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“Why you limp?”

He didn't hesitate answering. “Birth defect.”

“Your parents sue the doctor?”

“No.”

“Sue the hospital?”

“No.”

“Parents sue each other?”

“No.”

“Parents sue you?”

“No.”

“You sue them?”

“No.”

“Grossberg!”

“Yeah?”

“Higgins family ain't Jewish are they?”

“Guess not.”

Another voice came out of the bullhorn.

“Holmes! Why you talk like an asshole?”

His thin face and chalky complexion made him look like a cadaver.

“From England, sir.”

“Walsh! Know why you're called Watson?”

He was a tall, barrel-chested guy with green eyes, cinnamon hair, and a freckled face that looked right off a Wheaties box.

“Nope.”

“Cause you and Holmes are asshole soccer buddies.”

He scratched his chest over the blue NO FEAR tank tap, revealing a ring through his left nipple. “If you say so.”

“Batman! Used to be named Bingham. Home town and major!”

He was my size, but stocky with his light brown hair already starting to thin at the top of his head. A silver piercing was above each eyebrow.

“New Orleans. Majoring in fucking around.”

First guy here that I liked.

“What's that hairy shit growing under your bottom lip?”

“Flavor saver.”

“What's that?”

“Keeps the flavor of pussy alive longer after going down on a girl.”

“Rasoom now known as Zoom! Why you always carry a toothbrush and stink of Listerine?”

The pledge standing on my right had rancid BO, a gut like a pregnant cow, and tiny pearl teeth.

“Good oral hygiene.”

“Can't gargle away AIDS pussy!” was somebody's great medical advice that got a few laughs.

“Rawlings! Why you here instead of at a school with a football team?”

At about six-four and at least two-fifty, this guy looked tough enough right now to play in the NFL. He had no neck, just muscles that connected his earlobes to his shoulders. “To raise my grades to play ball for UCLA next year. Sponsor pays me two thousand a month and gave me a new Xterra to go here and train every day.”

“Castle! Why you here?”

He was standing to my left. He was about five-ten, skinny as a broomstick, and so bowlegged that he must've been conceived when his mother was fucked on a saddle. He ran his right hand across the top of his dark oily hair that was probably soaked in Pennzoil.

“Killing time waiting for my father to die. He's a multi-millionaire.”

“Vysell, why your high school grades shit?”

He was about six-one, with reddish-brown hair, droopy eyelids and a deep dimple in the middle of his chin. He always seemed to smile. An intricate barbed wire tattoo circled each biceps.

“Didn't learn much,” he mumbled almost through clenched teeth like a ventriloquist. “School full of wetbacks.”

He seemed like another good guy and was obviously smart.

“Hood! You a virgin?” some other drunk yelled out laughing.

He was my height but heavier, with thick, dark hair and a very Ivy-League, prissy look behind tortoise-shell glasses. His first name was probably Skip, Buzzy or Troy.

“I went to Tijuana last month but I couldn't get an erection. Girl looked dirty.”

“I got his name!” some guy with a deep voice yelled out over the laughter. “No-Wood!”

The loud cheering almost drowned out a different voice on the bullhorn.

“Wide-Load! You with the fat ass and goatee! What's your father's occupation?”

“Real Estate.”

“He's a slumlord!” somebody else growled, making the word slumlord sound bad.

“So?”

“Who're his tenants?”

“Mostly beans and niggers. Animals, they break everything and run out on the rent.”

“Brannigan, the IRA mick!” the voice on the bullhorn interrupted.

A guy with pink skin, green eyes and a reddish-brown crew-cut who looked right out of an Irish travel magazine stepped forward.

“I'm English,” he growled. “Anyway, what kind of insulting question is that?”

“A mick question.”

“What is this shit?” he snapped. “School rules say no hazing pledges; nothing insulting, degrading or humiliating. Doesn't that mean anything to you?”

“No.”

“I don't have to be insulted by you fucking assholes!”

