American Fraternity Man (51 page)

“You were.”

“Fine. So what?”

So what? And a list of answers occurs to me. So what? So you were in those grassy parking lots outside the stadium, standing beside beer troughs and flirting with other guys for free cans of Bud Lite. So you put your hand on some frat guy’s bicep and asked him to help you up onto his tailgate. So you asked another guy, bigger, drunker, to hold your legs while you climbed up onto a keg and did a keg stand. He held your legs and you were wearing a jean skirt probably, and he helped you down and with a towel wiped off the beer from your wet t-shirt. So it sounds good when you say you care about “doing the right thing,” when you tell someone their plans are “noble,” but all you’re really thinking is that it’s cute and charming…for now.

“I don’t need this, you know?” I say.

“Don’t need what?” she asks.

“This. You, on the fence like this. I want a girlfriend who’s either with me or is not.”

She sighs. “What do you want me to say, Charles? I was emotional today. I missed you, is that what you want to hear? I was sad, then I was angry, then I was just drunk and everything kind of boiled. I don’t know what else to say. I said too much already.”

“Well, then. It’s all settled. Life’s perfect.”

“Don’t be an asshole.”

“I’ve got to get a shower,” I say. “Work never ends around here. 24/7, you know? It’s my life, like you said. So I’ll have to talk to you tomorrow.”

She protests a bit, tells me that I should call her again tonight, but there’s no point in that. I don’t want to pencil in another goal for the evening—“Call Jenn/ 9:00 PM,” or “Devise strategy for reconciliation/ 10:00 PM”—while she enjoys her night. No, instead I hang up my clothes on the towel rack in Jose’s bathroom, and I shave, and I arrange my hair gel and my comb and my toothbrush along a clean countertop, and I step under the showerhead and hot water hits me and I watch the layers of desert grime on my skin come loose and wash away.

*

Afterward I’m driven to the NKE chapter house, which is located in a neighborhood directly across the street from the university. Out in the paved parking lot of the house, Sam tells me, “Just wait outside here with the pledges while we finish getting set up inside, ‘kay? We’ll be back in a second.”

The fraternity house is
sand-colored, would probably blend into the dusty landscape in the daytime, but now darkness is taking control of the evening, the wide-open sky deepening to navy and the moon growing crisp, high-definition white clarity. It’s mid-September and the sun is starting to set sooner.

Surrounding me in the parking lot are the fifteen pledges for this chapter’s new member class. Rush concluded two weeks ago, Sam said, so the world of fraternity life is still new to these kids; they’re living the denouement of Rush Season, the final still-clueless days before the definition of “fraternity” balloons to include a national organization with 120 chapters and Educational Consultants
and a hundred-year history stretching back to a place called Carolina Baptist: they are living the days when “fraternity” is a happy ending to a tumultuous first few weeks of college, when “fraternity” is a cozy college family and “family” never needs to mean more than family.

Among these fifteen freshman students, I alone wear a full suit and tie, just unpacked from my garment bag. The others wear a mix-and-match, borrowed-from-here-and-there, whatever-I-could-get-my-hands-on ensemble; they wear awkward-sized dress shirts with ties poorly tied, torn cargo khakis, scuffed and dusty dress shoes. Impoverished backgrounds, Jose said: for some of these kids, 17
- and 18-year-olds, this might be the first time they’ve ever had to wear a tie. But we are all together, fifteen freshman men and a single college graduate, waiting outside the house for the new pledge sisters of Alpha Alpha Sorority to arrive.

I consider introducing myself as the Consultant, listing off my job responsibilities and speaking of the national mission, modeling the correct social behaviors of the Marathon Man.

“—this fucking girl,
Maria
,” one of these kids says, “body like it was
built
for fucking.”

Uproarious laughter from the rest of the pledges. A group of young men whose experience with sex largely consists of a few hectic afternoons at their girlfriend’s homes back in high school, trying to slap on a condom and find the right spot and grope without seeming like they’d never seen a naked female before
, trying not to come too quickly but at the same time trying to finish before her parents came home from work, and oh shit, I put the condom on wrong and it pinches, it pinches,
oh my God
! But they’re laughing over there at the sex-talk, the whole group of freshmen.

Except one. Because he’s wandered over to me, has a cigarette in hand. Spiky black hair that shoots in every direction, wearing a violent red shirt with black pants. Looks like he wants to join the cast of
Jersey Shore
, but he’s too short, too tiny, has no muscle mass on his frame.

“G
ot a light?” he asks, lifting his chin in a “‘sup” motion, brandishing the cigarette.

“No lighter,” I say. “Sorry.”

“Have I met you?” He lifts his chin higher, squints hard.

I open my mouth to answer, then stop.

This early in the semester, all the pledges are still learning one another’s names. They’re all strangers. So I could introduce myself as the Consultant, the Fun Nazi, but I have a choice.

Blank white space. Possibility.

“Yeah,” I say. “You’ve met me. I’m Charles.”

