American Fraternity Man (4 page)

The outsider doesn’t
know that our dues not only go to social events, but also to Alcohol Responsibility Workshops, and charter buses to off-campus events so that our members don’t drive drunk. The outsider doesn’t know that, every year at EU, we rent a gigantic church van and stuff as many as
sixteen
of our brothers into it, and we drive from Fort Myers to Charlotte or Knoxville or Atlanta for the annual Regional Leadership Conclave, sixteen grown men—some of them goliaths who play for the EU football team and who take up two full seats—occupying every square inch of that van, long drives from 9 PM until noon the next day, limbs in one another’s faces, knees bunched together, Jeff Simmons pissing in a Gatorade bottle so that we don’t need to stop at a rest area, Edwin farting and nearly killing us all…and it’s one of the best times of our lives, but it’s still
sixteen fraternity men
on the road to a
leadership conference
, to spend a full weekend in hotel meeting rooms with NKE staffers drawing on dry erase boards and helping us to re-think our study habits, our time management skills…
Fraternity men
!

And it’s bigger than that, even:
the National Fraternities belong to professional associations: FEA, FIPG, ICE, NEA…And members attend interfraternity conferences, too: SEIFC, MGCA, Recruitment Boot Camp…

The outsider sees it as frivolous, but
Greek Life is an industry, a world unto itself. It isn’t quaint or outdated. It is thriving, a Grand Tradition stretching back more than two centuries, hundreds of thousands of alumni in the sixty national fraternities, an impressive list that reads like a “Who’s Who” of influential American men. Drew Brees and Brad Pitt of Sigma Chi. Sam Walton and Ken Kesey of Beta Theta Pi. Dr. Seuss and Orel Hershiser of Sigma Phi Epsilon. George W. Bush and George Steinbrenner of Delta Kappa Epsilon. Astronauts, governors, CEOs, baseball players. Musicians, actors, writers, skyscraper owners, presidents. In our history, Nu Kappa Epsilon has seen five governors of South Carolina and four governors of North Carolina, twelve Major League Baseball All-Stars, three NFL All-Pros, one Academy Award Winner (cinematography), two Gold Star winners, two Emmy Award winners, the former CEO of Insight Marketing…

A Grand Tradition that—now—was recruiting
me
into the super-selective brain-trust of the “National Fraternity Headquarters,” the 15- or 20-man teams of esteemed alumni staff members responsible for keeping the machinery going. Beat that.

*

The night before I flew to Indianapolis for my first interview with the executive directors of the National Fraternity Headquarters, I sat at my final Alumni Ball in a Tommy Hilfiger tuxedo with my girlfriend Jenn, at the Golden Crown Country Club a half-mile from Fort Myers Beach, dead-drunk from dirty martinis.

Halfway through the night, my good friend and fraternity brother Edwin Cambria stood up, clinked his glass, and informed all 250 of us in the room—fraternity brothers, dates, alumni—that he wanted to give a special dedication to Mr. Charles Washington, our departing chapter president. All eyes on me in that country club ballroom as Edwin spoke into the microphone. All those gigantic round tables—hanging white lace tablecloths, tall NKE-red candles on silver platters, white carnations the centerpiece—and young men in stiff tuxedos, dates with brilliant curled hair creations, with dresses shimmering on hour-glass EU-gym-sculpted bodies, with makeup borne of hour-long preparation, with sparkling earrings and heavy necklaces…all of this…the most intelligent, talented, attractive men and women of Edison University, each table of students buzzing with its own electricity…they could turn the lights off and still the room would glow, and this room, all eyes on me as Edwin held his hand over his heart and said that it was his honor to stand before us tonight. His honor to present me with a plaque recognizing my dedication to the university and the fraternity. A heavy applause followed, the brothers with whom I’d entered the fraternity as a pledge cheering the wildest, alumni clapping for the man whose name graced the “Update Letters” that our chapter mailed out each semester.

