Ye Nob Hill Inn : Part 2

The Real Animal House: The Awesomely Depraved Saga of the Fraternity That Inspired the Movie
By Chris Miller

(Page 2 of 2)

I shook my head. "That's bullshit. I'm never going to do that. I just - Ace, listen. My freshman year was horrible. They put me in a dorm room with these two guys - one never talked about anything but sports and the other didn't talk at all. They didn't know anything about what's cool. I'd mention the Five Satins, and Brad thought I was talking about a basketball team and Isaac just looked at me. I want to have some fun up there, you know?"

Jan arrived with the beer and Ace took a drink. "Look, you're not going to find many Five Satins fans at Dartmouth anyway. It's totally Republican up there. They probably listen to Dixieland or Glenn Miller or something. Now at Grinnell we have these hoots -" "'Hoots'?" said Josh.

"Owl music," said Froggie. "It's very now." "Hootenannies, you shitheads. Folk music! And we visit Negro churches and get to know the, uh, Negroes who, you know, sing spirituals and stuff there. I met great Negroes last semester." I sighed. Meeting great Negroes was fine by me, especially if the Negro in question happened to be Bo Diddley or one of my other musical heroes, almost all of whom were black. For rock 'n' roll was the very defining influence of my being. Nothing was more important than this musical gift from the gods that had arrived in New York, along with redoubtable disc jockey Alan Freed, back in late '54. But I wasn't sure there were any Negroes in New Hampshire, much less ones with electric guitars. The life Ace was talking about would be fine if you were going to school in Alabama or Los Angeles or even here on Long Island, but at Dartmouth? It was different up there.

And now, somehow, summer vacation was all but over. I'd finished my swell job with the Roslyn school system - cleaning desks and toilets with the school janitors - a week ago. The day after tomorrow I'd be returning for my sophomore year, which began with this horrible thing called rush, the process that sorted the majority of Dartmouth guys into one or another of the school's twentyfour fraternities and left the rest high and dry, condemned to three years of unaffiliated assholehood. This latter category would include guys with grave zit problems; or breath that was like poison gas; or glasses so thick they magnified their eyes, making them resemble Mr. Toad; and, well, yeah, Negroes, although there were only three of them allowed per class, which meant a grand total of twelve in the whole school at any given time, and some of those were African. And homos? At Dartmouth? As far as I knew, I'd never actually met a homo. They were really rare, as I understood it, maybe only one guy in a thousand. So of which group would I be a part - the conformist, square, yet fun-loving fraternity guys? Or the wretched social outcasts? It wasn't much of a choice.

"You know," Ace said to me, "Kerouac and Ginsberg and Cassady never joined fraternities. Look at the fun they had."

It was true - being on the road and smoking gage and digging starry dynamos sounded extremely cool. But there again, gage at Dartmouth was probably rarer than homos. What would work for Ace at Grinnell seemed impossible at the Big Green.

"Maybe so," said Josh to Ace. "Maybe I should be like you and sing folk music and integrate Negroes. But you know what? I got laid last spring. Did you?"

Ace flapped his mouth once or twice. "Well, uh, I got a hand job from this chick behind the kiln . . ."

"I rest my case." Josh returned to his beer, his biceps flexing prodigiously as he brought it to his mouth.

And there, it seemed to me, was the crux of the matter. Even if it took becoming a corporate robot, getting laid was number one. I gazed at girls as a man obsessed. If fraternities were the road to that, I'd join in a minute. The key thing to be striven for in life, I felt, almost as important as listening to rock 'n' roll, was continuous sexual activity with every beautiful woman I could find.

"Ace, I don't know. Folk music doesn't exist at Dartmouth. If you read poetry, they think you're weird. What if I did join a house?"

"You might be sorry," Ace said quietly. "Or he might have a ball," said Froggie. "And get laid and blown," put in Josh.

On the TV was that senator, Kennedy, who was running for president. They watched awhile. Actually a pretty cool-looking guy, I thought. Sharp dresser. The fraternity subject slipped away now and we united in laughter and the verbal play, punctuated by expressions of sexual yearning, that had gotten us through high school. Eventually, Jan threw us out so she could close. With many slurred assertions of undying friendship in the parking lot, we bade each other farewell until Thanksgiving and drove in our separate directions. I made it home without mishap, hit the sack, and dreamed I was a corporate robot, marching with thousands of other corporate robots off a cliff and into a sea of beer.

Copyright © 2006 by Chris Miller

About the Author

Chris Miller burst into the public consciousness in 1978 when he turned his fraternity memories into National Lampoon's Animal House. The movie detonated a cultural and cinematic explosion that's still echoing - for kids today are as nuts about the movie as the crazed collegiate hordes who turned the school year 1978-79 into one long toga party.