The exodus starts around 4 p.m. on Friday. Computers flicker off in offices across Baltimore and Washington. Duffel bags stuffed with T-shirts and bathing suits are tossed into the trunks of Hondas and BMWs. ATM machines are milked. The race to beat the Bay Bridge backup is on.

A hundred miles away, a gray, aluminum-sided house sits dark and empty. Its six bedrooms are freshly vacuumed, and its kitchen counters gleam. The refrigerator holds eggs, juice and blueberry yogurt.

Now the cars point east on Route 50, speeding toward the same destination: A place right in the middle of a bar-, restaurant-, and rental-house-packed strip of Route 1 in Delaware. Behind the wheels are twenty- and thirtysomethings about to converge in a swirl of booze, junk food, sun and seduction.

Tom Oliver, 26, climbs the steps to the gray house, located across the street from the Starboard bar. Oliver has paid $635 for a summer-long weekend share here, but he isn't even guaranteed a bed. There are 32 other men and women in the rental house, not including guests - scheduled and spontaneous. He reaches for the door knob.

For the next 48 hours, the real world will be put on hold.

The group house in Dewey Beach is about to come alive.

Friday night

Oliver lets out a roar and leaps into the air, wrapping his arms and legs around Tom Grannas, the "house dad" who makes sure the beer supply is never lacking. Another guy shouts at two women coming through the door: "Get a beer and get naked!" Chris Graham sits in the kitchen, wolfing down barbecued chicken wings from a plastic container. Cans of Miller Lite hiss as they pop open.

Welcome to the the crash pad for what may be the hardest-partying crowd in Dewey. Welcome to Darwin House.

The name is no accident: Only bodies that can endure a self-inflicted marathon of abuse will survive a summer here. If group houses were people, other homes in the neighborhood might be middle-aged salesmen, or tea-sipping librarians. Darwin House is the nocturnal, guitar-bashing, tabloid-headline-grabbing rock star of Dewey Beach.

Listen to its voices:

"So I know this guy, and he gets ATM receipts - he collects them from the trash and looks for the one [with the biggest balance]. Then when he meets a girl at a bar, he says, 'Here, I'll write my number on this - it's just an old ATM receipt.' He's 12 for 12 on getting calls back!"

"The worst was when we were driving home and I was in the passenger's seat, about to puke. We were in my new BMW, and I couldn't find the button to roll down the window in time."

"I went through a drive-through last year and we decided it would be a good idea to go through backwards. Our headlights were shining into the car behind us, and theirs were shining at us. The woman at the window hated us."

By now, 14 people are sitting around the living room, killing time before hitting the bars. Fourteen hands clutch beers. The juice and yogurt have been pushed to the back of the refrigerator, crammed behind two 30-pack boxes of Miller Lite. The television spins through channels, lingering on a Jennifer Aniston movie.

"She's smokin'," sighs one of the guys.

Seeking out attractive members of the opposite sex is a pastime house members pursue vigorously. It's a prime reason they come to Dewey. But there's one exception: Flings between housemates are prohibited. The potential for disaster is too great. Nearly every weekend, as people stumble around in an alcohol-induced haze searching for sleeping space, this rule gets broken.

Flings with members of other houses, however, are highly encouraged - so much so that the $25-a-night guest fee is waived for unplanned visitors. It's called "boosting house morale." Oliver exercised the option when he met a girl from another house. She's a frequent visitor, but if they stay together, she won't be able to buy a share in the house next summer. At Darwin House, couples are banned.

Darwin House's only other nod to structure is a schedule pinned to a bulletin board. It determines which eight people get parking passes each weekend, but with this perk comes a chore: Laundry duty, bathroom clean-up, vacuum patrol. No other ironclad rules exist here. That's the way members like it.

At 9:30 p.m., everyone peels themselves off the floral-print couches. They stop for pizza, then wander into the Waterfront, which has an indoor bar and a sandy beach bar that backs up to the water. A waitress wanders by with a tray of little plastic cups of Jell-O made with vodka. She wears a T-shirt that says "Jello Ho."

The Waterfront is dead tonight, so after a few quick rounds, the gang heads to the Starboard. They cram into their usual corner by the disc jockey booth and shout to each other over the music. Grannas, 30, the house dad, sips a beer, rests his right foot on a bar stool and surveys the action. Two house members are passing a cigarette back and forth. Another, nicknamed the Octopus, is hugging every woman within reach. Someone orders a round of kamikaze shots.

