by Nathan Holic
(Just like that cooler of Jungle Juice during Rush. Shh, shh.)
I close my eyes, rub them. Smooth my pants. But I’m still shaking.
“Listen, Adam,” I say. “I understand your position. But flyers? A Facebook page? A fifteen-kegger? This breaks so many rules that I don’t even know where to begin. I’m tired. I’ve been driving so much, and I’m…I’ve got to explain to your Greek Advisor why the university shouldn’t take immediate action. You see how this is tough for me?”
“Other houses are having parties. This is nothing out of the ordinary.”
“I just…” Close my eyes, rub them. When I open them, the room is blurry, Adam is blurry, swaying, and I’m picturing my Explorer grumbling over rough roads, the shirts in my backseat swaying on their hangers, door handles rattling, bags and suitcases rustling, everything so tight and feeling like it is going to collapse around me. “Please, Adam. Just cancel the party.” Slipping out of my mouth: “Just cancel the thing, all right? This is a big offense. Big.” And, I’m thinking, do I even have the energy to be the Fun Nazi right now, to document everything like I did at Shippensburg and then have it all mean nothing?
“How big of an offense?” Adam asks.
“Big,” I say. “Big big,” but I don’t know. Two days ago, I thought I knew, but now? I only know that I want to sleep, that a company credit card means shit when you can’t use it for a hotel room, that my head is pounding, that my hands are shaking. “You seem like a nice guy,” I say. “Intelligent. Really you do. So I’m not going to lie to you or anything. I’m a straight shooter. I don’t beat around the bush. You know what I’m talking about, Adam? Honesty, you know? Honesty’s the best thing. What’s it do for anyone to be deceptive? To lie to someone? To themselves? You know?”
He nods politely. But he’s wearing Burberry. And I don’t even know what I just said.
“I’m frustrated, Adam. I’m frustrated with the things I’ve seen, and I don’t have the energy to deal with more of this shit. I want things to work out. I need you to work with me, Adam. You’re going to cancel this, Adam.”
He nods.
I’m silent for a moment, trying to replay my words.
“So they sent you all this way just for our little party?” he asks and smiles mercifully. “You weren’t supposed to be at Illinois until late October, right?”
“That’s right. That’s exactly right.”
“We have your visit listed on our semester calendar. We’d planned around it. Even found an alumnus off-campus who has a guest room. For tonight, we just cleared out one of the empty bedrooms and set up an air mattress for you.”
“Well,” I say, “that’s good.”
“I do feel bad. Right now, you were supposed to be at—” and he holds up his finger, closes his eyes, gives me the “don’t help me out” head shake, and finally says, “Saint Joseph’s, right? That’s quite the drive you had to make. I apologize for that.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Quite the drive.”
“Where are you headed next?”
“Delaware? No. I don’t know. I’m mixed up right now.”
Details are swaying, shaking loose.
“This is quite the job you’ve got,” he says. “Driving back and forth. We really don’t want to make things difficult for you.”
“Thank you. Just do what needs to be done.”
“I’ll call the Executive Board together. Don’t worry. By the time you get back here tonight, we’ll have this sorted out.”
“Good,” I say. “Good, good. I mean, I wish I could stick around here, help you out with this, but I’ve got to meet with the Greek Advisor. Try to prevent the university from going crazy. You…take care of this, Adam. I’ll be back after dinner.” And he shakes my hand, actually shakes my hand with real feeling and I look into his eyes, these crisp, green eyes, absolutely clear like he’s paid good money to ensure they will never go bloodshot, and he heads to his class and leaves me in the library.
I want to feel relieved. Like I’ve just had a breakthrough moment, like I’ve made a difference and I’ve ensured that Adam and Illinois are “with us” and that the party will be canceled. Like I can call LaFaber tonight, and I can call my father and I can say, look, look what I did, I just saved a chapter and a house and so much money and maybe even some lives.
