American Fraternity Man

by Nathan Holic

  “Easy to say afterwards, isn’t it?”

  “What do you want, Maria?” I ask. “I told you I’m sorry. But I’m in Indiana right now. There’s not much I can do out here. What is it that…I mean, what do you want?” I realize, after I say this, that it comes out sizzling like acid—what do you want?—like I’m some action hero who finally finds the dastardly villain who’s been threatening to blow up the city for no real reason.

  She’s silent for a moment, considering the ridiculousness of the question. “I want more than some half-assed apology,” she says eventually. “We’ll talk again, player. Till then, be easy on those little Ohio bitches.” And she hangs up; the car suddenly grows cold, a light rain hitting the windshield and then rising in violence, the long road back to campus falling dark.

  *

  Long after the fraternity house has gone silent on my final night at BGSU, I type the final letters on my visit report for New Mexico State University. It’s late, so late that many of the local gas stations have closed until sunrise, and outside the guest room window the campus appears so windy, wet, and desolate that I feel as if I’m in the middle of a Florida hurricane. Middle of night darkness made darker because the rain and the shaking tree branches obscure the street lamps. Everyone on lockdown, not a car on the streets, not a smoker on the park benches.

  Nobody, it seems, wants to watch me finish this report.

  “I did not witness hazing in Las Cruces,” I typed on the first draft, “but I recommend further investigation/ temporary suspension. I saw clear signs of bullying (brothers making jokes at the expense of the pledges), though one could dismiss such activity as ‘boys just being boys.’”

  But this wouldn’t have been good enough for LaFaber.

  So I added, “I saw boxes full of blindfolds. Unclear whether these were to be used in a ceremony, but I feel it must be recorded.” Then, “I was unable to attend any chapter events, but…” But I strike it out because LaFaber wouldn’t believe it, replace it with, “I attended a chapter Etiquette Dinner for a few minutes, and many of the pledges seemed terrified when they learned that I was a national representative, perhaps indicating that the member education process is flawed? Warrants further investigation.”

  LaFaber needs specifics, individual incidents and observations. So I type, “I overheard a brother call the pledge class a bunch of ‘dirty scumbags.’ I overheard one pledge complaining about having to do push-ups all night long.” And, “I think they have some alumni connection to a pecan farm they use for pledge activities. Didn’t see anything, but this seems suspicious.” But I also write that it is “important to note that individual brothers—Sam Anderson, the New Member Educator—seemed committed to doing the right thing,” but “the overall chapter culture seems influenced by ROTC/ military training tactics. This is a problem chapter.”

  “Charles…is typing the wrong date. The date: one month ago.”

  “Charles…is printing the report.”

  And then the visit report is in my hands, paper-clipped, all six pages. I shake it and expect it to be heavy.

  I remember a time, back when I was in high school, 14 or 15 years old, and my father was involved in a long and bitter battle over a sizable chunk of land along a few of the twisting brackish creeks and rivers that fed into the intracoastal waterway. I don’t know who he was working with, which investors or holding companies, but the plan was to transform the mud and palmetto scrubs and spiderwebs and snake pits into long rows of condos, town centers, boat clubs, docks, seafood restaurants…“Coastline” was the name of the development…undesirable land turned into waterfront property…but an organized political push from the Sierra Club was holding them back. Something about tortoises, pelicans. And I heard the daily updates from my Marine Biology teacher, Mr. Foster: how we would never get these wetlands back, how this was Corporate America at its worst and today they just got another permit approved, how there was a march at the Super Wal-Mart the next weekend and a letter-writing campaign and we need to stand up and do what’s right, how the people in charge—“Suits” and “Blazers,” he called them, but you knew he wanted to say “Greedy Bastards” or “Shady Sons of Bitches,” that he had faculty-lounge conversations with the other teachers where his face grew red and he pounded his fist on desks—were fudging documents, commissioning environmental studies showing that there were no endangered tortoises anywhere close and they were lying, Mr. Foster said, he’d seen them! One morning in class he read aloud an article from the Cypress Falls Herald, and my father was quoted as saying that “it had been a long struggle” but “it was a big win for the local business interests.” Coastline was a reality. Thomas Washington, my teacher said, throwing the paper down. Thomas Washington! Who is this guy? How can he sleep at night?

