American Fraternity Man (6 page)

“I can do this,” I said. “You’re wrong about me.”

And that’s when the conversation died and I led him back to the front door, and he drove back across town to unpack at the hotel and wait an hour or two while my mother finished at the spa and then showered and dressed for the Senior Send-Off dinner buffet.

The wine bottle wound up back in his car, in a cooler, leaving me to wonder
if he’d brought the wine to my Senior Send-Off as a gift, if he’d even intended to open it, or if he just wanted to present it so that he could take it back and tell me that I wasn’t responsible enough for it. Was it even possible to convince my father that I was anything but a toga-clad Bluto, shotgunning PBR cans, fireballing hard liquor like Ogre from
Revenge of the Nerds
? And if it wasn’t possible to convince him, how could I convince anyone else?

The night hadn’t even started, but already it felt desperate.

CHAPTER
THREE: The Jenn Outlook.

Sometime after my father left the house, and sometime before the first flood of parents poured through the front door, Jenn stopped by to help me put the finishing touches on the living room, the bar, and the back courtyard. Everything had been thought-out. The house was a showroom of fraternity accolades: photo albums on the wicker end tables opened to display brothers whose parents had RSVP’d, the handsome
Complete History of Nu Kappa Epsilon National Fraternity
on the long coffee table, several
Marathon
pledge manuals scattered about like magazines at a doctor’s office, just in case some mother or father got curious about our policies, what their sons had been through as pledges. We had nothing to hide. We were fraternity re-defined, and the parents—in reading—would be left mouths agape by the nobility of it all.

I’d even worked with our Web Chairman to create “Parents’ Guide to NKE” brochures, which Jenn and I had printed at the local
copy shop and which she was now arranging in the foyer on an information table, and then skillfully leaving on random chairs inside and outside to make it seem as if the brochures had already been picked up and perused by other parents. The brochures were a wonder, a revelation conjured by Jenn: “The parents are a captive audience, Charles,” she said, “so here’s your chance to get your message out there.” It was impossible to read one and not feel as if your son had made the best decision of his life: there were GPA statistics, a list of awards, blurbs about our alcohol workshops, run-downs of our Habitat For Humanity projects, a thank-you letter from Charles Washington on one inside flap.

As we walked through the house,
Jenn helped me spot things I barely even saw anymore: a gash in one chair (“Move it over here, so the table hides the rip,” she said), a long stain in the tile grout that almost looked like blood. “Give me the bleach,” she said. “You’re dressed already. I haven’t showered yet, so I’ll scrub it out.”

She found bubblegum under tables, chiseled it off with a flat-head screwdriver. The nicer the house became, the more nervous I got. Certainly there would be
one
thing I’d miss, one thing made all the more glaring for the surrounding spotlessness. An extension cord I hadn’t properly hid under a rug, maybe, and some mother would trip and break her neck and—

“You worry too much,” Jenn said.

“You never get a second chance to make a last impression,” I said. “This is it, Jenn. Last fraternity event. This is how they’ll remember me.”

“It’ll be fine,” she said. “Everyone’s gonna have a great time.” She looked toward the bar,
the liquor store of bottles, and shook her head. “I mean, how could they
not
?”

The Jenn Outlook, we called this:
an unfazeable optimism that seemed to always silence any doubts. Whether we were worried about making a movie’s showtime, or burning burgers on the grill at DeLaney Park, or stressed about a Research Methods exam, Jenn would speak a single sentence and make our worries or complaints feel groundless.

“Are your parents in town yet?” she asked.

“My father already stopped by,” I said.

“Where was I?”

“This was, like, twenty minutes before you came over. My mother was at the spa, so he was just stopping by to drop off some—” I paused. “He just wanted to hang out.”

“Did he like it?”

“Did he like what?”

“The bar, the house, all this work you did. He’s gotta be excited, right?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Did you tell him about the job?”

“I did.”

