PART 2 ***** COLLEGE FREEFALL. First some skydiving & Animal House-type parties, before classes/career-shifts!

Excerpted from TWELVE DEAD FROGS and Other Stories--a Filmmaker's Memoir: https://bunchofgrapes.indielite.org/search/Schmidt%2C%20Rick?type=author

FRAT RAT (1962)

As I disembarked from the airplane in Tucson, descending an open-air gangplank, I was immediately hit by a blast of ninety-plus degree air. Overdressed in my long-sleeved cotton shirt with undershirt beneath, I soon became drenched in sweat. After a quick taxi ride, I began to get assimilated to my new life, first getting my dorm room assignment, locating the building (an ugly cement bunker four stories high), and stowing my suitcase in the two-person, bunk-bed room. Then, following the exodus of a few other disoriented freshmen, I walked down the street with them to a nearby restaurant and ate a hamburger. That familiar meal brought me back to life, supplying not only nourishment, but a sense of emotional stability as well. I may be on Mars, I thought, but at least they have burgers! I can’t say that I made any real friends those first few days, just kept pretty much to myself. I still wasn’t sure yet whether I was in college as a punishment or as a reward.

The heat made the whole first week of college even more surreal than it would have been for me otherwise. People basically seemed to move in slow motion. I was coming in from coastal southern California, where there was always some water content in the air. In any case, my body tried to adjust.

Before my classes got underway beyond the assigning of books – I was entering the College of Mines, majoring in Geology – I enrolled in the so-called fun of rush week, where the freshman would visit the various fraternity houses and be chosen or not. Over the course of a week this selection process began to, not surprisingly, take a toll on me. I certainly couldn’t handle the process of accepted/rejection, being judged like cattle. So, the stream of daily evaluations began to make me more than a little crazy.

Finally, on about the sixth day of rushes, at the Phi Psi House introduction, I noticed one of the senior members fraternity ID pins laying on a table and I just snatched it up. I pinned it on my jacket, just under the hankie pocket, and started interviewing the pledges myself (kids my age), riddling them with the usual inane questions. “Where are you from? What’s your major? What are your future aspirations? Where do you see yourself in five years?” I repeated the same tired questions I’d memorized from all the other fraternities. I had the routine down cold. After about twenty minutes of this play-acting with several different pledges, I noticed a group of Phi Psi fraternity brothers out of the corner of my eye, just cracking up as they watched my activities. So we bonded in that way, my insanity proving well-aligned to the appreciative membership of that particular organization. When I got word of their invitation to become a frat brother I joined up.

Living in the Phi Psi house I quickly learned that I was rooming with a group of people even crazier than I was. One guy invited me to parachute jump, so early one Sunday morning I drove with him and a girl I knew to a small desert landing strip outside Tucson. We were each given extremely cursory instructions on how to jump and land – we basically hopped off a foot-high log and rolled over like in a tumbling class. That was the entire training session. That’s all!

On my first real jump out of a plane I was on my back in the air, spinning around in a roll a couple thousand feet above the ground when the chute opened up. I was shaken somewhat unconscious for a few seconds by the jolt of the static line operation (a static line remains connected to the airplane, for automatic dispatch without a manual ripcord). Coming to, I untangled my right foot, which was by then snagged in the nylon lines above my head. Then came the fun part. I floated peacefully above the desert for a couple of minutes before crash landing on an asphalt runway. I didn’t break any bones because I followed orders of an instructor on the ground. He yelled up to me through a bullhorn to “Look straight out! Keep elbows in, legs bent slightly!”

Most importantly, he kept repeating, “DON’T LOOK DOWN!” That was critical information, because after floating awhile in the sky, the natural inclination of jumpers is to pull back their legs as the ground suddenly approaches. This results most often in one or two broken legs, from the equivalent of that two-story drop. Amazingly, I landed correctly, although I was way off target while the girl I was with landed right on the small bulls-eye painted on the tarmac.

