by Nathan Holic
“Enough from me,” I said, and I dabbed my sweaty forehead with a napkin. “It’s time to hand out the awards and the annual Nu Kappa Epsilon scholarships.”
And then the room erupted into real applause, this time much heartier than the last, this time genuine. And before I could say another word, Todd Hampton—the newly elected president of our chapter, the man who would move into my presidential suite once I drove away to Indianapolis in two weeks—was beside me, arm around me, and he was saying “I’ll take over from here, Charles. Why don’t you step down?”
“Um,” I said, but he nudged me back into the crowd. And from down here, surrounded by fraternity brothers and swaying mothers and 50-year-old men still chewing ribs, I could no longer see Jenn. She’d fallen to the thick of the crowd somehow, maybe all the way to the back of the room. And Todd passed out plaque after plaque, “Best G.P.A.” and “Most Improved G.P.A.” and “The Damon Jarred Memorial Scholarship,” and it was supposed to be me up there, soaking in the applause and offering my commentary on the brothers who meant so much to me, the family, the power of fraternity, but it was Todd. “Thank you all so much for coming,” Todd said. “We worked so hard on this night, and it means everything to have our families celebrate with us. And now, I’ll—”
“Time to cut the cake!” I shouted over him. And I was motioning for everyone to follow me, and the room was a flood of parents and teenagers and twenty-somethings rushing to the next room, where—wobbling—I was soon cutting the giant cake with a tiny plastic knife, fingers slopping into the frosting, mothers taking slices of cake while trying (but not very hard, after all the wine they’d finished) to hide their grimaces when they noticed thumb prints in the icing, Jenn taking pictures, Jenn taking pictures! And I tried to elbow my way away from the table and toward her, but the mothers were too intent on their cake, and it was all arms and torsos and I was pushed back to the table and someone said, “Not so fast, buddy! Keep cutting that cake!” and Jenn was gone.
Minutes later, I escaped to the courtyard, but there was no sign of her. Not inside, not outside.
“Looking for Jenn?” Edwin asked. He was out here with a girl who looked like Lindsay Lohan, his hand on her ass while his parents were inside finishing another round of martinis.
“You seen her?” I asked.
“She went home,” the Lindsay Lohan girl said and pouted her lips. “Back to the KD house.”
“She went home? Without saying goodbye?” I asked. “She can’t…”
“Christina was waaaa-sted,” the girl said. “She, like, had to get her out of there.”
“Christina?”
“His formal date,” Lindsay said and slapped Edwin’s chest. She said formal as if it had twelve syllables, the “foooorrrrrrr” lasting so long that Edwin was able to move his beer bottle to his lips, take a long gulp, then bring it down and toss the empty bottle into a trash can.
“What?” Edwin said nonchalantly. “I’m with you tonight.”
“She’s not coming back?”
The girl held up her palms, and the action was enough to make her stumble and almost fall into the fountain. Edwin caught her. “Take it easy, Charles,” he said, “we don’t want her thinking too hard tonight, buddy.” And she laughed and fell into him and he caught her by the boobs and balanced her and grabbed her ass while doing so. “God, I love this house,” he said.
*
“So proud of you,” my mother said. “So proud, Charlie.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“Whoops.” Splash of drink on the wall, on the floor.
“You all right?”
“Charlie Charlie,” my mother said. “I was always hard on you, wasn’t I?” And she had her hand on my shoulder, was leaning close as if this was a conversation we’d been putting off for far too long. “All the clubs, all the sports.”
“No, Mom. You were fine.”
“But it paid off, didn’t it? Look at you now, Charlie!”
Splash of drink on my pants.
“Yes, Mom.”
“Let me tell you something about your father,” she said.
“Um. Please don’t.”
“He won’t even let himself have a good time,” she said. “It’s so…it’s pathetic.”
“He’s trying to be…I don’t know…responsible,” I said.
“We did all right as a family, didn’t we, Charlie?”
“What are you talking about, Mom?”
