Around the house Luxton went by Lucky. He was a blond lifeguard type, a triathlete. Catalog handsome with a jaw you could’ve used as a protractor. Like a number of the other brothers, Lucky exhibited a host of Stoic Southern Guy personality traits I wished I had. He greeted people with an upward nod of his head that I found appealingly Tourretic. His wardrobe consisted of Wallabees and roughed-up khakis, well-worn T-shirts and Lacoste polos. He always looked so at home with himself, so imperturbable—he’d drink and drink without ever appearing to get all that drunk. And he dated Cara. It was hard not to be intoxicated by the idea of being part of a group of such good-looking people. To maybe even be mistaken for good-looking myself.
* * *
Beirut bā-'rüt n: A drinking game common to college campuses the nation over. Four people play at a time, in teams of two. There are twelve cups on either end of the table, divided into two tight pyramids of six, which go 3-2-1 from the back edge of the table. Each team gets two beers and pours them evenly among the twelve cups. Before the game begins, the two Ping-Pong balls bob in separate cups of water at either end, used periodically (uselessly?) as a rinse. The point is this: you want to land your Ping-Pong ball in one of the dozen cups at the other end of the table. You may toss or bounce the ball, but if you choose to bounce, a member of the other team may swat the ball away. (House wisdom also held that only bitches bounce.) When a ball is made, a member of the other team must drink the beer in the cup and remove it from the pyramid, leaving an empty space where the cup used to be. When six cups have been made, the remaining six are “reracked” into the 3-2-1 pyramid shape and shot at until all the cups are gone. Each team member gets to shoot on a turn, and if both shots are made, they get the balls back. When the last cup is made, the losing team must then chug however many cups are left on the winning team’s end. Winners stay on the table.
* * *
And there end most definitions of the game, which sometimes goes by beer pong and has evolved from the Norman Rockwelly days when you’d play on an actual Ping-Pong table and use paddles to hit the balls into the cups. But we played a mutant form of this game, one that was surely dreamed up in the crunked crucible of a state university somewhere. We played “full-contact” Beirut. Gone is the Ivy League decorum, the letter-jacket probity. Welcome instead an element of danger, a danger that allowed the game to achieve an exalted form of frattiness.
Say you shoot your ball and it plunks off a cup’s rim and goes plink-plinking across the floor. That ball is live. Until one team possesses it, it’s a free-for-all. You may use any means you see fit to retrieve the truant ball—slides, dives, swim moves, tackles—but once someone has it in hand it’s game on and you have to return to your side of the table.
The linoleum floors of our basement unit would soon grow slick with water and beer and dirt and other fluids, which combined to form an amoebic mess we called, flatly, “frat-sludge.” So slick would the floor grow that some brothers liked to run a couple feet and drop to their stomachs and haunches and glissade across it—our own meningitic slip-and-slide. And with two games going at once, the result was a manufactured mayhem that most of us couldn’t get enough of.
A brief digression: your more evolved drinking games will typically demand some specially developed skill, something more than drinking alone, and they will, more often than not, entail making someone else drink. We’re not talking the Neanderthal-like Edward Fortyhands or Roxanne here. Try lobbing a Ping-Pong ball seven feet into a Solo cup. It’s not easy. And then try doing so under threat of physical harm—harder still. So you could say the final point of full-contact Beirut is to inflict drunkenness upon the other team by sinking your shots. While you’re at it, though, you’re also trying to put a literal hurt on them, which also happened. Often.
Whitaker chipped his two front teeth and for more than a week, before he could fix them, they presented an interesting parallelogram of empty space. After a second concussion, Hicks had to wear an old motorcycle helmet when he played. Doctor’s orders. L’il Dave was six-six and 250 lbs and known house-wide to be the descendant of African royalty—he left cartoonish indentations in the metal door one night when he dove for a ball, but got up and just stared confusedly at the door, not a scratch on him. At another Games Night, Whitaker slammed the back of his head into the table during a scrum for the ball, and so added blood to the ingredients of that night’s frat-sludge, blood so thinned by booze that the doctors couldn’t give him painkillers when they stitched him up. There were countless bent-back or broken fingers. Elbows to stomachs and nuts. Knocked heads and knees. Bruised coccyges. The Zookeeper fly-tackled Squeak, sending him hospital-bound with a punctured lung. Gerritz busted Ashley’s big-ass nose with a strategically thrown shoulder. And Pig Nuts up and punched Pruitt in the face, which yielded approximately nothing by way of kind feeling.
Incidents like this typically went down late-night, after all the booze had transmogrified the brothers into Hyde-like ag-bros. By that time I would’ve long since stepped away from the table, having sheepishly retired to the relative safety of our slip-and-slide or excused myself to the charter room, where mellower herbal delights could sometimes be found on offer. In fact, that I never broke a bone or left blood on the floor now seems an odd portent, a telling piece of evidence that I’d never really fit in.
