by Nathan Holic
“A lot of sorority stuff. Senior year stuff. I got nominated for Homecoming Chair, so things have been crazy.”
“Oh, cool. I didn’t know about that.”
“We haven’t talked.”
“Right.”
“We’re doing Homecoming with Kappa Sigma,” she says. “Did I tell you?”
“Kappa Sigma. Good stuff.”
“We like those guys,” she says. “They came to our house and made us breakfast the other day. We came up with a great idea for the Homecoming float.”
“Breakfast.”
“Breakfast,” she says. “And a rose for every girl.”
“Interesting. Breakfast and roses. Real gentlemen, those guys.”
“Charles, I hate to do this.”
“Do what?”
“Cut us off. But I’m supposed to go to lunch with some of the girls.”
“You can’t talk for a couple minutes?”
“Things are hectic. Homecoming. You remember. You are flying back for the weekend, right?”
“Plane tickets are so expensive,” I say.
“You have a job, a salary. You haven’t been back here in more than a month.”
“This job is non-profit. I can barely afford my car payments.”
“You promised you’d come back,” she says. “Next weekend. Homecoming is a big deal, Charles. You can get a weekend off, for crying out loud. You want me to call your parents, see if they can come into town to see you, too?”
“No. Don’t call them. I’ll look into the tickets.” How else can I give her my NKE letters, clasp the charm around her necklace and confirm once and for all the seriousness with which I’ve burdened my life? Of course, how can I plan ahead to make it down to Florida when I’m being shuffled around, when I don’t know where I’m going on any given weekend? I’ll check ticket prices later, when things slow down.
“Okay. They’re calling my name,” she says. “Text me later.”
“I’m almost out of text messages.”
“God, you’ve become a difficult guy to communicate with.”
*
I pull out of the gas station, grumble along the interstate toward the university.
Six hours of driving last night before a sharp detour into northern Ohio to find an alumnus who, LaFaber told me, had a guest bedroom where I could stay for the night. LaFaber gave me this guy’s number yesterday afternoon, told me there was no need to blow $80 of Headquarters funds on a hotel when he’d found a place I could stay for free. “Life in a non-profit is never easy,” LaFaber said. “It’s a labor of love.” So he hooked me up with this alumnus, Paul Bennett, a former Educational Consultant now studying Student Personnel at Toledo. Six hours of driving…plus two more hours to get to Toledo. At one point, I missed an exit, drove twenty minutes out of my way. When I finally realized that I was heading in the wrong direction, I also realized that I couldn’t remember the last hour of driving. Not a single second. The last hour of my drive had become a blank.
“How’s the road treating you?” Bennett kept asking last night while I tried to fall asleep. “What’s been your favorite visit? Your favorite school?” And then he asked about the National Fraternity, about any big news, about his alma mater, the University of Kansas, because “I can’t get back there as often as I’d like.” Eight hours of driving last night and another seven hours of driving this morning.
So much caffeine, my head pounding all the way. Shirts on the hanging rod in my backseat swaying on their plastic hangers, like they could slip off if I hit a bump. Last thing before we left Indianapolis, LaFaber drew this on the dry erase board:
Told us to face the hangers the same way, just like the drawing, and if we placed them the wrong way, they’d twist around and shoot off the hanging rod if we braked too suddenly and then our backseats would be a mess, utter disorder. Even if just two or three hangers slip off, I’ll lose count of my shirts and the days on which I wore them (some can be worn twice before washing) and I won’t be right, no, and I’m wondering if I placed the hangers in the right direction, even, if I mixed up the drawing in my head, if I’m arranging my life under the wrong system. This Explorer is packed so tight that it’s hard to move, hard to breathe.
