Fraternity Stories

I went to college in small town located in the upper part of our state, outside of a somewhat large city. I know this sounds like a porn story in Penthouse, but it’s not. I’m just trying to orient you to time and space. There will be no sex in this story, just young guys, plenty of alcohol, a car and a good time.

It’s a really nice town, and it has a main road that runs North & South through the village. The street is lined with old, late 1800’s buildings, big trees, quaint fences, well kept houses, etc. etc. All that Norman Rockwell shit.

So, one year, while living in the fraternity house, it started to snow. Now, for where we live, it really wasn’t much, say 4 – 5 inches by 10 that night. And I’m pretty sure it was a Sunday night, because it was really quiet outside that night, which becomes really critical to our success that evening.

With it being a Sunday evening, we (the brothers living in the house), were endeavoring to finish off the multiple kegs that we had left over from the party the night before. At that time the only night of the week that we didn’t drink was Tuesday night. Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday nights all of the bars in town had drink specials and Tuesday’s didn’t. Since we were poor college students (like any of us would even consider getting a job and earning money, right?), drink specials were key. Eventually, we even got one of the bar owners to tailor his specials around us, which we thought was really cool and that he was really cool for doing that. It turns out this guy was connected with the local mob and died of mysterious circumstances a few years later, but that’s another story.

Where was I? Oh yea, we never went to the bars on Saturdays because we always had house parties. The whole goal of our house parties was to charge other people money so we could drink our faces off and they would have the pleasure of drinking with us (well, at least we thought it was a pleasure). It was a good plan that worked really well for several years. Everyone got what they wanted (generally), nobody got hurt (generally and this really depends on your definition of hurt, I might add), we got to drink huge amounts of alcohol (our typical Saturday night we would go through between 10 - 15 kegs of beer) and act like complete morons.

This led to the Sunday evening kill the keg parties. We would all sit around in the garage, playing cards, drinking beer, farting, telling lies about who slept with whom, and just being guys. We never allowed any chicks or outsiders in on these parties, as we wanted to keep it to ourselves, just our core group of guys. Guys’ behavior really changes when women are around, especially when we are drinking. We had come to realize this and had made the decision to not allow any women into the house on Sunday evenings. We just wanted to be together, have a good time without any distractions.

By the way, it was after one of these parties that I was woken up by the campus police, having passed out in the middle of the college campus with my head shaved. That’s a good story, believe you me. But we’ll just save it for later.

So, it’s snowing, we’ve been drinking, and I’ve got the only working car in the fraternity. It was a silver, diesel VW rabbit with a hand crank sun roof that just ran and ran. So, one of the guys (we’ll call him Frank, to protect the innocent) comes in from taking a piss and says that we should go skitching. Being a pampered white kid from the suburbs, I had to ask what skitching is. As it was explained to me, you crouch behind and hang onto the rear bumper of a car when it goes down the road and try to stay on your feet. It’s like you’re road surfing behind a moving car.

Frank says that with all of the snow, it will be perfect conditions to go skitching. We grab a bunch of beer and go warm up the Rabbit. Five of us pile in and pulled out onto the road, where Frank started skitching.

After a little while, we realized we needed a look-out, in case the skitcher fell off the car (which happened). So we opened up the sun roof and one guy would stand backwards on the passenger seat, half way out of the sun roof and watch for people falling off (since it was below freezing, this was a really good way to keep his beer cold, we found out). Some of the other guys got inpatient for their turn so we started doing two and three skitchers at a time. We would drive back to the fraternity house, fill up our cups of beer and head back out again.

Once we realized that there was no one out on the road, we started going up and down Main Street. This was really the optimal skitching ground, we all agreed, because there wasn’t any turns (very difficult to handle when you’re half in the bag, being dragged behind a car going 20 miles an hour), the road was wider (nothing to hit when you fell off and tumbled away) and there seemed to be a lot less manholes, which proved to be a problem on the side streets.

So here’s the final picture. Main Street USA at night. The snow is gently falling and it’s completely dark out except for where the street lights cast their muted glow. Everything is covered in a deep blanket of white snow and it’s completely quiet. Then comes along a diesel VW rabbit, music thundering, three guys hanging off the back, one guy standing up backwards out of the sun roof, the driver hunched over the wheel, sipping a beer and trying to see where he is going.

Good times, baby, good times.