Chapter 4. – The pledgeship

I’ve always argued that I was one of the lucky ones. They say (where they is everyone that speaks in adages) that you don’t get to pick your family you only pick your friends. This was not true in my case. I was one of those kids that came from a wholesome family with a dad, a mom and a set of living grandparents at one time or another in living memory. I had two half-brothers and half-sister. And then I transplanted my existence somewhere 3,000 miles north from home where no one knew me.

Enter a problem surrounding operations and the basic lie that Friedman told us: the world is flat. Yes, it might be flat, but it’s large enough for us to see the curvature of the earth – or small enough for us to be able to hug a model globe.

If I broke my legs, needed immediate hospitalization or simply required the warm presence of my family or friends in a moment of dire emergency the following would occur. I would call them – assuming I was in a condition to do so.

1) 2007 was the year Guadalajara stopped having direct flights to Philadelphia. 2007 was my freshman year.
2) To get from Guadalajara to Philadelphia you have multiple options. You can have layovers in Atlanta, Dallas, Chicago and Houston. All those flights leave GDL early in the morning.
3) If the call back home happened any time after 11am local time, my family would have to wait at least till the next day.
4) At which point anywhere between 9-12 hours of travel time would have to occur baring any major delays or the weather being its usual cooperative self or my parents avoiding being put on some sort of list because they didn’t speak English.

That was my reality.

And so before discussing something that I would later look at in morbid retrospect with warmth and melancholy – pledge – I should say that before I left home I promised my dad I would never join a fraternity.

Enter a lost in translation moment. Fraternities in Mexico are secret societies that handle all the power – they are the prototypical skull and bones type societies except they operate in a country where rules are easier to bend and money truly speaks. Where money is your name and it doesn’t require a last name. You kill people to sign the pledge and get a ring and never speak of it again until someone in your organization decides to break out, write a book about the secret society and gets killed 2 months after publishing.

Or you know, whatever.

I came back from Winter break with a new haircut, a suitcase packed with a variety of alcohol, a saxophone and a stark determination to avoid the winter blues no matter how much indigo my life felt like. And campus greeted me with a 10 day rager.

This is when I began to rage.

Admittedly my preparation over break had involved reading Pledged – the underbelly to sororities or something like that and though I always wanted to talk to my parents about it, it never seemed real.

On the first night of closed rush – past the first two awkward days of house jumping looking for the best free food and impossible conversation – brothers put us on a bus. I sat near the front perhaps as homage to the many years I enjoyed seating up near the front of the bus with the teachers and the good kids. The word boat race started being thrown around. Two gallons of beer were handed to either side of the bus and people were tasked to drink as much as possible and then hand it down. The goal was to kill the boat. So I did. All of it, the gallon full, to the (for some reason) admiring eyes of rushes and fratters alike. I then sat down and enjoyed a comfortable buzz for the rest of the night.

The week progressed in a similar fashion except that with each drunken revelry I felt more and more engaged with the people around me. They had something inexplicable between them – they cared about each other and obviously enjoyed their company terribly.

Most fraternities have a final dinner as part of the rush process. This dinner is a little more formal than the rest of the nights – though heavy drinking is not only allowed but highly encouraged – but it also has the premise as the last time to have a serious or meaningful conversation. That night a brother sporting a white suit and a backwards, flat-rimmed Phillies hat told me he wanted kids like me running his fraternity years from now. I was sold.

I was offered a bid and after a bit of crying and screaming – both coming from me – my parents supported my decision.

Then pledge came.

No details of course for those are the secrets of the fraternity but what I failed to realize at the time was the purpose and its effectiveness.

The idea of pledge or as nationals insists on calling it – new member education – is to provide a set of strangers with a shared background and childhood. It’s the school of thought that claims that bonds are develop edwhen the individual is subjected to high levels of physical and mental distress. When the two god-given legs you have are no longer enough you have two choices: crumbling to the ground or reaching out and hoping your new brothers will catch you.

At first it feels weak and artificial and I still wonder why not one of us walked out. We do not know each other and the only thing those 24 kids had in common was that a large group of guys thought we were cool, or interesting, or hung out with the hottest girls or had a great set of hair. But by the end everyone cracks and once that’s done it’s easy to rebuild yourself in the image that they want you too.
I’d often tell stories of pledge and realize how silly or futile our little acts of heroism sounded when voiced out loud. When you were down in the hazement though, we were no longer 18 years old, we were men wiling to do battle with whatever was thrown against us and nothing was going to stop us. The vice of mob mentality was overpowering and you truly believed that what you were doing had a higher purpose and that the young man I was holding in my arms as he convulsed and his eyes rolled to the back of his head would be fine not only because I hurriedly and passionately whispered – “it’s ok, it’s ok, it’s ok” – into his ear but because he had to get through. He simply had to.

The same reasons why when handed a gallon to chug I would decide to do not as much as possible but all of it so that other wouldn’t. Staring up from the ground as everything around me blurred and my body shivered uncontrollably with the loud “WOARGHHH” I thought not – “I’m crazy” but “I’m doing it, they can’t touch me”. I’d drank nearly a gallon of it and through the tears I could see the plastic bottle empty lying only a couple of feet away from me. My brothers would try to pick me up but my weakened body would do little more than melt in their arms before another surge from within forced me to the ground, crying and heaving.
And sometimes we drank. The idea was that whatever you did not drink your brothers would have to. In that the nights were finite – no matter how long they felt.

During pledge you rarely see anyone outside the people you pledge with. You go to class, have dinner and then go pledge for anywhere between 3 and 12 hours a night. On your spare time the expectation is that you’ll clean the house, be in the house or hang out with the brothers. The idea of coming back form pledge and doing work never jelled with me. My mind would be gritting its teeth analyzing every little part of it and swearing to quit tomorrow only to end by seeking a drink with my pledge brothers.

You go to the parties you organize for the house or that the house sends you to. Other relationships and friendships go down the wayside and I found myself, for the first time in my life, in the difficult situation of attempting to evolve a booty call into a dating thing. I was exhausted half the time and all I could do was seek a little warmth and company from whomever was willing to offer it. It was only about a month and some change later I realized she had a boyfriend.

That ended things.

With Spring Fling came the end of pledge and I went home for some much needed recuperation.

The semester ended with finals that I barely passed because I’d spent the majority of my time focusing on learning things from a little black book and knowing which brothers had swam the red river of rage or who had thrust his nipple into an unwitting girl’s mouth.

My grades suffered. So did my sanity and other important things like my health and my friends. But I had finally developed a family that was just down the hallway or half a block away at worst. Artificially initialized, it was now solid enough to carry me, I thought.

Four years later the fraternity has been through a lot but for the first time in my life I've known the pleasures of having a little brother and an older brother who was actually involved with my life. I've enjoyed toasting to the sunrise as I overlook the Philadelphia skyline and a desolate campus. And I've learned to appreciate the idea of being Greek despite being Mexican. It might just be a unified approach to dealing with race relations.