American Fraternity Man

by Nathan Holic

  And just minutes later, Brock is walking Todd from bedroom to bedroom to collect the brotherhood pins for all 33 members whose names we’ve gathered, Todd explaining—through tears—that this is their only option. “I’m gonna fucking appeal!” I hear from upstairs more than once, but there is no chance of that. Really, we don’t even need the pins or the membership placards in order to take action; I just wanted them, wanted to hand them over to Headquarters so there would be no chance of turning back.

  And I know this isn’t what LaFaber wanted, but you know what? EU is still alive, still kicking, and once the reports are written, LaFaber won’t be able to complain. Maybe this kills my shot at the Illinois expansion, at grad school, and maybe one good action doesn’t make up for all the wrong that I’ve done—shit, maybe it was even wrong to demand that New Mexico State be left alone, maybe it was selfish and dangerous, maybe this one good decision is canceled out because I defended another group of hazers—but I also know that right now, I only have control over this moment, and one good action is a hell of a lot better than making one more mistake.

  Whatever happens, I’ll figure it out.

  Whatever happens, I know that I’m not willing to crumble ever again.

  While Brock and Todd are upstairs gathering pins, I’m on the phone with the pledges, one after the next, to tell them that this is their fraternity now. It’s theirs, and they can make of it what they will. There’s no more dead weight, I tell them, no more trouble-makers. This is it, I tell them. Your chance to change the culture.

  *

  Our flight leaves the next morning, but there’s one more place I’ve got to go before I can leave town. I leave Brock at the hotel to finish the final paperwork and catalogue the pins and placards he’s collected, leave him to draft the formal memo to the alumni which will instruct them to evict the punished brothers. “I’ll be back,” I tell him, “but I have to…”

  “I know,” he says. “You want to see your girl, don’t you?”

  “Jenn,” I say.

  I know it’s over, know that the things I’ve done have made it impossible for the two of us to ever have the life I’d imagined. But I can’t leave things the way they were. I need to see her, convince her that the good things she saw in the old Charles Washington do still exist. That I’m capable not just of mean disappointment and injury, but also of…something better.

  Jenn doesn’t know I’m coming for her, but Facebook has made it impossible to hide. “Bored at the KD house,” she wrote ten minutes ago as her status update, and so that’s where I go.

  Park, ring the doorbell, and a girl named Elizabeth Safron answers the door, recognizes me, puts hand to mouth. “Oh my God, Charles.” She’s wearing a bright orange t-shirt with a black screen-printed jack-o-lantern face smiling wide and gap-toothed, the shirt three sizes too large and sweeping down over her black leggings like it’s a skirt. “What are you doing here?”

  “Hoping Jenn was home,” I say.

  “Well,” Elizabeth says. She closes her eyes, likely searching her mind for an alibi, somewhere Jenn can be instead of right here, but she wasn’t prepared for this.

  “Can I come in?” I peek my head through the doorway. There are plastic pumpkins lining the hallway, each stuffed with Lemonheads and snack-sized Snickers, each pumpkin painted with the letters of a different fraternity. Beyond the hallway is the living room, and from this angle it’s all hair spilled across couch cushions, legs on arm rests, flashes of denim and cardigan.

  “Um. Sure,” Elizabeth says, but I’m already inside, not even waiting for her to walk me to the living room and the couches and the TV and the girls.

  I know this house almost as well as my own, remember when the wallpaper was stripped away and the walls were re-painted lavender, remember when the plantation shutters were installed in the new cafeteria. I remember each couch, the way they feel when you’re the only man on them surrounded by a dozen sorority girls. I remember evenings after date nights, watching Eight-Legged Freaks or Scream 3, and I remember the drunk girls who would walk into the house late-night, coming home from the bar with boys they didn’t know, douche-bags who’d plop onto the couches and make comments like, “This is what a sorority house looks like?” and “What’s it gonna take to get some three-some action, eh?”, the other girls on the couches going nervous until I said, “He tries to get past the stairwell, I’ll tackle him,” and then the relief. Charles to keep us safe. Charles the good boyfriend. Charles the Protector. I remember the boxes of Cap’n Crunch that seemed to appear magically whenever the girls sat down and turned on the TV, conjured from hiding spots behind the couches, Goldfish too, and Oreos, the accompanying “I’m such a fat-ass” remarks while girls stuffed face with Crunch bars. Other comments, too: “Ahh, these panties give me such a freakin’ wedgie!” and “Oh my God, Dana is passed out naked on her bed upstairs! Can someone go wake her up or something?” Days when they forgot a boy was present, days when I was transplanted into the sorority world, followed by nights when Jenn faced the same at the NKE house: dozens of dudes watching Monday Night Football and throwing Doritos at one another and farting and wrestling one another in the grass of the backyard, comments like “I’m soooo gonna fuck that Ashley girl. Oh, shit. Forgot you were sitting there, Jenn.”

