by Nathan Holic
Several times throughout the night, I part the drapes and stare out at my car.
It looks pained, still, and I want to ask if it’s all right. If the tires were enough. But just like a dog after a visit to the vet, you can ask questions but you’ll never get a response.
I spend three days in Delaware (a Dogfish Head chapter), then drive to Marshall (a Yuengling chapter) in Huntington, West Virginia.
My Explorer rattles worse than it ever has before, hangers shaking, the framed Illinois charter from 1921 banging against my suitcase, and I try to ignore it all.
*
“Charles is…out for a night at the Hall of Fame bar and grill!”
“Charles is…THUNDERRRRING HERRRRDDD!”
“Charles is…now friends with Randy Jung.”
“Charles is…now friends with James Neagle.”
“Charles is…ha ha ha! WHOOOOO!”
*
“Dude,” the Treasurer says. “Don’t tell me you’ve never jerked off while driving.”
“No,” I say, laughing. “Jerked off? Come on.”
“Oh, you gotta. All the driving you do?”
“How do you even…the logistics of it?”
“You buy a pack of tube socks, is the thing.”
“When did you do this?”
“When I drive back to Cleveland for the holidays. On the road for how many hours? You need something to occupy your time. Anyway, listen: you buy a pack of tube socks. Don’t just grab some old sock from the bottom of your drawer. Don’t be cheap. Buy the full pack. You need at least two.”
“At least two socks. Got it.”
“Roll the sock over the cock, see,” he says, “and do your thing. Jerk off and don’t worry about it, you know? Don’t worry about getting anything on you, don’t start looking down or anything. You don’t want to crash while you’re jerking off. Talk about tragic, man. So let the tube sock do its thing. Roll it back off, stop at a rest area, a McDonalds, whatever, dump it in a trash can. Boom. No worries.”
“Okay,” I say. “So why do you need two socks?”
“The other sock,” he says, “that’s for the trip back.”
*
Marshall to Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and most of the fraternity brothers are out of town for some football-related road trip, so I have the house to myself. Fridge full of Samuel Adams. Then north, through the down-and-out Great Lakes cities of northern Ohio and eastern Michigan. Miami University to Toledo (Wild Turkey, unfortunately). To Central Michigan in distant Mount Pleasant (Mickey’s malt liquor), where the brothers get me a hotel room near the local casino. To the University of Michigan, where I visit five different college bars in one night, probably a personal record, and I’m never even sure what type of beer I’m drinking.
*
Here in the Midwest, away from the t-shirts and flip-flops and sunshine of the West Coast, away from the stacked-on-top-of-one-another cities of the mid-Atlantic, the universities feel different. The campuses themselves are secluded kingdoms of limestone castles and thick brick buildings, rocky facades emblazoned with donor names, wide open grassy spaces graced with statues of past presidents and administrators, each campus encircled by neighborhoods of fraternity and sorority mansions as old as the school itself, then surrounded by hundreds of square miles of cornfields. Though the schools burst with Chicago and Indianapolis and Cincinnati and Cleveland kids, these Midwestern universities feel far removed from the crowded urban centers of each state. Worlds unto themselves.
But the weather is turning now.
The sprawling green campus quads have gone autumn yellow, ready to be frozen and covered in snow. Trees are changing, shaking off red-orange leaves, afternoon air growing cold, smoky. Living in Florida all my life, never having experienced any season but endless summer, this has happened quicker than I imagined. And everywhere I go, I’m the only one who regards this change of season, this cold, as…as anything to be regarded. It was always supposed to be one way, and I’m the only one who wonders why it doesn’t stay that way.
The students are changing with the season, also. The once-naïve freshmen have donned an extra layer of clothing, thick university logo sweatshirts, thicker skin after having suffered humbling first-year embarrassments, the excitement of FREEDOM! and INDEPENDENCE! settling. The world no longer sparkles with newness. Now, college is life, that’s all. Midterms approaching. Homecoming Weeks ending at campuses everywhere, the semester’s final stretch before Thanksgiving.
