Saturday Night The Brothers Don't Do No Tooling

In the House they call him "Butt-fucker" because he does all the dirty work. He's the guy they turn to when a hot water pipe bursts in the gameroom at 2 a.m. or when the Toast-R-Oven short-circuits the entire first floor. When they had a Hawaiian party and didn't know what to do with all the sand, he figured out a way to truck it down the block to a tiny tributary of the Charles. To this day, Butt-fucker's Beach lies invitingly under the overpass, at the intersection of Beacon Street and Charles Gate West.

Last Saturday was Butt-fucker's birthday. Everyone was chasing him around the House. "C'mon Butt-fucker," they screeched, "time for your BIRTHday present..." Eventually he tired, and they caught him, appropriately down near the boiler room. With well-practiced teamwork, five of them grabbed him like a cord of firewood and hustled him out into the middle of Beacon Street, where he received two rounds of boisterous "Happy Birthday" and 21 solid whacks from an official House paddling board. Laughing, they filed back inside to shower down for another Saturday night formal dinner at an MIT fraternity.

"If Sigma Alpha Epsilon is the big jock and lady's man house, and Phi Sigma Kappa is for duds, then I guess our House is in between. We're middle of the road." Tex, a dedicated student of the MIT fraternity scene, hunches forward as he lectures on the meaning of Brotherhood in one of the House's cramped four-person bedrooms. "We do things together, so that we can get to know each other, know each other well." he explains. "Like we take canoe trips and go out to restaurants and goof around. You don't know what a blast it is to march into a public place, all 31 of us, and take the place over." Brothers perched on desks and leaning on bunk beds look at their feet and nod in agreement, grinning.

Like most inhabitants of MIT's own fraternity row--a line of stately brownstones directly across the river from the campus--members of the House consider themselves "nice, regular guys," doing their best to whip that next thermodynamics problem set and score Saturday night.

Although they have initiation rituals and secret passwords, and they hoist a skull-and-cross bones up their flag pole each day, the Brothers do not run an Animal House operation. No brassieres hang from the bannisters, no motorcycles are driven through the dining room. By 7 p.m. most weekday evenings a hush falls over the carpeted upstairs hallways and regal, mahogany-trimmed smoking rooms. No one is gatoring to "Louie Louie" under the 25-ft. dinner table or filling water balloons on the roof. If you plan to remain at MIT for any length of time as a student, frat brother or not, you must do some serious "tooling."

But if you do live in a fraternity, you are expected to absorb quite a different education in addition to the one you get at the Institute. "You learn to get along with other guys here, to work with them and have fun with them," says Smilin' John, the "Alpha"--Greek for Grand Illustrious Poobah. "Responsibility" is a word Smilin' John barks at his charges with the regularity of a firm coxswain. "It might be true that you lose some independence here, but we all come to agree that it's for a good cause," he says.

The Brothers do all of the house keeping: the clothes washing, floor mopping and window cleaning. Until 12 years ago, an ancient cook lived with the fraternity. But as one middle-aged alumnus mournfully reports, "We came back one day to say 'hello' to Chef, to give him a hug as we always did because we loved him so much, and discovered that he had died." Aside from his pot roast, the old man was always a favorite because "there was inevitably some form of socializing going on in the cook's quarters when he went out Saturday nights."

Today the Brothers cook for themselves--a chore to some, an art to others. Josh is the James Beard of the House. He even looks like him, only with hair. Josh knows he's good. He enters his spacious culinary atelier by 2 p.m. on the days he is creating, and he does not emerge with his weary assistants until well after his masterpieces have been consumed and eulogized. Maybe someday, Josh hopes, the Brothers will name a dish in his honor, as they do for all legendary House cooks.

"Tradition," says the Alph-in-chief, "really helps us keep things going. It gives us pride in ourselves and in the history of the House. We all feel like we're part of something larger, more reassuring."

There is no hazing within the House. Pledges (freshmen) do not have to foxtrot through libraries in evening dresses to prove their fraternal dedication. "We do give them a hard time sometimes, but everything we do has a purpose, and usually it's fun," Smilin' John insists. Take Scavenger Hunt, for instance--pledges are "kept amused" until 4:30 a.m. and then awakened an hour later to begin a city-wide search for museum guidebooks, match book covers from favorite strip joints and foreign language pornographic literature. "We've been doing it for a long time," says Dave, a veteran of two-and-a-half semesters at the House. "It's kind of good for them; they get to learn about Boston."

