by Nathan Holic
“What makes it so awesome?” I ask.
“We get them together, our pledges, and they’re all dressed up in shirt and tie and everything,” Sam says, “and we invite a sorority to come over as their dates—”
“A sorority?” I ask.
“Right. They, um…they come to the house…”
And now he’s gripping the bill of his baseball cap, wondering if he’s said too much.
Etiquette Dinner, I think, still turning the words over in my head, and attempting through a waning state of inebriation to process images of the night. Sorority girls. The bodies in their tight white pants waiting to enter the front door of the fraternity house. When I close my eyes, though, I see only numbers and spreadsheets and then the Code of Conduct and “three times/weekly” and “No Dating, Drinking, Drugs, or Digital Footprints” and “NEVER,” and I rub my eyes, smooth my pants, try to make it all go away.
“This sounds like fun,” I say. “I think I want to do this.”
“You want to…” Sam says. “You want to watch?
“I want to do this.”
“You want to participate?”
“Definitely.”
“Well. Like. This is for our pledges?”
“Etiquette dinner,” I say again. “This sounds fun. So what’s the deal? When’s it start?”
“You really want to do it?” Sam asks, voice sinking. “No joking?”
“Of course, of course.”
“Hmm,” Sam says. “‘Kay. Well. Guess we can...” He looks to Jose.
“It is…”
“There’s a few…”
“…a detail that needs…”
“…but, shit…”
“I did not think that…”
“I hope this isn’t going to be a problem,” I say. “I don’t want my visit to be too serious. I can get serious, if you prefer?”
“No. Of course. We change things,” Jose says. “This will work.”
“All right,” Sam says, not visibly upset, not displaying the look of a man in the heat of competition whose best-laid plans have been spoiled, just continuing to run his fingers over the bill of his hat, staring at the ceiling of the car in strong contemplation, morphing from Man With the World’s Greatest Event to Man Who Must Fix Now-Flawed Event.
“I’ve never done anything like this during a chapter visit,” I say. “Usually it’s just meetings. I like to have fun, though. Really. I’m a consultant, but I’m still your age. Still young.”
“I guess you are,” Sam says.
*
At Jose’s off-campus apartment, I drag my bags to his living room and then scarf a bag of his potato chips and watch the USC game while he’s in the shower and, mostly sober now, I open my suitcase and stare at the inside, at the shirts, the socks, the shoes, the belts, the toiletry bag. Just as when I stared into it at a hotel in Illinois, nothing is where it should be. And after a careful inspection, I realize that—yes—I definitely left my goal sheets behind in my Explorer. They’re nowhere to be found. And I’m thinking that these black shoes in this corner of the suitcase could be easily moved a couple inches, and this stack of undershirts could be easily straightened, this bottle of vitamins lifted, shifted to a better location.
But I grab only what I need from the suitcase, from my garment bag, shut both of them and try—eyes closed, straining—not to think about how I will organize them later.
Before I shower, I check my cell phone’s voicemail and discover that Jenn has left three more messages since this afternoon. The first message is confused, cryptic, sounds like she called for a reason and then forgot (“I, uh…listen, I called Charles, because…I’ve had these weird feelings lately”), and it’s all rambling build-up with no payoff. The second message is more focused, but still Jenn doesn’t seem to say much; she tells me that she wants to make plans now; am I getting a hotel room, because I know I can’t stay at the sorority house, right? And what was I thinking about for Thanksgiving? I get the whole week off, right? She’ll call my parents, is that okay? This second message is all questions, a feeling-out, but underneath I hear a tremble of emotion that finally surfaces in the third message: “Charles,” she says, no accompanying happy high tone in her voice to counter the upset low, “we need to talk. Really. Where are you? Things are not good, Charles. Where are you?” She sounds drunk. Bravery fueled by alcohol. The middle of the afternoon and a gameday six-pack helped her to find the words that she hasn’t been able to speak in the last month.