  I didn’t say a word. To Mr. Foster or to my father.

  But I remember thinking: no one would ever say the same thing about me. I just wanted to do good in the world, to have everyone acknowledge that and say, “Yes, Charles Washington is doing good. This world’s a better place because of him.” It didn’t seem like that tough a mission.

  I flip through the report, looking not for typos but for some sign of the damage I will do, as if the text will suddenly have turned red, bolded, surrounded by blinking lights and arrows that denote each individual lie, as if I will see the wetlands drained and all the pelicans and tortoises and deer and foxes slaughtered, but…it’s just paper. Black and white. Just text on paper, and paperwork isn’t action, right? I stuff the report into a FedEx envelope.

  Just paper, I tell myself. Just paper. Just paper.

  And I don’t know if I know where I am now. If I know who I am, what I’m doing.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR. Purdue.

  I leave Bowling Green on an afternoon when the sky has again taken the color and texture of cracked cement, and I drive to Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, where the world seems even darker, more jagged, the campus painted with grayer grays than BGSU, the cold sidewalk puddles longer and deeper. Students burrow into gray Boilermaker hoodies as late October winds slice through campus, tearing apart piles of leaves in the grass and sending the leaves rocketing through the air until they eventually smack against kids in their hoodies and leave muddy leaf-prints. Winter is hungry, and Purdue is experiencing its first bite.

  Just the same as Illinois and Michigan, the fraternity houses are spread throughout the campus, and it takes me half an hour to find the correct one-way street, pull into the proper alley, and park in the correct lot for the sharp-edged limestone Nu Kappa Epsilon Fraternity house, a structure built from stone blocks as large as the parking spaces.

  I dart through a steady driving rain, wearing my EU windbreaker over a long-sleeved Fresno State T-shirt I bought in California, but as soon as I make it to the front door the chapter president tells me that I’ve got a meeting with the Greek Advisor in twenty minutes. Face is cold and wet, my hair dripping in matted-down tangles. Dress shirts still packed.

  “I’ve got a meeting?” I ask. “In twenty minutes? You’re kidding me.”

  “Yeah,” he says. His name’s Bryan O’Reilly, a thick Irish kid—half fat and half muscle—with a shaved head and fiery goatee, and he takes huffing breaths after every sentence he speaks. “Only time he could meet. I can take your stuff upstairs, though.”

  “I look awful. I need to clean up,” I say. “Didn’t you think to call me?”

  “No,” Bryan says. “You didn’t tell me I was supposed to.”

  *

  I change into an NKE polo, stick with the destructed jeans I’ve been wearing nonstop, sprint across campus to the Greek Life office, and dry my hair with a brown paper towel from the building’s first-floor bathroom. The Greek Advisor here at Purdue—Grant Farmor—is just another 23-year-old kid with a Master’s in CSP: soft face, pale white and marked with acne scars on the cheeks, hair such a thin fair blonde that it looks like it might fall out at any moment. Grant rolls his chair to his scuffed desk, b
oxes and boxes of folders and papers and disks and network cables at his feet, and with an energy level sustained by grande Starbucks coffees, he introduces himself and lists his accomplishments: he is the Greek Advisor of Purdue, the man in charge of the third-largest Greek Community in the country! He is only 23! He has presented at conferences as diverse as SEIFC and SROW and the Beta Theta Pi National Convention! The first ten minutes of our conversation feel like a spoken-word performance of Grant’s resume, and then suddenly he looks me in the eyes and shifts focus: “And you,” he says. “I’ve heard about you.”

  Heard about me. Again? All of these advisors: do they just spend their days instant messaging one another? I’m about to throw my hands in the air, about to toss my laptop bag across the room. You know everything, don’t you? So why don’t you fill out my reports, and let’s just call it a motherfucking day!

  But Grant leans forward, lowers his voice: “I mean, you closed the Illinois chapter.”

  “Illinois?”

