Read Life of the Party: Stories of a Perpetual Man-Child Online

Authors: Bert Kreischer

Tags: #Humor, #Form, #Essays, #Biography & Autobiography, #Entertainment & Performing Arts

Life of the Party: Stories of a Perpetual Man-Child (3 page)

BOOK: Life of the Party: Stories of a Perpetual Man-Child
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The smell was absolutely atrocious. The room cleared out in a matter of seconds. People literally jumped out of the windows, piled out of every door, began violently dry-heaving. The council lost their minds and demanded that I go back in the room and clean up my mess, which I did (and directly after, threw up). I’ll spare you too much description except to say that my aim for the pizza box was balls-on accurate.

We gave the room a solid ten minutes of aerosol air freshener, assumed our places, and waited for everyone to vote. Ballots were collected as Josh and I stood at the front of the room, listening as people chuckled over what they had just seen. As the votes were tallied, I heard a rumbling of dissent from the members.

“You guys have got to be fucking kidding right now.”

We answered with curious faces.

“There is only one vote for Josh. Bert won in a landslide.”

The place went fucking bananas. Josh walked over to the ballots and confirmed what the council had told us, that everyone had voted for me … except for his own vote, for himself. (I had opted to abstain, as I found both candidates incompetent. I instead wrote, “Mills Sucks Pole” on my ballot.)

The council congratulated me as Josh began to shout. “You’re not really gonna let this happen are you? The guy shit on a pizza box! I have a plan and a laser pointer. I wore a fucking suit.”

“He won fair and square,” said the president.

Josh looked at his brethren and shouted, “This is fucking bullshit!”

An unknown brother piped back, “No, it’s bertshit.”

*   *   *

If these two stories, the beauty and the beast, form my legacy as an entertainer, then so be it. I hope to keep growing artistically, and I think these stories suggest I have. But if, at my funeral, the only people to speak are my makeup artist Brian Callahan and my bandmates John Dacre and Brent Brackin, and they share these two stories with the friends and family in attendance, please know that I will be smiling from up above. Naked. In KISS makeup. Rocking the fuck out.

 

2.

Alcoholism, Vandalism, Drug Use, and Other Ways to Have a Good Time

 

Fraternities take a lot of flak, and rightly so. Mine was something of a breeding ground for racism, sexism, alcoholism, vandalism, homophobia, and drug use. I know that anyone with a liberal blog is about to lose their mind and get those angry butterflies that inhabit enraged chests, but my goal here is not to anger, but to show you how much fun racism, alcoholism, vandalism, homophobia, and drug use can be for a young man. Maybe shine a light on a secret part of society, the way a disco ball sparkles in a dorm room at 3
A.M.
when you’re blowing up on X. No one ever meant too much harm. We were a bunch of simple-minded boys who were desperately trying to find out who we were before entering the big wide world. There’s a part of me that wishes I had been strong enough as a young man to carve my own path, rather than following in the footsteps of so many. But it was a whole lot of fucking fun if you were a guy with six years to kill. One thing I can say for certain, I would do it again completely.

I pledged along with my roommate and best friend at the time, Jeff Hartley, in the fall of 1991, the first semester of my freshman year, the year grunge meandered its flannels onto the music scene. We rushed a couple fraternities but gravitated toward the one that was populated mostly by guys who had gone to our high school in Tampa. Pledging a fraternity is a mindfuck of an activity. They wine and dine you to get you to join, then allow you a two- to three-week grace period, just enough for you to get comfortable. It’s the kind of grace period an abusive husband or a sociopath might give you. You’re comfortable, you’re confident, then when you least expect it, you are hiding in the closet because you’ve overcooked dinner. The first time it happened to me was also the first time I heard the N-word used unapologetically. I was so appalled I almost stood up and left. But no one else was leaving, and considering that the group of older boys yelling at us was looking for someone to single out—and standing up and protesting,
“Language, gentlemen,”
would do exactly that—I held in my liberal rage until we were alone.

After the meeting my pledge class sat around in a circle drinking beers, collecting our thoughts. I waited for the right moment to voice my concern.

“Can you believe that guy said the N-word?”