After seven hours of driving, I arrive in Champaign-Urbana. And I coast through the obligatory “campus town” district, down a road called Green Street; students seem to skip from corner to corner with an in-your-face happiness, as though they know and don’t care how grimy I feel from the foreign showers I’ve been using, how envious I am of their t-shirts and shorts. They sit outside internet cafes at metal tables and they type on wireless laptops. They sit outside the Starbuck’s across the road, outside Panera Bread, outside a “Used Books” shop with a heavy black door. They sit in a carefree September happiness, class syllabi still fresh from their professors’ copy machines, the spines of their textbooks still un-creased from lack of use, quizzes and midterms and final exams still months away. Oh, they’re happy here at Illinois. It’s Rush Season, but not just for fraternities; the season is a state of mind, and everyone on this campus is living it, flaunting it, sorority girls walking in packs from Smoothie King or Jimmy John’s, wearing cheerleader-skimpy gym shorts with or across perfectly round asses. Two black kids, one in an Omega tank-top and the other in a stark white undershirt, hop out of a Honda parked at the curb, and they saunter into Subway. Several students rush out of the two-story bookstore on the corner and scurry across busy Green Street, avoiding bicycles and cars, avoiding campus shuttle-buses so large that they’re actually two buses joined in the center by some accordion-like connector. Blue shirts, orange shirts everywhere, shirts with “CHIEF” or “Fighting Illini” splashed across the front. They’re all so satisfied, these kids, that they could be coming from the pool, not from class, that they could be wrapping up their week, but it’s only Thursday, 3 PM! Yes, Rush Season for everyone at the University of Illinois. Everywhere. Every intersection, every sidewalk. I take another sip of my coffee; it’s cold and tastes like dog breath.
The local bars, on the other hand, look worn-out from the early semester. Bartenders stand outside the doors, slapping dirt from filthy mats. In the back of a bar called Legends, a bartender hoses out a trash can, a thick goo bubbling out the bottom. Mid-shift servers and cashiers file into Murphy’s, into Brothers, into Zorba’s.
I spend ten minutes, fifteen minutes, turning down one-way roads, backtracking, making wrong turns that I can’t correct, ending up in places I’ve been five times already. Head pounding. Shirts swaying on their hangers. I pass fraternity house after fraternity house, sorority houses, left and right, all around me, but they are scattered between classroom buildings and dorms and bus stops and the campus YMCA and the Armory, and there’s no central Greek Row so there’s no pattern and no way to know exactly how to find the Nu Kappa Epsilon house. Fifteen minutes, twenty, but finally I find West Chalmers, another street over-populated with historic fraternity houses: tudor-style mansions under the shade of maple trees, directly next door to limestone castles with every decadent Gothic feature save for gargoyles, “RUSH” banners hanging from nearly every roof. Five fraternity houses in a row on Chalmers, and another seven or eight down Armory Avenue. Shippensburg’s Rush Season was dangerous, but at Illinois, a school of 40,000 students where more than 5,000 affiliate with fraternities and sororities—largest Greek community in the country—the possibilities are even scarier.
Moments after I turn onto Chalmers, I find the NKE fraternity house and pull into the parking lot, a tiny dirt pen in the shadow of a magnificent structure that, were it not in a college town, were it not surrounded by similar houses, were it not occupied by 75 fraternity brothers, could be serviceable with some paint touch-ups as a celebrity mansion on Cribs.
I have trouble negotiating my Explorer into a parking spot, almost scrape an Oldsmobile. Shirts sway in the backseat, and I can’t see out my back window.
The tall, wooden lamp post ou
tside the house is covered in flyers, top to bottom. Fifty or sixty fluorescent-papered flyers stapled to the crackling wood. “Where do YOU want to live?” the flyer asks in large type, a picture of John Belushi in his iconic “COLLEGE” sweater slapped below the text. Then, clear as a court summons, the words: “NKE House, 10:00 PM, Thursday Night. Beer, Beer, Beer, Beer, Jell-O Shots, Beer, Girls, Girls Gone Wild Camera Crew. Any questions? Be there.”
And this flyer is probably posted all over campus.
This is it. Illinois. An historic chapter with more than 2,000 alumni since 1921, smack-dab in the middle of Big Ten Country. If I can’t make a difference here, save this ship, I’m just painting over a stain.
