American Fraternity Man

by Nathan Holic

  I rest my elbows on the high-top. “I need to tell you something,” I say.

  “Well, I already know you cheated on me,” she says and holds up her glass as if to cheer me, “so it can’t be much worse, can it?”

  “My parents are divorced,” I say.

  “What?”

  “They lied to me,” I say. “For months. I don’t know why. Maybe they told me the reason, but I don’t care what it was.”

  “Divorced.” Jenn puts her drink back on the table and exhales slowly. “God, Charles, I’m sorry. I had no idea.”

  “Because I lied to you, too,” I say.

  “What do you mean?”

  “They told me at graduation. When we went out to lunch. But I kept it from you.”

  “Back in May?”

  “I’ve barely spoken to them since,” I say. “When they call, I don’t answer.”

  “My God, why didn’t you tell me?”

  At the front door, the Palins and the Jareds and the Bushes are clumping together and yanking cameras from pockets and purses, fighting for position to photograph the approaching zombie mob.

  “I wanted you to think I was someone else,” I say. “That’s as honest as I can be.” I swirl the Miller Lite in the pools of condensation that have formed on the table-top. “I spend all my time trying to be these personas. But I don’t even know which one is the real one anymore. It’s like being in a house of mirrors, but as an out-of-body experience…and you can’t find the real you anymore. Every time I turn around, there’s some other me that I want to be, or some other me that I hate and want to erase, and…it isn’t supposed to be like this, is it? I mean. Is it this way for you? When do we grow up and be the people we’re supposed to be for the rest of our lives?”

  We hear the first groan, a guttural growl that sounds exactly the way it should: like a response to my rant. Following it are a series of less-impressive (but still adequate, I suppose) expressions of pain and flesh-hunger. Someone out there is screaming “Brains! Brains! Brains!”, a zombie more picky than the rest.

  “I don’t know what to say, Charles.”

  “I’m crazy,” I say. “You’re scared of me. You think I’ve snapped or something.”

  “You’re not crazy,” she says. And she stands, taps my chest with her fingertips, and motions for me to follow her. We settle at one of the front windows, where—through the scuffs and spilled beer and hardened bubblegum deposits—we can see the first wave of zombies braving the crosswalk and coming toward the Indie Saloon, confused drivers at every corner watching the grim procession.

  “Thank you for telling me that,” she says.

  “That I’m crazy?”

  “Thank you for being honest,” she corrects.

  Beside us is a man dressed as Kurt Cobain. Or, at least, I think he’s supposed to be dressed as Kurt Cobain. He has his painted-black fingernails pressed to the window, forehead nearly touching the glass as he watches. “That first one,” he says. “Oh man. That first zombie.” And there’s a touch of wonder in his voice, as if there’s more beauty in what he’s seeing than he was even able to imagine.

  “Can I tell you something?” she asks.

  “Tell me anything.”

  “You’re upset that your parents got divorced,” she says. “But all semester, I…I didn’t tell you that my parents got back together.”

  “Did they?” I ask and gulp my beer. “Well, shit. Good news for one of us, at least.”

  “No,” she says and looks down at the terrible floor, a timeline of a hundred thousand hipster footsteps smeared and caked into the surface. “He hit her, you know that?”

  “He hit her? When?”

  “Always?” she says. “I guess. We didn’t know, my sister and me. We didn’t find out until after he was out of the house. My mother…maybe she thought it was normal? Or maybe she wanted us to think that everything was normal, that he was as good as any other father? After he was gone, she finally talked to us about it.”

  “You never told me.”

  “I’ve never told anyone,” she says. “How do you even start to tell someone that? I’ve never even talked about it with my father. It’s like this secret that we all know, and that we were all supposed to keep, and maybe it was okay when they were divorced and we never had to worry about the two of them in the same room. But now we’re out of the house, and he takes some anger management class, and she puts herself right back there.”

  The bar is swimming in the irony of John Mayer’s “Your Body is a Wonderland,” the zombies overtaking the security guard at the front door; he just steps aside, laughing, doesn’t even attempt to check their IDs or mark them with wristbands. The zombie in the lead—the one that mesmerized Kurt Cobain beside us—is indeed a masterpiece of both makeup and performance: both arms outstretched, one leg twisted around unnaturally as if it was crushed by a truck, stumble-walking and biting the air, a long piece of fake flesh—a piece of pulled turkey? a painted pasta noodle?—hanging from his mouth. One of his eyes is yellow, and the other appears to have been ripped from its socket, leaving only a chewed-up red-black cavity.