“
I bet he was crazy-excited for you, wasn’t he?” she said. “I told you not to worry.”

I opened the Kahlua, sniffed inside and breathed deeply, dropped a few ice cubes into a rocks glass and set about making a White Russian.
There were two options here: I could tell her the truth, and for once be honest about my imperfect life, or I could do the same thing I always did and convince her that Charles Washington’s life was as happy and flawless as the feed on an average Facebook page. “
Crazy
-excited,” I said. “He was proud that I was doing something I believed in.”

“I told you,” Jenn said. “I
told
you.”

*

In late Fall at EU, when Dead Week hits and the semester’s end comes into view, we drag the lawn furniture out of the fraternity house living room and onto (appropriately) our front lawn. We drag televisions outside, too, and we drink and watch college football; sometimes we grill hamburgers and set up lawn chairs on the grass and—if it’s still sunny in December, which it usually is—kiddy pools, and we invite sorority girls over. We sit outside in the sunshine while the rest of the country is shivering in front of fireplaces, and we post pictures of ourselves (shirtless, arms around girls in bikinis) to Facebook so that all our friends up north can scream at the injustice of it all.

That was how I first met Jenn,
actually. On a Thursday afternoon when nearly everyone had stopped studying for the day, a pack of Kappa Deltas strolled up our front walkway wearing thin t-shirts under which the bright straps of bikini tops were visible. If anyone still had a textbook open, this was the cue to shut it.

That Thursday,
Jenn and I wound up sitting side-by-side on chaise lounges, and we spent hours drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon and discussing our favorite
Seinfeld
episodes, learning one another’s childhoods through sitcom. Every time I saw the “Magic Loogie” episode, for instance, I remembered breaking my arm during a Little League game, spending my first night in a cast on the family room couch, eating pizza and watching
Seinfeld
reruns; I’d video-taped the Magic Loogie episode for some reason, and my father paused the tape again and again to explain the
JFK
references. Jenn would always remember the Soup Nazi episode because her parents had held a family conference after that specific show to tell Jenn and her sister that they’d all be moving from Dallas to Tampa, that her father was quitting his life as a truck driver so they could have stability. Even now, long after the sting of divorce has faded, Jenn told me that she still jokes with her older sister and says “No soup for you!” whenever discussing the buzzkill of trips back home for holidays.

We moved from
Seinfeld
to
Saturday Night Live
. Then
Friends
to
Futurama
. And holy shit, a sorority girl who watched
Futurama
? And
The Simpsons
? And could recite quotes from
The Monster Squad
and
The Goonies
as easily as most of her sisters could recite lines from
Dirty Dancing
? Who
was
this girl? We spent hours on those lawn chairs, following personal pop culture histories and getting lost in memory the same as if we were tumbling down into internet hyperlink loops, unsure where we started and how we’d wound up where we did, hours and hours of conversation so natural it shouldn’t have been possible, and then—like any fantasy—she was gone, and the next day I wondered if she’d existed at all.

But j
ust days later, Jenn’s sorority organized an end-of-the-semester “Grab-A-Date,” one of those affairs where each girl wakes up to learn that she has just 24 hours to find a date at some undisclosed venue: sometimes it’s a beach bar, other times a bowling alley or even a movie theater. At the zero hour, desperate because she’d only heard about the Grab-A-Date with fifteen minutes to spare, Jenn rushed to the NKE house and asked everyone where she could find someone named Charles, the guy she’d met on the lawn days before. “Charles. Do you mean
the
Charles Washington?” one of my brothers asked. I was the Vice President of NKE at the time (pegged as president when elections rolled around next term), and the VP of ESG. My brothers jokingly called me “MOC,” man on campus. “Didn’t realize you were such a hot commodity,” Jenn said when Edwin led her to my second-floor bedroom.

