I headed off to college about as unprepared as anyone in the history of heading off to college. When I got my class schedule, I was surprised you didn’t have to stay in school all day like high school. I didn’t realize that your time was your own – before, between and after classes. And I didn’t realize, you didn’t even have to go to class.

But very soon after I arrived at Northeastern University in Boston in the fall of 1969, I transformed myself into a guy with a 4-point grade average. I lettered in football, basketball and baseball. Engineering was my major.

At least that’s what I told the guys from the engineering fraternity when they were looking for recruits. Since there was the potential for parties, girls and help with tests and term papers, I told them I was a National Merit Scholarship finalist and an all-star athlete. And very quickly, I became their prime recruit. They didn’t bother to check my stories. They were engineers, after all. Not journalists.

The plot began raveling on the second night of school in the dorm. I had gone to dinner with my roommates the first night because I thought, by luck of the draw, they might be my new best friends. But I quickly recognized I had nothing in common with them. Nothing. I wasn’t going to eat another meal with them and I began plotting to get rid of them.

On the second night, I went to dinner on my own. I went down the line, calmly collecting my dinner. But I knew the dreaded moment was coming: The moment when I had finished my purposed march through the food line to the instant when I turned to face the vast maw of the cafeteria. It’s an experience most school kids know. You look for friends, or a friendly face or an empty table. It feels as if everyone is staring at you to see if you indeed have friends. I scanned the cafeteria faster and with more precision than the Terminator, hoping to show as quickly as possible that I belonged.

Finally, I spotted a table that had several empty seats with just two guys who looked like guys I would hang around with sitting at the end. I headed in their direction. As I neared the table, they seemed to sense that I was the type of guy they would hang around with. They invited me to sit.

That’s how I met Glenn and Bob.

 We hit it off immediately. For one thing, they thought I was funny. That’s always a deal maker. Glenn, especially, burst out with big guffaws at most of my attempts at humor. And for another thing, the three of us had similar high school sports experiences: we were on the teams, but we didn’t play much. Where we differed was that I focused on my social life in high school while Glenn and Bob had focused on their grades.

Now that they were in college, though, Glenn and Bob wanted to mix in a bit of socializing with their studying. Since they were engineering majors, they planned to pledge the engineering fraternity. In fact, they said there was a social at the frat that Friday night and they asked me to come along.

I didn’t know anything about declaring a major at that point, much less declaring myself an engineer. And I wasn’t on the invite list. But Glenn and Bob said I could go as their third roommate, Dale. Dale was an engineering major and on the invite list. He didn’t have a social bone in his body and there seemed to be no chance anyone in the frat would ever see or meet him. He was the type who went straight to class and then back to his room – or the library – to study.

So that weekend, I became Dale.

The frat was located in a 100-year-old, four-story, gorgeous row house on Commonwealth Avenue. Everywhere I looked, there was dark, rich woodwork that screamed – in an understated way – old money.  There seemed to be fireplaces in every room and the art on the walls had thick wooden frames that were works of art themselves.

However, I didn’t really have too much time to soak in the details of the house because there were so many friendly people approaching, saying how happy they were to have me/Dale there. The people approaching were not just the frat brothers. There were a lot of women at the party that night, too.  The brothers had invited many more women than men. After introductions and kind of pairing each of us off, we were escorted to a well-stocked bar.

One of the senior brothers was the bartender.

“What’ll you have?” he asked as he wiped the counter in front of me.

This was the first time I was in a house being offered alcohol and I did not have to have that nagging thought in the back of my head that the parents might come home any minute. I could relax.

 Ordering a beer seemed like a childish choice, what with a pretty, older upperclasswoman sitting next to me, chatting me up. And too pedestrian. The only mixed drinks that I’d had up to that point were gin and tonics and rum and cokes. Choosing one of those might indicate I wasn’t as sophisticated as I wanted to appear.

“I’ll have a martini,” I answered.

Luckily, the bartender caught on to where I was going.

“Shaken, not stirred?” he asked, appearing to take me very seriously, as if I were a peer.

“Quite right,” I responded, revealing to anyone paying attention that I got my cocktail ideas from James Bond movies.

That one martini led to another. And another. And I lost count after that.

As the evening wore on, I began inflating Dale’s already impressive academic credentials with a few impressive sports and social credentials. Just for fun. I wasn’t going to assume just any identity.

That’s when I became a 4-point student from White Plains (that was true – about Dale) and lettered in football, basketball and baseball (definitely not true – about either me or Dale) and still had two girl friends from high school, one was going to Harvard and the other to Tufts (which was partially true). The added brag about me still dating both of them and them not knowing it was, of course, not true.

It hadn’t been my intention to go that far. But the alcohol, the flattering attention of the women and the atmosphere of the frat house that made me feel as if I entered adulthood that night got my mouth out in front of my brain.

After that night, I was the prize pledge. Number one of the recruiting list. I was invited for dinner, for drinks, set up on dates with older women (juniors and seniors!) who would pick me up after classes and take me wherever I wanted to go. They showed me the sites of Boston, took me to the best bars and pizza joints and brought me to great parties.

