American Fraternity Man

by Nathan Holic

  Something in my stomach gurgles. Almost a full week of Mexican food and beer and mixed drinks coursing through me, and I need to get back to the bathrooms. In a hurry. But—oh for fuck’s sake—I can’t run through the girl’s dorms in just my boxers.

  Stomach groans again.

  I give up on my clothes. They’re lost, at least until the lights come back on. But I’ve got to get to the bathroom, quick, so I look for a temporary solution.

  Across the room, Maria turns in the bed, makes a mousy noise, and finally comes to a rest facing me. She can’t wake up now. Let me get my head straight, get to the bathroom, purge whatever is rebelling against my insides, clean up the mess I made so the entire floor doesn’t notice, and then let me figure out how to sneak out of here.

  Maria moves again, this time brushing away the blanket.

  Eyes still closed, but she faces my direction as though watching my every move. Meanwhile, I’m standing in a stooped position in the center of her dorm room, one hand in a clothing pile and the other holding a pair of her panties—a lace thong?—and so I fling it away and make an innocent face in case she wakes. She doesn’t.

  I toss aside a pair of Capri pants and finally find a t-shirt, a small powder-blue baby T. Why not? I struggle into the shirt and it’s so tiny that every flabby curve of my chest pops out. The shirt barely covers my stomach, stretches only to my belly button.

  But no matter how much I rummage through the clothing, I can’t find any pants large enough to manage around my waistline, so this baby T and this pair of boxers will have to suffice. I head across the room to the door, remember that—because this is a university dorm—it’s the sort of door that automatically locks as soon as it closes. I grab a sandal from the floor, turn the door handle softly, and as I squeeze out—hallway light flooding into the room—Maria wiggles her nose and coughs—I hurry out into the hallway and stuff the sandal into the crack between the door and the doorframe so it stays open.

  *

  Another snapshot from last night develops in my mind. Brief, indistinct, the sort of photo taken with blinding sunlight in the background. Perhaps useless?

  After the dancing, there was a corner booth. Maria’s tongue in my mouth, my hand on her ass. Looking out across the bar, Jose staring directly back at me as he sipped a drink and nodded to the beat of an Usher song. Shelley dancing in front of him, but he barely acknowledged her: he was looking at me, face as humorless and unforgiving as a sand-trap.

  Sipping the drink, staring at me like an outsider.

  So I moved my hand up Maria’s back, let it rest on her shoulders instead of her ass, and finally he turned his attention elsewhere.

  *

  The dorm’s hallway is lit orange by overhead lights, the same exhausted pharmaceutical color of over-the-counter cold medications. Doors run both walls—heavy metal bedroom doors, so strong they could survive a battering ram attack (this is the type of “security” that fathers demand for their college daughters, but it’s rendered pointless when a daughter invites a young man to her room). To break the industrial intimidation of the hallway, the RAs have lined the cinder-block walls with colorful bulletin boards; they’ve taped cut-out construction-paper New Mexicos just below each door’s peephole, occupant names written in bubble letters within the cut-out: Maria and Shelley on the door I just closed, Christy and Angel on the door across from me. Many of the girls on this floor have also decorated their doors with glossy photos taken in these first few weeks of school, sprawling collages of party-time craziness, nights at El Sombrero and afternoons at Aggies football games, snapshots of long lunch tables at the campus cafeteria, ten girls to a photo, hugging, cheek-kissing, “sorority squatting,” making their fingers into Charlie’s Angels guns, holding red plastic cups and smiling like their days never have dull moments or tiring routines, and it’s college college college, some of the photos cut in cute shapes, in hearts or circles or zig-zag outlines, and some of them have thought-cloud and word-balloon stickers stuck to them, too, with smarmy captions like “Who needs boys when you’ve got the girls?!?” and “Girl’s Night Out!”

