John Barth - Where Three Roads Meet

Here we go: Tell it, Gracie.

Introduced himself as Manfred Dickson, a freshman at MDU who was pledging Lambda Upsilon fraternity, known for its Hell Week hazing rituals—

"Such as olive races, where the pledges scramble naked through the house on all fours with olives in their ass-cracks while getting whacked on the butt with pledge paddles by their upperclass brothers, and whoever drops his olive has to eat it? Yuck."

And their famous scavenger hunt, where the poor fucks draw lots for such tasks as hauling up into Pennsylvania in the middle of the night to steal road signs for the towns of Bird-in-Hand, Intercourse, Paradise, and Blue Ball…

Or, in Pledge Dickson's case, producing for the brothers' pleasure a woman or women prepared to satisfy for a reasonable fee the carnal appetites of the entire chapter house: a task that he'd've flunked cold, he said, if one of the guys hadn't happened to be an ex-Marine junior-year transfer from the D.C. area who'd gotten our phone number from a Naval Academy plebe bar down our way, where we were sort of famous. And hey, he wanted to know: Didn't I think it meant something, quote-unquote, that my name was Mason and his was Dickson and our paths were fated to cross at Mason-Dixon U.? If, that is, we would please please PLEASE rescue his ass by letting one of his car-owning brothers pick us up pronto and fetch us to Lambda Ups for just a couple of hours at whatever was our usual and regular rate? Which was what, by the way? But not to worry, he'd made them promise to pay cash up front, and they were all really great guys, really: gentlemen and scholars, though tough on pledges and heavy on the brew. And was my first name actually Grace, as in Saving or Amazing? Fact stranger than fiction!

Et cetera, at a mile a minute, the guy was so nervous and excited and maybe a bit beered-up himself. But he agreed to our fee per head, so to speak, and to my proposal to bring along a couple of my sisters to help service his brothers, if he'd pick us up at nine sharp at the Arundel Club, near the ASTC campus, and have us back by one A.M. latest, as we had heavy studying to get done before our Monday classes.

And boyoboy, Listener, did that ever turn him on! What were we majoring in? What did we think of our profs at ASTC? Were we taking any literature courses, and what had we read lately that really blew us away? It was all Grace could do to get him off the phone and into his frat buddy's car to come fetch us in time for our date.

"Which, however, he did, on the dot, with his Marine-vet brother at the wheel; and where that one was all wise-guy winks and raunchy jokes, Pledge Manny was as flustered and courteous as if we were three debutantes being escorted to a coming-out party."

A lanky, bespectacled, red-haired, and freckle-faced nineteen-year-old he was, Listener, from the western Maryland mountains, on full scholarship at MDU and green as those Allegheny hills in May about most things social, sexual, and even academic. But a quick learner, as Gracie mentioned earlier, with a drunkard's thirst in all three of those departments.

"Speaking of which — I mean threes? …"

He was so wowed by there being three of us, and by the Mason-Dixon/Mason-Dickson coincidence, and my being named Grace, that by the time we hit the highway north for MDU he was already calling us his Three Graces—

Like the ones in the myths, which back then we-all were just learning about…

— and right away he names Thelma "Thalia" and Aggie "Aglaia," like them, and starts filling our ears with how, in his opinion, the Hell Week pledge tasks, with their go-find-thises and figure-out-thats, are a sort of undergrad version of stuff that the old-time heroes like Odysseus and Aeneas had to do: descents into the underworld, quests and ordeals and like that. And since what those hero types were really after was capital-K Knowledge — like who they truly are, and how to get where they're supposed to go and do what they're destined to do when they get there? — it was sort of appropriate for college freshmen to reenact that Heroic Quest business as they began their own, didn't we think? And please excuse him for rattling on about this Greek myth stuff: It was on account of the coincidence that while he was learning the Greek alphabet, the way all MDU frat pledges had to do, he happened also to be reading Homer and Company in his freshman lit survey courses and getting hooked on all that great stuff, though he hadn't chosen a major yet because he couldn't make up his mind what he wanted to be when he grew up — maybe because he didn't really know yet who he was, you know? And we should forgive him for hogging the mike so, when what he really wanted was to hear about our paying our way through college the way we were, which he thought was twice as heroical as anything he and his Hell Week pals were doing.

"And didn't he flip when Gracie said he should make that thrice as heroical instead of twice, 'cause she'd noticed in our own lit classes that things in those old-time stories usually come in threes, whether it's the Graces and the Fates and such or the number of heads on that monster-dog Whatsisname, that guards the gates of Hades…"

Just about creamed his chinos at that, Manny did, and then perched on his knees in the passenger seat like a five-year-old—

"Like a three -year old—"

— to talk to the three of us in the back and see how many three-things we could come up with, from Goldilocks's bears to Dante's Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise.

Which Listener will remember are the three books of The Divine Comedy, written in three-line stanzas, which Aggie gets the same A-plus for remembering now as Manny gave her for coming up with it then, especially the terza rima bit, all of it echoing the three-in-one Holy Trinity. Meanwhile, the driver-guy is rolling his eyes and shaking his crewcut head and telling Manny to pass the fucking Budweiser for God's sake and change the subject? By then we're in the city, in the blocks of rowhouses near the MDU campus, which is where most of the students live and the frat houses are, and we pull up to one that has two big Greek letters over the door, the left one like an upside-down capital V — which is actually their L, lambda — and the other like a right-side-up capital Y, which is upsilon, their U.

As Manny happily explains to us, until smart-ass "Thalia" tells him the lambda looks to her like a pair of wide-open legs, and smart-ass Yours-Truly-"Aglaia" says that if that one has her legs open, the other one must have hers closed, which is no way to make a living. And then our driver — Bob, I believe his name was? — finally joins the fun by saying, "That chick's legs aren't closed; she's upside down with 'em spread wide open," and Manny says, "Welcome to Lambda Upsy-daisy, girls" as he hands us out of the car, and Gracie says, "Ten bucks a head to dine at the Y, guys," and in we go.

In we went, and out we came by midnight, nearly four hundred to the good, if that's the right word for it, having scored nearly a score of Lambda Upsies at our twenty-dollar group-rate special—

Including a couple of first-timers too nervous to get it up and a couple of old hands too drunk to; but nobody asked for a refund, so we gave 'em rain checks. Gents and scholars indeed, those guys, serenading us from downstairs while we turned our tricks in three separate third-floor bedrooms. Gentleman songsters off on a spree …

"Doomed to get laid by the Graces three?"

Who then gratefully rewarded Pledge Dickson with a freebie Threebie to add to his catalogue of triples: a stunt not to be found in his old-time myths. We improvised it on the spot, as I remember, having had a few beers ourselves by that time.