American Fraternity Man (36 page)

After s
even hours of driving, I arrive in Champaign-Urbana.
And
I coast through the obligatory “campus town” district, down a road called Green Street; students seem to skip from corner to corner with an in-your-face happiness, as though they know and don’t care how grimy I feel from the foreign showers I’ve been using, how envious I am of their t-shirts and shorts. They sit outside internet cafes at metal tables and they type on wireless laptops. They sit outside the Starbuck’s across the road, outside Panera Bread, outside a “Used Books” shop with a heavy black door. They sit in a carefree September happiness, class syllabi still fresh from their professors’ copy machines, the spines of their textbooks still un-creased from lack of use, quizzes and midterms and final exams still months away. Oh, they’re happy here at Illinois. It’s Rush Season, but not just for fraternities; the season is a state of mind, and everyone on this campus is living it, flaunting it, sorority girls walking in packs from Smoothie King or Jimmy John’s, wearing cheerleader-skimpy gym shorts with  or  across perfectly round asses. Two black kids, one in an Omega tank-top and the other in a stark white undershirt, hop out of a Honda parked at the curb, and they saunter into Subway. Several students rush out of the two-story bookstore on the corner and scurry across busy Green Street, avoiding bicycles and cars, avoiding campus shuttle-buses so large that they’re actually
two
buses joined in the center by some accordion-like connector. Blue shirts, orange shirts everywhere, shirts with “CHIEF” or “Fighting Illini” splashed across the front. They’re all so satisfied, these kids, that they could be coming from the pool, not from class, that they could be wrapping up their week, but it’s only
Thursday
, 3 PM! Yes, Rush Season for everyone at the University of Illinois. Everywhere. Every intersection, every sidewalk. I take another sip of my coffee; it’s cold and tastes like dog breath.

The
local bars, on the other hand, look worn-out from the early semester. Bartenders stand outside the doors, slapping dirt from filthy mats. In the back of a bar called Legends, a bartender hoses out a trash can, a thick goo bubbling out the bottom. Mid-shift servers and cashiers file into Murphy’s, into Brothers, into Zorba’s.

I spend ten minutes,
fifteen minutes, turning down one-way roads, backtracking, making wrong turns that I can’t correct, ending up in places I’ve been five times already. Head pounding. Shirts swaying on their hangers. I pass fraternity house after fraternity house, sorority houses, left and right, all around me, but they are scattered between classroom buildings and dorms and bus stops and the campus YMCA and the Armory, and there’s no central Greek Row so there’s no pattern and no way to know exactly how to find the Nu Kappa Epsilon house. Fifteen minutes,
twenty
, but finally I find West Chalmers, another street over-populated with historic fraternity houses: tudor-style mansions under the shade of maple trees, directly next door to limestone castles with every decadent Gothic feature save for gargoyles, “RUSH” banners hanging from nearly every roof. Five fraternity houses in a row on Chalmers, and another seven or eight down Armory Avenue. Shippensburg’s Rush Season was dangerous, but at Illinois, a school of 40,000 students where more than 5,000 affiliate with fraternities and sororities—largest Greek community in the country—the possibilities are even scarier.

Moments after I turn onto Chalmers, I find the NKE fraternity house and pull into the parking lot, a tiny dirt pen in the shadow of a magnificent structure that, were it not in a college town, were it not surrounded by similar houses, were it not occupied by 75 fraternity
brothers, could be serviceable with some paint touch-ups as a celebrity mansion on
Cribs
.

I ha
ve trouble negotiating my Explorer into a parking spot, almost scrape an Oldsmobile. Shirts sway in the backseat, and I can’t see out my back window.

The tall, wooden lamp post outside the house is covered in flyers, top to bottom. Fifty or sixty fluorescent-papered flyers stapled to the crackling wood.
“Where do YOU want to live?” the flyer asks in large type, a picture of John Belushi in his iconic “COLLEGE” sweater slapped below the text. Then, clear as a court summons, the words: “NKE House, 10:00 PM, Thursday Night. Beer, Beer, Beer, Beer, Jell-O Shots, Beer, Girls,
Girls Gone Wild
Camera Crew. Any questions? Be there.”