The happy hunters are, of course, the lucky ones. Many would-be Brothers never make it past Rush. "Yeah, Rush is big," says Brother Richie with a smile of absurd understatement.

Freshmen arrive in Cambridge on a Thursday in late August. They get Friday to look around unaccosted before the infamous Freshman Picnic that night.

Tex narrates:

"You've got all of these nervous freshmen. MIT hasn't told them jackshit about anything. They're all sitting there stuffing down hamburgers and all of us, we're sort of lurking on the sidelines, waiting. Sometimes we even send some people in, to infiltrate and scout around. Then a guy stands up--the adrenalin is really flowing now--and right at 6 p.m. he yells, 'Let Rush begin!'

"We all jump in there and literally grab people left and right and drag them back across the river. The the parties start, and a few days later we figure out who we want and who we don't want."

Pledges soon learn that parties and "having fun" are not merely occasional distractions at the House; they are hallowed institutions you learn to love if you plan to stay. "You must be happy in the House," says Smilin' John. "We make a special effort to keep everyone satisfied. At times, if a pledge is having trouble, we'll make a big push to get him a date, or something."

The Brothers are so thrilled to be living under the same roof that they have trouble expressing their bliss in mere words. Everything works out right at Phi Kappa Sigma. Everyone is smiling. How can this be? These guys go to MIT, don't they?

"There's a love/hate relationship with MIT that affects most people, and often we just want to forget it," says Dave, who says he came to college "concerned about intellectual things," but now sees the value of "mindless activity." An unwritten rule forbids Brothers to discuss classes at the dining table and "it is definitely sacreligious to tool on a Friday afternoon or evening." Dave now dates "without worrying about whether she and I match up intellectually. I just don't seem to want to go to art museums or the symphony anymore when I go out." He adds, "I'm not sure if the frat itself doesn't have something to do with it."

A majority of the Brothers socialize with women from Simmons and Wellesley, upholding a symbiotic relationship between the three schools that has existed as long as most House alumni can remember. Everyone talks about THE stat: 50 per cent of all Simmons women marry MIT men. Even if it is an exaggeration, and most insist it is, MIT frat members are prone to long-standing romances with the women from Brookline Avenue, and it is not at all unusual to hear nuptials discussed over milk and cookies.

Tex on MIT-Simmons/Wellsley relationships:

"Most people who come to MIT didn't do a hell of a lot of socializing outside of high school. They arrive, well, inexperienced. Extreme excellence is abnormal in most high schools; you get excluded. So when they get a girlfriend, hey, they want to hold on and tell everybody. It becomes kind of a habit. I guess things are freer at a liberal arts school in general, and that would go hand-in-hand with the social atmosphere."

"Very bright people go out, not with imbiciles, but with women who certainly are not as bright," says Dave. MIT women are generally left to the schlumps who live in the dorms across the river, dismissed as "weird," "too different," or just "too damned ugly."

"What are you going to do? You're at MIT; it's just not a normal place," says Smilin' John, shrugging off a question about the calculated joy of fraternal living. "You've got to do these things to stick with it."

No one will force you to go to a party, or to attend a late night shots 'n' brews study break at the House, but they might come to your room and "remind you that you're doing a little too much power-tooling...you really get shit from a few guys if you don't come out and have fun," Dave admits, adding, "At times, the anti-intellectualism around here is undeniable."

***

The Brothers fear that like some sort of ghoulish Star Trek villain MIT will snatch them from behind and suck all of the life juices from their bodies. If they don't stay armed, beer mug in one hand, Simmons woman in the other, and stick together, they might be picked off one by one, left to rot in nurd purgatory. So they help each other out, getting the pledges dates, reminding a careless eager beaver that he's spending too much time under the high-intensity bulb with his organic chem models, and generally by being unnaturally cheerful.

Unfortunately, as one of their number notes, there is noticeable pressure not to over-achieve, not to push yourself mentally beyond the limits you have already discovered. "That's certainly a shame, since we are at MIT, and we're supposed to be testing ourselves."