“I’d like to think we did something right. You’re going to do so well. Maybe you’ll do better than we have.”
“Do better? You did fine. What are you talking about?”
“Whoops,” she said again.
*
I still remember the first time I ever saw my parents drunk. When I was fifteen or so. They came home from a party, a housewarming party, my mother crashing through the front door, laughing and stumbling through the dim hallway to cook leftovers in the kitchen, my father trying to keep her quiet while I pretended to be asleep. She made ridiculous comments about doing yardwork at midnight, or about dusting fan blades, howled, but the next day appeared normal again, like a werewolf the morning after a full moon. My father, in the morning, was back to wearing pleated khaki shorts and a polo, sipping coffee on the front porch. Thinking about it now, I’m not sure if he’d even had a sip of alcohol the night before, but he knew, at least. Knew I’d heard. My mother, too. And I think they realized my mental picture was altered that night, irrevocably, and it wasn’t a bad thing to them, just gave them license to resume “Saturday Nights on the Town,” something they’d abandoned the moment I’d been born, gave my mother license to start a wine collection, a new red every few nights. As an only child, she was the one who’d kept me involved all throughout middle school and high school, in soccer and Key Club and Cypress Falls Service, always telling me about my potential and about how I could be anything but I needed to be driven, and so—starting, perhaps, that night when I was fifteen—she could see the credits rolling on her parental responsibilities. Perhaps she imagined a rewind to her youth. I would be off to college in two years, gone, a financial burden but no longer a physical one.
Out in Cypress Falls, many of my friends’ parents one-upped my own; no longer needing large houses for their kids to spread out toys and textbooks, they moved into the city, into condos in Tampa and Orlando and Miami, or back up north to Chicago or New York. All those ideas we had about who our parents really were had been extinguished in an instant. They’d played a role for sixteen years, and now they’d called it curtains. Even the idea of “family” seemed to dissipate, divorce after divorce ravaging my friends’ lives while they were in college, but at least my parents still held that together. That was the thing that kept the past meaningful, after all: to know that it was still alive, that it hadn’t just been an act, that the world didn’t need to re-start, that it had always been going.
*
By 10:30 PM, the food was finished. Slop in pans. The cake a shredded mess, a slasher victim. Parents were sitting in the living room lawn furniture, cups still full, yawning and grasping for conversation. Glancing at their watches, at the front door.
My mother had refilled her glass, had grabbed some cake and retreated to the patio with a few other Real Housewives types with whom she’d somehow become instant best friends. But my father hadn’t moved in fifteen minutes, just stood at a wicker coffee table flipping through The Complete History of the Nu Kappa Epsilon Fraternity that I’d placed out in hopes of wowing curious parents with our storied past; it was a leather-bound volume of black-and-white photos assembled and published for the 90 anniversary celebration several years before, and it was a massive testament to the Grand Tradition. My father examined a photo, read a caption, registered no real reaction. Still taking sips of his water. Flipped a page, then sipped water.
“Interesting stuff?” I asked, approaching him.
“I remember this,” he said, pointing to a photo of the NKE house at the Universi
ty of Florida, the entire structure consumed in white flames. I’d remembered looking through the book on a few lazy afternoons, knew that this picture was taken in the early 1970s; at the bottom border of the photo, you could make out the silhouettes of a dozen onlookers, some of them crying, others with their hands digging deep into their wild Social Revolution hair, all of them wearing laughably tight jeans and t-shirts. “I was a student at the time,” my father said.
“I didn’t know that,” I said. “They rebuilt the house, right?”
“Yes. This was almost a major tragedy.”
“Looks like it.” A house on fire, billowing smoke, campus in turmoil…
He stared back down into the photograph, eyes lost in the grayscale conflagration.