Excitement over. Unpack that peacoat I bought, those gloves and that sweater, prepare for my first-ever winter. The past month—plane-hopping the West Coast, then region-hopping from Atlantic to mid-Atlantic to Midwest—seemed to pass more quickly than I could’ve imagined, but now the cold is coming and I’m slowing down.
*
Todd Hampton, the new President at EU, has posted a McCain photo as his profile picture. Every few hours, he posts a new status about war heroes and patriots, “Ted Nugent is so fucking right” and “Obama isn’t even a citizen!!!” and “A vote for that man is a vote for terrorists.”
Everywhere there are arguments, long comment threads of vitriolic virtual finger-pointing, socialism and Godlessness and stupidity and hockey moms and Vietnam and Muslim faith and “I can see Russia from my house,” an election approaching and the Facebook world suddenly a room full of hungry zombies fighting over the squirming-dying man on the floor, yanking out his intestines and ripping scraps of flesh from his face. It’s nearing the end of October, and I don’t want to hear this shit. I don’t want any of it. This is not what it was supposed to be. This is like going home to Cypress Falls on holiday break, seeing some new area where I played as a kid now gobbled up by a condo development or a Wal-Mart, bull-dozed, chain-link-fenced, world of Florida hotter, pavement multiplying, power lines multiplying, Facebook no longer a magical portal back to the wonderful world of college but instead a window to the world beyond.
The future President of the United States of America with his own Facebook page? Has he ever visited, do you think? Would he update the page himself, the occupation title, when elected? Does he even know his own motherfucking password?
I try to ignore it all, try to focus on the comments about food, about vacation, about movies, about last night, about
*
And I am driving south once again, Explorer making noises so loud that I have to crank up my stereo to an unhealthy level and I don’t even hear when someone honks behind me; I drive south, away from the lakeside industry and smokestacks and back into the quiet cornfields of northwest Ohio. To Bowling Green State University.
And I’ve still made no attempt to organize my car.
Just keep moving, just keep moving, just keep...
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE.
As I finish my drive to Bowling Green, I receive a phone call from Sam Anderson at New Mexico State, the first in three weeks (except for a few Facebook messages). The roads here in southern Michigan are mostly flat, sometimes rising/ falling in prairie rolls, but the hangers suddenly rattle on my backseat rod.
“Got a question for you,” Sam says, no pleasantries.
“Would love to hear it,” I say.
Sam could be calling to formally ask for his letter of recommendation, to ask questions about the job, to seek advice, or to give me an update on his chapter…these could all be reasons for the call, positive news…but somehow I doubt it.
“I just read that blindfolding is considered hazing.”
“That’s correct,” I say.
“Blind-folding?” he asks, a high-pitched Jim-Mora-Playoffs!?-style squeak in his voice that I’ve never heard from him before, the sort of desperate voice crack only possible when you learn something completely unexpected, the truth behind some long-kept lie. “Just a piece of fabric? Just a shred of a bed sheet? Or a sock?”
“Sam,” I say and I pull off the highway, onto the shoulder, hoping the hangers stop shaking. I try to speak gently, delivering the la
w as a friend and not a policeman. “The by-the-book definition of hazing mentions blindfolds. It doesn’t say anything about material. Just the blindfold itself is considered—by those who developed the definition, not me—they say it’s a way to demean someone psychologically. To scare them.” Gentle, supportive: “Is there anything you need to tell me? Anything I can do?”
“Just fabric?” he says. “Not physical abuse or any of that shit.”
“Sam. I can help, really.”
“There’s a rat,” Sam says. “Fucking snitch.”
“Who? What do you mean?”
“Every day, I tell these pledges that this is a fraternity, ‘kay, a secret society. We’re all adults now, I keep telling them. We don’t reveal our secrets. Am I right?”
“Sure.”
“‘Kay,” he says. “That’s all I need to hear. This organization is founded on secrecy. Our letters. Our ritual. We don’t run and tell our parents what we do.”
“What happened, Sam? Tell me. I can help.”
“We’ve always blindfolded,” he says. “It’s always been like that. It was never against the rules before. When I came into Big Brother Night three years ago, they blindfolded me. I didn’t complain. Nobody complained. You don’t fuck with tradition.”
