Lookaway, Lookaway

by Barnhardt, Wilton

  Oh dear God, she was wasting her time! What delusion, what folly! Jerilyn, get real! These elite sororities could smell her desperation, they could tell she was a party-girl fraud …

  No, no, her best bet was to run, crawl, abase herself before her mom’s house, Theta Kappa Theta, and hope for a legacy bid. She had a paper due but this was now or never! Her mind was made up … and this new plan had the added tactic of possibly pleasing her mother. Mother would be officially furious, of course, but she’d be a little proud too, just a tiny bit, and would probably relent and pay her dues for her. Oh God, there she was, stressing out about her mother again.

  Jerilyn grabbed her handbag. She wore a sleeveless Carolina Blue linen dress, formfitting and flattering, Stuart Weitzman sandals. She would wow them at Theta Kappa Theta; she resignedly marched out to West Cameron Avenue. Soon Theta House rose into view, a brown-brick box with narrow horizontal upper windows which made the structure look like it was squinting. She glanced across the street at the legendary Sigma Kappa Nu and thought how much more grand their old mansion was, despite their torn-up front yard, repair trucks and construction cones. She saw a laughing band of girls emerge, happy, thrilled to be there …

  Nope, Theta it is.

  θKθ was a hyper-preppy sorority, retro add-a-beads and sweaters, men’s dress shirts and khaki shorts for crazy casual wear, Italian wool hunter-green peacoats, pearls with little black dresses for evening events. Jerilyn breathed deeply and strode inside with false confidence for what was now the belated second visit. It looked like a furniture showroom, Jerilyn thought again, overstuffed with love seats and china cabinets full of plaques and trophies. Jerilyn was asked her name (and to spell it out) while a smiling older girl wrote it out in lovely penmanship on a peel-off name tag and gently affixed it between breast and shoulder. “Now we’ll all get to know you, Jerilyn,” she chirped.

  Margaret, a homeroom acquaintance from Mecklenburg Country Day, spotted her from the stairs and sped down to hug her. “I’m so excited you’re here! I’ve talked you up to so many of our women … I didn’t see you for the first part of rush and I thought about calling you which is dirty rushing and wrong wrong wrong, but … oh I know I shouldn’t ask, but are you aiming for any other houses? Naughty me!”

  “Well, of course, Theta’s my mom’s sorority, so this is my priority.”

  Margaret squealed and squeezed her arm.

  “Though I had a good time at Alpha Delta Phi.”

  “Oh yeah, well, they’re nice girls over there,” said Margaret, powerless to berate them.

  “I haven’t been in Sigma Kappa Nu yet—been scared off by the mud, I guess.”

  “They’ve become the big drug-and-party sorority, you know,” Margaret said with real sorrow, not able congenitally to savage anyone, even if they needed savaging. “It’s sure not our style,” she added.

  Yep. That was the settled, empirical truth about unexciting, underdated, good-girl Jerilyn Johnston: being wild was simply not her style, not her scene. Two-beer maximum. Politeness and manners and good breeding, associating with the right people who did the right things—that was her summary, Young Ladyhood’s Southern poster child, halfway to some law firm’s partners’ wives’ charity’s annual luncheon—non-alcoholic of course. She winced a bit as she sipped from her crystal punch cup; someone had put in way too much unsweetened citrus. Next thing she knew, there was a tink-tink-tink of a spoon against a teacup.

  “If I could … Each even-numbered hour on the hour, we ladies at Theta Kappa Theta want to introduce ourselves to you and let you know what we’re all about. Each of us, with the red name tags—you, the visitors, have the blue name tags—will be happy to tell you about life here at Cozy House. In truth, the house is named for our chapter’s founder, Sarabeth Scarples Cosy, C-O-S-Y, but through the years we’ve just stopped fighting its being constantly misspelled and gone with Cozy House, C-O-Z-Y, because, you know … it IS cozy here.” Hums of assents from the red-name-tagged girls. “This is a great house for you to pursue your dreams of being all that you can be. We have the highest grade point average at Carolina of any of the houses, male or female…” A slight pause for some of the red-name-tags to let out a mild whoop, some dry hand claps. “… and our sisters have gone on to so many impressive walks of life.”

