American Fraternity Man

by Nathan Holic

  Brock is a pitbull let off the leash, and I’m doing nothing to rein him in.

  “Charles,” Todd says softly, “Charles, is this true?”

  “You don’t believe Brock?” I ask. I look across the room, where Brock still stands over the trash can, winded-looking, hands on his hips like it’s taking every ounce of energy he has to prevent real violence from erupting.

  “No, it’s just…closure?”

  “Are you calling Brock a liar?” I ask.

  “Charles…”

  “Who the fuck do you think you are?” I ask, and he’s half-standing again and this time it’s my turn to rush over to him but unlike Brock, I shove him back into seat and his rolling chair skids backward and collides with the bookshelf, a stack of alumni directories spilling over and crumbling onto the floor. “Calling a consultant a liar?” I say.

  “Geez, Charles—” He’s holding his elbow, but he isn’t hurt. He’s fine.

  “We meet with you last, Todd,” I say. “You better hope your brothers don’t turn on you.”

  And we send them all out, everyone except the Chapter Secretary, lowest on the totem pole. They shuffle to the door with backwards glances at me, like kids hoping they can get away before their father decides he wants to spank them. Brock puts his arm around my neck, whispers into my ear, “I don’t think we’re, uh…I don’t think we’re supposed to touch them, right, Charles?”

  I nod. “Probably not. But whatever.”

  Brock backs away, and suddenly he doesn’t look so terrifying anymore. He stares at his own hand, in fact, the condensation from the Super Big Gulp cup still on his fingertips…he’s wondering if this was too much, the spiking of the drink. He doesn’t know too much.

  “Secretary,” I say and I walk to where he’s seated and grip the armrest of his chair.

  He’s a scrawny class-clown-type nicknamed “Taint.” And hell if I know how the nickname came about…it’s something silly and endearing to his other 19-year-old friends, no doubt, but it doesn’t help him in his National Review. Tell us about the night in question, Taint, I say. Leave something out, or lie to us, Taint, and you’re the first to go. We take your pin, Taint, and we strike your name from the records of our brotherhood. Taint. Anyone with a nickname of Taint can’t be trustworthy. Why should we trust you, Taint? Your brothers aren’t going to save you. Stop looking at the door, Taint. Hey. Look at me. You’re accountable for your own actions, you know that, Taint? We could expel you from Nu Kappa Epsilon. Hell, we could turn you in to the Campus Conduct Board, have you expelled from the university. What do you think about that, Taint?

  He’s damn-near crying by the time I’m done yelling in his face. He’s the youngest of the officers, was a pledge just nine months ago; whatever he thinks and whatever he knows, he’s still years away from truly understanding the machinery of the National Fraternity.

  “I wasn’t there!” he says at one point, breaking down. “I had no idea they were going to do that!”

  “Do what, Taint?” I ask, and slam an alumni directory onto the table so hard that the glass gives an anguished cry, a whisper from cracking. Brock has gone rigid beside me, seems afraid to move, afraid to say a word. Who is this Charles Washington, he’s wondering. What really happened at Illinois? For that matter, what really happened at Grand Valley College, at New Mexico State, at Delaware, at Pittsburgh? Has he snapped? Is this what it looks like when someone snaps? For God’s sake, I was supposed to be bad cop. Brock is a pile of fat and muscle, but in this moment he’s afraid of me: in the Lodge and at Headquarters, Charles is the boy concerned with ironing his khakis and drafting goal sheets, but there’s something dark inside of this man, isn’t there? An anger. A rage that’s suddenly exploding like a geyser here in the library. This guy’s like one of those Alien movie creatures, acid for blood, a whole other face waiting to scream out from the face he shows the world.

  And Brock, if this is all you’re thinking, you don’t know the half of it.

  “Get the fuck out of here, Taint,” I say. “Send in the Treasurer.”

