by Nathan Holic
“That’s just, you know, two little things.”
My father shook his head. “The first week I lived in my co-op in college, I had to replace a toilet. We had water coming out under the baseboards in two of the bedrooms, and the screws were stripped around the bottom of the toilet. We didn’t have vendor lists, Charles, and we didn’t have cleaning ladies. We were 19, and we had to work together to make things happen.”
“I know, Dad.”
“You don’t know, Charles. I try to tell you, but you don’t listen.”
But I’m not entirely sure that was true. My father never talked much about his own past, except random memories (a stint as a farmer in the late ‘70s, a 9-month business trip to London in the mid-80s, a nagging pain in his shoulder about which he’d say only, “Use your seatbelt,” or—here, now—his broken toilet at his co-op in college) revealed during pivotal points in conversations when he wanted to prove a point.
“I can clean this. Please. It’s nothing.”
“So this is what we’ve been paying for, then?” he asked. “I trusted you to do the research, Charles. But the big-screen TVs? The pool table? This is what the semester dues pay for? This is the ‘leadership development’ you brag about?”
He made it sound as if this was a new realization he’d just come to, but really, the fraternity had never stood a chance with my father. As a high school senior one year before, I’d worked out a deal with him so that I could attend Edison University, an expensive private school on the Gulf Coast. I’d pay tuition (student loans), and he’d pay room and board at the campus dorms for all four years. “I still think you’d be better off at the University of Florida,” he said. “Hell, you’ve got scholarships that would cover the full tuition there. But this is the same deal I had with my father. So: room and board it is.”
Then I joined a fraternity during the first week of classes. Didn’t tell him. And—because the university owned all housing facilities and approved most transfer requests—I quietly moved to the freshman floor of the fraternity house. The cost of rent, which now included a full meal plan, National Fraternity insurance, and social budget dues, tripled. I kept my father unaware until Thanksgiving break in November, when I drove the four hours back to Cypress Falls and my father held in his hands the first semester’s fraternity house bills. “Room and board,” he’d said softly. “Really pushing this deal, aren’t you?”
But I’d bullet-pointed the benefits of fraternity life to him as if I was an infomercial host (“But that’s not all! We also have a chapter library full of old textbooks, so I can actually save money on books every semester!” “But that’s not all! We designate two brothers each week as Sober Drivers, so we can call any time, any place, and get a safe ride!”). I’d insisted that the fraternity was the logical continuation of my old days in high school, a new leadership activity to take over for Varsity Baseball and Key Club and the Honor Society. But for every benefit, he’d countered with a news story about hazing, or alcoholism, something to suck the positive energy from my speech. The evening before had been his first visit to the fraternity house. First chance to see it up close, to document the wrong that had before been unseen, intangible, always elsewhere. And there on the floor at the end of my freshman year, I knew that he’d have enough ammunition to keep firing for my full college career.
I couldn’t look him in the eyes anymore; I just made an “Unnh?” noise, the sort that someone makes when every available response feels wrong…the exhale of defeat.
“The things you learn,” he said, “when you find your son sleeping in puke.”
“I don’t…” I started. “This isn’t me.”
“Who am I looking at, Charles?”
“I don’t know. But this isn’t…it’s me, but it isn’t me.”