*
The porch of the Nu Kappa Epsilon chapter house is modest, stretching only the length of one side, but the front door is an intimidating wooden block, the letters “NKE” carved into its surface along with elaborate expressionist white carnations and the date of the chapter’s founding. There is an electronic button-pad lock above the door handle…but someone has wedged a rock the size of a football (the words “Go Away!” scrawled in black marker) between the door and the frame, rendering the lock irrelevant. I push open the door, hold my breath, expect the chaos of Shippensburg.
But here at Illinois, after I pass through a small foyer and walk up a half-dozen stairs into the living room, there is…nothing. Just an open room, wood-paneled walls and floors that make it feel like a colonial library, but no furniture, no posters, no framed portraits, no stitched NKE banners or flags. Just an empty room, a fireplace and empty mantle and several thick rolls of industrial-strength black sheeting pushed up against the wall like smooth black bails of hay.
The living room is dark and hollow, and I wonder if this is an encouraging development. If this chapter cleared out the room to preserve all furniture from the inevitable damage it would sustain during a house party, I almost admire their forethought. Don’t want any freshmen puking on the rugs, after all.
Eventually I locate two stairwells on opposite ends of the room, each shrouded in shadow. I pick a stairwell, my every step leaving deep booming thumps, a pretentious academic sound, the kind of thoughtful clanging I imagine whenever someone says “hallowed halls.”
When I descend into the gigantic basement of the fraternity house, the hallway branches off into several clearly labeled rooms: a kitchen, a mess-hall-style cafeteria, and a library. I open the first door, “Chapter Library,” hoping I can find someone in all this emptiness, and sitting inside is a clean-complexioned young man in a white polo. He’s got messy-stylish frat-star hair, but he’s holding three thick library books under his arm, one of which says, A Critical Approach to the U.S. Tariff. “You must be Charles Washington,” he says, and it’s a mild voice, a Rob Lowe or James Spader voice.
“That’s me.”
“Adam Duke,” he says. “Chapter President. I was just about to give you a call, see when you were getting into town.”
“Were you?” I ask.
“Please come in. Have a seat.”
I follow him into the Chapter Library, a room with its own fireplace. Above the fireplace hangs a golden-framed charter, the original 1921 document preserving the signatures of the chapter’s founding members and the edict of the National Fraternity, establishing the group as the “Iota Alpha” chapter of Nu Kappa Epsilon. Everything appears clean and polished; no fingerprints, no stains, no dust, no burn marks. This isn’t what I expected from an “emergency visit.” Adam Duke is about my size, nothing special, but his voice is calming, not antagonistic; I expected someone who would act like an enemy.
“I wish I had more time to talk to you on a one-on-one basis,” I say. “But I’ve got a strict schedule for the rest of the day. I just got here, and I’ve already got a meeting in a couple minutes with your campus Greek Advisor. Then a dinner meeting with a bunch of your alumni.”
He nods, reassumes his seat in a leather chair behind the desk. Motions for me to sit down on a wooden chair on the desk’s opposite side. “Have a seat,” he says again. “Please. I’ve got class in about twenty minutes, anyway. I’m supposed to lead discussion today. But ask me anything you want to know.”
“Oh.” I scratch the back of my neck. Nobody’s ever given me that prompt before. I think I actually wanted him to be an asshole, just so I could be an asshole, too. Give my frustration some outlet. “Okay, then,” I say. “First thing’s first. This freshman…the blood alcohol poisoning thing. This thing is big.”
“Josh Martin is his name,” Adam says and nods. The confident nod of a scholar on a History Channel special. “Honestly, I don’t know how this was inflated into such a big story. It’s not a big deal. Josh barely drank anything in the house.”
“It was a party, right?” I ask. “He had something to drink?”
“No party. Most of our brothers were out on Green Street, actually. Josh Martin is a high school friend of one of our brothers. In town for the football game last weekend. But they both drank so much beforehand that neither wanted to go out. Josh passed out here in the basement sometime after midnight. Actually, we were lucky that someone found him and called 9-1-1. They said he was barely breathing.”
“And he’s fine, now?”
