ring of fire

by Kase Johnstun

IN JANUARY 1995, I waited in a line seven deep outside the Sigma Nu Fraternity house at the University of Utah in an oversized suit jacket, a tie, and slacks. Sigma Nu elders—boys between twenty and twenty-four years old—lined us up shortest to tallest, and because I was the shortest, I stood first in line. I was eighteen years old. Snow fell light and flaky from the silver clouds above.

The elders threw empty (and sometimes full and hard) beer cans at our heads and yelled down from the roof of the massive off-white, square-cornered home. Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” blasted from loudspeakers, his deep voice cutting the night air, a roar in the dark. Beneath the overhanging chants from the roof above, I shook, not because of the cold but from fear and excitement.

I’d heard legendary stories about the pledges who went before us. Stories of those who cried and screamed and begged for mercy. During the past five months of pledging, I'd spent less and less time in the one-bedroom apartment that I shared with my two lifelong friends, Neale and Marc. I was giving them up to spend time at Sigma Nu, and to be honest, I felt that my college life was superior to theirs because my dad had forked over the 750 dollars to buy my entry ticket.

I paid for new friends.

I grew up dreaming about college, about parties, about girls. I was raised Catholic in Mormon Utah, and my parents sent me to a small Catholic school. When I began elementary school, nuns still roamed the hallways. By the time I left elementary, the nuns had gone, but the strict rules of Catholic Schools had not. Fewer than two hundred students attended my high school on the edge of the Rocky Mountains, and I graduated in a massive class of forty-two kids. My life was small, and I wanted BIG. My high school girlfriend had graduated a year earlier than me, attended the Midwest college she had always wanted to attend, joined a sorority, and seemed to be living the college life she wanted. To me, a fraternity would give me that, too, and I would look cool in her eyes, which is what I wanted.

For the month before I started college, I’d felt freedom. My friends and I rented a 600-square-foot apartment and all shared the one bedroom, Neale and I on bunks and Marc in a twin bed below. Neale and I had been friends since the beginning of high school, played on the basketball team together, and somehow ended up as roommates at the U. Marc and I, however, had been friends since kindergarten. We owned the class Candyland games. We hid beneath our teacher’s desk when she went on breaks and scared her when she returned. I slept on his family’s living room floor for birthday sleepovers and random summer-night get-togethers. His mom was our Cub Scout leader. There had been few places in my life outside of my home and my Grandma Cordova’s where I felt that comfortable, that welcome, and safe.

The three of us bought dishes and groceries and decorations. We drank beer. We worked at the car wash and the supermarket during the day and watched Seinfeld at night. We navigated our first month of adulthood together. We learned how to cook spaghetti.

Once they let us inside, the elders made us get down on our knees and clean the blackened kitchen floor of the most disgusting house on Greek Row. The floor turned out to be white linoleum beneath all the gunk. I’d been to other houses, and Sigma Nu was the grossest, no doubt, with the oldest couches, the dirtiest toilets, and the most rank-smelling entryway near campus. But it was also the most anti-Mormon house on campus, so it was the only house that claimed me during pledge week five months earlier. For the house and for us pledges, there were two criteria: non-LDS and a drinker. I was both.

“Clean it, Guut,” the elders said. Guut was the Sigma Nu derivation of goat, which they called all of us, not to be confused with GOAT—more like actual billy goat.

While we scrubbed, they kicked us in the ass with their Doc Martens. They spat on the tile in front of us. They berated us. They threatened that we wouldn’t be full brothers if we couldn’t make it through the week. Finally, when the elders were too drunk and tired and were ready to be assholes somewhere else together, they sent us to bed on the basement floor, another floor just like the kitchen that had been covered in the black tar of footprints and spilled beer from keg parties and sweat from dancing. That’s where we slept. Goats. Guuts. Freshmen. Initiates. The lowest of the low in the lowest room in the house. The symbolism did not escape me. They wanted us to bond down there.

In the middle of the night, we rose to shouts of drunken brothers yelling, “Guuts, get the fuck up.” They put handkerchiefs over our eyes like we were kidnapped, made us stand on chairs, and told us that they’d placed broken glass on the ground.

“Jump,” they said. “Take the risk. There’s glass on the ground. Prove your loyalty.”

I jumped first. In my mind, I knew there was no glass on the ground. Lawsuits, ya know?

I landed on potato chips.

They made us parade up and down the street in our underwear, place our fingers at the edges of the pool table while they took pool shots at them with the cue ball, and tied our wrists and feet together and made us look at each other for hours while they disappeared to party.

One night, we stood in the basement of the four-story home and wrapped our lips around the thin tubing of a four-story beer bong—they had threaded the beer bong through the floors of the house. Someone on the top floor of the home poured three beers into the funnel, and the liquid gained speed with gravity, filling our bellies at the bottom.

