by Nathan Holic
Brock was gritting his teeth, and though I’ve often heard people tell me that they are so upset that they “could burst,” I’d never truly believed it until this moment.
“You all right?” I whispered.
“No, sir,” he said. “Makes me sick to my stomach.”
“But I don’t think this perception is accurate,” LaFaber said. “I think that you all are something very different, that our organizations are something very different.”
He paused, one hand stroking his chin, and there was a deep silence in the room, a silence that shouldn’t have been possible with more than 150 people gathered in one place. No rustling, no shifting in seats, no movement of pants or shirt fabric, no change jingling in pockets. A beneath-the-Earth silence, mystical, as if LaFaber had found a way to will away any competition for his attention, to make us all float above our seats. I’m not sure what I expected of my first day on the job. Paperwork? Office tours? Here’s how to use the copy machine, here’s the code to the fax machine, here’s your cubicle, and we have a stapler around here somewhere, and oh, we’re not sure how to unlock this old filing cabinet beside your desk, but if you figure it out, let us know. The sort of things that had taken up the entire first week of my internship at Gulf Coast Communications. But this was different. I found myself standing like a soldier at attention, the slightest fidget unacceptable.
“You are not the headlines!” LaFaber said. “You are the best and brightest. You were the presidents of your fraternities and sororities, the advisors in your residence halls, the senators in your schools’ student governments. Best and the brightest on your campuses. And now? You’re ready, aren’t you?”
Brock was nodding again, trying to steady his breathing.
“You’re going to save the world. I couldn’t stop you if I tried!”
He shook his head comically, and everyone in the room laughed.
“You are leaders,” LaFaber said, “and you cannot falter in your faith.”
The Henderson Memorial Auditorium is an aging structure. Water spots on the ceiling, fading public service announcement posters on the walls. I was told on my initial tour that it was built as a joint project between the Indianapolis-based national fraternities and sororities in the mid-1980s, during a golden age of Greek Life when college enrollments were exploding in a way that hadn’t been seen since the end of World War II, fraternity houses filled to capacity, expanding, adding new bedrooms and kitchens. A golden age when everyone wanted to join and anything seemed possible. Before the Liability Era came and ruined everything.
But even against the dated backdrop, LaFaber looked impressive as he walked the glossy floorboards on-stage before us. Towering above us, impossibly tall, and impossible the way he made eye contact with so many of us so quickly, each of us, one after the next, perhaps 50 consultants in all.
The power of Walter LaFaber. Larger than the stage on which he walks.
“Repeat after me,” LaFaber said, and his voice was barely a whisper, but still the world held its breath to hear him speak. “We are leaders.”
“We are leaders,” the front-row echoed. And I still spoke so softly that I couldn’t even hear my own voice over the din of dozens of other young men and women repeating the same words. But somehow, it didn’t matter anymore.
“We are not stereotypes,” LaFaber said softly.
“We are not stereotypes,” we said.
Brock trembled, he was so excited.
“We are not stereotypes,” LaFaber said and paused, searching our eyes, finger pointed directly at us. All of us, somehow. “You know you’ll encounter groups that just—don’t—get it.” He shook his head sadly. “I want you to remember these words. The men and women in this room? The men and women in the organizations you will be consulting? We are leaders.”
“We are leaders,” we echoed.
“We are not stereotypes.”
“We are not stereotypes.”
“Forget the google search results,” he said, fist held before him again, jaw clenched. “You know what we really are.”
“We are leaders.”
“And you know what we’re not.”
“We are not stereotypes.”
Again. Again. Again.
There in the auditorium, with all of the other consultants, I stood as tall as I could.
“We are leaders,” LaFaber said. “No matter what anyone wants to think!”
“We are leaders,” we said, and it was becoming easier for me to join the chorus.
“And when we do encounter resistance,” LaFaber said, “we will change the culture.”
Penetrating silence.
“You’re the top fraternity and sorority leaders in the nation,” LaFaber said, face still ablaze, scar on his forehead still shining under the spotlight. Suddenly, though, he sighed. He looked disappointed, and this is a man whose every expression screams, Do not disappoint me. “I want you to tell me, with no uncertainty, what you will be doing out on the road.”
The long row of consultants in the Henderson Memorial Auditorium looked from side to side again, then back up at LaFaber, then left, then right; beside me, Brock was mouthing “I believe” yet again, but he seemed unsure that this was what he should be repeating, so he didn’t actually say a word. It was as if we were all performers in a dress rehearsal who’d suddenly realized that we’d been missing a page in our scripts.
And I don’t know why, but the words came to me in that moment: “Change the culture!” I yelled, all by myself, and ran my hands through my hair like an athlete after a grueling game, absolute relief from mental exhaustion.
Up on stage, LaFaber nodded in confirmation. “Yes. We will change the culture.”
“We will change the culture,” we all said together. Taking my lead.
“I didn’t catch that,” LaFaber replied, scratching his chin, looking at the far wall. “This is your career now. This is your life. And that’s all you got?”
“We will change the culture!” we tried. And now Brock was struggling to say it as loud as I was; now Jeanna from Bowling Green was trying to keep up with me.
