Part II and Sample Chapter 12

PART II

CHAPTER 12
The Brethren of the Bitter

At Tellefsen Hall in Berkeley, I started a club for men of the Cal Band who were frustrated with women. It started off as a joke that went out of control. The origin of the Brethren of the Bitter lays with my crush on a young woman named Melinda Ng, who played the cymbals and later switched to trombone. She was a petite Asian woman with short black hair. Men of the Cal Band often tried to get the new women of the band to like them by helping the women learn their marching fundamentals during FTP.

The Cal Band held FTP at the University of California at Davis, and we stayed in a dormitory on campus. I was asked to help Melinda learn her marching fundamentals. We practiced in the hallways of the dormitory at UC Davis. Since Melinda had missed much of FTP due to an orientation she had to attend at Berkeley, I had to instruct her in the Cal Band marching style.

Something about teaching a woman something one-on-one left me enamored with Melinda. She was a new member of the Cal Band, and as an oldman (Cal Band jargon for “veteran”) I was her mentor. Eventually, I deluded myself into thinking she had amorous feelings for me. So I invited her to the Festival of Animation held later at UC Berkeley.

My friend at the time, Rich Wong, also invited a lot of other people from the Cal Band to the festival. Rich and I had planned to go with our dates together. He was interested in a Miss Teresa Sanchez, also a newman (Cal Band jargon for “new member”). She too played the cymbals. (Teresa and I would have our own fling about a year later.)

Of course, Rich invited Teresa, his love interest, to the Festival of Animation. So what originally started out as a double date (in my mind at least) turned into a Cal Band excursion. A large group of us all walked from the Band Rehearsal Hall (BRH) to Wheeler Auditorium. Melinda, however, had no idea our outing was supposed to be a date. When she didn’t sit next to me in the auditorium, I became frustrated. In the middle of the festival, I just stood up and went home alone.

I grew bitter with women in general. I made sarcastic jokes about how women never give men (or at least me) a chance. My frustration turned into rants against all women. Phil Escamilla, my roommate and best friend at the time, started calling me, “Hate Guru”. As a joke, I started calling Phil, “Hate Monger”. Our other friend at the time, Wayne Blake, also a Cal Band member and TH resident, Phil and I named, “Hate Lover”. I have to admit that was a dumb name, but I thought it was funny at the time. Phil, Wayne, and I thus invented “hate names” because we hated women.

Together, we formed the Brethren of the Bitter. We were Brethren because we are men, and we were Bitter because women wouldn’t go out with us. Our exclusive club, within TH, which was a club within the Cal Band, began to grow. Other men of the band frustrated with women joined. To join the Brethren of the Bitter, prospective members had to tell current brethren during a meeting their “nuke stories”. When a Cal Band man told the Brethren his nuke story, he told us of how a women (or women) rejected or “nuked” him. Upon delivery of the nuke story, the new brother received his hate name, such as Hate Sponge for example.

We Brethren tried to make the hate names clever and witty, but we weren’t always so successful. Wayne didn’t like being called “Hate Lover”. The Brethren of the Bitter gave hate names to all of the Cal Band women, especially Melinda. We called her, “The Emperor”, in reference to the Emperor of the Star Wars Trilogy movies. Phil carried a torch for Melinda’s friend Angel Hsu, a snare drummer. So we Brethren called Angel, “Darth Vader”. We Brethren gave silly names to Cal Band women and to ourselves. I don’t know for sure if the Cal Band women knew their hate names.

The whole Brethren of the Bitter club was one big inside joke. Luckily, it did not get too much out of control. Most Cal Band members dismissed us as guys with too much time on our hands. The Brethren of the Bitter eventually disbanded after I graduated from Berkeley in 1993.