Frat Facts Part 2

FRAT FUN PART 2 THE BROTHERS OF MU LAMBDA CHAPTER

When I first joined Mu Lambda chapter, the very Reverend Brother Brown, a great man of the cloth, was President and if my recollections serves me well, it certainly took a great lot of cloth to cover his girth! True to his ecclesiastical bent, he welcomed me to the chapter, was supportive and did his best to make me feel at home. We had many congenial conversations and over time he shared that he had been branded while on line. He told me how the brothers had smacked his chest repeatedly and with a super-heated coat hanger, burned an “A” into the left side of his chest. According to him, the “A” was about two inches in height when administered. He opened his shirt to show it to me and we both laughed because of his subsequent corpulence and the attendant dermatological distension that he had acquired, the “A” was now about ten inches in height and traversed his entire left side!

These early chapter meetings were worthy of note. Many of the distinguished brothers arrived about an hour prior to the scheduled meeting time, to participate in the social hour. Most of them had, ensconced within the deep folds of their outer garments, pint sized flat flasks, filled with their preferred alcoholic concoction. Some of these flasks were entirely of metal, sized and shaped to fit into a jacket pocket and often personalized with their initials engraved upon them, as benefited men of their stature. As they communed and consumed prior to the call to order, they imbibed these beverages copiously while discussing the issues of the day, week or month and quite often when the presiding officer tried to call the meeting to order that was what he literally had to do. The tower of Babel had no advantages upon these gentlemen since most, if not all of them, cared little for the tender ministrations of the grape but opted for the more intense and vitriolic enhancement of alcohol distillates. Some even jokingly bragged that their libations had been distilled and bottled within the last twenty four hours, aging be damned!

As my stock improved among these brothers, I was occasionally summoned to their tables and allowed to share in a splash or two from the aforementioned flasks. I learned quite quickly that while I was an occasional visitor to the shrine of Bacchus, I was no match for those venerable doyens who virtually worshiped there! These men were not run of the mill, they were a cut above the rest, the Bailey’s Irish crème de la crème so to speak, bibbers to be reckoned with! One of my first shared “splashes” set me back a few years. Cognizant of my Caribbean roots as a native of Barbados and card carrying West Indian rum drinking man conversant with the vagaries of and the lethal toxicity of Jamaica’s Wray and Nephew white rum, I quaffed the proffered libation without thought. That was my first mistake! A flash of liquid fire traversed my lips, searing its way through my mouth to create spontaneous conflagration. I felt that I had been struck by lightning! In hindsight, it occurs to me that such a thought might have been correct as the lightning may have been of the “white” assortment! It engulfed my entire oral cavity! Flames shot from my nostrils! To protect my nasal sinuses, I stopped breathing and to save my tongue, I swallowed rapidly. Mistake number two! The scorching lava swept past my virgin and now liquefying tonsils, immolating them on its way down through my esophagus, finally coming to rest in my unwitting stomach. My internal thoracic cavity was ablaze! I believe now that “come to rest,” is a contradiction in terms, because my next memory was of a facsimile of the cloud that arose over the city of Hiroshima after the dropping of the atomic bomb. On reaching the gastric portion of my stomach, it exploded, spuming its way upwards through my already tortured esophagus to once again assail my oral cavity and envelop my entire person! Dazed, I rocked back on my heels as my breath was wrenched from my body. I hadn’t even realized that I had stopped breathing! I then gasped to vent my alimentary canal of the toxic build-up of incendiary fumes that had coalesced within me! Beads of sweat appeared upon my brow, my mind became befogged, my vision dimmed, I temporarily lost my hearing and I was simultaneously rendered speechless! I struggled mightily to contract my anal sphincters to avoid embarrassment and to hang on to my kidney function although I cannot be entirely certain that a few drops of ureic effluviate did not escape of their own volition! I learned two things that day. One, there was a vast difference between an occasional visitor to the hallowed halls of the shrine of Bacchus and those epicureans who dwelt constantly therein and two, any liquid blessing offered by these same gentlemen had to be severely diluted before any attempt at normal human consumption was executed!

