American Fraternity Man

by Nathan Holic

  But we don’t get as far as his stories, not even as far as my own, because Nick bumbles through the Lodge’s front door just a few minutes later. He isn’t unbridled energy like Brock, doesn’t lift anyone off the ground, doesn’t bear-hug the life from us. Nick is a five-ten California boy, laid-back but not timid, gay but low-key about “gay pride”; he doesn’t have an Equal Rights bumper sticker or talk-squeal like a sorority girl; often, Nick tells people that he doesn’t want homosexuality to define him, and in the fraternity world maybe it doesn’t. So what if he reads The Advocate? So what if he owns the entire DVD collection of Queer as Folk? So what if he has a poster of a shirtless Abercrombie model tacked to his cubicle wall? He’s a dime a dozen, one gay man among a sea of higher-ed gay men. No, homosexuality doesn’t define him in the fraternity world, but—as much as I don’t like to admit it—it does define Nick for me, because his motives as an Educational Consultant are as pure as Brock’s. Homosexuality, in fact, is the very reason that he’s a consultant. Like many fraternity men across the country, Nick came out during college, sophomore year, after he’d already started living in the UCLA chapter house; there were 55 brothers in the chapter, and together they negotiated and worked through a situation that elsewhere might have descended into the blackest of hate. What did it mean to have a gay brother? What did it mean—as an 18-year-old who’d always told gay jokes and squirmed whenever he saw two men holding hands—to live with a gay man? The results weren’t always happy and sunny, of course: and in other chapters, sometimes the gay brother is forced to move out of the house, surrender his pin, give up the fraternity. But because Nick’s experiences in college were so positive, so encouraging, he’s made it his mission to help other college men through this transition, to work with chapters to understand rather than judge; after his consultant contract expires, he’ll move on to another job in higher-education: a lifetime of helping young students to realize themselves without the harassment or negativity they might have encountered in high school or in their myopic hometowns.

  Nick tosses his duffel bag onto the hallway floor, wipes sweat from his forehead, oscillates a hard stare between Brock and me, on the living room couches. “So-ooo…” Nick says. “Here we are again.”

  It takes Brock a moment to summon his unrestrained enthusiasm, but when he does, Nick doesn’t stand a chance. “Get your ass over here!” Brock says, shoves himself from the couch and wraps his arms around Nick, squeezes. “Aw,” Brock says, tousling Nick’s hair, “you look like you’ve lost that California tan.”

  “Okay,” Nick grunts, prying at Brock’s hairy arms, “okay, okay. Playtime’s over. I get it. You’re glad to see me.”

  Brock finally lets Nick loose, and Nick tumbles toward me, bumping his hip into the armrest; he stands upright, then, and brushes his long-sleeve t-shirt, brushes his jeans.

  “And you,” Nick says to me, waving his hands to indicate my ensemble. “Looks like we’re really gonna be mistaken for brothers now.” That was the running gag over the summer: the California boy and the Florida boy, both of us with dark Caucasian skin and short, black hair. For the old ladies who’d worked as administrative assistants for thirty years and had seen a hundred consultants (and who would forget about us the moment our contracts expired), it was just easier to lump us together into one man: “Nickorcharles.” The more perceptive Headquarters staffers would describe Nick as the “Laid-Back Consultant,” the one who rarely tucked in his shirts, who styled his hair with a bit more wild college zest. By contrast, I suppose I was the “Uptight One,” though no one ever said that to my face.

  Now, though, except for his two-day-old facial hair overgrowth, we look nearly identical.

  “Never seen you wearing jeans before,” Nick says. “Looks like you turned over a new leaf.”

  “That’s one way of putting it,” I say.

  Minutes later, we’re at the dining room table so Nick can open the sliding glass door and smoke. This has always been an unspoken agreement: our conversations follow Nick wherever he goes, wherever he can smoke. “Tell me about your semester, Charles,” he says, words mumbled through the cigarette. “How’s Jenn?”

  Oh, she’s fine, I say.

  “Fine?” Nick asks, cold air swooshing inside as he opens the door wider. “You get back to Florida to see her at all? You never call us. I have no idea what you’ve been up to.” Nick taps the ash of his cigarette out the window where it likely falls into a patch of dead vegetation. “Hope you’ve been calling her, at least. Gotta make sure you hit your two-call daily goal, or whatever.”