  The living room—the long sweeping couches, the HDTV mounted to the wall but still surrounded by a massive and unnecessary espresso-colored entertainment center, shelves and cabinets lined with stuffed animals and framed photos. This feels more like home than anywhere I’ve been in the last six months.

  When I turn the corner and enter the frame, there are only three girls seated before me, and all three gasp.

  “Charles,” Jenn says. She might be the last to see me, to register that it is me, as she was looking down at her cell phone and typing out a text. She has an iPhone now, and I remember some September conversation when she told me she was going to the Apple Store, but this is the first that the unseen moments of time away have connected with the visible, the here, the unexpected now. Her hair is shorter, so light that it’s damn-near platinum, bangs falling over her black headband and slashing down her forehead like icicles. “What…what are you doing here?”

  “In town for the day,” I say.

  “Yeah, but…” And she looks at the clock on the wall, as if it contains the answers she’s struggling for. In her mind, she is flipping the pages of a calendar, finding the holidays. “Thanksgiving is not even until…why now?”

  “Not glad to see me?” I force a sheepish shrug, my posture and face suddenly like the Monopoly Man when forced to pay his poor tax.

  “Charles, I…” She’s wearing an old Eddie Money t-shirt and a pair of black yoga pants; the hair has changed, the purse has changed, but maybe there’s more same here than I thought.

  The other girls are still staring with the same faces they’d have if someone came into the house and told them that Florida had split from the continent and was now drifting on a collision course with Cuba. Ten minutes before, they were thinking of Halloween parties. Spread out on the empty cushions are the bits and pieces of half-costumes, a tall pair of clear heels, a Hooters shirt, a pair of bunny ears. Ten minutes before, they were timing the exact moment they’d need to leave the living room and head upstairs to start getting ready for the night’s parties, cramming their tight bodies into fishnets and long white gloves and three inches of glittery top or bottom. And then: Charles Washington appeared.

  “Maybe we should get out of here,” Jenn says. “Talk somewhere else.”

  “I’ve got a car in the parking lot,” I say. “I’ll probably get a ticket if I don’t move, so…”

  The Lindsay Lohan girl—Edwin’s girl from the Senior Send-Off—is sitting on the other couch, wearing a set of vampire teeth in her mouth. She spits them out into her hand. “Don’t go with him, Jenn,” she says. “Nikes are all assholes. Your boy”—and she’s pointing at me, now, spit-strands from fingers to still-clutched vampire teeth—�
�your boy Edwin never calls me back.”

  “Edwin,” I repeat.

  “Edwin,” she says caustically. “Your best friend.”

  “Well, he never calls me back, either,” I say. “So you won’t get any arguments from me. Not about Edwin, not about any of those assholes.”

  She sits back, makes a “harrumph” noise, and stuffs the teeth back into her mouth.

  “Jenn?” I ask. “Wanna go?”

  Jenn looks at her sorority sisters, unseen thought clouds bubbling throughout the room. It’s a moment that no one saw coming, and there’s something to be said of such surprises in life. No one can form any other defense to stop Jenn from leaving—they never thought they would need to, that I would ever be back, perhaps thinking that I’d actually taken some real job in Indianapolis and I lived there and had a real apartment and did real adult things—and so Jenn’s moving from couch to hallway to door to front porch to parking lot to passenger seat of my car, and I am cranking the A/C and we are leaving her sorority house.

  And then we’re in the car together, and I’m driving us out of the Kappa Delta parking lot and down Greek Row.

