by Nathan Holic
*
To Fresno State, and now I’ve arrived at a Bud Lite chapter.
Loosen up, loosen up, you don’t want to be the only guy in the house without a drink.
By day, I help the Fresno State brothers create and fine-tune their budget, help them fill out Delinquent Forms for members past due, help them research collections agencies for members who owe more than $500, help them research online dues-paying sites, OmegaFi. We update their decades-old chapter bylaws to comply with new university regulations on membership and housing, and I collect checks for National Headquarters dues and national insurance. “We just got more accomplished in, like, two days, than we had all year,” their president tells me, and I nod and tell him that I’m happy for him.
“Friend-request me,” he says. “Join our fraternity’s group page.”
“You have a Facebook page for the chapter?” I ask.
“It’s a forum. We post questions, updates, that sort of thing. I’m sure our officers will have, like, a thousand questions about the budget.”
“I’m not on Facebook anymore,” I say.
“Dude,” he says. “Get with the times. You don’t have internet or text messaging on your phone? You don’t have a profile? Even my mother is on Facebook.”
LaFaber’s speeches about digital footprints seem less dire now, articles in the Washington Post and New York Times chronicling Obama’s social media strategies, the first political candidate to fully embrace and absorb himself in Web 2.0. I’ve gone from a world where Facebook and MySpace are liabilities, dirty autobiographies to drag you down and ruin whatever future you might want to write for yourself…to a world where the technologies are Potential! Potential! Potential! “Yes we can!” speeches reprinted in their entirety atop photos from the civil rights era, photos of white and black hands clasped together, shared and re-shared and re-shared, 20-year-olds changing their profile pictures to the Obama “Hope” graphic. Friendships suddenly blossoming between kids and their corporations, all at the click of a “like” for MSNBC and FoxNews. Amazon.com and Microsoft and MTV and Kellogg’s, “liked” and friended and shared. It’s clear now: there is no way other than this.
“You don’t even have any mp3s on this shitty laptop,” the president says. “How do you survive?”
“Our Tech Director warned us,” I say. “He told us not to download anything, that they could track it when we got back to Headquarters.”
“You’re shitting me,” he says. He clicks a few buttons, weasels his way through my internet settings and my control panel. “Well, this laptop probably doesn’t have the memory for iTunes anyway. But I can change a few settings, download Kazaa for you. Then you can listen to songs on the Windows Media Player, at least.”
“I don’t know,” I say.
“Just delete the program before you give the computer back,” he says. “Transfer your songs by flashdrive or Ethernet cord or something. Simple, brother. A man without mp3s can hardly be called a man. Do you even have an iPod?”
“Come on,” I say. “You’re making me feel shittier by the second.”
That’s my day. But it’s a Bud Lite chapter, and so—by night—I travel with the brothers to a shack-in-the-woods bar called Jimbo’s on the fringes of Fresno, a musty-brown building at the end of a dark choppy road; it’s adorned with flickering Budweiser neon signs, spattered with caked mud kicked off the tires of pick-up trucks. To get here, I’ve stuffed myself into a car with six or seven other fraternity brothers, and we all tumble out and walk a quarter-mile gravel road from parking spot to bar. “This place is a dive,” one of the guys tells me, “but we’re all going to get ripped, ripped.” Jimbo’s looks built of driftwood, feels like we’re crawling inside a beaver dam: boards creak as we walk across a shaking front porch to show our IDs to a mullet-haired security guard. But inside, it’s packed with beer tubs and girls and bars and the guys all wear jeans, torn jeans, faded jeans, vintage Twinkies and Spam T’s and striped button-downs and “Trojans” caps and trucker hats, and it’s irony overload, the bar itself and the apparel, everyone looking like they just stepped off the set of The Real World, and I’m dressed just like them.
“That girl’s checking you out, bro,” one of the Fresno State chapter brothers tells me, yelling over the unlikely (but seemingly sincere) boyband/ gangsta rapper combo of Justin Timberlake and 50 Cent, as they sing about technology (“Hey-oh, I’m tired ‘a usin’ technology. Why don’t sit down on top of me?”). Words to live by.
