Photo by Sandy Huffaker, Jr.

Sigma Phi Epsilon house. “In the fall there are probably about 12 groups of 20. We start them in here and we talk about the ritual aspect."

Having gone to a small college with no fraternities, all I knew of them came from movies like Animal House and Revenge of the Nerds or from TV news reports like the recent one of an inebriated Greek at the University of New Hampshire who fell off the roof of his fraternity house. Both sources offer fraternity members as beer-guzzling, chick-chasing, irresponsible slobs.

“About four or five years ago, there would be eight, nine, ten kegs. Whichever house had the most kegs would get more people to go there."

Photo by Sandy Huffaker, Jr.

But consider these facts: All but three U.S. presidents since 1825 have been fraternity members; 76 percent of Congress is Greek; 85 percent of U.S. Supreme Court justices since 1910 have been fraternity men; and 43 of the nation’s 50 largest corporations are headed by fraternity members. Pretty impressive numbers. There must be something more, something good, going on within the walls of America’s fraternity houses to have produced such men.

“We like to let everyone party just as much as we do."

Photo by Sandy Huffaker, Jr.

To find out what that something is, I observed the time-honored fraternity tradition of rush week at San Diego State. “Rush,” says an SDSU Interfraternity Council (IFC) brochure, “is a selection process by which fraternities recruit new members.

Sigma Phi Epsilon. "In the past there has been that Animal House mentality, and we’re really trying to change that."

Photo by Sandy Huffaker, Jr.

Fraternities do this by opening their doors to interested men in an informal manner. The fraternity rush period at San Diego State University is held during the second week of the fall 1996 semester. All rush week events are held at the fraternity houses.”

At Theta Chi a half-court, three-on-three basketball game is raging.

Photo by Sandy Huffaker, Jr.

Though Monday is the official start of rush week, the “rushees,” as fraternity hopefuls are known, can attend an orientation the Saturday before at Aztec Center, on campus. Delegates dispense information and literature on each of SDSU’s 12 fraternity houses. The next day is “house tours,” when rushees are led by fraternity members to all the houses on campus.

Costume party. "In the Teke house, there is no fakeness going on."

Photo by Sandy Huffaker, Jr.

At each house, rushees are given a short presentation and a tour. “[During] house tours,” explains Anthony Dittmann, rush chairman of Sigma Phi Epsilon, “you go around to all of the houses and you spend about ten minutes at each house. It’s long because you’ve got to walk all the way to where Sigma Nu is on the other side of campus and then to us over here. So you’re walking with a group of rush ambassadors, which are Interfraternity Council people, and they’re not supposed to tell the rushees anything about themselves or what house they’re in. They just drop them off and walk them to the next house.”

It’s a couple of weeks before rush week, and I’m talking to Dittmann at the “Sig Ep” house, on Hardy Avenue at the edge of campus, to get an idea of what to expect. He is 23, medium height, and wearing shorts and T-shirt with a green ball cap. A senior journalism major, he will graduate in May. “The rushees come in groups,” he says. “In the fall there are probably about 12 groups of 20. We start them in here and we talk about the ritual aspect, the brotherhood aspect, because this is the chapter room. Then we take them to the rec room and pool area and talk about social life; then we’ll bring them out into the back yard and talk about sports, because we’re big on sports and athletics here. During house tours you don’t really pay too much attention to what’s going on. You just give them their rundown and welcome them to come-back on Monday.”

Starting at 7:00 p.m. Monday night, rushees are on their own. They walk around campus popping in and out of fraternity houses, checking things out and being checked out. Justin Moore, 21 -year-old rush chairman of Sigma Chi, describes the scene. “Monday and Tuesday are the first real nights as far as going around and trying to meet guys in the houses and seeing what the houses are actually like. They walk around — some people go out with friends, some people go by themselves — and they go around to the houses and they just start talking to people.”

Moore, a senior majoring in finance, is tall with short blond hair and bright blue eyes. As with Dittmann, I’m talking to him before rush week. Sitting on a couch in the common room of the Sigma Chi house, he speaks with a comfortable, confident manner. “I know other houses have parties,” he says, “but we take them off by themselves, one-on-one, and try to get to know them. Everybody in the house comes to rush, and we just pair off [with the rushees] and try to get to know them. It’s more personal because you actually meet them. That’s the best way that we’ve found of doing it.”