“Where am I?” I ask. “Where am I?”
I call her back, not even willing to stifle the rising anger because I want it to match—no, exceed—that sharpness I sensed in her messages. Where am I? Things are not good? I’m working. Out in New Mexico. Working while she’s drinking.
“I was in an airplane, Jenn,” I say as soon as she answers. “I was in the air.”
“What are you…” she starts, then switches to, “Charles, why are you yelling?”
“Why am I yelling? I’m not yelling.”
“You’re shouting.”
“I was in an airplane, Jenn,” I say again. “That’s where I was.”
“Okay? What are you talking about?”
“You kept asking where I was. In your messages. I was in an airplane.”
“All you had to do was tell me—”
“I’m trying to tell you.”
“All you had to do was tell me what you were talking about. You just call me and start saying these random things. How am I supposed to know what you’re talking about?”
“Why leave the message, then?” I ask. “Why leave a message like that if you don’t want an answer?”
“How…” she says. “What’s going on here?”
“I’m answering your question, that’s what’s going on.”
“You’re yelling again.”
“I’m not.”
“You’re yelling. And you make no sense.”
“I make sense, Jenn. You’re the one...”
“You call me and you start yelling?”
“I was calling you back because you—”
“I got emotional today,” she says. “What do you expect? The way you’ve been talking to me? Texting me? You told me you’d call me, and I didn’t know you were flying all day.”
“I told you this morning.”
“No,” she says. “I knew you were flying, but not all day.”
“You were preoccupied. You didn’t care.”
“Charles,” she says. “Please. I’m preoccupied?”
“You’re always preoccupied.”
“I texted you, like, ten times today. Did you check your texts, or did you forget to even turn your phone on when you landed? This fraternity has become your life.”
“You’re preoccupied,” I say again. “You’ve got your socials. You were at a football game all day, weren’t you? Tailgating? What do you need a phone relationship for? You’re just doing me a favor by staying with me. Humoring me. Don’t do me favors.”
“Charles. You misunderstood me.”
“Were you at the tailgates today? With another fraternity, right?”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“You were.”
“Fine. So what?”
So what? And a list of answers occurs to me. So what? So you were in those grassy parking lots outside the stadium, standing beside beer troughs and flirting with other guys for free cans of Bud Lite. So you put your hand on some frat guy’s bicep and asked him to help you up onto his tailgate. So you asked another guy, bigger, drunker, to hold your legs while you climbed up onto a keg and did a keg stand. He held your legs and you were wearing a jean skirt probably, and he helped you down and with a towel wiped off the beer from your wet t-shirt. So it sounds good when you say you care about “doing the right thing,” when you tell someone their plans are “noble,” but all you’re really thinking is that it’s cute and charming…for now.
“I don’t need this, you know?
” I say.
“Don’t need what?” she asks.
“This. You, on the fence like this. I want a girlfriend who’s either with me or is not.”
She sighs. “What do you want me to say, Charles? I was emotional today. I missed you, is that what you want to hear? I was sad, then I was angry, then I was just drunk and everything kind of boiled. I don’t know what else to say. I said too much already.”
“Well, then. It’s all settled. Life’s perfect.”
“Don’t be an asshole.”
“I’ve got to get a shower,” I say. “Work never ends around here. 24/7, you know? It’s my life, like you said. So I’ll have to talk to you tomorrow.”
She protests a bit, tells me that I should call her again tonight, but there’s no point in that. I don’t want to pencil in another goal for the evening—“Call Jenn/ 9:00 PM,” or “Devise strategy for reconciliation/ 10:00 PM”—while she enjoys her night. No, instead I hang up my clothes on the towel rack in Jose’s bathroom, and I shave, and I arrange my hair gel and my comb and my toothbrush along a clean countertop, and I step under the showerhead and hot water hits me and I watch the layers of desert grime on my skin come loose and wash away.
