Volume 2: Knocking on Heaven's Door Chapter 72 A Little Misunderstanding in the Brotherhood
"Do you think if we compile a fraternity freshman handbook, there will really be some stupid freshmen who will pay for it?" Jason asked as he opened the mini-refrigerator and put the cans of beer from Tommy's backpack into it one by one.
Tommy's suggestion of compiling a fraternity freshman handbook and selling it to freshmen to earn some extra money for entertainment brightened his eyes.
Tommy nodded affirmatively. "Don't underestimate the desire of freshmen for the mysterious fraternity. Think about it. On Friday night, the lights of all fraternity houses will be turned on. All the beautiful sororities will put on short skirts, showing their healthy and slender legs. They will wear high heels and make final preparations for recruiting new members. As a freshman, you are completely confused. You don't know which fraternity party is more fun and has the most girls. What do you need at this time?"
“Our manual,” Jason said.
Tommy sat on the bed and strummed the guitar Jason brought. "Yes, our manual will tell them which fraternity is likely to hold a one-handed bra-unbuttoning competition at the recruiting party, and which fraternity will invite a mysterious guest from the strip club. This way, he won't have to take his chances alone. He mustered up the courage to push open a door, intending to find a girl, but walked into the unique honor fraternity of the school, and found that all the professors, including the dean of the school, were having a party like medieval wizards, and stared at him with an expression of judging heresy."
"I almost believed what you said, you bastard. How could a fraternity hold such a competition at a recruiting party... But it's enough to deceive the guys who are horny." Jason put the beer in the refrigerator and laughed, "Based on the fantasies of most high school students about fraternities, they must think it's real."
Tommy strummed the strings twice: "Prepare two copies, one abridged version, one complete version. The abridged version is free, and the complete version is available for purchase."
"What's the biggest difference between the two? Why make two copies?" Jason was stunned and looked at Tommy.
Tommy said to Jason, "The abridged version will introduce the fraternities in the most straightforward terms, making them seem completely the same. The full version will give newcomers the answers they want. You want the paying customers to feel that they are getting value for money, and it's best to have a direct comparison."
"So you really know those tricks? I mean the one-handed bra-unbuttoning ones?"
"I don't know. I just made it up. So remember to properly avoid the name of the fraternity and don't take it personally."
"Boss, after hearing this, I think adult movies or magazines should hire you as a producer. Just because it sounds like you want to participate." Jason scratched his crotch and said with admiration, "For the normal growth of American youth, I strongly recommend that you take the position of editor-in-chief of Playboy."
The fraternities the two men are talking about are the most common student organizations in American universities. Some are notorious, some are famous, and some are low-key and mysterious.
The most common ones are divided into three types.
The first type is a service-oriented fraternity, which has common values, is willing to engage in social services and charity activities during college. Basically, it can be understood as a university volunteer organization. By joining this kind of fraternity, you may work hard to achieve a certain social goal during your college career, such as opposing racial discrimination, women's equality, etc.
The second type is professional fraternities, such as fraternities formed by students majoring in agriculture, engineering, computer science, medicine, etc. They help each other and make progress together because they are in the same major and are committed to professional development. Students who generally prefer to exchange professional knowledge and discuss professional development with alumni in the same major and field will consider joining this type of fraternity.
The third type is the social fraternity. Scandals involving alcoholism, bullying, etc. reported in newspaper news are basically about this type of fraternity. But at the same time, this type of fraternity is also the one that freshmen are most eager to join, because this type of fraternity often maintains friendly relations with many sororities and organizes social activities from time to time. This means that you will have the opportunity to chat up the best-dressed and most beautiful girls in the school.
These three fraternities will hold various gatherings and parties regularly or irregularly, but with different styles. Freshmen can also participate in the parties of these organizations during the fraternity recruitment, learn about the basic situation of these fraternities, and figure out which fraternity is more to their liking.
As for the academic honor fraternity that Tommy just joked about, it is relatively rare. Basically, only those academic elites who have been determined to devote their lives to academics since childhood have the opportunity to join. It is very likely that after joining, you will find that the president of the fraternity is the dean of your department, and the youngest girl in the fraternity is a female professor who is seventeen years older than you.
The main reason why American college students are keen to join fraternities, besides enjoying small circle socializing and getting more opportunities to interact with girls, is that as a young man who has just reached adulthood and is far away from home, joining a fraternity can help them integrate into the new life more quickly. Of course, the premise is that you can manage your time well and have strong enough self-control. After all, you have to participate in these extracurricular fraternity activities while ensuring that you complete your studies.
At Stanford University, many California students go home on weekends, so most of the dormitories and apartments will be empty. If you join a fraternity, there will always be brothers calling you to join activities on weekends, so that you don't have to stay alone in the dormitory, masturbating in tears facing your roommate's bed.
When you are shopping in San Francisco where you are unfamiliar with the place and you get into trouble, you can also call the fraternity. The brothers in the fraternity will naturally find a way to bring you back, and then spread the word that you are a fool who was arrested for soliciting prostitution and refusing to pay the bill, so that everyone will donate sperm to help you raise money for bail and help you become famous in college.
Joining a fraternity means that during your four years in college, you will have a few more brothers who have the same hobbies and experiences as you. They will accompany you to do stupid things, pursue girls with you, stay up late with you to prepare for exams, and walk you through the last part of the journey before entering society. Eventually, you will grow up together and become those hateful, sanctimonious bastards that you used to call yourself, but years later you can still sit together and laugh and reminisce about the stupid things each other has done.