Before I leave the house to meet with the Illinois Greek Advisor, I walk up the stairwell from the basement to the first floor, but I don’t stop in the main foyer. I travel another floor and wind up at a hallway lined on both sides with bedroom doors, many of which are closed, posters for the Fighting Illini or Fallout Boy or the Chicago White Sox taped to their surfaces. The first door on this floor, however, remains open, and a small nameplate beside the doorframe indicates that this is the “President’s Room.” Adam Duke forgot to shut his door before he left. I resist the urge to creep inside and document receipts and illegal paraphernalia as I did at Shippensburg because, if Adam cancels this party, nothing else matters. But I do walk as far as the door, peek around the corner and into the room. The walls are painted in icy blue. A flat-panel HDTV—50 inches, at least—is bolted into the wall like a mounted portrait, tall and thin silver speakers fastened to the wall on either side of the television. At the far end of the room is a frosted glass shelf, held by several platinum brackets, and along the shelf are no less than ten full bottles of liquor: the only brand that I can see from where I stand is Grey Goose. This kid is in college and his bedroom feels like a penthouse.
Down the hallway a door opens, so I hustle back to the stairwell.
*
I stuff myself back into my Explorer, back out from the tight NKE parking lot and pull out onto the pot-holed road, but I’m facing oncoming traffic, driving the wrong way on a one-way street and someone is honking and I turn onto another street the first chance I get. The roads in Champaign-Urbana…I could’ve walked from Chalmers to Turner Hall—the historic building housing the Office of Greek Affairs—but the Illinois campus map makes the school look so sprawling that it’s exhausting, attempting to measure distances in my head, the inches of the map converted to miles to quarter-miles to footsteps to sweat on my forehead and sweat under my arms and a soggy dress shirt and soggy socks and I’m not unpacked so I can’t just change clothes when I get back from my meetings, and so I drive. Twist up hills and down hills, past construction, past granite and limestone and crowds of blue-shirted students waiting for shuttle buses to pack them up and shoot them back to their dorms, until I finally find meter parking outside a Panera Bread equidistant from both the NKE house and Turner Hall.
So I drove ten minutes just to spare myself five minutes of walking. And meter parking! I’ll have no receipt when I fill out my expense report.
When I enter the over-air-conditioned lobby of Turner Hall, an Asian girl in a “Math Nerd” shirt directs me to the elevators. Upstairs, I pop out into another lobby, this one swarming with students in orange, blue, white, “Chief” shirts and “Illinois Basketball” shirts and they all love this school, love it, and once again I’m the easily identifiable Fun Nazi—shirt and tie, sweating, scowling.
I follow a sign that says “Greek Life,” and soon find myself in another lobby.
“You must be from Nu Kappa Epsilon fraternity,” says a pineapple-haired young woman in a pant-suit. She rises from her computer desk with her hand outstretched, smiling with such force that she looks like Jack Nicholson’s Joker, and she sounds unbearably energetic, happy, too happy, orientation happy. “I’m Sandra Worth,” she says, “the Graduate Assistant for Greek Life. You’re Charles Washington, correct? The consultant from EU?”
“That’s me. How’d you know?”
“You’ve got the consultant look.” She giggles in an insider way. She’s the model of Student Affairs enthusiasm, this Sandra Worth, likely a 23- or 24-year-old grad student straight from four undergraduate years as an RA or Orientation Leader, now funneled into 60-hour work weeks as a Graduate Assistant in whatever depa
rtment her College Student Personnel program sees fit. In this case, she works under Dr. Lynn Jacobs, the university Greek Advisor.
“The consultant look?”
“Tired,” she says, giggling again like it’s something she can’t help, hiccups or a coughing fit. “You look tired.”
“Thanks,” I say. “I try hard for this look.”
“Not in a bad way. I’ve been the Assistant here for the past year and a half, so I’ve seen a lot of consultants, and I’ve seen the whole cycle.”
“There’s a cycle, is there?”
“Oh yes. You start off looking like you’re going to conquer the world and then you start looking tired. A couple weeks in bad beds with no sleep. Am I right?”
“Something like that,” I say.
“How long are you on the road for?”
“One year.”
