It wasn’t exactly “Animal House,” but it was a frat. And beggars can’t be choosers.

Turns out, they were the real beggars. My first duty as a pledge was to cold-call names from the no-bid list — the roster of the 400-odd students who were rejected from all the other fraternities — and invite them to our events, an activity that reminded me of canvassing for Obama. (“Hi, this is Alex with Acacia Fraternity. I’m following up on an email we sent you last week about an awesome tailgate we’ve got planned for Saturday.”)

I spent the next three months “in training.” I studied the membership manual, memorized the credo, code and preamble; I learned the Greek alphabet (which I more or less knew, thanks to physics). I helped out with recruitment efforts, fetched pizza and beers for the brothers, let them call me “pledge,” and familiarized myself with the frat’s history.

Acacia was founded in Michigan in 1904 by a group of Freemasons. Since then, roughly 50,000 men at 95 schools had joined their ranks. But the Michigan chapter had fallen on hard times and lost its house and charter in the 1990s. The International Council — Acacia’s supreme governing body — had bumped them down from chapter to colony.

I WAS initiated in January, four months after I’d nearly died during my first rushing attempt.

The rite of initiation consisted of a ritual re-enactment of the life of Pythagoras, on whose teachings the frat’s philosophy and iconography were based. Because they didn’t have a house, it was held inside a room in the student union, booked by the hour. As a test of worthiness, I was asked to prove the Pythagorean theorem (a2 + b2 = c2) in under three minutes, and then made to believe I’d gotten it wrong.

Their idea of hazing was to trick you into thinking you were bad at math.

For me, this was a fitting torment. The thought of not being able to tackle an elementary proof was far more demoralizing than failing to hold my liquor and weed.

I had far more in common with these guys than I’d originally thought. And best of all, they didn’t seem to care that I looked like an undercover cop posing as an undergrad.

Unfortunately, the frat itself was a mess. No one came to the chapter meetings, house-hunting was going nowhere, and our recruitment efforts had been a dismal failure: We invited more than a hundred no-bids to our first tailgate, and only three showed up — a pair of skinny punks who were clearly just there for the free hot dogs and a Chinese student who hardly spoke English and didn’t seem to know what a fraternity was.