American Fraternity Man

by Nathan Holic

  “Yes, no, you haven’t looked up plane tickets?”

  “I just—” I say. “I haven’t been in front of a computer, I said.”

  “You’re being difficult on purpose, aren’t you?”

  “Me? I didn’t mean to be. I’m being difficult?”

  “Homecoming is a week and a half away. You know that.” And her voice is low and disaffected, not at all the high-low syllables of her voicemail recording, the intonation of some happier time. Where has the Jenn Outlook gone?

  “I know that, I know that,” I say. “You told me. Things are just difficult for me.”

  “You’ve got a laptop. I don’t understand why you can’t just book tickets.”

  “This laptop doesn’t have wireless. It’s ancient, Jenn, I’ve told you that. Every time I want to go on the internet, I have to unpack that gigantic fucking ethernet cord and hope to God that there’s a place to plug it, and that I don’t need some obscure password.”

  “You could use someone else’s computer, right?”

  “I’m not at the house. I’m…God, I don’t even know where I’m at.”

  “You’re at the University of Illinois,” she says.

  “I know that. I mean, it’s all maps and…I don’t even know where I’ll be next week. I have to check my schedule. Like, really.”

  “I thought you had your schedule memorized. Pittsburgh to Shippensburg, Shippensburg to Saint Joseph’s, all that. You should have just put it all on Facebook.”

  “No longer an option.”

  “Which is too bad.”

  “Things have changed,” I say. “It’s…getting harder to stay organized.”

  She sighs. “What’s the point of having a boyfriend I never get to see?”

  “I just—” I say. “Wait, what?”

  “Listen, Charles,” she says. “I’ll, you know, have to call you later tonight. This probably isn’t a good time. We’re supposed to have an Executive Board meeting in a couple minutes.” Someone is laughing in the background. A girl’s laugh, light and innocent, but I can’t help thinking that it’s me that this girl is laughing at.

  “Sure,” I say. “Oh, sure. I understand.”

  “What?” she says, not to me. “Oh, God.”

  “Hello?” I say.

  “Charles, hold on.” And suddenly the phone grows louder with laughter, and Jenn tries to say something else but her voice breaks up a little and she says, “I’ve got to go, Charles. Why don’t you just give me a call tonight, could you? Or tomorrow.”

  “I wanted to talk now,” I say.

  “Call me when you get the tickets,” she says, and she hangs up without saying goodbye.

  Slipping. Things are slipping. We had a way that we always ended phone conversations back at EU, a cute couple words (not “I love you,” but something just as routine, a little inside joke), and I’m thinking but can’t remember, and I’m holding the phone so tightly I’m surprised I’m not cracking the plastic. I run my hands through my hair and shiver violently, like it’s cold out but it’s still oven-hot.

  *

  Ten minutes later I’m ushered into Dr. Jacobs’ office, past stacked boxes of three-ring binders that spill from her doorway into the hall. Her degrees are posted prominently on the far wall of the office: Bachelor’s from Nebraska, Master’s from Bowling Green, Doctorate from Penn. But there are other certifications scattered about, mixed with group photos from dozens of conferences, fake smiles, none of it actually hung on any wall, the photos and certificates resting in random spots as if still waiting for someone to pound a nail into the drywall and affix them permanently. Bookshelves wrap around the room, and the reading material all feels predictable—notebooks labeled as ASB Manual or Operations or Conference 1999, and probably ten different books called “Leadership”—but it, too, is stacked haphazardly, as if just unpacked and life is too busy to organize.

  Dr. Jacobs is a gaunt woman in her early 50s, with frighteningly jagged black hair and crackling wrinkle lines that make her smile look more like a teeth-gritting gasp. At many schools, I’ve learned, the Greek Advisor position is seen only as an administrative starting point for new Master’s degree holders, with most advisors remaining in this position for only a year or two before rising to something sexier (Assistant Dean, perhaps, or Director of Campus Housing). It’s the climbers who are responsible for so many Greek Communities falling into administrative disarray, thus allowing so many “drinking clubs” to grow without the university’s knowledge. Dr. Jacobs, I’ve been warned by LaFaber, has decades of experience in university administration, but was demoted to Greek Advisor for conduct issues. Foul language, comments that sounded threatening, but nothing ever extreme enough for firing. She is not a “climber,” but instead a “lander.” Perhaps by leaving packed boxes on her floor, she’s registering her disappointment with the Greek Affairs position, still holding out hope for a softer landing in a new department.

