by Nathan Holic
*
I wait to call Maria, wait until I’ve been asked—“you’re going to do it, right?”—and urged—“bro, she was all up on your D”—by every brother and pledge in our NMSU chapter, wait until I’m absolutely convinced that, if I do call her, the result will not shatter the illusion of “Charles Washington” that I’ve built. I wait all Sunday night. I wait through a two-hour-long chapter meeting on Monday (during which I earn a round of applause when Sam introduces me as the “Nationals Pimp,” and Jose says “Quiet, quiet. Okay, quiet. There is business to be done.”). I wait through three or four officer one-on-ones (during which the conversations quickly derail from Nu Kappa Epsilon policies and procedures to Iron Man and Lil Wayne and USC’s killer season). And I almost wait through Monday night, too, but I’m sitting in a Mexican restaurant called Green Chile with Sam and four other brothers—all native Mexicans, and they tell me why this is the best New Mexican (not Tex-Mex) restaurant in Las Cruces, and then they won’t let me continue waiting. Monday night, they’re assertive.
“Do you have her number right now?” asks a pudgy-cheeked kid with curly black hair and a blue Adidas shirt. His name, I think, is Andy, but I’ve been afraid to call him by name, just in case I’m wrong. The name might be Alejandro, and I don’t want to say the wrong thing and look culturally insensitive, as if I always hear “white names” no matter what you tell me.
“I saved it in my cell phone.”
“Listen, bro,” Andy (?) says. “You’re only here for two more days.”
“I’ll call her tomorrow.”
Andy (?) curses in Spanish, speaks an entire Spanish sentence. An entire paragraph. All night, when they haven’t been extolling the benefits of green chile salsa over tomato-based salsa (“New Mexico is green chile country, amigo,” they’ve said a thousand times) or bragging about their fathers’ gamecock training pens, they’ve been drifting into Spanish or Spanglish as though I’m fluent in either. “Como?” I keep asking, jokingly, and they laugh. “You’re from Florida,” Jose said to me last night. “How is it that you do not speak Spanish?”
“Give me the phone,” Andy (?) says.
“Why?” I grab a tortilla chip from the large black bowl in the center of our table. I’ve come to expect free appetizers at every restaurant, and I’m sure I’ll miss them when I’m back in New Jersey or Delaware.
“If you don’t call her, I will,” he says.
“I’ll do it. Just not now.”
But before I know what’s happening, Sam has me in a headlock, and the tortilla chip flings out of my hand and lands on the floor, and I make a desperate unngh noise, flail for a second, but Andy has my phone and he scrolls through the numbers and says, “This is what brothers are for, homeboy.” And then he says, “A-ha!” and his face lights up because he’s found Maria’s number in my phone and he’s hitting “dial” and until now, it’s been pure fantasy, just another in a long line of “things I want to do but never will,” but when Andy says, “Is this Maria? Oh. Oh, good, good,” the fantasy itself is just a fantasy, because Sam lets me loose and Andy says, “Charles lost your number, so we called you for him. Here he is.”
He hands me the phone.
Released from the headlock, I flop forward in my seat and take the phone hesitantly, hear Maria say “hello” and I clear my throat and speak. Five minutes later, I have plans to go out to Juarez on Tuesday night.
*
My schedule on Tuesday looks like this, but I only keep track of it because Jose prints a copy from his computer:
9 AM -Wake up
10 AM - One-on-One with Alumni Relations
12:30 PM - Lunch with Vice President (Rancho’s all-you-can-eat)
4:00 PM - One-on-One with Greek Advisor
6:00 PM - Dinner (Taco Bar)
8:00 PM - Juarez
I spend the day at a second-hand boardroom table in the fraternity house chapter room, scrolling through ESPN.com. Sometime in the afternoon, though, I receive a phone call from Walter LaFaber. Very rarely does LaFaber call me outside of our scheduled “one-on-one” phone conferences. Just for emergencies. But I answer the phone and muster a super-excited Disney World voice. “Hey Walter!” I say.