Joining a fraternity means that maybe on a boring weekend in your junior year, when you are lying on the sofa and wondering if women are the only thing left in your life, the fraternity boss who has already graduated suddenly shows up and tells you rookies that the company he founded has recently expanded and needs some people with professional skills. Those of you idiots who are good at certain majors can take a leave of absence now, and then, while he can still squander the investors' money, you can go over to work and accumulate some money and work experience.
Joining a fraternity means that many years after graduating from college, you have forgotten your experience. One day, you want to change jobs and join a new company to increase your income. When a conservative interviewer you don’t know reads your resume and listens to your brief without any emotion, you think the interview is a failure and there is no hope of salary increase. However, at the moment of shaking hands with him, you are surprised to find that he actually uses the secret handshake of the same fraternity as you. The other party has a sullen face and uses the hidden danger of handshake to tell you: Stupid, are you scared? In fact, you are accepted.
Of course, you can have a wonderful college life without joining a fraternity, but a fraternity, as its name suggests, can guarantee that you will meet brothers with the same interests as you. You don't have to worry about joining a fraternity and participating in too many social activities, which will cause your academic performance to plummet. Most fraternities at prestigious schools have academic requirements for their members. Once they find that you are having too much fun and your grades are seriously declining, you will find that the president who took the initiative to take you to the strip club for fun last night will frown today and hand you a note, telling you to report to the fraternity's study group. Before your grades return to their peak, other activities of the fraternity except the study group will say goodbye to you.
As for the bullying that new members of a fraternity will encounter, first of all, not all fraternities are perverted and like to torture people to death, but there is no fraternity that can be easily joined unconditionally. Most of the assessment tasks for joining the fraternity are actually nonsensical and crazy tasks that make the participants look stupid. As long as you truthfully report your physical fitness, alcohol tolerance, appetite, thickness of skin and other issues, instead of exaggerating, basically the assessment tasks are not too difficult. For example, if you honestly confess that you can only drink two bottles of beer, then when you are tortured, it is very likely that there will be no perverted task of asking you to blow a whole bottle of vodka and then run naked for five kilometers. At most, you will be asked to run five kilometers in sexy women's underwear.
In his previous life, Tommy had joined the Asian fraternity at Boston University. In fact, compared to most white fraternities, the Asian fraternity's methods of torturing new members are more extreme. In the words of the Asian fraternity: Only by being harder on yourself can Asians be braver when facing oppression by white people.
Jason had already taken out a pen and paper and bent over the desk to start compiling introductory materials for various fraternities based on the descriptions of his cousin and uncle. In fact, this stuff could only deceive newbies who knew nothing about fraternities and make some quick money.
This guy wrote very quickly. He said that he had put in a lot of effort to get into Stanford University. He had a deep understanding of everything from the school's various departments to the prices of various restaurants. Not to mention the fraternities he had been planning to join since high school, he knew the characteristics of all 17 fraternities by heart.
After a day's work and with the help of the library's printing center, the two now had 300 copies of the Stanford University Fraternity/Sorority Freshman Handbook on display in front of their flea market stall. It was only 30 thin pages, 100 copies of the abridged version had colorful covers, and 200 copies of the complete version had parchment-style covers.
However, the 100 copies of the abridged version given away for free were piled up in a mess on the stall, while the complete version was neatly stacked next to it. There was also a sign written by Tommy in front of the stall -
Free freshman networking brochure
The word "free" attracted most of the freshmen who came to the flea market to buy second-hand textbooks. The two manuals with the same name but different covers and layout aroused their curiosity. After some boys asked, they looked at Tommy's ambiguous smile and decisively paid another five dollars to buy the complete version. Then they quickly compared them, smiled at Tommy and Jason with sudden enlightenment, and turned and left.
This combination of free and paid sales allowed the two to sell out the brochures in just a day and a half. After deducting the library's printing and production costs, the two earned more than 700 yuan. Jason was as excited as if he had become the richest man in the United States. He ran to the girls' dormitory to announce that a freshman party would be held in the public living room of Hope Apartment that night, and even added in a low and mysterious voice that there would be drinks.
Just as Tommy and Jason were working hard to be the first freshmen to date girls, the recruiter of Stanford University's Sigma Delta Fraternity, abbreviated as SSD, was looking at the two brochures in front of him with an unpleasant expression. Although Tommy and Jason cleverly avoided all the fraternity abbreviations in the brochures to avoid unnecessary disputes, everyone could easily identify them. At this moment, the recruiter was looking at the introduction of his own SSD:
"Which idiot leaked our secret plan? How did two freshmen know about the big stunt that SSD was going to have at the charity gala to raise funds for Vietnam veterans this semester? And they said we would come up with it at the recruiting party. If we don't come up with it, how will the freshmen see us? Even worse, if other fraternities see this handbook and think it's a good stunt, and they plagiarize it, what should we do?"
"But only five people in the entire SSD know about this secret plan, and it's still in the preparation stage. Moreover, the person in charge of the Zeta Sisterhood is not sure yet whether there will be twenty girls to cooperate with our one-handed bra-unbuttoning competition." The companion next to him looked puzzled.
The person in charge of recruiting new members looked at him and asked, "Where are those two guys?"
"I'm using the money I made from selling brochures to date freshmen like crazy." The companion looked at the person in charge and said, "Like most impulsive freshmen, I'm full of desire for the opposite sex."
"Call Martin, Wright and a few others, and ask your girlfriend to bring a few sexy girls from Zeta. We have to find out who leaked the secret from these two new bastards." The person in charge stood up and walked out the door.
"I don't believe that two freshmen who just left high school and could only see naked girls in magazines could come up with these sexy ways of playing in the manual. I don't know the professional knowledge of these two bastards, but at least I am willing to give them full marks for writing. Do you know why? Because I have been playing for three years, and none of them are as exciting as the ones they wrote. Just reading these words can make me aroused."
