The mistake shrugged and turned his palms up as if to say, “I want porn. What’s the big deal?” He didn’t seem to realize that Julian was sneaking up behind him…Bango! Julian wrapped his arms around I.P.’s chest, pinning the mistake’s arms to his sides, and began thrusting his wrestler’s gut and pelvis against the mistake’s big rear end like a dog in the park.

Everybody broke up again.

“Leggo a me, you grotesque faggot!” screamed I.P., his face contorted with anger as he thrashed his pinioned body about.

Convulsive laughter, waves and waves of it.

“What makes you so fucking grotesque, Julian?” said Boo McGuire, coming up briefly for air. The repetition of the fancy word threw everybody into a new round of paroxysms.

I.P. broke loose and stood there for a moment glowering at Julian, who put on a sad face and said, “Don’t I get one little hump?”

The mistake then turned and glowered at everybody in the room and started shaking his head. Without another word he stormed out into the entry gallery, toward the stairs.

A big, rugged varsity lacrosse player named Harrison Vorheese yelled after him, “Happy hand job, I.P.!”—and everybody cracked up, convulsed, and dissolved all over again.

Julian’s rutboar embrace was a form of fraternal gibe known as humping, generally inflicted upon brothers caught doing dorky things such as covertly working on a homework assignment in the library while SportsCenter was on or coming into the library at ten o’clock at night looking for porn videos, especially if you were a mistake in the first place.

“What is all this walking around the house with a fucking microphone in his face?” said Boo. “I.P.’s become some kind of wireless nut. You should see the shit he has up in his room.”

Once they finally got control of themselves, Harrison, invigorated by the success of his “hand job” crack, said to Hoyt, “Speaking of cum dumpsters, did you know—”

Boo broke in. “What the fuck’s this cum dumpster shit, Hoyt? Didn’t I see a little cutie-pie in disco clothes coming out of your room at seven-thirty this morning?”

Everybody went “Wooooooooooo!” in mock dismay.

Harrison said, “Like I was saying—”

“I was speaking generically, not specifically,” said Hoyt. “Specifically, I only allow discriminating visitors in my room.”

Horselaughs and groans. “Oh, brother”…“Discriminate this, Hoyt”…“Where’d she come from?”…“What’s her name?”

“Whattaya think I am,” said Hoyt, “a fucking playa? I wouldn’t tell you her name even if I knew it.”

Harrison said, “Like I was saying—” Laughs and groans directed at Hoyt drowned him out.

“What the fuck were you saying, Harrison?” said Vance.

“Thank you,” said Harrison. “It’s nice to run into a gentleman in this fucking place once in a while. What I was saying was”—he looked at Vance and then at Hoyt—“did you know Crawdon McLeod’s started hooking up with you guys’ favorite ice-cream eater?”

“Craw?” said Hoyt. “You’re kidding.”

“I’m not kidding.”

“Does he know who she fucking is?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he can’t fucking resist. After all, she’s a fucking documented genius at skull work.”

They all convulsed and disintegrated yet once again. Harrison’s beefy square face was beaming. He was on a roll.

Julian said, “Does she know you guys know she was the one going down on the fucking governor?”

“I don’t know,” said Hoyt, who now tilted the beer can up almost vertically to get one last swallow. Idly he wondered how many of these things he had drunk tonight. “Probably not. I don’t think she ever got a real look at us. We were behind a tree.” He indicated with his arms how big around the tree was.

Then he noticed that Vance was grilling him with a certain stern look he was very familiar with by now. Vance didn’t want to be a legend in his own time. He continually beseeched Hoyt to bury the whole incident. They’d been lucky. So far nobody had come looking for them. Or maybe they had. Politicians had their own ways of getting even, and so forth and so on. Hoyt looked at Vance’s pained expression for a couple of seconds. A pleasant breeze was beginning to blow inside his head. Nevertheless, he decided to drop the subject.

But Julian said, “You think they’re ever gonna come looking for you guys?”

Vance got up and walked to the doorway in exasperation, pausing only long enough to say to Hoyt, without even a suggestion of a smile, “Hey, why don’t we talk about it some more?” He pointed toward the TV screen. “Why don’t you get SportsCenter to broadcast a replay for you? That way you can let the whole fucking country in on it.” He turned his back and left.

Hoyt hesitated, then said to Julian, but more for Vance’s benefit than Julian’s, “They ain’t coming looking for no body. All they’re looking to do is over look the whole fucking thing. Nothing they could do to anybody at Dupont would be worth the risk. The guy got himself fucking gobbled in the bushes by a little girl. Syrie’s nineteen, twenty years old, and he’s the fifty-whatever-year-old governor of California. She’s a little blond college girl, and he’s a big old cottontop—two and a half, maybe three times her age. Talk about grotesque.”

The others were watching Hoyt with big eyes. Hoyt and Vance weren’t boys any longer. They were real men who had been in an elemental physical fight with a bona fide professional tough guy. They had been in a real-life rumble with no rules, and they had won.