As the senior brother who had shared his libation continued to engage in proliferate oratory, I could only sit back and nod my head, as speech was still rendered impossible! I believe that he took this as a sign of my agreement with his tenets which probably added to the

rise in my stock! When I had partially recovered, I had to be shown to my seat by a kindly senior brother who had observed my condition as I had no idea where it was! I wonder now if somehow the incident had been arranged as a rite of passage! After I had regained a modicum of coherence, I surreptitiously checked my person for defective mal-odors and ureic effluvia. To my relief I had survived the ordeal intact! When Brother Leroy Lowery first took the chapter gavel for the first of many such forays, he was so concerned with the amount of fraternal inebriation amongst these august brethren that he wondered if this indeed were not a new virus, possibly a Vat19! Lowery, at this time, in his great naivete and not fully comprehending the import of the social hour, mandated to the brotherhood that no liquor be drunk during the meeting. Like Trump, he had no clue as to the repercussions of such an edict! What this now meant was that the liquor that had been previously consumed throughout the entire meeting, a period of about two hours, now had to entirely ingested in the social hour, since there was no intent of any of these brothers to return home with anything less than an arid and empty container. Lowery soon discovered that much of the rapt attention from these miscreants that brought a smile to his face which he thought was as a result of his pronouncements and subsequent scintillating discourse, was no more than glassy eyed paralysis concordant with abundant alcoholic stupor! Not only were they oblivious to his ardent entreaties but worse yet he came to realize that they were not in a condition to even care and had no recurrent knowledge of his perorations! Reclining contentiously in the weeds was Brother Wayland McClellan, attorney at law, a very vocal and passionate member of the chapter. Like the most revered Brother C.C House, he had a leonine countenance; a full head of long, striking white hair, with mustache to match, more Caucasoid in feature than the African wooly cranial covering with which I am endowed. I observed that as meetings progressed he would get more and more lugubrious and lachrymose in his utterances and his visage would become more cherubic and flushed. This phenomenon, I discerned, after much investigation, had to do with President Lowery’s edict. Brother Wayland apparently took umbrage with Lowery’s insistence that no liquor should be consumed during the meetings so he therefore adroitly and studiously avoided being in open opposition to his chapter President by presenting at the meetings with a jumbo sized slurpee cup loaded with liquor, which was now twice the size of the original offending flasks! Gently sipping on a straw, he continuously consumed his “soda” during the meeting. The situation now was that instead of McClellan only imbibing a pint of his favorite elixir, he was now guzzling an entire quart! Half way through the meeting his cerebrum would become profoundly inundated with the oaken flavored spirits and the meningeal fluids that were supposed to bathe his corpus callosum to prevent dessication, became replaced by fermented alcohol. This served to liberate his glossopharyngeal musculature, setting free a propensity to garrulous extemporaneity, and precipitously casting him several veritable sheets into the wind! His voice would increase in tenor, his face in torpor, and his words would became garbled and intelligible, sometimes sounding as if he were strangling. His visage, normally somewhat florid became crimson and as one with a frigid version of Santa Clause’s backside! On occasion he would become so overwrought that he would dissolve into tears and sob as he impassionedly described some Inconsequential incident or other. Needless to say, President Lowery made no more pronouncements which referred to alcohol intake after that! Subsequently Brother McClellan departed these earthly climes which, fortunately or unfortunately, depending on one’s perspective, restored some semblance of calamity and general sobriety to chapter meetings, albeit far less entertaining. His final terrestrial farewell, however, was replete with its own drama. Brother McClellan’s wife was a lovely lady, as dusky in hue as he was florid. She had preceded him across the River Jordan on that final trek that we all one day must make. On second thought, there are some of us who may never see the River Jordan but may be directed to the River Styx, conduit to Hades, a venue quite different from the pearly gates! On subsequent rumination also, I believe that her quiet and dignified preceding departure may have contributed somewhat to his unfettered ingress and subsequent lay wasting of the fortifying spirits. Brother Mac loved his lady dearly and I could sense his feelings of deep sorrow and loss after she had departed. Ultimately he too took that same journey, although I think, in a far more corporally preserved condition than she was. Embalming him may have been overkill and an exercise in futility! The day of his Omega service, held at an Anglican church on Piney Branch Ave, was one befitting his need. It was clear, crisp and refreshing. His devoted spouse must have intervened with the Father Almighty to decrease his alcoholic haze so that he could ultimately find his way to her. The woman was a saint! I believe that Brother Lowery may have been the presiding chapter president at the time but Continued on the next page