American Fraternity Man

by Nathan Holic

  For the past three days, I’ve been sinking into the slippery-sided pit of Pittsburgh. When I’ve showered, I’ve done so in the dingy first-floor bathroom they usually use only during parties: I had to clear dead leaves and the pieces of a broken volleyball from the tub before stepping inside. When I’ve slept, I’ve done so in a guest bedroom with holes in the walls and piles of old Busch cans in the corners. I eat with the frat stars at their dented dinner table. In my spare time, I sit on the slimy couches and talk with them, even though the conversations are the same each night: Family Guy is hilarious, the BCS is evil, and it’s absolute bullshit that Nationals won’t allow them to have kegs at their parties. All the while, 24/7, acting the part of Marathon Man. A “beacon for leadership,” instilling in the brothers of each chapter the mission of Nu Kappa Epsilon, to “develop our members into the socially responsible leaders of the next generation.”

  Three days at one school, pack up and drive, then three days at the next.

  “Nobody said it’d be easy,” Walter LaFaber told us during training. “But you are the face of the National Headquarters. The embodiment of our spirit. Without you, there is no national fraternity, no mission.” There are three Educational Consultants at the Nu Kappa Epsilon Headquarters—Brock London, myself, and a kid from California named Nick—and we spent the summer in training with LaFaber, learning every word of every Sacred Law, every name and date in the fraternity’s history, every number and decimal on the national budget, every story of fraternity life gone wild, the hazing, the alcohol and drug abuse and house fires and sexual abuse charges and gang warfare. Two years ago, we suffered three alcohol deaths in a single semester (Brandon Kane, Wisconsin, fell from a balcony during a Big Brother ceremony; Eddie Sandor, San Jose State, asphyxiated on his own vomit; and Kyle Benet, UTEP, died when, after a party, he drove his truck into the concrete divider in a Texas highway), three immediate lawsuits that threaten the financial foundation of the fraternity.

  “It’s the Sandor Lawsuit we’re most concerned with,” LaFaber confided to us. “His parents? They’re going for the throat.”

  Millions of dollars each year pass through some individual fraternity chapters. My own chapter back at EU, sure, but especially the oldest chapters on historic campuses—Alabama, Illinois, Nebraska, Cornell—who live in ten-columned mansions, eighty live-in members, full breakfast-lunch-dinner meal plans, cleaning services, Spring Formals, alumni anniversary banquets, faculty luncheons. And each year, millions of dollars pass through our National Headquarters: student fees, alumni contributions, investments, grants, conferences. We don’t have an impressive travel budget for our employees, but if a lawyer sees these numbers…?

  “What do they want?” I asked.

  “I’ll tell you what they don’t want,” LaFaber said. He leaned forward over the conference table and spoke with the same intense whisper he’d used during our first-day orientation, the one that could silence the entire world. “They don’t want an easy cash settlement. And unlike the Kanes and the Benets, they don’t want to admit that their own son might have been at fault.”

  “But Sandor was drunk, right? He had a choice about whether to drink—”

  “That’s what they want to prove,” LaFaber said. “That he did not have a choice. That it was the fraternity’s fault that he drank a bottle of rum. That the fraternity members made him do it, that the entire national fraternity is responsible for perpetuating a culture of alcoholism.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I said.

  But beside me, Brock London was shaking his head. “They got a hell of a case, don’t they?” he asked. “Some older brother hands a freshman a drink, tells him to chug it…who wouldn’t feel pressured?”

  “This is the lawsuit that makes or breaks Nu Kappa Epsilon,” LaFaber said. “They don’t just want our financial resources. They want to end our existence.”

  “They can’t do that,” I said. “What did we ever do? Nationally, I mean.”

  “Just the same as my buddy Ashton,” Brock said. “Parents wanted someone to blame, and they took down Beta Beta Alpha.”

  “This might seem bleak at times, but this is the fraternity world as it exists,” LaFaber said, and he backed away from the conference table, the rugged intensity now replaced with a calm confidence. As if he had everything under control. “If you believe in the power and importance of our national brotherhood, though, you believe we can change the culture.”