  “You knew about that?” I try to smile, but I don’t want to tell them anything else. Both of these guys are good friends, the sort with whom I’d share a dinner, stories from college, even a couple beers, but neither values my friendship over his job as an Educational Consultant.

  Brock turns to me, shrugs, looks as though he’s about to say something—and I can tell, just by the way he’s raising his wide shoulders and stretching his face in that curious way, that he’s going to ask another question about Jenn, or about my travels, my chapters, my stories, how I handled Illinois, everyone’s heard about Illinois, about how I take no prisoners, and so I head him off. “Tell us about your semester, Brock. You look like you lost weight.”

  “Me?” he asks and pats his belly. “Ha ha. Nossir. Put on fifteen pounds, been eating so many hamburgers. Everywhere I go, someone says they got the best hamburger in the state. Or the best barbecue. Or whatever. Can’t call ‘em liars unless I try it, right?”

  But he’s been waiting for this moment, a prompt, someone to give him the green light: and Brock is off to the races, listing his top visits and his worst, unfurling a lengthy narrative of the worst sleeping conditions he had to endure. Most interesting visit was West Alabama, he says, where he slept in the freshman dorms for a night (“Men’s dorms?” I almost ask, but swallow the comment at the last second, because why would anyone but me wind up in the women’s dorms?) and was then kicked out by an RA who claimed that residents couldn’t have visitors, and then spent the next three nights at the president’s mother’s house ten miles away from campus. “Hell of a cook, that woman,” he says. Brock is still wearing a dress shirt right now, and his underarms have gone wet with sweat despite the cold air cutting inside from Nick’s open window.

  “That’s nothing,” Nick says, lighting his second cigarette. He tells us that when he visited the College of Charleston, nobody was at the house. Deserted. He called every number on their roster and no one answered. It was late at night; he had nowhere to go. “And this is Charleston, too,” he reminds us, “where the cheapest hotels are, like, 150 a night.” And Nick tells us that he drove thirty miles before he could find a reasonable hotel, and he learned the next morning that the chapter had taken a road trip to Florida for a mid-semester break, and he wound up spending three days in an empty fraternity house. The conclusion of his story is interrupted by Brock’s laughter, and he’s slapping the table with been there, done that gusto. Did I tell you about Labor Day, how I forgot it was a holiday and no one was on campus?

  And then Nick’s telling us about a water balloon fight at Clemson, and when he’s finished and tosses his cigarette butt out the window, Brock’s got another story. And when Brock’s finished, Nick’s got another story: he stole one president’s sandals so he could walk across the scummy floor of the UNC-Wilmington shower. Ha ha! Brock says. Well, Brock had to take a shower in the community “gang-bang” shower at Texas A&M, and while he was shampooing, the cleaning crew came in and mopped and sprayed and cleaned and stared at him, and they were all women and they didn’t even say hello! I laugh but not too loudly, don’t say a word about Purdue or my stolen clothes or the pictures. I keep waiting for each story’s secret sub-plot, an Easter egg or a deleted scene that will reveal Brock or Nick as a Frat Star, also. Like, did Nick ever get friendly and fraternize with the undergrad brothers at any school? Did Brock allow himself once—just once—to polish off a 12-pack
with some good old-fashioned All-American Texas-sized Nu Kappa Epsilons? Just once? A couple beers? Come on!

  I stay quiet through their stories.

  They say that their lives are enriched, that they’ve seen places—schools, national monuments, historical markers, natural beauties—they never would have seen otherwise. They’ve eaten things…oh, the places they’ve eaten! “I had no idea pimiento cheese was so awesome until I went to UNC – Charlotte,” Nick says. “Most gigantic ribs I’ve ever chomped into,” Brock says. They’ve met people who have already changed their lives. “And we get paid for all this!” Brock howls. Say, Charles, did you stop by Gettysburg while you were in Pennsylvania? “Um,” I say. “Sure.” You go to Chicago while you were in Illinois? Go up the Sears? “Sure, sure, sure.” They list museums that were on my route, obscure off-highway attractions that are world-famous and that I had to have seen, right? (“Largest model train set in America! Saw a YouTube video of it. So amazing.”) “All of that, yes. That’s what I did,” I say. And I just nod, agree, and then stay quiet, because the less I talk the more they fill the silence with their own experiences. Maybe this isn’t so tough, I realize. They’re a couple of old ladies sharing vacation photos, and they could go on for days and barely notice I’m here.

