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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
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ALPHA PHI ALPHA FRATERNITY, INC
MU LAMBDA CHAPTER
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 Continued on the next page
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