Lights Out

by Douglas Clegg

  “Underdog,” Nate addressed me in his usual manner, “the Hose Queen’s coming down tonight. You want to get laid?”

  “No thanks, and get out of here, willya?”

  This particular winter semester, in my second year, Nate, who was my big brother in the House, wanted me to learn how to be a man as only Nate knew how. It wasn’t enough that I was flunking Physics for Poets because of the midweek grain parties, nor that I had no interest in cow punching or whore hopping. Nate was a wild man and rich redneck from Alabama, and his life was something to marvel at. He had learned the ropes of human sexuality at twelve from his babysitter; at seventeen, he’d saved an entire boatload of immigrants off the coast of Bermuda — losing three toes in the process. He knew life, how to live it, which paths to go down, when and where to get a hard-on and what to do about it — and with whom. The bizarre part was, he was an honors student, his old man ran one of the growing tobacco companies, and he never, ever had a hangover.

  Somebody stuck a condom in the scrambled eggs that morning, a typical frat joke, so I passed on breakfast and headed up to the Hill to do some studying on campus. I didn’t have a date for the Fancy Dress Ball that night, even though I’d bought two tickets well in advance thinking this girl I knew from high school, Colleen, might want to go, or maybe I’d meet someone else last minute. But Colleen was not to be wooed down to what she called the “last bastion of the old South.” I called three girls I knew Down the Road, but each had had a date since October. One of them was kind enough to say she could set me up with this really homely girl who majored in Chemistry. I passed, and figured I’d get some studying done for once, and let them all go to hell. I was determined to spend the day studying, not scrounging for dates or hazing freshmen.

  But Nate was not one to give up easily in his quest to keep me from doing anything productive. He hunted me down on campus, shut my American history book for me, sat on the edge of my desk, and said, “You missed Ice Palace.”

  “Big deal. Jesus H., quit following me around like some kind of retriever.”

  “Jonno told a good one. Got us laughing right off. Bug Boy practically froze to death, we had to let him off after about half an hour, just ‘cause we were getting bored watching his lips turn purple. Only one part left.”

  I groaned. “Yeah, yeah, the crowning of the King. It’s like being with Nazis in kindergarten.”

  “Hey, it takes a special kind of guy to be King of the Palace.” Nate Wick had a snarly way of talking that was both seductive and distancing, as if he were an untamed dog waiting for the right master. “Ice Palace is almost as good as fish dunking.”

  “I hate the whole thing. Ice Palace could make one of them sick.”

  “You liked it well enough last year.”

  “Well, I was drunk last year. I liked lots of things then.”

  “Well, piss on you, Underdog. Sometimes I wish the old you would come back, the one that would stay out all night and really howl.” But his mood changed again. “We’re gonna kidnap Lewis,” he said, like he was planning out the day in his head. He grinned so bright I thought the sun had come out from the gray sky outside the window.

  “When?”

  “This afternoon. Few hours.”

  “Shit,” I said. “Jesus, of all days. He’s your King? Christ, Wick, that poor son of a bitch won’t last three hours in the cold. He’s got bronchial asthma, he’ll come down with something.” The truth was, I was protective of Stewart Lewis, who didn’t even have the hapless luck to be a brain, for he was skinny and homely and not too bright; if he hadn’t been a legacy, he would’ve gotten blackballed by sixty percent of the House. But his old man was a major brother back in his day, so the frat had no choice, because it was in the charter to take legacies no matter what. I had known Stewart Lewis back at St. Sebastian’s, the Episcopal school I’d gone to before college. Lewis was always a weenie, always sick, always a mama’s boy, always something not so good.

  Nate dismissed Lewis with a snap, and then a slap on the desk. “He’s a Spam, don’t worry about him. We’re gonna take him to Crawford’s Dump, stick him in the snow, pay Donkeyman to watch him, tie him up, nothing bad. We won’t leave him there all night, you fiend. Just a couple of hours, and then I’ll go get him in time for Fancy Dress. I doubt he’s got a date, though. He’s such a Spam. Maybe we’ll write on him. The usual. Scare the kid a little. Just a shit speck. He’ll get to wear his Jockeys, whatta you want? Whatta you want?”

