by Nathan Holic
“Yesterday. Start with yesterday.”
“I was…I needed new wiper blades? And an oil change. So I forgot to call.”
“You weren’t overdue, were you?”
“No. Well, a little. A couple hundred miles.”
“Take care of your car,” he says. “That is your office, Charles. Take care of your body, take care of your car. You’ll find it difficult to accomplish much without either of those. Dr. Wigginton always says: you can tell everything you need to know about a man from his shoes and his car.”
“Yeah, I—”
“And do not miss another one-on-one call.”
“I won’t. It’s just—”
“I get the feeling that you’re slipping.”
“Slipping? No. I’m fine, I’m fine.”
“We’re deep into the semester. Are you slipping?”
“Walter, everything is—”
“I don’t have your last several reports.”
“Right. I’ve just been jam-packing my days with meetings, so it’s been tough to find extra time to sit down and type. But I think I’m winning a lot of battles out here, Walter.”
“Are you?”
“Definitely.”
“We haven’t talked lately.”
“I know.” I walk toward my suitcase, toward my laptop bag and my paperwork, but LaFaber continues responding so quickly that I barely have time to process/answer/move/think before he’s snapping back once again.
“I haven’t received any reports. So tell me. What battles you are ‘winning?’”
“Um. Organizational stuff, mostly? Budgets? Goals? You know.”
“Do I?”
“Winning hearts and minds, Walter.” Scrambling through a series of print-outs, but don’t even know what I’m looking for. Something I can read back to him? Something tangible that will prove that I am who I should be? “Accomplishing the mission on a personal level,” I say. “It’s not always the workshops that are, you know, going to reach everyone. Sometimes, it’s just the one-on-one conversations—”
“I still don’t have a report from your visit to New Mexico State University.”
“You didn’t get that?”
“No.”
“I thought I emailed that to you.”
“No.”
“I have it on my computer. I can email you.”
“Tell me about New Mexico State,” he says.
“Why?” I ask. “That was, like, a month ago. I barely remember.”
“Barely remember? A month? I hear you shuffling through papers. Stop that. Just talk.”
“No, I remember. It’s just…why do you want to hear about it? Why now?”
“Is that a problem?”
“Listen, I’ll get the report finished.”
“I thought it was finished already.”
“They were fine, Walter. They were good kids. I’ll get more specific in my report, but they seemed like they really had it together. There’s nothing to worry about, so I didn’t feel like I needed to be in a hurry to finish the paperwork.”
“That was your impression, Charles? Good kids?”
“Maybe some little things to work on. We made a budget.”
“No evidence of hazing?” he asks.
“What?”
“Hazing. Physical violence? Harassment?”
“Of course not,” I say. “Walter, I would have told you right away if I’d seen—”
“I didn’t ask whether you’d seen it. I asked for your impression. Often, as consultants, we’re forced to piece together a picture of a fraternity chapter based not simply upon observations, but also nitty-gritty research and investigation. Interviews, reactions.”
“I didn’t have a bad impression, then,” I say. “No.”
“What about their New Member Educator? Sam Anderson?”
“Sam Anderson?”
Hangers shaking. I smooth my pants. Eyelid twitching.
“I don’t, um, think I remember him…specifically.”
“That’s too bad.”
“Too bad?” I ask. “Too bad that I didn’t find evidence of hazing? Or too bad that I don’t remember Sam—um, what’s his name?—Sam Anderson?”
“Both,” he says and exhales, a noise that—through the phone—sounds like nails falling against particle board. Hundreds of nails. “I received a phone call this weekend, Charles.”
“A phone call. From who?” I miss Donnie Ackman’s call this morning, and Ackman immediately phones the National Headquarters? “Was it the Greek Advisor who called?”
“The Greek Advisor,” LaFaber says. “I haven’t talked to him yet.”
“You haven’t?”
“Not if I can avoid it. Not yet. You know by now, Charles, that these Greek Advisors are a bunch of hacks. No need to stir the pot until we know what we’re cooking.”
“I thought…”
“You thought?”
“Never mind,” I say. “Who called?”
“I received a phone call from an irate mother of one of the pledges.”
“A mother. Something serious?”
“Nothing terrible, not from what I could understand. No deaths, no injuries.”
“So there’s no problem? Just something minor?”
“No problems, as long as we take the proper actions.”
“But even then, we’re not talking about anything major?”
“We cannot afford another lawsuit, Charles. Not with the Sandor suit hanging over us. We’ve got to act quickly, but we’ve got to take retroactive action, as well.”
“You never even told me what happened,” I say.
“No, I did not.”
“What did she tell you, the mother?”
“You don’t need to know.”
“Did she give names? Was it…I mean, how specific did she get?”
“I can’t tell you. Rest assured, I can handle the situation, but we need your assistance with that visit report that you haven’t submitted.”
“All right, all right,” I say. “I’ll email you the report. But I told you, I never saw any indication of hazing while I was in Las Cruces.”
“It’s not what you see, Charles.”
“Okay. I get it. It’s all about the ‘impression.’”
“You’re not hearing me. Give the report extra-special care. Print it. Overnight it to me by tomorrow. Do not email it.”