  But my stomach tightens: posted on the door across the hall, a weekly class schedule: Christy (the room’s occupant) apparently has class at 8:00 AM on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. My cell phone is stuffed in the pocket of my lost jeans and I have no idea if it’s 7:00 or 8:00 or 9:00, but I know—just from the sunlight and outdoor sounds—that it’s Wednesday morning, and even though I journeyed to Mexico last night, the rest of the world went about its usual business and the work/school day is definitely beginning. Christy and the rest of the freshman girls on this floor are ready to enter this hallway to head to class, and they are not ready to see a 22-year-old man standing here in skimpy boxers, gut hanging out of a powder-blue baby T with a screen-print Anne Geddes photograph of a little boy wearing an over-sized suit and holding out a flower to a girl in a sundress.

  I place my hand on the wall, steady myself, and—running my fingers over bulletin boards and doors and posters—I make my way to the end of the hallway, several times stepping barefoot on discarded staples and tacks, several times biting my tongue to keep from swearing. And when I’m mere feet from the bathroom door, an electronic beep rings out from the opposite end of the hallway: the patient and unnerving noise of an elevator changing floors. Followed by the clinical swoosh of the elevator doors opening, someone coming home.

  I dart toward the bathroom, baby T ripping under the arms as I run.

  “Totally bombed that test,” says a girl from inside the open elevator, keys jingling in her hand. “Like, none of that shit was in the notes. How am I supposed to know what a macro is?”

  She steps out of the elevator, into the hallway.

  And I run, and the bathroom is right here and I skid to a stop, a couple heavy rattling steps as I change direction, and I look over my shoulder and she’s standing still and looking into her purse, and I fling open the bathroom door, hope she didn’t see me, hope I’m safe, but before the door closes, the girl says, “Can I call you back? Gotta hit the bathroom.”

  The door shuts tight behind me. And not only is that girl on her way down here, but I suddenly realize that this is a women’s floor, that there is only one bathroom, that this is the women’s bathroom, that this room could be full of girls already. Really fucking smooth, Charles Washington. You just trapped yourself in here.

  *

  The bathroom is no friendlier than the hallway, suffering under honeycomb lights so muted that they seem to darken rather than illuminate the space, the floor a moist expanse of tiles punctuated down its center by grimy gold drains that long ago lost their sparkle. The wall to my left is cold gray cinder-blocks, and the wall to my right is lined by five or six stalls; lucky for me, they’re all unoccupied.

  At the far end of the bathroom, thirty feet away, is an unlit cave of showers and faded pink curtains, all of which (lucky for me, again) also appear unoccupied: I have not walked in on some 18-year-old in a bathrobe, ready to scream like a horror movie victim. I step forward, bare feet on cold wet tiles, and to my right are the bathroom sinks, five total, yellowing formica countertops and rusty faucets and…and…

  Vomit across the counter, vomit splashed on the mirror and caked on the floor, up, down, across, in the sinks and hanging from the faucets…

  And this is all mine. Every drop.

  Maybe no one knows it yet? But word will get around on the women’s floor, questions asked, fingers pointed, names volunteered, word eventually traveling from Las Cruces to Indianapolis. And, insult to injury, I can’t even clean it, not yet, can’t use the toilet either, because even if I slip into one of the stalls to wait out the girl from the elevator, she’ll still scream when she sees the sinks, or (at the very least) when she sees my hairy legs under the stall door, and her screams will bring the RA, the Hall Director, and then the dorm will have its culprit immediately. Caught at the scene of the crime! Could I lock the door, then? Lock the bathroom and k
eep everyone out until I’ve cleaned this mess? But I inspect the door, and there is no deadbolt.

  I search around, looking everywhere for escape, footsteps outside the door now, and there, just feet away, right behind me, across from the mirrors and the sinks, so close that I can’t believe I didn’t see it sooner, is an open door: a janitor’s closet.

  The footsteps in the hallway clack louder, and I sneak into the closet, a tiny dark space smelling of bleach and passion fruit, crowded with rolls of paper towels. I pull the door closed behind me and try to settle into the clutter, leaving just one open inch between door and doorframe so I can watch, a broom poking into my back.

