The Chuggers

THE College promised me a liberal arts education but nobody told me that my education would include learning how to chug-a-lug beer. I was initiated into the Mead Hall ritual two winters ago when some rugby players who didn't know better cajoled me into competing in "crew races" in the basement of one of the fraternity houses. A crew race, in the chugger's argot, is a contest in which two teams of drinkers align on opposite sides of a bar; the members of the teams in turn each chug a 12-ounce cup of beer until the last mate of one of the crews has quaffed his draught and won the match by putting the emptied cup upside down on his head. When I made my pea-green chugs two years ago, I was slow, I spilled a lot of beer, and I "booted" after the third race. Freshmen are supposed to spill, freshmen are supposed to boot, my mentors in drinking assured me; with practice you'll be able to chug fast - and hold it in, too.

I never did practice after that, but an acquaintance of mine named Crazy Bill did practice after his freshman year. Crazy Bill is a companionable guy - even when soused - who once a drove Comfort Cab in suburban New Jersey, knows all three verses of "Men of Dartmouth," and likes to chug-a-lug beer and make crazy bets. Last spring he wagered a fellow $100 he would defeat him in a 60-yard foot race. After he won, Crazy Bill voided the $100 payoff check and put it in his wallet to keep as a souvenir. When Crazy Bill was a freshman, he pledged at , ------ and his brothers baptized him "Sip Chug" because he chugged so slowly. During his sophomore year he would occasionally practice with water in the bathroom to try and figure out what was wrong with his technique. Now he's a grand old senior and sort of a chugger manque - he chugs a lot of beer, but he's not really that fast.

One wintry Saturday night last November, I went to watch him down a lot of beer in a "Death Chug" that was held in the same fraternity basement where two years earlier I had made my first chugs. Crazy Bill had made another crazy bet; but this time he lost and had to chug two beers for every beer chugged by Hammer, until one of the chuggers couldn't chug anymore. Hammer, the winner of the bet, has chugged at least 500 beers since the time he matriculated, thinks he is the best chugger at the College, and says, "Chugging's one thing that won't give way to coeds" and "I hate having the reputation of being a good chugger because wherever I go they always want me to chug."

Chugging is an art, and practiced chuggers follow a technique that enables them to chug fast. A very few chuggers have a short epiglotis and are able to perform what Crazy Bill calls "this Linda Lovelace routine" - that is to say they open their throats and just pour the beer down. Almost all chuggers are gulpers. Crazy Bill and Hammer are gulpers.

Practiced chuggers - that's Crazy Bill's term - like to tell chugging tales. Several years ago, there was a phenomenon named Brian M. who had a number of droll accomplishments such as putting knives and squash balls down his throat, encircling a wide-mouth Coke glass with his lips and then lifting it and chugging its contents, and getting a baseball stuck in his mouth. There was a fellow in Psi U who downed 201 shots of beer in 201 minutes, more than one and one-half gallons without booting.

The Death Chug: it was a wager both Hammer and Crazy Bill had never heard of being made before, one of those drinking challenges that chuggers talk about long afterwards. Hammer chugged four beers and Crazy Bill eight in the first 21 minutes. Hammer's chugs were truly acts of grace. As he prepared for the chugging motion, he held the 12-ounce cup of beer the way a man would hold the hand of a beloved woman. When he tilted his head back, he positioned the cup so that it was perpendicular to his face. Then three consecutive waves of beer would roll into his mouth, and all that would be left was a trail of foam hugging the bottom of the cup. The residual foam is Hammer's chugging cachet; he always leaves a small amount of beer at the bottom of the cup because he likes to feel that when he imbibes his last beer there's part of his first beer in it. "I'm going to go for 16," Crazy Bill said as he prepared to quaff numbers nine and ten, "maybe slow down the pace a little to four minutes a chug." He reached 16 chugs and kept going; at around number 20 he chugged his fastest beers ever. After number 26, he looked like a besotted puppet. He hung on around Hammer's neck and asked Hammer if he was hurting, and stumbled around behind the bar with his head tilted to one side, looking as if he'd soon founder. Hammer had chugged 15 beers and was acting sober. Some philanthropists helped Crazy Bill upstairs and into bed.

Several nights after the Death Chug, Crazy Bill and I talked about chugging over a couple of pitchers of Bud in Peter Christian's, the Main Street tavern. Four years earlier I had editorialized in a high school newspaper that "when a person sees his own friends snared by the 'drinking trap' he begins to re-evaluate the harms of drinking" and, although I now believe beer is a nectar that makes much of our intercourse in life sweet, I couldn't help but revert to my past sententiousness for a moment and ask Crazy Bill why he engaged in such a destructive act as to chug 26 12- ounce cups of beer. What Crazy Bill said about chugging - and he said this soberly and sincerely - was that it's tied in with brotherhood and competition and education and life. I sensed afterward that maybe a man has to undergo a little degradation, as Crazy Bill did in the Death Chug, to reach those heights. This is what he said:

How good you chug has no bearing on how good a person you are. Everybody knows that. It's sort of like a tribal ritual. If you have a guy who is typically a pencil-neck weenie in a fraternity, and" he's a good guy, but likes to study ... somebody'll say, 'I think so and so should chug,' so he chugs and he gets relaxed and stays around and talks for a while. It's not to get him 'faced, but just to sit down, have one or two beers - that's when your acquaintances are made. That does not mean that when you have a beer in your hand there is not good conversation. Guys here, I've found, are incredibly smart - you'll"always have a good conversation.... At the bar, you talk about a lot of offbeat things. It's very enlightening....

Ninety per cent of what you learn here is not going to mean squat to you when you get out. But what is important is what you become when you get out. You learn things like loyalty. You tend to become a personable individual - a hot ----. Maybe along the way you become a little bit crazy - less conservative. When you've been drinking you tend to do more crazy things than when not; you have that spark to try something new. To be set in your ways is never to go anywhere. If you are always middle of the road, you'll never get burned. But if a guy who went to Dartmouth gets burned, he can come back.... That's because people here have a lot of gumption - a lot of balls.