by Nathan Holic
“This?” he asked, and he touched the kick-mark on his shirt, the bits of grass and sand that had been deposited by the tip of her shoe. “I’d be lying if I said that I saw this as a possibility for the night.”
“I guess this is how you know it’s a good party, right?” I forced a smile, slapped my father’s sore chest. “Aside from the violence, of course.”
“Charles.”
“Sorry. Bad joke.”
He closed his eyes.
“Will she be okay?” I asked.
He went silent for a moment, looking back at the fraternity house behind us. Arms crossed over his chest even though he was still breathing heavy. “When do you move out?”
“Two weeks.”
“And then you drive up to Indianapolis. To start your job?”
“That’s right.”
“Then you drive across the country, to fifty fraternity houses just like this one.”
“That’s the idea.”
“So what would you do if you encountered this particular scene?”
“I don’t know, Dad,” I said through a long exhale, and now I leaned against the car with him, looked at the house also, trying to see something different than what he was seeing. I tried to invoke the same fraternity excitement as always; I could hear myself asking him where else in America you could go on a Friday night at midnight to find a well-kept mansion, first-floor popping with activity, a full bar and no end to the night…a party like this, a house like this, accessible to a common middle-class young man? Where else but fraternity rows? This was an American institution! Sounded nice in my head, of course, but all I could focus upon now were the empty bottles on the front steps, one of which I’d accidentally kicked over, and a long wet trail of…something…leading down the sidewalk. Silhouettes inside the house, young men fist-pumping to some sort of chugging chant. The sound of shattering glass from the backyard. “I assume there’s some standard operating procedure for breaking up parties,” I said. “It’s parents, though? All grown-ups. Who am I to tell them not to drink? They’re responsible.”
“Are they?”
“I mean…for the most part?”
“Hmm,” he said and went silent once again. “Your mother will feel like hell tomorrow. But yes, this is indeed her responsibility.”
Still, my father looked as if he had more to say, as if he had full dissertations waiting to be delivered. His words were coming slow: was he pacing himself, saving something for later, afraid of saying something? He motioned toward the house. “You think you can stop a party like this from getting out-of-hand if it’s all kids?”
“It’ll be my job. I’ll have to.”
“It’s your job right now, isn’t it? President of the house. And you couldn’t stop your own fraternity brothers, could you? There was a kid passed out in the men’s bathroom, too, Charles.”
“You’re blaming me, aren’t you?” I said.
“Blaming you?”
“For everything that happened in there. For Mom. You’re blaming me.”
“I’m not blaming you, Charles.”
Head spinning again, now that I was leaning against the car, now that the unthinking labor of carrying my mother was finished. Harder to find the right words, harder to make any sense. “This was a party, all right?” I said. “Things happen at parties. But it’s like…this is what we do every night. This is my life.” Stop. Reconsider. “Not every night. It’s not, you know, a lifestyle. It’s just a party, is all I’m saying. A Friday night. Just a party. And I’m graduating tomorrow. And I have a job, which is, like, more than some of the other Seniors can say. So…like…why wouldn’t I celebrate?”
He unfolded his arms, held them out. “So you celebrated.”
“Right. I celebrated. That’s all this is.”
“So what happens next time?”
“What do you mean?”
“Every night isn’t a celebration. What happens when you’re on the road? What do you do, Charles? If you encounter this?”
“I told you. I’ll act different when it’s my actual job. That’s what people do.”
“I’m not an idiot, you know,” he said. “I know you didn’t plan everything in there. It’s not as if you bought all that alcohol yourself.”
And I realized at that moment that he didn’t know: I’d made no speech, no declaration that these were all my purchases, this entire bar full of Stoli and Bacardi Limon. He assumed it was some sort of collaborative house effort. Hell, he probably didn’t even know that I’d initiated the Beer Pong tournament. Who, after all, would take it upon himself—all by himself—to get five or six dozen parents wasted out of their minds? It was unthinkably dumb.
“I don’t want you to fail, Charles, but you need to hear this.” He was no longer looking up at the columns of the Nu Kappa Epsilon house, no longer looking through the car window at his wife. She’d passed out by now. No, my father was now pinning me to the door with the same Authority Figure look that he’d used in key moments throughout my life: when I’d gotten into my first fight at a soccer game in elementary school, when I’d been suspended from school in seventh-grade for swearing at a teacher, when he’d found a bottle of Aftershock hidden in my bedroom on the night before Senior Prom. His chin up, five o’clock shadow blooming across his cheeks, and even in the dark it seemed as if he could find a way to make every inch of his face illuminated. “When my own father sent me off to college, he told me—from the start—he told me I was on my own. Make your own mistakes, he said. This is where you learn to be the man you’ll be for the rest of your life.”
“And I think I have—”
“Don’t talk. Listen,” he said. “I worked landscaping in the afternoons, on the weekends. Lived in a co-op in Gainesville, cheaper than the dorms. Biked to campus for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Had to find rides back to Jacksonville for Thanksgiving. Hitch-hiked a few times. Hated my father because he wouldn’t come to visit, never gave an encouraging word. Made me pay my own tuition, even though he could afford to help. I hated the man, Charles. Hated him for many years, even when he tried to make nice.” Chin still raised, breathing still heavy from the exertion of the struggle. “It wasn’t until your freshman year that I understood his point. It wasn’t until I saw you on the floor. I can live with myself if you hate me, Charles, because it was my father who let me become a man on my own.”
