The Observer, March 25, 2005
Volume XXXVII, Issue 22
Blood and brotherhood: Hazing turns deadly
If Brad Land's memoir Goat was a movie, it would be equal parts Animal House and Fight Club. If Goat was a movie, though, the blood would be fake, the bruises would wash off, and the psychological trauma would be convincingly portrayed by chiseled actors.
But Goat is not a movie and it is not a work of fiction; it is a story of brotherhood and betrayal, laced with testosterone-fueled violence and tightly coiled into a 224-page book that reads faster than an episode of The OC.
The story opens at a party in a small South Carolina town where Land, then 18, lived with his parents after dropping out of his second college in two years. "I couldn't hack school last year because I was lonely and failed most everything," he writes. "I tell everyone it was from the drugs or the alcohol but the truth is I was just lonely and cried all the time and lived in an old house with lots of dust."
At the party, two strangers approach Land and ask for a ride. Afraid to say no, Land obliges. Once on the country road, the strangers, who Land calls "the smile" and "the breath," steal his Oldsmobile, beat him, and dump him in a ditch by side of the road.
"Everything dirt and dust," he writes. "I'm watching from the ground, head straight down, eyes raised, my mouth open in the dirt, all blood and spit and clay, arms laid straight at my side, the breath, his foot on my back grinding my spine down with his heel. He drags it gently up my back, lets it rest on my neck, mashes the toe into my skull, holds it there and I can feel my nose breaking. The breath takes his foot away, the smile down next to my face on his knees, palms laid flat in the dust. I don't want to look at him but I turn my eyes up anyway. His eyes level with mine, he smiles and smiles."
The attack shakes Land to the core. A fragile outsider to begin with, the incident further isolates him from society. The police accuse him of picking up the strangers to make a drug deal. His friends jeer him for not fighting back. His parents refuse to acknowledge what happened.
To regain a sense of normality in his shattered life, Land moves across the state to join his brother Brett at Clemson University. Eager to fit in, Land rushes Kappa Sigma, his brother's fraternity. But he can't escape the violence. At school, Land endures beatings comparable to the earlier assault. Only this time, he is not the victim of a senseless crime – the beatings are a part of the fraternity's hazing ritual.
In his dreams, Land is haunted by images of faceless tormentors. "I know … it was the smile and the breath I was dreaming about," he writes. "Or brothers. Whichever."
The title of the book is derived from an initiation ritual in which the Kappa Sig pledges are herded into a room, shoved on the floor, and forced to bah like goats while punches, spit, and insults are hurled at them.
Unable to handle a second round of abuse, Land quits Kappa Sigma and withdraws from Clemson. Not all in the fraternity are so lucky, though. Following an intense round of hazing, one of the 18-year-old pledges dies of a heart attack.
When an excerpt of Land's story appeared in Go, the magazine billed the piece as "Frat boy abuse: a battered brother tells all." The full story, however, extends beyond a tabloid expose of frat culture – it's about grappling with identity as a victim in a society that glorifies violence and worships masculinity. Written in jerky, terse prose, Land's description of how the incidents change his psyche ("I am dead. I never existed.") are just as raw as his blow-by-blow account of the assaults.
With his impressive literary debut, Land joins a crop of young memoirists – think Elizabeth Wurtzel's Prozac Nation – whose scope of personal experiences shed light and spark dialogue on broader public issues.
Goat ultimately questions violence in society. What's the difference between a fraternity's rite of passage and a first-degree assault? Does it matter if the perpetrators are hoodlums with ski masks or college boys with polo shirts and Kappa Sig pins? The line is blurry. And this time, beer goggles have nothing to do with the haze.
