by Nathan Holic
At the National Fraternity Headquarters, where each year insurance costs rise higher and higher, and where the staff spends the majority of its energy on preaching alcohol responsibility and enforcing strict guidelines, we use a simple graphic to educate members on how to avoid liability. It’s called the Circles of Danger:
The basic idea is this: when alcohol is present, the danger for the fraternity chapter is greater in each new overlapping circle of danger.
Drinking games are so dangerous that they don’t even warrant inclusion on the Circles of Danger. They’re banned outright. Everyone knows: you get caught, and you’re fucked.
And there I was at the Senior Send-Off, in my brand-new Banana Republic slacks and blue dress shirt, rolling the old warped ping-pong table from our storage closet to the center of the first-floor game room, Edwin rummaging through the bar cabinets for plastic cups and clean ping-pong balls. These were items, of course, that we’d never allow the cleaning staff to lock up in the kitchen: they needed to remain accessible. Always. Walk into the NKE house on any Saturday night and you might find this table in use, tournaments in progress, elaborate charts of team rosters and round-robin seating drawn on the dry erase board on the wall, brothers with sharpies writing their signatures and their team logos on the underside of the table after winning: crude sketches of machine guns (“The Automatics!”) and fraternity/sorority letters (“TEAM NKE & ), messages to future gamers: “Ten wins in a row. Good luck topping that.”
“Beer pong?” someone asked. One of my fraternity brothers in the other room.
My head still spinning, but a smile returning to my face.
“Fathers and sons, doubles matches,” Edwin said.
“Hell yeah!” someone else yelled.
Table wheeled into place.
“What’s this?” one father asked.
“Beer pong!” someone else yelled.
Explanation of the rules under way.
“What are these signatures, here?” a father asked his son.
“We create team names, Dad.”
“Interesting. And logos?”
“That’s mine. We won the Super Bowl tournament.”
“Atta boy!”
Hundreds of different drinking games: Asshole and “What the Fuck?” and Power Hour and Flip Cup and Quarters, but Beer Pong is the most notorious of them all, maybe the only one with national tournaments. All you need is a simple ping-pong table (really, though, any table can be manipulated for Beer Pong), some solo cups, beer, and a ping-pong ball. Usually you play in teams, two per side; half-fill a cluster of cups on each side of the table with beer (ten per side, usually in a triangle formation); then take turns bouncing a ping-pong ball from one side of the table to the other with the aim of plopping the ball directly into each of the cups of beer opposite you; accomplish the feat before the opposing team can do it first, and you win the game. And for each ball you plop in? Your opponent chugs the beer from that cup, then removes it from the table. Of course, that’s just the basic concept, and the game is full of variations: regional variations, with South Floridians playing different than Central Floridians, Californians playing different than New Yorkers; cultural variations, with the campus Hillel and Filipino Student Organizations claiming different rules; or even personal variations, with some teams deciding upon a modified set of ground rules before ever squaring off. But the game itself, no matter the rules prohibiting it, is as universal on college campuses as the spiral-bound notebook.
And as crowds began moving from the bar and the courtyard and the living room to the game room, I checked for my father, looked to the coffee table and The Complete History. By now he was absorbed entirely in the photo narrative. Still standing, not even bothering to lounge with the book and get comfortable. Ice melting in his un-sipped vodka tonic.
“Push the table into the living room,” someone said.
I backed up against the bar as the table was wheeled past me, a platoon of my fraternity brothers pushing it as quickly as a battering ram but as reverently as if it was a coffin and they were its pall-bearers.
And soon it was dead-center in the house, directly atop the area rug, in line with the front door. Now it was the centerpiece of the party, occupying the space where the cake had sat a short while before. Ordinarily, we never played Beer Pong anywhere except the game room, always made sure to tuck the forbidden drinking game away in the back corner of the house, even closed the door and made non-participants into look-outs so the Greek Row Resident Advisors—there were four of them, two fraternity members and two sorority members—would not feel obligated to report the infraction. Generally, the Greek Row Resident Advisors looked the other way. We had an understanding, so long as we were discrete.
But this particular Friday night?
“Round one,” someone shouted, and I heard the squeak of the dry erase marker on the board. Names written, charts scribbled. “Edwin and David Cambria will take on James…and your name, sir?...Henry Betterman! Round one, everyone!”
Head spinning. Men rising from their chairs.
“Sign up, right up here!”
Marker squeaking. The pop and psssh of Miller Lite cans opening, sound of foam rising, beer into plastic cup, ping-pong ball knocking against painted particle board. Bottles of Heineken popped, perhaps the first time in our chapter history we’d used Heineken for Beer Pong.
And this was it. The fathers, sleepy a moment before, now had the wide-eyed looks of waking-life dreamers. You want us to play drinking games? You’re inviting us, the old men? Here, now, in the fraternity house? Oh yes, oh yes! Designated drivers be damned. Wives, children…whatever. 10 PM bedtimes forsaken! It was now time for some serious father-son bonding over ten cups of Heineken! The party was undying, room full of stumbling zombies lurching toward more drink, ping-pong balls plopping into cups, sons showing fathers their tossing technique, how best to score.