“Great news about Illinois!” LaFaber exclaims.
“Oh yeah?”
“They’ve been completely evicted from the house. Completely removed!”
“What?”
“The house is empty! They’ve been removed!”
And just like that, my voice is deflated. “Holy shit. It’s been how long? Three days?”
“They were issued eviction notices on Friday morning,” LaFaber says.
“The chapter has only been closed for a weekend,” I say. “That seems too quick to pack up and find a new place to live.”
“They knew it was coming,” LaFaber says. “It was in their lease. They were warned.”
“But still.”
“And the house is absolutely destroyed, too!”
“You sound happy. Why is this good news?”
“We can go after these punks, Charles,” he says. “Do you realize how much history is in that Illinois house? Since 1921, that chapter has stood for the ideals of our organization. On the final walk-through this morning, the Housing Corporation found severe structural damage to the support beams in the basement. Water damage in the top floor. Beer stains the size of watermelons. Dog fur. Dog fur! Urine stains. Missing doors. Cracked windows. The charter is missing, too: that’s an irreplaceable artifact. The list goes on and on. We can go after them. We have the last laugh with these clowns.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I say. “They couldn’t possibly have done all of that. That house has been in continuous occupancy for decades.”
“They signed leases. If they didn’t create the damages, they should have reported them when they first moved in.”
“Structural damage, Walter? That takes years. That’s not a one-night party.”
“Calm down, we won’t sue them for everything,” he says, and I can picture him in his office, a thick manila folder before him, complete with grainy black-and-white photos of damages, complete with spreadsheets and checklists and signed and verified documents. All the things I could have sent him as I investigated Shippensburg. I can picture his face, thick Alabama football player cheeks pulling back in uncontainable smiles, rich hair shaking as he laughs and twirls in his chair and attempts to stay professional despite his victory over the Illinois undergraduates. Scar on his forehead glowing as it does when he gets excited. “We have the sort of list that can make a statement,” he says. “A reminder that we are a leadership organization, not a drinking club, and we hold our members accountable. We dodged a bullet with Illinois.”
“Those kids. Where are they living, now?”
“Not our problem,” he says.
I’ve collapsed in my chair. “This doesn’t seem right.”
“Remember the mission, Charles,” he says in a gravelly voice, and he’s back: LaFaber, the man who can stifle his emotion in a split-second and revert back to a walking and talking leadership book. “Our fraternity lives by a lofty set of standards. These men at Illinois, they did not live up to those standards. They violated every bullet-point of their lease. This is justice.”
And, yes, my mind is still an Educational Consultant manual when it needs to be. Job responsibilities, Page 4; Visit Expectations, Page 8; National Hierarchy and District Structure and Suggested Bylaws, and Page 1, black spirals touching the edge of the text:
“Listen,” LaFaber says. “I want to talk. We need to get caught up. I have a few concerns with those guys out at New Mexico State. But I’ve got an important conference call with some Illinois alumni, have to give them a timeline for our return to campus. Give me a call sometime tomorrow, could you?”
“Whatever you want,” I say. “Whatever you want.”
*
On our trip to Mexico, Sam drives. He jokes that he’s the “DD” for the big-shot fraternity consult
ant, and I give a dry chuckle and say, “No, no, I won’t drink more than a beer or two, I’m still working,” but as soon as Maria enters the car and I’m sitting with her in the cramped backseat while Shelley sits in the front with Sam, I tell her that—hey, check this out!—Sam has agreed to be our DD for the night, no worries, what a great fraternity brother and chapter officer, etc. Jose follows behind us, driving Brandon and two other Alpha Alpha sorority sisters, a convoy headed to Mexico. I’ve already had a beer, so when the Black Eyed Peas blast from the stereo, singing “Tonight’s gonna be a good night,” I sing along.