  *

  We left the bar, I remember, myself and Maria riding with Sam, and I remember looking around for Jose, thinking that I was escaping him somehow…I was just happy that he hadn’t stomped across the dance floor to forcibly remove me from Maria. And Sam’s driving didn’t feel drunk/ dangerous, maybe because I wasn’t paying any attention, and we wound up at another bar called “Pub,” a hole-in-the-wall where we drank Tecate out of cans, crunched the empty cans in our fists and tossed them into a giant mesh-metal bin. Maria curled into my lap in our booth, just as effortlessly as if we’d been dating for years. Sam ordered a bowl of hot pecans from the bar.

  But this is foggy. I don’t remember how we got back to the dorms. Hazy memories of me and Sam bouncing into the hallway walls here in the dorms late at night. But I do remember Maria staring up at me while we were in the booth, interested eyes peeking out from beneath the shiny black hair falling across her forehead and into her face, hand on my thigh just inches from my crotch and fingers creeping upward; I do remember that she said, among other things, “You seem older, but in a good way,” and “Everyone tries to get out of New Mexico, but you came here,” and every time we kissed, it wasn’t just the quick lip-to-lip starter smooches, nor was it the middle-school variety tongue-all-over-the-place make-out, but she instead pressed her face into mine and bit my lips softly and I could feel heat, real heat as if someone not only wanted me, but craved me, and it was something I haven’t felt in so long.

  *

  From the tiny crack in the door, I stare directly into my mess…the bathroom mirror, the sinks, the chunks, the culmination of last night’s exploits, the raw reminder of how far I traveled.

  The bathroom door opens, and the girl from the elevator—librarian glasses, brown hair still in early-morning tangles—turns the corner for the stalls without even a cursory glance in the direction of the mirrors and the vomit, and she shuts her stall door and I can hear her tearing off sheets of toilet paper and placing them on the toilet seat, and I think NOW! Now is the time for a getaway, the time to escape back to Maria’s bedroom. I place my fingertips against the closet door, am ready to push it open and run, but stinging bladder pains shoot through my body again; I clench my stomach and picture myself actually clearing space inside my body, rearranging my spleen and my kidney to allow my bladder to expand. And all of these sinks, all of these toilets, seem to be engaged in constant draining and dripping, water flowing freely through pipes. Get out now, and what? Piss in the corner of Maria’s room?

  Before I can move, her stall door opens, the toilet flushes, and this girl—who, I conclude, looks just like Lisa Loeb of ‘90s alt-rock fame—is still buttoning her jeans as she leaves the stall, still buckling her belt, has her shirt pulled up over her stomach to adjust the jeans around her waistline, slips her fingers into her pants and grabs her panties and pulls them this way and that, adjusting. And fuck. This is no longer simply an “embarrassing moment,” a 22-year-old man trying to clean up puke at a sink. Suddenly I’m a pervert, a peeping predator surveilling the women as they dress. If caught now, I’ll look downright depraved.

  “What the hell?” Lisa Loeb says.

  She now stands just inches from my janitor’s closet door, back to me, and as she stares into the sinks and mirrors and takes in the gross grandeur of the vomit, a helpless strand of dangling matter hanging from a faucet, matter collected in the drain of one sink…as Lisa sees it all, absorbing the magnitude, I am inches from the back of her maroon t-shirt. She might even hear my breathing, my rustling among the mops and towels. She stands still, hand over chest as if bracing for a heart attack, taking quick-burst breaths.

  I’m pressing against the closet door in such gut-clenching anticipation that it creaks open about four inches under my weight. I step back, startled.

  Lisa Loeb lifts her head, gaze shifting from the vomit to the reflection of the closet door in the mirror. Did the door just move half a foot, she’s wondering? By itself? Did she really just see that?

  I retreat deeper into my cave, but now my left foot lands on something that makes an awful rattlesnake noise—bristles at the end of the broom—and the handle of the broom shifts, knocks into a shelf, and the noise is quick and explosive, like someone dropped a handful of those white 4 of July snap-crackers.

  Lisa Loeb steps closer to the door, real fear in her eyes: maybe imagining something furry, something slithering through brooms and toilet paper, but maybe she knows that I—

  The bathroom door opens, another girl enters, and Lisa backs away from the janitor’s closet. “Hey.”

  “What’s up?” the new girl says, rubbing tired eyes and walking in a crooked line as if barely awake. She’s tall and athletic, black hair, wears a Santa Fe Invitational T-shirt and has the look of a high school basketball player who wasn’t quite tall enough for college ball.

