6/23/05

In World of Ideas today, we were talking about Kant and his concept of enlightenment.  And Deidre talked about her rugby initiation (yes, it WAS related, but that’s not really the important part).

I started thinking about that Saturday (over one long year ago) that Mark was initiated into rugby… 

It was quiet in the short wing of 4th floor Bigelow, being a weekend, and I was just hanging around in 430, watching TV and playing JT’s Blocks.  I remember him bursting through the door, sweaty, filthy, and looking exhausted despite an exuberant smile on his face.  There was an overwhelming stench of onions and his hair was ridiculously greasy.  I asked him, hesitantly, how it went, and he wouldn’t tell me at first.  It was, after all, initiation, and therefore a huge secret.  But I coaxed it out of him as he began to get ready for a shower.

I wanted to cry.  There he stood, my best friend and boyfriend (at that time), the person I cared about most in the world, telling me about the disgusting things he’d been forced to eat, in insanely short amounts of time.  My stomach churned as he described the combination of beer, butter, fish, onions, and other things he had choked down, doing so in order to be accepted, to be tight with the guys, to not let his fellow rookies down.

I hated that he had done all of that.  That something inside of him wanted to be on this team so badly that he was willing to submit himself to physical pain (I definitely recall him throwing up a few times that afternoon/night).  He understood it, accepted it, and did it, in a bizarre way that I would never have been able to.

It was the same with Delta Chi.  I know very little of what he endured as a pledge, because the code of secrecy was choke-hold tight at the fraternity, but from the bits he revealed to me in strictest confidence and from that one night (the night that the jar of applesauce fell and shattered), I had all the knowledge I wanted or could bear to hear.  There are two songs that I cannot listen to to this day ("She Don’t Know She’s Beautiful" and "Just To See You Smile") without feeling a twist of pain in my gut, an instant reversal to some primative happening.

He wanted it – acceptance and loyalty and brotherhood.  In some ways, I got it, but mostly, I didn’t. 

So I never let him see me cry over him.  Not about that. 

I only cried to myself.