American Fraternity Man

by Nathan Holic

  “You’ve got it, Charles Washington. You’ve got it.”

  *

  Charles is…packing up his bags on a Sunday morning.

  Charles is…leaving his hotel room, missing it already.

  Charles…has two months left. Pack up and drive, pack up and drive.

  Charles is…heading south to Bloomington. Indiana University. Hoosier Country.

  Charles is…breathing. Two months. Smoothing his pants.

  Charles…has one last chance.

  Okay, here goes. Pound chest.

  Charles…will walk straight into that house at IU, yessir, no question, his pants dry-cleaned and pressed and looking just as crisp as the day he bought them, and he’s got a new belt now, too (and maybe his dress shirt is still tainted by pizza stain but who will notice?), and he will walk straight into that house, and they will say “MARATHON MAN!” and Charles will nod in the affirmative and he will step from foyer to chapter room, running his finger through the dust on the mantel, unacceptable, unacceptable, and Charles will gather the brothers in the chapter room and he will ask them why they have let their house go, and why they are drinking so much beer that the trash cans out back are over-filled, and…and…shit…they will not quake with fear at the sight of the Big Bad Consultant, will they?, probably won’t say “MARATHON MAN!”, might not even quiet enough to let Charles speak a full sentence at the Alcohol Responsibility Workshop, might even say “Aw shit, the fucking consultant is here” and might drop stacks of “Fun Nazi” business cards in his suitcase, but does it matter?, because no, Charles is not out to change the culture, not today, not tomorrow, not at Indiana University. That much was clear before Charles ever began typing this status update.

  But Charles can pretend. He’s good at that.

  So.

  Charles…will go to bed at a reasonable hour from now on, and he will wake up at 6 AM each morning, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and he will salute the National Fraternity Headquarters and Walter LaFaber will look out his window and he will see Charles and he will be proud and he will think that Charles is doing a bang-up job out there, writing reports, facilitating workshops, etc., bang-up job, and then, later this week, Charles will drive north once again to Indianapolis, back to the Nu Kappa Epsilon National Fraternity Headquarters, to the office, khakis and dress shirts, and it will be such a magnificent reunion with his fellow consultants Nick and Brock, with Walter LaFaber himself, the mission of NKE, a three-day “debrief,” three days, where everyone will talk of student potential and achievements and “I stormed into that chapter house and I told them that we would not tolerate this destructive behavior anymore” and “We have standards, we have values!” and “We are not stereotypes, that’s what I told them” and Charles will smile and smooth his pants and nod and hope that they trust their eyes and the image they see before them, the flesh-and-blood image, the thunderous voice and the passionate fist-pump, and not the images they might see on their computer screens should they perform a 0.13-second google search, all those digital images—jpgs and bmps and gifs—all those kilobytes and all those thousands of colors and all those faces and arms and hands and beer bottles and balled-up socks and naked Charles Washingtons in second-floor hallways that tell the true story about the students he has failed, the Pittsburghs and Shippensburgs and New Mexico States, images that tell the true story about how he has failed himself most of all, but he will never forget that it wasn’t really his own fault, this mess, no no no, because—somehow, for some reason—he still believes he is capable of great things if only everyone would stop stealing his clothes from him, if only the computers everywhere would crash and cripple google and the search results would vanish, and hell, maybe he can call Jenn and summon the energy to sob and tell her that he’s so sorry and that he’s been a wreck, a real wreck ever since his parents revealed their divorce and you’re the only one I can talk to and I’ve been keeping this to myself and I’m sorry I never told you about the divorce but I’m telling you right now and I need you, Jenn, and maybe this will work, and maybe he will be honest for once, and then Charles will argue to become “Lead Consultant” at the Illinois expansion and he will keep quiet about the Master’s program at Bowling Green where he’ll tell Dr. Vernon everything he wants to know about the “inner workings of national fraternity colonizations,” and by next year maybe he can change his entire Facebook profile again—photos, career, everything—and who will even care about the footprint he left from some other life? This is possible, right?

  Back to the Headquarters.

  Where they build the socially responsible citizens of tomorrow.