“Grow the fuck up,” said one of my older pledge brothers, who had gotten hazed beyond belief and would later de-pledge because of it. “He didn’t mean it as racist. He wasn’t calling a
black person
a nigger. He was calling
us
niggers; it’s not racist if you call a white person a nigger.” Although I cringed every time he said the word, you couldn’t argue with his logic.

Another pledge brother chimed in. “Yeah, it had nothing to do with race … you dumb nigger.”

Everyone laughed, and I left my longhaired liberal outrage behind. And that is how complicity to racism happens.

It made sense in a way. They were constantly trying to shock us. In that climate, you kind of fell into line quickly and you were never comfortable. Anytime you felt relaxed, it was because they let you feel relaxed so you could slip up just enough that they could haze you. They were giving you the rope to hang yourself. They’d let you show your ass and then call you on it. So when they did haze you, it was for those things that you’d done—like admit which brother you thought didn’t belong in the fraternity, or who had the hottest chick you’d like to fuck, or better yet who you thought might be gay. The proper reprimand would always involve ratting you out and lots of screaming.

To say that our house was a place of hazing is like saying that Guantánamo Bay is a residence for independent-thinking Middle Easterners. There were one or two guys that got hazed worse than the others because people had personal beefs with them. I got hazed because I was gullible, likeable, and something of a moron. I’d be walking into the house in the early morning to clean the up head and pass Pete Whalen, a guy I’m still friends with. He’d see me walk in, tired and hungover, and grab hold of me.

“Hey, at 6
A.M.
I need you to wake up Brother Siminson.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah, he asked me to do it, but I have to leave.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“He’s a heavy sleeper, so he said to grab a hammer and bang on his door until he gets up.”

“Are you sure?”

“Certain. And don’t make me say it again, pledge. You got a dip?”

Dip was the binding powder that brought us all closer to each other. Ground-up tobacco that you pinched and placed between your bottom lip and teeth. Your safety as a pledge was dependent on two things: if you dipped, and what brand you dipped. The only two acceptable brands were Skoal mint and Copenhagen. Copenhagen was for the guys who owned trucks, had been hit by their fathers, drank whiskey, and said the N-word. Skoal mint was for the softer boys, who usually came from country clubs, private schools, and veered away from racial slurs. Pete and I were Skoal men, as was Siminson. I pulled out a fresh can, handed it to Pete, and he took a big morning-sized dip, as did I.

“So, I’m safe leaving my responsibility in your hands?”

“Safe!”

“I don’t want to get fucked on this one!”

“You won’t, I promise.” We both spat and walked in separate directions, me to clean the up head, and Pete to economics class.

Come 6
A.M.
, there I was with a framing hammer outside Siminson’s door. I started soft, but after a short while found no result. My soft taps then turned into harder bumps, grouped in machine-gun spurts. Still nothing. Slowly I could hear other brothers in other rooms waking up, shouting for the guy with the jackhammer to stop, but still I heard nothing from my intended target. Finally, I decided to pull the stops and began taking Paul Bunyan–sized swings at my target. The dip juice seeped between my teeth as I swung at the door with all my might. I remembered thinking at one point I should probably pull back a bit or I might just knock the numbers off, when I finally heard movement in his room. Excited, like a fisherman who feels a tug on his line and wants to set his hook, I banged out a few murderous booms for good measure, and with that Siminson was at the door, in a rage.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

“You have to wake up.”

Siminson looked still asleep but shocked, like someone had just lit him on fire in the middle of his slumber. He grabbed the hammer out of my hand and slammed the door in my face. “Motherfucker,” I heard him yell from the other side of the door.

Part of me wanted to make sure he was up, and the other part of me realized Pete had most likely been fucking with me. The question of which part of me was right was answered when I ran into Siminson at lunch in the mess hall.

“I’m gonna make your life a living fucking hell this semester.”

“But Brother Siminson, Brother Whalen—”

“Shut the fuck up before I go to my room, get that hammer, and shove it up your ass. You got a dip?”

I handed him my can of Skoal, he put it in his pocket and walked away. That was the way it worked. Brothers fucked with the pledges, and if they could ricochet it so that fucking with us meant fucking with a brother at the same time, even better.