“So listen,” I said, and I held out a vodka-tonic for my father. “I saw that you didn’t have a cocktail. I made this for you.” There was still an excess of alcohol, so many unopened or half-finished bottles looking like they would go to waste: I couldn’t take it with me to Indianapolis where I’d literally be living in a dorm attached to the Nu Kappa Epsilon National Fraternity Headquarters, and I didn’t want to just leave all this alcohol at the fraternity house where it would be consumed without any real memory of who had purchased it and why. This was for my Senior Send-Off, not for two dudes on August 15 who wanted to play Halo and get drunk for free. It was clear that the parents in the room had come to their middle-age senses, all of them adopting the same behavior as my father. Maybe a single drink in hand, but hey, it was 10:30 PM, and that was later than they’d even planned to stay, and they needed to get back to the hotel before they fell asleep, and listen, it was nice meeting everyone, thanks for a wonderful evening, good night, good night, good night.
The party was just moments from breaking up, and what had I accomplished? What would be the final impression with which these men and women would be left?
“I’m driving your mother,” he said, waving his hand to decline my drink.
“You can have a single drink,” I said. “I mean, you brought that wine, so I know you were planning on having a drink.”
“I’m saving that wine,” he said. “I don’t need to drink.”
“Just take this or it’s going to go to waste.” I pushed it closer to him, arm rigid, a drop or two splashing out and onto the black and white photos of the Complete History. This, I realized then and there, was as close as I’d ever come to telling my father what to do.
“Fine.” He took the rocks glass. “One.”
“One.”
He sipped, nearly spit it back out. “Jesus! Could you make this any stronger?”
“It’s not that bad, is it?”
“It’s all vodka, Charles.”
“Half and half,” I said.
“There’s no tonic in this. Are you trying to kill me?”
“Dad, take it easy. We can add more tonic. Just take a sip and make some room.”
“Is this how you drink?” He shook his head, placed the drink on the coffee table.
“What do you mean?”
“No wonder.”
“No wonder what?” And now I shook my head, something I wouldn’t have done if I hadn’t already finished several vodka-tonics myself, several Heinekens. But this was my Senior Send-Off; this was the night before my graduation; this was the night to celebrate my new job. This was not a night on which to receive lectures about alcohol responsibility. This was not a night for him to play Fun Nazi to me. The money I’d spent! The trouble with the caterer, the embarrassment with the serving spoons and the cake. I would have a good time, damn it! I would. He would. Everyone would. They would remember me, and they would remember how fucking amazing—in my head, I even heard Jenn saying that word, “a-maaaz-ing”—this fraternity was, that it wasn’t the stereotype they’d heard; fraternity held us all together, fraternity was family, fraternity was protection and leadership development and career and citizenship and future, life itself, and they would see that, they would see what I had been seeing and preaching for four years, and fine, I wasn’t going to be able to lavalier my girlfriend so the least you can all do is fucking enjoy yourselves!
“No wonder I found you on the floor, right over there,” my father whispered, pointing to the living room floor, to the very spot. “You sure you want to be drinking so much? With all these parents here?”
“It’s all right,” I told him. “Trust me.”
My father regarded me with narrowed eyes, sighed.
“I’m not the same kid I was three years ago. I am responsible now, Dad.”
“Charles, I know that you’re a smart young man.”
“But?”
“But nothing. That’s all I’ll say.”
“Somehow I doubt that.”
He sighed again. “That’s all, Charles. You graduate tomorrow. You’re a big boy. Just make sure I don’t have to wake you up.”
“See?” I said. “See? You can’t just let it go.”
“I care about you,” he said. “You want to have these sorts of conversations, you’re going to hear things you don’t like.”
“What conversations, Dad? This is my”—and I whispered now—“my night, okay? My party, my celebration. For one night, can you just pretend to have a good time? Can you just pretend you’re, like, proud of what I’m doing?”
And I’m not entirely sure what he heard at that moment, if he heard the indignation in my voice that I wanted him to hear, the anger. Or did I just sound like a whiny teenager, no longer even a fraternity stereotype but now an angsty rebelling-against-my-awful-parents stereotype? No matter what he was thinking, he just shrugged, sniffed at his drink but didn’t take another swallow. “The job? What am I supposed to say, Charles? You’re better than this.”