  “What are you doing here?” This might be the first time I’ve seen her so emotionless, holding her purse in her lap no different than if she were a woman riding the subway by herself and trying to avoid human contact.

  “It’s a National Review,” I say.

  “Is that like—did the Nikes do something wrong?”

  “Hazing,” I say. “You’ll hear about it. We’re kicking a bunch of guys out.”

  “Wait. They sent you back here to kick out your own brothers?”

  “Wouldn’t be my first major purge as a Fun Nazi.”

  “A what?”

  “Never mind.”

  Outside, Halloween has begun. Kappa Sigmas are walking Greek Row in the president masks from Point Break, waving like political candidates at intersections and shouting nonsense at passing cars: “Death or taxes!” and “Abort my bill!” and “Amend your own asshole!” Down the street, someone is dressed as a ghost in front of the NKE house, just a bed sheet with eyeholes and arm-holes, and he is standing all alone, an eerie image through my rearview mirror as we roll to the stop sign. I expect him to move, wait a few extra seconds at the stop sign before the driver behind me grows impatient and mouths “Come on!”, and then we’re going again.

  “Where are we going?” Jenn asks. She holds up her hands as if our stillborn conversation has already exhausted her. “Where are you driving me?”

  On the rental car’s radio, the afternoon DJ’s relaying some news update about McCain, the election just days away now. Then the DJ laughs and the music takes over, “Misery Business” by Paramore. Maybe there was an election joke tying into the song, who knows?

  “I don’t know where I’m driving, Jenn,” I tell her.

  “Okaaaay,” she says in the sorority-girl voice that I can’t stand. “Well, can we go…I don’t know…somewhere?”

  “I can’t stop at my own chapter house,” I say. “They hate my guts now.”

  “Well, we can’t just keep driving to, like, nowhere.”

  We roll to the final stop sign at the west end of campus. Behind us are the parking garages, the faculty office buildings, the classrooms, the campus quad, the dorms, the fraternity and sorority houses. Ahead is a long avenue lined with pine trees, medianed by marigolds, the beautiful boulevard by which you enter or exit campus, the buffer zone between “real world” and “college world.” In a quarter-mile, the trees disappear and the commercial glut of Mid-Sized American City takes over: long plazas of textbook stores and liquor stores and coffee shops, edge-of-university Applebee’s and Chili’s, a big-box nightmare a half-mile away where you can go from Best Buy to PetSmart to Kohls all in an afternoon but you need to drive from parking lot to parking lot in order to do so.

  “I want to talk, Jenn. And if I stop somewhere, you’ll get away.”

  “That’s creepy, Charles.”

  “No, I didn’t mean it like that. I just…there’s so much I want to talk about, and I really”—how does one say it, that he is only comfortable in a moving vehicle? That he has forgotten what it means to sit somewhere, to open up in conversation, to be honest about who he is? How does one say that his home is now couches and car seats, his friends only memories? “I don’t want it to end, Jenn,” I say.

  “What do you mean?” she asks. “It’s already over.”

  “If I keep driving, I don’t have to think about that. We can just talk. It can be…I don’t know. Like it was.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, you’re about to cry.”

  “I’m not,” I say. “I’m not.”

  We pull onto University, and all is silent in the car. It’s November in Florida, but there are only occasional dead leaves on the ground, nothing that would constitute “foliage” in the Northern sense of the word. The trees along University are still full-canopied, the road heavily shadowed here in the last gasps of daylight.

  “What do you want to talk about, Charles?” she asks. “I’m starting to feel like I’m Kim and you’re Eminem.”

  I turn from University to Central, the short “campus town” district jam-packed with the bars and restaurants that carried me through my four years at EU. Hem-Haws, Sangria’s, Bang-Shots. And the old Campus Theatre, too, where we’d go to occasional concerts. Maybe this is some sort of hopeful test: will Jenn ask me to stop so we can go to dinner? Will she be the same Jenn I remember, and point at Supernova where we went to ‘90s Night, tell me that she wants to check out the Presidents of the United States of American Cover Band Cover Band? Will she keep quiet, and just hope that I take her home?

  “There’s a Zombie Walk that ends at Indie Saloon,” she says. “Let’s go there.”

  “A Zombie Walk?” I’m not sure whether this is a good thing or a bad thing.