“Louder! This is your life!”
“We will change the culture!” we shouted, digging deep within our lungs to convince him that we were serious, 40 of us, 50, and it was the sort of chant that could make a believer of every Animal House Bluto out there. If we’d been singing a hymn in church, we’d have had our hands outstretched, convinced we could feel the Holy Spirit on our fingertips.
LaFaber nodded, perhaps satisfied for the moment. “What is most important,” he said from the stage, “is that you believe in yourselves. You can’t do a damn thing if you don’t believe that you are leaders!”
“We are leaders!”
*
During my first semester of senior year, I’d interned at Gulf Coast Communications, a Fort Myers-based marketing and public relations office whose main focus was on event planning. I’d been lured into this unpaid position at EU’s annual “Internship Fest,” where a man in a silver power-tie showed me a laptop presentation of the events with which I might assist: the Bank of America Southeast Regional Awards Banquet, the Sanderson Properties Parade of Homes, the Edison University Faculty and Staff Outreach Night. Ice cream socials, galas, chili cook-offs, barbecues, martini and mashed potato nights. Planning social events, mixers, dances, fundraisers? Hell, I’d been doing this for three years already. Now it could be my career?
But there was no way that the reality of daily office life at GCC could match what I’d imagined. It was long lines of cubicles, men in short-sleeved button-downs and ties who spent mornings emailing YouTube clips to one another, women who rarely moved from their computer chairs and their cubicle-shelf Beanie Baby collections, and who seemed always to be clicking through online photo albums. It was as if everyone at the office tried their damndest to avoid work, as if the 9-5 workday was no different than an average Spring day at a local high school, kids snoozing and passing notes and copyin
g homework. Why are you even here? I wondered.
And, of course, my role at the office was to make copies, to update seemingly endless Excel spreadsheets one symbol at a time, to spend four hours searching online for novelty martini glasses for the Naples Health Care Association’s “Roaring ‘20s”-themed fundraiser. Just before an event, the office descended into a frenzy, swept up in gossip about table settings and life-sized Ray Charles cardboard cut-outs and the 25 different toppings from which guests could choose to create their own designer mashed potatoes. But only four or five employees were ever allowed to attend the events, and these were the elusive and well-dressed executive types who hid behind the tinted glass windows of their enclosed offices, or who spent days, weeks, out of the office on supposed “business trips” to LA or New York or New Orleans. “Gotta put in your time,” my fellow intern, a kid named Randy, told me. “This shit might be tedious right now, but someday, that could be us in those offices.” I usually just smiled and nodded out of courtesy, but I also wondered: Why? Years of toil, so that hopefully I could plan a bank’s holiday party, and then get the privilege of going to the party and eating the chicken fingers? Was this really it?
Often, I spent hours at GCC imagining others at their own jobs: had my father felt like he was accomplishing something important as he moved money from place to place, or were his tasks no different than when I moved stacks of papers from copy room to filing cabinet? The alumni who came back to visit the fraternity house during football season, who walked with such a profound sense of purpose as they inspected our furniture and our floors…what sort of jobs did they have?
And there in the Henderson Memorial Auditorium, body and voice seemingly possessed by purpose, I knew it: no matter what my father had said, no matter what the outsiders thought, this is a job that would actually mean something.
*
“Change starts with each one of you,” LaFaber said from the stage. “I have faith in you. I know what you’re capable of. I’ve read your bios, your resumes. But it’s no longer about what you did in college. It’s about what you’re going to do now. And what are you going to do?”
“Change the culture!” we screamed.
“What are you going to do?”
“Change the culture!”
“You must be flawless. You must be angels. Wherever you go, students should be blinded by your haloes.”
Laughter from all around the hall, from the back rows of fraternity and sorority legends, from the CEOs and Foundation Presidents, from the secretaries and interns. Laughter from the front rows, too, from all of us consultants. And I want to think that, because we were strangers from across the country, we’d all been hiding behind defensive armor this entire time. Not just me. And in this moment, because we all knew that we were part of something special, we began shedding that armor, revealing ourselves, and there was no one who was any better than me, any worse.
“If you don’t have a halo,” LaFaber said, and he seemed to be looking directly at me now, as if he feared that all the chants in the world would not change the man I was, the man I’d tried to erase, “you better hurry up and get one.”
So I chanted even louder the next time. Louder. Louder.
Until nothing else mattered but this moment, when I was one of them.
And by the time we left this first session, it felt like we were all indestructible crusaders protected by God Himself, glowing and so full of energy that we no longer needed to breathe, we floated out of the auditorium. It seemed that so much of my life had been a search for some way to make myself matter to the world, some way to protect or preserve something I cared deeply for, a family, an organization, preserve it and make it perfect and pass it to others, and for this bright shining moment I knew I’d found it.
Two months of training before I was to hit the road, and here I was—here I am, now on my final night in Indianapolis—ready to be what I never could before. Ready to be the Marathon Man that they expect me to be. Ready to change the culture. Ready to save the world.
Part II
CHAPTER NINE: Alcohol Responsibility Workshop.