  Jerilyn subtly abandoned the punch cup on a windowsill, and sat on the arm of a sofa while the roll of the immortals was declaimed. The wife of the state attorney general, the assistant to the agricultural commissioner, the CEO of a Durham-based company that manufactures cruelty-free lipsticks. Plus, scads, just scads of prominent communications majors!

  “But,” the young woman was saying, “who really can give y’all the rundown is Mary Jean Krisp, who is our president, and oh so many more things.”

  Jerilyn saw, presumably, Mary Jean, with her immobile blond hair-helmet and foundation-heavy makeup, smiling to each corner of the large living room like a lighthouse beaming into every cranny of the coast. She wore a peach turtleneck whose collar nearly swallowed her chin—the old hide-the-double-chin trick, thought Jerilyn—and below that hung a small gold chain with a pendant with a gold Greek theta and a cross.

  “… during Greek Idol 2002, Mary Jean was named Most Talented Female Singer, and that’s just … why, I’ll read my durn notecard. President of the Panhellenic Council, junior Panhel delegate. The 2001 Theta Kappa Theta State Convention Delegate; 2001 National Convention Delegate, Rush Chairman, co-Chairman of the All-Greek Council, Chairman of the 2002 Homecoming Activities Committee, Director of the Sorority Presidents’ Council—I mean, I don’t know how she does so much important work!—Assistant to the Student Representative on the Chancellor’s Task Force on Greek Issues, an Adopt-a-Grandparent volunteer, a Big Little Sister, a volunteer at the Chapel Hill Animal Shelter, and … phew…” She playacted being winded. “… most importantly, the 2003 Outstanding Greek Woman for her work in the community and on campus. Here she is, Mary Jean Krisp!”

  Mary Jean had been beaming to all her subjects, winking to someone she knew, rolling her eyes at some of the honors, little waves to someone special she just noticed, but now it was time to speak. After the mild applause subsided, she began.

  “What does it mean to be Greek? I’ll tell you what it means. It means we give a little more, work a little harder, and do a little more than our friends who favor a non-Greek lifestyle. Some people think of a sorority as a place to drink or where women go shopping together and, yes, well, we do that too!” Mild laughter. “But the real point of our being here is to raise ourselves to a higher plane. We are in a position, since we are banded together, to really really help some underprivileged people in this state—to make a difference. Girls whose mothers have made bad life choices: poverty, hopelessness, drugs. Sometimes their kids are lucky and they end up in foster care or in shelters but, even so, they must feel sometimes that nobody cares. But we at Theta Kappa Theta care, and our Little Sister program, which brings these girls out for a weekend here at Cozy House, is one of the most important things we do. I think of a little girl, a little black girl, named Tasha and…” Mary Jean looked away, a noble stare into the middle distance, then composed herself. “… I’m sorry, I just get a little emotional when I see how some girls have literally nothing in life and I think what good it does for them to see us, in school, on a positive path, with nice things to aspire to.”

  Jerilyn smiled at Margaret, but when Margaret looked away, she looked at her watch and mapped a path to the door. She could still stick her head in Sigma Kappa Nu by four P.M. and then get home and write her paper.

  * * *

  Old East, Old West, the Playmakers Theatre, and many other landmarks of campus were slave-built,3 but there was some free-black labor as well, particularly where furniture and ornament remain (many of the original Thomas Day4 pieces survive). In 1799 the debate club took up the proposition of “Ought slavery to be abolished in the United States?” Starting Chapel Hill’s long history of being a
radical hotbed, the “yes” faction won the night.5 But that was just a brief foray into abolitionism. UNC would not have been possible without slavery.