*   *   *

One night, I was setting up the mess hall for dinner when I got called into the kitchen by one of the older brothers called Cuz. Cuz was from the Panhandle, and he had the kind of happy-go-lucky attitude that made everyone like him. A couple years later he would go on to work for Nabisco and show up at my house with rejected boxes of cookies, and we would get stoned and feast on broken Nutter Butters. But back then he was just a brother working in the kitchen to help pay his dues. And I was his pledge.

Cuz was hollowing out pumpkins for a pumpkin-carving social we had with a sorority later that night, and when I walked into the kitchen he had his hands full of pumpkin innards.

“Yo, Bert. You take a look out there and tell me if there is anyone wearing a suit.”

I looked out and noticed that, in fact, there were quite a few brothers wearing suits. I told him so and he smiled.

“Do me a favor and reset the tables for an outside dinner.”

“Okay!” I said. The word
no
has never been a strong part of my vocabulary.

I got all the tables on the basketball courts and set out all the plates. When I came back in he had an even bigger smile on his face.

“Bert, you wanna play a hilarious prank on the brothers? I mean this is a legendary, next-level kind of prank that will be talked about for years, just like the donut prank.”

The donut prank had occurred a few years earlier and was the stuff of folklore. The pledges at the time, after spending a night getting hazed beyond belief by irate and drunk brothers, woke up early the next morning and left the brothers a couple dozen donuts in the lounge as a peace offering.

The brothers woke up, hungover, and feasted on them. Later that day the pledges posted a blow-up picture of themselves in the same lounge, with the same donuts, only with them skewered on their dicks. The brothers got pissed, but the prank was so legendary it was worth it. And that was the ultimate job of the pledge class: to grow enough balls to prank the brothers.

“Will they get pissed?”

“No, come here.” He led me into the storage closet. “Take all this flour up to the roof and hide. When they start saying grace, I want you to run to the edge of the roof and throw all the flour on the brothers. Then I’ll come out and spray them with the hose and yell, ‘Looks like ya’ll got the ol’ papier-mâché treatment!’”

Cuz started laughing so hard at the idea of his prank that the laughter became contagious, and soon we are both smiling ear to ear. I was already figuring out the dance I’d do up on the roof afterward, kind of a mix of the Ed Lover Dance and the Icky Shuffle. He told me to grab Accardi, the only other guy to get hazed as much as me—if not worse—and to get on the roof through the only access we had: Brother Bongwater’s window. After we dumped the flour, we’d go back into his room and hide until it all blew over. He said if there was any fallout, he would take it for us. But when time passed and everyone realized just how funny the ol’ papier-mâché incident was, we would get full credit, and it would become legend.

Accardi and I grabbed four sacks of flour, went to Brother Bongwater’s room, locked the door behind us, climbed onto the roof, and waited like snipers. Many a thought passed through our heads while we waited, including, “Is this a good idea?” and “Is this really how you make papier-mâché?” and “Will everyone know that this was how you make papier-mâché?” and “What does
mâché
mean?” and “Why exactly is this so funny to Cuz?” But when we heard Cuz start off dinner by announcing, “Brothers, please. A moment of prayer,” we leapt into action like soldiers. I covered the near side and Accardi dumped the brothers on the far side. We thrilled at coating the brothers who’d hazed us the most, waiting for Cuz to come out with the hose.

What happened wasn’t what was planned. Instead of Cuz, one of our pledge brothers showed up with a hose, and he proceeded to shower our suited brothers.

Cuz stood by his side feigning astonishment.

“What have they done? The balls on these guys to hit you with the ol’ papier-mâché treatment.” He turned his gaze toward us. “Look, on the roof, it’s Kreischer and Accardi! They’re going to Bongwater’s room! I’ll get the keys!”

We crawled back into our only escape, eyeing each other in panic like we had been running a train on a hooker in Haiti and both our condoms simultaneously broke.

“They’re gonna beat our asses.”

“They’re not allowed to hit us,” I said hopefully.

“They hit me all the time,” Accardi said.

At that we heard the keys to the door jingling outside, like a Drunk Santa coming in to discipline his unruly reindeer.

“Bert, whatever you do, don’t hit them back.”

The door opened and to my relief, I saw that the first to enter was the most religious brother of our fraternity. He stood, covered in flour, but I knew that without a doubt, despite being enraged, he wouldn’t resort to violence.

BOOK: Life of the Party: Stories of a Perpetual Man-Child
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