I watched from a distance, alone, still drinking vodka-tonics. I’d let it go a few games, then I’d drag my father over and force him to play. No sitting on the sidelines. Everyone plays, even you, Dad.
*
It started with father-son teams, but soon it was couples: teams of husbands and wives. Ball splashing into Miller Lite, Mrs. Schell lamenting that the ping-pong ball was getting pretty dirty by now, but oh well, let’s just dip it into the water cup, ha ha ha, oh goodness!
Then it was mothers and sons versus mothers and sons, cups raised for a long chug, and then it was one woman saying, “I’ll just sit down over…over here,” and then we were helping someone to stand, and Edwin and his Lindsay Lohan lookalike were beside me, and he was saying, “This might have been a bad idea.”
“They’re fine,” I said. “We’re all adults here.”
And at that moment, someone’s father—a man with garlic-colored hair, body-builder’s arms and torso, but a gut that suggested that he’d long ago given up cardio—let out the sort of scream that I usually only hear at football and basketball games. “Yeeeaaa-aaahhhhh!” Low and angry, from far back in the darkest caverns of his body, a recess left unexplored for years. “How you like that, huh?” he screamed. Slapped his wife on the back, then pointed across the table at his opponent, a skinny sophomore named Marc who I hoped was his son. “Drink it up! You just lost to an old man!”
“Scary,” Lindsay said.
“Marc bears no resemblance to his father,” I said.
But then they were gone, and I was standing alone again and still talking and it took me how long to figure that out?
Head spinning again.
I took another strong gulp of my vodka tonic.
Screeching laughter from somewhere. And then Todd Hampton was at my side. The new president. A year younger than me. The boy who’d pushed me from the podium. He’d said some things during elections a few weeks back that I suddenly remembered, how things needed to change, “things” in quote fingers and I had no idea what he meant. “We’re never doing this again,” he said. “
These parents cannot handle their alcohol.”
“Relax,” I said. “It’s a good event.” Swaying.
“Easy for you to say. You’re graduating,” he said.
“Nothing easy about life after graduation,” I said.
“Someone’s mom is passed out in the bathroom.”
“Well,” I said. “Just having fun, you know?”
“Whole house is a mess,” he said, “and now that the pledges are initiated, we got no one to clean it up.”
“Um. We can clean it up ourselves, maybe?” I said. “Since when do we make the pledges do everything around here?”
“Beer Pong at a family event. This is out of control.” He shook his head. “Things will be different when I’m president.” There it was again, that word “things.”
But drunk as I was, I couldn’t argue. What was I to say?
So I nodded. “Whose bright idea was this, anyway?” I asked.
“You really don’t understand what the brothers in this fraternity want,” he said, and then he was gone, too.
*
And then there was my father. Five minutes later? Ten? Beside me.
“I need your help,” he said.
“Help with what?” I asked, tried to stand, slipped and fell back into my seat. When had I sat down?
“Your mother,” he said.
“What about her?”
“She can’t walk.”
“She’s fine. I just saw her.”
“She’s on the bathroom floor, Charles.”
“What?”
“Passed out on the bathroom floor. I need your help getting her to the car.”
And when I followed him down the hallway, past the Beer Pong tournament and past a father and son sitting at one of the patio tables drinking whiskey and playing cards, all the way down the hall, hand up for support, past the now-crooked charter on the wall, into the women’s bathroom, there was my mother, a knocked-over rocks glass with chunks of melting ice spilled across the tiles.
“Is there anyone else in here?” I asked.
“Does it matter?” my father said. “Help me get her to her feet.”
Really, the only reason we even had a women’s bathroom at our fraternity house was because this was a university-owned property; I’d lived here for four years, and I’d only ever stepped foot inside the women’s room once or twice, both times searching for extra toilet paper, both times scrambling to get in and out post-haste just in case one of the other residents had brought a female guest. Women’s bathrooms: they’re like some mystical forbidden zone, made you paranoid and loopy, made you feel icky and naughty for your intrusion. I ducked and peered beneath the stall doors, gave the entire space a once-over—
“Help me out, Charles,” my father said. “Come on.” He’d rolled her forward so that she was now sitting.
“Whu—” my mother mumbled, eyelids opening then closing.
“Just needs some water,” I said. “Give her a few minutes.”
My father brushed her hair away from her eyes, pressed the back of his hand against her forehead, then leaned in to whisper something in her ear. He smoothed out the tangles in her shoulder-length hair, then adjusted her shirt from where it had stretched around her shoulder as she rolled on the floor.
I stood nearby, hands in my pockets, trying not to watch, eyeing the door.
Truthfully, I’d never seen anything like this before, had no idea how a son was supposed to act when his mother reverted to freshman sorority girl. Yes, I knew my mother had built up her wine collection after I’d left for college, and I knew that she drank more now than she ever had while I lived back home, but still I thought that parents had…I don’t know…some sort of emergency shut-off switch before they went too far, something that prevented them from the same stupid behavior as their children.
