"A couple years ago, I was at a party in a nearby town celebrating the completion of a new record by an up-and-coming Northwest band," says Roderick. "The party was an informal gathering of friends—all indie rockers—in the singer's backyard. The producer of the record, a well-known musician himself, was in a celebratory mood and became quite tipsy, eventually retiring to the upstairs bedroom to 'rest' while the party soldiered on.
"Looking for fun," Roderick continues, "I said, 'I'm going to go upstairs and draw a big dick on his forehead [with a] Sharpie marker.' I made a show of marching off in the direction of the house, but I was immediately swarmed by three or four concerned indie girls who grabbed my arms and shrieked, 'Don't you dare!' This doubled my resolve, and there commenced several minutes of drunken grab-ass as I tried to get up the stairs. When it became clear that they would never let me pass, I went instead to the rest room, where I discovered 15 rolls of unattended toilet paper. Where I grew up, leaving 15 rolls of toilet paper unguarded was like setting a tuna casserole on the floor to cool in a house of five dogs. It goes without saying that I immediately smuggled a dozen rolls out of the house and proceeded to TP the trees and bushes all across the front yard while the party noisily raged on behind the fence. I was discovered only when I threw the last roll of toilet paper high up into a tree. The singer-guitarist of the band in question looked me up and down when I returned to the backyard and said, with some effort to sound withering, 'John, you're such a...a...frat boy!'
Robert C. Warner
All the cool kids will be at the Crocodile this weekend to hear Bobby Bare Jr.- alt-country darling/former frat boy.
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"The insult was the equivalent of slapping my face with a white calfskin glove," Roderick goes on. "The term 'frat boy,' as he intended it, had all the connotations of beer-swilling, date-raping, jock, macho crap. I laughed, because to me, a fraternity boy was someone who sneered insults at people with sarcastic WASPy smugness. His knotted-sweater, white-collar disapproval was everything I associated with the Greeks.
"So here we stood, two indie rockers, faced off across a gaping cavern of American culture as defined by the term 'frat boy.' He dismissed my car-wreckin', prank-pullin', fire-startin', gun-shootin', whoop-it-up, call-the-cops American party-makin' with one word: frat. And I saw his sniffing, eye-rolling, weak-assed, big-vocabulary-but-not-quite-used-correctly tsk-tsking as more or less the same thing: fraternity boy. But in fact, we were both limp-wristed, lit-major indie rockers."
The operative words in Roderick's diatribe: "gaping cavern." The stigma associated with frat boys is not a one-size-fits-all-proposition, but has rather been expanded over time to signify anything that anyone might find remotely annoying about white heterosexual males.
I know, I know—poor little white boys. To that, I'll grant you that of all the oppressed groups in society, ex–frat guys should be low men on the totem pole. But like cheerleaders, gays, urban Republicans, white-collar defense lawyers, and Air Supply fans, we deserve to be out, proud, and freed from the shackles of prejudice, once and for all.
mseely@seattleweekly.com
Editorial intern Keegan Hamilton contributed to this report.