  “You always sound homo to me when you talk about it,” I said, hoping to get him angry. I was only a sophomore, but I’d hated hazing so much from the year before—I’d been too blotto to protest much—that I felt very protective of the poor freshmen pledges who went along with any idiotic torture that seniors like Nate devised.

  “Maybe I am homo, Underdog. Wanta suck it to find out?” Here he whipped out his thing, which was not the most unusual sight between frat brothers, and was, perhaps, a big reason why we were all so homophobic. Then he put it back in his trousers, zipped up, and said, “You gonna go tonight?”

  “Why? You want to buy my ticket?”

  “Just wondering. I’m not always as insensitive as I seem, buttface.”

  It started to snow again, and the wind picked up outside, whistling around the old brick and columns along the colonnade; feather flakes seesawed beyond the beveled glass of the windows. It was an ancient campus, from the 1700s, all columns and Greek Parthenon-types and mountain vistas, and I wished I was somewhere, anywhere, else.

  “Look,” Nate said, “Helen’s coming up from Hollins. She likes you. She said she wants to see you.” Helen was his girl friend, a pretty girl who, for some reason, idolized Nate, possibly because she was more unbalanced than she seemed—there was a hint of this in her Sylvia Plath-like scribblings. I thought she was too good for him.

  “That’s nice,” I said. “Look, Nate, I don’t want Lewis to go to Ice Palace. He’ll get sick. If Dean Trask hears about it, we could get shut down. Think about that. I mean, a half hour of Ice Palace is one thing, but three or four hours, and it’s snowing…it’s not that funny.”

  Nate laughed, drumming his fists into the desk. I’d seen him pummel a stray dog like that once, just because the dog was in his way. That was how he used his fists most of the time. He said, “I think it’s a goddamn laugh riot.”

  I avoided the frat house until six, when hunger got the best of me. I was wary of most of my brothers, because I wasn’t good at taking any kind of teasing, and that seemed to be their primary business in college. When I entered the foyer, I smelled the steaks—it was a special night, Fancy Dress Ball and all that, and so our cook was doing it up good, steak and asparagus and biscuits and potatoes and fruit and apple pie. Most of the brothers had taken their dates out to dinner, but the poorer among us sat at the long tables, not yet dressed in black tie, with dates astride hard-backed chairs. Plain girls, too, for the most part, until, upstairs, in a guarded bathroom, they would make up and spray, Vaseline their teeth for smiles and for other, more urgent desires, later; spruced with expensive, oversize gowns, transforming from ordinary faces and bodies to creatures of unconscionable beauty, perhaps gaudy in the garish light of the upstairs bathroom, but almost mythic, the Woman in All Her Glorious Aspects, in the dimmed, squinting light over at the student center, where the dance would take place.

  Nate called out, “Underdog!” He was at the last table, with Helen at his side. She looked up briefly, and then down at her plate again — a flash of curiosity about me, about what I’d been up to since summer. She was skinny—looked like she had starved herself for this one night—and she’d greased her hair back around her ears with some sort of conditioner.

  I went over and took a chair, grabbed some slop, and lopped it on my plate. “Helen,” I said.

  “Hey, Charlie,” she said sweetly, her accent growing more Southern with each year she spent in Virginia. She did not look up from her plate; it was obvious she hadn’t eaten.

&nbs
p; Nate lip-farted. “Call him Underdog. Humble but lovable.”

  I smiled at Nate. “Things go okay with Lewis?”

  Nate winked. “Fine, fine.”

  “He around?”

  “Yeah. I don’t know. I guess he was upset.”

  I wasn’t sure whether to believe Nate or not, but Helen must’ve detected my doubt. She said, “He said he was going to a movie. He was very upset. Y’all are so dang insensitive. It’s what I hate, absolutely hate, about y’all being in a fraternity and all.”

  “Helen’s on the rag,” Nate half-whispered, loud enough for all six tables to hear.

  I looked to Helen, and reached my hand across to touch hers because I felt so bad for her at that moment, stuck with Nate, Nate who bragged about doing her on his water bed, about muff-diving her in the backseat of her father’s Continental, taking her every which way but loose up in the carillon tower of chapel when she didn’t want it but loved it anyway. I didn’t know Helen well, but I wanted to touch her more than anything.