What kind of preparation goes into rush week? I ask him. “What’s happened in the past, and for the most part it’s going to be the same,” Moore answers, “is we’ve gotten food from local sponsors like Domino’s and Togo’s and other food shops around here, and that’s basically been the extent of it. This year I’m trying to get a radio station to come and broadcast from here on Sunday to try and get more publicity for the whole thing. We’re going to try to do it like a fundraiser for a charity — I don’t know which charity yet, but its probably going to be through the Miracle Network. What we’re going to try to do is have a barbecue and get [92.5] The Flash over here and get all the bros here and play some basketball and have a barbecue. Hopefully, that will give us more publicity and give rush more publicity. We’re going to try and make it so we can sell food and any money we do make, We give to charity.”

“For rush week, there is a lot of preparation,” says Dittmann. “I’ve been working on it all summer. T-shirts and posters and all of that, that’s one aspect. We just put together a booklet that explains everything. It’s another thing you learn being in the fraternity, how to organize it and get it together. It’s really casual and really informal compared to other campuses and compared to the sororities. It’s just ‘Come tour us, check us out, look at what we’re about.’ We’ll have food from a local establishment. Tuesday night we’ll have the Charger Girls here. 91X will be here Wednesday night. Thursday night, Wells Fargo is coming to try and get people interested, and they are going to give us food. We’ll have a sorority over here on Monday and Tuesday because that’s part of the draw to it: girls. So we try to bring them in with the idea that you can meet more people. Whether it be guys in other fraternities or girls, you get opportunities to meet these people. Then we try to get you interested in the programs aspect.”

The “programs aspect” is the internal activity of the fraternity. “Basically,” Dittmann explains, “we look for what we like to call ‘balanced men,’ people who are athletic, academically inclined, leaders, people that are socially adept. In the past there has been that Animal House mentality, and we’re really trying to change that. People on the outside just see the parties, but we’re really trying to develop people.”

Bringing me over to the corner of the room, Dittmann points out a grid chart hanging on the wall with fraternity members’ names in the left margin and membership requirements along the top. He explains, “We just made this development board. The whole idea is development. We have chapter positions, committee members, sports, guest speaker — get a guest speaker to come to the house — join a campus organization. If you’re a new member, you look here to see your requirements. You have to go to a campus meeting, whether it be an ASB or IFC meeting, community service, etc. The whole idea is that all the way through college you make contacts and connections so you’ll be prepared for after college. We’re not really looking for guys to come in here and drink beer. We’re coming from more of a business and development aspect, not chicks and beer — although that is a reward. So what kind of men are we looking for? People that will fit into that program and want to stick with it.”

The chicks-and-beer image that hounds fraternities is almost inescapable. Try as they may, fraternities can’t seem to shake the Animal House chicks-and-beer image. Part of the problem is that the media attention they receive is nearly always negative. “Channel 8 did a piece on fraternity life, and they just bashed us — I mean just bashed us,” Moore recalls.

The bad image has insurance ramifications, driving fraternity dues up to between $75 and $100 per month. Dittmann says, “Here it’s $85 a month, and that’s only for the semesters; you don’t pay over the summer. Eight months out of the year you’ll pay that. We’d like it a little bit lower, but fraternities are the third highest thing in the country to insure behind toxic waste dumps and amusement parks.”

Fraternities recruit new members from the pool of rushees by giving formal invitations called “bids” to the ones they want. Dittmann explains the process. “Monday night the actual rush starts, but we can’t give out bids on Monday. That gives everyone a chance to get around and see where they want to go before someone says, ‘Hi, here’s your bid,’ and you’re stuck there. You can actually go somewhere else after you get a bid, but you might be more inclined to stay there without seeing any more houses. So there are no bids Monday night, but they fill out the cards and they come in and meet everyone.

