I Left My Mark on Pi Phi

The housemom at the Kappa house asked me to throw away two bottles. These were spray bottles, like Windex, but filled with dye. You can see the bottles sitting on the grill outside the dining room (which I call the Kappateria; no one else calls it that). They've been there for a year and a half.

I put them there. My junior year before Owl-o-ween (the Kappa Halloween function - apparently they like it when they come up with the puns), my date and I tie dyed shirts. As a Halloween function, a couple goes as anything matched. I've been a robot, a tattoo artist, and even a unicorn. That year, we were professional function goers, because we were good at dancing. We were really good.

When I told Mom Shanks that the bottles were mine, it wasn't apparent whether or not she was mad. I get away with many things because I'm now the senior houseboy. Ringo, who's a year older than me, left last Tuesday. Afterwards, I was late to my shift, and when scolded I told the chef that washing dishes was like Top Gun, and I was the Maverick of KKG.

My sophomore year I worked at the Pi Beta Phi house. They paid us there, but they only employed five houseboys, so you had to work five meals as opposed to two. It evens out. Trust me - I was a math major. I worked with a few fraternity brothers, which made it fun, but the head cook was this old harpy named Wilma. We hated Wilma. When she was a kid, people asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up, and she said, "Ugly and mean." She smoked like a chainsaw.

The housemom, Mom B, may have had Alzheimer's. I say this because in the spring, I studied abroad in Rome for a semester. I just worked at Pi Phi for the fall; when I got back, Mom B had given my job away because she thought I was Heath Mitchell, another houseboy. A month later I was working at Kappa.

I tell this story because, like the tie dye, I left something at Pi Phi, too. When I was gone, somehow one of the girls got my picture printed onto posterboard and pasted it on the wall in the kitchen, above the buffet line. It was probably an 8x10 - a good sized picture. After I left, no one took it down because if they did, it would strip the paint off the wall. They left it there for two years.

It went down earlier this year. By that time, none of the girls who lived in the house knew who I was. I still get stopped between classes by girls who say, "Oh my god! Yours is the face who haunts me! Tell me your name, spirit!"