  *

  Late on Wednesday night after everyone has gone to sleep, the late-October cold seeps into the Lodge, seeps under the windows, seeps up from the basement. I unpacked my sheets but couldn’t find my comforter in the basement storage bins, so I wake up shivering at 3 AM. And I’m not the only one. Across the dorm room, Brock is curled up into himself, his sheets pulled over his head, a series of pillows piled over his body like a makeshift blanket; Nick appears to have ripped loose his fitted sheets from the mattress and has cocooned himself in these, as well as his flat sheets, combining both sets so that the sheer thickness might warm him. Everyone is wearing sweatshirts, several pairs of socks.

  Half-asleep, still shivering, I shed my sheets and grab a left-behind Colorado sweatshirt from the closet. I’ve got to crank up the heat, but I can’t find the temperature control. Downstairs, perhaps? I tiptoe out of the room, through the hallway, down the staircase, through the living room…the kitchen. Nothing. The basement? No. At this hour, in this cold, I am not walking down into the basement. But here in the living room, even though all is early-morning dark, I can still see the outlines of the couches…the rich, soft cushions…and the thick Nu Kappa Epsilon quilt draped over the back of the sofa. Teeth still chattering, arms still prickly, I bump through the living room and climb onto the couch, pull the quilt over my body, and something about the couch feels ordinary, natural, warm. I consider taking the quilt back up to my bunk bed, but that isn’t my bed up there. This couch…this makeshift living room sleeping spot…this is mine.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN. Debrief.

  Thursday morning is bright through the windows of the Lodge as I iron my khakis, but the sunshine is deceiving; when I step outside and walk across the pavement of the courtyard to the Headquarters building, my still-wet hair feels like it’s crackling into a quick freeze, my breath spreading from my mouth in a frosty puff that almost feels solid. The Indiana sky a blue canvas streaked with white, exhausted brush strokes from a paintbrush starved for paint.

  The three of us—a Californian, a Texan, and a Floridian—huddle into ourselves as we dash to the Headquarters. Brock and Nick have been traveling along the Gulf Coast throughout the Fall; this is probably the first morning that either of them has tasted temperatures below 30 degrees. Me, I’ve been living in the cold.

  Inside the Headquarters building—at the vanguard of the “V”—is an impressive lobby, Merlot carpet, walls a waxy blush color, your eyes drawn first to a leather-bound guestbook, pages tied together with gold string; then to the “Chapter Book,” a three-ring notebook filled with page-sized composite photos from each chapter slid into plastic sleeves; past the notebook to the ten bronze busts of our National Hall of Fame Alumni; and finally to a banner the length of two SUVs, draped from the ceiling, cataloguing every “Chapter of the Year” winner since 1975 (Edison University making the list in 2001, just before I began my freshman year). At the very back wall of the main lobby, a yellowing NKE flag, proportions of 10 feet by 19 (the same, says The Marathon, as the proportions of the American Flag), signed in one corner by the eight original founders of Nu Kappa Epsilon Fraternity. The letters and symbols were hand-stitched onto the dyed cloth by Marjorie Mayweather, the wife of Carolina Baptist’s esteemed President Edgar Mayweather, who helped the young group in its early years. There are also tall portraits of past Executive Directors of NKE, and framed pencil drawings of fraternity houses from across the country, and Donor Roll plaques, and—

  The Headquarters lobby is a showcase of fraternity history, of the size and scope of NKE, and even the bookstore-smell ensures that you are inhaling Grand Tradition. From eight young students at Carolina Baptist…to this, a National Fraternity, a Headquarters! A true Nike Man should get a boner.

  Of course, I’ve only just now noticed: this lobby is so focused upon asserting the importance of Nu Kappa Epsilon that nowhere does it mention the friendship of those eight men in 1910. Who were they, other than black-and-white photographs, names to memorize for the Pre-Initiation Exam? Did they care about one another, or did they only care about crafting this institution?

