by Nathan Holic
All is quiet tonight. The rain outside. The big-screen television at the front of the living room. All sounds like soft static, and many of the brothers stretch out on couches as though drugged. Some have opened textbooks, but they don’t appear to be reading or studying.
Into the silence, I say, “Anybody want to grab a beer with me?”
Around the room, all heads turn to regard me.
“It’s sort of quiet around here,” I say. “Anybody want to, like, just hit up a bar or something for an hour? Let off some steam?” Blank-faced stares. “You’ve got some good bars around here, right? Or, we don’t have to go to a bar. We could just go to Applebee’s or something. I need a drink. It’s so…” Stares. “Quiet.”
But now the stares seem to take me in from head to toe, from my mall-purchased shoes to my faded American Eagle jeans to my untucked long-sleeved t-shirt. “You’re a con-sul-tant, right?” one of them says, upper lip curled in this disgusted look like he just accidentally stumbled upon his parents naked.
“Just one beer,” I suggest. “Just half an hour? Anyone?”
But they all, one by one, shake their heads and then open their textbooks or type text messages on their phones or engage in some other low-energy activity simply to avoid eye contact. “We’ve got a mid-term tomorrow,” one of them says. “In Statics.”
All of you? What the hell is going on here? Why is everyone so concerned with textbooks and school and mid-terms, I want to ask. Just go out and relax. Loosen up!
*
And so I leave the house, leave them all to “studying,” and I head to a bar called “Brother’s” and sit at the bar and it’s busy, clusters of frat guys in backwards-turned baseball caps gathering under the wall-mounted televisions to watch college football, and I order a pitcher of Bud Lite and ask for three cups and turn to a couple of girls beside me. “Hey,” I say.
Both have been talking to one another conspiratorially, pressing lips to ears in order to be heard over the loud beat of…Ludacris? Or is it Lil Wayne? Or some other rapper I haven’t heard? If you are what you say you are…a superstar…then have no feeee-arrrr…Both are brunettes, also, wearing jeans and black shirts, and they turn to me in unison with faces bereft of amusement. “We’re talking,” one says.
“Sure,” I say and hold out the two cups. “Thought you might want a beer?”
She holds up her own cup, a lime-garnished cocktail that is by now mostly ice. “Already got a drink, so…”
“Looks empty,” I say. “You sure?”
The other girl leans forward, says, “We’ve got boyfriends.” And then they turn their barstools so that they’re no longer facing me, and they are speaking into one another’s ears again, their bodies barely registering any interruption.
Heavy ceiling fan. Mold breaking through.
The beer goes warm before I can finish it, the crowds of college students seeming to all stand at a distance from me, as if I’ve fallen into a crater and one false step might send any of them tumbling down here with me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE. Toxic.
After I pay my tab at the bar, I consider driving back to the Purdue chapter house, consider whether they’ll still be awake—it’s past 2 AM, but this is a fraternity house—and consider what they’ll see when I ring the doorbell and ask to be let back inside:
Or:
When I pull into the parking lot, the lights on the limestone castle’s first floor are all dark; the second floor seems alive, soft music seeping from one room, lamplights in three windows and blacklights in a couple others. I park, leave the Britney CD on low volume, “Toxic” again the soundtrack as I stare through my windshield at a fraternity house.
I know what they’ll see.
I’ll walk to the front door, and when they answer the ringing bell (and who will hear, who will answer?), there I will stand, shifting from foot to foot. Dark blue jeans with holes in the knees. EU windbreaker over a black graphic tee: an Express t-shirt I bought last week, the screen-printed image of some sort of winged creature snarling in the center, an angel maybe?, feathery wings consuming the entirety of the shirt’s front and sharpening as they wrap around the back. A pissed-off angel. Beer spilled onto the white graphic. The smell of cigarette smoke so heavy on my clothes that I feel encased in a gray cloud. Rain water matting my hair, two-day stubble on my cheeks, and have I brushed my teeth since yesterday morning? I don’t know anymore.
Oh, I know what they’ll see.
