I Started Wearing Fraternity Letters in High School

I decided to join a fraternity sometime during the spring of my junior year in high school.

The town where we lived, Laurel, MD, was a generic strip mall suburb. We lived in the central part of town, a predominantly middle-class area of townhouses, apartments, and run-down single-family homes.

On a typical Friday night, if we weren’t working as cashiers at People’s Drug Store, my buddy Eric would pick me up, and we’d drive some laps around the mall parking lot in his puke green Ford Pinto. The thing was about ten years old, and it was a used heap of junk when his dad got it years before. It ran on hope and the cheapest gas we could find.

Our mission at the mall was to find a townie to buy us a six-pack of Milwaukee’s Best (aka Beast). If we could pull that off, we’d head to Cinder Road, an out-of-the-way street with no lights.

There were usually lots of other kids from our school drinking some Beast and hanging out. A bunch of the cars would be tuned into 98 Rock out of Baltimore, and songs like “Here I Go Again” by Whitesnake or “Livin’ on a Prayer” from Bon Jovi would blast across the night.

For some reason, the local cops hardly ever drove through to chase us away. But plenty of guys from our school would slowly drive down the road with a flashlight hanging out on the side of the car to pretend they were the police. That would get everybody scrambling to hide and drink somewhere else.

If Cinder was quiet, Eric and I would check who was working at the Laurel Centre Mall and bug them for a while.

After that got old, we’d head over to Erol’s Video store and maybe pick up Faces of Death III and watch it in my basement as we sipped the now-warm cans of Beast. As the night wore on, we’d turn on the Night Flight show on the USA Network and finish the beers with B movies, like Suburbia or Pink Flamingos.

This routine was so tiring, and I wanted something different. We played soccer and were part of the “in crowd,” but I never felt comfortable there. I wanted something more. This all felt too small for me.

One Friday afternoon, my dad called from work and asked if I could get someone to drive me to the Mid-Atlantic** campus to drop off some food for my brother. He had planned to leave early from his job as a statistician for the federal government, but he got tied up with something. So, he needed me to make the food run for Alex.

I looked at the grocery bags on the kitchen table—lots of cans of Campbell’s chicken noodle soup, Oodles of Noodles ramen, Kraft mac and cheese, a couple of two-liter bottles of Pepsi, and some Utz crab chips.

I called Eric to see if he could drive, and he was excited to make the trip. We lived about ten miles away, but I hadn’t gone to the campus since we dropped Alex off in late August 1986 at his freshman dorm.

He hadn’t been home since Christmas break, and why would he come back except to wash his comforter for the first time that school year and grab some groceries? There was nothing in Laurel for him, and I totally felt the same for me, even though I still had another year of high school.

Alex was living in his frat, Alpha Delta Beta (A?B)*. He’d just become a brother before the spring semester, and I was dying to see if he was living in a busted-up party place like in Animal House.

We were driving along the street looking for the address of the A?B house when a football slammed into Eric’s windshield, and he almost veered into the curb. I looked over, and my brother was laughing with some other guys.

“That was me, jackass. Park that nasty ass car and bring me my food,” shouted my brother.

He was on the porch of a big, white mansion with giant columns on the patio. It was a little run-down and could use a fresh coat of paint, but his house still looked cool. Guys were drinking cups of beer on some ratty couches on the porch. Some others had picked up the football from the street and tossed it around the yard with one hand while gulping their beers in the other.

“With or Without You” by U2 was pumping from speakers hanging on the front of the house. A constant flow of guys streamed in and out of the front door wearing sweatshirts with the A?B letters.

As Alex led Eric and me inside, things got even better. There was a pool table, a beach volleyball court outside, and a big TV room. Alex asked if we were thirsty, and Eric piped up, “Thirsty for beer.” Alex rolled his eyes and said, “Follow me.”

We scurried after him to their basement. “This was our kitchen at one time, but there was a fire,” Alex said, pointing to a large area filled with a bar, a large wooden table, and chairs.

“After the fire, all of the kitchen appliances were destroyed, so they just threw them in the garbage and made a second bar in their place,” he continued.

“So, there is another bar?” I asked.

“No, just a second bar. Of course, there is another bar, you fucking idiot,” replied Alex as we turned a corner and saw this mammoth bar. A sign behind the bar read “End of the World.”

The bar must have been thirty feet long and had beer taps for Coors, Coors Light, and Coors Extra Gold. Sleeves of clear plastic cups were piled in the corner. Guys were leaning against the bar, downing beers. I went behind it with Eric to grab a couple of cups and pour some of our own.

Being in the middle of the fraternity like this was like the soundtrack to Animal House, but for my nose. The smell of stale beer that I grew up liking when I’d go to the bar with my dad on Saturdays, guys wearing too much Polo and Calvin Klein’s Obsession for Men cologne, and the faint smell of weed wafting through the house.

I wanted this.

They had the bars wired with the stereo, too—U2 followed us down there, and “Running to Stand Still” played as I sipped on some Coors Extra Gold. I hadn’t had many beers, but this was easily the best.

Alex told us there would be a happy hour soon, so we needed to leave. Damn, I was hoping he was going to ask us to stay for the frat party.

We headed out of the basement and back to Eric’s car. I looked back at the house, and the big A?B attached to the front, and knew I wanted to be one of them when I went to college. It wasn’t just the parties, although they sounded awesome. It was a place to belong and an identity with a bunch of fun, cool guys. As we drove home, Eric and I talked about our brief peek into the frat life and how cool it looked.

Neither of us could get the frat life out of our minds, so I hitched another ride with Eric to the Mid-Atlantic campus after school the following Monday. We both bought sweatshirts with A?B on them. We were a little scared that the person at the campus store would ask why we were buying them, and we had a whole story about how they were gifts. But nobody said a thing, and we purchased our “letters.”

We told our high school friends that we were junior pledges. Although nothing like that existed, we found a cool identity that was unlike our high school world and went with it.

We would hang out at the campus whenever we could for the rest of high school. We weren’t going to the frat house—my brother wasn’t inviting us. Instead, we were soaking it all in. We bought T-shirts, sweatshirts, and hats for Mid-Atlantic and wandered around while we waited to finish high school.

None of this got me laid or anything. But it got my attention, and I think I probably wanted that more in high school.

*Alpha Delta Beta is a fictionalized name of the fraternity
**Mid-Atlantic State University is a fictionalized name of the university

Originally published at Substack.

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