“There are four rush chairmen and probably about six ‘rush captains,’ we call them, who are under the rush chairmen. So if a bro meets someone and he likes them, they’ll take him to the rush captain. If the rush captain likes him, he’ll swing him over to the rush chairmen. That’s kind of the order of events. It’s very important to have full participation from the full fraternity, not only from our point, but that of the person that’s rushing so they have a chance to see everyone and what the whole house is about, the diversity of the house, etc. At the end of the night, especially after Monday night, the whole fraternity has a half-hour meeting where we’ll discuss what was good and what might be detrimental to us about all the guys that came through. The rush chairmen run the meeting. They’ll read off the names, and then we’ll discuss the pros and cons. It doesn’t have to be unanimous, but it has to be pretty close, probably about 80 percent...actually I think it’s two-thirds. If someone comes by Monday and we think they are a cool guy but then they never come back, then they never get a bid. If they come Monday and we say, ‘We like you a lot, come back tomorrow,’ or ‘We think you have what it takes to be a Sig Ep,’ or however you want to say it, and they come back on Tuesday, we bring them upstairs into a room and we’ll say, ‘Do you accept our invitation to become a pledge to our house?’ And they’ll say yes. Usually we’ll get a feeling beforehand. We’ll say, ‘Is this something you want to do? Do you have the time to do it? Do you have the money?’ Because it does cost money, unfortunately. We’ll make sure that they are interested and we’ll say, ‘Do you want to accept our invitation?’ And generally it’s a yes.”

At Sigma Chi, unlike Sigma Phi Epsilon, the decision to offer a bid to a rushee is made by a committee. “Typically, when we’ve done it as a whole house,” Moore says, “it’s taken a long time. So, basically, what we’re going to do this year, and what we’ve done recently, is have a rush committee. The rush committee is a group of people we pick in the house, a group of, say, seven guys who will actually sit down after all the rushees go home around nine and basically talk about everything that’s happened and talk about people we’re going to give bids to and the people we’ve already given bids to and what’s going on for the rest of the week. So it’s a group of seven to ten guys. [With the whole house] it gets rowdy, it gets out of control, and there are a lot of different ideas going around. It takes too much time. We can do it a lot quicker and a lot more efficiently if we have ten or less guys.”

After accepting a bid, a rushee becomes a “pledge,” or the more PC term, “new member.” Says Dittmann, “A lot of [fraternities] are switching it around and using ‘new member’ because ‘pledge’ sounds demeaning. ‘New member’ sounds more equal; you’re not a member yet, but you’re a new member. We’re trying to make it so there is no hazing or any of that stuff. When I came through [as a pledge], you couldn’t vote; you couldn’t walk through the red door, the front door; you had to go around. But now, we’re changing it around; you have full rights.”

Despite the full rights, Sig Ep pledges must go through a “ten-week period during which we see what you do.” Dittmann explains, “You have to interview all of the bros, because we want you to know everyone in the house. So as a pledge, you’re required to do, say, five interviews a week. You’ll sit down with one brother and ask him where he’s from, what does he like to do, does he have a girlfriend, etc., so everybody in the house really knows who each person is. A lot of houses don’t do that, but we stress brotherhood and that’s part of it.”

With a better understanding of fraternity life and the workings of rush week under my belt, my next step is to observe rush itself. Along with Sigma Chi and Sigma Phi Epsilon, Zeta Beta Tau, Tau Kappa Epsilon, and Theta Chi have agreed to let me observe their rush week parties. On Monday around 7:30 p.m., I walk up to the Sigma Chi house on College Avenue. In front of the building stands a white, 15-foot Maltese cross. From a window above, a purple shirt on a hanger drips dry. The entrance leads past a trophy case crowded with pictures of Sigma Chi’s past and present and into a meeting room with a vaulted ceiling. At a table just beyond the trophy case sit three attractive young blondes whose similar outfits and Friends hairstyles make them look like sisters. The three are giving rushees cards to fill out with name, address, major, and GPA and taking a snapshot of each.

Justin Moore meets me at the door. “Is this your welcoming committee?” I ask, motioning toward the blondes.

“Yes,” he answers with a smile. “And that’s one heck of a welcoming committee, isn’t it?” He tells me one of them is the sister of a member and the other two are her friends.