  “I think there’s something in the closet,” Lisa whispers.

  “Something?” the basketball girl asks, still rubbing her eyes. “What do you mean?”

  “The broom just fell down in there.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t placed right.”

  “I really think there’s something in there, Tara. I think it’s a rat or something.”

  I’m crouching in a corner now, far from the door so that I can’t even see them anymore.

  “Fine. Let’s open the door, then,” Tara says. “We can shoo it out.”

  “Shoo it out?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That makes no sense,” Lisa says. “It’s in there. Why do we want it out here?”

  “I don’t have time for this shit.”

  Lisa sighs. For a moment, neither says a word. Just that same steady drip.

  “Shit,” Tara says finally. “I have to take a fucking shower. I have to work in an hour.”

  “Take a shower, then,” Lisa says, sounding both relieved and victorious, perhaps sensing a chance to escape the bathroom without having to face the closet creature. “There’s nothing in the showers. Only in the closet. You’ll be fine.”

  Silence. That dripping noise again. My bladder.

  “I’ll tell Linda about it,” Lisa says. “And about that, too.”

  “Holy shit. Who puked on the mirror?”

  “Some of the girls on this floor are disgusting,” Lisa says. “I can’t wait to move out of here.”

  “I can’t deal with this,” Tara whispers. “I need to get a shower.”

  “Okay, listen. Temporary solution. You shut the door and hold it closed, and I’ll grab the trash can and barricade it. You can take a shower without worrying about…whatever it is…and I’ll tell Linda to have maintenance check it out.”

  A barricade? I back up against the shelving unit (almost knocking over a bottle of Liquid Plumber) and try to stay as far out of view as possible. I hear some minor metal-dragging noises, a 1-2-3 count, and I can picture a complicated operation out there in the bathroom, the sort of ultra-timed system that might be employed for a SWAT raid of a crackhouse, one girl creeping toward the door while another scoots the trashcan into just the right spot, both of them poised and ready like this is a life-or-death mission. And then the door bangs closed and the trashcan crashes and Tara says, “Shit, the can fell over!”

  “Not our problem,” Lisa says. “Let the maintenance crew clean it up.”

  “I
don’t want those nasty janitors in here while I’m in the shower,” Tara says.

  “They’ll wait for you to get out.”

  Siiii-ghhh, from Tara. Then: “I’ll stop by your room after I get dressed.”

  And then—mercifully—the conversation stops, and seconds later the sound of a shower echoes through the bathroom. Tara might still be waiting for the water to warm, and Lisa might still be roaming the room, but I have to take a chance. I have to get out of here. If I stay in this closet, the RA or the maintenance men will find me.

  *

  Did we see Jose again last night? I remember text messages. Who did I text? How many? Will they appear on the billing statement that our Financial Director receives? And at some point in the night, I used the word “rebound,” also, I remember that much, but in what context? “I’m rebounding from a relationship,” is what I said. That’s right. I said that?

  “Who?” Maria asked.

  “Some girl in Florida.”

  “Poor baby,” Maria said.

  And I thought that would be the end of it, but when I checked my text messages throughout the night, both Maria and Shelley looked at me in a strange and pitying way. Waiting for a message from the ex-girlfriend? Had I become pathetic?

  And I talked to Shelley for awhile, too, didn’t I? A heart-to-heart. At a Burger King?

  “You’re not on Facebook?” she asked. “We have to set up an account for you.”

  “No, I can’t do it,” I said.

  “Seriously. We’ll do all the work. We’ll show that bitch how much fun you’re having.”

  *

  I push open the closet door, reintroduce myself to the fluorescent lights, and along the floor is a scattered pile of brown paper towels, q-tips, tampon wrappers, strings of floss, a used condom, and a toppled trash can, and I hop over it and take a long look down the far end of the bathroom: Tara is in the shower, so I’ve got ten minutes, tops. I rush into a stall, spend two minutes, four minutes, five minutes—fuck, it never ends—emptying every ounce of everything from my body, then rush back to the closet for paper towels, Windex, buckets, gloves.