by Nathan Holic
There is opportunity here in this moment. A weaker consultant would turn away. So I walk up the steps to the front porch, and I don’t know what I have in mind, but I need to do something. I am a leader, a role model.
In the far corner of the porch, beyond the tables and the scurrying brothers, I spot a shiny row of kegs, maybe fifteen in all, grouped together as though just delivered, silver surfaces glistening with condensation. One of the fraternity brothers stands behind them, the handles of a rolling dolly in his grip, and he’s looking at all of the kegs with an expression that says, “where do I start?” Someone else points to the door, says, “We need to get five of them into the freezer downstairs. The rest, you can take into the library and the backyard and start icing.”
“We need one of them up front,” someone says. “For the guys working the table.”
“A full keg up front?”
“Why not?”
I walk up the stairs and one of the brothers says to me, “Party’s not until 10, bro.” He tears open a bag of ice, dumps it into one of the half-trash-cans.
“I need to speak with Adam,” I say.
“Oh,” the brother says, voice dropping. “You’re that guy, aren’t you?”
And these guys are bigger than I thought they’d be. Bigger than Adam, bigger than me. Thick, defined torsos under Abercrombie polos. Sleeves barely covering their biceps. I don’t know why, but perhaps because this is a dying fraternity chapter, I expected them to be smaller. Maybe they’d all be pale suburban kids with freckles and flabby stomachs. Five-six, five-seven. Scared. Insecure. Easy for me to handle. But these guys are tall, built, GNC regulars, the type who wouldn’t be caught dead using Cybex machines, only free weights.
“Yes. That guy,” I say. “That’s who I am.”
“He’s in there somewhere. Just hold your breath in the foyer. They just spray-painted the visqueene.”
“Right,” I say, but they aren’t even paying attention to me anymore.
I stand tall, walk past them and into the house, into a club-dark room where the walls are now covered in black sheeting, and the sheeting is gang-style graffitied with glow-in-the-dark words—“NIKE, BITCHES!” and “Cum on over, baby, Cum on over” and “Make your mom happy, Sleep with a NKE”—and neon pink renderings of the Nike swoosh and slippery red Rolling-Stones-style tongues and it’s all glowing under this flickering black light, all around me, and a DJ booth occupies one distant corner like a wasp’s nest, some guy in all-black—black sunglasses, black headphones—sorting with flickering insect-fingers through a crate of records, and the black light reveals lint clinging to my pants and detergent stains across the front of my dress shirt, and the tomato stain from the pizzeria seems to stand out even brighter, and someone has spray-painted “YOUR MOM!” in electric yellow and I stumble a moment—all around me—and find the stairwell and it’s dark, too, and I keep stumbling, trip down some stairs and then I’m opening a door and I’m walking into some other room, and it’s not the basement, it’s another open room and I haven’t been here before, and the band—four guys in grungy indie-rock clothing, torn jeans and vintage Spaghetti-O’s T-shirts—is tuning its instruments and they all see me enter the room and they look at me and the lead singer says, into the microphone, “You need something, bro?” A wave of feedback pierces the room and I shake my head and I see a doorway to the backyard and I lurch past the band and outside.
Out here, out where the sky is darkening, the air should be fresh but instead smells like cigarettes. I spot Adam, wearing a pair of jeans so destructed that I can see the insides of his pockets poking out at his thighs; his hair is even spikier now, his polo replaced by a tight black graphic tee. The sort of shirt Ultimate Fighting fans wear. He stands here in the backyard, supervising two guys as they hammer stakes into the ground, wrap orange construction-site netting from stake to stake and create a compound out of the yard to perhaps give the impression that they are keeping people from entering the party from the back.
This is it. This party is minutes from becoming a reality.
“Don’t, please don’t,” I tell Adam.
“The fuck do you care?” he asks, and the words sound so different. Voice edgy and unsympathetic. This isn’t the same Adam.
“You didn’t get the Executive Board together?” I ask. “You didn’t get this sorted out?”
“Over there, over there,” Adam says to one of the brothers, who carries a dirty cinderblock. “We got it sorted out, sure. And it’s looking pretty good.”
“You never had any intentions of canceling this party, did you?”
Adam reaches into a cooler, picks out an ice cube, clenches it in his closed fist until water seeps out from between his fingers. In his other hand, he holds a full bottle of Goose Island 312. Fifteen kegs, and this kid’s bought his own craft-brew six-pack.
Guitar strings from inside the house. Then: “Check, one, two.”
“All this time,” I say. “I go to your Greek Advisor, to your alumni, try to work through this. All this time, it doesn’t matter. You weren’t going to cancel this party.”
“Yo, yo,” someone says over the microphone inside, and it blasts out of the speakers, static-saturated. He sings: “Summer-tii-iiime, and the livin’s easy.”
“You could get arrested,” I say. “What if someone dies this time? Not just alcohol poisoning. What if some freshman chugs a bottle of vodka and falls face-first into the toilet?”
“Won’t happen,” he says.
“You don’t know all of the things that could go wrong at an open party. And you’re responsible, Adam. You. The chapter president. The national fraternity would get sued into oblivion, but you’re the president and you’re responsible for the party: you’d get thrown in jail.”