  “Change the culture,” they will say and Charles will echo the words, but he will have something different in mind.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX. The National Fraternity.

  Nu Kappa Epsilon was founded in 1910 at Carolina Baptist, but Dr. Wigginton was right: it didn’t truly become a “National Fraternity” until franchises swept North. In the first decades of the fraternity’s existence, there was no Headquarters, and only semester-by-semester postal correspondence between the brothers at their respective schools kept the fraternity from dissolving or from splitting into wildly different operations. But the National Fraternity kept growing, Carolina to Georgia to Virginia to Pennsylvania and Illinois and Nebraska, and so, to keep track of all of these new NKE chapters, Jackson Cohen (now 29 years old, the fraternity still his foremost concern) proposed in 1922 the creation of an “Executive Secretary” post, and a “National Headquarters.” Archives would be maintained, tradition written into record, correspondence between chapters formalized, conventions held, Sacred Laws voted upon. Like some towering and respected oak in the center of a sprawling woods, the National Headquarters would watch over and protect the entire forest.

  National dues, of course, would now be necessary.

  And houses? The Headquarters would solicit alumni to help purchase fraternity houses at each campus. Housing to entrench the groups into the campus culture, to make them permanent.

  And more new chapters? Like an empire establishing colonies, the Headquarters would establish new chapters at schools across the country. An NKE flag flying in every state, that was the original goal. Build the brand. Grow the HQ revenue stream.

  And insurance for those houses, for intramural sports, for legal issues?

  And more staff members to assist the Executive Secretary?

  And a National Headquarters building, of course, of course. 1952.

  From a tiny dining hall idea to strengthen friendships at a small college came a National Headquarters for a National Fraternity called Nu Kappa Epsilon. It seems improbable, this development, the math of chapters and members and alumni—multiplying from one tiny group of eight at Carolina Baptist—as explosive and surprising as the growth of the billion-dollar fantasy football industry from one tiny “rotisserie baseball league” in the early ‘80s. But it happened.

  When I was a kid, my parents used to take me to the Thomas Edison House and museum in Fort Myers every summer; vacations, my father told me and gripped my shoulder, should be enriching. We traveled to Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, also, and the fort in St. Augustine, and the Everglades. (It took awhile before I got Sea World or Busch Gardens, let alone Universal Studios in Orlando.) But mostly, it was the Edison House. And I hated the museum, the smell of sawdust in the old cabins, the yellowing note cards describing various artifacts, the moss and algae growing over Edison’s “historic” swimming pool behind the house. But out in the sprawling yards, there was a giant Banyan Tree that I’d spend the entire afternoon exploring. From one original trunk, the Banyan Tree had grown and spread to cover more than a full acre of land. Each time a new branch of a Banyan Tree grows and extends, vines drop from the branch and plant themselves in the ground and strengthen and thicken and form into new, sturdy, independent trunks capable of growing their own branches. Over the course of more than a century at the Edison House, the Banyan Tree had consumed the yard
, had invaded and ruined some of the sidewalks when the vines and branches ran amok. And I’m sure someone knew the spot where the acres-large tree had started, but I wasn’t sure which had been the tree’s original trunk. It was impossible to sort out.

  It’s the same with the National Fraternity, I’ve decided. Those vines, those branches, those roots of power. As the Headquarters has grown its finances, its staff, and its influence, creating new programs and buying new properties, it’s no longer some independent oak keeping vigil, its motives single-minded, values-based. No, the Headquarters is that Banyan Tree, its origins forgotten behind a system of trunks and branches and vines that obscure 1910 and 1922 and 1952. The National Fraternity Headquarters, an institution made stronger by the thousands of lifelines dropped from branch to ground, thousands of alumni with competing interests, hundreds of chapters whose motives cannot be grouped so simply into “get it” and “doesn’t get it,” an interconnected manifest destiny that no one can slow, let alone topple.

  The National Fraternity Headquarters: that’s where I’m headed right now.

