Inside the Frat House: Manic escapades and basketball

 By Carl Sessions

sessions@grinnell.edu

The inhabitants of 1017 High Street are proud of the cars strewn across their front lawn.

“Every day you have to switch your car to the other side of the road if you don’t want to get a ticket,” tenant Joel Pollick ’13 said.

“We don’t have parking spots in the house,” Joe Rogers ’13 explained. “[And] it’s annoying to switch spots.”

The front-lawn as parking lot solution is typical of the gregarious ethos maintained by Frat House’s members Pollick, Rogers, Griffin Lentsch ’13, Brian McManamy ’13 and Garrett Nitz ’13. After all, they have experience living together, as everyone except Pollick lived in the house last year.

The Frat House name stems from the fact that they are all basketball players.

“The name started out as a joke because [fraternities aren’t] really what this campus is about,” Nitz explained. “But people started calling it Frat House, so we kept calling it that.”

Inside the living and dining rooms, the Frat House brothers have done little to decorate—a small table and several couches are the only items of furniture, all in one corner. This may be because of there is a history of destruction inside Frat House’s walls.

“We’ve had many people jump through tables here,” Rogers dead-panned.

Apparently, a revelrous partygoer once body-slammed into a ping-pong table and caved it in. During the same night, this individual continued his rampage by breaking a living room window in what Rogers described as a “happy punch.”

When explaining the story of the broken window, the crew seems more amused than upset. They had advised the individual to not punch the window, but he “just decided to do it,” according to Lentsch.

“He was cut really badly and had to go to the hospital,” Rogers said.

Exploits at the Frat House have gone beyond broken windows and destroyed ping-pong tables.

“There was a kid who tried to punch through my door,” Pollick said. “He thought some girl had called his friend a rapist, which she didn’t, and he took it out on my door…he just started punching it and broke two of its panels.”

Cleaning up after parties as destructive as these may seem to be like a lot of work, but when asked the topic of chore division came up, the group laughed.

“We cook, not clean,” Pollick said.

“But we don’t really cook, either,” Rogers added.

The most use that the kitchen gets is apparently on weekend nights.

“Our oven has a sensitive on/off switch, so when we have parties here…every single night someone accidently turns on the oven,” Pollick said. “Then 15 minutes later someone mentions that the oven is smoking and we find it preheated to 450 degrees.”

“It begins to smell like gas in the house,” Nitz added. “So we figure it out eventually.”

An overactive oven might be the least of the group’s problems, though. According to Rogers, “the insulation’s not great” and Pollick noted that “multiple cats live under our porch.”

Despite these structural issues, the group loves living in the house. They are excited for the year to continue, so more manic memories can be made.

“Cinco de Mayo is coming up,” Rogers said. “It’s our big basketball-themed party. It’s going to be f*****g awesome.”

“We put a lot of money into it,” Nitz said. “Everyone’s invited.”