We made it through September fine, and then I did that first weekend at Marilyn's the first weekend of October. She visited two weekends later, and as I promised Joe, he had plenty of advance warning. We were already working on a calendar - I would visit Marilyn the beginning of November, she would visit a week or two later, I would visit her for Thanksgiving, and that would be it. December we would go bonkers for finals, and then we would have the winter break. We'd worry about the 1975 schedule then. I wanted to keep things under control this time around, and be a better roommate. Joe was a decent guy, and I always felt guilty about being an asshole with him. I knew he didn't like my being a doper and one time Marilyn and I went to bed while he was still in the sack himself, and that really offended him.
I could already see what was happening with some of my incoming brothers. Andy Kowalchuk was a big time pot smoker, which I knew now but not on the first trip through. He got me into pot big time back then, but I kept it much more low key now. Still, he got Bill Keswick, a chemistry major, to design a hash oil still and steal some lab gear to run it. This turned out to be an amusing weekend project for the two of them. Jerry Modanowicz was proving to be an asshole, but since he had moved into the glorified closet that was one end of the Underground Railroad, he didn't have any roommates to worry about. The Cisco Kid was back, uglier and stupider than ever, having barely managed to keep his grades high enough to come back. Within two weeks he had already broken one chair when he sat in it, and I knew it was the first of many to come.
Joe was a math major, and was taking sophomore level math classes, but he didn't need all that much help from me, and rarely asked. He thought my working on a doctorate was a little strange, but it wasn't that odd. In fact, despite being a real animal house and a nest of dopers and drunks, Kegs had a surprising number of geniuses living there. A lot of the upperclassmen were in five year engineering masters programs. Both Pabst and Schlitz, the Beer Buddies, would graduate with electrical engineering degrees (pure math) in three years, and Homer Simpson would get out in four years with a masters in computer science. Joe would graduate in four years with two bachelors degrees, math and economics, and then defer his military duty while he went to Wharton on his own dime and get both an MBA and a masters in operations research (also pure math) in two years. My doing a doctorate in four years was not at all out of the question.
Marilyn showed up two weeks later in the middle of the afternoon on Friday, while Bradley was taking a rare late afternoon Friday class. We quickly tore upstairs and snuck in a quickie before he got back, although we giggled a lot when he came back from class and found us sitting there pretending to study. Marilyn had already met Joe before (he was my second in the duel with Ghormley) as well as the rest of the brothers, and settled right in. There were always a few girlfriends around the house, some serious and some not. We did not live a chaste lifestyle. It was rather more of a desperately horny lifestyle!
The best example of this was a fellow about five years ahead of us who made a name for himself and the fraternity at every college campus in the area. He combined the finest traits of nerdly math wizardry and terminal horniness. He figured that an average brother would meet, over the course of a semester, ten to twenty girls at various parties. They would end up getting one or two of them in the sack, a closing ratio of roughly 10%. So therefore, apply some good old fashioned Yankee ingenuity to the problem. He would hit on 100 to 200 girls a semester! If it had two X chromosomes, he would buy her a drink at a party, quite bluntly say that he was only interested in one thing, and ask if she was interested in it also. If so, they could leave together. On the down side, he got his face slapped a whole shitload of times, had drinks dumped on his head even more, and earned a major reputation as a first grade creep. On the plus side, he figured his ratio held true, and he got laid a lot! It took us years to live his reputation down!
By strange happenstance, we were having a party Saturday night, the first big one of the semester. It wasn't Halloween, which was the following week, but we were celebrating Oktoberfest, so we had a couple of kegs going. Next weekend we'd get even sillier. That afternoon, Marty and I and Marilyn set up the bars, much like I had done with Marty last year when I met Marilyn. It was looking like I was a junior member of the Social Committee, or maybe they had just figured out I was a lush. Joe was spending the night in the triple with Bruno and Lynchburg, and with any luck, Marilyn and I could spend some quality time alone before the party that afternoon.
We had finished setting up the bars and were relaxing in the living room when another couple of guys, juniors, came in and plopped down on the couch. They were starting to argue about learning and education, which Marilyn found amusing, since she was an education major. Meanwhile, they got totally off the first topic and started arguing about what the most important thing they learned in high school was. That was when I chimed in. "Hey, I learned everything I ever needed to know back when I was five years old. Everything else is just BS."
"Like what?", sneered Jim Easton.
"Well, I learned to play well with others and to share my toys when I was five. Didn't you learn that, too?"
That got a good laugh from everybody there, including Easton. "That's true. It didn't take, but I do remember learning that."
"Everything else important is from that time, too. Don't you remember being told to watch both ways before you cross the street? Five years old!"
Everybody nodded, and they started tossing around stuff like, 'Don't run with scissors.', 'Don't cheat.', 'Nobody likes a tattletale.', and so forth.
I nudged Marilyn in the side and said, "Here's a good one. Always take a nap every day." Marilyn turned bright red at that, especially when Marty asked if I needed a nap.
"Maybe.", I agreed. "Besides, I always remember what I learned on Romper Room."
That got a few people reminiscing about Romper Room. Marilyn got some attention when she announced, "I was on Romper Room!"
"Really? You and Miss Sally?"
"It was Miss Nancy in Utica."
I nodded. Romper Room was a sort of franchise operation, and every town and station in those days, back before you had nationwide broadcasting like that, had their own hostess. "Well, I learned a very important lesson from Miss Sally."
"What?", she asked, falling into my trap.
"Be a Do-Bee and eat your honey!"
Oh my God but the place roared at that, and Marilyn turned beet red and squealed as she ran out of the room. I raced after her and caught her and carried her up to my room. I was a Do-Bee!
Marilyn put up with quite a few jokes the rest of the weekend, but we left the party early and had our own party upstairs. Sunday morning, after a nice bout of early morning loving, we hit the bathroom early. The procedure was that you could lock the main bath on the second floor hall from the inside, and then clean up together. Sometimes, if the traffic was heavy, a girl would simply barge in and hop into the shower, and then peel off her robe and hang it up by sticking her arm out through the curtain. That I saw more than once in my time there.