“You’re lucky. Some of the fraternities employ their consultants on two-year contracts. They have junior and senior consultants so that the younger guys have a support network. You don’t want to fall back into the trappings of college life, you know?”
“The trappings of college life.”
“Yeah,” she says, giggles. “We try to put consultants in contact with one another when they’re here, just so you have some interaction with other professionals. Or, you know, us grad students can take you out. We like to have fun, too.”
All that Sandra says, even the tone of her high, caffeine-pricked voice, reminds me of a girl I knew back at EU, an ADPi named Elizabeth Westfield, and I’d known her all four years of college. In social settings, she seemed to always relate her career progress, telling everyone her grade point average, her completed coursework, her interactions with businesspeople of note. During our senior year at EU, she landed a decent internship and, a couple weeks before graduation, while we celebrated the start of Dead Week at a bar called Gulf Breeze, she told me she’d lined up a job with Coleman-Harris Advertising. “We’re too old to even be at this bar,” she said, peering around as if someone was watching her, judging her. “It’s a college place. We’re graduating.” I can almost hear a conversation between Elizabeth and Sandra, both of them discussing with disdain the “trappings of college life.” But Elizabeth is in a cubicle now, learning the programs her bosses told her will best economize her time; she’s learning how to fill in forms, busy work, just as she did when she colored paint-by-numbers in kindergarten, just as I did at my internship at Gulf Coast Communications. Sandra probably stays inside on weeknights to watch bad sitcoms, only goes out on Friday and Saturday nights to bars that serve Blue Moon with orange slices and charge too much, to bars that serve thirty different kinds of designer martinis, to bars where balding 35-year-old men in sweat-necked white dress shirts are post-college frat stars.
“Spring will be different for you,” she says. “There’s a whole new cycle for Spring. But I can’t spoil it, you know? The experience of consulting is the main reason to do it.”
“Yeah, the experience. Did you do it?”
“No,” she says. Shakes her head sadly, short blonde hair rustling like there’s something living inside. Her pant suit is tight on her skin, but she doesn’t look like she minds. “I wanted to,” she says. “I really did. It’s just…I wanted to go to grad school, not put it off. I figured if I put off grad school, I might never come back. Life’s so short, you know? And I just wanted to get on with it, and—”
I nod, thinking of our party, Wasted on the Water, the time that I spilled daiquiri all over Jenn and her shoulders were stained red for the rest of the day, and her white bikini top was stained, but we were so drunk that we just laughed and she dumped a daiquiri over my head.
“—and it’s absolutely everything I expected,” she says. “Wait. Wait a second! Don’t you want to know what sorority I’m in?”
Head pounding, and I’m not sure I heard anything she just said.
“Sorry,” I say. “What sorority were you in?”
“Don’t use the past tense. We’re members for life, remember.”
“Right. What sorority are you in?”
“I’m a Delta Zeta,” she says. “From Miami University.”
“Oh.”
“We were founded there at Miami. Very exciting.”
“Oh.”
“Miami University. In Oxford, Ohio. Not ‘The U,’ in Florida. I’m sure you were wondering that. Miami University was a school before Florida was even a state. No offense.”
“None taken.”
“Don’t you want to know about your chapter here?”
“I figured that when I talk to Dr. Jacobs, she’d—”
“Quick objective viewpoint on Nu Kappa Epsilon,” Sandra says. “I know the chapter president, Adam, because I’ve communicated with him so much the past week about the alcohol poisoning. You know the details?” I nearly interject, but she doesn’t give me a chance. “He’s a nice guy, and the brothers are all nice guys. Great GPA. But we have a term in our program, and that’s ‘All-Star Squad.’ You know how some sports franchises will go out and spend money on the best free agents, and they’ll have a group of great individual athletes, but the team itself doesn’t win? That’s Nike! Nice individuals, but not a good team.”
“Thank you, Sandra,” I say. “I appreciate you telling me that. But I’ve got a few meetings later this evening, also. Is Dr. Jacobs ready for me?”