“I don’t hate you,” I said, pretending to be shocked that he would imply such a thing. But, of course, the faux-shock was betrayed by the fact that I had a response ready to fling: “But you have it out for fraternities. And fraternity is who I am. You don’t recognize any of the good things we’re doing.”
“The good things?”
“We had this whole awards ceremony inside!” I shook my fist, traded the shocked look for one of pure anger. I gestured toward the sloping grass lawn, the house and the porch and the plantation shutters. But my father just sighed, again ran his fingers through the sweat-dampened gray hair on the sides of his head, smoothing it back. He didn’t look at me, either, only stared straight ahead into the house windows for a few silent seconds before finally turning and peering through the passenger-side window of his Lexus.
After awhile, once he’d allowed the silence of the outdoors to smother the emotion of my words, he spoke again: “Did I ever stop you?”
“Stop me from what?” I snapped. I was holding onto the anger. I would not let it slip away.
“Stop you from joining.” He rubbed his eyes, squinted.
“You never approved of it.”
“I’m not shy about my opinions,” he said. He rummaged in his pockets now, pulled out a small leather case and removed from it a pair of slender glasses. My father never wore glasses during the daytime, never even liked anyone to see him wearing reading glasses at work, hid the fact of his declining eyesight the way that other men his age tried to hide or conceal their bald spots, but once the world went dark and my father’s vision went foggier, street signs turning
to bright wordless bars, he’d finally submit. But always slowly, dramatically, unfolding the glasses, inspecting the lenses, polishing the glass even though they were spotless, positioning them over his ears, over his nose, blinking to adjust his vision, all of it an act to show the world that glasses were not normal for him. Finally, he looked up and stared me in the eyes. “I always share my thoughts,” he said, “but I never told you not to join, did I?”
I still faced him, didn’t break the eye contact that I’d fought so hard to gain, but I had no similar nonverbal gestures or practiced routines which I could force him to watch. No glasses in my pocket. I could only stand and shift my weight from foot to foot, could only slide my fingertips down my pants and rub the front of my legs. Again, again, over and over, until my fingertips were staticky hot.
“Did I?” he repeated.
“Not…you know, expressly.”
“Do you know why I never joined a fraternity?”
I shook my head. As always, it had taken only a short exchange to wear me down, to wring the unthinking aggression from me, and even though I was still spinning I’d at least had some fight for a minute or two, had at least managed for a round. But—like my mother, after kicking him in the chest—now I felt defeated. He’d asked such a simple question—“Do you know why I never joined a fraternity?”—and the fact that I’d never even thought to ask it myself proved something about me, didn’t it?
“For one thing, I had no money,” he said and smiled, maybe drifting into some college-years memory to which I’d never have access; I didn’t see my father smile often, committed as he was to showing the world that his actions were not dictated by emotion, that he had complete control over his feelings. But the smile would still creep out on occasion, just a subtle movement of his lips, but real joy overtaking his eyes and making them shine like freshly cleaned silver; it made you want to cry, seeing this, knowing that he had such happiness inside him but that he suppressed it so entirely.
But at the curb of the fraternity house, it faded quickly.
“My roommate—freshman year—he joined a fraternity. He joined Nu Kappa Epsilon.” He stopped, stared me in the eyes again, and it was so sudden and his eyes so searing that I had to look away.
Behind us, on the long and winding campus roadway that snaked through Greek Row and the scattered upperclassmen residence halls, a patrol car rolled past, one portly security officer in the driver’s seat with a Nextel phone in his hand. The “Night Patrol” was what this was called, and it wasn’t an official police force, was really no different than mall cops with cars, but they did have long laminated sheets on their clipboards of every important campus phone number: the residence hall directors, the RAs for Greek Row, the off-campus police. And if you were having an event that maybe you didn’t want the world to know was happening, the absolute worst thing was that they’d cruise past without a head-nod, without a wave, without any acknowledgment that they’d just called someone to investigate an incident they found suspicious. If the security officers stopped, then a fraternity president could at least shake hands, pat them on the back, assure them that calling the authorities would be a waste of time, and would you like to come inside and talk to a few girls, have a drink?
The Night Patrol car sped up after it passed, was gone around the corner.
What had he seen here at the curb? A father and son, a mother in the car? Had he seen us as who we were? Or had the relationships—even the ages of the participants—not registered? Had he seen only a fraternity house, a party, Greek Row a series of blind spots that his mind could fill in with the predictable generalizations of frat life: two drunk guys arguing over keys, a drunk sorority girl the prize whenever they got home.
“Campus police, Charles?” my father asked.
“Just the Night Patrol,” I said. “They patrol for burglaries. Fights. You know.”
“They’re not looking for parties to bust?”
“This is a family event,” I said. “They don’t care.”
My father shrugged and gave an if you say so look. “Your book had some dramatic photos of that Florida house fire, but the caption said nothing. Know how the fire started?”