And this flyer is probably posted all over campus.

This is it. Illinois. An historic chapter with more than 2,000 alumni since 1921, smack-dab in the middle of Big Ten Country. If I can’t make a difference here, save
this
ship, I’m just painting over a stain.

*

The porch of the Nu Kappa Epsilon chapter house is modest, stretching only the length of one side, but the front door is an intimidating wooden block, the letters “NKE” carved into its surface along with elaborate expressionist white carnations and the date of the chapter’s founding. There is an electronic button-pad lock above the door handle…but someone has wedged a rock the size of a football (the words “Go Away!” scrawled in black marker) between the door and the frame, rendering the lock irrelevant. I push open the door, hold my breath, expect the chaos of Shippensburg.

But here at Illinois, after I pass through a small foyer and walk up a half-dozen stairs into the living room, there is…
nothing
. Just an open room, wood-paneled walls and floors that make it feel like a colonial library, but no furniture, no posters, no framed portraits, no stitched NKE banners or flags. Just an empty room, a fireplace and empty mantle and several thick rolls of industrial-strength black sheeting pushed up against the wall like smooth black bails of hay.

The living room is dark and hollow, and I wonder if this is an encouraging development. If this chapter clear
ed out the room to preserve all furniture from the inevitable damage it would sustain during a house party, I almost admire their forethought. Don’t want any freshmen puking on the rugs, after all.

Eventually I locate two stairwells on opposite ends of the room, each shrouded in shadow. I pick a stairwell, my every step leaving deep booming thumps
, a pretentious academic sound, the kind of thoughtful clanging I imagine whenever someone says “hallowed halls.”

When I descend into the gigantic basement of the fraternity house, the hallway branches off into several clearly labeled rooms
: a kitchen, a mess-hall-style cafeteria, and a library. I open the first door, “Chapter Library,” hoping I can find someone in all this emptiness, and sitting inside is a clean-complexioned young man in a white polo. He’s got messy-stylish frat-star hair, but he’s holding three thick library books under his arm, one of which says,
A Critical Approach to the U.S. Tariff
. “You must be Charles Washington,” he says, and it’s a mild voice, a Rob Lowe or James Spader voice.

“That’s me.”

“Adam Duke,” he says. “Chapter President. I was just about to give you a call, see when you were getting into town.”

“Were you?” I ask.

“Please come in. Have a seat.”

I follow him into the Chapter Library, a room with its own fireplace. Above the fireplace hangs a golden-framed charter, the original 1921 document preserving the signatures of the chapter’s founding members and the edict of the National Fraternity, establishing the group as the “Iota Alpha” chapter of Nu Kappa Epsilon. Everything appears clean and polished; no fingerprints, no stains, no dust, no burn marks.
This isn’t what I expected from an “emergency visit.” Adam Duke is about my size, nothing special, but his voice is calming, not antagonistic; I expected someone who would act like an enemy.

“I wish I had more time to talk to you on a one-on-one basis,” I say. “But I’ve got a strict schedule for the rest of the day. I just got here, and I’ve already got a meeting in a couple minutes with your campus Greek Advisor. Then a dinner meeting with a bunch of your alumni.”

He nods, reassumes his seat in a leather chair behind the desk.
Motions for me to sit down on a wooden chair on the desk’s opposite side. “Have a seat,” he says again. “Please. I’ve got class in about twenty minutes, anyway. I’m supposed to lead discussion today. But ask me anything you want to know.”

“Oh.” I scratch the back of my neck. Nobody’s ever given me that prompt before. I think I actually
wanted
him to be an asshole, just so I could be an asshole, too. Give my frustration some outlet. “Okay, then,” I say. “First thing’s first. This freshman…the blood alcohol poisoning thing. This thing is big.”

“Josh Martin is his name,” Adam says and nods. The confident nod of a scholar on a History Channel special. “Honestly, I don’t know how this was inflated into such a big story. It’s not a big deal. Josh barely drank anything in the house.”