"I love doing this," Grannas says. "Sitting back and watching my friends have fun."

Sometimes he thinks about how surreal it all is in this never-never land, where people who work at respectable jobs do things that would make their co-workers - not to mention their parents - shudder. Grannas is a commercial architect, something that surprises people, just as he is often surprised when he learns their occupations. Take the girl who got naked during a drinking game at the house a few weeks ago - she's a staffer for a Republican on Capitol Hill.

On Monday, they'll turn into different people. They'll rack up long hours at work, and some won't touch alcohol until they return to the beach. For now, though, it's like college all over again - without the books and classes and term papers. It's like one long, alcohol-soaked, Saturday-night frat party.

Every party has to end sometime, and this one does at 1 a.m., when the bar shuts down. House members stumble home and play a drinking game involving a quarter, an ice-cube tray and a straw hat. Over in a corner, the Octopus is hiccuping uncontrollably. Two guys trade deep thoughts while they wait to bounce the quarter: "Do you know that half of the world's population is dumber than the average American?" one asks. "Of course, half is half."

The other is silent. "That's scary," he finally says.

After a while, three girls pile into a queen-sized bed, while Grannas and Graham head for the deck outside. Oliver and his girlfriend squeeze into a single bed upstairs. Most people end up the living room floor in sleeping bags.

For a few hours, the house is quiet.

Saturday morning

Last night was a dud, everyone agrees. Tame. Boring. Not even PG-13. No one got naked, and no one hooked up. But tonight ... well, tonight will be a different story. Tonight is bar golf night.

But first, the fight is on for the shower.

Chris Ward, also known as Big Daddy, lounges on a bed, impatiently awaiting his turn. Three other people are sprawled across the floor, still half-asleep. Two are in the same clothes as the night before. The blinds are drawn tight against the 10 o'clock sun. A chair is overturned, and a pile of clothing litters the floor.

"What are you doing in there?" Ward shouts into the bathroom. "Just rinse, do not repeat!"

"I talked to your girlfriend last night," Grannas informs Oliver. "Boy, was she tanked. Holy God."

"Actually, she wasn't," Oliver says.

Grannas fumbles for a recovery: "It was probably me, then."

A plan is formed: breakfast, then they'll hit the deck to catch some sun. The beach is just two blocks away, but the closest many house members anticipate getting to the ocean this summer is the outdoor bar at the Waterfront.

One bedroom door is still closed, and someone kicks it open. A guy lifts his head off the pillow. "There he is!" someone shouts. Then a girl sits up. "And there she is!" The girl is a house member, the guy is a guest. They disappear from view as the bedroom door bangs shut.

At the restaurant, several house members order mimosas - orange juice spiked with champagne. It is 10:55 a.m.

Saturday afternoon

Laura Lindenberg and Beth Hurley recline on the concrete deck outside Darwin House's second floor, wearing bikinis and suntan lotion, as they explain the appeal of the group house.

"You just cross the Bay Bridge and forget everything in D.C.," says Lindenberg, who is getting her master's degree in special education at George Mason University.

Hurley, whose blond hair and sleek physique have earned her the nickname "Barbie," agrees. Maybe it's something about the beach, but more likely, it's something about this particular house. True, the weekends are wild, but that isn't the only side of Darwin House. Consider this: Most members met while volunteering for a D.C.-based charity group that raises money for a different cause each year. Or this: When one member lost his mother, everyone pulled together, showing up at the funeral, writing notes, sending a flood of sympathetic e-mails.

In addition to seeming like genuinely nice people, all of the house members appear to be competent professionals. They include a nurse, two engineers and a grade-school teacher.

So why do they do it? Why do they drink so much, and eat so badly, and sleep so little? Why do they come back for more, weekend after weekend, sometimes year after year?

Reada Kessler struggles to explain it. She turned 30 this year, and she has the job of her dreams as a traffic reporter for AM radio stations. Kessler almost quit the house this summer. But at the last minute, she changed her mind. "We're not ready to grow up, I guess," she says.

Inside the house, Mike Abernathy is reading Lynn Margiotta questions from a survey entitled "Find your inner sexual animal" in Cosmopolitan magazine. A woman in a bikini top perches on a stool, keeping score. A giant jar of pretzels and jumbo box of chocolate chip cookies adorn the kitchen counter. The television is tuned to a John Candy movie, and several people sip a concoction of beer and Fresca.

When the Cosmopolitan survey is over, Margiotta is declared a bear.