* * *
First semester junior year I spent so much time around Lucky and Cara I could’ve been charged with loitering. By then I’d started running with the same crew as Lucky. The fraternity was split, roughly, into two factions, divided by what side of the Mason-Dixon line you called home. We were the Southern Assholes. We wore our beat-up khakis and sweat-stained white baseball hats and ate blue crab by the bushel and were vaguely proud of our “history,” a history none of us really wanted to get too specific about. It wasn’t about the history itself anyway, not really, but an attitude it allowed us to project, the tight-lipped sanctimoniousness of those who have brooked a whupping. The Northern Assholes, those fucking carpetbaggers, wore their hair short and sometimes “styled” it with gel, which was among the most egregious no-nos we could imagine. We held an annual Civil War–themed party to honor and stoke this intrafraternity rivalry. We’d break off to separate sides of a backyard and call regional-centric insults across an imaginary dividing line while attempting to discover which faction could more swiftly empty a keg. By the end of the night the war would end and we’d reenact our own version of Appomattox, gathering together in corners of the backyard to throw up.
For a short time, I’m ashamed to say, I dated Cara’s close friend and housemate, Addy, just to be closer to her. I took Addy to formals, bought Addy drinks, said nice things to Addy, even made out with Addy a little, my mind mostly on the time I got to spend around Cara. Lucky and I grew closer, too, and the four of us ended up going on a few dates together. At that semester’s Civil War party he held my legs aloft for a keg stand like he was signaling a field goal good. I did likewise. He gave me an old pair of his Wallabees. I used to go to parties at Cara’s house and play civilized, noncontact Beirut with him and some other brothers, looking forward to when the cameras were brought out, because it was then that Cara would drape herself on me as part of some inscrutable pose. I read sub rosa intimacy in the tiniest of gestures—the faintly flirtatious touch of a hand, a chesty hug hello or good-bye, the throaty way she’d sometimes say my name. And with them I’d entertain elaborate fantasies about her, many of which ended in the spontaneous combustion of her clothing. A combustion that didn’t terrify her and left her lustrous hair unsinged and her buttery skin free of abrasions and burns—whatever, I wasn’t majoring in physics.
The next semester Lucky studied abroad in Australia. Not long after the semester’s start, I went to a party and found Cara slung about the waist of a soccer player, a guy as handsome and seemingly self-assured as Lucky. What could she possibly see in him? The guy was practically nothing more than a flawless jawline, a six-pack, and surfer hair. I mean
, for fuck’s sake, did he even have pores?! After I’d made sure she’d seen me, I left. I told myself I was disgusted with her willingness to betray Lucky, but really it was that she hadn’t chosen to do so with me.
She and I shared an English class that semester, though, and I ended up helping her write a couple of essays. I assured her I was but a humble midwife for her good ideas, that once she got started there was no stopping her, and so on. Sometimes during these sessions she got to talking about Lucky and from her stories I started to see that all the coolness and effortless self-assuredness that I wanted, that defined how he and the others in the fraternity interacted, actually put up a wall. He was distant, cold. Could be a dick. And soon I was advising her to break it off, saying she deserved better, someone who’d appreciate her. Jesus, was I really ever such a milquetoast?
My already ambivalent feelings about the fraternity—deep down I probably always knew that it couldn’t provide me with the freedom from self-doubt I was looking for—were further adulterated by my desire to see Cara naked. Because I still agreed, at least in principle, with one of the fraternity’s basic tenets: you don’t fuck with another brother’s girl. No matter what.
Then one night after discussing the finer points of Our Mutual Friend, we decided to watch a movie. We both lay on the couch. I kicked off Lucky’s Wallabees and they thudded Tell-Tale-Heartishly on the floor. We’d never been horizontal together before and I got nervous. I decided to fall off the couch.
I’d grown up in the church, as the saying goes, and was, at twenty-one, still unlearning the most draconian and shame-baiting lessons about le sex that’d been urged on me as an adolescent, namely that it was something that I, a boy, did to (not with) a girl. (I suspect the girls were operating with even more disturbing wisdom: that it was something they let happen to them. And God literally forbid you choose to identify as anything other than straight. . .) As an exemplar we were presented with a parishioner couple who’d shared their first kiss at the altar. Not that I had that many opportunities, but thanks to these rules and to the eternal consequences associated with violating them, I’d once been a champion self-sabotager, master of the auto-cockblock. My pièce de résistance came when I faked untimely gooage, choosing the thrum of blue balls over the hellish shame I knew would’ve dogged me had the young woman and I, you know, . And while much reformed, every so often during a hook-up I’d fall prey to a proleptic fit of guilt and hit abort. Odd habits die hard.
“What are you doing?” Cara asked.
“I fell off the couch,” I said, looking up at her.
“Come here,” she said, and leaned down over the cushions. She took my face in her hands, and when she kissed me with lips I’d inflated in my mind to the size of those made with candy wax, when after a few minutes she suggested we go upstairs, when once there she unveiled her gravity-defying whathaveyous and her famous sculpted backside, barely bound by the pasta-thin ribbons of her miraculous underwear, when desire then subsumed me like drunkenness, I wondered how it was that anything in this world ever managed to go wrong.