“Checking me out?” I ask. “Introduce me.”
Here at Fresno State, the one-on-one meetings pop past so quickly that the days seem to turn to night in half the time. I ask the students to complete any/all reports for me because it’s just details, formalities. “I won’t make you do any workshops if you don’t want to,” I say, so we see a movie, go to the mall, go out to eat, tour the city. Sunday through Wednesday at Fresno State, and not a day passes that I don’t help a group of brothers rip open a box of Bud Lites and fill their recycling bin with empty aluminum cans, and then I fly to
*
To Cal State-Highland, and they are an Anchor Steam chapter, and it feels good to drink something distinctive. Like getting drunk is a cultural endeavor.
I mark reports with the same gusto that I reserve for filing taxes and completing credit card applications. I do no background checks or investigations, even when I know that alcohol infractions are rampant. I do not repeat that “The mission of Nu Kappa Epsilon is to build our members into the socially responsible citizens of tomorrow” because even when they listen to me, the message thuds in the members’ minds with the same empty phrase-to-remember cadence as the Pledge of Allegiance or the Lord’s Prayer…just words. I do not wear my silver-black Ralph Lauren suit and my Tommy tie into any more fraternity houses, and I do not recite the “Four D’s” or show the “Circles of Danger.” They drink Anchor Steam, and this is why I feel good as I drink with them: you can drink Bud Lite like water, ten Bud Lites out of a cooler at a football game, drink till you puke; but the better and more expensive the beer, the more you appreciate it, savor it. Quality alcohol—not afternoon-long workshops—has made these fraternity men into responsible drinkers. I recognize this. I tell them congratulations.
“We started our Awards Packet for Nationals,” the President says.
“Fuck it,” I say. “Do you want to be a paperwork chapter? Let’s get out of the house. Let’s do something. Fresh air, you know?”
Daily, I scroll past Jenn’s number in my cell phone and send text messages even though I’m past my limit and each will cost me more than I want to imagine.
Charles: Listen…really sorry about homecoming. U understand right?
Jenn: [No response]
Charles: Just saw a girl at the airport in a KD shirt.
Jenn: [No response]
Charles: Got a call from Edwin. Said he saw u at Hemhaws?
Jenn: [No response]
Charles: Can u call me? This is silly.
Jenn: [No response]
I want to call her, but I can’t, and I don’t know why. Am I afraid that I’ll have to listen to her voice, so happy, on the voicemail message? Am I afraid that I’ll have to leave a message, that my own voice will be recorded and saved for her, some sad desperate kilobytes crossing the continent and captured forever in her phone in a way that feels more real—more human—than the easy letters of a text message? Am I afraid that I might actually have to talk to Jenn, that I’ll be forced to speak more than a single sentence, a single question, a single observation?
I discover Maria’s number in my phone, am surprised that it was still saved. Am surprised that she didn’t save my number when I first called her, that she hasn’t called me since I left New Mexico, but I think this was her dorm number maybe, not her cell, so maybe she never had my phone number? I delete Maria from my cell phone.
From Thursday afternoon in CSUH to
*
To Friday morning, waiting for a meeti
ng in the Cal State-Highland chapter room, and I’m using their high-speed internet to download T.I., “Live Your Life,” a song that surges through me like an anthem. I download Kanye, “American Boy.” I visit Billboard.com and download the entire Top 50, most of them pop songs I’ve only sort-of heard at bars and in the staticky in-out crackle of radio stations as they fade from Illinois to Indiana to Ohio to Pennsylvania. The more I download, the more I realize how incomplete my life has become, a once-full profile now drained to empty questionnaire (“What’s your favorite song, Charles?” “What was the last movie you saw?” “What is the most pressing issue in the current election?”). A man who suddenly knows nothing about the world.