This is the same route that we took the other day when Jose first drove me into town from the airport in El Paso, a long drive across a wasteland of charred desert. Now, though, the sky is dark save for stars speckled across the blackness so brightly that I think, for the first time, I can actually see constellations, dots connecting in purposeful patterns. The world is so dark and unending, and out here in the desert, with only an occasional blinking light, a radio antennae, a car on some distant road …aside from these things, aside from the highway itself, there are no distractions. No office buildings. No billboards. No development. No Blazers. Just…space. And Maria beside me in the backseat, smelling like raspberries and wine and sex.
Sam pops in a hip-hop mix CD, and now Nelly is singing, “It’s getting hot in here, so take off all your clothes,” and the girls are singing along, and it’s just a song but the way they move I know they want us to imagine: clothes off, sweat rolling down bodies, skin, heat.
Just thirty or forty minutes ago, Sam and I stopped into Hanson Hall, a co-ed dorm, and walked through the hallways with the sort of self-assurance born of several years of Frat Stardom. Look at us, our stride said. Destructed jeans. Crisp button-downs, sleeves folded up halfway to our elbows, top two buttons unbuttoned. Faded brown belts. Flip-flops. (For me, an ensemble made possible by an afternoon trip to the mall, my packed clothes still office-building awful). Sam made stupid jokes about the male freshmen we passed in the hallways, cocky laughs at their expense because they still wore high school graduation t-shirts. The same sort of jokes he made at the Etiquette Dinner, but now I have no trouble joining. And we met Maria and Shelley on the third floor, where they stepped out of a room so pink and purple it hurt the eyes.
“Do you drink tequila?” Maria asks, here in the backseat.
“Shots?” I ask. “Or, like, do I sip it like a drink?”
She laughs, glitter on her face sparkling. “Shots.”
“I try not to. Tequila is bad news.”
“Oh, no. Tequila makes good memories.”
“Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
“What the hell,” I say. “This is Juarez, right? First time in Mexico for me. It’d be an offense to not drink tequila.”
I meet Sam’s eyes in the rearview mirror. “Tequila?” he says. “Careful.”
I shrug. It’s hard to argue when a night takes on a life of its own.
We pull through the border check-point, then drive through a city that’s all lights and dust and dark alleys and surly congregations of homeless Mexicans on street corners beside flashy tourist-stop restaurants. I’ve never been to Mexico, but I have been on a cruise, and Juarez reminds me of the grimy-glitzy port cities of the Caribbean, those places like Nassau and Barbados whose subsistence depends on the constant loads of cruise-ship passengers, those places that are used and abused by American travelers who disembark and stay for a day and get trashed and then ship off. Yes, that is Juarez. A border city where, Sam tells me, impoverished Mexicans will create jobs where none are available. Some stand on corners and count the seconds until the next bus will arrive, or until the streetlight changes, and, for a nickel or a quarter, tell the time remaining to any interested passersby. When we park at a bar called “Dios Mia,” Sam hands a limping, unshaved Mexican a twenty and the man nods and stands on the sidewalk beside Sam’s car: Sam has just hired this man as a security guard for his vehicle.
The other car—Jose’s—has not yet arrived, but Sam assures me that this man has also agreed to protect Jose’s dusty Toyota Corolla.
“You’re not scared, are you?” Maria asks me. We walk behind Sam and Shelley, sexual energy pulling their bodies together, Maria walking close enough beside me that she continually brushes up against me, sometimes places her hand on my forearm as she did at the Etiquette Dinner, and her skin is so cool and smooth—almost slick—in comparison to the rock-hard, hairy hands I’ve shaken in the past month.
I think briefly of Jenn, of her hand leading me to the dance floor and the world going dark blue and so much possibility appearing in front of me, so I keep touching Maria, however subtly I can, and hope that she doesn’t object or recoil. A hand grazing her waist as we enter the bar, a palm on her upper arm after I laugh at one of her jokes. An arm around her shoulder as I say, “I’m really scared, but I think I’ll be all right as long as I have you for protection.”
