American Fraternity Man (19 page)

“Yes,” I said to Brock. “Yes, of course.”

“Show the excitement, then, buddy!” he said and slapped my back one more time, and this time I did fall forward again, knocked into someone in a suit who turned and scoffed as if I’d charged forward like a linebacker and had intentionally tried to tackle him. He brushed the back of his jacket even though it was clean and still wrinkle-free. I backed away, mouthed an apology, and meanwhile Brock was saying, “What a morning, what a morning. I’m ready to save the world, you better believe it. Let’s get it on!”

Around us, the crowd was growing. Gravel crunching as cars parked. Doors opening, shutting. More shirts, more ties, more pantsuits and dresses, more portfolio notebooks, more introductions and handshakes and names paired with alma maters and Greek letters, more stories of leadership development and tough choices as the clock ticked closer to the start of the consultant orientation, more smiles that seemed more natural and genuine than mine, the purest of motives for every one of them because they were not hiding anything, no, they’d always been what I was seeing in front of me, their profiles always clean, lives always structured and disciplined and honest and good-hearted, and I straightened my tie again and hoped that no one was staring at me, seeing through me.

*

Finally, as if in fulfillment of Brock’s let’s-get-it-on declaration, the doors of the Henderson Memorial Auditorium were unlocked from the inside, and all of us—all of the freshly hired consultants on our first day of training—were ushered into the auditorium, packed together like kids at a church camp ready to sing and praise the Lord.

We shuffled together toward the front row, knees bumping against seats as we side-walked down the tiny row. Beside me, Brock held his too-short tie against his shirt as he walked, like he was afraid that it might fall off if it kept swinging. But we barely had time to find a seat before the speakers at the front of the auditorium cackled from microphone feedback and Walter LaFaber burst onto stage, one clenched fist held out before him like a head football coach who has just watched his team execute a critical scoring drive. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he yelled, “we are on a
mission
!”

We all stopped, asses still halfway out of our seats, the same awkward posture one might assume when a pastor finishes a prayer and the congregation opens its eyes and starts to re-settle…only to be forced back up when the pastor launches ahead with a new hymn.

“We have a mission,” LaFaber said, “and that’s what they don’t understand out there.” He motioned with one massive arm, pointing at the world outside the doors of this building. “We are creating positive change in the lives of young men and women all across the country. Do you believe it?”

We hovered, knees still bent, and I looked left, looked right to see if anyone else had sat down, if we were supposed to. But everyone else was still staring straight ahead.

“No, I don’t think I need this,” Walter LaFaber said, regarding the microphone in his hand as if it was an expended cigarette. “You all are going to be my voice this morning.” And he placed the microphone back onto the podium, projected louder: “We are creating positive change. Do you
believe
it?”

And again, after LaFaber repeated his question, I took tentative glances at the graduates to my left and right. Beside me, Brock was nodding emphatically and clenching his fists in excitement, so when I turned my attention back to the stage, back to LaFaber, I nodded also and mouthed the word “yes.” Brock said, “I believe!” and so I said those words, too.

“I want to really hear it,” LaFaber said. “Do you believe in what you are doing?”

“I believe it!” Brock said, his blue eyes so clear that I could almost see the heroic consultant fantasies he was imagining. And there were other similar rumblings, too—one of
the girls at the end of the row was cheerleader-clapping as she shouted, one clap for each syllable—but we still sounded disconnected.

“I don’t know if I’m feeling you guys yet,” LaFaber said, smiling. “But we’ll work on it, we’ll work on it. We’ve got all morning. Heck, we’ve got all summer.”

He returned to the podium, flipped through a stack of notes.

LaFaber, who was once again pacing and summoning his energy, is not just the Director of Chapter Operations at Nu Kappa Epsilon National Fraternity Headquarters, but is a tremendous draw as a motivational speaker (even for a Monday morning group orientation in Indianapolis): though the front row
s were occupied only by the newly hired consultants, the auditorium behind us appeared to be filling with the most important faces in all of fraternity and sorority life, twenty or thirty Greek Life staffers who’d crowded into the room to hear LaFaber and to meet this year’s class of consultants, forty of them, fifty: there were National Fraternity CEOs back there, Foundation presidents, Alumni Board directors, rows upon rows filled with gray-haired men of sixty, their lapels graced with side-by-side Lambda Chi Alpha and American flag pins; there were rows of sorority administrators and volunteers, women with short dark hair and perfect ladylike posture; there were bespectacled motivational speakers, former consultants from years past who now—like LaFaber—were making commendable salaries for weekend speaking engagements, and they had their sleeves rolled up as if they’d just come from a stage; there were sorority and fraternity volunteers of every age, interns from DePauw or IUPUI younger than me, next to men and women so old that they likely remembered a time before this auditorium was built, before there even was a National Fraternity Row of headquarters buildings in Indianapolis.

“You know, the
media loves to feast on Greek Life,” LaFaber said, no longer smiling, but still walking back and forth across the stage slowly, his eyes meeting each of ours. He has a long and perfectly straight scar descending from his widow’s peak, an old football injury that every magazine profile about his life seems to explore in-depth, as if the hard hit made him a prophet or gave him superhuman powers; when the light strikes this scar dead-on, as it did in this moment, his entire face glows, becomes electric. “Newspapers are always quick to point out the bad stuff,” he said. “It’s sexier, sells more copies when they find a way to make fraternity guys into a collection of binge drinkers and womanizers, or when they can find a story that makes our sorority women seem as if they all have eating disorders, or they’re all—pardon the language—a bunch of sluts. Sorostitutes. These are the words we hear.”