  “You need to call them back,” Jenn says. “Your parents.”

  I pretend not to hear. I watch the apocalyptic procession. The next zombie is a nurse, her white outfit splashed with blood, one sleeve missing. Another is dressed as a Hare Krishna, blue skin and orange outfit pulled straight from Dawn of the Dead. There are construction workers, policemen, truckers, an Indian, as if a group of guys bought Village People outfits and bloodied them up into zombie costumes. There are tattered shirts, long cuts down faces and arms. One zombie is even carrying a frighteningly realistic severed arm, and he digs his face into the appendage every few seconds.

  “Everyone’s a house of mirrors, Charles,” she says. “You, me. Our parents. But I know the way that you think about family, how much you care about them, and you’ll regret it forever if you cut yourself loose from your parents.”

  I look deep into the faces of the zombies until they no longer seem strange or menacing, until it feels like this is just life, just an ordinary night on the town with zombies hanging out in a bar. “My father,” I say, “he told me: if you’re in a situation that you know is destructive, you should remove yourself from it. That’s what I’m doing. Just following his advice.”

  “That’s what you want to think you’re doing,” she says. “You might not like all their drama, are they really destructive? What’s worse? Making a phone call and being honest with them, too, or holding a grudge for the rest of your life?”

  Long sip of my beer. That damned Jenn Outlook again.

  Then: “Whoops!” Jenn says, as a zombie in a Superman costume trips over his own cape, face-plants into the sidewalk. But he rises and bumbles forward without breaking character, and everyone inside the bar’s clapping, Jenn’s applause the loudest.

  And I understand now that I don’t really know Jenn, that perhaps I never did. Not the way I should have, anyway. The Jenn that I thought I knew—the Britney Spears, the NKOTB, the Poison t-shirts, the ‘90s Nights, the old-school slap bracelets she jokingly wore to semi-formal dances, the ‘80s-era ColecoVision she had in her bedroom—it’s part of her, but it’s all surface-level stuff. What did I avoid? The confusion and the pain she feels from some other life, a life that I never thought to ask too deeply about? I wanted perfect, and so I made her perfect, but she never asked for that. Everyone’s a house of mirrors, she said. You, me. Our parents. But I never bothered walking through.

  Charles is…telling Jenn that he’s sorry.

  Charles…doesn’t want to make this moment cheesy, okay?

  Charles is…not going to ask you to say anything. And he knows that this is over, the two of us, and that you only left the house and came here with me because…well, because you’re a decent person. But I’m sorry, Jenn. For what I did, yes, but most of all for what I didn’t do. For the things I never tried to talk about, or cared enough to realize.

 
Jenn nods, closes her eyes.

  And when she opens them they are brighter, and she’s pointing to the bar and saying, “Let’s just watch the zombies, Charles.”

  Tomorrow I’ll be back in Indianapolis, and by next week I’ll be back on the road, but tonight it’s zombies, and it’s Jenn smiling again as the zombies mock-fight to pass through the open doorway. “Ohhh, look at that one!” she says and points with her drink to a zombie with a sword through his head. Another zombie has cleverly dressed as a dead alcoholic so that he can sneak his own beer into the bar: in one hand, he clutches a six-pack of Pabst, and no one stops him as he shuffles through the door. Jenn’s smile turns to a laugh, and she’s clapping again, and it’s a tiny moment, this smile, the zombie, the beer, the applause, but suddenly I can’t think of anything in the world that could be better than this, and then I’m tipping back the last of my Miller Lite and groaning like a dead man and I allow my whole body to go rigor mortis, and I pluck the raspberry lip gloss from Jenn’s purse and paint sparkly blood trails from my mouth to my chin like I’ve been eating super-excited sorority girls who bleed sparkles, and then I’m lurching toward the bar, a Zombie Frat Star in pursuit of another beer, and Jenn is laughing and following me and I’m growling “Brains! Leadership! Fraternity! Brrraaaains!” and Sarah Palin claps me on the back and says “Nice!” and Subway Jared screams “Hide the pledges!” and when I go so stiff that I accidentally bang into a barstool, Jenn steers me back in the right direction.

  And it feels good to be dead for a little while, and then—just like initiation night—to know that I’ll soon wake up reborn, this time maybe in skin that’s all my own.

  Acknowledgements:

  Some readers—particularly those who have visited any of the university campuses featured in the novel, or who work for a fraternity or sorority headquarters in Indianapolis—will notice that minor liberties were taken with either geography, institutional hierarchy, semester scheduling, or academic offerings. No disrespect intended, homeys.