“I hear you, Walter. But email is easier—”
“You’re not hearing me. Do not email the report.”
“Why not?”
“I want the report to be dated as it should have been. The day after your visit. If you email it, the current date becomes record.”
“So what? It’s the same report.”
“It might be the same report, but the date of the writing is what is most important. With a mailed package, I can lose the envelope.”
“Still not understanding. Maybe I had too many beers last night.”
“Excuse me?”
“Joke. Just joking.”
“Listen to me, Charles. You saw something in New Mexico.”
“I didn’t see anything. I told you.”
“You saw something. You saw several things that were unsettling. The way that the brothers spoke to the pledges, perhaps. Maybe they made embarrassing jokes at the expense of the pledges. Maybe they seemed capable of physical cruelty. Capable. Maybe you saw paddles at the fraternity house. Maybe you saw a box of blindfolds.”
“Walter, I didn’t see any—”
“I don’t give a damn what you did or did not see, Charles,” he says, and now his breathing is hard, grating, the fuming nostril exhalations of a dragon, and there is a crackling noise. He wants me to hear these things, to picture him in his office in a way that I’ve never before seen or heard him. Suddenly, he wants me standing on the chair in the center of the room as he paces and screams behind me. “When I see that report in my office, I want to be scared of what that New Mexico State chapter might be doing to
its pledges. I want your impression of that fraternity to convince me that—even though you saw nothing directly incriminating—I should suspend them.”
“You want me to lie?”
“For the good of the National Fraternity, for the good of thousands of young men across the country, you will emphasize certain features of this chapter that we know to be true. And if the report is dated properly, I’ll be able to claim that all suspension paperwork was filed at least a month ago. I can convince that Greek Advisor that I sent him a copy of the report weeks ago, that he must have lost it…with the dysfunction at some of these schools, that isn’t too hard. If we can claim that we suspended this chapter a month ago, we can tell our attorneys that we acted out of obligation to our mission prior to any hazing allegations. We can tell the mother that punishment was swift, that she has nothing to worry about.”
“Wait. This isn’t right.”
“It isn’t right or wrong. It’s just paperwork.”
“Walter, I can’t. For God’s sake, I can’t do something like this.”
“They did indeed haze,” he says, words breathed with fire. “The dates are just numbers on a page, and you will make those numbers work for us.”
“But if they didn’t? If they didn’t actually do anything?”
“Get to work, Charles. I look forward to reading your report.”
*
Tuesday afternoon, and I have a meeting with the campus Greek Advisor in a building that looks like a brown flying saucer. When I enter the lobby of the Greek Life Office, I’m greeted not by one lone Graduate Assistant at a receptionist-style desk—as is usually the case—but by a crowd of graduate students, a full Last Supper of seated disciples at a long wall-mounted computer desk, and all of them rise and rush to me and shake my hand and tell me how much they admire what I’m doing, that I’m making such a big difference in the lives of students everywhere. Saving the culture, saving the world.
“I wish I could travel to different universities,” one blonde guy says sadly. “My fraternity didn’t select me as a consultant.”
“That’s too bad,” I say.
“It’s always exciting to meet new consultants, though,” a curly brunette reassures me. “It’s so ex-citing.”
“You look excited,” I say.
All around me. They’re all around me.
“We are excited!” she says.
Someone is gripping my shoulder, slapping my back.
“So this is, um, a full office,” I say. “What do you all do?”
“I’m Todd, and I’m the GA in charge of IFC,” the blonde guys says. “And that’s Lisa, the Special Events GA. And Tamara, the Panhellenic assistant. Rodney is the GA for NPHC. Shannon is the Department assistant, and Sheryl is the Recruitment assistant.”
All of them surrounding me, a funhouse of smiling faces everywhere.
“That’s a lot of assistants,” I say and they laugh and continue smiling. Wider now, and after I say it, I realize that this is probably a comment that every visitor makes, that the GAs probably laugh every time it’s said, have learned how to laugh with appropriate volume and vigor at this specific joke. Everywhere, these Bowling Green GAs, all around me since the moment I arrived: in the fraternity houses, in the dorms, on every floor of this building, in every office, these graduate students who still look awkward in their suits and ties, who scurry about with clipboards and portfolio binders and to-do lists for their departmental supervisors. It’s consultant orientation all day everyday in here. Every major “student life” department at Bowling Green is the same, they tell me, from Homecoming to Orientation: GAs, GAs, GAs. The best program in the country for student personnel! You’re guaranteed to get experience and good job placement. Whether you want to become the Director of Orientation at the University of Maine or the Coordinator of the Office of Student Involvement at Memphis, BGSU is the place for CSP. And, like me, these graduate assistants were all students who’d been tremendously involved in campus life during their undergraduate college careers. They were all Diamond Candidates who chose to fashion their undergraduate social activities into their careers, and now—whooooo, hold on!—they’re climbing!
I should go back to grad school, they tell me. Consulting gives me an edge on the application process! And this was the plan all along for me, wasn’t it? they ask. To use my experience as an Educational Consultant to propel me into a career in student personnel?
“I don’t know,” I say.
“You don’t know? You don’t have a plan?”
