American Fraternity Man

by Nathan Holic

  “And why are you telling me this now?” I asked finally. I waited for him to open his mouth, and then I shouted: “Things are different now, don’t you understand? All of that stuff…it just feeds the stereotype, but you don’t want to hear anything different.” Oh, this was it. “We’re all a bunch of drunks,” I said. “Or we’re all a bunch of hazers. Just a stereotype, and you eat it up! Do you know what we’re doing at the Headquarters? Do you know that we have a mission? That we offer our members more leadership programming than any other men’s group? Do you know how many community service hours we log? We’re different. That—your little gossipy story—that’s not who we are!” I stepped away from the car, from the curb, paced on the sidewalk with fists clenched at my sides and heart pounding. Yes: this was the moment I’d hoped would come, when impulse took over and the space between us was flooded with the rush of my true thoughts.

  But as quickly as it had started, it was over, and my father didn’t say a word for what felt like a very long time. I couldn’t bring myself to make eye contact with him again, to see the reaction to such deep and intractable feelings. Just kept looking up at my house as if to gain some strength from the comforting columns, from the long green hedges, from those concrete steps. The black “Nu Kappa Epsilon” above the much-smaller address numbers on the white boards below the gutters. The laughter inside, the cracking glass. The bouncing ping-pong ball. The “Yeeeaa-aaaah!”

  And at the far end of the road the Night Patrol car had returned, had parked in front of the quiet Kappa Delta sorority house, observing from a distance. Darkness behind the windshield. Only a black shape that made the tiniest of motions, head tilting slowly and curiously to the side…he wanted me to know that he was watching, and no, he didn’t care who I was speaking with, what we were saying. The whole Row could hear the bouncing of ping-pong balls, and no matter what, there would be trouble.

  “So why do you need to take this job?” my father asked finally.

  I held out my hands, forced a look of confusion. “What do you mean?”

  “A leadership organization. Role models. Responsible citizens. All the buzz words,” he said. “And yet you are hired to change the culture?”

  I held out my hands farther: why couldn’t he understand? “The fringe elements!”

  “You’re hired to be a role model, you keep telling me,” he said. “A role model.”

  “That’s right. I’m going to be something important. Something positive.”

  “Is this how role models spend their Friday nights?”

  “That isn’t fair. This is a party.”

  “Yes, these are the good guys.” Pointing at my house now. “These aren’t the ones who would lock pledges in closets. But still, they love their alcohol. And now you’re going to spend a year of your life trying to be a role model when, really, you don’t want to change anything. You enjoy it too much.”

  “It’s a party,” I repeated, as if that somehow disarmed his argument. “A party.”

  My father raised his hand to his face, slid his thumb and forefinger beneath the glasses and pressed them to the corners of his eyes, squinted hard. “You asked me if I blamed you for your mother,” my father said finally, and tapped on the window to remind me that she was mere feet away. Beyond the glass, she was still asleep, didn’t stir; she remained a hunched-over middle-aged mess of brown hair and Ann Taylor clothing and sparkling Macy’s jewelry. “I know how she gets, and this isn’t even the worst I’ve seen.” He paused again, stayed that way—eyes closed, fingers at his eyes—for another moment. “I didn’t want you to see any of that, Charles. I didn’t. I’ve always…I’ve always known who she is, and I’ve tried not to let her put herself into the sorts of situations that will bring out the wrong side of her. But she doesn’t listen to me anymore.” He paused again, peered back into the interior of the car. I now noticed that she hadn’t ever finished buckling her seatbelt; it hung limply around her arm. “When we were carrying her, Charles, and she said your name, what did you think?”

  “What did I think? I don’t know.”

  “If she would have told you—looking like she did—to put down your beer, to stop drinking, that you’d had too much, what would you have thought?”

  “Put down my beer?”

  “This is my point, Charles. You can’t be two different things at once. You can’t be a parent and also be what you see in the car. You’re one thing, or you’re the other, and you make a choice and you stick with it. I look at your mother now, and I think…”

  I pushed myself from the car and tried to stand of my own volition. “Are you okay?”