This is what has been printed on the blank side of the business card, and I can’t let anyone see me, not like this.
So I stay in my Explorer, waiting for another car to pull in. “I’m on a ride,” Britney is singing, and if someone parks and walks to the front door and opens up (“You’re toxic”) then I will jump out, catch up (“I’m slipping under”) mumble something about how lucky I am that we both arrived at the same time (“Don’t you know that you’re toxic?”) and slip inside and slip to my guest room and no one else will notice. Things will work out: the Etiquette Dinner, the bathroom at New Mexico State. Things will work out.
But I’m alone in the parking lot for a long time, the rain and wind breathing strong bursts, and at some point, that long tree branch in the fraternity house front yard—bending for the last several days, bending in the gusting wind—splinters and collapses to the ground.
*
I’m awoken early in the morning by someone tapping on my passenger-side door. The car is still grumbling, heat still blowing, and I’ve been sleeping in the driver’s seat for the last several hours.
“You okay in there?” I hear.
“Huh? Fuck,” I say, and try to stretch forward, slip back against the seat.
“You the consultant?” At the window is a youthful Jeff Goldblum lookalike, dark hair and glasses and inquisitive eyes, palms pressed to the glass, face just centimeters from leaving a nose print. “Shit, it’s the consultant in there. He’s sleeping in his car.”
“No,” I say. “No. I’m…ugh…I’m fine.”
I force myself to lean as far forward as possible—stretch—and there are pains in my neck and back that are brand-new to me, spots on my body that have never before registered a moment’s thought now aching with the sharpness of just-purchased dress shoes worn for a long and heel-scraping walk.
And then there’s another face at the window. Bryan O’Reilly: chapter president. Boston Celtics sweatshirt, beanie pulled over his shaved head. “You want to, like, go inside?”
“Yes,” I say. “I do need to.”
The clock reads 7:04 AM.
“Well hurry up. We’re already late for class,” Bryan says.
I shut off the car. Not sure how much strain I put on the battery. Open the door, shiver in the early-morning cold, slump out onto the pavement. “Glad you guys have early classes,” I say and rub my eyes. “I…I didn’t want to wake anyone up last night.”
“Shouldn’t have gone out to the bar by yourself,” Bryan says.
“You sleep out here all night?” Goldblum asks. “Fuck.”
I nod and we walk through the front yard, the fallen leaves and dead grass and broken branches and mud. There is no wind right now, but still the cold feels as if it is finding new ways to penetrate me. Shouldn’t have worn jeans with knee-holes.
“Everyone’s got early classes,” Golblum says. “Only time they offer some of the engineering pre-reqs.”
“That sucks,” I say and wipe my nose with the sleeve of my windbreaker.
“You look like shit,” Bryan says. “But at least you’re up for breakfast.”
“Breakfast?”
“You missed breakfast the last couple days,” he says, opens the front door, and straight ahead, there in the dining room where I’ve eaten lunch and dinner with the chapter throughout my visit here at Purdue University, are twenty or thirty fraternity brothers at the long cafeteria-style tables, trays before them, bowls of cereal, cups of orange juice, plates of toaster-friendly waffles or Pop-Tarts. They t
urn, they see me, a collection of heads swiveling in unison.
“Everyone, it’s the consultant,” Bryan says. And then he’s back outside and heading to class and the door is shutting behind me and I’m standing in the hallway alone and they—the dining room full of hoodie-clad fraternity brothers, their hair pillow-messy or hidden beneath Boilermaker baseball caps—are shaking their heads and making “whoooo” noises, and one of them says, “Really fucking professional, dude. Really classy.”
*
There is a community shower in the second-floor bathroom at the Purdue chapter house, what the brothers call a “gang-bang shower,” and I’ve counted my blessings these last few days when entering an empty bathroom at 11 AM. At Edison, we had individual showers, each separated from the next by cinderblock walls, closed off from public view by plastic curtains. At most of the universities I’ve visited, the bedrooms have shared attached bathrooms with other bedrooms, or—best case scenario—the guest room has enjoyed its own shower. And no matter how disgusting the tile floors or how impotent the water pressure, I’ve always been able to at least savor my privacy; no matter what the fraternity brothers thought of me, how they saw me, I could at least preserve an image in their minds of a man fully clothed. This morning, though, when I slink into the bathroom, it seems as if every brother who wasn’t eating breakfast is now standing naked at the long row of showerheads. One after the next, they turn their heads to see me walk in, towel draped over my arm, toiletry bag in hand, frozen at the sinks.