Her eyes were open now, and she was mumbling again.
“One arm around her shoulder,” my father told me, and I did as he instructed. “One arm at her waist. And lift.” And we did, my mother’s legs jiggling beneath her as she rose, her head rolling from side to side before finally going rigid to stare me in the eyes. “Whoa!” my father said, because I nearly dropped her. I tightened my grip on her waist. My other arm brushed against my father’s, both of us volleying for position at my mother’s back; he tapped my forearm, a sort of “you okay?” gesture, and I nodded. We were standing now, an interlocked three-person unit. “All right,” he said. “Going out the doors now, Kim. One foot in front of the other. I’ve already pulled the car up.”
When had he done this? How long had he known about Mom, passed out, before finally enlisting my help? Where had I been for the last thirty minutes?
“One foot in front of the other, Kim,” he said again.
We lumbered forward, but she was at least conscious now, legs regaining their stability but still bending like rubber swords poked into steel armor. If we loosened our grip, she’d take a hard spill.
“There you go, there you go,” my father said.
“Charles,” she said then, and I tried not to hear. “Charlie. Charlie boy.” Words as haunting as a nightmare that you can’t convince yourself wasn’t real. “Oh, Charlie.”
“Keep going,” my father said, gripping the bathroom door now. He was sweating, fingers trembling as he pushed the door open.
Mother still staring into my face. “You’ve grown,” she said and nodded sloppily, her body weight shifting. My father was letting her rest against my chest and shoulder so that he could keep the door open, his foot wedged into the doorway. Soon we were moving again, out into the hallway where the sounds of the ping-pong balls and the splashing and the midnight chatter of other parents and children replaced the wet empty echoes of the bathroom. “Oh,” my mother said, “don’t let them see.” I held her tighter, already feeling the stares of Tim French and Bryan Hopper, both of them saying “oh shit!” in unison as they saw the three of us proceed through the hallway and toward the living room. Brand-new president, Todd Hampton, standing and watching with his arms crossed, rolling his eyes.
“Oh,” my mother said, “I ruined your party, Charlie.”
“No, you didn’t,” I said. “Just keep walking, Mom. You’re doing fine.”
I kept my gaze fixed to the ground before us, tried not to imagine what my fraternity brothers were seeing at that moment, how they were reacting, at what point the initial shock of a husband and son escorting a drunk mother outside would give way to laughtrack, as if we were just a couple of bumbling characters in a sitcom created for their enjoyment. One foot in front of the other, and finally we turned a corner and the front door was only yards away.
I saw the flash of a picture being taken, but tried to ignore it. Tried not to think of the comments I’d get on Facebook.
“Charlie,” my mother said. “I’m so sorr-rrrry.”
“Stop, Mom.”
“Charlie. Charrr-rrrrlie.”
My father kept us moving. “Could you grab the door for us?” he asked someone who was standing in the foyer, and then we were outside, teetering down the steps and onto the sidewalk that slit through the front yard to the curb of Greek Park Drive. One foot in front of the other, and I knew that they were gathering in the doorway, men and women, boys and girls.
But there was my father’s Lexus convertible at the curb, his shining I’ve-made-it toy. “Hold her,” he said, and now I had her full weight again as he searched his keys and then opened the passenger-side door.
“Charlie Boy,” my mother said, glassy eyes upon me once again, one hand now resting on my shoulder. I held her in a dancer’s embrace: we were chest to chest, hands at one another’s waists and necks. “I ruined your little party.”
“No,” I said. “Just…let’s just get you into the car.”
“I don’t want to go,” she said.
“Kim,” my father said. “Please.”
“No!” Voice like a petulant child ripped from the ball pit at Chuck E. Cheese at the end of her b
irthday party. “I don’t want to go! I don’t want to ruin the party!”
And now the front door of the fraternity house did close, any onlookers shrinking inside, likely sensing that this moment was becoming too personal, the sitcom humor now bleeding over into reality TV “should I laugh or should I cry?” horrorshow. A trainwreck scene on The Real World or Rock of Love that you turn the channel to avoid.
“I’m closing the door,” my father said. We’d sat her down. “Pull your legs inside.”
“Charles, tell him!”
“Pull your legs inside.”
“Tell him I want to go back to the party!”
“Kim. We’re going to the hotel. You’re done drinking.”
“Charles, help me.” My father was now grabbing her legs, trying to manage them into the car, but my mother had been reinvigorated by all of this, had a burst of strength in which she was able to land one good kick to my father’s chest. He stumbled back, hand to his shirt, face scrunched in pain…and then, just as suddenly, my mother’s mood changed again and she was crying, feet inside the car. “Oh God, Charles, I just want to go. I just want to…I just want to…”
My father stood up straight, smoothed his shirt and closed the door as gently as he could. He took a deep breath, ran his hands through the grayest of his hair above his ears, and this was the closest I’d ever seen him to becoming unraveled.
“Is this…” I started, looking in at my sobbing mother. She was now attempting to buckle her seatbelt, but couldn’t quite finish the job. “Does this happen often?”