Frat Boys

A friend of mine, Chris Miller, is the ultimate frat boy. The frat boy's frat boy. Look up 'frat boy' in the dictionary and you'll find his picture there.

A former National Lampoon and Saturday Night Live writer, he wrote the movie 'Animal House', based on his own fraternity experiences. We became friends through our kids - his son and my stepson have been best friends since preschool; they are now college sophomores. He has an encyclopedic knowledge and appreciation of jazz, rock, blues and reggae, is a science-fiction fan, as am I, and is one of the few people I knew who actually knew of and appreciated Don & Dewey, who I played with for years. Cool guy.

When the Kowboy was first running for office in 2000, I remember talking with Chris about him. From what I had learned about him during the primaries, I was underwhelmed. "He's just an overgrown frat boy," I said to Chris.

"Hey!" he said. "What's wrong with frat boys? I was a frat boy!"

"Nothing is wrong with frat boys as long as they're in college, where they belong," I replied. "But would you want a frat boy like you and your buddies were back then to be in charge of the free world?"

He thought about that for a minute. "You may have a point," he said.

He has just written a book called The Real Animal House: The Awesomely Depraved Saga of the Fraternity That Inspired the Movie, and he e-mailed me yesterday to tell me that he was going to be on the O'Reilly Factor that night to talk about it with none other than the Splotchy One himself. Apparently BOR was hidden away in an undisclosed location (perhaps the S-Ps were after him) but nevertheless he intended to poke his liver-spotted puss out long enough to interview my pal.

Now, I must admit that I am not exactly what you'd call a regular Factor watcher. In fact, I can say with some accuracy that my retinas have never been assaulted with that particularly grisly visage on the TV. I'm careful to limit my exposure to him to the clips that Stephanie Miller plays in the morning - sloppy seconds is all I can handle from him. But for Chris I would heroically make an exception.

It was worth it, though - this was an O'Reilly I had never seen before. He was practically babbling. It became embarrassingly obvious that the secret desire of BOR's shriveled little raisinish heart was to have been a cool frat boy in college, instead of the antisocial, irritating, splenetic little weasel that he must have been. He was lovin' on Chris like a drunken co-ed. I was waiting for him to ask Chris for his phone number, or did he maybe wanna hang out sometime, y'know - get crazy.

I hope nobody has the heart to tell him that Chris is an S-P.

On second thought, I hope somebody does.