“If you puke, you eat it!”

A fellow pledge puked. They didn’t make him eat it. They only made him clean it up amidst a barrage of, “You pussy. You wimp. You don’t deserve to be here. You fucking girl. You fat fucking piece of shit.” I did not puke.

We sang songs and memorized oaths, but I have never been a fan of faux ceremony, so while the elders chanted in their robes, my mind left the room and drifted away to thoughts of “How stupid is this?” and “I gotta work tomorrow.” The ceremony felt hyperbolic, rituals to exult young men with a synthesized authority. I pushed away hard. Those nights, those chants, they planted a small seed opposing the one they had intended: instead of dependence and the aim to please, I moved toward independence and dismissal of their ways, of their traditions, of their cruelty for cruelty’s sake.

“Are you scared, Guut Johnstun?” one elder yelled at me while I stood between other guuts and took a barrage of insults. “Your face looks like you’re going to cry.”

I shook my head no.

“You gonna cry, Guut Johnstun?” Marc said to me. He laughed at me with a smirk on his face and a drying towel over his shoulder. I could barely hear him over the loud dryers at the car wash where we worked.

I was the only Guut who had a job, and to me, scrubbing cars was a godsend. The water and sunlight and cold winter days nourished the planted seed of discontent and unadulterated bemusement at what happened at the fraternity house that week—work gave me a separation.

The other pledges had to spend their days in the library studying while the older boys watched to make sure they didn’t sleep during the day. At work, I was me again. I washed cars. I joked with Marc about all the shit going on back at the frat house, even though I had been warned to keep it a secret. I didn’t really care. We laughed. I made fun of the ridiculous robes and how seriously the boys wore them and acted in them.

Working and sweating over cars in ten-degree weather and laughing with Marc was like a pressure valve being released, and it brought perspective: this initiation thing was just that—a “thing” that young men did to pass the time, to try to break you down, and to attempt to establish hierarchy in a made-up society. We weren’t going to war after this. This was child’s play, not much more advanced than our rule over Candyland in kindergarten. Sometime during each of my shifts, an elder would pull into the parking lot to make sure I was there. And I always was—I needed money (that was the deal with my dad, and my boss wasn’t going to let me off for some silly college thing), so they would just drive away—their hangovers too much to bear.

One night during the week, a fight broke out between two brothers. One of the brothers had slept with the other’s girlfriend after a party. The fight happened out of nowhere. One “brother” came into the house screaming and found the boy who'd slept with his girlfriend. Fists were thrown until the oldest of the house stepped in to break it up. Another night, a boy laughed about how his girlfriend wouldn’t “put out” so after she passed out, he masturbated on her. Others laughed along with him. I didn’t laugh. It made me sick inside. This story cemented my scorn toward them all. They laughed at these things. I wanted out.

I’d made one friend in the house, a guy named Eduardo. Our fellow initiates had all broken down and cried for one reason or another, mostly from exhaustion and sleep deprivation and from someone yelling at them for being fat or stupid or both for a whole week. Eduardo, like me, had yet to cry; however, on the second to last night of the week, with time running out, the elders tied our hands together and made us sit back-to-back on the bedroom floor of the fraternity president. I knew what they were doing. They needed us to fully break down so they could bring us back up in the comfort of our “new” family, like we were in boot camp or a cult.

“Do you think your father doesn’t love you? Is that why he left? Do you think that if he loved you more he would have stayed?” the president said to Eduardo. And then, after one last, “Does your father not love you? Is that why he left?” Eduardo cried. His head dropped and rose and dropped and rose again, his chest grunting to raise his body from its bent-over curve. His lungs shuddered against mine.

In that dark chamber filled with marijuana smoke and the smell of rarely washed sheets and the odor of stale beer that rose up from old, hardened carpet, the president used what he knew about Eduardo’s past and his parents’ divorce against him. The president took his knowledge of Eduardo’s weak spot and exploited it. If I didn’t see this blatant low blow, I might have cried that night, too, to get them off my back, just to fit in—but after that, I saw behind the curtain. I knew I wouldn't let them win.

While Eduardo sobbed, they turned on me. I don’t remember what they asked. They drilled me with questions, doing their best to find my weak spot until that session of the initiation ended. I did not break. It’s not that I was stronger than my friend, but I was strong because of him. I hated the whole thing.

I wouldn’t fucking cry for them.

The next night, we were initiated. We partied. We became members. During the awkward ceremony, they gave us all our pledge names. I don’t remember any of the others, but I do remember that they were all a mix of derogatory and funny at the same time. Not mine. Mine was straightforward: Guut Underdog. My senior talked about how they never broke me and how, with my small stature, I was much, much tougher than anyone would have believed. I accepted that name with pride—not for the reason they believed, but for my own reasons—and I would never use my pledge name. I was already gone.