Suddenly Christianson's voice came out of the bullhorn. “Unless you're the victim of an IRA kidnapping, the door's open. Get the hell out of here!”

“Fuck you!” this short-lived pledge brother snarled. He twisted out of line and stormed toward the door. “Fuck all you!” he yelled over his right shoulder, slamming the front door so hard that it was lucky the door didn't fly off the hinges.

And just like that, one pledge down and eight to go.

The mood was somber for about five seconds until the next name was called out.

“Rainey. Your blind barber near death?”

He was a husky, rugged-looking guy, with bright blue eyes, a thick, blue-black beard, and a dark mullet haircut: sides shaved, top in a crew-cut with the back hanging down way past the collar of his yellow Polo shirt.

He laughed. “Not really.”

“What's your favorite sport?”

He smiled, revealing about ten grand of perfectly capped, sparkling, white teeth.

“Sixty-nining.”

“Spottler!” somebody yelled out. “Your first name really got three G's?”

“Yeah. G-R-E-G-G,” the guy with the pockmarked cheeks and the Bart Simpson haircut answered.

“You're now known as G-Spot. Why you here?”

“Got a track scholarship.”

This got one of the loudest laughs of the night.

“This school couldn't win the Special Olympics.”

“Ovary! Get up here!”

“Yes, sir. But my name's Overby not Ovary.”

At six-one and wiry, he had tan fuzzy hair that looked like a Brillo pad perched on top of his head and enough ear, nose, and mouth piercings to keep an airport metal detector beeping for hours.

“You're always poor-mouthing. Who's paying for college?”

Somehow this question really hit a nerve. He swallowed slowly and seemed to hesitate before he answered unevenly, “My uncle.”

“Rick Shaw now known as Rickshaw Boy! Why you here?”

He was the guy about six-eight who was smoking dope with me and the other three guys last week in the yard.

“Full basketball scholarship.”

A bunch of guys laughed.

“This school couldn't beat a wheelchair basketball team,” somebody yelled.

A squeaky voice suddenly screamed out, “Why ain't there no gooks on campus to pedal your rickshaw?”

“Because they're too smart to be here.”

Christianson's voice on the bullhorn said sternly, “Pledges: Here's your last warning on the subject. Even any hint that any of you pledges is involved in gay sex is your ticket out of here.” Then he sounded friendly again. “Congratulations to our new pledges. After you pose for Richie LeRoy, the house photographer, join the rest of us here at Club Jagermeister!”

Monday, September 16

3:15
P.M
.

“L
YMAN SAID THAT IF HE COULD AFFORD IT
,
he'd pay somebody to kill you,” Holmes told me at the apartment that he and Watson shared with Lyman in Westchester, near the airport. “Why does he hate you so much?”

“Because he thinks the whole family hates flippers.”

“Filipinos?” Watson asked.

“Who do you think I'm talking about? Flipper the Dolphin at Sea World?”

Watson laughed as Holmes continued this stupid conversation. “Only person he hates more than you is your grandfather.”

“Seriously, why does he hate you?” Watson asked.

“Because he's jealous. My parents give me everything like they should but his cheap-bastard parents make him work. For grades, spending money, all that shit.”

“Why does he hate your grandfather?”

“Because he never had anything to do with Lyman.”

“Because he's Filipino?”

I shook my head in disgust. “Probably. But so what? My
grandfather hated me too. Anyway, how can you guys stand living here with Lyman. He's such an asshole. Always was and always will be.”

“Actually, he's OK,” Watson answered to my surprise, “except for his obsession with that genealogy shit.”

“What do you mean?”

“He's trying to locate his real mother and father. Look at his room.”

It seemed like every five seconds another goddamn plane roared overhead. I looked up at the ceiling. “Isn't the noise annoying as hell?”

“You get used to it,” Holmes answered.

We walked down the small hallway and Holmes opened Lyman's bedroom door and we went inside. Except for the girl with big tits on the
collegehumor.com
poster, almost all the rest of the wall space was covered with maps, charts, diagrams; all on the subject of ancestors and finding people.

