American Fraternity Man (47 page)

“Yes
. I’m there. I’m sold.” And we shake hands. I thank him again for the shots, tell him this was a great time, and I speed-walk to my terminal, not thinking about where I’m going or the steps I’m taking.

*

I remember when the Educational Consultant visited Edison University during my junior year, his tiny Hyundai Accent occupying the chapter’s “Reserved – President” parking spot for four days. Wore the same Nu Kappa Epsilon polos that I wear now, same blue dress shirts, same backseat rod. At the time, just as with LaFaber, there was something otherworldly about this guy: how he spoke of his pristine chapter house back at the University of Washington, how he looked at our budget and within seconds had found a massive error in our Treasurer’s spreadsheet, how he spoke of the National Headquarters as if it was the Emerald City. His posture, his carefully chosen words in each workshop he facilitated, his perfect responses to even the most inane questions that my chapter brothers asked (“How can we amend Sacred Laws to, like, make it legal to have kegs at the chapter house?” “What’s your name?” “Jonathan.” “Okay, Jonathan. Well, first of all, it is
legal
to have kegs at your house. But as members of Nu Kappa Epsilon, we believe that it’s our responsibility to battle the fraternity stereotype of binge drinking, and a regulation prohibiting kegs is one way that we strive toward this goal. On a different note, though, it’s important to understand that the fraternity supports your right to
drink responsibly
. Along with several other fraternities, we actively fight any college or university that forces campus housing to go dry. In fact, studies have shown that students are safer when…”). And yes, I was transfixed, amazed that someone could have his life so neatly ironed.

But after the consultant left:
“Homeboy needs to pull his pants down a little,” my friend Gavin said. “His belt was at his fucking nipples. Looked like my grandfather.”

And: “You hear what he said about our guest room? That it was unacceptable?”

And: “Saw me drinking in the foyer and asked if I was underage. You believe that?”

And: “Guy was a fucking douche bag. The fuck does he know?”

And for all the perfection, maybe I was the only one impressed?

CHAPTER
FIFTEEN. Flight to El Paso.

Walking in a single-file line behind ten or fifteen Blazers, each of them processed by the attendant. On the plane, each Blazer navigates the center aisle to his seat, deposits carry-on bag in overhead compartment in one swift motion. Scattered families/vacationers stall the overall progress, but the Blazers stream inside like high-speed internet, and I’m so drunk and bumbling that I feel like outdated dial-up.

I knock into someone.
Try to apologize but can’t enunciate. Plop down into Seat 13.

I think about the Marathon Man diagrams,
that—sloshing into a plane—this isn’t the drawing the National Fraternity had in mind when they hired me:

Beside me
is a Blazer, smells like cardboard and cologne. Trimmed beard so wooly that I almost feel like itching it for him. He’s packed a light lunch, Ziploc baggies with slices of cheese, crackers, strawberries…Has a copy of Stephen Covey’s
The 8
th
Habit
on his tray table.

All around the plane, Blazers find their seats, drap
e their jackets over their legs. One frustrated man with curly black hair has trouble folding his
Wall Street Journal
in such a way that he can read while still giving the wide woman beside him room enough to position her laptop on her tray table. Shorter man in a green blazer opens a Cinnabun to-go bag, passengers around him bursting with envious “Ooh, that looks good” commentary.

And then they all s
tare at me, these men and women. Noticing the embroidered letters on my polo, NKE.

Time passes. Shuffling noises from everywhere, laughter.

And then the captain’s voice crackles from overhead and people are buckling seatbelts and I close my eyes and I’m not this—

—but instead this—

And soon the world is moving fast around me. Won’t stop.

—and
then the plane is moving down the runway, moving-bumping—

—and the Blazer is in the window seat and he barely looks out but the runway is whipping past like a gray smear and the buildi
ngs, trees, towers, here, gone—

—plane lifting up,
breathless
, everyone, for the requisite fifteen seconds—

Lifting.

Lifting.

Turning on its side.