  Helen glanced up at me, her eyes dry. Nate was clanking his fork on the side of his plate. He was always jealous when it came to Helen, and he must’ve seen the way she looked at me.

  “Why don’t you just fuck her?” he asked, shoving himself away from the table, his chair falling backward. He was drunk; so that was it. He stomped across the room, and went upstairs.

  Helen said, “I hate him.”

  “Nah,” I said, “he’s a jerk sometimes. But he has his good side.”

  Helen laughed. “No, he doesn’t. I don’t know why I’m even here.”

  She shut her eyes, her face taut, hands clenched in fists. “Because I’m a good girl. Because I do what I’m told.”

  She said it like it was taking her medicine, an antidote to some other, more profound venom. “Will you go with me tonight? I don’t want to go with him.”

  2

  There are certain humiliations we will withstand when we are young, if it means that we can become part of something bigger than just ourselves, by ourselves. This notion upheld all the tortures of hazing.

  Ice Palace was a peculiar ritual, in which a tunnel at least the length of a man’s body was dug out in the snow. The pledges had to dig it, for they were virtual slaves to the upperclassmen. Then, one at a time, the pledges were stripped down to their underwear. Each was then hosed down with water, and sent into the tunnel, which was now deemed the Ice Palace. The pledge had to sit back in the freezing ice and tell a joke until every upperclassman present laughed.

  When I endured Ice Palace, I got them cracking up within ten minutes; but I was good with jokes. There had even been something of a respite from the outer world when I had crawled into that ice cave, shivering for sure, but also experiencing a strange pleasure, as if I were protected in a way I didn’t quite understand. Some pledges could not tell a joke to save their lives, however, and so it could be a painful, if not simply a chilling, experience. This was one of the least pleasant aspects of hazing. The other rituals (egg yolk passing from mouth to mouth, or fish dunking in a toilet) were disgusting, but essentially harmless. Even paddling was child’s play, with the only casualty being a sore butt for a few days.

  But Ice Palace…

  I thought of Stewart Lewis, with his taped-up glasses on his beaky nose, his small peapod eyes, that squirmy way he had of moving as if he had worms or something, and of the humiliation of the whole ritual, particularly of being chosen to be the King of Ice Palace, as he had been. King of Ice Palace: the honor at the shit end of life’s stick, the pledge chosen basically because he was commonly known as the Spam, the Nerd, the Loser, the Meat. There was always one pledge that fit this bill—almost as if, each year, the brothers decided to admit someone they could torture, someone who was so desperate to be accepted that he would take it.

  The King’s hands and feet were roped together, and he was to be sealed up in Ice Palace until someone came to get him out. Cold water was hosed over the entire tunnel in order to truly give it a thick layer of ice. Then, after a set period of time, the Brother High Alpha, which in our case was Nate, would break open the door to Ice Palace. The King would come forth from his white chamber, freezing and cursing, yet somehow stronger, and more part of the group than he could ever be through ordinary means. If the chosen one tried to get out early, there was Donkeyman, the local wino. He was as scary as any nightmare, his face elongated, his ears out and pointy like a mule’s, only three teeth in his head, and barely a nose at all, just two flared nostrils exhaling frosty clouds of carbon dioxide. The freshmen weren’t familiar enough with the university to have seen Donkeyman yet, for Donkeyman was a creature of alleyways and Dumpsters. He was perfectly harmless, but he looked like a demon lover of donkeys.

  Ice Palace was a fraternity secret and, by all accounts, illegal, at least as far as the college went. If it had been known that it was an ongoing ritual, the entire fraternity system, which was then enjoying a rebirth in popularity, would have been shut down.

  There was a story that back in the late fifties a boy had died in Ice Palace.

  3

  “That’s the boy,” Helen whispered in my ear. We were slow dancing, off the dance floor. She had abandoned Nate to his drunken fury earlier in the evening. Because I owned my own tux, she grabbed me and we’d gone to the Student Center and the Fancy Dress Ball before I could protest much.

  I felt a little guilty for snaking my big brother’s date, but she was pretty, and he was acting like an asshole, anyway.

  I glanced up from her shoulder, for I had been watching the bone there, beneath the skin, so delicate, so feminine. Smelling her, too, like jasmine with the snow just on the other side of the walls, and here, there were flowers and sandalwood. “Huh?” I asked.