  “For that keg party? You walked inside and closed that chapter, right? I heard about it.” When I nod, he leans back a little in his cheap creaking chair, and he says, “Oh man, that takes some serious…” hushed tone “…serious balls, brother.” Hands miming the act of holding some serious balls, face pure delight, as if he doesn’t get the opportunity to use the word “balls” nearly enough. He seems like the sort who would also jump at the opportunity to pantomime masturbation if we were talking about someone he considered a jerk-off.

  “That wasn’t exactly the way it happened,” I say.

  “That’s a wild campus, my man,” he says. “Usually, when I hear about chapter closures, it’s always sort of…” Leans forward again, whispers: “Always sort of pussy-ish, you know? An email that says ‘Oh, by the way, your chapter is closed.’” Leans back, mimes the ball-holding again. “Nobody goes into a chapter house, pistol drawn, and lays down the law. You’ve got a reputation as, like, some kind of cowboy. Let the legend build, brother. Let it grow.”

  “I tried to save that group,” I say. “That’s what happened.”

  “Some chapters are beyond saving. You either get it or you don’t, you know?”

  “That’s what they say.”

  “In any case, it’s better this way.”

  “I suppose.”

  He looks at me with squinted eyes, like some unspoken dialogue is now taking place. He pats his thinning hair, makes it cover a bright spot on his scalp. “You don’t think it’s better?”

  “The house is empty, trashed,” I say. “The kids were evicted in the first month of the semester. Doesn’t seem like it worked out for anyone.”

  “Incidental casualties. If what we’re hearing is true.”

  “What you’re hearing? Is there something I’m missing?”

  “There’s been rumblings from Illinois…?” he says, squinting hard, perhaps gauging me, what I know, what I don’t. Hands spread out across his desk.

  “Rumblings?”

  “Rumblings. You really haven’t heard? Come on, brother-man.”

  “Good or bad news?”

  “Both,” he says. “I’m friends with a grad assistant over in Cham-bana. Did our undergraduate together at Iowa. He told me about…” And he looks around, like someone is spying on him through the wall vents or from under his crumbling green desk…“Nu Kappa Epsilon’s interest group.”

  “An interest group?”

  “An interest group,” he says, closes his freckled hands into fists. “You know? An interest group?” When I give no response, he finally divulges: “Haven’t done any colonizations yet? Still new to the game? There are two different ways that a national fraternity can start a chapter on a campus. The first way, you’re probably familiar with.” He gives me a prompting look, stretches one hand out, palm facing me.

  “National colonization,” I say.

  “At Purdue, we allow one national fraternity to colonize each Spring. Generally, a chapter that closed down a few years ago, and we re-colonize to keep the old alumni happy.”

  “I thought we already had a colonization deal with Illinois. Five years from now, after all the evicted brothers graduate.”

  “That’s what most universities prefer,” he says. “But every now and then, you get a group of non-affiliated students on campus who want to start their own fraternity. Like, let’s just say you’re some sophomore, and you start thinking how cool it might be to get your friends together and start a fraternity from scratch.”

  “How does that relate to Nike?”

  He grins and leans forward, and for a moment he looks like a little boy trapped in his father’s suit, a little boy cursed with thinning hair and the early effects of old age on his skin. As he shakes his head, I picture him in a sandbox, on a baseball diamond, on a bicycle. He doesn’t look old enough for this position, for a desk, for these clothes or that hair or those wrinkles, but here he is. Educating me.

  “When a new fraternity forms, they usually declare themselves a ‘local’ fraternity, some combination of letters that doesn’t exist on a national level. We’ve had this happen at Purdue…they’ll call themselves something ridiculous, like Tappa Kegga Miller. Those fraternities don’t last long. They collapse after football season. If a group is serious, it’ll ask a national fraternity to be their sponsor. The plot of the original Revenge of the Nerds, the white-boys asking the all-black Tri-Lambs to be their sponsor? Anyway, this is what we call an ‘interest group,’ and rumor has it that you’ve got an interest group at Illinois petitioning the Nu Kappa Epsilon Headquarters to become a colony. And it’s causing an uproar in the fraternity community there.”

  “Only a month after we closed the old chapter?” I ask.

