The Mat Room

Fraternities and sororities at Oneonta existed mostly for the hardcore suburban Long Island crowd who went to the same high school together (which seemed like a pointless thing to do in college), or those downlow weirdos too embarrassed to join the unisex organization of social do-gooders with the purple triangle logo on their Greek shirts, ya dig? With the high-priced fees that came with "rushing" during pledge, me and my crew thought it was crazy to pay to have friends when you could just throw a kegger and kids would show up, anyway, once the word got out around campus. We had more trouble containing a good time than publicizing it.

Still, a slow Wednesday night with no Thursday classes could find you extending beyond your typical routine to include off-campus frat parties, especially if one of your boys roomed with one of their "frosh" pledges. It meant we might catch a break with the cover charge. Five bucks blown on skunky stale beer or a drained keg meant you just walked down a mountain in a snowstorm with nothing to show for it besides missing dinner at the cafeteria. Oh, well. You'd have to wait until the morning, if you didn't stash food in your room from lunchtime.

I'd been to few of them without incident, which must have driven the crazies wild, because I found myself alone in their basement kitchen thumbing through an old issue of NatGeo I'd found on the counter (with its distinctive yellow border) while my friends made a run for the keg, when some douche came over to make a rude comment to me about the partially nude African women depicted in the magazine. It was a shocking thing to do at a hip New York school with a lot of urbane city kids, but certain pockets of the state bred bad stuff that we didn't have close at hand growing up, though it was certainly around. 

He was obviously drunk, too, and he had a wild angry look to his bulging glassy eyes that made him doubly dangerous. Psychotic drunks were a serious hazard at any party. Most gatherings I went to were attended with my large boyfriend, but without a big bouncer around, anti-social headcases could take the time to hassle you and feel comfortable doing it with their similarly challenged friends. As soon as he targeted me, he flipped on me, demanding to know who I was and how I got into his party. I was trapped against the kitchen counter, alone in the room with him.

I tried to look past him to catch the eye of someone, anyone, because I couldn't see the heads of my friends over the crowd in the living room. He got in my face, yelling about who the fuck did I think I was to rebuff his advances in his frat house? It was insane, and it got out of control within seconds. Some tall guy finally came over to see what the commotion was about, because the kid wanted me thrown out of the party, which was fine by me. I'd had enough. As bad as it was, that was nothing compared to the stories I'd hear walking home that night.

As we walked around collecting our friends after my "ousting" from their lame party, I caught a glimpse of a dirty room, behind a partially opened door, covered in graffiti with bare mattresses on the floor. During the party, we'd been told that it was a makeshift crash pad for brothers too drunk to stand, but that's not what another girl at the party told us. She whispered to our small group that it was the room they took girls too drunk to resist. It was their rape room. And it was the last frat party I ever went to.