Page 14 of Frat Row

Unlike sorority rush, I received a bid that night.

I got to spend the rest of the week with Alpha Chi, my fraternity, simultaneously chugging beers and playing beer pong, video games, and watching porn or a homemade video on a projector one of the brothers recorded with a girl who clearly didn’t know she was being filmed.

Having your own homemade sex videos is a rite of passage here, and sharing them at chapter is thought of as a normal thing.

If you video yourself banging a girl from each sorority, you obtain a special pin on your sash when you graduate, and only our fraternity knows what it means.

Yes, it is someone’s job to keep up with it and track this kind of shit.

Trust me, it’s not a hard position to fill.

You’re surrounded by cocky and horny guys; they are basically foaming at the mouth to get their hands on any of the homemade videos. Share any of this, and the fraternity will rain hell down on you. Recruits who don’t make it into the fraternity keep their mouths shut.

It doesn't matter if you are a legacy or not. If you are a new member of a fraternity, you are going to get hazed. Everyone is assigned grunt work, and you’re expected to do anything the older brothers instruct you to do.

You’re dropped if you say no without a second thought.

My dad prepared me for this part of becoming a new member and told me some of the stories of things he had to endure.

Making it through hazing is essential to being an initiated brother of any fraternity. We’ll only be new members for around a month of absolute hell.

Here’s to hoping they don’t ask me to do any illegal shit.

I desperately want to be a brother, and I know I’ll do whatever they ask of me.

Thankfully, my dad told me about what might be coming and what I might be asked to do.

One of the first things is having to chug a ton of alcohol and go swimming in the school fountain at night, fully nude.

Then, we have to memorize the current top hit songs and sing them to other sororities. Carrying books for older brothers is expected and easy, and the same is true for taking notes for them in every one of their classes. That’s all beginner-level hazing.

One of the things my dad had to do was steal a crest flag from one of the other fraternities without getting caught. Quite honestly, I don’t know how he pulled it off with how heavily locked the Greek houses are.

Unless they tell me to, drinking and going to bars is out of the question. You must have your phone on loud at all times, especially at night, in case a brother needs a designated driver to pick them up.

Fraternity brothers drink considerably; for some, it’s their whole personality.

As if this wasn’t enough mental suffering, we are also expected to wake up at four in the morning and run along the beach for miles until they tell us to stop, all the while chanting our fraternity’s songs.

If you cannot keep up with the group, you are forced to stop and swallow about a fourth of a bottle of vodka in large gulps.

Afterward, you have to race to catch up with the group, and if you puke, a brother will oversee you doing push-ups, sit-ups, planks, and anything else they can think of until they decide you can stop.

Breaking you is their ultimate goal. Dropping out means that you don’t have what it takes to be a brother.

They need you to think you’ve earned it when you become a fully initiated brother. Hazing is frowned upon at any college, but no one says shit because you’re a brother now, and you would risk your fraternity getting kicked off campus.

By the end of the week, they hand me and fourteen other guys an invitation cordially inviting us to become members of Alpha Chi.

I accepted right away. The happiness that surges through me because I don’t have to be anyone’s bitch anymore is unmatched.

Now for the initiation.