I can’t leave, not now that they’ve seen me. The only thing worse than a naked wannabe-professional is a Fun Nazi too scared to get naked in front of the boys.
One of them—a blonde-haired wrestler-type—shuts off his shower, waits for a moment as the water slows to a dribble and swirls into the drain below, and then he turns around fully, proudly, not a flinch of shame or embarrassment. He shakes his hair from his eyes, blows the dripping water from the tip of his nose; there are towels stacked here at the sinks, and so he walks—one leg dragging as if hobbled by a sprained ankle—straight toward me, settles beside me, the air around us suddenly thick with humidity and hot flesh. “You can have that shower,” he says, slaps my back. “I’m all finished.” He grabs a towel, ruffles his hair, trudges out into the hallway still wet and still naked, rubber flip-flops squeaking as he goes.
“Hey, it’s the consultant,” says one of the guys in the showers, staring back at me with giant puffs of shampoo in his hair.
“No way,” another says. “We get the honor of showering with the fucking consultant.”
“Heh,” I say. “Quite the privilege.”
“Lather up! Plenty of room for you right here!”
They’re laughing now, an echoing room full of steam and jet-spray and bare asses, naked men who have seen a hundred times before the swirls of hair on one another’s chests, the pimples on one another’s backs, the white nether-regions of one another’s thighs, the sadness or exuberance of one another’s penises. Every single day, every single morning. Just skin, by now. But me? I’m different. My every pore is new to this room.
“Don’t tell me that you consultants shower in your pants! Ha!”
“Heh,” I say. “No.” I pull the shirt over my head, try to take my time in folding it and sliding it to one empty section of the sink. It’s a stupid thought, but I find myself hoping that—maybe—this might all end if I stall long enough. Staring straight ahead into the mirror, I unfasten my belt, roll it as tightly as I can, place it atop my shirt.
“Hope you brought soap on a rope, bro. Crazy things happen in the Purdue showers.”
Slip one leg out of my jeans, then the other.
“Better have a big Nationals-sized cock, homey. Only big cocks allowed here.”
Hold my boxer shorts in front of my crotch for a moment.
But no one is looking at me; they’re washing the soap from their eyes, scrubbing their legs, working the conditioner into their scalps, rinsing their bodies one last time. I toss my boxer shorts into my pile of clothes on the counter, walk slowly and cautiously forward into the community shower with my toiletry bag blocking the view of my Headquarters cock. My feet have never been colder in my life, and my chest has broken into goose flesh, but I eventually take the shower vacated by the wrestler. And when I turn the faucet, the water that hits my forehead is such a perfect temperature—feet thawed, chest thawed instantly—that I already know it will be difficult to shut off and creep back into the cold to grab a towel.
“Best part of the day,” the kid beside me says, his eyes closed as the hot water hits his face. “After this, I gotta walk halfway across campus for my first class. So fucking cold, the wind between these buildings.”
“Hot water doesn’t run out?”
“No, sir,” he says and spits. “I feel like Kevin Spacey in American Beauty. After my morning shower is over, it’s all downhill from here.”
But then he shuts off his shower, squeaks away in his flip-flops.
Then, a moment later, another shower shuts off.
And another.
Brothers flopping away, chatting at the sinks, towel-drying, leaving.
And soon, it’s just me in the community shower, standing under the water and trying to wash the dirt away, and there is no more laughter, no jokes, no comments, no greetings or goodbyes, no adjusting of handles and water temperatures, no more squeaking of sandals, no more rustling of towels or clothes, no blow-dryers, no scratching of razors. Just one naked man in the second-floor bathroom of a limestone fraternity house on a cold autumn morning, not another sound in the world but the rush of hot water over my head and in my ears, one naked man now shutting off his own shower, tip-toeing across a chilly floor, searching for clothes on the counter. Gone. Searching for a towel, clean or dirty, anywhere. Gone.