  And one after the next, we call them into the room. There is no chair in the center of the room for them to stand on, no Brother Wall and no Pledge Clump, but still the officers of my old chapter tremble like pledges at an Etiquette Dinner. I am Sam Anderson suddenly, slapping the table and yelling, “I didn’t ask that. Don’t you fucking get clever on me!”

  “I’m not trying to be clever, Charles!”

  “Look at this, Brock,” I say. “A thousand comedians out of work, and this joker’s got the nerve to try to be funny.”

  “Ha ha!” I say during the next interview. “We’ve got another crier!”

  One after the next, the full story assembled bit by bit, new details pulled from each new officer: the event was called “237,” and really, it’s been going on at EU for at least five years. I’ve heard of it. As President, I knew that there was something called “237,” that each year a small crew of Big Brothers took their brand-new Little Brothers to a hotel room at a ghastly place called Seaside Inn. The “No-Tell Motel,” we called it. A place meant to inspire fear, water stains on every ceiling and cracks in every window, bodies hunched over curbs out in the parking lot twenty-four hours a day. 237: it was the room number from The Shining.

  But the event was supposed to be a bonding experience. Big Brothers and Little Brothers spending the full night together, downing a case of the nastiest, scariest beer on the market: Natty Light or Milwaukee’s Best, one of those terrible value beers so disgusting it had earned a frightening nickname, “The Beast,” or “The Liver Killer” or whatever. Just eight total men, that first year. Eight the next, as the former Little Brothers now became Big Brothers to a new group of pledges. I wasn’t part of it when I was a pledge, and so—as a sophomore, when I had a Little Brother—he wasn’t part of it, either. No one talked much about 237; there wasn’t really much to share, as far as I knew. Just a bunch of bros hanging out, drinking more than they should, and watching bad horror flicks all night long: that was the other thing: they would watch bizarre ‘70s horror movies, Dario Argento, maybe some ‘80s slasher flicks, Sorority House Massacre and Peeping Tom, and they’d spend the night performing a drunk version of Mystery Science Theater. Stupid, but harmless.

  But in the fraternity world, there’s something called the Law of Threes. Whatever you start doing in your chapter, it will be three times worse, three years later. Start an annual party with a single keg, and three years later the kegs will be stacked and there will be two DJs and three bands and a Girls Gone Wild camera crew. And I learn here in my old house that the Law of Threes has proved true once again.

  I wasn’t paying attention, I guess, when the number of participants in 237 went from eight to ten to twelve to—this Fall, while I traveled—the entire pledge class, stuck in a single hotel room. Twenty-five men. And how was I supposed to know? I never called Todd Hampton to see how he was doing; no one called me, either; this entire Executive Board felt like a group of cousins I hadn’t seen grow up, personalities etched without my influence…

  The context sharpens with each new officer Brock and I interview.

  A couple semesters ago, the event had transformed from “brother-pledge bonding” to full-fledged hazing. Big Brothers forcing Little Brothers to chug. Big Brothers quizzing Little Brothers on fraternity history, threatening push-ups for incorrect answers. “C. Anthony Croke!” they’d scream at the pledges. “Get the names right! Your founders would be ashamed!”

  Still small, still hush-hush while I was president, but meanwhile there’d been rumblings rippling through the chapter. “Charles has made us a bunch of bitches,” Todd Hampton had complained. “Come on. Not allowed to fuck with the pledges, not even a little bit? He’s more concerned with some stupid Family Weekend bullshit than he is with running this chapter the way it needs to be run. More concerned with awards packets. Things need to change.”

  He’d been joined by a chorus of malcontents, a song I
was too busy to hear. “The pledges don’t respect us, that’s the problem.” “They fucking walk all over us!” “Pledge looked at me funny.” “Pledges need to be taught some fucking respect.” “Goddamn inmates running the asylum, thanks to Charles, the Pledge Lover.” Pledge Lover? I’d been the only thing protecting the 18-year-old new members from boot camp and near-torture? As far as I knew, we’d all agreed that hazing was pointless; as far as I knew, we all wanted a brotherhood, we all cared about one another. But I was some relic, the last of an old guard dying off to graduation?

