Here’s a cautionary tale that I personally lived through and wish to share to all of those that have a heart for wisdom and ears to listen. Heed my words, friends …

It was Fiji Rush in the summer of 2000.  Fiji.  Phi Gamma Delta.  Actually, I feel that I have to write like this for some reason – PHI.  GAMMA.  DELTA.  For those of you outside the college Greeks system, permit me to give you a quick primer.  Fraternities are the embodiment of drunken debauchery tinged with a bit of colorful hazing and all-night video games.  The best way to describe would be to say ‘the most awesomeness ever invented by mortals’ … so that’s what I’ll say.

Fraternities are the most awesomeness ever invented by mortals.

Grab 70 guys of roughly similar interests (chicks, Warcraft, kung-fu, sports, illegal pledge fighting rings, et al) and stick them in a small, old, 3-story house.  Of course, a Darwinist hierarchy will develop organically based on a combination of sheer physical power, mental acuity, and most importantly hardcore sadistic wit.  It’s like Lord of the Flies except with copious amounts of Natural Light and silly string.

Rush is how we recruit and select the next crop of lucky young men to share in the values and tradition of our glorious fraternity.  Once a candidate, known as a rushee, successfully navigates rush and is nominated to become a candidate for brotherhood in our sacred institution, they become pledges.  Pledgeship is how we craft these young men into fine gentlemen.  How do we do this?  We learn songs, memorize trivia, and wear suit jackets soaked with sweat and grime for sixty straight days.

On this particular summer day, we were holding a rush event in the south eastern corner of Oklahoma, the finest state in the USA just after Manitoba.  Our rush was different than other fraternities.  Sure we did the typical things, such as cookouts at the lake, jet skis, paintball, hookers in Vegas, etc.  But it was what was not present that is the surest sign of how Phi Gamma Delta was different than the rest.  Most fraternities use alcohol and whippets to entice candidates to sign with their houses (or shotguns and Columbian Bam Bam for the Beta and Sigma Nu methods).

The only thing that I remember distinctly about this rush event was the fact that Mike Pinter showed up with zero percent body fat like he was some kind of Marky Mark underwear ad.  When he jumped into the lake it was like watching Animal Planet – like a cheetah with glasses stuffing Fritos into his mouth with grape soda in one hand.  But … that is a different story.

On the way back from our little event, I rode in the red SUV belonging to my Fiji brother, known as TNT.  For the purposes of this story (and the fact that my lawyer advised it), I am going to lamely conceal his identity with his very well known and easily figured out fraternity and high school nickname of TNT.  I was driving and he was riding shot gun with two other brothers in the back.

Southeast Oklahoma, despite its similarities to Shangra-La, possesses the most boring, near post-apocalyptic stretches of poorly maintained, neglected highways in the Union.  So we were looking for anything to distract us from TNT’s collection of Jodeci and Sarah McLachlan albums.  As a side note, I can vouch for TNT’s heterosexuality as he is currently married and with children.

As we were soaring down the broken pavement at a scorching 54mph, we approached a beat-up Ford chugging along with a trail of black smoke blazing from its rusted tailpipe.  So I had this idea.  I looked over at TNT and said, “let’s run that car off the road and loot the dead bodies in the wreckage.”  We had a plan.  But then it occurred to me that it might be just as fun to pretend to make come-ons to the driver as we passed.  Ok, that was a new plan.

I increased our speed to 63mph and closed the distance quickly.  As we overtook the car, I beeped the horn suggestively as all of us waved and howled.  TNT, ever the improvisational genius, licked the glass of the passenger window.  The driver was a 600 pound woman, whose name I will never know but I will remember forever as Orca.  She had bottle cap glasses, nubby teeth, and the aspirations to be the a guest on a lead-in segment for Jerry Springer.

Haha!  We were geniuses!  No one had ever pulled such an innovative and courageous stunt in the history of Oklahoma metro transportation.

As our laughter died down, I casually glanced back into the rearview mirror and I felt a tinge of dread.  There was the beaten down old Ford, slowly creeping up to us.  It was like seeing the three yellow barrels pop up in the cold, New England sea pulled by a 25 foot super-powered great white shark.  Closer.  Closer.

“Guys … um … take a look …”

The joyfulness in the car ended as the rest of its occupants turned to spy our stalker.  Closer.  Suddenly, all of us felt like snot-nosed, juvenile kids playing games at being tough, hard, and worldly.  Suddenly, we knew something was forming, happening.  Closer.  Closer.  Our lives would be defined by this day, we could feel it.  The marking of time would be divided into two distinct eras of measurement – before the Day, after the Day.

Closer, closer.

I considered accelerating to avoid the moment, my panic and fear leading me to desperate thoughts.  Yet in my core I knew that destiny was calling and, like a German dominatrix, it would not be denied.  The car reached the back of our SUV and as it came even with us, uniformly we looked over as one to see what fate held for us.

There – in the beaten down old Ford – was a grossly obese, redneck woman, holding her shirt with one hand revealing the ghostly pallor of her broad, sickly stomach and the dragging mass of her large, piglet breast flapping around her belly button as she struggled to maintain control of her automobile as she slurped at us with her tongue from behind the nubs of her yellow teeth.

I lost control of our SUV.  I nearly careened off the road, slipping from the blacktop onto the weed chocked shoulder and into the loose gravel and red dirt.  I was blinded by my nausea, struck down by the horrible karma that recalled  the four naive boys that dared to fly too high … just like four little Icaruses with damp swimsuits and sunburns.

When the tears of my revulsion cleared and the vomit left the notch in my throat, I steadied the vehicle and returned to the journey home at 32mph.

None of us spoke.  No words could capture the … the horror … of what we had witnessed that day.  There was a promise that we shared, though it was never mentioned or verbalized.  None of us would ever speak on what happened on that day.

Until now.

In the crater that is now my life since that day, I hope that my suffering – the psychological scars that I can never shed, the scars that sometimes leave me weeping quietly on my pillow while I listen to ghostly and mysterious Celtic sounds of Enya – will somehow help the world.

It is my hope.  It is my prayer.