It’s only inevitable, then, that—with all those songs downloading in the background of my slow-moving laptop—I find myself on the Facebook home page, typing in the old familiar email address and password, entering the familiar domain once again. I change my privacy features so that the world cannot search my photos, double-check that I am “EU – Graduate” and that my employer is kept vague, just “Higher Education,” and soon my entire life appears once again on my computer screen. I am restored. I need updates, yes, but I also wonder: could I have ever truly made it disappear? It was always saved somewhere, just waiting patiently on some server. It wouldn’t ever let me stay away.
“Charles is…back,” I type.
My first Facebook status update in four months, five months? I download a photo of Ryan Reynolds in Van Wilder, make it my new profile picture.
And there in the Highland fraternity house chapter room, I spend the entirety of my morning calling auto shops in the greater Philadelphia area, pricing tires and wheels, doing some mental math, deciding that I can put the tire on my credit card but I’ll pass on replacing the dinged-up wheel because the price is approximately equal to a full month’s salary and my credit card bill has already grown substantially larger than my bank account can ever be as long as I’m in this job. I set an appointment to change the tire but don’t tell the mechanic that my wheel is damaged.
When the afternoon turns to evening, I suggest to a couple of the Highland undergrads that we drive to the Save-Mart and grab a couple Anchor Steam 12-packs. “On me,” I say, because I can pay with my NKE credit card and lose the receipt and try to report the expense as my lunch or dinner.
The clerk scans the card. I sign my name to the receipt,
then crumple it and toss it into the trashcan. The cold worries of back East are thawing, cracking apart, melting away.
*
“Dude, a girl can’t bone a guy,” the President says. We’re drinking Anchor Steam in the backyard of the house, a guy chasing a screaming sorority girl through the grass with a lit sparkler. Someone else is shooting bottle rockets. I don’t know if these are left-overs from July, or if the Highland brothers just keep fireworks around for lazy backyard nights.
“It’s just an expression,” I say. “Boning. No different than screwing, or fucking.”
“No, no. Boning implies that you’re doing work with a bone,” he says. “The best a girl can hope for is getting boned.”
“But a guy and a girl can bone. Like, together.”
“No, if a girl is talking about sex, she’s got to say ‘We were having sex.’ She can’t say, ‘We were boning.’ The man bones. The woman gets boned. You see what I’m saying? The only way a girl can bone is if the dude’s unconscious and she has to do all the work. You see?”
“An astute observation, sir,” I say and reach my hand into the ice to find another bottle.
*
This is the difference between driving and flying. Driving: I have an entire snap-shut case filled with maps and directions and every mile is necessary and planned, and I hit the gas and then the brakes and then the turn signal and then check the map and then hit the brakes again because someone cut me off and then the gas and then swerve and then move into the center lane and my fingers grip the steering wheel under the stress of a seven-hour drive and then I collapse into a jagged pot hole. And flying? I just settle into a seat and look at the window, and maybe there’s turbulence but it isn’t my problem.
*
Jenn’s page: new photo, and she’s smiling wider than the old one.
That’s what she wants the world to see, anyway.
Jenn’s new photo: dressed in her costume for the Homecoming Skit Dance, an event taken so seriously by EU sororities that tens of thousands of dollars are spent, choreographers employed. In sorority Rush, cheerleaders and dancers are treated like top draft picks; the Kappa Deltas are notorious for scouting them all, for recruiting the one former Miami Heat dancer now attending EU, the two Bucs cheerleaders, all for the purposes of a Skit Dance worthy of YouTube immortality. And the girls…the girls dress like they’re auditioning for a Vegas show, tight silver pants, or short skirts that fly up when they spin around and expose asses almost in total, breasts gleaming, a single shade removed from strip club.
So yeah, there’s Jenn at Skit Dance. Costume. Hair streaked with pink and black like she’s a Pussycat Doll, the picture burning with hot sex. The type of picture that, after you take it, a girl says “Holy shit, I look fucking hot!” like she didn’t ever think it was possible to look so good, and you can tell that her first thought is that the world needs to fucking see this, men drooling and fantasizing and—
Whatever. Back to my own page.
