American Fraternity Man (17 page)

“You
said ‘re-invent yourself,’” she said. “That sounds so intense.”

“It’s just semantics.”

“People can change in bad ways, too, you know.”

“Sure. But I won’t.”

“Nobody ever
thinks
they’re going to change for the worse,” she said. “My parents. I heard them say the words ‘change’ and ‘re-invent’ and ‘renew’ and all this other bullshit…I heard it over and over again, every day for two years, till it made me sick. And you know how
that
turned out. It was like listening to New Year’s resolutions that you know aren’t going to last. God, sometimes I wish my parents were more like yours.”

“
Right,” I said.

“Speaking of which, should I come stay with you guys for Labor Day?”

“With…my parents?”

“Yeah. Or for Thanksgiving? We can spend the whole holiday in Cypress Falls.”

“I don’t...” I shrugged. “That’s just so far away.”

“More time to plan?” she said.

I nodded, but changed the subject. “Anyway, I’m taking a job where I have to act a certain way.”

“Every job is like that.”

“People are going to see me as a role model, Jenn. I have to
be
that person. All the time, I have to be that person.” As I spoke, I stared at my suitcase, thought of the insides: on one half of the suitcase, one stack clean undershirts, one stack clean boxer shorts, six total pairs of socks, black toiletry bag, plastic bottle of vitamins, cell phone recharger, one pair pajama pants, three belts; on the other half of the suitcase, in the zipped-up pouch, my blue bath towel, three pairs of shoes, and a mesh laundry bag for my dirty clothes. This was the new Charles Washington. I’d packed and re-packed, measured pros against cons, multiplied to determine the number of possible outfit combinations of one shirt vs. another, before making my ultimate decisions and then boxing up everything I wouldn’t take on the road and dumping it in a storage unit to wait for my return.

“I admire what you’re doing
. No question,” Jenn said.

Her
older sister had gone into an America Reads program after college, living in the Ukraine and teaching English to villagers or something (the village had even named a pig or a cow after her), before coming home to take an unrelated job with a health insurance company. So Jenn understood
the fluidity of life, that career decisions need to make sense to
you
before they can make sense to everyone else. As soon as I’d told her about my mission—building young men into the socially responsible leaders of the next generation, beacon of leadership, all of it—she’d called it
noble
. Do you know how that feels? To have a beautiful woman call you noble?

“But you’ve got to promise me,” she said, there in the fraternity house parking lot, “that the Charles Washington I see when you come back for Homecoming will be the same one that I know.”

“I’ll be the same guy, just new and improved. An extra scoop of raisins.” I gave the suitcase one last shove, and boom: the Explorer was packed. “And you don’t need to worry about
us
. I’m ready to do the right things to make this relationship work. I have goals.”

“Do you know what my father told me when we moved to Tampa?” she asked.

“Jenn, I’m not your parents. I’m not your father.”

“He told me, he told all of us: ‘I’m ready to be the man.’ And he had this look in his eye, this…determination? I don’t know. Like he was listening to himself speak, and he was hearing his words as the voice-over in some movie trailer. ‘I’m ready to be the man.’ And he changed, all right.
Sure, he quit driving semis so he could have a normal job and spend time with his family, but then he bitched about getting up for work, slept in, yelled at my mother that she’d ruined his life. Stopped coming home at night. Got fired for lord-knows-what. Ready to be the man? We believed him, and he probably believed himself, but it’s like…the more determined you are to change, the worse it is when things go wrong.”

“Jenn, listen to me,” I said, and maybe
I
was hearing myself speak, too, maybe
I
was listening to a voice-over. “I would never let that happen. Not to my family.”

“Oh yeah? Why not?”

“Because,” I said. “I just won’t let it happen. I see these other couples. If I’m going to do a relationship, I’m going to do it right. You look at our friends…look at Edwin. Thinks that he’s Vinnie Chase or something. Has a girlfriend, but he goes out to Bang-Shots and he hooks up with a different girl every night. Look at Amanda. Tells everyone she doesn’t want to get married until her 30s, wants to play the field. Thinks she’s—and no offense to your show—she thinks she’s in a
Sex and the City
episode.”

“This coming from a guy who made out with three different girls on his 21
st
birthday?”

“That was
before
. No, I’ll do this right.”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t want to be them. That’s everyone around us. They either rush into a relationship because they’re scared, or think they’ve got all their lives to figure it out and then avoid making commitments.”

“Yeah?”

“And don’t get me started on, like, Baby Boomers and their weak ideas about marriage and—” And I was thinking about my parents by that point, even though I hadn’t told her anything I’d learned about their marriage. I was delivering speeches again, and maybe this one even sounded great, but because the speech pre-dated the challenges it spoke of meeting and overcoming, did the words matter at all? Whatever. I wasn’t thinking of that at the time.

Noble
, I was thinking.
I’m going to be noble
.

“I’ll do this right,” I said. “Trust me.”

*

This was my last-gasp
Facebook status update, typed just before I left the fraternity house in Fort Myers for good :

“
Charles Washington is
…headed to training at Headquarters today, and I’ll be disabling my Facebook profile when I stop at a hotel tonight. Joining the ‘real world’ now, homeys, so no incriminating evidence. Sad but true. Leave one last comment on my wall, or drop me a text and wish me good luck.”

By the time I checked my profile later that evening, unfurling below the status like the plastic-sheet baby pictures dropping from the inside of a father’s wallet were nearly 50 comments.

Lauren Vintner
– Are you really closing down your account? I don’t get it.

Andy Hitt
– Are you switching to MySpace or something? Wanna hang with the 14-year-olds? Are you pursuing a future in pedophilia?

Josh Dorsey
– And I’ve written some awesome comments on your wall through the years, buddy. You sure you want to deprive the world of my amazing sense of humor?