I nodded politely
—
fraternity stereotype
—but beside me Brock’s face had gone red, as though he was not just intense but angry. I held my breath and clenched my teeth, wondered what it would take to look the same way, vein popping out on my forehead.

“Hell, just google the word ‘fraternity’ and see what happens,” LaFaber said, and he held the stack of papers high in front of him. “Here are three of the top results that came up this morning: ‘Freshman student stuffed into freezer for three hours,’ ‘Two students forced to wear women’s panties,’ ‘Orlando youth loses nose in freak hazing accident.’”

“Disgusting,” Brock said. “Absolutely
disgusting
, some of these punks.”

“And that’s just the headlines!” LaFaber shouted to the room. “What about the YouTube videos of drunk men performing explicit dances on-stage to the song ‘My Dingaling?’ During university talent shows! Or the hundreds of thousands of photos from
Facebook, from blog sites, photos of jell-o shots, photos of ‘Sexy CEOs and Secretaries’ parties, photos of men hanging from the windows and balconies of their houses?”

Brock was gritting his teeth, and though I’ve often heard people tell me that they are so upset that they “could burst,” I’d never truly believed it until this moment.

“You all right?” I whispered.

“No, sir,” he said. “Makes me sick to my stomach.”

“But I don’t think this perception is accurate,” LaFaber said. “I think that you all are something very different, that our organizations are something very different.”

He paused, one hand stroking his chin, and there was a deep silence in the room, a silence that shouldn’t have been possible with more than 150 people gathered in one place. No rustling, no shifting in seats, no movement of pants or shirt fabric, no change jingling in pockets. A beneath-the-Earth silence, mystical, as if LaFaber had found a way to will away any competition for his attention, to make us all float above our seats. I’m not sure what I expected of my first day on the job. Paperwork? Office tours? Here’s how to use the copy machine, here’s the code to the fax machine, here’s your cubicle, and we have a stapler around here somewhere, and oh, we’re not sure how to unlock this old filing cabinet beside your desk, but if you figure it out, let us know. The sort of things that had taken up the entire first week of my internship at Gulf Coast Communications. But this was different. I found myself standing like a soldier at attention, the slightest fidget unacceptable.

“You are
not
the headlines!” LaFaber said. “You are the best and brightest. You were the presidents of your fraternities and sororities, the advisors in your residence halls, the senators in your schools’ student governments. Best and the brightest on your campuses. And now? You’re ready, aren’t you?”

Brock was nodding again, trying to steady his breathing.

“You’re going to save the world. I couldn’t stop you if I tried!”

He shook his head comically, and everyone in the room laughed.

“You are
leaders
,” LaFaber said, “and you cannot falter in your faith.”

The Henderson Memorial Auditorium is an aging structure. Water spots on the ceiling, fading public service announcement posters on the walls. I was told on my initial tour that it was built as a joint project between the Indianapolis-based national fraternities and sororities in the mid-1980s, during a golden age of Greek Life when college enrollments were exploding in a way that hadn’t been seen since the end of World War II, fraternity houses filled to capacity, expanding, adding new bedrooms and kitchens. A golden age when everyone wanted to join and anything seemed possible. Before the Liability Era came and ruined everything.

But even against the dated backdrop, LaFaber looked impressive as he walked the glossy floorboards on-stage before us. Towering above us, impossibly tall, and impossible the way he made eye contact with so many of us so quickly, each of us, one after the next, perhaps 50 consultants in all.

The power of Walter LaFaber. Larger than the stage on which he walks.

“Repeat after me,” LaFaber said, and his voice was barely a whisper, but still the world held its breath to hear him speak. “We are leaders.”

“We are leaders,” the front-row echoed. And I still spoke so softly that I couldn’t even hear my own voice over the din of dozens of other young men and women repeating the same words. But somehow, it didn’t matter anymore.

“We are not stereotypes,” LaFaber said softly.

“We are not stereotypes,” we said.

Brock trembled, he was so excited.

“We are not stereotypes,” LaFaber said and paused, searching our eyes, finger pointed directly at us. All of us, somehow. “You know you’ll encounter groups that
just
—
don’t
—
get it
.” He shook his head sadly. “I want you to remember these words. The men and women in this room? The men and women in the organizations you will be consulting? We are
leaders
.”

“We are leaders,” we echoed.

“We are not stereotypes.”

“We are not stereotypes.”

“Forget the google search results,” he said, fist held before him again, jaw clenched. “You know what we really are.”

“We are leaders.”

“And you know what we’re
not
.”

“We are not stereotypes.”

Again. Again. Again.

There in the auditorium, with all of the other consultants, I stood as tall as I could.

“We are leaders,” LaFaber said. “No matter what anyone wants to think!”

“We are leaders,” we said, and it was becoming easier for me to join the chorus.

“And when we do encounter resistance,” LaFaber said, “we will
change the culture
.”

Penetrating silence.

“You’re the top fraternity and sorority leaders in the nation,” LaFaber said, face still ablaze, scar on his forehead still shining under the spotlight. Suddenly, though, he sighed. He looked disappointed, and this is a man whose every expression screams,
Do
not
disappoint me
. “I want you to tell me, with no uncertainty, what you will be doing out on the road.”

The long row of consultants in the Henderson Memorial Auditorium looked from side to side again, then back up at LaFaber, then left, then right; beside me, Brock was mouthing “
I believe
” yet again, but he seemed unsure that this was what he should be repeating, so he didn’t actually say a word. It was as if we were all performers in a dress rehearsal who’d suddenly realized that we’d been missing a page in our scripts.

And I don’t know why, but the words came to me in that moment: “
Change the culture
!” I yelled, all by myself, and ran my hands through my hair like an athlete after a grueling game, absolute relief from mental exhaustion.