“I’m going back to the hotel,” he said. “Your mother and I will be back at 10:30 for your Awards Brunch, as your Family Weekend schedule indicates. I assume you can find a way to clean this up before then.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Good. I’m not bringing your mother back to this.” And my father walked down the hallway, through the foyer and out the front door, taking a sip of his coffee while on our front porch, and then he was off and it was just me and the mess. It wasn’t until fifteen minutes later, when I finally found some Windex stored in the upstairs bathroom, that I took the time to look at myself in the mirror and see what my father had been looking at during our conversation: at some point in the night, I’d rolled over into my own vomit, and now it was caked in my hair, caked in my sideburns, smeared across the front of my red polo. Yes, here was the model young man who’d just planned a splendid end-of-the-semester Family Weekend, full of presentations and live music and meet ‘n greets and—soon—a Saturday brunch. Here was the young man who was supposed to win both “Freshman of the Year” and “Leader of the Year” honors at the upcoming brunch, the young man who wanted so badly for all the world to know how ambitious he was, even as a freshman, how responsible and dedicated, how smart and full of potential. I picked a piece of floor fuzz from my eyebrow, brushed some drywall from my forehead, and headed to the bathroom’s paper towel dispenser, dutifully restocked the afternoon prior by a woman named Sonya who sometimes smiled at us, and to whom we sometimes nodded.
For the next three years, I tried to pretend that this moment hadn’t happened, that maybe my father had never even come to visit the house, had never seen me on the floor, and that I was indeed the young “Leader of the Year” I was supposed to be.
For those three years, I worked my ass off to maintain a near-perfect GPA, to turn those grades into solid internships by my junior and senior years, to win spots in the Edison Student Government and on the fraternity’s Executive Board. Freshman of the Year became Sophomore of the Year became Junior of the Year. For three years, whenever I’d talk to my father, my voice would sound like a bad Christmas letter, a list of updates on my leadership activities, my academic progress, my career development. Sure, I kept a few things to myself: no mention of how many 25-cent Beer Nights I’d conquered, how many Bladder Busts, how many Power Hours, how many Beer Pong tournament wins. I was a Public Relations expert when it came to my own persona. And whenever possible, fraternity took the spotlight: when we appeared on the front page of the campus newspaper for organizing a Toys For Tots event, I sent my father the cut-out article; when the EU school web site posted on their front page a photo of our Executive Board receiving the Florida Leader magazine “Organization of the Year” award (I stood dead-center in the photo, holding a framed magazine cover while my brothers crowded around me and held up #1 fingers), I captured the screen shot and convinced my mother to make the jpg into his computer’s background image so that he’d see it every single day.
But still, I’d have to wait three full years before my parents would visit the fraternity house again, before I could change their minds by showing them who I’d become. By now, I was the outgoing President, a more accomplished student-leader than I’d ever imagined I could be. And yes, I’d just accepted a job offer, too, so it felt as if everything in my life was on schedule, as if I was passing each mile marker at the right time: college degree, first job, then up ahead, family and house and pool and all that. My mother even kept asking “how serious” it was with Jenn, and we were at that strange-but-exhilarating moment in a relationship when Jenn was receiving birthday cards and Christmas cards in the mail from my parents. At the Senior Send-Off, I was prepared to lavalier her, the first step toward a planned proposal around Thanksgiving. Everything on pace.
But there was something I still hadn’t told him.
My job: it wasn’t just any job.
I’d just taken a position with the National Fraternity Headquarters.
*
There at the bar on the afternoon before the Send-Off, my father still gripping the wine bottle tight, I finally gave voice to the one thing that could take the emphasis off of my own ambitions and failings. “Where’s Mom?”
“What?” he said.
“Mom,” I said. “Don’t tell me she’s in the car?”
My father looked up at the gigantic Greek letters painted onto the tall wall behind the living room staircase, took a deep breath. “I dropped her off at the hotel.”
“That’s a little bit out of the way,” I said.
“Yes,” he said.
“And why are you here so early?” I asked. “The event doesn’t start for three hours.”
My father exhaled, still staring at the wall…and suddenly everything clicked into place: he’d committed her to the event without clearing her Friday night schedule, hadn’t he? He’d forgotten to tell her about the Senior Send-Off, and now—somehow, some way—she was making him pay for his oversight. Maybe she was shopping right now. Or maybe she would show up later in the night in a brand-new sports car she’d bought while his back was turned.