At the National Fraternity Headquarters, we divide them neatly into two groups: the high-achieving leadership organizations who keep their houses clean and behave as gentlemen and raise money for charities and maintain stellar GPAs, and the frat stars, who seem to fuck everything up. And right now, at the end of my second week on the road as an Educational Consultant, I’ve fallen into a nest of frat stars.
I’m at the University of Pittsburgh now, in the Chapter Room of a crumbling two-story fraternity house so rife with a rotten-orange-juice smell that I’ve been fighting my gag reflex since I arrived two days ago. All around me, on deteriorating couches and rusty metal fold-out chairs, sit the twenty-five dues-paying, live-in brothers of the house. During the day, this is simply the Living Room, but when the fraternity gathers for meetings, the brothers drag couches and chairs from all the first-floor bedrooms and closets and construct a haphazard meeting facility. The “Chapter Room,” they call it. Among my job responsibilities: document and report any damages to alumni-owned housing facilities. But where do I start? The burn marks on the front door, perhaps? The rotting railings of the front porch? The stagnant liquor-beer-trash-water in the dark corners of the basement?
And currently, I’m sitting on a sofa so saturated with beer, liquor, wine, soda, and cereal milk that the cushions are probably more liquid than solid. The assembled fraternity members are busy finishing an exercise I gave them ten minutes ago. I passed out Sharpie markers and tear-away sheets of paper from my portable presentation pad to every member. “I want you to create a timeline of your life,” I told them all (and I could almost hear the squishy noise of everyone rolling their eyes in unison), “but I want the timeline to focus on your life with alcohol. Like, your birth would be your first drink, and major events might include a drunk driving experience, or a night where you made a poor choice because of alcohol.” I checked my watch. “I’ll give you fifteen minutes.” Then I shifted from my front-and-center position as Presenter to my current position on the couch as Observer, watching the members attempt—with various degrees of awkwardness—to draw their timelines, using the floor or the couch as desks, sharpies bleeding into the cushions, poking holes through the paper.
Pittsburgh is one of those groups that sets the fraternity stereotype, that puts Animal House to shame. “Very fratty,” they say at Headquarters. “Frat-tastic.” Eight members on academic ineligibility, four members serving university probation for underage drinking, two live-in brothers who aren’t even enrolled in school. A group that lives in the ‘80s, a reckless lawless Wild West decade for fraternities.
And I’m staring straight up now, looking at nothing, looking at everything, while they draw. The ceiling fan rests motionless overhead, broken and beyond repair, its blades (and the ceiling itself) splashed with dried caramel-brown blotches. The chapter president told me that someone tossed an open beer into the fan as it spun, and instead of scrubbing the splattered mess with hot water and a sponge and 409, the chapter’s elected House Manager pulled a can of spray-paint from the supply room and drenched the stain with a coat of white paint. The stain recently broke through the paint, the chapter president said, and was now growing larger. My face remained flat as he told this story. In the moment, I was too shocked to really say anything, though later I imagined a more productive reaction. A discussion about “respect for housing,” about “personal responsibility,” about “pride in the fraternity.” I imagined unclasping my laptop and sitting down and working with the President and the House Manager to create a set of bullet-point action initiatives that could make this house into a clean and profitable unit.
“Yo, EC,” someone calls from across the Chapter Room. EC: Educational Consultant. In the world of higher education, everything is shortened or abbreviated. Educational Consultant isn’t tough to say, but no matter the title, someone will eventually acronym your position.
/> “My name is Charles,” I say.
“Right,” he says. “Sorry, man.” He’s wearing dirty gym shorts and an ash-gray shirt, cut-off sleeves, a faded slogan across the chest. Looks like it says What’s My Name or Ain’t the Same. Maybe Play the Game. When I met him yesterday he smelled like rusty barbells and weeks-old laundry, but we talked about the National Fraternity and the other Pennsylvania chapters for an hour. He loves this fraternity and all his brothers, he kept saying, but he hates “Nationals.” We’re always getting his chapter in trouble, he said. I told him that we weren’t getting them into trouble, only enforcing standards because we do care about them as individuals. But I’ve already forgotten his name. Could be James or Joe or Jason. So many names, so quick, and no system to remember them all. “How much longer we got for this?” he asks.
“A few minutes,” I say, and I struggle to lean forward on the sofa, to look professional, but I slip, sink back into the cushions. The couch is broken and the springs squeak. I smooth my dress pants again and again to make it seem as if I’m comfortable, but it feels like I’m getting eaten alive by a soggy stack of laundry. “Don’t worry. I don’t expect these timelines to be artistic masterpieces.”
James (or Joe, or Jason) nods, goes back to darkening some gigantic black letters on his paper. And once again, even though the entire room looks like a kindergarten run by crack addicts, I have to tell myself that I’m making progress.
*
This is my schedule for the semester:
University after university, college after college for sixteen weeks. Three days at one school, pack up and drive, then three days at the next. Twenty-four hours a day at fraternity houses, reporting social infractions, documenting housing damages, living in them. The Headquarters doesn’t have the money for plane tickets or hotels, so my car is my office, and my home is a scattered series of fraternity house guest rooms across the Midwest.