“She’s meeting with the Dean,” she says. “I updated her appointments on Outlook to clear time for your meeting, but you know how it goes? The Dean comes first. It’s hard to cut it short when you’re eating cobb salad with the woman who controls your job.”
“I’ve got to wait, then?” I say.
“I’ll keep you company!” Sandra says and pats a padded chair beside her desk.
I can’t tell if she’s flirting or if she’s just unceasingly cheerful. This is my first extended contact with a college-age girl in several weeks, but I consider briefly how many college guys Jenn talks with everyday, back at EU. How many other fraternity guys.
Sandra asks me what my favorite campus has been. I start to answer, but then she asks me if I’ve ever been to Indiana University. I start to answer, but then she tells me that MGCA was one of the best weeks of her life. I start to speak, but then she tells me about all of the chapters at Illinois, about how this Greek community is great, the largest in the country. It’s tough work to be a fraternity or sorority member here, she says, but it’s so rewarding, and I’m thinking that Jenn wouldn’t screw around on me, that she’s probably just busy, like me. Such an incredible community, Sandra says, and the percentage of the student population in fraternities and sororities is unbelievable. Every now and then, there’s a small problem, but the chapters are all so old and established that it only takes a call to the alumni and they stop in and have a come-to-Jesus meeting with the undergrads, and the problem goes away.
Jenn has this way of putting her fingers (just the tips) along the upper portion of your chest as she talks, on every guy’s chest, and I never thought about it because I was always around, and it was usually my chest.
Sandra is now talking about Miami, about how—at Miami—the sororities don’t have houses and one sorority wanted to build a house but the other national sororities blocked it because that would hurt their recruitment numbers and then they’d be forced to build houses also and there’s so much money at stake. And there’s just as much money at stake here at Illinois, she says, much more than at Miami. Million-dollar houses. Millions of dollars in alumni contributions to the university. She talks about how impressive the new Pi Kappa Alpha house is—have I seen it?—and she’s telling me that we have a great responsibility in higher-ed, that we need to ensure that the organizations don’t slip up, and it’s totally under our control, she says, but I’m not sure anything is under my control and my vision is shaky and I’m picturing the shirts swaying in my backseat again, and I’m picturing myself packed into my Explorer, surrounded by suitcases and snap-shut cases and box
es of supplies and I can’t even move my arms or turn the steering wheel or reach the emergency brake, and it’s like getting strapped into a rollercoaster and knowing that I’m stuck going wherever this machine wants to take me, up up up, dowwwwwwnnnn, and I’m thousands of miles from Jenn and I have no control.
“I think…” I say.
Sandra’s voice, her giggles…they’re somehow inside my head, cutting into my brain…they’re behind my eyes, pulling my eyes back into my skull…it feels like my face is puckering into an implosion.
“I think I need to make a phone call,” I say, and stand up while she’s talking.
*
Outside Turner Hall, I call Jenn.
I stand on the building’s concrete steps, a half-block from the long grass expanse of the school’s quad where students lay out on towels and fling Frisbees, something I rarely saw back at Edison University. Our students didn’t sport long hair or tattoos, our girls didn’t wear hemp dresses. There were no protests, and there was no literary magazine, no poetry readings. When we wanted a tan, we went to the pool or the tanning beds, not the campus greens.
“How was lunch?” I ask when Jenn answers the phone. I try to sound like I’m interested, but I think my question comes out sounding condescending.
“Fine,” she says. “It was just Applebee’s.”
I try to lighten my tone. “Applebee’s sounds good. I had gas station food for lunch.”
“That doesn’t sound like a very good choice for lunch.”
“Ha ha. I wish I could choose. But it’s hectic out on the road.”
“You could have had something else, I’m sure.”
“Well, yeah,” I say. “I didn’t mean, you know, that I definitely couldn’t have.”
This isn’t how I imagined our first conversation in forever would go.
“You look up plane tickets?” she asks. “For Homecoming?”
“I haven’t been in front of a computer.”
“So…no, then?”
“Yes,” I say.
“Yes, no? Or yes, yes?”
“Um,” I say. “Yes, no?”