Hoyt looked up at the TV screen with a steady gaze and a somewhat cross expression, to indicate that this particular topic of discussion was now terminated. Not that he really cared; in fact, he did it mainly for effect. The happy wind was rising. Nobody said a word. Everybody became conscious all over again of the quarters bouncing in the front parlor and the boys whooping ironically and Swarm’s bang beat banging away in the terrace room.

Up on the screen, the SportsCenter anchorman was interviewing some former coach from the pros, an old guy whose bull neck creased every time he turned his head. The guy was explaining Alabama’s new “tilt” formation. A play diagram comes on the screen, and white lines start squiggling out to show how this guy blocks that guy and this guy blocks that guy and the running back goes through this hole here…At first Hoyt tried to concentrate on it. Of course, what they don’t fucking tell you is that this guy who blocks that guy better be the size of Bobo Bolker, because that guy’s gonna be three hundred pounds of gorilla-engineered cybermuscle. Otherwise that running back’s gonna be another sack of bones…After perhaps thirty seconds of it, Hoyt was still gazing at the screen, but his brain was no longer processing any of it. A thought had come to him, an intriguing and possibly very important thought.

A replay of what happened in the Grove up on the screen…Too bad that was impossible…Every Saint Ray should see something like that. They ought to all think about what that little adventure really meant. It was about more than him and Vance. It was about more than being a legend in your own time. It was about something serious. It was about the essence of a fraternity like Saint Ray, not a fraternity merely in the sense of him and Vance fighting shoulder to shoulder and all that…A concept was taking shape…Fraternities were all about one thing, and that one thing was the creation of real men. He would like nothing better than to call a meeting of the entire house and give them a talk about this very subject. But of course he couldn’t. They’d laugh him off the premises. Besides, he wasn’t sure he could give an inspirational speech. He had never tried. His strong suit was humor, irony, insouciance, and being coolly gross, Animal House–style. In the American lit classes, they were always talking about The Catcher in the Rye, but Holden Caulfield was a whining, neurotic wuss. For his, Hoyt’s, generation it was Animal House. He must have watched it ten times himself…The part where Belushi smacks his cheeks and says, “I’m a zit”…awesome…and Dumb and Dumber and Swingers and Tommy Boy and The Usual Suspects, Old School…He’d loved those movies. He’d laughed his head off…gross, coolly gross…but did anybody else in this house get the serious point that made all that so awesome? Probably not. It was actually all about being a man in the Age of the Wuss. A fraternity like Saint Ray, if you truly understood it, forged you into a man who stood apart from the ordinary run of passive, compliant American college boys. Saint Ray was a MasterCard that gave you carte blanche to assert yourself—he loved that metaphor. Of course, you couldn’t go through life like a frat boy, breaking rules just for the fun of it. The frat-boy stuff was sort of like basic training. One of the things you learned as a Saint Ray—if you were a real brother and not some mistake like I.P.—was how rattled and baffled people were when confronted by those who take no shit. His thoughts kept drifting back, almost every day, to one particular moment that night in the Grove…He cherished it…The pumped-up thug (he could see his huge neck), the bodyguard guy, grabs him from behind, totally surprises him, and says, “What the fuck you punks think you’re doing?” Ninety-nine out of a hundred college boys would have (a) been frightened by the brute’s tough-guy pose and bulked-up body and (b) tried to mollify him by taking the question at face value and saying, “Uh, nothing, we were just—” Instead, he, Hoyt Thorpe, had said, “Doing? Looking at a fucking ape-faced dickhead is what we’re doing!” That was the last thing in the world that motherfucker had expected to hear. It rattled his tiny brain, ruined his tough-guy intimidator act, and provoked him into launching the wild roundhouse punch that led to his downfall. The phrase fucking ape-faced dickhead and the insolent way he had thrown the dickhead’s own word, doing, back in his face—that wasn’t some strategy he had thought up. No, it was a conditioned reflex. He had shot that line quickdraw, like a bullet from the hip, in a moment of crisis. He had triumphed, thanks to a habit of mind, a take-no-shit instinct…He began to see something even bigger…Everywhere you looked at this university there were people knocking “the frats” and the frat boys—the administration, which blamed them for the evils of alcohol, pot, cocaine, ecstasy…the dorks, GPA geeks, Goths, lesbos, homobos, bi-bos, S and Mbos, black-bos, Latinos, Indians—from India and the reservation—and other whining diversoids, who blamed them for racism, sexism, classism, whatever the fuck that was, chauvinism, anti-Semitism, fringe-rightism, homophobia…The only value ingrained at this institution was a weepy tolerance for losers…The old gale began blowing, and the concept enlarged…If America ever had to go to war again, fight with the country’s fate on the line, not just in some “police action,” there would be only one source of officers other than the military academies: frat boys. They were the only educated males left who were conditioned to think and react…like men. They were the only—