Hell is other people. I should know; since leaving home, I’d been living with a gaggle of them. After a stint in residence at Vic, I moved into a student co-op and spent years having to co-exist in painfully close quarters with ten others.
So, when the university’s administration announced it was shutting down said co-op, I was nearly relieved. It was finally time to get my own little place, and start living blissfully uncooperatively.
I had a pretty domestic scene in my head. I would paint the walls a soothing pastel blue; I’d have a cozy breakfast nook, where I could stretch out the paper and read it in my underwear; the dishes would pile up in the sink without anyone saying a word. I’d have a tiny balcony where I’d go to smoke and think, or drink, depending on my whim. The landlord would be kind-hearted, with a love of home repair, and would summarily fix leaky faucets or chase out spiders as required.
Not only would this miracle place exist in a fashionable yet suitably grungy neighbourhood, but due to my tremendous skill at browsing Craigslist classified ads, rent would be so reasonable I wouldn’t need any style-crampin’ roomies.
Of course, when I started looking at places in my price range, harsh reality set in, as it is wont to do. If the price was anywhere in the vicinity of reasonable, the domicile was probably in some centipede-infested basement with one window the size of a porthole. The ceilings would be so low even a hobbit would be forced to stoop. The kind-hearted landlord I’d envisioned would end up a beer-bellied drunk who looked like he kicked puppies for fun. The front door would have the telltale dents of getting smashed in during police raids, perhaps during a crackdown on puppy kickers.
I begrudgingly set about adjusting my expectations accordingly. What could I compromise on? Maybe a roommate or two wouldn’t be so bad — so long as they didn’t mind me breakfast-nooking in my underwear.
Armed with newly lowered standards, I found a bunch of decent options full of seemingly decent people. Time would surely tell what perversions lurked behind their facades of normalcy, but sometimes you’ve gotta roll the dice. The most promising place was beside an iconic art school, and the three people already living there hadn’t left much evidence of nocturnal deviancies lying around. Instead, there were books and magazines scattered about, a Globe and Mail on the table near a well-used coffee pot, and a few houseplants that looked like they got watered more than cacti.
My kind of people, for sure. They offered me the spot right then and there, but I had just one place left to check out first.
The ad promised it all: separate pool and ping-pong tables, a massive deck, a giant TV, cheap rent, a location roughly a mini-putt away from The Varsity offices, and laundry on-site.
I know. What was the catch, right?
Of course, the advertisement had neglected to mention a rather crucial caveat: it was an honest-to-goodness frat house. Luckily, I discovered this little detail before viewing the place by looking up the ad-poster on Facebook. In his profile picture, he was sporting a Fu Manchu ‘stache, had a brewski in hand, and was wearing a shirt that — in the name of protecting the debauched — I’ll pretend said “Helta Skelta Delta.”
Now, I wasn’t much of a bro. I hadn’t played a sport since high school, when I traded basketball for hacky-sack and drug experimentation. I wore skinny jeans, cardigans, and nerd glasses proudly. And I’d managed to make it through five years of undergraduate education without ever so much as attending a frat party. To be truthful, I felt smugly superior and yet a little jealous that I’d never gotten to experience the brotherhood and boyish hijinks that accompanied frats, or at least did in the movies.
I showed up for a tour of the place, still trying to treat this like a bad joke. I was wearing my baggiest clothes and had leafed through a sports section earlier that morning, in case anyone asked questions about what team I rooted for. But when I got to the address I was taken aback. The house was a spectacular Victorian mansion, and I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that students apparently lived here. It looked like it belonged to an eccentric millionaire, or perhaps a deposed king.
I rang the bell, and was ushered inside by the dude in the Facebook photo. After explaining that the frat was looking to fill a few summer vacancies with non-pledge boarders, he started giving me the tour, and I grew more excited with every room. There was a wood-working area, a fish-watching nook with a giant aquarium, a red-lit space that looked vaguely like a darkroom, a pool-shooting den, two kitchens, a beautiful dining room with a live snake in it, and, most intriguingly, a locked secret room.
“You can go pretty much anywhere in the house but here,” said my host, who I’ll call Taylor. “This one’s for pledges only, and you don’t want to get caught trying to sneak in there.”
At that, I knew I had to live in this house. I hadn’t even been shown the promised giant deck yet, let alone my potential room, but as a life-long sucker for cloak and dagger, I needed in on this. When Taylor showed me my room and named a price that was the absolute most I’d be able to afford without signing up for paid medical experiments, I tried to play it coy. I managed to demur for about ten seconds.
On move-in day, the boys immediately surprised me by helping me bring my junk in from the van. In my excitement to sign a lease I had somehow overlooked the fact that, though the room had two big couches in it, there was no bookshelf. I piled my boxes stuffed with musty paperbacks in a corner, where they remained for the next 120 days.
Mostly settled in, I headed to the patio and met more of my new housemates. After only a few minutes of chatting, they invited me out the following night to Maddie Monday. Thoroughly uninitiated, I needed it explained to me that this was the big weekly Greek society mixer, when the various frats and sororities around town met to mingle. I said I’d think about it, and repaid their kindness by posting a snarky comment on the Internet asking if anyone had a lime-green polo I could borrow.
Time passed, and I grew more accustomed to what I started privately referring to as Frat Palace. At any given time of the day or night, hip-hop or classic rock would be blaring out of at least two of the many bedrooms in the place, and there’d likely be the incessant reports of video game machine guns echoing out of another. That was fine — I blasted my hipster bullshit indie rock just as loudly. The boys rarely wore shirts, and while I felt overdressed in my ironic tees, I didn’t have the midsection to join in on their displays of chest hair. I started doing sit-ups. Though the washroom on my floor had the decadence of an actual urinal in it, most of the lights were permanently burned out, so I learned to bring a lamp in when I had to shave.