I jumped twice more, even packed my own chute with the help of a frathouse crazy, Brad, a multiple jumper with 50+ freefalls to his credit. He walked me through the complex wrapping and folding up of lines and parachute material, which, if done carelessly, could result in a deadly tangle. On the third try we were supposed to pull our own ripcord before the static line automatically did that for us. I remembered, while the girl didn’t. I was glad to learn that if I bailed out at some future time, I would activate my chute. After that, I called it quits. I figured that I could think of less painful ways to die than free-falling thousands of feet if my parachute failed to open

I heard later that a woman instructor had watched in horror as her brother completed his freefall – he disappeared behind some tall trees in the distance, with no apparent chute having opened. It seemed to the onlookers that he hadn’t pulled his cord in time. Without goggles, his eyes had fogged up in the high velocity wind, and he couldn’t read the altimeter properly. Noticing the rapidly approaching desert floor, he had popped his emergency chute instead (last packed in the 1940’s, during WWII), and that that quick release pattern had saved him. If he had deployed the regular chute – its sliding sleeve gives a less jarring release – he would have hit the ground at around 90 miles per hour.

(Actor Tom Cruise will skydive at Olympics?

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Another crazy fraternity brother down the hall was a collector of animal life from the surrounding desert. Once he invited me into his dorm room, had me sit on the upper bunk while he released his pet rattlesnake collection – two five-foot diamond backs and a couple smaller species. I quickly pulled my feet up, wondering just how high those big snakes could jump!

When I accompanied him out to the desert once he casually revealed a small ’bark scorpion’ sitting under an innocent-looking log, remarking that its bite was possibly fatal. Later that day, he found a cute little coral snake – pretty orange and yellow stripes – which he presented to me curled up on his palm. He asked if I wanted to hold it, saying that if I kept my hand skin stretched tightly like he was doing, arching his fingers back, the little snake had no place to sink in its teeth. When I asked him if it was poisonous he replied that the venom could supposedly kill a person in about seven or eight seconds, corals being the deadliest snake in North America. So much for desert lore! To think that I had gone into the desert at night for frat parties, laid around in dry-washes drinking beer, oblivious to dangers such as that.

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Just like in the movie Animal House, they had crazy, rowdy parties too. Somehow, at the first big one I attended, I got hooked up with a blind date, a fairly plain young blond girl whom I was told to pick up at her dorm. The party, insensitively called ’a pig party,’ was devoted to having intercourse with as many ’undesirable’ girls as could be lured to the fraternity house. (For the record, I didn’t ‘score’ with any female there, and neither did I want to!)

It’s embarrassing enough to admit now that I was ever a part of such a thing. But I did end up the instrument of fate, my actions (or inactions) indirectly responsible for getting that frat house kicked off campus for all eternity.

The interior of the frat house had been redecorated for the big bash, floors covered with mattresses, parachutes hanging from the ceiling all the way to the floor, strategically placed refreshment centers that held huge cauldrons of fruit juice mixed with sloe-gin. You literally had to crawl to get around, and with the lights so low you could barely see a foot in front of your face. The disorientation from such tight, dark enclosures, and the loud pounding music, made you feel drunk before a drop of the lethal beverage even touched your lips.

My date and I tried to kiss and get in the mood, but our hearts just weren’t in it. So, she proceeded to wander off and get completely shit-faced drunk. When it came time to find her and get her back to the dorm, I couldn’t locate her anywhere. Only the next day did I learn what had happened.

Somebody had brought the girl into the bathroom to sober her up, held her under the shower (to wash off the vomit, etc.), and had then proceeded to strip off her wet clothes, dry her, wrap her up in her coat and return her to the campus. At the front desk of the woman’s dorm she’d passed out, sinking to the floor, her coat flipping open to reveal a naked body. That incident finally got the fraternity house expelled from campus for good, dispersing all its members, including myself, back to normal life.

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