  “You can’t be the good guy and the party animal, Charles. And your fraternity? It can’t be what you say it is, this remarkable leadership development organization, and also be what I know it is. It can’t.”

  “It’s a stereotype, Dad,” I said, but softer now. “We’re changing it.”

  “You’ll never change a culture that doesn’t want to change,” he said.

  “So I shouldn’t try?”

  “Not if everyone seems to like it broken,” he said. “Not if you like it broken.”

  “How much of my life have I already invested in this?” I said. “It’s not—”

  “Four years, spit in the wind,” he said. “I’m telling you. Sometimes it’s best to remove yourself from situations that are damaging to you.”

  “It isn’t damaging me,” I said. “It’s this fraternity that made me who I am.”

  “Who you are?” he asked and shrugged. “Who are you, really?”

  “Please. You know me,” I said. “I mean…I’ve been drinking tonight, but I’m—” And what was I going to say at that moment that didn’t sound ridiculous? I’m the Man on Campus? Diamond Candidate, Marathon Man! I’m a cartoon diagram! The catered barbecue and the cake and the open bar were supposed to speak for me, but they’d only managed to turn my mother into a freshman sorority girl, the other fathers into frat stars. Who was I?

  “Is this what you want to stand for?” he asked.

  “You’re wrong about me. About all of this.”

  “Maybe I am. Maybe I am,” he said. He pushed himself from the car and started toward the driver side. “Either way, Charles, I’ve said what I can. I’ve got to get her home.” He was now at the door, opening up. “You really want to accomplish something, I can see that. And you think there’s something wrong with how I’ve done it. I understand that. But when I’m finished with a project, I see that something’s been built. Blank space before, and something tangible after…a house, a parking lot…No two ways about it. You either agree that it was a good thing, or you disagree. I just want to make sure you can have that feeling, that your accomplishments aren’t just empty words on paper.” He shrugged again. “We’ll see you tomorrow at graduation.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Tomorrow.”

  He slid into his car, just a flash of khaki pants and blue polo shirt and gold-and-silver watch, all of it disappearing behind the tinted windows of the Lexus. Behind the windshield, just a dark shape adjusting his glasses, turning the keys in the ignition, checking the rearview mirror and then the unconscious woman at his side, all of it as methodical as if it occurred each time he entered his vehicle. No final wave, no glance in my direction, and the car itself became a silver flash, pulling away from the curb and down the street and to the stop sign at the end of Greek Row, and then it stayed where it was for a moment, my father looking into his rearview—

  Because another car had rolled up to take my father’s spot at the curb.

  The Night Patrol.

  It had crept forward a tenth of a mile, lights off, from where it had been idling just moments ago. The dark shape behind the windshield now reaching to his left, opening his door, stepping from the car, a blue and white shirt stretched to its limits, coming untucked as the officer huffed his way toward me.

  “Good evening,” he said, and I returned the courtesy greeting, but really I was staring down the st
reet at the fading lights of my father’s Lexus. Part of me hoped he hadn’t seen the security patrol car coming to life and rolling down the street to the curb of the Nu Kappa Epsilon house, that he was just checking his hair in the mirror, but I knew this was fantasy. My father had glanced in his rearview mirror and had seen his still-drunk son confronted by a patrol car—and no, this wasn’t the police, but it damn sure looked like the police, black-and-blue painted vehicle, spotlights on the sides, emergency lights on the top—ready to bust up the party, ready to issue citations for public intoxication, disturbing the peace, whatever, all those things from which my father had removed himself.