“Physically, yes,” Adam says. “If he hadn’t been here at the fraternity house when he passed out, with so many people nearby, he might have died. But still, his parents…can you believe this? They keep calling for an investigation, calling for suspensions, throwing out the word ‘lawsuit.’ Like we gave him all that alcohol. We saved the kid’s life.”
“I see.”
“So that’s currently where we stand,” Adam says, nods again.
“Okay,” I say, head pounding, swaying, but I need to focus. “Then there’s the other big problem. This blood alcohol poisoning thing…we can deal with it, since it doesn’t really seem, you know, according to what you just said, that you’ve done anything wrong. But this party. We need…we need to deal with this issue, too.”
“Certainly. What would you like to know?”
“This doesn’t sound good,” I say. “There’s so much wrong here.”
“Truthfully, I think this is the best decision we’ve ever made.”
“Explain?”
“Things have been rough around here for a few years, ever since the rape accusations. We need something to really get our heads above water.”
“Rape,” I say. “That doesn’t sound good, either.”
“No, no, two years ago,” he says. “When I was a freshman. I don’t know all the details because I was just a pledge at the time. Not really privy to the inner workings of the house. But something happened in the basement. Without getting graphic, I’ll just say that there were four girls and seven guys, total. All consensual. Next day, though, one of the girls goes to the police, says she didn’t want to do it, she was forced, etcetera, etcetera.”
“Four girls and seven…what does this have to do with your party?”
“We were a strong chapter then, back when I joined.” He’s still nodding as he talks, nodding constantly, as if it’s all so simple, so cut-and-dry: they had 110 members, he says. Best GPA on campus, intense campus involvement. One of the top houses at Illinois. But with the accusations of rape came the impending threat of lawsuits. Despite the accusing female dropping her case and apologizing, the National Fraternity still arrived on campus and conducted a hasty “Formal Review” of the chapter, expelling all seven of the “offenders” and initiating a rigorous re-organization, suspending fifteen other members who didn’t meet some standard or another, and placing the chapter on a year’s probation. Frustrated and confused by this odd turn of events, nearly a quarter of the chapter (and almost the entire pledge class) protested these national decisions by relinquishing their pins and moving out of the house.
I let Adam go on for awhile; he makes honest eye contact as he speaks (if this was a job interview, he’d be hired on the spot), but my focus keeps drifting to his styled bro
wn hair and to the history books that rest on the desk before him. To his white polo, which I realize is Burberry, his thick silver watch. Adam Duke is wearing clothing and accessories straight from the front-matter advertisements of GQ or Esquire. He’s 20 years old, probably doesn’t have a job, and while I smell of old coffee and McDonalds and have the frumpy look of a DMV or Post Office employee, he has the carefree look of young money, born into a swollen bank account..
“I don’t get it,” I say finally. “What’s the relevance of all of this?”
“The entire year after the accusation,” Adam says, “even though the case was dropped, everyone on campus was talking about it. Calling us rapists. And who wants to be associated with that? Guys couldn’t even wear their Nike shirts on campus, couldn’t bring girls back to the house. If you haven’t noticed, there are plenty of empty bedrooms upstairs. Economically speaking, it costs more to maintain this place—internet, meal plan, electric—than the money we generate through rent. Things have fallen apart since those accusations.”
“It’s been two years.”
“Exactly. This year’s Rush, this is our last chance. Incoming freshmen don’t know about the incident. Campus is starting to forget. If we have a good party, a real blow-out, we’ll have a good Rush and things will be normal again. There won’t be a cloud over our house.”
And this is the same type of thing we used to say back at Edison at the end of every Fall semester, when we had one “blow-out” party at the beach out in Captiva. The final weekend of warm Gulf water before Florida’s quick winter blew in. Jugs and jugs of margaritas, coolers crammed with Coronas. “Wasted on the Water,” the party was called, and because we kept such a sterling reputation throughout the school year, we figured that we were less likely to get into any serious trouble for this one party we had. This one little party, where we usually booked three bands, hired four security guards, and set up a basketball-court-sized tent in the sand. We deserved to cut loose, we thought. This party saves our sanity.