“You’re right, Sam,” I say. The rules haven’t changed, but I don’t argue.
“Last Friday, we do the same thing as always. We blindfold the pledges and have them march into this dark room. We’re in the fraternal robes, all the brothers singing ‘Song for a Brother’ just like it says in the New Member Education manual. I mean, it’s in the manuals that you guys gave us. We quiz them about one another,” he says and pauses. “I can’t believe I’m telling fucking Nationals about this.”
“Don’t worry. You’re right about the manuals, Sam.” This entire ceremony, blindfolds included, is outlined in the national officer binder that we give each chapter delegation at our annual Transitional Leadership Conference; the undergraduates are supposed to do all of this, even though another manual—the Risk Management Handbook—forbids the blindfolds. The Initiation Ritual itself, a twenty-minute experience for each pledge, is a highly scripted and choreographed performance involving candles and fires, tricks in perspective, trust, quick scares, and is dependent upon blindfolds. Historically, the pledge is also supposed to “walk Initiation free of spirit and unencumbered by earthly burden.” Butt-naked, in other words. To enhance the experience, or…I don’t know what. Generations of Nikes were forced to undress and walk Initiation in the nude, and although some old-school chapters still do it, the National Headquarters now sells “fraternal robes,” a more popular option. But hell, you can do whatever you want in the Initiation Ritual. Why the fuck not? It’s a ceremony hidden behind of veil of secrecy for more than a century, the idea of secrecy sworn by oath in the ritual itself, blood oath at some chapters (naked blood oath at others)…I will never betray the secrets of Nu Kappa Epsilon…if the ritual ever became public, the meaning of the letters public, it would be almost worse than some alcohol lawsuit because it would mean that the national brotherhood had failed. In the eyes of the National Headquarters, it’s leadership development that makes us a fraternity and not a drinking club. But in the eyes of many of our brothers and alumni (especially the oldest among them), it’s the shared rituals; they bind the generations togethers, and no one will change a single motherfucking detail of any of them. “Go on,” I say. “Tell me what happened.”
“They’re blindfolded in this dark room,” he says, “and we give them these far-fetched questions that they can’t answer. A test of brotherhood. Like, ‘Name the hometowns of your pledge brothers,’ shit like that. Every time they get one wrong, all the brothers get, you know, loud, and yell at the pledges about how they should know these things about their brothers. They’re blindfolded, so it’s scary for them, but it’s”— silence—“it’s nothing.”
“Is that it, then?” I ask. “You get loud, and that’s the whole ceremony?”
“After that, we pretend to have a fake blackball session. Pretend to kick them all out. We tell them to get the fuck out of…I mean, we tell them to leave the room so we can vote on whether or not to keep ‘em in the fraternity. Just then, though, a brother walks behind each pledge—this is the Big Brother—and he whispers the information into their ears, the answers to the questions, and he argues for a second chance. They answer correctly this time, see? With a little help from their new Big Brother? That’s when we remove the blindfolds and reveal the pledge’s Big Brother for the first time. And we sing the song again, go through the explanation about how real brotherhood isn’t just memorizing stuff, but being there for your brothers.”
“That sounds acceptable,” I say, but I suspect that the New Mexico State version of these events includes additional layers that Sam keeps hidden behind his chapter’s veil. “And one of the pledges was upset by this? Even after he heard the positive message of the Big Brother ritual?”
“Wasn’t just him. Some pledge told his parents the ritual.”
“Okay, well—”
“The entire ritual!”
“Relax, Sam. Headquarters will defend you on this.”
“Shit.”
“And anyway, that’s a pledge ritual, not the Initiation Ritual. It’s not one of the Higher Secrets.”
“Well, fuck,” he says. “That’s not all of it, you know?”
“There’s more?”
“Yeah,” he says. “I guess.”
“Tell me, Sam. I can help.”