  Change the culture.

  And that is why tonight, a Friday night, at the end of my fourth chapter visit of the semester, I’m facilitating an alcohol education workshop, a cornerstone of the risk management component of the National Fraternity’s newly hatched “DO IT!” initiative. This is how we show the world what we truly are, what we truly want to be.

  *

  I try to lean forward from the couch, try to reach my notebook on the condiment-stained coffee table, but I fall back into the damp cushions. I lean forward again, stretch with all the energy I can muster, grab the outline: “Life with Alcohol Timeline,” it says, “15 min.”

  I’ve given them twenty.

  “All right, guys,” I say and push myself up, and this simple action—pushing myself from a broken couch—is an exercise much more difficult than it might sound, like shooting a basketball while sitting cross-legged. I stand and wobble, pat my behind—still dry, surprisingly—and walk to the center of the room. “Good job, guys. Very good,” I say. I clap my hands, attempt to make eye contact with as many of the fraternity brothers as possible, many of whom are still coloring or drawing unrelated pictures on their timelines. I keep my demeanor friendly, positive; I laugh, smile, bend the knees so I don’t appear wooden like an old English teacher, keep one hand in pocket the same way that Walter LaFaber does. “So tell me,” I say, “why I had you all participate in this exercise.”

  The brothers trudge back to their seats, timeline papers clenched in their hands, but no one immediately volunteers an answer. Most stare at the floor, look in different directions, check the time on their cell phones.

  “Anyone?” I ask.

  Several seconds pass. I can hear my own heartbeat in my ears.

  The problem, as I’ve learned in the last two weeks, is that some chapters get it, and some don’t. Some want to change the culture of fraternity life and live the mission, and some want to live the stereotype. This University of Pittsburgh chapter? For the past two days, they’ve treated me like an enemy spy attempting to learn their every secret, sneak a peek under their pillows, in their closets, and report the findings back to my superiors at the Death Star. In fact, one of them dropped a few homemade business cards on my suitcase, all of them printed with the job title “Fun Nazi.” I forced myself to laugh when they asked me if I liked the gag, but I couldn’t smile.

  “We’re a bunch of drunks, yo,” someone says finally, and everyone laughs.

  “Well, um,” I say. “Thank you for confirming that. Anyone else?”

  A couple seconds pass.

  “So,” I say, “how many of you were surprised by your timelines?”

  No answer.

  “Anyone?”

  And such is the inherent flaw of interactive presentations for groups that have no desire to interact with you.

  A few of them have cell phones in laps, are texting or checking Facebook or moving images around the interactive screens of their iPhones. Throughout the past three days, whenever I’ve made an educational suggestion for improving chapter operations, someone has said, “There’s an app for that!” and everyone has snickered in a dirty-joke sort of way. And I’ve never before had to pretend that I understand technology-related gags, but I’m lost. Just months ago, before LaFaber told us to clean up our digital footprints, I’d spend hours every night updating my own Facebook profile, leaving comments across my network, over a thousand friends, dozens of groups, Farmville, Mafia Wars, zombie-ized profile pictures, Flixster movie reviews. But that Charles Washington doesn’t exist anymore.<
br />
  “Anyone?” I ask again. “Anyone who found your timeline surprising?”

  And then, mercifully, one hand rises with measured reluctance, slinks upward like a periscope poking out of the water. Then, another hand rises. Three or four more. Not so bad. Very good response, in fact. Most of the hands then drop, flop back into laps as though I’d snake-charmed them all into the air and now my spell is broken. One of the brothers, though—I think I met him, think his name is Tony—hasn’t realized that he’s the only one with his hand still raised. So I point at him and say, “Great. What surprised you about your timeline?”

  “What?” Tony says, looks around. “Oh. I don’t know. Guess I…guess I’ve had more good times than I thought?” A few random snickers throughout the room. I hold my breath: I think he’s done. He’s made a joke, and this is probably the best I’ll get out of this workshop, just jokes and smart-ass comments.

  “Putting it all on paper, I mean,” he says. “I had some good times, but hell, I think I’ve spent more money on alcohol than I’ve ever had in my account at any one time, you know?”

  Everyone laughs.

  More jokes and smart-ass comments.

  But there are several types of laughter, right? You can laugh when you make fun of someone, but you can also laugh when you realize something about yourself that’s maybe a little disturbing and you’ve got no other way to cope with it in public. You joke and you laugh to relieve your own tension. So this could be productive laughter?

  “Excellent!” I say. “Putting it all on paper. That’s a great point. Anyone else?”

  “These guys made me into an alcoholic,” someone blurts out and everyone laughs again. And I’m about to scowl but then I’m thinking, wait, productive. “I’m just joking, you know,” he says. “I ain’t complaining. But I probably could’ve made a whole other timeline just from the time I’ve been living in this house. Maybe that says something.”

  “Interesting,” I say. “Thank you. That’s an honest observation. It seems to me that these timelines, more than anything else, allow us to see trends in our habits. When I created mine, you’d never believe the things I learned about myself.”

  And, amazingly, they’re sitting forward in their seats, all thirty of them alert, elbows at angles and palms pressed against their knees, baseball caps lifted out of their eyes; for the first time in the presentation, their eyes are wide with interest. Like they actually want to talk about this, like they actually want to get it.

  “Would anyone like to share their timelines?” I ask.

  And now, without a moment’s hesitation, someone stands from a fold-out chair, eager but nervous, like he’s been recognized at a major awards show and must now deliver his speech. He’s wearing a navy NYPD shirt and a Yankees hat turned backward, bill flipped up. He’s either the “Vice President” or the “Director of Chairmen,” one of the officers I met briefly.

  “Thanks for volunteering,” I say, and he nods and walks to the center of the Chapter Room, holds his paper high for everyone to see. It’s the typical Life with Alcohol timeline, a bumpy black line from left to right across the page, sharp date-lines shooting upward like porcupine spikes, each carrying a barely-legible description.

  I slip away, sink back into the couch.

  “At first,” NYPD says in a coughy coal miner’s voice, “I was going to draw every time I’ve been drunk. But we only had fifteen minutes to do this. Time was limited, know what I’m saying? Had to pick and choose.”

  Everyone laughs.

  “So I was like, well, I could just write the times when I’ve puked,” he says. He waves his hand across his timeline. He says he can’t even remember all the times he’s puked, but he tried anyway. He says that it’s pathetic, all this puking. No one laughs.

  When I gave this presentation at the University of Kentucky, my very first visit, one of the brothers stood up and tore off his Wildcats hat and said in this ultra-bluegrass voice, “You calling us alcoholics?” Took me the rest of the presentation just to convince him that I wasn’t trying to insult anyone, that I never said that alcohol was evil or that it made anyone a bad person or an alcoholic, that I was only trying to help them understand alcohol responsibility, that alcohol education is an important part of leadership development.

  I wanted to talk to them about restraint and regrets, maybe share something from my own life, joke about how to avoid waking up on the living room floor. But you do not veer from the script, LaFaber said. Do you want to be a leader or a punchline?

  Here, now, maybe I’ve got a stack of “Fun Nazi” business cards on my suitcase, but…I see opportunity.

  Someone else stands and volunteers.

  Says that his name is Gerry and he’s an alcoholic, and everyone laughs.

  Shows his timeline. Points to the major events in his college career. Big Brother night. Homecoming. End of Finals Week. End of freshman year. Sophomore year. Junior year. The night of his first sexual experience. The first night he got drunk with his parents. And he tells a story about the first night he lived in the dorms here at Pittsburgh, how his father left him with two 12-packs of Rolling Rock for his mini-fridge, how he and his roommate played Power Hour and they both got wasted and paranoid and didn’t know how to get rid of the bottles and they spent the night sneaking the bottles and the caps and the cardboard cases out of the dorms and across campus to the Meal Hall dumpster, little by little, any way they could. Picture that movie Shawshank Redemption, he says, when Andy breaks out of prison over the course of many years by carrying chunks of his chiseled wall in his shoes and dumping them into the prison yard.

  And it’s a good story and everyone’s into it, having fun. And I’m laughing, too, caught in the moment and laughing because I did almost the same thing my freshman year at Edison University. Carried a backpack of empty bottles out of the dorms. Got caught, too, and had to explain to my father why I was on university probation before classes had even started.

  And he keeps going, listing each spike of his Life with Alcohol timeline, and I do understand this guy, Gerry. Part of progress is understanding, not just condemning.

  He talks about his twenty-first birthday, and I’m thinking of my own.

  Back at EU, back in Fort Myers, Florida. Back at Hem-Haw’s on Central, sinking into the dark cushions of the back booth. Boom. Shot of Jack, from Ronnie. Boom. Sex on the Beach, from Tara. Boom. Three Wise Men, from Edwin. Boom boom boom. Knocking ‘em down. Singing “Under the Bridge” along with the jukebox, making out with Natalie, telling somebody that I’m going to kick his ass cause he called me a pussy, and then it’s boom boom boom and three more shots, and then I’m face down on the floor, under the booth’s table, George grabbing me by my left arm, dragging me under the table, dragging me out the only way that he could get me. Dragging me out of Hem-Haw’s twenty minutes before I turned twenty-one.

  Gerry walks back to his seat and the chapter applauds him.

  “We want to see your timeline,” someone says from the back of the room.

  “Excuse me?” I ask.

  “Yours. Show us yours.”

  “My Alcohol Timeline?”

  “Yeah, dawg. You said you did one.”

  “No, no,” I say. “That’s private.”

  “We’re showing our, like, deepest and most personal moments, bro!” It’s someone in the back of the room, and he’s got a milk jug full of water. He unscrews the cap and takes a swig, swirling it around in his mouth. Has thick arms, a 20-inch neck, probably training for some athletic competition or another. “But yours is personal? How we s’posed to trust you?”

  “Yeah,” someone else says. “How about just, like, the biggest spike?”

  “Not a chance,” I say. “Let’s get back on task.”

  “Come on!” Water Jug says. “Don’t even need to show us everything.”

  The room is grumbling now, kids nudging each other, a bubbling collection of side conversations and under-their-breath jokes and comments threatening to t
urn to full boil.

  Do you want to be a leader or a punchline? Headquarters doesn’t want us to discuss our own negative experiences with alcohol because Headquarters wants us to be the living embodiment of social responsibility. We are not cautionary tales. I’m picturing our Educational Consultant Code of Conduct: “While you’re a representative of the fraternity, the four D’s are off-limits,” the Marathon Man tells us. “No dating, no drinking, no drugs, and no digital footprint.” Consultants cannot accept a drink at a fraternity house, cannot accompany undergraduates to a bar, cannot purchase drinks for (or accept drinks from) alumni, cannot purchase a drink for an undergraduate female, cannot…Well, there are dozens of scenarios. And failure to meet these guidelines results in immediate termination as an Education Consultant. “You’re not ‘one of the guys,’” LaFaber told us. “Watch what you do, watch what you say. Everywhere.” We had a consultant two years ago who talked about his DUI during college. A great story. Very compelling. Guess the chapter’s response. “Our consultant got a DUI. Fucking hypocrite.” A three-day chapter visit, and they were posting that on comment boards, as if it was the only thing they’d heard.

  “It’s…I don’t even have my timeline anymore,” I say.

  “Bullshit, you don’t have it. You can’t remember it?”

  “After I went through the workshop training, I tossed the paper.”

  Water Jug shakes his head, disappointed. “Tossed the paper? Come on. This guy’s bullshit. We’re listening to this?”

  “I’m a traveling consultant. I don’t have a bedroom anymore,” I say, leaning forward from the couch to project my voice, “so I can’t pin it to my wall like a poster, if that’s what you expected. Not like it would make a great interior decorating choice anyway.”

  The room breaks into choppy chuckles, amused but hesitant, as if this room of frat stars never expected me to crack a joke myself, and now they’re unsure how to treat it.