He shakes his head. “You have to take chances.”
“Chances. What are you talking about? You’re such a smart guy.”
“Yes. Yes, I am.”
I start to say something, a sound.
“Right now, I’m at home,” Adam says. “I’m at my fraternity house. Don’t you realize that? You people at Nationals keep talking about risk management and circles of danger, all this bullshit. But don’t you realize that this is fucking college?”
“It’s college, but there are real consequences for your actions.”
“It’s college, and everybody parties,” he says. “That’s what I meant.”
“You said you’d make an effort to stop this.”
“I never said that. You said that.”
“I just…what are you hoping to accomplish, Adam? Come on.”
“A party. A good party. What does it look like?
“You could lose your house over this, even if nothing goes wrong,” I say. Straining, not sure if I believe that. Head pounding. “Headquarters could shut you down.”
He shrugs. “You make the rules, not me.”
Microphone feedback inside.
“Let’s go somewhere to talk about this,” I say. “Somewhere else.”
“Talk about what?”
“Talk about how to work through this.”
“Not interested in that conversation,” he says. “We’re not canceling the party.”
“Just tell me,” I say, fingers at my temples, “what you’re hoping to get out of this. You could get evicted, thrown in jail. What’s the risk/ reward?”
“You went through Rush. Shit, look at you. You only graduated four, five months ago? Without a Rush party, you might as well order pizza and play chess and jerk one another off. This is how it’s done. You know. I know you know.”
“We’ve got specific rules, though,” I say.
He tilts his Goose Island back, chugs, wipes his lips with the back of his hand.
“Fuck your rules,” he says.
“Fuck my rules?”
“Fuck your rules. This house has been absolutely pathetic for the past two years. Who visits the rapist house, huh? What have your rules gotten us? More pledges? More girls? You kic
ked out half our house and left us for dead. This is it for us. I don’t want to go through all of college paying the price for what some girl said before I was even a brother. This party will keep the house alive, change things.”
“Fuck my rules?”
“This is it. For us, this is it.”
“I don’t…” I say, shaking, and I swear it’s cold outside now.
Slipping, everything, because I’m thinking about Wasted on the Water, our annual party at EU. Had we been confronted just minutes before the party started (hell, even days or weeks before) and told to pack up, dump out the booze, go to sleep, we would have revolted. It was our social event, our chance to unwind and play drunk volleyball and sit in hot tubs with beautiful girls and enjoy our own youthful recklessness…no one could take it away from us.
“Nationals has been trying to shut us down for the last two years, anyway,” he says. “We’re a poor investment on a great campus, they say. We’re dead, one way or the other. Have the party, we get shut down. Don’t have the party, we have a shitty Rush and don’t fill the house and we get shut down. If this house is going to get shut down no matter what, we might as well go crazy, right? We might as well have one good night as a fraternity.”
Microphone feedback.
“You’re not right,” I say.
“Then tell me what’s right.”
“This is about more than you, Adam. This is about me, too.”
“Unless your house is a hundred grand in debt, I doubt that,” he says, tosses his empty beer bottle onto the ground and turns his back on me. “But stick around if you want. You look like you need to unwind. Still have the room upstairs cleared out for you. Air mattress and everything.”
*
Minutes later, after stumbling back through the dark house, feedback pounding everywhere, I sit behind the wheel of my Explorer in the NKE house parking lot and I dial LaFaber at his home number. My tie is tight, and I grab and claw at it, making it looser and looser until my entire neck and collar look vampire-mangled.
A group of girls—all of them wearing second-skin white pants and bright tube tops that keep slipping down their breasts, and they keep pulling the tops back up, slipping down, pulling up, over and over—walk to the front door of the NKE house, and one of the brothers hands them wrist bands and plastic cups, and the girls giggle and walk inside, all bouncing tits and airbrushed asses and this is it, then. It’s started. LaFaber will tell me to be resourceful, no doubt, that this is the challenge that consultants live for, that I should cut the power or block the front door or who knows what?, but this is impossible; this is like trying to witness to a non-believer while he’s black-out drunk.
As soon as LaFaber answers his phone, I spill the story of my entire day without pausing for breath. “Charles,” he responds. “It’s past 10 PM. Where are you right now?”
“In their parking lot,” I say. “And shit! Another group of girls just walked in. The party is starting. It’s starting!”
“Charles. You’re still at the house?”
“I should go back inside, try to stop it—”
“You need to get out of there. If they are determined to have this party, we cannot have you at that house.”
“What do you mean? Where do I go?
“It would be bad news if anything happened at that party, and a national consultant was present. Bad news. You need to get out of there. Get a hotel.”
“What, like lawsuits? Like I’d be involved?”
“We don’t want it to come to that. You need to get out of there. Get a hotel.”
“Where? I don’t—”
“Wherever,” he says and yawns audibly. “Be resourceful.”
A hotel? Past 10 PM? “I don’t have an internet connection to look…” I start. Ordinarily, I’m only allowed to book hotels on Saturday nights, but now suddenly…“I don’t know where the hotels are. I don’t know where anything is. I just got here this afternoon!”
