that trees look smaller than they really are when they’re standing up? For some reason, we tried to drag it into the back yard and it got jammed…just as the university police arrived. We scattered. I managed to run around to the other side of the house and come in the front door. Very innocently, I walked out the back door and asked the police officers what had happened. When they explained the obvious to me, I said, “Oh, I noticed a couple of guys running out towards College Place.” They thanked me and I innocently asked them what they wanted to do with the tree. They looked at me like I had two heads and said that if we wanted the wood we should just cut it up. So we did. And for the next two years our fireplace had the nicest supply of white birch wood.

And lest you think that I only picked on my fraternity brothers, let me tell you this story. My girlfriend (now wife) Joy and I were lying on my bed watching the movie The Ten Commandments on TV. Shortly after Moses leads the Children of Israel out of Egypt the following conversation took place:

Joy: Was Moses married?

Me: Yes.

Joy: Do you know his wife’s name?

Me: Yes.

Joy: What was it?

Me: Mrs. Moses.

With that she shoved me off the bed. This might not seem significant but I had the top bunk of a bunk bed.

We tended to be very tolerant of brothers having “guests” spend the night. This tolerance, however, was pushed to the breaking point when one of them moved his girlfriend into the frat house. She was actually giving our phone number and address as her number and address. He, of course, denied that she was living in the house but she had several suitcases worth of clothes in his room. Oh, and did I mention she was the daughter of one of the university vice-chancellors? Well, when we had the infamous 5 AM TGIF that led me to run afoul of The Major, the other Little Sisters did not tell her about it. At the weekly brothers’ meeting, the brother in question raised the issue. Once again, always the lawyer, the following conversation took place.

Me: Let me ask you a question. Isn’t the purpose of the 5 AM TGIF to surprise people living in the house?

Frat brother: Yes.

Me: Well she was surprised, wasn’t she?

End of conversation.

Let me say this. I have never been a big fan of practical jokes. It is just far too easy for them to go badly and dangerously awry. But…my junior year, the national fraternity sent one of its traveling secretaries to visit us. Aside from the fact that the chapters in the northeast detested national because they detested us, this individual was particularly unpleasant…no, let’s be honest. He was an almost total asshole. When he visited us, he came down with the flu bug that was running rampant across campus. For reasons unknown to me, my big brother who was chapter president, allowed this yutz to take his bed for the visit. At the time, we had an alumni brother, Larry, going to grad school and who was living in the frat. The guy from national did not know him. As a “med student,” Larry looked in on him and I had told Larry to tell this detestable yutz about a weird strain of the flu they were working on and Upstate Medical Center. What Larry told him was that if your urine turned blue, it meant that the flu was fatal within days. The last day with us, he felt well enough to interact with us. One of the other guys got me some methylene blue. I had an eye-dropper full of it that I palmed into his black coffee when he wasn’t looking. Guess what methylene blue does to urine? We understood from our Cornell chapter that he never made it there. And they were quite pleased about that.

One of the last things I did in college involved the same two individuals who had been surprised by the TGIF. The frat house had been built in two stages. The back part of the house was built after the front part and had a separate furnace and the thermostat was upstairs where Barry and I and a few others lived. The brother in question was the house steward. (He got a discount on room and board by being the in-house repairman.) A window in his room was cracked yet he refused to fix it. Rather he would constantly whine about us not turning up the heat enough. (Syracuse, NY winters tend to get verrrrrry cold, BTW.) So, the first nice warm day in the spring, we finally felt very guilty about the heating situation. So we took the cover off the thermostat, packed ice on it…and cranked it to 90 degrees. The best part was we could hear him stomping up the stairs in enough time to pull the ice, replace the cover and hide the ice. This went on all afternoon until we determined that our heat debt had been repaid.

Like all good things, though college came to an end, so it was off the Uncle Sam’s Air Force. Stay tuned….