  *

  On the night I drive into Indianapolis for our mid-semester debrief, the skies are the color of old German war helmets, and the highways at rush hour are a long crackling strip of red lights one way and bright-white headlights the other, a thousand plumes of exhaust meeting the cold air and vanishing high in the charcoal sky. The “Mid-Semester Headquarters Debrief”—two days of meetings conceived, LaFaber says, to update Headquarters on what’s happening “in the trenches.” Not quite “mid-semester,” since November is just days away, but it gives me a shot to tell LaFaber in no uncertain terms that I am his man for the Illinois expansion. One last chance to step into a future bright with promise. Because if the worst happens and, while I’m here at the Headquarters, I’m fired for Code of Conduct violations, then I’m unemployable in higher-ed, only a broken hyperlink to a future at Bowling Green with Dr. Vernon.

  Unemployable: a future where I’m pulling up to my father’s driveway in my Explorer, stepping out as he waits for me on the front porch, his head lowered, one hand in his pockets and the other holding a mug of coffee, entire body radiating with I-told-you-so. A failure with no money and no home, forced to return to the father I defied with a job I couldn’t handle. Just another kid in his quarter-life who crashed and burned when he thought he was soaring through a Compassion Boom. “You’re on your own now,” he said, and there would be no recovering from such a pathetic homecoming.

  When I pull onto Founder’s Road, the scene on National Fraternity Row is much different than when I arrived for orientation in bright cheerful May…The road is dim, the parking lots mostly empty at this hour, only a workaholic financial director lighting a front window of ZTA or . Each Fall, once consultant training is over at each headquarters and the semester begins for colleges, the consultants disperse across the country and the Row becomes silent, populated only by full-time secretaries and chapter services directors and CEOs and interns. And damned if they’ll work consultant hours during the semester.

  At the far end of the road is NKE, that stealth fighter of a building, concrete triangle pointed directly at you. In summer, the front lawn was colorful, blooming, but now the fountain is ice on metal, the plants and grass just fossil versions of former selves. The “Headquarters Lodge” (the residence hall for NKE consultants, interns, and visitors) sits a hundred feet behind the Headquarters, behind a smattering of now-bare trees and beyond a gravel parking lot empty at 6 PM save for a single car. My Explorer bounces more than usual as I grumble across the gravel.

  When I first step into the Lodge, I’m blasted by nostalgia. The Lodge! The fraternity house for professionals. Where every NKE consultant stays during summer training, where I spent two months of this past summer, where I slept and ate and read once training had finished for the day. Two months. My belongings (the few things I brought from Florida to Indianapolis that I couldn’t fit into the Explorer) still stacked in cheap plastic storage cases in the basement: some CDs and DVDs, my bed sheets, an extra pillow, some leadership books, and extra clothes.

  The nostalgia is brief, though. We left Indianapolis in August, and now—the end of October—the Lodge walls are already covered in different posters than I remember—Linkin Park, the Cal Golden Bears, a Barack Obama “Hope” poster with a Hitler mustache drawn on—probably because the summer interns have gone back home to their own campuses, and new fall interns have attempted to impose a new personality upon the place, the Lodge a constant patchwork project of always-new residents. Nobody stays here longer than a year, so the Lodge is never completely cleaned, and never completely lived-in. The living room’s three sofas do not match in size or color, and the television is an old 27-inch CRT monitor likely gifted to the Lodge when some full-time staffer no longer wanted it, a black bar encroaching upon the picture and advancing a millimeter toward center each day; the kitchen is a Goodwill mess of mix-and-match silverware sets, of steak knives and spatulas. Dust and carpet-fuzz is ancient, and old porno mags sit sticky beneath the second-floor sink like the sad reminders of long-gone adolescence you hope to never stumble upon again.

  I drag my suitcase through the empty living area, bump it up the stairs.

  No, I never called this place “home,” never could. The Lodge might as well be a hotel or another chapter house; I still have to unpack when I arrive, find my sheets in the basement storage, find an empty bunk bed and prepare it for my stay. “Home” should be comfort. The Lodge is just empty space.

  As I push my suitcase onto the second-floor hallway, I hear a quick thumping noise, increasing in frequency and in volume, and when I look up I’m broad-sided, lifted, slammed into the wall and into a bear-hug embrace, and I can’t breathe and I’m choking—

  “Charlie Washington!” A bellowing Texas voice.

