American Fraternity Man (11 page)

The basic idea is this: when alcohol is present, the danger for the fraternity chapter is greater in each new overlapping circle of danger.

Drinking games are so dangerous that they don’t even warrant inclusion on the Circles of Danger. They’re banned outright. Everyone knows: you get caught, and you’re fucked.

And
there I was at the Senior Send-Off, in my brand-new Banana Republic slacks and blue dress shirt, rolling the old warped ping-pong table from our storage closet to the center of the first-floor game room, Edwin rummaging through the bar cabinets for plastic cups and clean ping-pong balls. These were items, of course, that we’d
never
allow the cleaning staff to lock up in the kitchen: they needed to remain accessible. Always. Walk into the NKE house on any Saturday night and you might find this table in use, tournaments in progress, elaborate charts of team rosters and round-robin seating drawn on the dry erase board on the wall, brothers with sharpies writing their signatures and their team logos on the underside of the table after winning: crude sketches of machine guns (“The Automatics!”) and fraternity/sorority letters (“TEAM NKE & ), messages to future gamers: “Ten wins in a row. Good luck topping that.”

“Beer pong?” someone ask
ed. One of my fraternity brothers in the other room.

My head still spinning, but a smile returning to my face.

“Fathers and sons, doubles matches,” Edwin said.

“
Hell yeah!” someone else yelled.

Table wheeled into place.

“What’s this?” one father asked.

“
Beer pong!” someone else yelled.

Explanation
of the rules under way.

“What are these signatures, here?”
a father asked his son.

“We create team names, Dad.”

“Interesting. And logos?”

“That’s mine. We
won the Super Bowl tournament.”

“Atta boy!”

Hundreds of different drinking games: Asshole and “What the Fuck?” and Power Hour and Flip Cup and Quarters, but Beer Pong is the most notorious of them all, maybe the only one with national tournaments. All you need is a simple ping-pong table (really, though, any table can be manipulated for Beer Pong), some solo cups, beer, and a ping-pong ball. Usually you play in teams, two per side; half-fill a cluster of cups on each side of the table with beer (ten per side, usually in a triangle formation); then take turns bouncing a ping-pong ball from one side of the table to the other with the aim of plopping the ball directly into each of the cups of beer opposite you; accomplish the feat before the opposing team can do it first, and you win the game. And for each ball you plop in? Your opponent chugs the beer from that cup, then removes it from the table. Of course, that’s just the basic concept, and the game is full of variations:
regional variations
, with South Floridians playing different than Central Floridians, Californians playing different than New Yorkers;
cultural variations
, with the campus Hillel and Filipino Student Organizations claiming different rules; or even
personal variations
, with some teams deciding upon a modified set of ground rules before ever squaring off. But the game itself, no matter the rules prohibiting it, is as universal on college campuses as the spiral-bound notebook.

A
nd as crowds began moving from the bar and the courtyard and the living room to the game room, I checked for my father, looked to the coffee table and
The Complete History.
By now he was absorbed entirely in the photo narrative. Still standing, not even bothering to lounge with the book and get comfortable. Ice melting in his un-sipped vodka tonic.

“
Push the table into the living room,” someone said.

I backed up against the bar as the table was wheeled past me, a platoon of my fraternity brothers pushing it as quickly as a battering ram but as reverently as if it was a coffin and they were its pall-bearers.

And soon it was dead-center in the house, directly atop the area rug, in line with the front door. Now it was the centerpiece of the party, occupying the space where the cake had sat a short while before. Ordinarily, we never played Beer Pong anywhere except the game room, always made sure to tuck the forbidden drinking game away in the back corner of the house, even closed the door and made non-participants into look-outs so the Greek Row Resident Advisors—there were four of them, two fraternity members and two sorority members—would not feel obligated to report the infraction. Generally, the Greek Row Resident Advisors looked the other way. We had an understanding, so long as we were discrete.

But this particular Friday night?

“Round one,” someone shouted, and I heard the squeak of the dry erase marker on the board. Names written, charts scribbled. “Edwin and David Cambria will take on James…and your name, sir?...Henry Betterman! Round one, everyone!”

Head spinning.
Men rising from their chairs.

“Sign up, right up here!”

Marker squeaking. The pop and
psssh
of Miller Lite cans opening, sound of foam rising, beer into plastic cup, ping-pong ball knocking against painted particle board. Bottles of Heineken popped, perhaps the first time in our chapter history we’d used
Heineken
for Beer Pong.

And this was it.
The fathers, sleepy a moment before, now had the wide-eyed looks of waking-life dreamers.
You want us to play drinking games
?
You’re inviting us, the old men
? Here, now, in the fraternity house?
Oh yes, oh yes
! Designated drivers be damned. Wives, children…whatever. 10 PM bedtimes forsaken! It was now time for some serious father-son bonding over ten cups of Heineken! The party was undying, room full of stumbling zombies lurching toward more drink, ping-pong balls plopping into cups, sons showing fathers their tossing technique, how best to score.