  In any case, this is only the lobby. The rest of the building is more modest.

  Beyond the decadent display of fraternity splendor, two doors open—each at opposite ends of the lobby’s back wall—into the two separate “office wings” of our stealth fighter. The left wing is never opened to the general public; it’s just a three-floor office building of inestimable unimpressiveness: rows and rows of cubicles that rival the Office Space set in their monotony, filing cabinets and cardboard boxes and stacks and stacks of three-ring binders, plastic crates filled with carbon-paper order forms, a full first floor simply called the “Warehouse,” where conference materials (t-shirts, cups, keychains, easels, notepads) are dumped onto metal shelving, and on every floor there are the closets…the closets! The left wing of the Headquarters, it seems, was built more for closets than for offices (occasionally, a closet is even cleared out and converted into a makeshift office). Past the cubicles sit four closets in a row, four, nicknamed the Ducks (someone, years ago, having mentioned something about keeping all necessary files in order, like “ducks in a row”), all overflowing with chapter files. Here in the Ducks, you can locate the entire financial history of our chapter at the University of North Carolina, including tattered budgets from 1974 and consultant financial reports from 1982. You can find correspondence from the National Headquarters to the University of Tennessee regarding a hazing incident in 1989 (and, for some incidents, there is a great deal of correspondence regarding these matters). Of course, nothing is easy to locate. Every semester, Walter LaFaber assigns an intern the unenviable task of organizing the Ducks. Every semester, the intern barely makes a dent.

  The lobby’s other door, the right, leads to a wing of a different sort. One that is available to public viewing. Here are the seven “real” offices of Headquarters, each of which exudes a power and opulence to match that of the lobby; here are two boardrooms and one library, filled with alumni directories dating back to 1920, old pledge manuals, books written by alumni.

  And in these “real” offices, you’ll find Dr. Simpson (Executive Director), Walter LaFaber (Director of Chapter Services). You’ll find our Financial Director, our Ritual and Special Ceremonies Officer, our Director of Alumni Relations, even our administrative assistants, everyone in this wing with a real salary, with health insurance.

  When I came through the National Headquarters on a tour during my interview, I was shown only the lobby and the “real” offices, not the disheveled “other half” which exists in a state of constant turnover—interns every six months, consultants every year, just the same as the Lodge—and where the only consistency is d
isorganization.

  “I forgot how this place smells,” Nick says.

  “You’re right,” Brock says. “Smelled so much beer and piss this semester.”

  “Smells like paper and reconstituted air,” Nick says, fanning the air toward himself with one hand.

  “And you can smell Betsy’s perfume,” I say. “She’s not even here yet, but it stays in the air. Even if this place was abandoned for twenty years, you’d probably still smell it.”

  Out of the far end of the lobby, a crisp and commanding voice: “Gentlemen, so good to see you this morning.”

  We freeze, all three of us, hands in mid-air, mouths open, and we stare at the doorway of the right wing from which Walter LaFaber has emerged. He stands tall, the massive muscles in his shoulders stretching his white dress shirt to the limit. His black hair is combed meticulously into the sort of young professional mold that one might expect from a serious contestant on The Apprentice. Black pants, thin gray pinstripes, not a single wrinkle. Silver belt buckle, smooth and blank, the size and weight of a Zippo lighter. Walter LaFaber. Cheeks as hard as granite. He stands like a statue, waiting while we take him in, the American Fraternity Man.

  Brock is the quickest of the three of us to return to life, and he lets out a haunting Texas cackle—“Haw! Haw! Haw!”—and stomp-runs across the lobby. “Walter, buddy,” Brock says and collides with LaFaber (neither moves), the two of them flexing as they embrace, the shirt over LaFaber’s shoulders so taut that it looks ready to rip. “Been too long! Too long!”

  “It has been, yes,” LaFaber says, smacking Brock’s back. Both smile violently, a war of happiness. “I’m glad you all made it back safe.” His voice is warm with understanding, like he knows all the “Road Horror Stories” that we—Brock and Nick, actually—were telling last night, like he knows it because he lived it. Because he’s one of us. Fifteen years ago, LaFaber was a consultant. Before consultants carried cell phones and laptops, he’s quick to remind us.