After talking evasively for another minute or so, finally Sam is ready to reveal the rest of the narrative. “This has got to stay between us. I’m not kidding.” Yes, I say. I can keep your secret. Trust me. Sam exhales. Tells me, Okay, listen: before the ceremony, he sat the pledges—fifteen of them, blindfolded—in the backs of pick-up trucks and hauled them to a pecan farm on the periphery of developed Las Cruces; like prisoners-of-war, he had them all march single-file through the rows of pecan trees, arms outstretched and clutching the shoulders of the man walking in front of them. Occasionally one of the pledges would trip over a root or over upturned soil or get smacked in the face with a renegade branch, but finally they all came to a creek or an irrigation canal or something (all Sam knows is that the farmer is a Nike alumnus who looks the other way when the brothers use his property, or so they’ve always been told), and Sam marched the pledges onto a modest wooden bridge with low railings, twenty feet over the rock-cut water. And there, with boards creaking below their feet, a steady stream rushing below the boards, Sam made each blindfolded pledge—one at a time, “so it was safe,” he says—climb a stepladder that he’d positioned in the center of the bridge, stand tall, fold his hands over his chest, turn around, and fall backward.
“A trust fall,” Sam says. “They thought we were making them walk the plank, you know? Into the water? But we had a bunch of brothers who caught them when they stepped off the ladder. Teaches the pledges to trust that we wouldn’t put them in harm’s way?”
“That’s not in the manual.”
“Nothing’s ever happened,” Sam says. “We would never hurt them, all right? I would never…I’ve got a younger sister, a younger brother, and fine, I’ll pick on them and give them a hard time or whatever, but if anyone touched a Goddamn hair on their heads, I’d”—voice trembling and growing louder—“I’d beat his face into the fucking ground, do you hear me? That’s how I feel about our pledges, ‘kay? We love them, do you hear me?”
“I hear you.”
“It’s just…one of our pledges told his parents, see, and they were pissed. Pissed. How could someone blindfold their son on a bridge, he could have died, blah blah blah. They called the university and got our Greek Affairs Director on the line. He called me—me, personally—and asked if the whole deal was true.”
“You didn’t confirm it, did you?” I ask.
“I said maybe, and he started talking about hazing, about suspensions. Student Condu
ct Board.”
“Does the kid want to pursue this? Or is it just his parents?”
“His parents,” Sam says. “Our pledges fucking loved the ceremony. Aren’t you listening to me? The thing is, there’s a picture.”
“Of, for fuck’s sake. A picture? Of what?”
“When we had the pledges in the back of the pick-up truck? Blindfolded? Someone took a picture of us while we were driving back to the fraternity house. The Greek Advisor emailed me a copy of the picture. All these kids in white shirts, hunched over, heads down, black blindfolds on. Looks so much worse than it is.”
“The Greek Advisor has this picture?”
“He gets pictures all the time, that’s what he told me,” Sam says. “Every time there’s anything weird going on around the university, people take pictures and assume it’s a fraternity. Could be the fucking football team, but the Greek Advisor files the pictures away in case he hears anything else. In our case, he gets a phone call from some parents, and all of a sudden he’s got a story that matches the pictures. Knows who it is.”
“Sam. How could you let a picture get taken?”
“They’re using the blindfolding charge to put us on ‘exploratory suspension’ for the rest of the semester,” Sam says. “And they want to conduct some big investigation.”
“Investigation, fuck,” I say. The further this situation progresses—another lawsuit for Nu Kappa Epsilon in addition to the Sandor Lawsuit, LaFaber said during the summer, and the entire National Fraternity could be wiped out—the greater the chance someone will uncover all the details of my visit, too, the Etiquette Dinner and the pledge humiliation that I watched, the trip to Mexico, the pledge DDs, the sex in Maria’s dorm room, the vomit in the sink. Hell, if the university administration takes Sam Anderson down, he’d hand me over without a moment’s hesitation. Our Educational Consultant condoned all of this, he’d say. Take him! Take him! And Jose—based on what I remember from Juarez, Jose looking pissed because, why? because I was dancing with Maria, his dream girl maybe?—Jose might not even need to hear someone ask before he sold me out. “Let me handle this,” I say. “Make sure your Greek Advisor has my cell phone number. Don’t say another word to him, no matter what he says. Without confession, without clear evidence, all is hearsay. Refer all questions to me.”