  “Nu Kappa Epsilon,” Dr. Jacobs says. “I wish I knew more about your fraternity.”

  “Nationally?” I ask. “Or here at Illinois?”

  “Both,” she says and holds up her palms. “We have more than 50 fraternity chapters on campus, Mr. Washington, more than 25 sorority chapters. That’s as many groups as most national organizations have across the country. By and large, many tend to be complacent, living in the bubble of their houses, sectioned off from the rest of the student body as though their house is just a dorm. House-Centrism, I call it.”

  “Hmm. Well, I’ve got quite a few meetings today, so—”

  “An inability to see beyond the front porch of the individual house.” She points her finger into her desk. “And it extends to the community lexis. Students don’t say ‘fraternity’ or ‘brotherhood,’ here. More often they ask, ‘What house do you belong to?’ The fraternity reduced to real estate, binding the members, holding them hostage, depriving them of opportunity.”

  “Um,” I say. I haven’t even sat down yet, but this is standard practice for Greek Advisors and higher-ed administrators: a recited speech detailing their theories. “Can I sit?”

  “And this, in turn, breeds a revolving door feel for the Greek Community. When a group huddles into itself, it doesn’t feel responsible for others. Last Spring, Sigma Nu couldn’t maintain the membership numbers necessary for keeping up with housing costs. So the National Headquarters dissolved the group and agreed to re-start the chapter in four years, once the current members graduate. Standard practice. But what’s interesting at Illinois is that nobody notices. It’s just another house. Here today, gone tomorrow, back in four years. I’ve been fine-tuning my article on this theory for two years.”

  “Sounds like it,” I say.

  She is silent. Stares into my eyes as if gauging whether I’m worthy to be taken seriously in her field. Maybe I was wrong. Perhaps she loves her role as Greek Advisor. She hasn’t unpacked her office, but she’s obviously been using her position to further her research.

  “And, of course,” she says, “you can’t ignore the Millennial impact.”

  “Millennials,” I say. “That’s the second time I’ve heard that term in the last week.”

  “Millennials,” she says and gives her teeth-gritting smile. “Start with Strauss and Howe’s work on the subject. Seminal, if superficial. And extremely self-congratulatory that they invented the term. Harold Vernon, a man I know personally, has written extensively on the Millennial Generation. Much more rigorous.”

  “Interesting. But I was wondering if we could talk about the—”

  “What we’ve found about Millennials, kids in college now,” she says, “is that they’re community-oriented. Nurtured by parents, involved in team sports and after-school programs all their lives. Unlike Baby Boomers or Gen-Xers, both of whom fought against the establishment, Millennials have been brought up to believe they are the establishment. Just like the old G.I. Generation who fought World War II. It’s a return to conformity, with social activism only acceptable if
it’s mainstream: an anti-war Facebook group, for instance.”

  “Listen,” I say. “I’m in a bind for time. How does this—”

  “House-Centrism,” she says. “Two hundred years of tradition in some of these houses. Alumni, money. Each fraternity believes it is the only community that matters, and their behavior becomes arrogant. Those who don’t join fraternities are branded outcasts. But on a campus as large as this, that means that we’ve got 35,000 outcasts! So we’ve got two groups opposed to one another, all conformist Millennials who believe that their way is the right way. Really, we could be looking at a destructive backlash against Greek life in the immediate future.”

  “Well, it’s a good thing we’ve got a noble purpose, then,” I say. “We can change the culture. Keep it focused on leadership. But the reason I’m here has nothing to do with a—”

  “The Millennials have no sense of purpose, that’s the real problem.” She shakes her head. “The G.I. Generation had a quote-unquote good war, and the space program, and a new information age. They were saving the world. The Baby Boomers were speaking out against Vietnam, against old social constraints. A sexual revolution! Even Generation X was lashing out against the hypocrisy of their parents, the failed idealism of the Baby Boomers. But the Millennials strive toward no true goal. A nationwide recession that in no way resembles the hardships of the Great Depression? A world where kids think they’ve got it rough if their iPhone is too slow? Ha! They have only a sense of entitlement, a feeling that all the world should be perfect, ‘noble’ as you say, and their perfect lives should never be disrupted. That, of course, is off-topic: a completely different article I’ve only just begun to draft.”