*
Afterward I’m driven to the NKE chapter house, which is located in a neighborhood directly across the street from the university. Out in the paved parking lot of the house, Sam tells me, “Just wait outside here with the pledges while we finish getting set up inside, ‘kay? We’ll be back in a second.”
The fraternity house is sand-colored, would probably blend into the dusty landscape in the daytime, but now darkness is taking control of the evening, the wide-open sky deepening to navy and the moon growing crisp, high-definition white clarity. It’s mid-September and the sun is starting to set sooner.
Surrounding me in the parking lot are the fifteen pledges for this chapter’s new member class. Rush concluded two weeks ago, Sam said, so the world of fraternity life is still new to these kids; they’re living the denouement of Rush Season, the final still-clueless days before the definition of “fraternity” balloons to include a national organization with 120 chapters and Educational Consultants and a hundred-year history stretching back to a place called Carolina Baptist: they are living the days when “fraternity” is a happy ending to a tumultuous first few weeks of college, when “fraternity” is a cozy college family and “family” never needs to mean more than family.
Among these fifteen freshman students, I alone wear a full suit and tie, just unpacked from my garment bag. The others wear a mix-and-match, borrowed-from-here-and-there, whatever-I-could-get-my-hands-on ensemble; they wear awkward-sized dress shirts with ties poorly tied, torn cargo khakis, scuffed and dusty dress shoes. Impoverished backgrounds, Jose said: for some of these kids, 17- and 18-year-olds, this might be the first time they’ve ever had to wear a tie. But we are all together, fifteen freshman men and a single college graduate, waiting outside the house for the new pledge sisters of Alpha Alpha Sorority to arrive.
I consider introducing myself as the Consultant, listing off my job responsibilities and speaking of the national mission, modeling the correct social behaviors of the Marathon Man.
“—this fucking girl, Maria,” one of these kids says, “body like it was built for fucking.”
Uproarious laughter from the rest of the pledges. A group of young men whose experience with sex largely consists of a few hectic afternoons at their girlfriend’s homes back in high school, trying to slap on a condom and find the right spot and grope without seeming like they’d never seen a naked female before, trying not to come too quickly but at the same time trying to finish before her parents came home from work, and oh shit, I put the condom on wrong and it pinches, it pinches, oh my God! But they’re laughing over there at the sex-talk, the whole group of freshmen.
Except one. Because he’s wandered over to me, has a cigarette in hand. Spiky black hair that shoots in every direction, wearing a violent red shirt with black pants. Looks like he wants to join the cast of Jersey Shore, but he’s too short, too tiny, has no muscle mass on his frame.
“Got a light?” he asks, lifting his chin in a “‘sup” motion, brandishing the cigarette.
“No lighter,” I say. “Sorry.”
“Have I met you?” He lifts his chin higher, squints hard.
I open my mouth to answer, then stop.
This early in the semester, all the pledges are still learning one another’s names. They’re all strangers. So I could introduce myself as the Consultant, the Fun Nazi, but I have a choice.
Blank white space. Possibility.
“Yeah,” I say. “You’ve met me. I’m Charles.”
“I don’t remember you.” His squint has gone suspicious, the unlit cigarette now dangling from his mouth. Solid spikes of hair under the fading light looking somehow more solid and dangerous than hair should, as if they are not simply a glued-together collection of strands but rubber or hard plastic to the core. “You don’t look familiar.”
“I’ve been busy. With classes.”
“You look nice. Nice suit.” He takes the cigarette from his mouth, stares me up and down, motioning with his hand to let me know that he’s taking in the visual of my professional-wear, that he sees the crease in my pants, the straight collar points of my shirt.
“Thanks.”
“You look a little old to be a pledge. How old are you?”
“Ouch. I look old?”
“How old are you?”
“Freshman,” I say. “But I took a couple years off after high school.”
He sucks on his cigarette, then realizes it’s still unlit. “True,” he says. “True.”