  And again, his face cracks into childish delight as he recalls his conversations with graduate assistant friends from the University of Illinois; “rumor has it,” he says twice, thrice, then twice more, and “word around the grapevine,” and “word on the street,” and the cherry: “from what they’re saying on the inside…” Uproar, he says with red cheeks. Uproar! The Lambda Chi Alpha Executive Director had assurances from the university that they’d be the next fraternity to colonize at Illinois, and now this NKE interest group has thrown off the entire expansion schedule. And the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity house on campus, vacant for the past four years (thousands of dollars sucked out of the alumni Housing Corporation bank account on a monthly basis), will remain vacant even longer because Nu Kappa Epsilon has an interest group forming. An interest group! Ready to move back into the house immediately and replenish the bank account. Illegal maneuvering, clandestine deals! Oh, the conflict between national fraternities, where millions of dollars are now at stake, he says. This is the big-boy leagues, he says. Getting things done!

  And Grant Farmor relishes every gossipy syllable he spills; he’s no longer a child in a sandbox; now he has the excited eye twinkle of a 19-year-old headed off to the bar with his new fake ID. Gossip gossip gossip, as though this is still college he’s talking about—who hooked up with whom last night, and when’s the next big party, and who got a boob job, and who talked shit about Danny. This is the same conversation, conducted in the same way as if he was still the Vice President for his undergraduate fraternity at Iowa.

  But I also realize: this kid’s got a job. A real job. An office. And a solid career ahead of him after he finishes what will likely be a two-year stint as a Greek Advisor. He’s going places, using this position to go somewhere. And what have I got?

  “I’m sure you’ll have everything lined up if you apply for grad schools, but if you need a letter of rec., let me know.” Twirls again. “It’s a small world, higher education, but you got to know the right people.”

  “Kiss the right asses, don’t piss off the wrong people, that’s what everyone tells me.”

  “You’re a fraternity consultant, after all. Natural transition into Collegiate Student Personnel.”

  “That’s what Dr. Vernon told me,” I say.


  “Dr. Vernon,” he says and chuckles. “Good old Doc Vernon.”

  “He told me to apply for Bowling Green’s program.”

  “You’d do well,” he says. “Good head on your shoulders.”

  “Just wait till you get to know me.”

  “Ha.” He twirls in his chair. “Really, though. Consider it. It’s fun to work with students, help them to realize their potential and all that.”

  “I do that right now,” I say.

  “Yep. And you met Dr. Vernon already, so…looks like you got your bases covered.” And he laughs, has an in-joke grin on his face. Knocks on the table. Nods. Takes a beer-chug-sized gulp of his coffee.

  “What’s so funny?” I ask.

  “Dr. Vernon? Dude’s a quack,” Grant says. And now he’s pointing at the surface of his desk, finger making a dull thump with each impact, and it seems that the coffee is forcing him to constantly move, constantly keep his hands busy. “Don’t get me wrong. I got mad respect for him, but let’s get realistic, you know? All the learning laboratory stuff. Come on.”

  “He seemed to have a good thing going,” I say.

  “People worship the guy,” he says. Hands swirling. “But it’s all because he publishes a few articles, a couple books, gets a bunch of grant money.”

  “That’s a big deal, though. Right? He had a lot of research.”

  “Research, right. The stuff he’s doing on campus? Psssh. Dude has been there forever. Who works as a Greek Advisor that long and doesn’t get a better job offer, you know? Shit, talk to anyone who works there, and they’ll give you the inside scoop: head-in-the-clouds theory, you know, all these programs and symposiums and what-not. None of it really accomplishes anything. Just gives him material to write more journal articles.”

  “I didn’t get that impression,” I say. “He seemed—I don’t know—honest. Like he saw through all the head-in-the-clouds stuff. I don’t see honesty very often.”

  “Talk to the grad students. When they first start the program, they love Dr. Vernon, think he’s a celebrity or something. By the time they’re done? Hate his guts. Makes everyone work 60, 70 hours a week on all this B.S. programming.” Shaking his head, shuffling papers. “The way I see it, it’s people like you and me doing the real work, am I right?”