I watch
ed from a distance, alone, still drinking vodka-tonics. I’d let it go a few games, then I’d drag my father over and force him to play. No sitting on the sidelines. Everyone plays, even
you
, Dad.

*

It started with father-son teams, but soon it was couples: teams of husbands and wives. Ball splashing into Miller Lite, Mrs. Schell lamenting that the ping-pong ball was getting pretty dirty by now, but oh well, let’s just dip it into the water cup, ha ha ha,
oh goodness
!

Then it was mothers and sons versus mothers and sons, cups raised for a long chug, and then it was one woman s
aying, “I’ll just sit down over…over here,” and then we were helping someone to stand, and Edwin and his Lindsay Lohan lookalike were beside me, and he was saying, “This might have been a bad idea.”

“They’re fine,” I said. “We’re all adults here.”

And at that moment, someone’s father—a man with garlic-colored hair, body-builder’s arms and torso, but a gut that suggested that he’d long ago given up cardio—let out the sort of scream that I usually only hear at football and basketball games. “
Yeeeaaa
-aaahhhhh!” Low and angry, from far back in the darkest caverns of his body, a recess left unexplored for years. “How you like
that
, huh?” he screamed. Slapped his wife on the back, then pointed across the table at his opponent, a skinny sophomore named Marc who I hoped was his son. “
Drink it up
! You just lost to an old man!”

“Scary,”
Lindsay said.

“Marc
bears no resemblance to his father,” I said.

But
then they were gone, and I was standing alone again and still talking and it took me how long to figure that out?

Head spinning again.

I took another strong gulp of my vodka tonic.

Screeching laughter from somewhere.
And then Todd Hampton was at my side. The new president. A year younger than me. The boy who’d pushed me from the podium. He’d said some things during elections a few weeks back that I suddenly remembered, how
things
needed to change, “things” in quote fingers and I had no idea what he meant. “We’re never doing this again,” he said. “These parents cannot handle their alcohol.”

“Relax,” I sai
d. “It’s a good event.” Swaying.

“Easy for you to say. You’re graduating,” he said.

“Nothing easy about life after graduation,” I said.

“Someone’s mom is passed out in the bathroom.”

“Well,” I said. “Just having fun, you know?”

“Whole house is a mess,” he said, “and now that the pledges are initiated, we got no one to clean it up.”

“Um. We can clean it up
ourselves
, maybe?” I said. “Since when do we make the pledges do everything around here?”

“
Beer Pong at a family event. This is out of control.” He shook his head. “Things will be different when I’m president.” There it was again, that word “things.”

But
drunk as I was, I couldn’t argue. What was I to say?

So I nodded
. “Whose bright idea was this, anyway?” I asked.

“You really don’t understand what the brothers in this fraternity want,” he said
, and then he was gone, too.

*

And then there was my father. Five minutes later? Ten? Beside me.

“I need your help,” he said.

“Help with what?” I asked, tried to stand, slipped and fell back into my seat. When had I sat down?

“Your mother,” he said.

“What about her?”

“She can’t walk.”

“She’s fine. I just saw her.”

“She’s on the bathroom floor, Charles.”

“
What
?”

“P
assed out on the bathroom floor. I need your help getting her to the car.”

And when I followed him down the hallway, past the Beer Pong tournament and past a father and son sitting at one of the patio tables drinking whiskey and playing cards, all the way down the hall, hand
up for support, past the now-crooked charter on the wall, into the women’s bathroom, there was my mother, a knocked-over rocks glass with chunks of melting ice spilled across the tiles.

“Is there anyone else in here?” I asked.

“Does it
matter
?” my father said. “Help me get her to her feet.”

Really, the only reason we even had a women’s bathroom at our fraternity house was because this was a university-owned property; I’d lived here for four years, and I’d only ever stepped foot inside the women’s room once or twice, both times searching for extra toilet paper, both times scrambling to get in and out post-haste just in case one of the other residents had brought a female guest.
Women’s bathrooms: they’re like some mystical forbidden zone, made you paranoid and loopy, made you feel icky and naughty for your intrusion. I ducked and peered beneath the stall doors, gave the entire space a once-over—

“Help me out
, Charles,” my father said. “Come on.” He’d rolled her forward so that she was now sitting.

“Whu—” my mother mumbled, eyelids opening then closing.

“Just needs some water,” I said. “Give her a few minutes.”

My father brushed her hair away from her eyes,
pressed the back of his hand against her forehead, then leaned in to whisper something in her ear. He smoothed out the tangles in her shoulder-length hair, then adjusted her shirt from where it had stretched around her shoulder as she rolled on the floor.

I stood nearby, hands in my pockets, trying not to watch, ey
eing the door.

Truthfully, I’d never seen anything like this before, had no idea how a son was supposed to act when his mother reverted to freshman sorority girl. Yes, I knew my mother had built up her wine collection after I’d left for college, and I knew that she drank more now than she ever had while I lived back home, but still I thought that parents had…I don’t know…some sort of emergency shut-off switch before they went too far, something that prevented them from the same stupid behavior as their children.