  Chapel Hill never bought slaves outright, but they were in the business of leasing, trading and selling. All the young gentlemen at Chapel Hill were provided servants and they had to pay a fee to the university for their services that in turn went back to the slave-owners whose slaves were being loaned to UNC. You could expect $35 for your slave in a school-year contract.6 Wealthier boys were always bringing their own personal slaves to campus, but they put a stop to that in 1845—it cut in on UNC’s slave-leasing enterprise.7

  UNC owes its existence to something called the “escheat,” which means that when someone died intestate or without a surviving heir, their property, including slaves, went to the university. UNC would auction off all the human property and thereby fund itself.8 Funding the university with, say, a tax would likely fail before the historically cheapskate North Carolina voter, so the escheat remained in place. This is out of Kemp Battle’s History of the University of North Carolina, 1776–1799, which shows how it worked:

  A free negro had a daughter, the slave of another. He [the free negro] bought her, and she then became the mother of a boy. The woman’s father died without kin and intestate. His child and grandchild became the property of the university. They were ordered to be sold. This sounds hard, but it was proved to the board that they were in the lowest stage of poverty and degradation and that it would redound to their happiness to have a master. It must be remembered that slaves were considered to be as a rule in better condition than free negroes.9

  That was probably the most-beloved president of our university soft-pedaling human trafficking for UNC’s gain—and he wrote that as late as 1907.

  There is no one, particularly local historians, who will say a word against this sanctified place.

  * * *

  Joey D had spent the morning rummaging through boxes in the basement of Zeta Pi house, even making a trip to the aluminum shed with the outdoor party items. He hadn’t bothered to dress; he wore what he slept in, T-shirt and boxer shorts. Now he was attacking the boxes under the first-floor stairs. “Where’s the damn slave auction stuff?” he finally yelled, within earshot of Frank.

  “I think the last president threw that shit away,” Frank said, hoping to discourage the search.

  “How we gonna have a slave auction without the woolly wigs and the chains?”

  Skip Baylor, sophomore, naturally pink faced and, when drunk or excited, an alarming lobster red, cried out, “Slave auction? Great!” Skip had heard about the slave auctions of other houses. You bid on a sorority sister, and if you won, you owned her, she had to do what you say! (At minimum, a hand job.) But it could be more exciting the other way around, when they bought you. Two or three Skank sisters making you take off your clothes and service them, and all you could say was Yes, mistress, and Whatever you say, mistress.

  Indignantly hurling broken toys and props to the back of the under-the-stair space, Joey D muttered, “Spears and shields and all the African stuff, Frank. Shoe polish for the guy who goes all in.”

  “Listen good. We are not having a slave auction, and if we do, then we’ll go with Romans and Toga Night and there’ll be no racial element. That’s the sort of thing that goes national, one Polaroid gets found by the local media and it’s on CNN. Speaking of that. We need to all watch a video sent by the Zeta Pi alumni board, okay, Joey? Now’s as good a time as any.”

  “I saw it last year.”

  “I honestly doubt that, since I got it today.” Frank was determined not to be Southern-nice and passive before Joey D’s mocking up-North assertiveness. Why did he come down South at all? With all the suspensions and flunkings-out from northern schools, what was he by now—twenty-four? Frank had heard about Colgate (an incident involving a blow-up sex doll and the steeple of Colgate Chapel) and then a graffiti incident at Brown (the red spray paint—ALPHAS ARE PUSSYS—did not wash off the white Vermont marble of the Hay Library evenly, and led to a sandblasting of the entire façade) and, unwelcome at the private academies, Joey D went next to Florida.

  At Florida, as activities officer for the Zeta Pi chapter there, Joey D was the mastermind of Blob Night, which involved the importation of a giant parade-balloon-sized blob which was inflated alongside the pool. The object, Joey D explained, was to jump from the third-story window of the frat house and into the blob, which would propel whoever was sitting on the other side high into the air and, ostensibly, into the pool. Joey D demonstrated, sending his drunken, loose-as-a-ragdoll roommate up ten feet and down into the pool. Then Joey moved to the bounce position and another guy shot him up even higher where, in midair, he opened and chugged an entire Red Bull before hitting the water. Now that was the gold standard. Soon it became irresistible to see what would happen when Moose (320-pound rugby guy) jumped from the third story and bounced Micro (his name was Michael, but at five-two he was the smallest of the brothers). Micro sprawled upon the blob with a Red Bull in his hand, ready for launch; Moose tried to wedge himself out the window … what happened next varies from what you read about it online, but what was undeniable was that Moose hit the center of the blob rather than the operative side, which flung Micro the wrong direction two stories up, smack into the brick wall of the house; having broken his nose and his right pinky finger, he fell back on top of Moose, audibly breaking Moose’s arm and breaking his jaw (with the still-clutched Red Bull can) … then they bounced together up and over the blob onto the pavement around the pool, with Moose landing wrong, breaking the arm in a second place, and Micro hitting the metal arm of a deck chair with his chin and, for all appearances, having broken his neck.