  “Ugh,” I say. “Brock.”

  He releases me and I flop backward, catch my breath.

  Brock London, everyone’s favorite cowboy consultant, bred on red meat and whole milk, a childhood of smashmouth sports and hunting, face like a hammerhead shark. Brock London is here, has unpacked already, and apparently there’s something in his Texas blood that converts all of the steak and ground beef and bacon into pure muscle, because now, three months into his life as a road warrior, he looks as dense and powerful as ever. “How the hell are you?” Brock asks.

  “Ugh,” I say again. “Hanging in there.”

  “Nick’s somewhere in Indiana right now,” Brock says. “Crossed over the border from Kentucky, last time I talked to him.”

  “Oh,” I say, huff. “Super.”

  Brock likes to wrestle, to bear-hug, to fart, to eat six hot dogs in a single setting. But I know that he’s also the kind of guy who hasn’t taken a drink all semester, the kind of guy who’d pin me against the wall if he knew what I’ve let so many undergraduate chapters get away with, if he knew what I’ve done on my own time.

  “We haven’t talked in weeks, buddy,” Brock says, slapping my back and leading me downstairs to the lifeless living room, his arm around my shoulder and determining my direction. “You sound so busy whenever I call you. Like you never have time to talk.”

  “I’m not a big phone guy,” I say.

  “You look tired,” Brock says, and he slaps my back again. It’s something he does unthinkingly and without after-thought, an impulse that—if I told him to stop—he might question whether he’d ever done it. “We need to get you some caffeine? Some eats? Grill House has all-you-can-eat on Wednesdays, remember?”

  “I’m not hungry,” I say.

  “All right, all right, that’s fine,” Brock says, and now we both sit on the clashing sofas of the Lodge living room. Despite Brock’s enthusiasm and attempts at friendship, the two of us will always remain as different as these couches. He has the Ashton Simon Tragedy, a best friend lost to binge drinking, a world colored by heartbreak and then by the undeniably productive reaction to the heartbreak. He lives i
n a fraternity world as black/white, good/evil as a Lord of the Rings movie: evil is always easy to spot and must be punished, and the punishments imposed by the good are always appropriate, just, effective. To even say that I watched a (potential) hazing activity at New Mexico State, or drank a Tecate with Sam, would be to peg me as evil as Sauron himself. “Tired or not,” he says, “just good to see you. Heard you had it rough, busting up the bad guys.”

  “The bad guys?”

  “Charles Washington takes no prisoners. We all heard how you stomped into Illinois at the zero hour, gave them what-for. Dirty Harry hisself. Never would have expected that from you.”

  “Thanks. A real compliment.”

  “Wasn’t an insult,” Brock says. He raises his hand as if to slap my back, but I’m too far away and so he slips it back onto his lap. Again, I wonder if he even knows that he’s done this. “It’s just that you didn’t seem like a hard-ass during the summer. Always reading those leadership books? I didn’t know you had it in you, closing chapters and what-not.”

  I stare at him emotionlessly, scratch my chin scruff. I don’t know what he’s heard, who’s been giving him his information, but I’ve certainly never known Brock London to be sarcastic. He honestly believes I’ve been a model employee. “Tough job,” I say, “but someone’s gotta do it.”

  “Hell yeah, buddy,” he says and smacks his own knee. And then he asks about my semester, my stories. “Come on,” he says, “you gotta have some good ones. I want to hear what else you got into.” And sure, I’ve got stories. But they’re nothing like his: he is truly Dirty Harry: like, probably he walked into the University of Houston chapter house and found a keg in the living room and picked it up with his bare hands and tossed it into the dumpster and grabbed a mop and made the chapter president clean the muddy tiled floors. “Unacceptable!” I can hear him shouting. Or maybe he stomped into McNeese State University and ripped down the Budweiser poster from the wall, replaced it with an inspirational Lance Armstrong poster. Or maybe he roared through Colorado State University’s basement and commanded the brothers to sweep the floor, take out the garbage, repaint, stand up straight no slouching, have some fucking respect, act like men.