  “That boy,” she said, dreamily, “the one they put in the snow.”

  We stopped dancing, and I turned around to look at Stewart Lewis. “I didn’t know he was going to be—” I said, but then, there was no Stewart.

  Just Stan the Man, who came over and slapped me on the back. “Fuck the fuck it very,” he said, his breath stinking of whiskey. “So, Underdoggie, you got Nate’s squeeze, bravo, good job, didn’t deserve her, the Flaccid Wick didn’t, my god, this wine tastes like cow jism.” His eyes barely registered either of us; his date, Marlene, stood off to the side, avoiding just about everyone.

  “Stan wasn’t Ice Palace King,” I told Helen. “Is that who you saw in Ice Palace?”

  “I didn’t see him.” Helen turned away from me, waving to a friend. “Nate told me it was him. Isn’t that Stewart?” and then, to Stan, “Aren’t you Stewart Lewis?”

  “The Spamster?” Stan guffawed. “Lawdy, no, Miss Scarlett, I don’t know nothing about birthin’ no babies.”

  “He’s too drunk to make sense,” I said. “Nate told you?”

  Helen shrugged. “I thought this guy was Stewart. You boys all look alike with your khakis and down jackets. Are you sure you’re not Stewart?”

  Stan grinned, but wobbled back to Marlene, who apparently scolded him for something.

  “Jesus, I wonder if he ever let Lewis out,” I said. “Look, Helen, you wait here, I’ll be back in a while.”

  “Charlie,” Helen said, not even startled. “Charlie.”

  “What?” I snapped, and then blurted, “My god. My god. It’ll kill Lewis. It’ll kill him.”

  I left her there, and ran through the make-out room just beyond the dance floor, out through the French doors, down the icy steps, almost slipping on the concrete pavement. The town was a small one, almost a town in miniature, and I didn’t own a car. It would be a ten minute jog down Stonewall Drive to get to the House, and to Nate, if he was still there.

  The night was a furious one. The wind picked up, and the temperature dropped at least twenty degrees.

  I was a decent runner then, but I’d had two beers, and this, with the wind, seemed to slow all motion down by half. I felt like an hour had passed before I arrived at the back entran
ce to the frat house.

  The lights were off in the kitchen; I flicked them up. The place was a mess, like a child’s giant toy box overturned, but this was usual. What was unusual were the marks on the wall, as if someone had tried finger painting with bacon grease—which there was plenty of around, for it was stored and used in another hazing ritual.

  “Nate! Wick! Where the fuck are you?” I took the stairs two at a time, and came to his room on the second floor.

  He lay in bed, with the light on. He was wearing his tux. He opened his eyes. “Underdog.”

  “Where’s Lewis?”

  “Lewis? Who the fuck cares? That human spittoon. You stole my girl, Underdog. You stole my girl.” He rolled over, away from me, facing the wall. “You stole my girl. But fuck it. Like Stan says, fuck the fuck it very.”

  I couldn’t believe that even Nate would leave Lewis in Ice Palace for the eight hours he would’ve been in it by now. I almost laughed at myself for worrying. I caught my breath, my hands on my knees, bent over slightly. I looked at the poster of the naked girl with the snake that Nate had on his wall. She was some movie actress, I don’t remember who, but her belly seemed to meet the boa constrictor in an almost motherly caress. “Whew, Nate. Whoa, boy. You almost had me going. You know, you miserable—you know I ran all the way down here from Fancy Dress, just to…just to—”

  “He’s still in it.” He didn’t turn to face me, but his voice was smug. “And I’m the only one who knows where he is.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “I’m joking, but the joke’s on Lewis. Or should I say, you can now find Spam in the freezer section of your local supermarket.”

  I went over and grabbed him by the back of his collar and hauled him off the bed. When he turned to face me, I slapped his face four times. “Where is he?”

  Calmly, Nate said, “What the hell do you care?” There were tears in his eyes. “What the hell do you care? It might as well be me in there, for all any of you care. Why don’t you like me, Underdog? Why?” His tears were both a shock and a revelation to me: He was only a nine-year-old in a twenty-one-year-old’s body, the jugface was a mask, the rough talk, a cover, the attitude, a sham.