  Additionally, I think it’s important to reinforce that no character in this novel is intended to represent any real-life student, alumnus, or higher-education professional. This isn’t Primary Colors. The Nu Kappa Epsilon National Fraternity does not exist, nor is it patterned on any one specific national fraternity, and any reader attempting to match real-world fraternity/sorority figures with characters in the book will be disappointed. There are some nasty people in this book, and if you’re currently reading this, chances are that you’re not one of them.

  On the contrary, I have many people to praise for their hard work in molding the lives of young men and women on college campuses. The culture of Greek Life is highly complex, always evolving, and heavy with baggage, but there are a lot of people who have made it their life’s mission to be forces for positive change. A thousand thank-yous to T.J. Sullivan of CampuSpeak, who does more to “keep it real” for fraternity undergrads than anyone I’ve ever met. Thank you to Mark E. Timmes of Pi Kappa Phi, for leading a fraternity that does challenge the worst elements of the culture, and to my own fellow traveling consultants with whom I’ve collaborated and commiserated: Dave Corey, Sean Mahoney, Kevin Yania, Matt Hunt, Todd Cox, Brandon Tudor, Josh Carroll, Kyle Longest, Lyle Dohl, Cal Majure, Tom Mosher, Dustin Alexander, and Ira Katzman. Special thanks also to the countless other fraternity men I’ve met who do honestly strive be role models for the next generation: Steve Whitby, Jeremy Galvin, Andrew McCarthy, Adam Nekola, and Abel Garcia, among many others. If this book at times shows the worst, I want this page to acknowledge the men who represent the very best.

  Thank you to my own fraternity brothers, also, the ones who have known about this book for years and have never discouraged my writing on the subject. These are men who know that human relationships are more important than protecting intractable institutions: Brandon Lee, Chad Feaster, Alex Scharf, Justin Pachota, Stu Chalmers, Adam Sich, Mike Gross, James Long, Mike Pigford, Mike Hayman, and Mark Mestrovich.

  Thank you to the super-supportive writing community of Orlando, Florida: Ryan Rivas, Mark Pursell, Hunter Choate, Jared Silvia, David James Poissant, Ashley Inguanta, Jonathan Kosik, Teege Braune, J Bradley, Laurie Uttich, Susan Hubbard, Craig Saper, Jocelyn Bartkevicius, Pat Rushin, Phil Deaver, Susan Lilley, and John King (and a hundred other great writers whose names would swell the word count of an already-gigantic book). Thank you, especially, to Jay Haffner, my Detroit writing homey, Lavinia Ludlow, my West Coast writing homey, and Lindsay Hunter, my Chicago writing homey. And, of course, the late Jeanne Leiby, who helped me to craft and shape the original draft of this book; and Matt Peters, who believed in the book’s potential and helped me to shape the final version you now hold. I can’t tell you all how grateful I am for having you.

  Finally, this book would not have been possible without the love and support of a family way cooler than the one Charles Washington was stuck with: my parents, John and Pam Holic, who gave me far more encouragement than I deserved; Aaron, Patti, Jason, and Crystal; my baby boy Jackson, who—someday, while on full scholarship somewhere (fingers crossed)—will face the decision of whether to join a fraternity, and who has a father that promises to tell it straight, but will still stand by him no matter his decision; and most important, the world’s biggest “thank you” to my wife Heather, who kept me positive and who believed in me for the full seven-year duration of this project. It ain’t easy being married to a writer. We have odd habits, and disappear for long stretches of time to the dark office at the far end of the house, emerging only to grab a new Fresca from the fridge and make odd comments about semi-colons; then we disappear again, and you likely start to wonder if your husband is ever going to finish this thing, if it’s even a worthwhile project, if it’s ever going to see the light of day, if it will all just result in seven wasted years…but you don’t say any of that, do you? Just: “Stay positive. It’ll happen. You’ll do it.” Not even a second thought. And that’s why you’re so fucking awesome.

  About the Author

  Nathan Holic teaches at the University of Central Florida and serves as the Graphic Narrative Editor at The Florida Review. He is the editor of the annual anthology 15 Views of Orlando (Burrow Press), a literary portrait of the city featuring short fiction from fifteen Orlando authors. His fiction has appeared in print at The Portland Review and The Apalachee Review, and online at Hobart and Necessary Fiction.

  American Fraternity Man is his first novel.

  Find him on-line at: http://NathanHolic.com/