  Indie Saloon is at the far end of Central, around the corner on a moldy side-street. But if that’s where she wants to go, that’s where I drive us. Far from the glitter and stripper outfits of the frat-tastic bars at Central and University, a place far less sexy.

  “You’ve never seen a Zombie Walk?” she asks.

  “Nope.”

  “Obviously, I failed as a girlfriend.”

  “This is a real thing? Something that’s been around?”

  “A Zombie Walk is when, like, there are dozens of people…hundreds, sometimes, in the bigger cities…and they all dress like zombies, do elaborate makeup jobs, and they just walk together down a city street like the apocalypse has started.”

  “That’s…bizarre,” I say. “Nobody shoots them?”

  She laughs, the first time today. “Maybe if they did it in Mississippi.”

  “So there’s a Zombie Walk at Indie Saloon?”

  “It ends there,” she says. “I don’t know the full route, but it ends there, and they’ve got all sorts of undead drink specials.”

  “What time do the zombies get here?” I shut the car off, parallel-parked just a block from the bar.

  Jenn checks her cell phone, swipes through a web page or a Facebook event or something, then says: “Fifteen minutes. We better get going so we can get drinks before they stumble in.”

  “Any of your sisters doing it?” I ask, and now I’m hurrying to catch up with her as she speed-walks down the sidewalk. “Dressed as sexy zombies or something?”

  “No,” she says. “You can’t make a zombie sexy.”

  “Your boyfriend?” I ask, and she’s at the door to Indie Saloon. And it occurs to me that—in the next minute—I could lose her for the night, lose her for good. It’s here where she can slip away and maybe find some new pack of friends in whom to take refuge. Wedge herself in, turn her back to me. We’ve left the car, and I’ll never get a chance to say another word to her.

  “I don’t have a boyfriend,” she says. Shows her ID, and the bouncer lets her through to the thick darkness of the bar. “You’ve stalked my Facebook page. You should
know.”

  The bouncer stops me, hand to my chest. “In a hurry?” he asks, and it’s just the two of us out here and Jenn has vanished. He stares at my card for what seems a very long time, and I picture myself searching frantically through the crowd, trying to spot that flash of frosty hair but seeing ironic slogan t-shirts everywhere, no Jenn.

  When I finally manage inside, the crowd isn’t thick at all, just twenty or thirty hipsters scattered at scratchy booths and on sticky barstools at high-top tables. Long hair, tattoos, beards, flannel, the antithesis of frat star.

  “Nice costume,” a guy says to me.

  I’m wearing the Nu Kappa Epsilon polo.

  “Tuck it in,” he says. “It’ll be more fratty that way.”

  “Right,” I say, and push the front of the shirt under my beltline.

  “Front tuck!” he says and claps. “Perfect, man. Perfect. Might as well do the popped collar, too, right?”

  “Absolutely,” I say and flip my collar.

  “Ha ha! This is the best,” he says.

  Jenn is waiting at a table, already has a cranberry-vodka but there’s no second drink for me.

  “They know you here,” I say. “Wave you inside, have a drink ready for you.”

  “They’ve always known me here,” she says.

  “I didn’t know you were still coming to these bars.”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe…the Louis Vuitton doesn’t go over very well in a place like this.”

  “I didn’t bring my Louis Vuitton purse.”

  I sigh and hold up my palms. “All right. I guess I’m an idiot, then.”

  Jenn reaches over to the next table and grabs a Miller Lite bottle, slides it over to me. “Here you go,” she said.

  “Did you just steal that from someone?”

  She laughs again. “No. I bought it. I just didn’t want you to expect that I’d get you a drink.”

  Fifteen feet away, a guy dressed as Sarah Palin is arguing with a girl dressed as George W. Bush. Someone else is dressed as Jared from the Subway commercials, and someone else as Hillary Clinton, but none of the white hipster crowd seems daring enough to go black-face and dress as Barack Obama. There’s someone dressed as the Verizon guy, too, going from table to table to ask the girls “Can you hear me now?” The monsters are coming, a hoard of zombies in what Jenn assures me will be professional and stunningly grotesque make-up, and yet—here in the bar—every costume is just a different celebrity or public figure.