“No, it’s not that,” I say. “I just wanted to work for my fraternity. That was why I took the job as a consultant. No grand ambitions. I loved my fraternity. So.”
“No grand ambitions?”
They all laugh softly, and I try to join in.
“What about afterward?” one of them asks.
“Afterward?” I say.
“After your consultant contract has expired?”
“I, um, want to keep working? No retirement plans yet.”
“Well, you’ll need solid references and a squeaky clean resume to get into this graduate program,” Lisa says, “but I’m sure you’ve got all of that.”
“In other words,” Todd says and play-elbows me, “kiss all the right asses, and don’t piss off the wrong people. It’s a small world, this field, and nobody gossips like CSP.”
“Right, ha,” I say.
“This is what you’re planning to do, right?” Lisa asks. “Grad school?”
All around me, all around me.
“Sure, that’s a goal.”
“Let’s get you in to see Dr. Vernon,” Todd says, voice reverential. “He’s ready to receive you.”
*
And I’m led into a large office that feels more like a cave carved into the thick of a million-year-old tree, everything around me wooden. Mahogany desk, I think, with matching mahogany pencil holder and “outbox.” Mahogany bookshelf, mahogany end-table. Furniture so strong that a tornado couldn’t move it. Reminds me of Dr. Wigginton’s mountain cottage, but here the lines are contemporary, surfaces smooth, handles of steel.
Dr. Vernon, the Greek Advisor, sits behind his desk, but when I walk into his office he continues staring out his floor-to-ceiling window at the crowds of students scattered on the wet pavement below, back to me. Slowly he turns his chair around, motioning with one thick hand for me to sit at the dark-cushioned wood chairs before his desk, his gold cuff links reflecting his lamplight like sparks on copper wires. He is better-dressed than every other Greek Advisor I’ve met so far, French-cuff shirt so starched that it doesn’t even bend or fold as he pulls a folder from the top drawer of his desk, slides it onto the desk’s surface to rest beside a couple hardcovers (the book on top is called Generation X in the Job Market by (surprise) Dr. Harold Vernon), and then he folds his hands before his face. “Charles Washington?” he asks.
“That’s me.” I sit.
“So good to finally meet you.” He examines my face, his eyes seeming to drift between colors as he squints, brown to hazel to bronze. His face seems heavy, skin dark and tough like one of those middle-aged Florida natives I’d sometimes see at the beach early in the morning, their entire days spent under the sunshine, 7 AM to 7 PM, bodies browned and weathered not from exhausting outdoor labor but instead from the simple desire to be beach bums…but this is northern Ohio, and Dr. Vernon is not spending his mornings on a beach towel on Lake Erie.
“Are you hung-over?” he asks.
“Me?” I pat my chest, my arms, ruffle my hair, checking to see how I put myself together this morning. “What do you mean? No.”
“I know how things get on the road,” he says, still squinting, perhaps trying to see beyond my eyes and into my mind, trying to confirm or deny his suspicions. “Surrounded by college kids? Every chapter, a fridge full of beer? Parties. I’m sure it’s tough to stay sober and serious…girls everywhere, beer everywhere.”
“What? No.” I start to stand again. “I must not
’ve slept well. Did I forget to iron?”
“You have a guest room when you stay on this campus,” he says. “I hope you’d let us know if the accommodations are poor.”
“It’s a nice room. Just. A lot of time on the computer last night?”
“So you haven’t been drinking while you’ve been here?” he asks.
“No. I mean. What have you heard?”
For some reason, the world around me no longer feels real. For some reason, it doesn’t feel as if I’m really here. In Bowling Green, in the mouth of a prehistoric tree, the world outside crackling to cold. Dr. Vernon squints harder and then finally leans back, fingers interlaced before him, and smiles like a tycoon. “I got you,” he says and laughs. Then holds out his hands in an I-couldn’t-resist pose. “I got you, Charles Washington.”
“Got me?” I smooth my pants.
“Only joking, young man. I’ve heard good things about you from my colleagues. Don’t worry. You don’t look a mess.”
“From your colleagues?” I sink back into my seat and let out a wispy laugh that sounds like a deflating air mattress. Hanging from the wall to my right is a plaque that reads, “For 20 Years of Distinguished Service at Bowling Green”: with twenty years of continuous employment, Dr. Vernon must be well-connected in the world of higher education and Greek Affairs. A small world, those GAs said. And Dr. Vernon’s colleagues? He probably knows—probably taught—many of the Greek Advisors I’ve met throughout the country. “Someone at this school?” I ask. “Or somewhere else?”
“My colleagues are everywhere,” he says. “All corners of the country. They say you’ve got a good head on your shoulders. That you truly care about the students you service.”
“This isn’t a joke, is it?”
“No, no. This is real. Forgive my sense of humor earlier, but this is real.” He opens the manila folder on his desk (they always have a folder or an envelope during meetings, always wet their finger and flip through pages of data and spreadsheets and photos and printed news stories, like criminal investigators attempting to scare a suspect in the interrogation room), and pauses on a printed email, laughing softly. “My colleagues also say you’re a bit—how do I say this?—unorthodox in your approach to consulting?”