And that night at the Grab-A-Date, it didn’t matter that I’d realized—at the start of the semester—that
my Organizational Communication program was so vague I had no idea what I’d be doing after graduation. It didn’t matter that I’d hated my internships. It didn’t matter, because I entertained Jenn with story after story of my nearly three years of EU exploits, and she loved this exciting persona, the
Man on Campus
, a Charles Washington who seemed to have it all together. Hell, I loved him too.

*

That was a persona, of course, and what I soon learned was this: there is only
one
Jenn, no façades, no deceptions, no performances. Just Jenn. Overwhelmingly optimistic, a little whacky, but only one Jenn, a girl who dances between two worlds and who—if you didn’t know her—you might think is two different people.

There is Jenn
who dances in the world of Kappa Delta, a girl who belongs to a sorority and attends Grab-A-Dates, who spends afternoons at Greek N Things putting together Big Sis – Lil Sis paddles, “Fam 34” paddles, painting the F, the A, the M, in the colors of KD. Jenn dancing in sundresses of fuschia during Rush Week, singing the sorority songs. Jenn dancing at semi-formals, at date functions to tiki bars, at hayride socials…She dances in the sorority house living room when the girls gather late-night in pajamas for chick flicks and re-enact full scenes from
Clueless
or
13 Going on 30
,
Centerstage
or
Showgirls
; she’s fine with all of that. She dances at formals, too, in gowns that glide glistening over her body’s curves, effortless though the dresses take forever to apply
just right
. She dances to every song at formals, the slow and serious—“On Bended Knee” and “Back to One” and “When Can I See You Again?” —and the freaky grindy hot-sex songs—Trick Daddy and Usher and maybe Snoop or 50 Cent. She dances with the other KDs when the
just the girls
! songs come on—“We are Family” and “I’m Every Woman”—and stays on the dance floor during the slapstick playlist—“YMCA” and “ABC,” and sometimes even “Tubthumper” or “99 Red Balloons”: every song, she’s out of her seat, her hands in the air even when Outkast doesn’t tell her to, dancing like a woman who’s let her hair down even when it’s still trapped in the stranglehold of pins and sticky-solid hairspray. She dances with her sorority girls, so in love with this brand of womanhood that you’d think there would be no energy left to dance elsewhere, but she does.

Jenn
dances at the Indie Saloon and at Hip-Star, too, bars far from the top fraternity/sorority hang-outs, bars where every shirt is a slogan T, where the irony is so thick and suffocating that that the crowds have forgotten that they’re even being ironic. She dances to ‘90s Night, to Backstreet and Marcy Playground while drinking two-dollar vodka-cranberries. And Charles, you sit uncomfortable in this other-world, this outside-the-establishment refuge for Gulf Coast hipsters. Jenn doesn’t care, doesn’t know discomfort. She disappears to the front of the room when the moody emo band plays Billy Idol, forces you to hop up and fist-pump and sing along to “867-5309 (Jenny)” and “Don’t Stop Believing” and “Two Tickets to Paradise.” She wears a Def Leppard t-shirt one day, but tomorrow it might be N’Sync or vintage Madonna or Poison or NKOTB, tight baby t’s she found on the internet or at thrift stores and that might have looked ridiculous on anyone else…but
she is Jenn
. For her, it isn’t sarcasm, really, just a style all her own, a sincere devotion to the things that make her happy no matter what anyone else tells her she should or shouldn’t enjoy.

Dancing one night at Alumni Ball
with her fraternity-president boyfriend, a week later at a Gin Blossoms Reunion Show, an outdoor block party in Port Charlotte you’d never have imagined existing if she hadn’t found it, but at the end of the night you somehow feel as if your entire existence has been enriched by the time you’ve spent here with her, the two of you yell-singing “Hey Jealousy” and “Found Out About You.” It’s like eating couscous instead of French fries, a gator burger instead of ground beef. There is nothing quantitative about such experiences, but there is this: there is
you
being better than you would’ve been had you gone to the same old bar and said/done the same old things, and there is Jenn leading the way to that better version of you, dancing as she leads.