INTRODUCTION
Fratire is not a book of scandal and decadence to be read for its entertainment value alone. The chapters of this book are filled with lies, sex, drugs, and violence—and these stories are indeed entertaining, but it is precisely because true life is filled with scandal and decadence that we find this behavior so fascinating. There is much to be learned from the observation of moral debauchery and social deviance and it is my intention to provide the reader with an opportunity to experience this behavior through the eyes and ears of a young man attending one of the biggest party colleges in
For the six years that I was a student at
When I was living these experiences as a student, I had no idea that I would one day write a book about them, but I was always observing, recording, and writing about the wild life I lived so that I might one day, look back with accuracy, and subjectively analyze the social madness that I perceived and endured within the college town of Tallahassee. That day finally arrived in the autumn of 2006, though my initial goal was to write a memoir for personal benefit and self-development rather than to create something to share with the public. And yet, as I relived these extreme stories through the pen, it became vividly clear to me that the truth of the young man’s voyage through the college years has never been justly told.
There are multiple books out there claiming to expose the dirty secrets of college life. Most of this literature was authored by investigative reporters and academics whose research methodology consisted of interviewing students and using this secondhand information to expose the darker side of the college experience. These books thus suffer greatly from their impersonal perspective because outsiders are unable to accurately perceive and interpret the intense social world of college students from a subjective point of view. The objective analysis offered by these authors also suffers in quality because outsiders are incapable of penetrating the mainstream culture of a college campus to truly comprehend the powerful forces of socialization at work. In other words, the social madness of a party college town can only be understood and revealed by those who have lived it.
Since most of these investigative reporters and academics spent less than a year with the college students they interviewed, their research was further inhibited from breaking through the veils of secrecy to see what is really going on beneath the surface. Worse yet, the psychological transformation students undergo in reaction to the many social pressures of a college town is ignored or misunderstood by authors who rushed their research and did not intimately follow the lives of students as they evolve from naïve and unaware freshmen to corrupted graduates. It would be disingenuous to claim that this body of literature is without some merit, but it is worth repeating that what all of these investigative reporters and academics fail to accomplish is portray the college experience as it really exists through the eyes of students.
A small handful of books on the market do examine college life from a more subjective point a view. Some of these books have been authored by former students who wrote paragraph long anecdotes about their personal experiences on campus. Other authors have compiled anthologies of narrative short-stories written by a variety of students. These books are far more authentic in their depiction of college life than the body of literature generated by investigative reporters and academics. Unfortunately, the actual stories shared within these books suffer greatly in quality. For instance, one author finds it entertaining to reflect on trivial things like the difficulties he encountered learning how to do laundry, hiding beer pictures when his parents came to visit, and being forced to streak naked across campus because he lost a fraternity drinking game of beer pong. These anecdotal collections and short-story compilations are cutesy books that paint a fun, bubbly perception of college life. Yes, college was tremendous fun, but for those of us who really lived the full college experience, it was a rollercoaster ride of good times intermixed with great sadness, confusion, and high risk behavior.
College life is not a PG-13 experience and cannot be accurately portrayed as one. These authors speak nothing of the tragedy of friends dying from fatal accidents. They share no stories about the betrayals, cruelties, and brutalities of young men and women. These authors never speak of girls being date raped and avenged with violence. Nor do they discuss what it feels like to sit in a jail cell, fearing that you are about to spend the next twenty years of years of your life in prison. These are the kind of stories that make for good reading because these are the type of stories that allow the reader to grow attached to characters and relate to the difficult challenges they faced and did not always conquer. A book that claims to be about college life should capture life in all of its comedies, triumphs, and tragedies because this is what makes a story powerful—the amalgamation of high and low moments that give men character.
There is one subjectively written book that does attempt to expose the darker side of the college experience, but this memoir was authored by someone you would typically expect to write a book of this kind, an introverted recluse without the personal qualities necessary to penetrate the inner social circle of campus elites in a party college town. He was not a leader among men. He was not a good-looking guy who seduced the best-looking women. He was not a physically powerful young man who dominated other men with violence. He was not a popular student other young men looked up to and tried to emulate. He was not a criminal on the run from the police. In other words, he was not an alpha male. The miniscule social life of this reticent individual provided him with enough material to generate a storytelling of the college experience that suffers a deficiency in both informative and entertainment value. At the objective level, the author does perceive the social stratification of the mainstream college culture from the vantage point of an outsider awkwardly attempting to fit in with the in-crowd, but his understanding of this competitive social environment is the limited perspective of a young man who never broke through to the other side. Since much of the book is an introspective analysis of the author’s haunted past, it may not have been his primary intent to provide the reader with a true understanding of the young man’s journey through the college years. If this was in fact his objective, he failed miserably to deliver.
I therefore repeat my bold assertion that the truth of the young man’s voyage through the college years has never been justly told—until now. Fratire is the true story of my journey from humble beginnings to become the most socially dominating figure at one of the largest party schools in the
Instead of providing the reader with an impersonal sociological analysis of my experiences at
Introspective analysis will be offered in this book, sometimes in the form of retrospection, but for the most part, the thoughts I articulate are the thoughts that came to fruition as I endured these experiences. It is therefore essential for the reader to recognize that many of the ideas and opinions expressed in this book should not be taken out of their chronological setting. The way I view the world has changed with both maturity and the life lessons I learned through the mistakes of my youth, but in an effort to reveal the true nature of the college experience, I have attempted to capture within this memoir the passions and ideologies that motivated me during these confusing years of self-discovery.
I have also integrated within this book the empirical deductions I made through the insight of my experiences at the time of their occurrence or have since drawn through years of reflection. When it was necessary to shed light on a particular subject matter, I even broke away from the narrative form altogether to write several passages devoted entirely to informative analysis. However, I reiterate once again that my primary goal in writing this book is to demonstrate college life as it really existed through the eyes of a young man so that readers may draw their own conclusions from my experiences. It is important to bear in mind that the lessons that can be learned from these stories transcend the college experience. This is not just the memoir of a young man’s journey through his college years—this is a coming of age story that all young men and women can relate to who are trying to find their place in the world.
In conclusion, I would like to affirm that this is a book about what to do in college as much as it is a book about what not to do. There is no doubt that I did many things wrong as a young man, but I sure as hell did a lot of things right. It will therefore be up to the reader to decide if the life I lived, the decisions I made, and the costs I endured were worth the experiences I lived. In the end, I leave the reader with only one piece of advice:
If you live a life of extremes,
it will always end with a crash,
but sometimes the ride is worth it.