I ask him how the night is shaping up.

“We’ve got about 45 guys in here right now, which is unreal,” he answers. “Basically we’ve got more rushees in here than brothers.” Just then, someone across the room calls him away on an errand. “Make yourself at home,” he tells me as he walks off.

Past the welcoming committee and out a sliding glass door to the left is a terrace overlooking a small parking lot and a long, deep canyon. About ten groups of five or six people stand around chatting, eating pizza, and drinking Snap-pie while hard rock music floods the patio with heavy undertones. The Sigma Chi members are wearing T-shirts printed with their insignia while the standard uniform for rushees seems to be shorts and surf-logoed T-shirts. A few young women dot the male landscape. The scene is informal and subdued, possibly due to the absence of alcohol, which is strictly banned during rush week. A poster stuck to the wall gives the fraternity’s rush calendar and lists some Sigma Chi alumni: Brad Pitt, Missouri, ’86; Woody Harrelson, Hanover, ’83; David Letterman, Ball State, ’69; Tom Selleck, USC, ’67; Warren Beatty, Northwestern, ’59; and a few others of lesser fame.

After a while I slip out and walk around the corner to the Tau Kappa Epsilon house on College Place. A member in a black polo shirt with “TKE Exec.” printed in Aztec red on the left breast greets me at the door and leads me into the house. We walk by a staircase on the right, down a hall past a small rec room full of foosball and dart players, and into a bigger rec room where a pool game, Monday Night Football, and general hanging out are the activities of the hour. There aren’t as many people here as were at the Sigma Chi party, but there is more going on activitywise.

My guide introduces me to Terry, the fraternity’s vice president. He is a burly six feet, with square face and trim dark hair. He invites me out onto the deck where it’s quieter. The deck overlooks the same canyon as the Sigma Chi house, which is just across a small alley. I ask Terry what Tau Kappa Epsilon — nicknamed “Teke” — has planned for rush week.

“Each night,” he says, “we hold certain events where it’s pretty much private parties — miniparties without alcohol — and what we do is we talk to the rushees. They look at the house and we speak to them. We’re just acting ourselves. In the Teke house, there is no fakeness going on. Everything is completely normal, and if they respond to us and they like us, they keep coming back to each event, and eventually, on Tuesday, we’re allowed to give them a bid.”

How many pledges are you hoping to get?

“We’re looking at a pledge class of 30, and we should get it. We’re having a good response right now.”

I ask if fraternities really differ from one another.

“Oh yeah,” he answers without hesitation. “Each fraternity has its own type of characteristics.”

What characterizes Tau Kappa Epsilon?

“We just like to have fun,” he answers. “We like to let everyone party just as much as we do. We do stay by the rules though. We have guidelines to follow as to who is allowed into our parties. We just like to kick back and have fun. There is no cockiness — no overcockiness where we are going to be jerks to people. We just want everyone to have a good time. We are here to provide a good time for people.”

But everybody says that. What makes you different?

“We mean it, that’s the difference. We’re not here to pull the wool over someone’s eyes. We show people that we can have a good time without trying to beat them up with a bunch of lies. We’re not here to say, ‘You are going to this,’ and end up not doing it. You’ve got guys in there playing foosball, darts, and pool. We’re just hanging out. Some people click with that, but some people want guys that are just going to lie to them. Some guys want to rush a house where they don’t have to do any work. Well, that’s fine, but we like guys that want to participate and really get into the house and really make the house work.”