“Right,” she says. “I’m so intimidating.”
“You can be, yes.”
“I look like one of these guys on the street corners?”
“No,” I say. “Intimidating in a different way. Like, when we were in the parking lot outside the Nike house, just before the Etiquette Dinner, I think all of the other pledges were scared to pair up with you.”
“Scared of me? Why?”
“Because you’re out of their league.”
“And you weren’t scared?”
“I was. But you were the only girl left. I had no choice.”
Dios Mia is a Mexican dive bar, but somehow it’s also a college bar. All the way out in Juarez. Servicing the students of NMSU and UTEP and the El Paso community colleges and probably many other Texas universities within an hour’s drive. A college bar. A typical college bar. Sweltering, packed with girls wearing short skirts and low-cut tops with thin straps, belly-buttons and lower-back tattoos showing; packed with guys wearing slogan t-shirts (“FBI: Female Body Inspector” and “College” and “Your Retarded” and “Let’s do the NO PANTS dance”) and torn jeans and baseball caps. Mike Jones playing so loud that you can only hear the pounding bass and an occasional hint of the chorus (Back then they din’t want me, now I’m hot they all on me)…not that it matters what’s playing…if you know the words, you gyrate and sing, and if you don’t know the words, you just gyrate. Typical college bar. Hundreds, hundreds of kids too young to drink legally in the states, chugging and yelling and dancing, plastic cups all filled with the same watered-down beer, this pattern broken only by an infrequent pink mixed-drink. Floors so sticky with spilled beer and liquor that you wonder if they’ve ever cleaned this place. The bar—a long wooden counter-top behind which two super-quick bartenders pour beers and splash alcohol into sugary cupfuls of punch or orange juice—is so busy that it looks like a mosh pit. Cramped, but that just means that Maria is pressed against me.
“Drinks are on me tonight,” I say to Maria and she looks at me again like she did at the Etiquette Dinner, like I’m some rare breed of New Mexico Man, one that actually buys a drink for a lady, and she touches me on the wrist and says, “Thank you,” and it doesn’t occur to me until after I order two Coronas (I flash a twenty, am immediately served by a bartender) and hand one of them to Maria and watch her drink half of it, that she is 18 and I am five years older than her, that I’ve seriously broken American laws by giving her this drink, that I’ve broken so many NKE policies (“No dating, no drinking!”), but it’s Tuesday night and we are alone, no fraternity brothers around to impress. Jose is gone, Brandon is gone.
I do spot Sam and Shelley out on the dance floor, grinding in the crowd, and there’s a strobe light flashing over the dance floor and then it stops and it’s a slower song now, a nasty song, “Freek-A-Leek,” the place now submerged in blacklight, Maria’s fingers on my belt, pulling me close, Maria saying something about dancing.
Dancing. Fuck. I’m an embarrassment. A white-boy embarrassment.
“If you insist,” she says.
Philadelphia to Illinois.
Illinois to Philadelphia. To New Mexico State. To El Sombrero. To Green Chile. To Juarez. To Dios Mia. To Corona. To Jose Cuervo. To Jose Cuervo. To Corona. To the dance floor, where Maria bends over in front of me, quickly, ass against my crotch, and then she stands and we’re front to front and her face is in my face and then she moves like Shakira, all hip shaking like she-wolves and hot sex, and then her face in my face, lips on my lips, tongue in my mouth and she bites my lower lip.
To the bar. To Corona.
To the dark corner of the bar, where we kiss more and my hands are at the small of her back, at the bare skin below the lowest length of her shirt and above the highest length of her tight black pants, and her hands on my traps and boom boom boom, this is it, right here, and she bites my lip again, tongue, skin, and this is it.
New Mexico State to Texas Tech. To…fuck it, wherever.
CHAPTER NINETEEN. …
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