“Better than this? Un-fucking-believable,” I said. “I’m going to talk to mom for awhile.” And on any other day, I might have turned and walked away without another word, just let it die, you’ve been bold enough for one evening, Charles, and in any case, you’re not going to ever win, he’s your father and that’s what fathers do, they keep you in check, and you’re making a big deal out of something that all good fathers do—but there on my night, after the wine and the barbecue and the awards plaques and Todd and the cake and Jenn leaving and now this, I had to say something: “I’m going to do something good with my life, okay? My career…I’m not going to be like you.”
“Hmm.” He didn’t move. “Good to hear your opinion of my life. How this whole experience was paid for.”
But I was already walking away.
Away from the coffee table, down the hallway, past Edwin and his parents and Lindsay Lohan still gripping him tight, out of the living room, out to the backyard and the patio, and there was my mother, sitting in a lawn chair and drinking her vodka tonic, chatting with another woman. Sipping, then flipping back her dark brown hair from her eyes as though she was once again a 20-year-old sorority girl. How did this happen, I wondered? How did my mother always find someone to befriend in social settings? Someone nearly identical in appearance? How was it that these newfound friends even seemed to exhibit the same mannerisms, that—no matter where we were—they would even have identical drinks?
The party had died inside, but my mother—and the small collection of women on the patio—they had the right idea. This was the Future Jenn out here, I realized; this was the older version of the Kappa Delta clan out here, all of them still drinking and still chatting and still enjoying themselves like they had in college. Husbands inside, collapsing from fifty-hour work-weeks and three or four alcoholic drinks.
If the party was dying, then maybe the men only needed a reminder of who they once were, permission to drop their facades and become fraternity guys again.
Strong gulp of my vodka tonic.
It didn’t seem right that it could all end so against-plan, either: Charles pushed aside, Jenn jetting early. If the night ended now, all anyone would remember of me was that I’d screwed up the catering order and given a
terrible speech. I needed to keep it going.
Head spinning, and from here the night turns to snapshots.
One second, I’m inside the house.
The next, I’m zooming down the hallway, faces a smudge of activity all around me.
Then: I find Edwin, leaning against the bar, Lindsay with her hand on his belt.
“Where’s the beer pong table?”
“Why?” he asked. “The party—”
“It’s dying, Edwin,” I said.
Strong gulp of my vodka tonic.
Voices, doors opening and closing, smudge of faces.
“They’re old,” Edwin said. “This is what old people do. They go to sleep by 10.”
“Not tonight,” I said. “Tonight’s different. Help me with the beer pong table.”
“You sure?”
“I’m President for two more days,” I said. “Of course I’m sure.”
CHAPTER SIX. Drinking Games.
The parents were already drunk and the night should have been fading gracefully to black, but now I was leading the house into a banned activity. Maybe something would happen along the way, I hoped: Jenn would return, or my father would join my team and grab a ping-pong ball.
Beer pong might not sound like a big deal, that label of “banned activity” maybe just an unseen administrator’s way of issuing blanket zero-tolerance guidelines in case of emergency, but I’d later hear during my summer training at the headquarters that drinking games have become one of the greatest “risk management liabilities” for undergraduate fraternities, one of the greatest causes of student death/injury, one of the top sources of lawsuits brought against national fraternities: stick a bunch of 19-year-olds in a room together with cards or ping-pong balls or some other seemingly innocent toy, give them a cooler full of beer, issue a set of rules forcing them to drink (on average) five beers an hour (most of it chugged), let them think that it’s an extreme sport, that Ability to Drink in Excess = Toughness, and then crank up the peer pressure in the room until everyone is chugging before they’ve even started playing the game and…Well. It was an activity banned by Edison University, by FIPG insurance guidelines, by Nu Kappa Epsilon National Sacred Laws, but probably you didn’t need any formal regulations to know that bad things resulted from drinking games.