Later that night, I sat in the country club’s outdoor hot tub with Jenn and a few other couples. For all the mad preparation for Alumni Ball, the dresses and hair appointments, the formal clothes slid off easily once the music ended and everyone returned to their rooms for after-parties. We’d brought a 12-pack to the hot tub, three bottles of champagne, and while the guys had no trouble ducking under the water and running our hands through our sloppy wet hair, our dates sat upright, barely allowing the water to rise as high as the swell of their breasts, trying to spare their makeup and their still-perfect hair.

“Did you ever think you’d be here, your last Alumni Ball?” Edwin asked me. He had one arm around his date, a girl who looked like Tara Reid (but who Edwin confessed to me was his s
econd choice as a formal date). He looked to be weighting her down into the water, and she struggled to keep from sinking. “Did you ever think that this would all be over?”

“Got a few months left in the semester,” I said.

“Still. It’s close to being over.”

“It’s never over.” I took a sip of my beer. “Fraternity is lifelong.”

“Maybe for you,” Edwin said. “You’re going to work for Nationals.”

“Are you really doing that?” one of the girls asked. “Jenn, you’re going to let him do that?”

“It’s just an interview,” I said. “Nothing definite.”

“It’s his decision,” Jenn said. She had one hand on my thigh, underwater, and the other held a plastic
cup of champagne. The next day she’d have a terrible headache, but that night she spoke with such clarity that it didn’t seem possible she’d finished more than a bottle of the stuff on her own. “I wish he wouldn’t leave me”—under the bubbles, hand moving up my thigh—“but you’ve got to do what makes you happy.”

“So mature, Jenn,” one of the girls said, laughing. “Wise beyond your years.”

“Do what makes you happy,” Edwin said. “Ha ha. Four years of college, and I still don’t know what the hell that is.”

“You’ll be fine,” Jenn said.
“Don’t be dramatic, Edwin.”

“So
much school, so many classes,” Edwin said, “and this is what you want as a career, Charles? This is what makes you happy?”

Such a simple question, and there in the hot tub, soaked and drunk and half-naked holding a cold beer, a hand
so close to my underwater hard-on, I began and ended a number of Hallmark responses in my mind, all of them corny but rich in emotion…
I don’t know what I’d do without this
…Or:
I never had real brothers
. Or:
This is where I found myself. This is where I was able to finally
be
myself.
But I prevented myself from saying any of that. Because I knew that once
I started, I wouldn’t be able to stop
:
“Who
was
I before this fraternity?”
I might’ve asked (as if any of them could answer), and then I would have been forced to tell them that I was nothing, that I’d never really done anything for myself back in high school, would just come home to find out that my mother had signed me up for Key Club, or had talked to the JV baseball coach to find an extra roster spot for me, or had scheduled a meeting with my English teacher to discuss my grades, or had filled out the first several pages of paperwork for a college application, a crowded resume that looked great to university admissions staffs but was a blur of text that meant nothing to me…the same was true for my friends in high school, all of us moving from club to organization to sport to club to practice to class like animatronic Disney versions of young people—“helicopter parents” was the term my college advisor used, as if my mother had buzzed overhead from birth to graduation—and I never felt like anyone even believed I could accomplish something important by myself.
“But fraternity?”
I could’ve said to my friends in the hot tub.
“This was a time in my life when everyone told me I would be hazed and humiliated, this was the institution that everyone told me would be worthless. Dangerous. But fraternity? You were different. You
made
me.”

When I told my father about the job in the hours before the Senior Send-Off, I’d imply that it was the lure of Grand Tradition—important people, networks, job opportunities—that had attracted me to a job with the National Headquarters. But that was just the stainless steel fridge, the hardwood floors, the upgrades on a house hunt. Something else drew me in: the way my father said “waste of time.”
The way my Public Relations professor at Edison University said “Hmmm, a position with a fraternity. How will future employers view that?” when I asked for his opinion. As if it was not simply skepticism at my employer, but an indictment of the past four years of my life.

My father didn’t understand
.
No one
understood.