Terry says brotherhood is the goal of Tau Kappa Epsilon and the Greek system as a whole. “Every week we have something going on,” he says, “brotherhood events like foosball tournaments, pool tournaments — the ones that are legal go out drinking all of the time. That’s what the whole fraternity system is about, camaraderie. You’re trying to build a brotherhood until it comes to the point where you can go up to a guy at any time and say, ‘Let’s go get a beer,’ or, ‘You can count on me if your car breaks down any time in the world.’ ”

My next stop is the Zeta Beta Tau house on the east side of College Avenue, across from Sigma Chi. The “house” is actually two houses, the one on the left containing a large meeting room with a few apartments in the back and the one on the right with more apartments. A large black flag with ZBT written in big letters hangs from the roof of the left building. On the raised porch by the front door, three ZBT brothers greet me and introduce me to Mike De Jesus, their president. He is tall and thin with close-cropped black hair. He offers me a seat on an old couch just inside the front door. The room is set up like a casino, complete with gambling tables and vest-wearing dealers. Six or seven people directly in front of us watch to see where the little white roulette ball will end up. Poker and blackjack are being played on the other side of the room. “We’re having a Las Vegas night tonight,” De Jesus tells me. “We hired a casino company to run it. You play for raffle prizes. The more chips you win, the more chances you have of winning. It keeps it legal. During this, guys get to meet the [rushees], talk to them, find out their interests and stuff. That’s how tonight works. We have certain guys that are designated to be rush captains, and they come up and talk to people about the house and what we do in our fraternity.”

How do you pick the ones you want?

“Basically,” he says, “the guys that are talking to them, the rush committee, they’ll make the decision. They are usually guys that have done a lot of work for the fraternity; they know what kind of guys we’re looking for. If each individual member had to decide which guys he wanted to join the house, it would be a long, hard process.”

What do you think about the no-alcohol policy?

De Jesus pauses and answers, “The university was probably wise making rush dry. It’s a great idea because what would happen is guys would get drunk at a house and then they’d join the house. You want a guy to join because you have common interests and you get along with them. You don’t want them to join because they drank a case of beer at your place and passed out . there. That’s not the objective of the fraternities.”

The last two houses I want to see before the night ends are on Hardy Avenue, several blocks from ZBT. While walking over, I see a poster at the corner of Montezuma and College. Above an image of a murder-scene chalk outline are the words, “Don’t be a statistic, rush Tau Kappa Epsilon.” At the bottom are a dozen or so sponsors’ logos, among which are Beer King and Inkers Tattoo and Body Piercing. Walking through the center of campus, I can hear the Latin rhythms of a Gipsy Kings concert going on somewhere toward the north side of campus.

At the two-story, Spanish-style Sigma Phi Epsilon house, I’m greeted by one fraternity brother at the curb and by two more sitting behind a table at the door, signing in rushees and handing out fraternity literature and posters. The posters have pictures of past house events with captions under them: “Spring Break in Lake Havasu” and “MTV comes to Sig Ep.” I walk down a hall, past the room where I’d talked with Anthony Dittmann the previous week, and into a rec room in the back that spills out onto a patio with a pool that has large red Sigma Phi Epsilon symbols painted onto the bottom. Fifty or 60 people stand around the pool, but nobody is in it. About 15 young women dressed in their shortest and tightest stand close to the door, attracting glances and stares of admiration from the male contingent. My Sig Ep rush poster tells me they are “The Ladies of Kappa Alpha Theta.” There is no formal entertainment going on, just eating and conversing, but everybody seems to be having fun. After a while I leave just behind half a dozen pretty but stoic-looking sorority girls. Once they reach the sidewalk, their stoicism melts as they discuss the party they just left. I overhear a tall brunette say to her blond friend, “Wow, that was sooooo fun!”

Two houses down, to the west, is Theta Chi. A guy at the door brings me through the house and out to the back yard, where a half-court, three-on-three basketball game is raging. He introduces me to Theta Chi president Yukon Palmer, who is about six feet tall, with short, brown, curly hair and a pleasant face. Like all the fraternity men with whom I’ve talked tonight, he is polite, well spoken, and confident of manner. Standing on the sand volleyball court in back of the house, he tells me, “What we focus on — there are a lot of houses that focus on this, but through the media you only see the bad parts — is, first of all, brotherhood. Basically, we are a group of friends that hang out like brothers. We have certain standards that we live by. As a fraternity, our main goal is to give guys an opportunity to gain leadership skills or skills that will help them out in the long run, once they graduate. We build responsibility and give them organizational skills, time-management skills, and stuff like that which will help them out. We give them that opportunity here. The way that the house is structured: I’m president, I have an executive board, and then we have a huge committee system. The committee system puts together all of our events, whether it’s something as unimportant as a party, or maybe a philanthropy where we’ll have a charity event — they will organize those. We do brotherhood events — they are internal events that get everybody tight — and there is a committee that organizes those. So there are guys that are in charge of committees of maybe three, or four, or five people that put everything together and that teaches them leadership skills. It’s through self-governance. It’s like an informal corporation.”