  This Fall, 237 was no longer some “aw shucks, we’re just drinkin’ a few beers and gettin’ to know one another” type of evening. Hell, there were no brothers in the hotel room. Just the 25 pledges stuffed inside, A/C turned off, curtains shut…and oh, such a perfect setting, too…you could do whatever you wanted to these little fuck-tards…the Seaside Inn was an establishment so shady that it wouldn’t mind all-night scream-fests in the rooms, or stains on the sheets, vomit on the carpet…hell, they barely cleaned, so could they even prove which occupant had done it, and when? Take a blacklight to the room and you’d find come-spatter from the Carter administration.

  The Law of Threes.

  237 was now a night in which 25 men were imprisoned in a stuffy hotel room, white t-shirts and jeans the dress code, and in the center of the room a single Gator-Ade cooler filled with the most unimaginable filth you could imagine. Everclear mixed with OJ topped with diced tomatoes, heaps of garlic, oysters, Natty Light, a slop-bucket that could probably kill cockroaches. Our New Member Educator, Danny Boller, organized the event with the promise to his chapter brothers that we will teach them respect for their elders. Locked the door, told the pledges, “You got three hours to finish that jug. Get started, bitches.”

  And of course there was no way it would be finished. No way. The jug was hell itself.

  So, at 2:37 AM, a gang of older brothers poured into the room, Todd and Danny and fifteen others, and they said, “You didn’t finish your jug? Oh shit. This is the dedication you show? You want us to initiate you into our fraternity? Ooooooh, shit.”

  And then there were push-ups, and air-chairs, and human pyramids, and jumping jacks till there was vomit across the walls, and the room was a sauna of sweat and slop and screaming, a scene worse than any American detention camp overseas, terror stateside, terror because these little shit-bags couldn’t just learn some simple motherfucking respect for the fraternity.

  And you know what? The pledges hadn’t even snitched. Nope, not the now-terrified EU freshmen who could probably still taste the hell that they’d tried to drink. It wasn’t even the hotel. They were fine with fifty men in a room, even when the prostitutes were calling the front desk to report noise complaints. The only reason they’d been caught was because Danny Boller had posted a “237 – Best Night Ever” photo album to Facebook, bragging to the world about how they’d abused their pledges. As if Facebook was still some secret message board shared between a couple dozen students on a single dormitory floor, as if you couldn’t read a status update from Barack Obama and Amazon.com and the city of Tampa, back to back to back, just before you stumbled upon the album of hazing photos.

  “This is bad,” Brock says before our final interview, Todd Hampton. “Charles, brother, I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry for what?”

  “For what happened to your chapter, brother.”

  “No apologies necessary,” I say, filling in small boxes solid-black on the official form that I was supposed to be using to take notes during their interview responses. There are other doodles, too. One looks like a spike, another like a burning house.

  “You’re not upset?”

  “I am,” I say. That my own fraternity could become something like this in less time than it took to complete a single three-credit-hour course at Edison University. That this had been everything in my life, my home and my family and my future, that I’d felt I knew it so entirely and yet behind the doors there was this darkness, the hate and malevolence of the Overlook Hotel’s Room 237 itself surging through my house and my brothers. Upset? I am. But: “But it isn’t the most surprising thing I’ve learned this semester,” I tell Brock.

  “What do we do?” he asks.

  “You’re asking me?”

  “Shit, Charles. You got the experience. You closed a chapter. I follow your lead.”

  “You want me to close this chapter? You want me to make that call?”

  “No, I just…” He hangs his head. “Is this fixable? Charles, I only know how to bust heads, buddy. I’m a big dumb animal.” He slaps the bookshelf and another stack of old hard-back volumes tumbles. “I don’t know…”

  I consider the moves that I’m supposed to make, the stern talking-to that I’m supposed to give Todd Hampton just before I tell him that, well, this time we’re not going to take action. You’re off the hook. But, oh boy, if there’s a next time?