  “It was like something out of a Road Runner cartoon,” Joey D once explained, still amazed by the Newtonian physics of it.

  Despite the groans and blood and abundant injury, no one called 911 but rather picked up and moved the boys inside to a couch until there would be a discussion about what would be done next, whether an ambulance was necessary, whether it might be best to make a discreet drop-off at an emergency room in Gainesville and quickly drive away. Which was the course of action decided upon and, later, punished by the university administration, getting the chapter on probation.

  Frank might have thought Joey D had gotten the message, but later that night, over a kegger and Linkin Park blasting at high decibels until the police were called, he overheard Joey D sharing the Hell Night plans with Cory and Kevin: pledges have to walk up all the flights of stairs of Zipperhaus with a brick tied around their testicles—he read about that somewhere!

  “Joey,” Frank said, shadowing him, “I would appreciate being able to have a Hell Week where the imprint of our pledges’ balls or spread ass cheeks are not emblazoned on my mind for eternity. Did you watch that video?”

  The Zeta Pi home office annually sent out to the 126 houses around the country the same safety video, the video that warned of hazing rituals—

  “Fuck all that,” Joey D said. “It’s time for Shelly! Shell-laaaayyyy.”

  The other guys were led by Skip, too drunk to enunciate but not too drunk to chant: “Shell-lay, Shell-lay, Shell-lay…”

  Frank shook his head, so vigorously his beer spilled from the plastic cup he was holding. “Guys, I am sure Shelly is dead.”

  “Bullshit Shelly is dead!”

  Alec chimed in: “She’s in some meat aisle at Food Lion.”

  Alec’s roommate Eric: “Yeah, when Jim graduated, that was it for Shelly. His dad wouldn’t let us use her anymore.”

  Joey D was truly exercised. “No more Society of Ram and Ewe?” Pronounced Rammin’ You, invariably. “Ladies, it’s not Hell Week at Carolina without Shelly! We’re not Zippermen without Shelly!”

  The next morning, Frank rousted Joey D out of bed at ten A.M. Frank looked away as a naked Joey D with his morning erection hopped out of bed. “Eh? Say hi to Frank, Little Joey…” Frank by now had seen Joey D
’s penis more times than that of his own brother, with whom he shared a bedroom for sixteen years. More times than could be counted, he had seen Joey D grab his penis and squeeze the end so it looked like it was talking. Little Joey extolled the virtues of sexual congress with Maribelle McClintock, before bemoaning all the fags and pussies at Zeta Pi who didn’t know how to conduct a Hell Week, concluding, “Hey Little Joey, big gay Frank is looking at you … Oh noooo, Big Joey … Thanks a lot, Frank, you made me lose my erection.”

  “I have to call the chapter and give my word that the committee watched their video. See you in the Dungeon in five, okay?”

  The video, circa 1997, with dated hairstyles and goatees and one-day stubbles, was hosted by Kip Donnelly, some pretty boy who was on a three-season WB Network nighttime soap set in Orange County. Kip was a Kappa Sigma at USC and tried to be, you know, totally L.A. cool-like, talking seriously for a minute about Hell Weeks and misadventures with pledges. So you see, guys, he was saying, I was a pledge once too …

  “The only pledge you ever made was to tongue my hole,” yelled Joey D, now in his boxers, falling into a weather-beaten stuffed chair and popping a beer, 10:17 A.M. “He’s got more makeup on than my alcoholic stepmom on her way to church!”

  There is no initiation, said Kip, worth risking someone’s health or someone’s life.

  Joey D: “I got your initiation right between my legs, Kippiepoo!”

  Alcohol poisoning, Kip intoned, is the number one Hell Week misadventure. Phi Kappa Tau at Rider University was not only ruined by criminal charges and lawsuits, but the dean of students had to face charges as well when a pledge died with .4 alcohol in his body. Many chapters get in trouble for forcing the pledges, who are not twenty-one years of age, to drink alcohol.