My father has always been the type to meet problems head-on, plowing directly through the thick of the continent, but my mother is the opposite: she has, over the course of many years, honed the fine art of circumnavigation. When I was a child playing with G.I. Joes, she’d help me with the A-B-C steps of building the tanks and armored vehicles, but when my imagination took over and I made a tank fly, she knew to back slowly away from my play-time rather than argue the impossibilities. “Oh, tanks can fly now?” she’d ask. Or: “Oh, his hands shoot lasers, do they?” My father would argue, try to explain that I should make the tank roll and the jetfighter fly, but my mother just let me live in my fantasy world. Even throughout my time in youth soccer, Little League, JV baseball, I might leave the field complaining of poor refereeing, blatantly missed calls, and she’d say only, “I know. Bad refs. Sorry.” My father would sit me down and for thirty minutes explain the nature of the calls, the difficulty of refereeing, the need to accept the penalties. Confrontation. If my standardized test scores were low, he’d outline why I needed to change my study habits, and he’d tell me over and over how I should do it. Meanwhile, my mother would just sign me up for SAT prep courses and drop me off before I even knew where we were going. Circumnavigation.
To the casual observer, it seemed almost as if my mother lived in a constant state of defeat. At home, while she watched the evening news, my father might snatch the remote and change the channel. “I just want to see where that hurricane is headed,” he’d say, and the station would remain fixed on the Weather Channel for the next hour. Out to dinner at Outback, my father might veto her appetizer recommendations, her drink (“You didn’t like that the last time you ordered it.”), or even her meal itself. “I suppose you’re right,” my mother would say, sighing. But then, while my father left town on business, she’d have the house painted. Or, at a silent auction, she’d buy a ten-day trip to Paris, signing her name and a too-high bid, committing my father to the bill while he was at the bar ordering drinks. Better to just act and then apologize, my mother told me once, and probably that’s why I’d joined the fraternity without telling him.
“Your mother is at the Ritz-Carlton’s Spa and Salon,” my father said, and for a moment he placed the wine bottle on the bar’s countertop. “She knew about your graduation ceremony tomorrow morning, but apparently she didn’t know that we’d be getting a hotel room in town the night before. So she scheduled some extensive…activities. I’ll need to pick her up in a bit.”
“She is coming tonight, though?” I asked. “To the Senior Send-Off?”
“Your mother’s made her own plans for the afternoon. But yes, she’ll be here for your event.” And I could tell from my father’s careful language that the long-standing marital tug-of-war was as taut as ever, though perhaps the flag in the center of the rope was crossing the line to my mother’s side.
“As long as you’ll both be here,” I said, “that’s all that matters.”
My father adjusted his belt, tried to straighten his posture.
“It means everything to me that you came,” I said. “That you gave the fraternity another chance, that you’ll see what we’ve become.”
My father was looking me in the eyes, and I reached slowly for the wine—
But at that exact moment, two of my fraternity brothers burst through the front door, both of them carrying Gator-Ade bottles and stinking of the gym, neither caring that his shoes were leaving wet footprints on the stone floor from having walked through the front yard sprinklers. “Fake tits, bro!” one of them said, shaking his head with the sort of seriousness that you might expect during a debate about the unemployment rate or the housing bubble.
“No fucking way!” said the other. “Fake tits don’t feel right. They feel like a muscle or something, all thick and solid.”
They trudged from front door to staircase, voices so loud that it seemed like the words might hang in the air and haunt the house forever. “You’re fucking crazy!”
“I’m crazy?”
“Real tits are, like, sloppy. If I grab something, I want firmness, brother. I don’t want my hand to disappear.”
“Please. Please.”
“Dude, there was this bitch who—” And then they were upstairs, voices faded by distance, and it was just me and my father again.
“So,” he said, cleared his throat. “How about, um. How about I hold onto this wine. Bring it back later.”
“Come on,” I said and reached for it, but it was in his hands once again. “It’s fine up there, with the rest.”
“It’s really good wine, Charles.” He held it back.
“You don’t want anyone drinking it?”