In fact, there is a
consensus among undergraduates that the world is unfairly hostile toward fraternities. After all, the scandal at Arizona—where a pledge was pushed into a freezer during a party, the door locked behind him, and he was forgotten about despite cold-hardened hands beating against the door, and only saved when two other pledges were told to retrieve ice to pour atop the kegs upstairs—was no more than ordinary college idiocy, the sort of brainless tomfoolery resulting from
any
gathering of young men whose bodies were controlled by testosterone and alcohol. This is college, just college, and
everyone
does stupid shit in college. But when a fraternity makes a mistake, boom! Front page news.

Oh, everyone in the media love
s to swoop in whenever we misstep so that they can deliver scathing O’Reilly-esque commentaries. We’re easy fodder. Take the incident at Auburn several years back: the guys who, at a Halloween party, came dressed as lynched runaway slaves, complete with black-face and fake nooses round their necks. No, we didn’t
like
hearing about it, but it’s tough to believe there are no other such parties on these Deep South campuses, and yet…no reporter can resist such a story when spiked with the word “fraternity.” Too potent to pass up. A fist fight at a football game between two fraternities? Front page! A drunk driving accident? Front page! Even a heart attack, an untimely death for a 22-year-old: investigated ad nauseum in local editorials, written about for years to come with the closing tagline, “He was also a member of a fraternity on campus, and although no charges were ever filed, some suspected hazing.” And there was Alexandra Robbins’
Pledged
, that tell-all expose of sorority girls in Texas, and the
Rolling Stone
article on the “secret lives” of sorority girls at Ohio State. Yes: a feeling that fraternities are targeted by media outlets, discriminated against by professors and other university faculty/ staff, that we are perceived as little more than drunks and womanizers, as spoiled white rich kids with inferior GPAs, all of us with jobs lined up after graduation. The “Frat Guy” stereotype. A label that so affected us as undergraduates that we’d only refer to fraternity as “fraternity,” never “frat” (“Just feeds the Frat Guy stereotype to use the word ‘frat,’” my Big Brother told me in my first week as a pledge. “I mean, would you call your country a cunt?”). We’d joined a social organization on campus, only slightly different than so many others at EU, but because it had Greek letters, we’d now been branded alcoholics, or rapists, or racists, or…

Fraternity
stereotype
: that is the rallying cry of undergraduates.

And even there in the hot tub on the night before my first interview, I knew I wanted to battle that stereotype. Prove that I’d been right all along, that fraternity
is
something special, that this was family and it was essential to the lives of boys growing into men.

Hot tub, head swirling, and I was thinking of a dozen different stories that debunked the stereotype. The time when I was knocked unconscious at a football game by a random beer bottle dropped from the bleachers, and it was Edwin who caught me before I hit the ground, who tore off his shirt sleeve and pressed it to the cut on my temple and shouted for help. Dramatic but true. Or the time when Alex and Brandon and Chad—seniors when I was a freshman—sat me down and forced me to study for my Economics final, locked the door of the chapter library, wouldn’t let me leave until I had my flashcards memorized.
The Habitat For Humanity projects. The “Rally Against Discrimination” we organized with Kappa Delta sorority on the campus greens. “This is my home,”
I could’ve said to Jenn and Edwin and all the others wet and hot and sipping champagne
,
“and you are my family, and fraternity means everything to me.”

But it just seemed like the sort of moment that you didn’t want to ruin with some sobbing speech, so I finally said, “This isn’t the end. This isn’t going to end.”

And the conversation moved on, and soon we were talking about our upcoming Spring Break cruise and duty-free liquor and cigars and free samples of tanning lotion, and everyone was happy and that’s the way I wanted it to be.

Later in the night
, the lens grew hazy.

Seven or eight of us finishing the final few beers and the last drops of the champagne we’d brought along, much of it warm by then. 2 AM or 3 AM, who knew? Our muscles so loosened that, if we stood up and tried to walk around, we’d just jello back into the Jacuzzi.