Palmer offers this explanation of the image problem fraternities have. “We all have parties on the weekends to let loose;” he says, “but what happens is you see stuff on the news when parties get out of hand. We are just like regular college students — we’re just like everybody else — we want to let loose on the weekends and have parties. The reason that things happen at our parties is because most fraternities host parties of maybe two, three hundred people, and when you have that many people, sometimes people bring alcohol and drink, and then sometimes things like that happen. You’ll get more exposure from a fraternity having a party and somebody falling off of a roof than somebody having a [nonfraternity] house party and somebody falling off their roof.”

He adds, “A couple of months ago we had a big philanthropic event called Greek Week. All of the fraternities and sororities on campus get together, and we do something for a specific charity. I was a PR guy for that, and I tried to get hold of the Union-Trib and KUSI and all the news stations, and they all said, ‘Yeah, we’ll be there,’ but they never showed up. But I got the feeling that if somebody got in a huge fight or something like that, they’d have been here.”

Before I leave, Palmer invites me back to see a hypnotism show they’re having the next night. “It’ll be interesting,” he says cryptically.

I remember seeing a hypnotist during high school and finding it pretty entertaining, so Tuesday night, I head straight for the Theta Chi house. I arrive about 7:30 p.m., before the show has started. Old couches and chairs are lined up in rows facing the north end of the room. There’s a mostly male crowd of about 60, and all seats are taken, so I find a spot on the left wall to lean against. The overcrowded room is stifling.

A couple of nearby Theta Chi’s strike up a conversation with me. Ronnie Edrozo to my left is stocky with a round, pleasant face, and Tony Stercl, sitting in front of me, is thin faced with short, dark hair. Both have been in the fraternity since fall ’94. Tony is discussing the dry rush rule. “About four or five years ago,” he says, “there were kegs and there would be eight, nine, ten kegs. Whichever house had the most kegs would get more people to go there. I think it was wrong because you’d publicize your house with beer. If everyone is sober and you hand out sodas and pizza, it’s...what’s the word?”

“You get a better idea of what kind of people are in our house,” Ronnie fills in.

“But if you’re asking me,” Tony continues, “I think beer should still be here. That’s my own f-----in’ alcoholic opinion. We can’t drink until Friday at noon. Friday at noon, we turn in our list of pledges we’ve accepted, and you can begin drinking after that.”

Ronnie tells me he is a rush committee member for Theta Chi. I ask him what approach he uses to find out if a particular rushee is right for the fraternity. “We’ll pretty much come straight out,” he answers. “How are your grades? Do you do well in school? What are some of the goals you want to accomplish while you are here at San Diego State? What are you trying to get out of fraternity life? If he says, I want to party, blah, blah, blah,’ we know he’s not going to do anything; it’s a warning sign.”

How many slots are you trying to fill?

“There’s no set number. We’d like to get a lot of people, but it just depends. If we don’t think the people are the right quality, then we’re content not giving out a lot of bids just to make sure we have the right kind of people,” Ronnie answers.

As Ronnie finishes his answer, Yukon Palmer emerges from a door at the north end of the room followed by half a dozen others. They’re clapping slowly and in unison. Ronnie and Tony and the other Theta Chi’s take up the clapping and head for the front of the room to join Yukon and the others. The clapping increases in volume and frequency until it breaks down into Marine-like barking, cheering, and fist pumping as the brothers slap five and shake hands with a beaming rushee who has just accepted a bid to join the fraternity.

Shortly after that, the lights go out, diabolical-sounding heavy metal fills the room, and a machine starts billowing fog and flashing colored lights. The music builds until a woman with a huge mane of silver hair, wearing silky black pants and top appears from the mist with her back to the audience, hands extended up and out. Her soundman, around the corner and out of my sight, says, “Are you ready to be mystified? On behalf of Theta Chi, the world-famous, mystifying hypnotist — Desiree!” Wild cheers erupt from the audience as Desiree turns around.