*
Friend requests on Facebook from the chapter presidents at Texas Tech and Highland.
“Your profile is back up?” Edwin—from back at EU—writes on my wall. “Nice.”
Jenn writes nothing, but I notice her relationship status has become “Single.”
At first, I’m afraid to write anything…it seems as if no one noticed that I was ever gone.
But one typed letter leads to another, one status update to another.
“Charles is…living the dream, fighting the good fight.”
*
While I’m sitting at a Karl Strauss bar at the airport, my father calls. First time in over a month. I answer. I don’t know why I answer. Possibly because I’ve had three Red Trolley Ales.
“Your mother said you haven’t called her back.”
“I’m in California right now,” I say.
“What does that have to do with anything? You have a phone.”
“Things are crazy. Traveling.”
“Call your mother back. She worries.”
“She doesn’t worry.”
“She thinks you’re upset with her.”
“So the two of you are talking now?”
“We never stopped talking.”
“Always a surprise with my parents,” I say. “I never know the real story, do I? I never know the real you, do I?”
“What are you talking about, Charles?”
“Nothing.”
“She thinks you’re shutting her out. Shutting us out. Have you booked tickets for Thanksgiving yet?”
“Can’t afford it. I’m on my own now, remember?”
My father sighs. “Charles, I told you. I’ll buy your ticket. We want to see you.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Well, anyway. They’re boarding.”
*
Cal State-Highland to Long Beach State.
To San Francisco State, where I spend a full day at an outdoor café, thinking about typing up chapter visit reports for Walter LaFaber but really just page-hopping on Facebook, following links to Daily Show clips and watching and re-watching Katy Perry videos and pretending that I’m doing it in an ironic way.
“Charles is…loving the Tina-Fey-as-Palin skits. Whoever said that SNL was dead?”
“Charles is…now friends with Sam Anderson.”
“Charles is…now friends with Tamara Jones.”
“Charles is…waking up at noon today.”
Answering questions about national dues payments and alumni relations programs via Facebook chat with the officers at Pittsburgh, Grand Valley College, Texas Tech,
St. Joseph’s. This is so easy, they say. Why haven’t we always done this?
*
Then, back on a plane to Philly for my visit to Delaware.
Cross the country. Two connections, two airport bars. I even find Ethernet connections.
When I roll my luggage through the parking lot at the Philadelphia airport and finally spot my Explorer, I stop for a moment, afraid to approach the door.
Finally I walk closer, touch the surface of the vehicle, warm but not hot, the handle of the back hatch, dusty but not dirty; it makes a crackling noise when I lift the door, sleep crust snapped upon opening. I slide into my seat and behind the steering wheel, the leather so familiar, the snap-shut cases, the scattered hangers and fallen backseat rod and it’s a mess but it all feels right, only takes a moment for the seat to conform to my body once again, and I start the car and the air-conditioning blasts out and Britney Spears screams from the speakers, and I shiver and cough and…I realize I’m crying, also. I don’t know why, but for a full minute, I stare at the center console…the maps, the goal sheets, the blank flipped-over business card, the rearview mirror, and I cry. There in the parking lot of the Philadelphia airport, in my Explorer, crying, to
*
To an afternoon at an auto shop in Philadelphia as the new tires are installed, the mechanic telling me that he’s worried about the condition of my wheels. The metal, he says, is so twisted that it could destroy the rubber; he’s surprised, in fact, that the spare isn’t already toast.
“This is like a ticking time bomb, kid,” he says.
“I wish I could afford new wheels,” I say. “My credit card is maxed out.”
“Cost you now or cost you later,” he says. “I’m telling you now, cause this don’t look good. You’re going to want to get them.”
“Just the tires for now. That’s all I can do.”
After my Explorer is repaired, I drive slowly and carefully to a hotel, eat and relax at an Applebee’s a block away because it’s already 7:00 PM, and I won’t drive nights. Not anymore. The stress of the potholes is bad enough during the day. So I will be a day late to the Delaware chapter house, but I don’t think anyone will stay up waiting for me.