  I consider what LaFaber wants me to do. Put the fear of God into them, or whatever, and then just let them go about their business? Walk away, fly back to Indianapolis, knowing that they’re no longer amateur frat stars but instead hardened Headquarters Haters (“Nationals doesn’t get what we’re doing here!”), having learned only that they were idiots to post the pictures, now determined to find more clever ways to hide what they’re doing…and if they’re spending so much time hiding it, well shit, they’d better make it worth it. Why stop with one event? Law of Threes. Make 237 into a weekend-long affair.

  I consider all of this, and again I feel like screaming, like punching the wall. Like I want to bring Todd Hampton into this room and make him my piñata for every fucking thing I’ve learned this semester, for my every failure, for my every frustration. But—

  Charles…knows this will never end. Never the right thing, always a fuck-up waiting to happen.

  Charles…just remember, buddy, it’s all for the greater good! Illinois! Grad school! You can do it, buddy! Change the culture! Change the institution!

  Charles…wants to punch the fucking wall.

  Charles…wants to break every bone in his hand, in his body.

  Charles…wants to punch the wall so fucking hard that his wrist breaks, too, that every bone in his arm is pulverized, ground to chalk, that his insides are liquefied and he’s a puddle on the floor and better yet: he’s blank space, and he can—please, can he?—start over, just motherfucking start over from scratch? Clean slate. A new Charles Washington, the man he’s wanted to be all this time, without this fucking footprint following him, please, can we just…

  Charles Washington…will do what he’s always done, won’t he?

  Charles Washington…remembers an old t-shirt from National Convention, back in 2006. On the front, “If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.” On the back, “Nu Kappa Epsilon: Re-Defining Fraternity, Re-Defining Excellence.”

  Charles is…

  Charles is…?

  “I know exactly what to do,” I tell Brock.

  “Okay, good.” He slaps my back. “What are we doing?”

  “Grab Todd. Bring him in, and follow my lead.”

  Brock nods, lumbers to the door and tugs Todd into the room.

  “Sit,” Brock says, and Todd tumbles into the chair like a man about to be executed.

  “This is what’s happening,” I say. “You’re going to turn in your pin.”

  Todd holds up his palms, makes a half-smile/ half-shocked face. He thinks I’m joking. “Oooo-kay,” he says and laughs. “Well, um. What’s really—”

  “You’re finished,” I say. “I’m serious. No discussion. You, every one of your officers, all finished. We’ll collect the pins and your membership placards before we leave, along with the pins of every brother involved in 237. And we know who was there. The photos are on Facebook. You tagged ‘em. You made my job easy.”

  “You can’t do that!” he screams. “That’s half the chapter!” He looks to Brock, like the pitb
ull is going to save him, but Brock is following my lead. Brock might never have done anything like this, but you know what? He likes it, and he’s not going to give a fucking inch.

  “Eyes on Charles,” Brock says. “He’s talking to you.”

  “Your other option,” I say, “is to surrender the charter. Your choice. But if you surrender the charter, remember that this university co-owns these houses, and there’s a waiting list a mile long for new fraternities here at EU. Lose the charter, we lose the house. And do you want to go down as the man who killed Nu Kappa Epsilon at Edison University? Call me Pledge Lover all you want, Hampton, but do you want that to be your legacy?”

  “Charles,” he says. “There’s got to be some other—”

  “Choice is yours, Todd. Turn in your pins and placards, and shit, we’ll even offer you this deal: instead of marking you as ‘expelled,’ we can make you ‘alumni’ in our national database. Ten years from now, no one will know the difference.”

  “Alumni?”

  “That’s right,” I say. “Your time as an undergraduate member of the fraternity is done. You aren’t worthy of it. You’ll clear out of the house. You’ll never attend another social event, another chapter meeting. Never talk to another pledge, never participate in another initiation. Nothing. And if you push it and choose to appeal before National Council, I’ll make sure that they revoke your charter, your brotherhood pins, erase any trace that you were ever a member…You’ll be disowned, Todd. A bigger disgrace than you could ever imagine.”