And I’m still holding my breath, thinking: if the plane crashed right now, would any of this have been worth it? High school, college, the clubs, the honor societies, the officer positions, the National Fraternity Headquarters, the “sacrifice in salary” and Pittsburgh and Shippensburg and Illinois, no life insurance, no will, no real possessions, an entire lifetime leading to
this
point
, and viewed from this perspective, my God—

Plane straightens out, but my fingers still clutch my thighs.

Fingers pried from pants, forced toward armrests.

—cabin pressure so fucking tight that it feels like I’m back in my Explorer, surrounded by all of my notebooks and snapshut cases and binders and forms and the Explorer is collapsing and I can’t breathe.

And I sit. Sit. Sit. Fingers clenched on my pants again.

And how can everyone else just sit there, I want to know, so content and so trusting that all will work out?
What have
they
accomplished that makes them so carefree? Confined space, heads close to implosion, the rooftops of one of America’s oldest and greatest metropolises shrinking beneath us, and they all just go about their business, continue reading newspaper articles and snacking on cheese cubes?

I breathe deep
. Thumb through the pocket on the seat-back in front of me, past
Sky Mall
, past an old granola bar wrapper, past the instructions for emergency landings, my fingers finally stopping at the barf bag—and oh God, what would I look like, if it came to that? How would the Marathon Man handle turbulence, a sudden and uncontrollable rumbling in his gut?

Is that how he would handle adversity?

Is that it? Is that me? That slick Marathon Man who always has the proper response to any question, any situation. Or is this more accurate?

My final moments: that about sums it up.

Plane feels
tighter
than my Explorer suddenly, more suitcases and more duffel bags and more seats and more garment bags and jackets and blazers and men/ women/ children/ noise and I can’t breathe, can’t breathe, no control, and I think of my goals and try to settle myself, but they’re back in the Explorer, aren’t they?

So I think of any numbers that I can, anything tangible, like how much money it must cost to fly Flight 183 from Philadelphia to Dallas, how many miles, how much gas is expended to move this hunk of metal and people and Samsonite from Point A to Point B. 150 passengers? $200 tickets? Staff costs, gas costs, marketing costs, web site costs, on-board snacks and drinks, plane maintenance, cost of the
plane
itself, in-flight movie and magazines and headphones.

To move my Explorer from Champaign-Urbana to Philadelphia (760 miles), it costs the National Headquarters $266, which is 35 cents per mile travel reimbursement, but then we’ve got to add staff salary, right? so we add the fixed staff salary of $12,000 per year (which equates to roughly $33 per day) and a dining allowance of $5/$10/$15—breakfast lunch dinner per diem—which I cannot exceed but which must be paid with credit card (receipts must be included on my expense report, stapled, mailed to Walter LaFaber, Director of Chapter Operations, who gives them to our Headquarters Financials Director) and of which I do not receive the remainder if I do not spend in its entirety, meaning that the maximum Headquarters per diem payout would be $30 a day and the minimum could be $0 (but I generally hover around $20 each day), but I’ll add all this up, and I’m breathing easier now, and let’s see, if it’s 760 times 0.35, plus $33, plus $30, and that’s about how much the Headquarters is willing to pay for a Consultant’s travel day (and, of course, to achieve this number, student dues—and that’s the amount of money we charge to each initiated student member of NKE, payable by September 15 of each Fall semester and February 1 of each Spring semester—are fixed at $50 per man per semester, and alumni contributions to the
Headquarters
, not the Foundation or the Brothers Assisting Brothers program, must exceed $200,000 after cost, which is tricky since our giving campaign nets millions for the Foundation and BAB scholarship program but very little for the Headquarters, because who wants to donate non-tax-deductible money to the
business
end of fraternity life?), so that works out to $330 for today, and if you take that as an average amount, multiply it by 32 (the approximate number of schools I’ll visit in a semester), then I cost about $10,560 each semester, and even if there’s something wrong with that number, with my math, I know that all of this is calculated carefully at Headquarters. The amount of money I can spend at hotels, the number of chapters I can visit, the alumni dinners I attend, the emergency visits I make, the chapters I keep open, the chapters I close, all of this is part of some pored-over budget that has nothing to do with a mission statement, and after everything, I cost so little, I’m worth so little.