“I don’t remember you.” His squint has gone suspicious, the unlit cigarette now dangl
ing from his mouth. Solid spikes of hair under the fading light looking somehow
more
solid and dangerous than hair should, as if they are not simply a glued-together collection of strands but rubber or hard plastic to the core. “You don’t look familiar.”

“I’ve been busy
. With classes.”

“You look nice. Nice suit.” He takes the cigarette from his mouth, stares me up and down, motioning with his hand to let me know that he’s taking in the visual of my professional
-wear, that he sees the crease in my pants, the straight collar points of my shirt.

“Thanks.”

“You look a little old to be a pledge. How old are you?”

“Ouch.
I look old?”

“How old are you?”

“Freshman,” I say. “But I took a couple years off after high school.”

He sucks on his cigarette, then realizes it’s still unlit. “True,” he says. “True.”

And then he’s off, asking someone else for a light, is successful in his request, but still stands nearby as if keeping an eye on me, all the while smoking his cigarette with forced displays of adulthood, taking long and dramatic drags to bluff the world into thinking he’s an old pro.

Nearby, another pledge has a plastic flask tucked into his sock, takes quick sips while no one looks.

“—so drunk that I passed out under the coffee table!” another shouts.

More of the uproarious laughter.

“Fuck that shit, bitch!”

L
aughter, and I try to smile.

*

Sometime after 8:30, after thirty minutes of waiting in the growing darkness of the September evening, after all the pledges have let their shoulders slump and have gone from stories of raucous drunken debauchery to muffled complaints about “when this shit’s going to start,” five modest sedans—pink lays hanging from rearview mirrors, Alpha Alpha bumper-stickers on back windows—pull into the gravel driveway. The pledges organize themselves into an excited clump, like paparazzi on the red carpet at a premiere, in anticipation for the arrival of the females who will be forced to listen and talk with them for the duration of this event. This Etiquette Dinner, while supposedly “educational,” doubles as a fraternity-sorority “mixer,” a blind date between fifteen guys and fifteen girls.

I stand behind the Pledge Clump, shoulders hunched, trying to stay inconspicuous.

The car doors open, so many at once that it just sounds like microwave popcorn—tump tump tump tump tump tump—and the sorority girls step out of the cars and form a single-file line behind an older, assertive brunette.

“All right,” one of the pledges says softly. “This is it, boys.”

“I get the one in the red,” says another.

The NKE pledges whistle with delight as they check the sorority girls out. Like the young men, these freshman girls are
also dressed with uncertainty of purpose, unsure if they’re going out to a club or going to an internship: they remind me of Paris Hilton from
The Simple Life
, wearing Gucci as she corrals a group of pigs on the farm. Some girls wear brilliant knee-length red skirts with black halter-tops, and others wear tan or black pants so tight I could see their goosebumps poke out if the temperature dropped ten degrees. The clothes glimmer with newness, perhaps purchased from the mall earlier today, acquired for this occasion just as the NKE pledges borrowed ties from roommates earlier today. They’re mostly Hispanic, the girls, just like all of the guys, and each moves with side-to-side hip sways copied from Beyonce or Rihanna videos, attempting to milk the motion for all the sexiness it’s worth.

Several girls wear shimmering silver or gold necklaces with gigantic cursive charms reading “Rachel” or “Tamar
a,” and twinkling hoop earrings and purses purchased from Clare’s or Rave or whatever celeb knock-off store is in the Las Cruces Mall. Items that were undoubtedly hip in high school, and that have yet to be phased from their wardrobes. It is a crowd of young people who have just crossed the borderlands into adulthood and who are still trying to imitate what they see in this new world. Some are good at it, but most are just obvious.

My suit is Ralph Lauren, silver-black (the salesman described this color and style as the
new
-new black, “a suit for men who know that there are just
so
many possibilities for black”), black fabric coursing with veins of silver, “a look that says both business and pleasure.” I spent most of my graduation gift money on this suit, but it’s an outfit I never intended for a New Mexico State pledge function. In fact, I’m the only one whose tie looks tight, confident.

A desert wind cuts through the parking lot, and we all get sand in our eyes.

For the second time today, I think: this is all a bad idea.

*

During my freshman year at EU, I was probably no different than any of these NMSU pledges, still learning how to act with social grace. Failing as often as I was succeeding. Waking up in my own puke, my father standing over me. That sort of thing.

In fact, t
here is perhaps no single year in any human lifetime where the gulf between
What I Know
and
What I Want Everyone to Think I Know
is as deep as it is for freshman men at American universities. You’ve never filed your own taxes, never worried about your own insurance, never even tried any beer besides Bud Lite, but you’ve officially hit
legal adulthood
, which you equate immediately with Manhood, capital M, so you think you should never admit any shortcomings.

Freshman sorority girls, though, are a different species entirely.

No responsibility, but also no social pressure to be “the man,” either.

If I drew it out in one of
our alcohol workshops, this is what a sorority girl’s social progression through college would look like: