American Fraternity Man

by Nathan Holic

  “The visit schedule was in one of the emails I sent you.” I look for an acknowledgment that I spoke, but when he doesn’t respond I keep going: “I guess you didn’t check it?” No response. “Well. I mean. I’ve got some workshops that I need to facilitate, and some paperwork that’s essential.” No response. “So I guess the thing is, you know, what’s most important is to figure out times,” no response, “and sort of find the best time to meet and get these things done and to talk with everyone?”

  He swallows. “Don’t got a chapter meeting till next Sunday. Till after Rush is over.”

  “Right. Rush.”

  “We’re busy. This is a bad time for a visit.”

  “This is my scheduled visit. I can’t just leave town.”

  He swipes a French fry through a patch of collected orange-white sauce. “I’ll do what I can for you,” he says, and he pops his last bite of fried matter into his mouth.

  And I realize that I’ve been speaking so much that I’ve barely touched my sandwich; when I attempt to scarf it down in one quick minute, he looks at me as if I’m uncivilized, so I only finish half of it and throw the rest out, pretending I wasn’t hungry. And then we’re back in his pickup, dented Coke cans and plastic water bottles at my feet, swishing with chewing tobacco spit. When we arrive back at the house, the yard is still garbage and party pollution, but several fraternity brothers lean against the unsure railings of the wrap-around porch, the nearby dumpster overflowing with black trash bags.

  “I’ll get the schedule together,” he says and jerks the gearshift into park.

  I ask him if I can maybe take a look around the house, and he steers me to a fire-hydrant-shaped guy on the porch named Chris, who wears plaid golfer shorts and a white polo and has a hat that says simply, “SHIP.” Neagle tells me that Christopher here will show me around while the officers are gathered in the chapter library for our meeting. “Show him the sights,” Neagle says. “Take care of the big guy,” and he slaps me on the back.

  *

  We wander the muddy lawn, and Chris—shorter than Neagle, but much thicker—tells me how bad Teke is, how dorky the Kappa Sigs are, how Pi Kapp just got booted from campus, how every sorority just loves Nu Kappa Epsilon and this is the best fraternity in the world and they’re going to kick ass during Rush. He’s looking down Greek Row as he talks, looking at the other houses not as neighbors, but as enemies, and he goes into maniacal blinking spasms every minute or so, laughing non-sensibly. Each fraternity house has a bright two-color banner hanging from its second-floor window, strung up with bungee cords, which says “Rush Kappa Sigma” or “Associate with the BEST!”

  “I spray-painted a penis on Fiji’s front door last Fall,” Chris says. He laughs, blinks rapidly, and as we walk to the back side of the house, he points at the sloping roof of the NKE chapter house and says, “This is balls to the wall, man.”

  And holy shit the roof! And suddenly I feel like I’m in a demented carnival funhouse, and he’s blinking and laughing and saying, “Gonna get at least twenty pledges this Fall, maybe thirty,” and someone has painted the words “Fuck the Bullshit: See NIKE City” across the shingles in bright red paint.

  Chris laughs, blinks, laughs. “We had the biggest party last night!” he says. “Ha!”

  And the words on the roof, Fuck the Bullshit, each as tall as a basketball player…a rusty red…and I could never have imagined anything like this…

  “At least twenty pledges,” he repeats.

  “Is that…” I start. “I mean, shit. Is that perm-anent?”

  “Oh, it’s so fucking tight, yo,” he says. “Everybody loves it. It’s like those old Rock City barns, you know what I’m saying? See Rock City? Ha! It’s throw-back, like, Mad Men style.”

  “I mean, shit,” I say. “You do know who I am, right?”

  “The guy from Nationals,” Chris says.

  “Yes.”

  “We should win some kind of award for Rush this year,” he says. Blinks, laughs. “Like, you guys have awards at the conferences every year, right? Most pledges Rushed? That kind of stuff? We should win some of that shit this year.”

  “Do your alumni know that you’ve defaced your roof?” I unbutton my shirt’s cuffs. Alumni disapprove when pool tables fall to three legs or when bedrooms go into disrepair, but as long as the house is spick ‘n span during Fall football season, little bits of destruction are fine. Hell, alumni like Ben Jameson probably contribute to the minor destruction. But the house is a representation of the past, present, and future of the fraternity chapter, there for everyone to see: “Fuck the bullshit,” the graffiti says.

  “Alumni,” Chris says. “What do they care? Not like they do anything for us.”

  “They bought the house.”

  “They never fix anything. Never donate money.”

  I could lecture him. I could spout off the Top 100 Reasons Why Alumni Don’t Donate Money (house irresponsibility topping the list), attempt to do missionary work on Chris, this gruff ball of muscle. Help him get it. But he’s already pointing to some other features of the house, laughing, flexing his biceps as he points to a few broken posts below the porch.

  “Fuck the bullshit,” he says to me. “Oh, we’re fan-fucking-tastic!”

  *

  There are three toilets in the upstairs bathroom. One doesn’t have a seat. The other two don’t have doors. None of the stalls has toilet paper. And where else can I go? A gas station down the road? An antique shop? It occurs to me that I haven’t used a bathroom that I would call “my own” in several months, that I never know what to expect, and that I’ve been holding my breath before opening bathroom doors in fraternity houses because I’ve been harboring the fear that one will eventually look and feel like the Shippensburg bathroom.

  *

  Hours later, I’m in the Shippensburg basement for an Executive Board meeting, surrounded by eight pissed-off fraternity officers.

  Maybe I didn’t expect boardroom professionalism—conference tables and TV/VCR combos and dry erase boards and padded gray chairs and suits and ties and absolute attention when someone speaks—but when Educational Consultants came to visit Edison University, our house was spotless, the books in our chapter library laser-lined on the shelves. Even Pittsburgh attempted an orderly meeting area. But this is what I’m given here: a dark basement that feels like a medieval dungeon, complete with a distant dripping noise, the vents opening into the bedrooms upstairs so that the basement echoes with 50 Cent’s “Many Men” over and over again, interspersed with grunts and clanks like someone upstairs is working out with free-weights and this is his get pumped song. In the corner is a warped ping-pong table covered and stacked high with yellow and red plastic cups. The smell of urine-soaked burlap hanging over all of this. And the officers all wear board shorts and stained wife-beaters and make such productive comments as, “When is this gonna be over, yo? Told Jess I’d meet her at the pool.”

  “First,” I say and open my portfolio notebook, “a couple housekeeping details that I’m required to go through. No pun intended. About, um, housekeeping?” Blank stares, angry stares. “Okay,” I say. “I’m going to pass out the Officer Update Form. I need you all to update your contact info and return it to me by the end of this meeting.”

  And now they’re not even looking at me. Eight officers, staring at the vent, probably wishing they were behind their own stereos, under their own dumbbells.

  “Blood in my eye, dog, and I can’t see,” 50 Cent blares through the vent.

  James Neagle, chapter president, makes no attempt to sustain everyone’s focus.

  “And I’m try’n to be what I’m destined to be,” 50 Cent raps.

  “Next,” I say, speaking louder, “I need to schedule one-on-one meetings with each of you. I’ve got a list of visit responsibilities while I’m here, items I need to collect and things I need to talk about with every officer.”

  “And niggas try’n to take my life away,” 50 Cent raps.

 
I stare at the vent, willing it to shut, but there’s no chance of that.

  “I put a hole in a nigga for fuckin’ with me,” 50 Cent raps.

  I speak even louder, running my finger down a “Chapter Efficiency” checklist on my laptop. “How many active members are currently in your chapter?” and “Does each officer have an operations manual?” and the answers thud like thick, dusty library books dropped on a table. The eight officers have melted into one dark clump, a mass of antagonism, crossed arms and squinted eyes, sighs and shaking heads, as I continue with the questions:

  And then: “How many new members has your chapter recruited in the past year?”

  “Recruited?” one of them asks. Danny is his name. Danny DeKalb. Kid with hair so perfect he doesn’t seem to want to mash it down and spoil it with a baseball cap like everyone else. The only blonde in a room full of soot-colored scalps. He’s the Vice President of Recruitment, but his James-Franco-face is cocked into a sucker-punched scowl. “What do you mean by recruited?”

  “Recruited,” I say. “New members. Like, through Rush.”

  “Why not say Rushed, then?” he asks. “Why this technical word? Makes us sound like we’re a business or something, not a fraternity.”

  “Rush and recruitment,” I say, “they’re not the same.” Minor difference in word choice, but major difference in attitude, I tell them. If we can change the word choice, that’s the first step to changing the culture. I tell them that “Rush” is just a week out of the year set aside by the university, advertised to students, and then all of the fraternities and sororities use this single week for new member recruitment. But at the Headquarters, we found that it’s better to say recruited, because that way we can understand that recruitment is a year-round responsibility. It’s anytime that you’re selling your fraternity to non-members. Fraternity recruitment is 24/7/365. We’re always selling ourselves, that’s the point. Always abiding by recruitment guidelines when speaking to non-members, always beacons of leadership, Marathon Men:

  Blank stares from the eight of them.

  “Thirty,” Danny says. “Fucking shit. Didn’t need a dissertation. Thirty pledges.”

  I nod, exhale, input the number into the worksheet: 30.

  “Next question. Do you use alcohol in recruitment?”

  And the answer is obvious by the condition of the house. Alcohol? Kegs, hunch punch, jell-o shots, ice slides, jager bombs, frozen margaritas, shotguns, Irish car bombs? Hell, if it’s in, and it’s cheap, and it’ll rock the Row, these guys probably did it last night. Shit I’ve never even heard of.

  “That’s against the rules,” Danny says.

  The others nod, their faces aglow with deceit.

  I wait a moment, unsure if I should force the subject, unsure how I can do it tactfully and intelligently, but I finally just blurt, “But you had a party last night.”

  “Rush starts on Wednesday night,” Neagle says. “After you leave. Since you wanna get all technical and shit.”

  “But it was a recruitment party. Didn’t you just hear what I said? Recruitment is year-round.”

  “Rush starts on Wednesday,” Neagle repeats.

  “You had a party. An open party? Free alcohol? To recruit new pledges?”

  “Can’t be a Rush party if it’s not during Rush Week,” Danny says, shaking his head. “Everybody gets crazy the start of the semester. Whole Row blows up. We drank some beer, had people over. No different than anyone else.”

  “But it doesn’t matter,” I say, thinking of all those drunk driving accidents, porch collapses, blood alcohol poisoning, all the ways that fraternity members and their guests have died over the years, have fed the Frat Guy stereotype. I’m thinking of the Sandor lawsuit, those parents who want to sue Nu Kappa Epsilon into oblivion. Head pounding, and I’m thinking of marijuana and ecstacy, beer and GHB, 16-year-old girls in the bedrooms of 25-year-old males, drunks drowning in bathtubs, young men crushed under tumbling dressers. Rush is a full season at universities, and when something goes wrong, the specific day of week doesn’t matter.

  All the workshops and manuals. But it’s blank stares because they don’t care.

  “What the fuck do you know, anyway?” Danny says finally.

  “I know that you guys are not in good shape, financially,” I say, because it’s the only thing I can say that won’t cause them to erupt. I can’t tell them that their house is a disgrace and that they’re a disgrace. No. My comment is safe because it’s just numbers, inarguable numbers, and no one can deny numbers: “You don’t have enough members to afford this house,” I say. “Your dues are too low. You’re spending more money on Rush than a full semester of pledge dues will generate for your chapter. These numbers don’t indicate a very promising future.”

  “Phhh,” Neagle says. “Thanks for the update. You’re a real Positive Pat.”

  *

  At night I try to sleep on Neagle’s couch; I stare at his empty unmade bed and wait for him to walk upstairs from whatever they’re all doing on a Sunday night, down in the main foyer and in the basement. Stereo-speaker bass rattling the cob-webbed vents. Stayed out too late with the alumni last night. Wait, that was last night? Need sleep. Can’t allow myself to wake up later and later each day.

  But I can’t sleep. I keep thinking about what might happen if I let my guard down. I keep thinking about those Fun Nazi business cards, the craftsmanship. I imagine a permanent-marker mustache on my face, a fake plastic snake on my chest, my hand submerged in warm water and my pants soaked with urine. I imagine Facebook status updates, too, all of my thoughts squeezed into 160 characters or less: “Charles is…at Shippensburg, and can’t sleep.”

  “Charles…can smell fifty different types of beer soaked into the carpet.”

  “Charles…would rather be sleeping on the floor.”

  And I’m awake. For hours, it seems. But Neagle’s bed remains empty.

  The bedroom is hot, dark, full of angry angular shapes.

  Before tonight, sleeping accommodations were below expectations, but still manageable. At the University of Kentucky, I stayed with the Alumni Advisor in the former bedroom of his 22-year-old son. Clean bed, clean sheets. At East Tennessee State, the chapter cleared out an unoccupied room for me. Even at Pittsburgh, I received the guest room. At the time, that house felt like a melting house of wax, but now…a fucking couch? I’d kill for Pittsburgh again.

  The cushions are hard, too. No. Just one is hard: the middle cushion.

  Sometime after 2 AM, my eyes adjusted to darkness now, head pounding and still no Neagle, I roll off the couch, kneel beside it, inspect the three cushions. And I knew it. Different patterns! All three cushions have come from different couches! I move the hard cushion to the end, to my feet. Head pounding.

  But now the “head” cushion is too soft, and every time I hear any noise in the hallway, my eyes open and I tense up. And something is poking me in the back, and it’s probably something they left in the couch, like a fork or something, just to fuck with me, but after awhile I check it out, and it’s just a spring: a spring has popped through the cushion fabric. I feel an open wound on my back.

  “Charles is…bleeding, and itches.”

  “Charles…just wants to fucking sleep! Is that really too much to ask?”

  Head pounding, and this is tomorrow’s schedule:

  And I just keep picturing it behind shut eyes, arguing with myself that I have to be ready by 9 AM, not 10 AM, not 8 AM, arguing with myself that I’m remembering the right schedule.

  “Charles is…hearing someone having sex down the hall. Really?”

  Sometime after 3 AM, head pounding and still no Neagle, and I stare at the cigarette-smelling pillow that Neagle gave me, and it’s covered in hair. Short hair. Clipped. Curly. Cat hair, I want to think, but no. Shavings from someone. Head, neck shavings? Chest shavings? Scrotum shavings. I throw the pillow on the floor, use the armrest for my head. Roar because Neagle isn’t here, that fucker, and if he was…if he was
…

  And then I spend the night staring at Neagle’s bed, coughing loudly, swearing every now and then, hoping to wake him. But the bed remains empty, I know that. Even when I awake in the morning, more tired than when I’d first slipped under this rough blanket, Neagle isn’t there. Empty bed. Empty fucking bed, and my back hurts from the couch.

  Anything suspicious, report it, LaFaber said.

  And that’s it, now. Fun Nazi, it’s not so difficult.

  Sometime after 11 AM, as I sit in the foyer talking with the Treasurer, Neagle bumbles in through the front door. “Spent the night at my girl’s place,” he says. “Thought I’d give you some privacy. You sleep well?”

  “Hmm?” I ask, and I could waste my energy on being mad at him—you fucker! I needed a good fucking night of sleep, and you gave me your couch when I could have had your bed, you lousy piece of shit!—but I keep it in check, say, “Oh yeah, fine.”

  Can a group of frat stars be rehabilitated, transformed into a leadership group? Three weeks ago, I believed I could accomplish the impossible. But now? The only realistic rehabilitation is elimination. Pull the weeds from the garden.

  Anything suspicious, report it.

  Yes, that’s it. Charles is on a mission.

  *

  I find all the materials I’ll need in my Explorer. I keep a plastic snap-shut box on the passenger-side floor, and inside the box I’ve assembled a file-system for each of the universities I’ll visit: manila folders stuffed with membership reports, financial data, chapter histories, disciplinary records, names, addresses, phone numbers, alumni contact info, fraternity house floor plans.

  I take the Fun Nazi business card from its spot below the speedometer, tuck it into my shirt pocket. Pull the digital camera and the Housing Damage forms from the “office supplies” case in the back seat, red pen from the center console—and it’s the hyperbolic red of the fake blood from the original Dawn of the Dead—and I head back inside the house, snap pictures everywhere, waiting until rooms are empty and brothers are in class so I’m not caught. Snap photos of the leaks in the basement, the keg taps in the cupboard, the over-filled dumpster, the unstable porch, bottles of Absinthe in one bedroom, marijuana posters, bongs under beds, anything, everything, more than 250 pictures, until I’m deleting the tame photos to make room for extra pictures of destroyed walls and—jackpot—a receipt on Neagle’s desk for two kegs.