Jenn Barry
– I miss you already, Charles! You need to come back to Florida NOW!

Edwin Cambria
– Ha ha, Jenn! He’ll never be able to delete himself from those pictures at the Senior Send-Off. Drunk, cutting the cake.

Jenn Barry
– So true. Don’t worry, world! He’s in, like, half of my Facebook photo albums, so you can get your Charlie Washington fix whenever you want!

Harry Stewart
– Charles…I know what you mean. I got a friend request from my boss and my mom on the same day…almost made me cancel my account right there.

Sean Farrow
– All these motherfucking political comments these days. I get it, man. It’s fucking annoying. Fuck Obama, too! Why the hell does he get to have a Facebook account? That’s like totally Big Brother. Fucking Nazi is what he is. Good call, Charles. You’re a brave man. Delete delete delete!

Jenn Barry
– I think it’s silly that you’re deleting your account. You should be allowed to have a social life, you know? Call me later.

On and on, the comments.

But then it was over. Click of a button, account de-activated at 5:44 PM, and it was done, everything vanished in an instant. “Charles is…clean,” I thought.

*

But on the day that I left Fort Myers and headed to Indianapolis for training, I texted Jenn to give her an update on my travels, and a strange thing happened. I started to type “I found the hotel that u booked for me,” but the phone’s auto-finish feature immediately completed the statement as “I fuck” and so I went back to erase the word “fuck” and start over, typed again, and then it auto-completed with “I found tits” and
tits
?
really
? so I went back, erased, typed “I found the hotel tits” and I erased and re-typed and before we were done with our text conversation, the phone had auto-finished the following additional words: “Booze,” “Fucking,” “Shitstorm,” and “Fraternity.” How many times must someone type “booze” in text messages, I wondered, before it becomes a phone’s favorite choice for auto-finish?

I know the real you
.

CHAPTER EIGHT: Orientation.

The sun had barely crept over the Indianapolis skyline and the consultant orientation was still sixty minutes from starting, but already I was convinced that my glorious new life as a role model was going to end in failure.

Earlier that morning at the hotel, I’d packed up and left before the staff had even finished setting out the continental breakfast.
Finally,
I’d thought. Finally my life was feeling like an Outlook calendar, not a Facebook page. Empty roads as I drove north, crisp skies free of jet trails, like the world was indeed offering me a chance to start a new profile, add new contacts, new tasks, new appointments, new goals.

But when I arrived at the gravel parking lot of the Henderson Memorial Auditorium a full hour early to the consultant orientation, expecting only empty spaces and cold rocks, expecting to beat my new colleagues to the first day of our new jobs, I found that several dozen of the other freshly hired educational consultants were already there, milling about the parking lot like early risers for Sunday service competing to show the still-sleeping pastor who
was most devout.

My first day of summer training for the Nu Kappa Epsilon National Fraternity Headquarters. An hour early, but somehow I was still late.

They all stood outside in the mild heat of a Midwest summer morning, 22- and 23-year-old men and women straight from college or grad school, wandering and talking to one another as if this was an evening cocktail party and not an early morning in a parking lot. From the seat of my Explorer, I could see them shaking hands and introducing themselves; I could hear their strong leadership voices even from inside, names always paired with alma maters:
Jeff, from Michigan State, nice to meet you! Jeanna, from Bowling Green, nice to meet you! Tami, from Purdue, nice to meet you
! They—well,
we
—all wore brand-new suits, dresses, ensembles purchased with graduation gift money, all carried leather planners and portfolio notebooks, all of us trying our damndest to look like we’d been at this for awhile. Only it didn’t look like they had to try. They had it together, every one of them.

One of the guys in the thick of the crowd saw that I was watching through my rearview mirror and that I was still buckled into my seat, and he waved me over, an emphatic flapping of his arm as if he was directing take-offs and landings on an aircraft carrier. So I smoothed my pants, adjusted my tie, told myself that this was the right choice, and I joined them in the gravel where they’d clumped together.

“Jeanna, from Bowling Green!” one girl said to me. Curly brown hair bouncing, eyes so wide and full of delight that she looked like Will Ferrell’s
Elf
character, fed on a steady diet of gumdrops and pixie sticks. Clutching her portfolio notebook with such force that she was likely leaving permanent finger marks in the leather.

“Nice to meet you,” I said. “Charles, from Edison University.”

She cocked her head sideways, still smiling, but there was a disappointment darkening her eyes…disappointment, perhaps, that I wasn’t displaying the same high-volume enthusiasm. Behind her, two young women had their hands on one another’s shoulders, bobbing their heads so much as they talked that it didn’t seem possible that they could keep eye contact without getting dizzy. So I tried again.

“Charles!” I said. “From Edison University!”

Her smile faded, deep dimples disappearing but still leaving faint parentheses in her cheeks…like maybe her face was unaccustomed to
not
smiling. “Um,” she said. “Well, Charles. Nice to meet you.” And she scampered off into the crowd to introduce herself to someone else, and I checked my tie again, my belt, smoothed my pants.

All around me, they smiled at one another in the same collegial fashion to which we’d all grown accustomed from weekends spent at SEIFC or the Gulf State Leadership Convocation or a score of other Greek-themed conferences, eyes lighting up as though they’d met a dozen times before
and it’s fantastic to see you again
, and it seemed so easy and natural for all of them. The men stopped just short of raised-voice excitement, favoring firm handshakes and hands on shoulders and statements with only a single word or two extra-emphasized (“Looking
forward
to
working
with you.”), but the women clapped and shouted. “You got the job!” Jeanna from Bowling Green said to another young woman, and she was now far away, but I could still hear her. “Oh my
God
! This is going to be the
best
year ever!”