“He's got a new lead,” Holmes said, sounding happy.

“Oh,” I answered, not really giving a shit.

“Yeah. Well, you know, Lyman's mother worked for your grandfather as a maid.”

“What're you, his biographer?”

“Hardly. But that's the only thing he does that drives me and Watson crazy. Always talking about when he got adopted.”

“So his mother was the maid. So what? She's a flipper too.”

Holmes looked puzzled, obviously not understanding my logic and continued with Lyman's pitiful, who-wants-to-hear-it? biography.

“When he was a year old she left to go to the Philippines temporarily for a family emergency and she left him with the woman who took over for her at your grandfather's house. Some woman whose husband was in the Army.”

This was still boring as shit. “So what?”

“So when his mother never came back, and the replacement woman went to Germany with her husband when the Army transferred him there, that's when your aunt and uncle adopted him.”

“So who-the-fuck cares? Anyway, what's the big lead from the Army?”

Holmes, with his pretentious English accent, sounded like a goddamn butler. “Army records came back a few days ago and showed that the woman and her husband left Germany and now live near Fort Worth, Texas.”

“Lyman talk to her?”

“No. Records must've been old. She moved from there since. But he's got a search company out looking for her.”

“You know what else I think of Lyman?” I asked innocently. A second later I broke the silence with a rumbling, five-second-long fart that picked up speed as I blasted it out of my ass. Then a big burp finished my opinion. “That's what. So who the hell cares if he finds his parents anyway?”

“He does, for one,” Watson answered testily. He looked over at Holmes and both guys shook their heads and looked at me. Then Watson smiled. “You told us why Lyman hates you and your grandfather. But why did you hate your grandfather?”

“Always criticizing me. And instead of calling me by name, he called me ‘useless parasite.' And he was always bragging about the goddamn Marines and showing off his war souvenirs.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, for instance, I remember a large, glass-covered picture frame in the den with his uniform shirt covered with dried blood that had the Purple Heart pinned on it. That was the biggest thing in his life. The minute anybody walked in the house, he'd grab them, take them into the den and show him the goddamn shirt and tell them he wore it when he got shot at Iwo Jima killing Japs.”

Holmes smiled. “You know what you and your grandfather have in common with Lyman?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “What?”

He pointed to the open bedroom door. “Look behind it.”

I pushed the bedroom door closed and saw two black and white cork dartboards, one on top of the other. My grandfather's cut-out picture was glued into the bulls-eye on the top one.
And my picture was in the center of the lower one! The sharp, silver tips of red-feathered darts was stuck through each of our eyeballs!

“A lot of pledges hate you too,” Holmes suddenly informed me, keeping this great conversation going. “And the list is growing pretty fast. There's even talk about most of the pledge class signing a petition threatening to quit unless the actives kick you out.”

I was really surprised. “Why?”

“Everybody can see that you don't give a shit about the pledge class or the fraternity. Always criticizing everybody, making cruel jokes, just being an arrogant prick. In fact, nobody can figure out why you even want to be in the fraternity.”

“To make friends,” I said straight-faced. “And the pledges are wrong about me,” I lied. “Anyway that flipper bastard's got no reason to hate me. I never did anything to him.”

Holmes opened the door. “Let's get out of here. Lyman ought to be back any minute. Nobody but me and Watson are allowed in here without Lyman.”

The continual rumble overhead from the planes was finally driving me crazy. “How can you stand the fucking noise?” I yelled.

“Told you. You get used to it. Don't hear it after a while.”

“Not me.”

We went back into the living room to wait for the others so we could discuss our term project in our Sociology class.

About two minutes later Lyman walked in with two girls. The taller one was Nina, Lyman's girlfriend. She was a dull, mousy-looking thing that we named Headlights since her good-sized tits bounced as she walked. She was with her bosom-buddy named Heather; a little twat about four-ten, with wild, frizzy hair that she probably styled by jamming a hairpin into an electrical outlet. Everybody called her Frizzhead.