“It was a party, right?” I ask. “He had
something
to drink?”

“No party. Most of our brothers were out on Green Street, actually. Josh Martin is a high school friend of one of our brothers. In town for the football game last weekend. But they both drank so much beforehand that neither wanted to go out. Josh passed out here in the basement sometime after midnight. Actually, we were lucky that someone found him
and called 9-1-1. They said he was barely breathing.”

“And he’s fine, now?”

“Physically, yes,” Adam says. “If he hadn’t been here at the fraternity house when he passed out, with so many people nearby, he might have died. But still, his parents…can you believe this? They keep calling for an investigation, calling for suspensions, throwing out the word ‘lawsuit.’ Like
we
gave him all that alcohol. We saved the kid’s life.”

“I see.”

“So that’s currently where we stand,” Adam says, nods again.

“Okay,” I say, head pounding, swaying, but I need to focus. “Then there’s the other big problem. This blood alcohol poisoning thing…we can deal with it, since it doesn’t really seem, you know, according to what you just said, that you’ve done anything wrong. But this party. We need…we need to deal with this issue, too.”

“Certainly. What would you like to know?”

“This doesn’t sound good,” I say. “There’s so much wrong
here.”

“Truthfully, I think this is the best decision we’ve ever made.”

“Explain?”

“Things have been rough around here for a few years, ever since the rape accusations. We need something to really get our heads above water.”

“Rape,” I say. “That doesn’t sound good, either.”

“No, no,
two years
ago,” he says. “When I was a freshman. I don’t know all the details because I was just a pledge at the time. Not really privy to the inner workings of the house. But something happened in the basement. Without getting graphic, I’ll just say that there were four girls and seven guys, total. All consensual. Next day, though, one of the girls goes to the police, says she didn’t want to do it, she was forced, etcetera, etcetera.”

“Four girls and seven…what does this have to do with your party?”

“We were a strong chapter then, back when I joined.” He’s still nodding as he talks, nodding constantly, as if it’s all so simple, so cut-and-dry: they had 110 members, he says. Best GPA on campus, intense campus involvement. One of the top houses at Illinois. But with the accusations of rape came the impending threat of lawsuits. Despite the accusing female dropping her case and apologizing, the National Fraternity still arrived on campus and conducted a hasty “Formal Review” of the chapter, expelling all seven of the “offenders” and initiating a rigorous re-organization, suspending fifteen other members who didn’t meet some standard or another, and placing the chapter on a year’s probation. Frustrated and confused by this odd turn of events, nearly a quarter of the chapter (and almost the entire pledge class) protested these national decisions by relinquishing their pins and moving out of the house.

I let
Adam go on for awhile; he makes honest eye contact as he speaks (if this was a job interview, he’d be hired on the spot), but my focus keeps drifting to his styled brown hair and to the history books that rest on the desk before him. To his white polo, which I realize is Burberry, his thick silver watch. Adam Duke is wearing clothing and accessories straight from the front-matter advertisements of
GQ
or
Esquire
. He’s 20 years old, probably doesn’t have a job, and while I smell of old coffee and McDonalds and have the frumpy look of a DMV or Post Office employee, he has the carefree look of young money, born into a swollen bank account..

“I don’t get it,” I say finally. “What’s the relevance of all of this?”

“The entire year after the accusation,” Adam says, “even though the case was dropped, everyone on campus was talking about it. Calling us rapists. And who wants to be associated with that? Guys couldn’t even wear their Nike shirts on campus, couldn’t bring girls back to the house. If you haven’t noticed, there are plenty of empty bedrooms upstairs. Economically speaking, it costs more to maintain this place—internet, meal plan, electric—than the money we generate through rent. Things have fallen apart since those accusations.”

“It’s been two years.”
“Exactly. This year’s Rush, this is our last chance. Incoming freshmen don’t know about the incident. Campus is starting to forget. If we have a good party, a real blow-out, we’ll have a good Rush and things will be normal again. There won’t be a cloud over our house.”