“It’s supposed to be enjoyed, not chugged. It was for us.”
“No one will chug the wine, Dad,” I said. “We’re not animals.”
He didn’t respond, but the look on his face—eyes like slits, forehead and cheeks smooth, lips stuck together at the edges of a mouth cracked open only slightly—suggested that this was exactly what he was thinking, that he did indeed imagine a National Lampoon’s scene later that night, a house full of cartoon characters dumping all the wine together into a giant barrel, pumping their fists and chanting for someone to chug, someone else speeding through the living room in a banana costume and tossing out condoms, while in the backyard a group of brothers sloshed into a kiddy pool of Jell-o…
“No one can open it without your corkscrew,” I said, then motioned to the bottles of gin and vodka. “And there’s so much liquor, no one needs to steal your wine.”
I held out my hands one last time.
“Well,” he said. “I’ll hang onto it for now.”
I needed to say something that would alter the air, something that would lift the smog that had settled over the two of us there in the bar. So I finally said it: I was waiting for the right moment, but I was already feeling like I’d lost some sort of battle. “Dad,” I said, “did I mention that I got a job?”
“Really?” he asked. “That’s exciting. Where?”
I took a deep breath, ran my palm across the bar’s countertop, and I told him the one thing that he didn’t want to hear.
CHAPTER TWO. The job.
Halfway through my Senior year at Edison University, I’d received an email: at the top was a masterfully Photoshopped header, the words “Nu Kappa Epsilon National Fraternity” backgrounded by watermark-faint images of historic NKE chapter houses, of brothers in intramural jerseys huddled up after football victory, of alumni standing together at weddings, beautiful women with white carnations pinned to their gowns. Below the graphic, the words “Save the World.”
It was the sort of email that made you stop breathing for a few minutes, the same as if I’d just been notified that I’d won some million-dollar prize…the sort of email that asked you to imagine a future full of possibilities you’d never before considered. “Save the World,” and it continued below in plain text:
Save the World…the world of fraternities and sororities.
Become an Educational Consultant with the Nu Kappa Epsilon National Fraternity Headquarters. Tra
vel the country! Meet hundreds of your fraternity brothers at dozens of campuses! Network with alumni! Work hands-on with chapters facing difficulties! Save fraternity life for future generations!
Job Responsibilities include:
Conducting leadership development workshops
Hosting roundtables with Alumni Advisory Boards.
Meet with campus Greek Advisors and other administrators.
Maintaining the standards of NKE excellence at each chapter.
Investigating and uncovering infractions of our fraternity Sacred Laws.
Acting as a Beacon of Leadership
Do you have what it takes?
What are you waiting for? We select three Educational Consultants for single-year contracts. NKE depends on you!
In a few months, I would be graduating and looking for jobs with my freshly pressed Organizational Communication degree, but suddenly I was receiving “Save the World” emails and phone calls from my National Fraternity Headquarters: I’d been scouted as one of the top student leaders in Florida, they said. Recommendations from my campus Director of Student Involvement, from the Student Government Advisor. Scouted. Apparently there was a permanent file somewhere, full of questionnaires and email interviews about me, about Charles Washington, about a kid who—when he got the phone call—was in a Publix supermarket buying margarita mix for his underage girlfriend’s birthday party.
Someone thought I was important.
Scratch that.
Someone important thought I was important. That meant something.
*
To the outsider, maybe the words “National Fraternity” don’t carry much weight. Maybe they feel small: just some frivolous college organization. Maybe they even feel outdated, a quaint relic of American history that has now become irrelevant. Fraternities, after all, started as six or seven-member orders, teenagers living and studying together in remote college towns; their collective history is captured in turn-of-the-century photographs, the corners yellowing around young faces eager for fraternal bonds, eager to share professed values through rituals and handshakes and ceremonies. What could be more out-of-touch with a youth culture immersed in Facebook and Jersey Shore?