And then he’s off, asking someone else for a light, is successful in his request, but still stands nearby as if keeping an eye on me, all the while smoking his cigarette with forced displays of adulthood, taking long and dramatic drags to bluff the world into thinking he’s an old pro.
Nearby, another pledge has a plastic flask tucked into his sock, takes quick sips while no one looks.
“—so drunk that I passed out under the coffee table!” another shouts.
More of the uproarious laughter.
“Fuck that shit, bitch!”
Laughter, and I try to smile.
*
Sometime after 8:30, after thirty minutes of waiting in the growing darkness of the September evening, after all the pledges have let their shoulders slump and have gone from stories of raucous drunken debauchery to muffled complaints about “when this shit’s going to start,” five modest sedans—pink lays hanging from rearview mirrors, Alpha Alpha bumper-stickers on back windows—pull into the gravel driveway. The pledges organize themselves into an excited clump, like paparazzi on the red carpet at a premiere, in anticipation for the arrival of the females who will be forced to listen and talk with them for the duration of this event. This Etiquette Dinner, while supposedly “educational,” doubles as a fraternity-sorority “mixer,” a blind date between fifteen guys and fifteen girls.
I stand behind the Pledge Clump, shoulders hunched, trying to stay inconspicuous.
The car doors open, so many at once that it just sounds like microwave popcorn—tump tump tump tump tump tump—and the sorority girls step out of the cars and form a single-file line behind an older, assertive brunette.
“All right,” one of the pledges says softly. “This is it, boys.”
“I get the one in the red,” says another.
The NKE pledges whistle with delight as they check the sorority girls out. Like the young men, these freshman girls are also dressed with uncertainty of purpose, unsure if they’re going out to a club or going to an internship: they remind me of Paris Hilton from The Simple Life, wearing Gucci as she corrals a group of pigs on the farm. Some girls wear brilliant knee-length red skirts with black halter-tops, and others wear tan or black pants so tight I could see their goosebumps poke out if the temperature dropped ten degrees. The clothes glimmer with
newness, perhaps purchased from the mall earlier today, acquired for this occasion just as the NKE pledges borrowed ties from roommates earlier today. They’re mostly Hispanic, the girls, just like all of the guys, and each moves with side-to-side hip sways copied from Beyonce or Rihanna videos, attempting to milk the motion for all the sexiness it’s worth.
Several girls wear shimmering silver or gold necklaces with gigantic cursive charms reading “Rachel” or “Tamara,” and twinkling hoop earrings and purses purchased from Clare’s or Rave or whatever celeb knock-off store is in the Las Cruces Mall. Items that were undoubtedly hip in high school, and that have yet to be phased from their wardrobes. It is a crowd of young people who have just crossed the borderlands into adulthood and who are still trying to imitate what they see in this new world. Some are good at it, but most are just obvious.
My suit is Ralph Lauren, silver-black (the salesman described this color and style as the new-new black, “a suit for men who know that there are just so many possibilities for black”), black fabric coursing with veins of silver, “a look that says both business and pleasure.” I spent most of my graduation gift money on this suit, but it’s an outfit I never intended for a New Mexico State pledge function. In fact, I’m the only one whose tie looks tight, confident.
A desert wind cuts through the parking lot, and we all get sand in our eyes.
For the second time today, I think: this is all a bad idea.
*
During my freshman year at EU, I was probably no different than any of these NMSU pledges, still learning how to act with social grace. Failing as often as I was succeeding. Waking up in my own puke, my father standing over me. That sort of thing.
In fact, there is perhaps no single year in any human lifetime where the gulf between What I Know and What I Want Everyone to Think I Know is as deep as it is for freshman men at American universities. You’ve never filed your own taxes, never worried about your own insurance, never even tried any beer besides Bud Lite, but you’ve officially hit legal adulthood, which you equate immediately with Manhood, capital M, so you think you should never admit any shortcomings.