  Nothing happened, of course, just a standard questioning from Jarred the Night Patrol officer (“Got a party going inside?” “No, no, just parents.” “Gonna be going on much longer?” “No, they’re parents. Should be wrapping up soon.” “Had a noise complaint, you know. I should probably call the RA.” “Won’t be necessary, Jarred. Why don’t you come inside, check it out? We’ve got some cake left, could probably make you a vodka-tonic if you’re game?”), and then it was over without any trouble. But it was the image in the rearview that had made my father linger at the stop sign for an extra three seconds, Charles Washington in the final hours of his college life, standing alone on the paved sidewalk to the fraternity house, law enforcement vehicle at the curb before him as he prepared in his mind some desperate appeal for the officer.…the image, immortalized not in some Facebook photo album where I could un-tag or delete it, but immortalized instead in my father’s memory next to the still-vivid image of a freshman boy laying in his own puke in the center of a living room. And hell, how did I know that Todd Hampton, the new chapter president, was not also watching out of the front windows of the fraternity house? Thousands of dollars spent for this epic send-off, and how would I be remembered?

  And I did see my parents at graduation the next day. Pictures with the family, pictures with the cap and gown, my mother looking embarrassed in each photo, the two of them fidgeting the entire time, long spaces between us as we ate lunch at one of those “nice restaurants” my mother had wanted to visit while down in Fort Myers. At first, I just thought they were eager to leave Edison University and escape the constant reminders of what had happened the night before.

  Jenn couldn’t come out with us; she had a Mother’s Brunch for the house Seniors. I’d thought about presenting her with the lavalier at dinner with my parents. Not the original plan, but still a moment with real potential.

  But then, at lunch, it was time for another “talk.” And very quickly it became clear that, even though the previous night had been the longest my father had ever spoken to me about college, about fraternities, about his own past, there was still more that he’d wanted to say. More that he’d swallowed and saved.

  “We didn’t want to ruin your night,” my mother said, and even at my post-graduation lunch she had a glass of wine, “so we waited until today to talk.”

  Oh no, I said. This isn’t about me again, is it? I mean, really. This is going to be a long afternoon, a long night, if you get started now. Can’t we just enjoy ourselves?

  “We aren’t staying for dinner,” my mother said.

  Wait. Not staying for dinner? But we were supposed to go out with Jenn and—

  “This is about us,” my father said and motioned toward my mother. “This is about our marriage.”

  Your marriage?

  “We’ve gotten a divorce, Charles,” my father said.

  Whoa, whoa. What?

  “We want you to know that we both still love you,” my mother said, “that nothing is going to change.”

  Hold on here. Is this…is this about last night?

  “No, Charles,” my father said. “This was a long time coming.”

  This doesn’t make any sense. Where did this come from?

  “Charles, this has nothing to do with last night.”

  That isn’t true, either. Oh my God.

  “Charles,” my mother said. “Charles, we’ve been living separately for six months.”

  Six months?

  Smoothing my pants, couldn’t breathe. Knocked over my water glass.

  How did this happen? You can’t do this. You’ve been married for 25 years.

  “There are a lot of things you don’t know. It’s better this way.”

  You’re giving up, I said. You can’t give up!

  “Remember what I told you last night,” my father said, “that sometimes it’s best to remove yourself from unhealthy situations. We’ve recognized that, Charles.”

  This is a marriage, damn it! You’ve always told me: you wouldn’t let yourselves become like everyone else. Don’t you realize what this means to me?

  “I know it’s difficult, Charles,” my mother said.

  You tell me today? On my graduation day? What is this?

  “Charles.”

  You were supposed to be different! This wasn’t supposed to happen to you!

  “College is over now, Charles,” my father said. “You’re a man, you have a job, you don’t need a safety net.”

  This has been a long time coming? Six months separately? You’ve been keeping this from me! You’ve been lying to me? Shit, this means you weren’t even living together when I visited for Christmas?

  “Charles.”

  It’s a lie. You are, I am. This entire family, just a lie. A long time coming?

  And then I was thinking about what else they’d never told me. Six months? How many dinners, how many phone conversations? Had my father cheated? My mother? Was she drinking? Was that what had caused this, and had she been drinking all these years, a glass of wine in her car while she waited for me to finish baseball practice? Who were these people? How long had they been acting? Every Christmas a choreographed production, every Thanksgiving, stage actors in the presence of their son, living out different lives as soon as I left the building. Curtains: daily.