Well, they were engineers, so the parties weren’t completely out of control, but engineers are creative and I was 18, away from home for the first time and these were college women, fawning all over me. So the parties and the people seemed pretty great to me.

I became known as The Martini Man.

It was a great ride. But after a few weeks, I could sense, just like in the spring when I was downing several beers between classes in high school, I was getting out of control again. And by October, I realized I was spending more time on the charade than I was on anything else, including school, ostensibly the reason I was at Northeastern.

Trying to keep straight the details of my made-up life and the studying of engineering just to keep up on the terms, the professors and the deception was wearing me out. The superficial relationships with the “older” women was something I always thought I wanted. But it in no way was as warm and fulfilling as my relationships with Bethani and Sam had been.

And I discovered I wasn’t a naturally a deceitful person. I had to work at it. It wasn’t fun anymore.

Even though I actually liked a lot of the people I met, my potential brothers, I decided to ease myself out of the situation. I stopped going around to the frat house every day. At first, I skipped a day here and there. Then it would be two.

After a week, Glenn and Bob said the brothers were worried that I might be getting attention from other fraternities. They wanted to seal the deal with me and decided to send an intervention party to “my room.”

I had no idea that they were coming. But on the day of the intervention, they didn’t come to my room. Because Alan Sivell was not their prize pledge. Dale was. And he lived in Glenn and Bob’s room.  And that’s who they found the day they came to our dorm, White Hall, looking for their recruit.

Uh-oh.

I only discovered this by accident.

White Hall was a big dorm, five stories high and home to about 400 freshmen. The building itself was shaped like a “C” with three wings – A, B, C – of about thirty freshmen on each of the upper floors. Glenn and Bob … and Dale lived on the 5^th floor in the C wing. I also lived on the 5^th floor, but at the other end of the floor in the A wing.

While the frat brothers were in Glenn, Bob and Dale’s room learning of the deception, I was in my room, thinking about how hungry I was. So I decided to head down Huntington Avenue to Ugi’s for a pepper steak sub.

I locked my dorm room door and began walking to the elevators that were in the middle of that floor, in the B wing because they were the fastest. Everyone knew that. Even the frat boys. Because just as I was about to push the down button, the curve of the dorm hallway suddenly revealed my soon-to-be former admirers and they didn’t look happy. It didn’t take a genius – or a 4.0 from White Plains – to figure out where they had come from. And what they had learned.

We saw each other at the same time. I figured I was a dead man.

I didn’t think. I reacted. I dove through the nearest door, which, thankfully was not some random guy’s room, but the door to a stairwell. I raced down two flights of stairs and popped out on the third floor. I ran back in the direction I came from along the third floor corridor.

When I came to the next stair well, I raced back up to the fifth floor, ran to my room and locked myself in for the night. I not only didn’t get Ugi’s, but I also skipped dinner in the café.

According to my engineering friends, the frat brothers were very disappointed. They weren’t really mad, just hurt. Which made me feel bad.

I was a little worried about bumping into the frat guys on campus, but it was a big campus. 40,000 students. The largest private university in the country. I figured I could wait them out. But just to be safe, I stayed mainly in my room for the next two weeks, growing out my beard and gaining 20 pounds by going back for seconds and thirds at each meal.

While I was in my self-imposed witness protection program, I got a letter from my Spanish professor. I had been getting an “A” in the class before I disappeared. Now she told me that I had missed a major test and was in danger of flunking the course.

Panicked, I ran to the mirror. After a few minutes of turning left, turning right, taking a few steps back and then getting really close, I decided it was safe enough to try going to classes again.

Once our fun little game had run its course, Glenn and Bob joined the frat and, even though they initially had been in on the ruse, switched sides. It had been their idea, but they acted as if I had done something terribly dishonest. And maybe I had stretched the game out too far. Anyway, we soon stopped checking on each other about when to go down for dinner. And we weren’t even speaking by the first of November.

I had tired of going down to Glenn and Bob’s room anyway. Maybe tired isn’t the right word. Frightened. I had to pass through the middle, or B, wing and that was a real no man’s land.

The University had decided to upgrade its hockey team that year and had landed a bunch of prize recruits. These guys were great hockey players, but not great scholars. They were very big, very strong and kind of cruel.  It was a real adventure getting from my wing – A – to the engineer’s C wing.

I had heard about guys who got yanked into the hockey players’ rooms and had to serve as their servants for the night. One guy was particularly unlucky: they held him for close to three days before he escaped. A few of them got kicked out for that, but no formal kidnapping charges were filed.

Before I had heard that, I would pass through their wing at a pretty swift pace, because I didn’t want to be hit by one of the bodies that occasionally would come flying out of their rooms. I certainly wouldn’t make eye contact. After I heard about the indentured servitude, I would, at first, try to make myself invisible as I passed their rooms.

Finally, I chose a safer route. I would take go down the stairs in our wing down to the lobby, go outside no matter what the weather, walk to the C wing lobby and climb the stairs to the 5^th floor, avoiding the hockey players altogether.

I eventually decided it would be best to spend more time in my wing of the dorm. And I needed to focus on my living situation and my room. Which meant getting rid of my roommates.

Next time: Chapter 26 Out with the old. In with the new.