* * *
Fraternity life isn’t all paddling asses and elephant walks. It’s not all ritual coitus with billy goats and baking-soda-and-vinegar volcanoes exploded on your johnson. No. There’s bad stuff, too. You gather fifty or more bro types together and not everyone is going to get along, no matter how much brotherly love and kind feeling the fraternity intends to promulgate. Grudges are cultivated, often over the pettiest of shit. There is deceit and anger and chest pounding and no shortage of derision and insensitivity. And these grudges, this anger and aggression, fueled the most intense showdowns at the Beirut table. Because, see, according to the implicit system of ethics that governed the house, forgiveness was not something one could simply give verbally. It couldn’t come at the expense of all the cool self-assuredness. It had to be worked out, had to be earned. And the logo-emblazoned tables in the basement provided the space where the ever-present tension in the house was allowed to flourish and erupt and, finally, be dispelled.
* * *
I was sorely disappointed when that first night with Cara didn’t usher in some new order, full of as much such-and-such as I could imagine. How close I came to avenging all those sheets! Instead, for a time after, she was inexplicably distant. She ignored my many calls and e-mails. I suspected she and Soccer Guy were off somewhere washing each other’s hair or whatever and grew paranoid, borderline obsessive. Then, out of the blue, she called me up and acted as though nothing had happened. And with that a pattern was established. After a thawing period she’d be caring and touchy again and my heart would race with my mind in expectation, but you could almost hear the squelch of brakes after each flurry of limbs. Crime and punishment, in this, were one. And then, at the end of the term, Lucky resurfaced from Down Under.
* * *
It wasn’t until late second semester junior year, after figuring we must’ve learned our lesson for the Games Night that sent one brother to the hospital and another to jail, that the college lifted its iron curtain of probation.
We were free! It was time to celebrate! Time for Games Night!
By then I’d more or less fully distanced myself from the fraternity. I’d started hanging out with some arty kids from my cultural studies classes. They didn’t judge me for being in a fraternity and I didn’t judge them for more than tolerating our school’s sketch comedy troupe. But while I was pulling away, I saw that something was developing between many of the guys in the house. A sense of togetherness. Community. They were proud to watch Lembo’s short film and to give him notes before he sent it off to festivals. They rallied around Rags when his dad got sick. And when Hunter’s brother was in a bad car accident, some of the guys sat up all night listening to him tell stories from his childhood. They were there for one another. I heard not a pinch of irony in their voices when they said “brother.” And when I came by the house for that Games Night, the coolness from the brothers no longer felt like part of our code, but genuinely cold. I got some “hey”s and some “where you been?”s, some pointed “what’s up, stranger?”s. I wasn’t sure the brothers liked me much anymore. Maybe they never had. Though I was deep in arrears, for example, no one mentioned my dues—maybe they didn’t even want my money anymore. But I showed up early that Thursday, because, well, I mean, it was Games Night after all. The chiasmus practically completes itself: you can take the boy out of the frat, but not the PARTYBEERTITSPARTYPARTYPARTY!!!!!!!!
I started off the night by playing a number of games of Kings in the charter room. The center of the TV screen now presented a large Videodrome-ish hole—I was told that Holtz had thrown a D battery through it, thus turning it into an alumni-funded art installation. More people arrived. Word had spread in that way word would mysteriously spread before Facebook and Twitter, before texting became de rigueur, by a kind of drunken osmosis, on the ether. I went back out on the floor and tried my hand at Quarters. “I signed us up for Beirut,” Overdorff said, gripping my shoulder after a few rounds. “Old times’ sake.” When we took the table, I didn’t recognize the shaggy-headed pledge in roughed-up khakis who scurried off to get us beers. Our first game got under way and I found that even though I hadn’t played in a while my shot was on. It was a curious piece of house wisdom that you sometimes got better at Beirut the more you drank. The booze and adrenaline would combine and complement each other and deliver you into a rarefied zone of attention, coordination, and aggression. And it was in such a zone that I found myself that night. I sank cup after cup and was ready to fend off any charges with quick grabs and a wiliness I’d cultivated as the fraidy-cat small kid on the lacrosse team. I, for once and finally, allowed myself to dissolve into the game’s logical chaos. And it was just as thrilling as it had always looked from the sidelines.
Overdorff and I dominated for six or seven games. After a win, I made like I was dusting rubbish off my shoulders and chest and walked over to where the list was posted.
“Next vict
im?” I said, running a finger cinematically down the list of crossed-off names. I couldn’t bring myself to call out the next team: “Ring/Lucky.”
There were so many people and so much noise that I hadn’t seen Lucky come into the basement. When he stepped up to the table, everyone made a big to-do about welcoming him back. He and Ring were still the reigning champs, after all—there was a house-wide tournament and they’d held the title three consecutive semesters. They took little comedic bows and waved Princess Di waves around the floor. The brothers clapped and woo-hooed and laughed and those closest high-fived him.
We met halfway down the side of the table and, in accordance with the code of the Southern Asshole, we clasped hands and brought each other close with a one-armed hug and patted each other’s back like nothing had changed. I was wearing his shoes. He was deeply tanned, his hair more sun-bleached than normal. My mind had played a sick trick on me: in my memory he’d grown small, atrophied.
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