Saturday night

Marlane Muller is lying on the ground at the Bottle & Cork bar, her shirt hiked up to her rib cage. A tray of shot glasses is beside her. Big Daddy grabs one, pours the contents onto Muller's stomach, and slurps it up. Bar golf is in full swing, and he has just made par.

No one is exactly sure who dreamed up the game, but it's a favorite of the group house. First you get T-shirts printed with the names of nine bars within walking distance. Then you decide what you need to drink at each bar to make par. Here at the Bottle & Cork, it's a body shot and a beer.

No one seems concerned that to make a perfect score, 11 beers and shots must be consumed. Instead, several of the guys are vying to go as far under par as possible.

This means that at the Starboard, the third hole, Abernathy, Grannas and Big Daddy need to drink more than one beer. They line up five shots each and race to see who can finish the fastest. Then they line up five more.

"We are not doing five shots apiece," Muller says, even as she pulls money out of her pocket.

Several group-house members use black markers to record scores and scrawl comments on each other's T-shirts. Someone has written "Miss Dewey Beach" on the Octopus' shirt, which he is wearing like a beauty-contestant's banner.

Suddenly, the theme song from "Hawaii Five-O" blares out of the bar's speakers. Everyone falls to the floor, wiggles into position between each other's legs, and rocks back and forth like a luge team. Graham grabs a beer, shakes it, and sprays it over the line. Other people start shaking their beers, too, and soon the house members are sticky and drenched, but they're still rocking back and forth under the beer mist, waving their arms and singing.

Next the DJ tosses out a bamboo stick. Limbo is on. Graham races through the clapping, cheering line and slips on the beer-soaked floor. By now, someone has written the word "nude" between "Miss" and "Dewey" on the Octopus' shirt.

It's 7:15 p.m., and it's time for the next hole.

Three holes later, beads of sweat are popping out on Grannas' forehead. He gulps air and fights back nausea. He drank 10 shots at the Starboard, but didn't stop there. He swallowed nine more at the Waterfront, while Graham, whose T-shirt reads "Viagra test patient," cheered him on. He is 33 under par.

For the first few minutes, he felt fine. But now everything is closing in on him. All around him, his friends are dancing, hugging, and scrawling on each other's T-shirts and bodies. Grannas is winning at bar golf, achieving his goal of getting as far under par as possible. Only now he can't remember why. "What's the point?" he wonders aloud.

Big Daddy is urging Grannas to throw up: It's only a two-stroke penalty. Big Daddy just puked, and he feels like a new man.

But Grannas doesn't hear him. He is listening to something else. Somewhere deep in his brain, a Darwinian-inspired gene is screaming at him to stop, that this has gone beyond fun, that he is now in a very dangerous place.

He sets down his beer and lurches home.

Back at the house, Jody Long triumphantly informs everyone she made par. Long is tan and petite, attributes that have not escaped the attention of the house's male population. She's a guest this weekend, and everyone is encouraging her to join next summer. She thinks she'll probably do it.

In the living room, Abernathy sits upright on a couch, his head tilted back, sound asleep. A woman is sprawled across his lap, also asleep. Long steps over them as a lovesick guy trails in her wake.

The smell in the room is the hamburger Grannas fried up after he left the bar. The sound is the ping of a quarter bouncing off the coffee table.

Sunday morning

The sun has been up for two hours, but no one in the house is.

Bodies are positioned haphazardly across the floor. Overturned beer cans and half-eaten cookies crowd the kitchen. The juice, eggs and yogurt are untouched. The bathroom trash can holds a Popsicle stick and three beer cans. In the rear bedroom, Muller is stretched out on her back. Beneath her T-shirt, her stomach has these words scrawled on it: "Nothing gets between me and my ..." Her underpants read "Calvin's."

Slowly, people struggle awake.

Graham reaches for his shoes. They are coated with tomato sauce from the pizza Grannas dropped on him at the Blue Hen bar.

"Hey, I'm not sure about the Starboard," Abernathy says.

"I'm not going," Margiotta declares. "You get sucked in, then it's a vacuum. Last weekend I went and stepped away for [a minute]. When I came back, they had a $340 tab." He glances down. "Hey, my left leg is tanner than my right leg!"

Muller tosses on a baseball cap. Grannas emerges from the shower and pulls on a fresh T-shirt. The group gathers at the front door. It is 9:30 a.m., and already they are late for first call.

Everyone looks expectantly at Margiotta.

"OK," he finally says. "But if I go over there, I'm not bringing any I.D. or money."

Pub Date: 9/06/98