  “Charles. There’s no need to get dramatic.”

  Families don’t do this! Families don’t lie to one another!

  “We had our reasons.”

  Families don’t say that.

  “You’ve had a good life, Charles. Everything you wanted.”

  Families don’t say that, either. They don’t congratulate themselves for fulfilling their responsibilities. They don’t use the past tense. It’s not like a birthday reminder on Facebook, an obligatory comment on someone’s page. Family isn’t like this!

  And aside from scattered “How are things?” phone conversations, that was it: the last I’ve spoken with either of my parents before leaving town for Indianapolis.

  CHAPTER SEVEN: Goal-setting.

  After the Senior Send-Off, the Edison University campus emptied for the three-month summer break, dorms and apartment buildings and fraternity houses going silent and dark. The EU staff members and professors—what few remained—hung up their blazers and ties and came to campus wearing seersucker shorts and Tommy Bahama button-downs, zipping in and out of their offices only to sign year-end paperwork and lug boxes of student portfolios to the dumpster. EU is a private university, its enrollment always bobbing above or below 7,000, the classroom buildings ultra-modern three-story structures with reflective ground-to-roof glass facades which glaze over with air-conditioning condensation in the humid summers. Filled with students, the campus is lively and you hardly pay attention to the architecture; but without students wandering on every sidewalk and through every green, it feels instead like an office-park, like you’re working on your Saturday off.

  For my final two weeks in town, I slept in the fraternity house President’s Room and each morning woke up to say goodbye to another carload of brothers who were heading back home till August. The left-over liquor from the Senior Send-Off lined the bar’s countertop, sticky and heavy and unwanted, like a collection of extra pecan pies and fruitcakes after the end of the holiday season. For the first few days after the party, I found discarded cups and forks in the living ro
om, in the bathrooms, in the courtyard, and I spent mornings Windexing the glass of the framed photos and paintings in our hallways, wiping away fruit-punch-colored fingerprints and spit-out Sprite; in the summer months, the cleaning staff came only once every two weeks, and the house would stink and fester if I didn’t clean.

  Jenn wasn’t around for those two weeks. Over summers, she worked as a lifeguard in St. Pete, stayed at her sister’s place and bought groceries in exchange for rent-free living in the guest room. She was coming back down to Fort Myers for my final two days in town, and we were going to spend a full forty-eight hours together before I left for Indianapolis: out at the beach with a cooler full of Miller Lite and Seadog Blueberry, out for dinner and drinks at one of the hotel steakhouses, lunch the next day at a tiki bar, then finally packing my car together on the last evening, keeping one another awake from dusk to dawn for our last night together in the President’s Room. I still had the lavalier in a box in the glove compartment of my Explorer, but I couldn’t give it to her. Not now. Not anymore. The letters required ceremony; they required that my brothers bruise me and bloody me, that they dump sour milk over my shoulders and crack rotten eggs on my scalp; to give her the letters while everyone was out of town…it would rob the moment of meaning, render the lavalier as procedural as a Tuesday afternoon courthouse marriage. I could hope for Thanksgiving, perhaps, or Labor Day, or Homecoming, sometime in the Fall semester when I might return to town and make my commitment with all of my brothers present and get my ass beaten to make it official, but for our last night in town, it would just be the two of us, no speeches or ceremonies or jewelry.

  *

  For those two weeks alone, I thought long and hard about the changes I needed to make in my life. I wanted to be this—

  —but I just seemed to keep fucking it up.

  Two weeks alone in the fraternity house, and I spent my time creating goal sheets for my new professional life. I created key categories, “Exercise” and “Healthy Eating” and “Leadership Development,” with individual goals like “Fast Food only four times/ weekly,” “Jog three times/ weekly,” and “No gas station candy purchases/ EVER.” All of it printed out, easily accessible in my notebook, right beside the original form email I received from the National Fraternity Headquarters. Save the World.