“If it isn’t in the caption,” I said, “then no.”
“The fraternity claimed it was electrical, but it wasn’t,” he said. And now his hands were in his pockets again, his most comfortable pose, even without a coffee mug in his right hand to finish the look. “I told you that it could have been a major tragedy. That’s not because the fraternity brothers were sleeping upstairs, innocent and unsuspecting.” He adjusted his glasses and squinted again, as if by moving them this way, that way, he could now see farther, deeper, through the walls of the fraternity house in front of us, into my mind, into my soul. “No, it could’ve been a major tragedy because your fraternity had the pledges blind-folded and locked in closets. It was a ceremony called ‘Trust a Brother,’ or something to that effect.”
He paused, perhaps waiting for me to interject, but I just leaned against the car and tried to remain straight-faced, as emotionless and reaction-free as he always seemed. It was a performance, probably a bad one because I was still swaying, but he continued.
He told me that the pledges were supposed to wait in their closets all night long, no matter what happened, until a brother released them. And all night long, apparently, there were distractions and surprises meant to terrify the pledges. Banging pots and pans, fights between brothers, bugs dumped into the closets. And the whole house was dark to preserve a creepy haunted mansion feel for the blind-folded pledges, only a few rows of candles lining the hallways. And then someone knocked over a candle. And who knows how the fire grew? Maybe no one knew what had happened until it was too late. But can you guess what happened next?
“The house burnt down,” I said. Shrugged. “Fine. An accident. But how is that—”
And then he was telling me that the house started to burn. But the pledges were still in the closets, the flames growing and growing in the rooms around them. Blind-folded. The house getting hotter.
“Come on.”
They were still standing upright in those closets, three or four of them clumped together. Told not to make a sound, no matter what happened. Trust your brothers. And outside those doors, does that sound like real fire? And boy, does that feel hot! How did the brothers manage this? Did they turn up the heat in the house? And the pledges stayed there, thinking it was still part of the game. Until one of the windows upstairs burst out, glass sprinkling far away on the sidewalk outside. And finally, one pledge decided—hell, this is getting ridiculous—and he took off his blindfold, come what may, and opened the door, and the house…was…ablaze. And it was this pledge brother, this single guy, who searched every closet—and he had no idea where everyone was, he’d been blindfolded the entire time—and he had to find every pledge in every closet, counting to make sure he’d reached them all, convince them this wasn’t part of some elaborate scenario, it wasn’t staged, and then they were all running out of the house, all these pledges in their underwear, and there were over a hundred people on the lawn by now, confused as hell as to why these twenty naked men were just now scurrying out of the burning house.
“I’m sure you’ve got it wrong,” I said. “Our UF chapter is, like, legendary. They’ve never been suspended. They’re—”
I was on the lawn, my father told me. Watching. Ten minutes before, he’d been in the library. Spent a lot of nights in the library, since he worked days. Someone comes screaming into the library, “Fire at the Nike house! Fire at the Nike house!” Nu Kappa Epsilon? Where his roommate was pledging? And he hurried over there. Saw the fire up close. Saw the pledges. The fire trucks. And you know what I remember most, Charles? I saw the brothers take the pledges aside. God knows what they said. A mixture of apologies and threats, no doubt, because there wasn’t a single pledge who came forward to report the hazing. Why were they in their underwear, everyone wanted to know. The brothers had an easy answer
: the pledges were on the top floor, already asleep, they said. We didn’t even realize they’d gone to sleep so early. We feel terrible! My God, we could have lost them all in the fire!
And the campus bought it, and oh, the poor Nikes who suffered this outrageous house fire, and for the next two months, all you would hear on-campus is how lucky they were that no one had died, and could you spare some change for the House Restoration effort? Help put these guys back into their home?
“So how can you be sure it was hazing?” I asked. “You jump to conclusions.”
“My roommate,” my father said.
“Your roommate?”
“He came forward. Spoke to the campus newspaper, finally had the courage.”
“So why does no one talk about this today?”
“Gerry—my roommate—he was blackballed as soon as he spoke. A liar, the fraternity brothers said. The National Fraternity? Your Headquarters? The place where you’re going to start a career? They offered all sorts of support for the beleaguered fraternity chapter, as if they were the victims somehow. Gerry’s name was dragged through the mud.”
But I shook my head: this was just his perspective, one story from an outsider, and I imagined that there were dozens of other versions of that night’s event that all conflicted with one another. Hell, how much of this story was sloppy foggy memory, a narrative he’d constructed out of the spare parts available to him? I’d listened to his story, but it was just campus gossip, the talk of outsiders jealous that they weren’t part of what was going on behind that heavy front door. The GDIs, the Goddamn Independents who hated Greek Life, the privileges, the Grand Tradition, the roots of power that burrowed centuries-deep into the campus soil. They needed these stories, needed the Fraternity Stereotype and kept it alive as if—like deluded Southerners who speak of the “War of Northern Aggression”— the words and the myths confirm something about their own choices, that it was wise not to enter those doors during Rush, that it was wise not to pledge, that no one should have to pay for friends, etc., etc.