Desiree greets her admiring crowd and thanks them for having her. In gratitude, she offers to help anybody, by means of hypnosis, improve themselves. “If you want to have better study habits,” she says, “I can help you. Maybe you want to quit smoking, or quit drinking....”

“Yeah, right!” yells someone in the back of the room, provoking cheers and laughter from the audience.

Next, 12 people volunteer to be on the hypnosis panel. Desiree, cordless mike in hand, starts talking to them, telling them how relaxed they are becoming, while soothing music plays over two speakers. The 12 become more and more relaxed. She tells them their hands are becoming weightless, as if they were holding 1000 helium balloons. The arms of 10 started rising. One guy’s elbow, to the delight of the crowd, scrapes the nose of the girl next to him. A minute goes by and then Desiree brings them out of hypnosis and dismisses 5 who apparently are not susceptible enough. One tall, blond fraternity member is obviously disappointed.

After recruiting a couple more people from the crowd, Desiree puts them through several hilarious routines. She makes them laugh as if they’d just heard the funniest joke of their lives. She makes them feel terribly hot, and some break out in sweat and pull off shirts, socks, and shoes, then terribly cold, and they huddle together for warmth. She gives one young man a pink wand with a star on the end and whenever she says “Theta Chi fraternity,” he stands up and says, “I’m Tinkerbell, the world’s biggest fairy.” Another guy shouts, “Sit down and shut up, you fools!” on cue. One of the two girls on the hypnotic panel gets up and boogies like Madonna at the mention of the singer’s name. Desiree convinces them they’re naked, then that the crowd is naked, and so on, all to the audience’s amusement.

After an hour of such harmless antics, Desiree’s soundman hands her a mop. Suddenly, a few cheers of expectation come from the crowd. “You’ve seen my act before?” she asks. The cheering grows louder in affirmation. She hands the broom to a dark-haired fellow on the panel. “The person I’m touching right now,” Desiree says, “when you wake up, you’ll be holding the most attractive woman you’ve ever seen.” Sure enough, she wakes him, he stares and smiles at the mop, kisses it, and then puts it against his crotch as if engaging in fellatio. The crowd — 90 percent male — roars with laughter. Desiree takes the mop from him and gives it to another Theta Chi member named Woody, who promptly starts holding a conversation with it. “Who are you talking to, Woody?” Desiree asks.

“This is Michele. She’s from Fresno,” he answers and carries on with his conversation.

Desiree then gives the rest of the male panel members mops of their own and tells them to dance with the mops and make out with them, which they do for a few minutes until she yells, “Now throw her on the ground and make love to her.” They all obey, throwing down their mops, throwing themselves down on top of them, and thrusting their pelvises as if having sex. Edrozo, who is part of the panel, suddenly stops, realizes what he's doing, leaves his mop, and sits down shaking his head. The hypnotic who had been closest to Edrozo on the ground takes Edrozo’s mop and places it alongside his own. The crowd is at fever pitch with excitement and laughter. A few brothers hop up and snap pictures.

Desiree lets this go on five or ten embarrassing minutes and then snaps them out of it whereupon, realizing what they’ve been doing, some blush and some laugh. Then she gives mops to the two female members of her panel. One keeps falling out of hypnosis, so Desiree tells her to have a seat. The other, a sweet, innocent-looking girl who couldn’t be any older than 17 or 18, obeys orders and dances with the mop. As she did with the guys, Desiree orders her to throw the mop on the ground, which the girl does.

“Now get down there and make love to him!” Desiree commands. The girl stands there looking terrified for a few seconds. My heart is going out to the poor girl, but Desiree is merciless. “Get down there and make love to him,” she repeats, and this time the girl obeys, sending the crowd into a total frenzy. More snapshots are taken, and the fraternity brothers hoot and holler their approval. Finally, Desiree brings the girl out, and she turns red with embarrassment. I wonder to myself if she’ll be branded “the mop girl” for as long as she is a student at San Diego State.