“We didn’t even have internet when I was a consultant,” LaFaber says. “Be resourceful.”
“I just…fuck.”
“Charles.”
“Damn it. I’m stuck here. What do you want—”
“Charles,” he says. “Hold yourself together. This is not the time to implode.”
“Not the…what?”
“Get a hotel,” he says. And usually, I imagine LaFaber at the window of his office, parting his blinds with his fingers and leaning close to the glass, staring out across the country, over thousands of miles of cornfields and highways and high-rises, seeing me and keeping me in line with his serious eyes. Now, though, I imagine him in the bedroom of his condo, sitting at the edge of his bed, eyes like slits, eager to hang up and go back to sleep. “Relax for the rest of the night,” he says. “Get some sleep. You’re no use to anyone if you’re…wound up. I signed the paperwork this evening that effectively closed the Illinois chapter.”
“This evening?”
“This evening,” he says. “They’re finished.”
“Then why am I still here? Why did I spend all day trying to stop this? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Standard operating procedure, Charles,” he says. “You know all about this, I trust. We immediately suspend a chapter whenever we hear of major risk management issues, just to cover our bases. That happened yesterday. Pending investigation, our suspension process allows us to close a chapter within twenty-four hours of the initial suspension, which we did. Strictly a paperwork closure to limit our liability, should there be trouble tonight. It puts the responsibility for any…damages…onto the chapter, and relieves us as much as possible. We can always reinstate Illinois, but from the looks of the situation, what’s worth saving? Depending on what happens in that house tonight, we might’ve just dodged a bullet.”
“They’re still having the party,” I say. “We didn’t dodge anything.”
“They’re no longer part of our fraternity, though. Not anymore.”
“What does that mean?”
“They can do whatever they want,” LaFaber says. “They aren’t part of the National Fraternity anymore. We’ve cut them loose.”
“This seems so quick. Too easy.”
“Listen, Charles,” LaFaber says. “It’s Illinois. A big university. We uphold our values, close the chapter, then re-organize later. Standard.”
Standard. And I’m thinking of my goals, of the “Healthy Eating” section of my goals. No fried food. No KFC or Hardees. No breakfast buffets. No danishes or cinnamon buns or Krispy Kremes. No elephant ears. So many ways I could get fat, waste money, so many ways. No beer, I wrote in those goals. No hamburgers and no French fries. No milkshakes and no ice cream. No pork rinds or onion rings. Standard, I’m thinking, but look at me, I’m already softer and pudgier. I never had control of this chapter, could never change anything even if I operated flawlessly; they’ve been closed all day and I didn’t even know it.
“I have to go,” I say. “I have to find somewhere to sleep.”
“Great,” LaFaber says. “Just get away from that house. Get out of that city, even. Hotels are out by the interstate. The second they find out they’ve been closed, you don’t want to be around. Nothing you can say or do will make things right for them.”
*
By the time I find a hotel, check in, unpack, and flop into bed, it’s past 11 PM. My head is pounding so hard and with such steady rhythm that I find myself taking deep methodical breaths as if I’m jogging. Pounding so hard that my head actually feels like it’s shaking. Deep breaths.
I tug my heavy-weight suitcase to the far end of the room, drop it onto the floor, pop the top and swing it open. The opened suitcase looks like some dissected creature from a high school biology lab, a cut-open cross-section of my life, but it looks different than usual, disheveled and scattered. This is a creature dissected by the classroom rebel, and he’s stabbed everything with his scalpel, and I don’t know what’s dirty, what’s clean; my boxers are bunched up, wedged betw
een mismatched socks and crumpled shirts, my bottle of vitamins opened and spilled out.
The room is hot. I’m tired, but I want to move. I’m suffocating.
I step outside the hotel, unlock my Explorer, open the center console. On the left side, I keep a package of black pens, a stack of notecards, and a flashlight. Each of these supports the next, fits so snug that removing anything would cause the infrastructure to collapse like a burning house. On the right side of the console, I keep the bound Sacred Laws of Nu Kappa Epsilon, and, under a pair of gloves, a flask filled with Jack Daniels left over from the Senior Send-Off. For an emergency. I remove the flask, lock the car, re-enter my hellishly hot room.
I drink from the flask until my headache subsides, and I’m thinking that I could walk back down to the front desk, talk to the cute girl at the counter in the red Ramada polo and khaki pants, maybe get her number, invite her to the NKE party, why not?, but I can barely remember what she looks like, and I finish the flask and I’m calling Jenn, leaving her a message, and I’m not even sure what I’m saying, but it has something to do with how I need her to be there for me and where is she and when I look at the clock, I see that it’s midnight, and I’m thinking, where am I going tomorrow?, thinking one stack clean shirts, plastic bottle of vitamins, one stack clean boxer shorts, thinking tube tops and tight white pants, and I flop onto the bed, and I’m tired and my head is pounding again.
*
Internet access at the hotel runs $15 a day, and even though it’s the middle of the night and I’ll be gone in just a few hours, I open my laptop and enter my credit card and head straight to the Facebook home page.