  “Off-topic?” I ask, and suddenly I can no longer even remember why I’m here in this woman’s office, what questions I was actually supposed to ask. Would you consider Nu Kappa Epsilon to be in the top third of chapters on campus? Why am I here? “Can we,” I say, and rub my eyes, “can we talk about Nike?”

  She wipes her forehead, bends down to a file cabinet, opens the squeaky-clean door. She’s ruffling through a stack of papers inside a manila envelope, all of them heavy cardstock with a blue “I” in the middle of the letterhead. She licks her finger, turns a sheet, scans some sentences, licks her finger, turns another page. Finally says: “Here we are. A houseguest in the hospital for blood alcohol poisoning, advertisements for an open keg party. I know only what I’ve read, so you can imagine how that colors my perception of the fraternity you represent? The better question is: what can you tell me about your fraternity, Mr. Washington?”

  “What can I…” I open my portfolio notebook, searching for a response. Shirts swaying, details slipping. “How long have you been Greek Advisor?” I ask.

  “Four years,” she says, eyes narrowed as though I’ve challenged her on some key issue of her research.

  “And you don’t know anything about Nu Kappa Epsilon? They’re on your campus, and you don’t know anything about this fraternity?”

  “Like I said,” she says, still scanning papers, “it is very easy to lose yourself in a Greek community so large. While we’ve compiled ground-breaking research, many of us in these administrative positions simply cannot make the time to get hands-on with the groups. The sheer number of organizations, and the constant student turn-over, all of these things work against us. So we leave the hands-on work to the practitioners in the field, such as yourself. For us, Mr. Washington, these groups remain—” and she tears a sheet from the manila envelope, presents it on her slick desk for me to gaze upon:

  “Numbers,” she says. “Numbers and letters on a page.”

  “But in four years,” I say. “Four years, you’ve been here. You know nothing?”

  “It is im-poss-ible,” she says coldly, leans back in her desk chair, and now turns her attention to her computer and scrolls through whatever Internet Explorer window is stretched across her screen, “to meet everyone. If a chapter is unwilling to actively involve itself in the campus community, and is unwilling to take that first step and ask for guidance from Greek Affairs…” She holds up her hands again. “If that is the case, as it is with Nu Kappa Epsilon, we can only do so much.”

  I’ve been to five states in three weeks, sleeping on couches. She has them all at her doorstep, and she knows them only by Excel spreadsheets? I rub my eyes, and my head pounds harder. Her neck is so thin, the size of my wrist but covered in loose flesh.

  “I can tell you this,” she says. “We need to get this situation—this party—worked out as quickly as possible. Illinois does not need an incident to start its semester.”

  “I agree,” I say. “Definitely. We need to do something.”

  “We need to get this squashed. These parties are the trappings of a bygone era. This is not acceptable in the Here and Now. We need to get this taken care of, this situation.”

  “Oh, I agree,” I say. The trappings.

  “Then call me in the morning. I look forward to an update. Good luck, Mr. Washington.”

  “Wait, that’s it?” But she motions for me to stand and so I do, force my hands in my pockets, stop myself from telling Dr. Jacobs that she’s got too much skin for her skeleton, that she needs to leave her office and walk her ass to the NKE house and see how well her theories hold up. I say nothing. Because of all things in my life, I do have control of this party tonight; I can stop it with or without her; I can change the culture. This is it. Illinois. I am a leader.

  *

  After I leave Turner Hall, I meet up with three alumni at a pizzeria called Garcia’s, where one has assured me over the phone that we will find “dee-lish deep dish.” But there’s a problem with how he speaks, how jovial he sounds. “There are real concerns here, and we’ve got to intervene,” I say when we sit down together around a pizza that takes up most of the table…my head pounds, and I drink Diet Coke after Diet Coke instead of devouring the pizza as the three alumni do. I look for fear on their faces, for anger or hope, but these guys—all thirty-somethings in town for the first time in years—talk as if they haven’t thought about the fraternity since college. They’re more focused on Garcia’s, on Champaign-Urbana, on the university, than they are on the party later in the night that could forever alter their fraternity.