Alone, and it’s all gone.
I stand at the sink, dripping water now chilly on my skin, cold wet hair in my face.
“What the fuck?” I say, hoping some merry prankster will laugh and toss my clothes back into the bathroom and this moment will end. But there’s no response.
I hold my toiletry bag over my crotch again, poke into the hallway, and it is there—naked and still wet, eyes wide and terrified—that the laughter begins and the camera snaps and then my socks are flung back into my face, and I say “Fuck!” again as they clap and hoot, scampering away and retreating into separate bedrooms, knowing that I won’t run—dick flopping—after them, knowing that all I’ve got is a pair of dirty socks, so what else can I do? I ball up the sock over my crotch and I lumber through the hallway, knocking on doors.
“My clothes!” I yell with each knock. “Give me my fucking clothes!”
“Whoop whoop whoop!” someone yells from somewhere, hyena-voiced.
“Who the fuck?” I cry. “Just…Who fucking stole it? This is juvenile.”
Inside one of the bedrooms, a stereo clicks on, heavy bass suddenly shaking the door. So I slam my fist against the door, try the handle, slam and knock again and again. “Open up your door! Open up the fucking door!” I scream.
“Go away,” someone says from inside. “Studying.”
“Open up your door!”
“Gonna call Nationals, dude. Tell ‘em you’re hazing me, not letting me study.”
“Just give me my clothes. That’s all I fucking want!”
And then another picture snaps from the opposite end of the hall, and sock over cock I dart that way, the flash still registering in my eyes, but the photographer has ducked away like a sniper after a successful kill, and then a picture from the opposite end, and I charge that way, and there is music coming from another bedroom, another, and I stand in the center of the hallway, wet argyle-patterned cloth in hand, balls aching from having been clutched so damn hard, and I say, “Fuck it. Fuck it. Take your fucking pictures, you pieces of shit.” And it’s at that moment that I hear a noise behind me, a sound like dirty sheets tossed into the dryer, and when I turn I see a pile of clot
hes. Not mine. But someone has taken mercy, tossed a gray Purdue sweatshirt and some jeans and a hand towel into the far corner. “Fuckers,” I whisper. “These fuckers.”
After I grab the stack, I retreat back to the bathroom sink to dry off and to warm myself in the sweatshirt. “Facebook, yo!” I hear someone shout from far away, laughing, and I want to storm out there and scream again, defend myself, defend my image as the National Fraternity Educational Consultant—“Keep that off the internet!”—but I know that whatever they captured on film: it is accidental brilliance: because you can find no better image, six months after my own fraternity brothers saw me carrying my mother out of the house, six months after my father saw me in the rearview mirror with the Night Patrol, to show the world what has become of Charles Washington on his mission to save the world.
*
It’s still Friday morning and my visit is supposed to stretch into Saturday, but I pack up and drive as quickly as I can.
Pack up and drive. Without ever finding my t-shirt, my jeans, my belt.
Battery making a pained noise, engine rolling over, Explorer unhappy at having spent a full night idling in the parking lot.
But I pack up and drive. Away from Purdue University.
According to my schedule, I’m now supposed to travel to Indiana University. From here in West Lafayette, straight down south to Bloomington. Directly through Indianapolis, home of the Headquarters. But I find a hotel south of Indy, know that I can’t step foot into another fraternity house right now. Not now.
*
Just as I’m unlatching my suitcase and staring once again into the tossed-about wreckage that I’ve still not sorted, my phone rings. And it’s Walter LaFaber. Even exhausted and aching from last night, my breath is still caught in my throat for a moment. Was he standing at his window, same as always, tall and military-proper, hands clasped behind his back? Did he watch me drive through Indianapolis? Does he know that I left Purdue early, that I’m putting two hotel nights onto the credit card, that I might not even go to Bloomington and Indiana University?