I woke up the next morning and went home to my longtime childhood friends. I didn’t go back to the Sigma Nu house until the end of freshman year, at Eduardo’s request. He said that our other classmates missed me. He and I had become close friends. We hung out outside of the fraternity, and he began working at the car wash, too. I think he invited me back because he was getting razzed that I never showed up.

When I finally did go back to Sigma Nu, I expected to take shit for not coming around after Guut week, so I gave some half-hearted apologies, some fake I-missed-you-toos, and some hugs. I missed no one. Toward the end of the night, I found myself on the overused, flat-cushioned couch alone—I wasn’t missed either. I began to gather myself to walk the two miles home. There was no Uber, no Lyft, only my feet.

And just as I was about to hoist myself up from the dirty, flat-cushioned couch, I got hit with an onslaught of insults from the same guy who’d jerked off on his girlfriend. He had always intimidated me, with his strong jaw and dark hair and chiseled physique. He called me a loser. He said that I betrayed the entire fraternity. He said that I was weak, that I didn’t have the stones to be a real brother. He laid it on thick, really thick, hitting me hard with what he had finally figured out to be my insecurities, the ones I’d had since childhood, not fitting in or being cool and always feeling like I never had the fun life I wanted.

He had found my weak spot, but this was not a charade. This was cruelty. I knew the difference. This man meant these things and they hurt. Other older “brothers” stood around and watched him sling insults at me while I sat on the couch, until I broke down and cried in front of him. I still regret that rush of emotion. This young man found a way to hurt me, and I let him.

I passed out on that couch. The next morning, I woke up, and I called my roommate Neale to come and pick me up. When I fell into his truck, he stared. He shook his head. He didn’t say anything. Instead, he shoved his stick into first gear and drove me back to our apartment where I climbed up onto my top bunk bed and fell asleep to the sounds of Marc and Neale watching TV and laughing in the living room of our apartment.

I never walked through the door of the Sigma Nu house again. My old friends knew all my weaknesses, all the things that could hurt me, all the things that had broken my heart in my young life. If they wanted to make me cry, they could. But they didn’t.

As a grown man, forty-nine years old, I cry. I’m a crier.

Whenever I watch McFarland USA and Kevin Costner yells, “That’s not Danny Diaz!” when Diaz crosses the finish line, I can’t hold the tears back. Sometimes, I cry at the overly produced ending of Kitchen Nightmares. Other times, I only have to watch my son grow in front of me, his smile and laughter and wit and limbs maturing on our comfy, lived-on couch when I catch a glimpse of him, and I have to pull back tears before he realizes I’m staring and asks me, “What, Dad?”

To be honest, I’ve always been a crier—as a child, a teenager, a young adult, and a middle-aged adult. Now I cry for others more than I cry for myself. But when I am threatened, I harden. Cruelty for cruelty’s sake makes me angry, not fearful or sad.

When I see others attacked, I ache for them. I cry.

In July 2018, still angry with our country’s first election of Donald J. Trump, I watched the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings. I sat on my family couch and leaned forward, elbows on knees towards the C-SPAN coverage—the unedited, unglamorized, unpoliticized coverage of those days. I should have been working, grading papers, but I wanted so badly for this man to go down for what he did. I wanted men to go down for what they do. It was time, wasn’t it? The Me Too Movement had gained a lot of steam in the previous year, and I thought this would be a big fish to catch and fry. Trump’s nominee goes down for being a complete asshole.

When Dr. Blasey Ford testified, I wept for her. I wept while she bravely testified against not only Kavanaugh but against power itself. Thirty years ago, during my brief tenure at the Sigma Nu house, I was never witness to assaults like those Dr. Ford described. But I remember Guut week, the way the guys fought over girls like property, the way they joked about masturbating on unconscious women, and these memories stick like kidney stones in my blood stream. Deep down, I think those guys wanted me to laugh with them—to laugh along is to approve. I think the young man who verbally attacked me that last night must have seen that I did not laugh and was threatened by my refusal. Maybe that’s why he targeted me. I can’t say for sure. Thirty years later, I’m telling my story in writing because I know we don’t have to witness it to believe that sexual assault happens, to believe the assaulted.

About the author:

Kase Johnstun lives and writes in Ogden, Utah. He is Manager for the Utah Center for the Book and Utah’s Representative to the Library of Congress. His novel Cast Away was a finalist for the multicultural category for the 2024 IPPY Awards, a finalist for the 2024 Page Turner Awards, a SHELF UNBOUND 2024 Notable Reads, and a juried candidate for the Ansfield-Wolf Book Award. His other books include the novel Let the Wild Grasses Grow and the book of nonfiction Beyond the Grip of Craniosynostosis. His essays have been published widely, and he was named the 2021 Ogden Mayor’s Award Recipient for the Literary Arts.