  “Illinois has a chance to go deep in the tournament,” one of them—Ed Huggins—says.

  I try to refocus his comment, force the issue. “You’ll have nowhere to come back to if the chapter closes.”

  “I’ll be honest,” Huggins says. “This group is…” He lifts his hands in the air, shakes them around a little, closes his eyes and makes an I-just-swallowed-piss face. “They’re just…eh-hh? So-so. I walked around with them during Homecoming last year, and I was embarrassed. It’ll be good to close them down. Get rid of that rape reputation. Start from scratch.”

  “Closure isn’t a foregone conclusion,” I say. “We need to think about this chapter as if it’s still the brotherhood that you were a part of. Present-tense.”

  “It’s a different house,” Huggins says. “Different than when I went to school.”

  “You have to care,” I say. “Have to.”

  “Why? What can I do? They’re kids. Kids party.”

  “You don’t see what’s wrong with this? Flyers? Kegs? The liability?”

  “We’re losing a ton of money keeping that house open,” Huggins says. “I see what’s wrong with the Housing Corp’s bank account. If they have the party, you’ll shut ‘em down on the spot, right?”

  It becomes difficult to eat, to cut my deep-dish pizza into manageable pieces. Time is running out before the party, and I wasted my afternoon with Greek Affairs and my evening with alumni who have no intention of helping me. As I carry a bite of pizza to my mouth, a chunk of tomato and cheese slips from my fork and lands on my shirt.

  “Watch out, buddy!” Huggins says.

  *

  At some point in the evening, my mother called and left me a voicemail. After I spend fifteen minut
es in the bathroom dabbing the tomato splotch on my shirt, I check the message.

  “Charles,” she says. “You aren’t calling me back. We haven’t talked in weeks. You can’t still be upset? This is life, Charles. Don’t shut us out.” I delete the voicemail.

  *

  When I get back to the Nu Kappa Epsilon chapter house after dinner, all has gone late-summer dark, a color that warns of a coming cold.

  Perhaps a dozen fraternity brothers have gathered on the porch, two of whom stand cross-armed and wearing imposing black “Security” t-shirts, many others arranging fold-out tables into rows, blockades. On one of the tables is a tall cardboard box, inside of which appears to be a stack of neon orange “21 & Up” wrist bands, and beside the box rests a black Sharpie and several folders stuffed with printer paper. From somewhere inside the house comes a drummer’s thump, then a ba-dump, then a thump, ba-dump-a-dump-a-dump, then crashing cymbals, then a strum of guitar strings and microphone feedback and someone saying in a deep voice, “Check the levels, man, it’s fucking crazy distortion.” Nothing has changed; the party will still happen.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” I say, then louder so the brothers on the porch can hear me, “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me!” No one turns to look. Inside, someone is beat-boxing into the microphone, freestyle rapping.

  Our spiral-bound “Educational Consultant Resource Guide” says something about this, something about the recommended procedure for handling social events. Different than a run-of-the-mill investigation. Phone call to Headquarters? Or make every attempt to end party, then phone call to Headquarters? I remember every word of the “Code of Conduct,” Page 12, all of it, from “Model the behavior of the ideal Nu Kappa Epsilon brother, the Marathon Man,” to “Safeguard the National Fraternity’s good name,” to “No dating, drinking, drugs, or digital footprint.” I remember these, but I can’t picture the proper procedure for stopping this party, which page of the resource guide, how many bullet-points, in which order…where did I even leave the resource guide? I can only picture the hangers in the backseat swaying, clothes slipping off, scattered on my backseat. Explorer bumping, shooting downhill and I can’t stop it. Slipping, details, everything. I run my hand through my hair, across the stubble on my chin; my hand still shakes from the caffeine, so I stuff it in my pocket. And there in my pocket, I feel something rectangular with soft corners: the Fun Nazi business card again. At some point, I pulled it from my dashboard and dropped it in my pocket. I flip it over and over before me, staring first at the “Fun Nazi” side, then at the blank back.