On Wednesday night, I return to Montezuma Mesa to talk to pledges. I go first to the Sigma Chi house. The purple shirt is still hanging from the window. Inside, I meet 18-year-old Stephen Caric, a freshman from Delano, California. I ask if he wanted to join Sigma Chi all along. “I’ve been here a couple of weeks already,” he says, “so I got to look around at the fraternities before the rush actually started, so by the time it started, I already had a good idea of four that I knew were just good guys. So I went around on Monday, checked them all out, and I was really impressed by these guys because they were a bunch of nice guys. They are a big house, they have a lot of chapters, they have a good time, they stress grades, they have good sports, they had anything you could want. Basically it just came down to these were just the coolest guys to hang around with. It just clicked. I was offered a bid last night, and I accepted right away.”

Carey Aranaz, also 18, is from Fresno. His approach to rush was a little more narrow than Caric’s. “This was pretty much the only house I rushed. I hung out at the other houses before rush, when school first started. I watched a Monday Night Football game at another house. But I just liked the guys here. I just clicked with them.”

Why were you thinking fraternity in the first place?

“I don’t know. Ive always been involved in something, and I like that close, brotherhood relationship. I thought only good opportunities could come from it.”

At the Teke house, Terry introduces me to a couple of pledges, Garret Perry, an 18-year-old freshman from Sacramento, and Juan Camarena, 19, of Fresno. Perry says he went on the house tours, then visited the ones he liked, and finally concentrated on Tau Kappa Epsilon because “I felt most at home here talking to people. At other houses, I didn’t feel as comfortable as I did here. The only other house I considered was across the street at ZBT. There were a lot of cool guys over there, but I felt more comfortable here. Monday night we were over there and we partied with them and next day we came over here. It was either going with this house or that one. I decided on this one, and they happened to give me a bid later that night.”

Perry says he joined a fraternity because he wanted “the full college experience.” He explains, “In high school, I didn’t get involved right away. I waited and I wished I had gotten involved earlier. So here, I wanted to be involved right away.”

Were your parents happy with the idea of you joining a fraternity?

“No,” Perry answers. “My dad especially, he thinks by joining one I’ll screw up.” Camarena is Perry’s roommate. He’s a junior transfer student from Fresno City College. I ask him why he wanted to be a Greek. “It’s the common bond,” he answers. “There’s 37 brothers, so you have a bond with 37 other people. They are like family— whenever you need them they are there.”

Joubin Bral is a pledge in the Zeta Beta Tau fraternity. He’s a freshman business major from Los Angeles. Describing his rush experience, he says, “I came here, and the second I came here, I just loved it and I stayed here. I went on the house tours and then I walked by one house, went into another, and then I came in here and everyone was friendlier than in all of the other ones.”

Bral says he joined a fraternity for “friendship and family away from family.” He explains, “It’s hard to move away, so you find people that have things in common with you to help you adjust to your new lifestyle. There are the parties too, but you’d still have the parties if you didn’t join the fraternity. You get the whole college experience when you come to a fraternity.”

I ask Bral what made him love ZBT so much.

“They were happier that I was here than the other ones. I could feel the brotherhood right away here.”

At Sigma Phi Epsilon, I meet Jesse Ibañez, a 19-year-old sophomore majoring in criminal justice. He is from Humboldt County in Northern California. “I’m going to be pretty honest with you,” he says. “I haven’t toured any of the other houses. One thing this house did was they put on the Balanced Man Scholarship. They put out a bunch of applications over the summer for incoming freshmen and transferring students. So I filled out the application with the hope of winning a little extra spending cash. It turned out that I was one of the 20 finalists and they had a really nice banquet for us, fully catered, and they had a bunch of speakers about the house and I met a lot of nice guys. So I just started coming to the functions they’ve been putting on here, and I got a real good impression of the house. Last night they offered me a bid, and I’m looking forward to the semester.”

Asked why he wanted to join a fraternity in the first place, Ibanez, like Perry at Tau Kappa Epsilon and Bral at Zeta Beta Tau, answers simply, “I just wanted to live the full college experience.”