Of course, I also gazed longingly at the door to the secret room, but I had yet to work up the nerve to even try and peer through the keyhole.
I soon developed the slightly paranoid habit of locking my bedroom door just to go downstairs and make breakfast. This was because weeks into my residency, I still had yet to figure out who exactly lived in the mansion and who was just hanging around. The official summer occupancy was sixteen people, but between the couch surfers, friends of roommates, and older brothers returning to hang, I could only figure out who thirteen or fourteen of the official residents were. Upon graduating, and presumably leaving the house, pledges got to keep their keys, and could return whenever they pleased.
And return they did. Years after vacating, brothers retained a loyalty to the house. They’d come by and fix things up sporadically, varnishing the deck, dusting the chandeliers, and planting flowers outside. These returning champions would actually take better care of Frat Palace then its current inhabitants, who mostly left empty cans of Red Bull and beer scattered everywhere.
Sometimes I’d get home, survey the wreckage, and picture the aristocrat who built the place being brought to the twenty-first century by the Ghost of Christmas Future. Imagine the instant seizure he’d have upon seeing how these kids were living in his once regal home!
I wasn’t much better as I adapted to the new environment. Turns out living in squalor is initially gross, but ultimately liberating when you realize nobody expects you to vacuum. And while I was mildly irritated at first when it was 6 a.m. and the Black Eyed Peas were still pulsing through the walls of my room, I eventually realized I could party like that too.
One warm summer night I had friends out on the the deck past dawn, and they were blasting synth-heavy remixes. No one in the house said a word, but around 8 in the morning a man from the building next door climbed up the fire escape to tell us to shut up. “You gotta understand, guys,” he said. “It’s not the volume, it’s the goddamn bass.”
“Man, that guy sure hates bass,” said a brother the next day. “He complains about it, like, once a month.”
My new roomies taught me about so much more than adjusting to depravity and annoying the neighbours. Once I found two of them arguing about who was more ripped from working out. Each was adamant that he was the more jacked of the two, so I tried to settle it by suggesting they arm wrestle. They looked at me like I was crazy.
“These guns aren’t for actually, you know, doing stuff,” said Phil. “These are show muscles.”
In time, I also learned a dizzying array of high fives, how to play beer pong — the bros had constructed a table specifically for the pseudo-sport — and about the intellectual origins of fraternities. One night, a pledge earnestly explained to me about how the founding Hellenic selective societies formed as a way for university students to debate politics openly, in an era when such discourse could be dangerous. The Greek alphabet naming scheme was an homage to those ancient fathers of democracy. My interlocutor was really into it.
“During the year, we take our studies very seriously,” Dave assured me. “The boys help each other in the subjects they’re strongest in. Your priorities are to your schoolwork, and then to the frat.”
And you know what? I believed him. I’d find my housemates intently studying U of T course calendars, amidst discarded king cans.
Another surprise was the love the house had for its animals. Between the cat, the snake, the aquarium, and the occasional dog, Frat Palace was a real menagerie, but all animals were well cared-for. Take the fish: the tank was regularly cleaned, and the guys loved to watch the vibrant creatures flit through the eye sockets of the plastic skull resting at the bottom of it. The greatest tragedy in the house’s recent memory seemed to be the time that a guest at a party poured an entire can of food into the tank, and many of the fish perished. “It was horrible,” someone told me.
I grew closer to my reluctantly adopted family. We’d have long discussions about brotherhood, what it meant to choose going Greek in a city that didn’t respect or understand it, and about the volunteer work they did in the community — partly to rehabilitate the negative image of fraternities. They were fiercely loyal to one another, but spoke harshly of the one pledge who kept bringing them shame.
The most recent antic of Raymond involved wandering drunkenly through traffic, shouting into the windows of cars. “And then a fist just comes out of one window and — wham! — hits him right in the eye. He falls over and the car speeds off. He totally didn’t learn his lesson.”
Near the end of my stay in the frat, I was trying to enjoy a beautiful late-August evening out on the deck when Raymond staggered out, offering repeatedly to fight me. I left, returning hours later to find him passed out, face-up under the few stars visible in the Toronto sky.
The next day, a different brother asked me if I intended to extend my stay into the school year. “You fit right in!” he assured me. I thought of Raymond, and cruelly didn’t want to fit in.
On August 31, I ended up moving out after midnight, thanks to a difficulty in procuring a van. The boys were partying, but were good enough to interrupt a raucous game of beer pong to assist with the heavy lifting. As they helped bungee my couch to the van’s roof, they told me I was welcome back any time. I told myself I was done with communal living, and as I sped off I was eager to put some space between me and the majestic flop house.
Fast forward to November, and I’m coming home to my generally clean and quiet little home, above a shop on Queen Street. There are a few dishes in the sink, but they’re mine. I put my groceries in the fridge, where I know only I will eat them; I can do so alone and in my underwear, if I please.
When I head into my room to finish writing this, I don’t lock the door behind me, and no thudding bass disrupts my concentration. But as I procrastinate on Facebook, wading through the noise of 600 people I barely know in search of some genuine interaction, I think: “God, I miss those bros.”
Oh, and as for the secret room? I noticed that someone had left the door ajar back in August, but I didn’t even peek in. That’s not what loyalty’s about.
