American Fraternity Man (60 page)

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..........................................pink and purple..............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

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.....................................................off my shirt....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

......................flesh................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................XXX...........................................................................................................................................................................................................hand on.......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................XXX............................................................................................................................................................................................

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................................................................................................................................... the sink and I grab ...........................................................................................................................

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CHAPTER TWENTY. Charles Wakes Up.

I slide out of the bed and stumble toward the door to Jose’s bathroom so I can piss-puke-shit/ whatever-the-fuck-my-aching-body-is-screaming-that-it- needs.

But
then the black shapes throughout the room start focusing: posters on the wall, colors, purples and pinks, an Alpha Alpha picture frame atop an end-table next to the bed.

Blackout night. Just a series of strobe-light snapshots.
And just before I open the door, I remember the most vital snapshot from last night: this isn’t Jose’s living room, this isn’t Jose’s pull-out couch where I’ve been sleeping. I came back to
Maria’s
dorm room. And there, across the room, buried beneath the fluffy purple comforter, pressed against the far edge of the bed, is a young woman, swaths of glittery dark hair spilling from underneath the blankets. Maria. And on the other side of the room, close to the door, is another bed and another shape under the blankets: two bodies: Shelley and Sam Anderson. Everyone sleeping.

It’s sometime early in the morning in Maria’s dark dorm room, so early that it might still be last night, so dark that almost everything seems indistinguishable from everything else
.

These are the only snapshots I remember:

The bar in Juarez. Dios Mia? The dance floor. Packed, hundreds of bodies brushing against mine throughout the night; barely enough room to breathe, but I didn’t feel crushed under any collective weight.
All those bodies, and still my legs were free to move however I wanted to move them, still my arms were free to slide around Maria’s waist and bring her close, still my pelvis was free to grind, my head was free to nod to the music.
We moved with ease through the crowd and to the bar, we floated.

Then:
crawling into bed with Maria, sloppy-drunk sex, and—after she fell asleep—vomiting in the community bathroom at the end of this dorm floor’s hallway. And not just “vomited,” like into a toilet, but, like, a spectacle…across sinks and mirrors.

I shouldn’t be here, and yet I am here. The cold certainty of my morning.

*

I
creep through Maria’s dorm room, hunched over, patting the dark carpet and searching for the shirt and jeans I tossed on the floor. Random shapes across the floor, boxes and giant plastic bins and folders and textbooks, maybe even a bean bag against one wall. Tequila hangover right now, but I
do
remember what this dorm room looked like in daylight: a pink and purple mess, notebooks and envelopes of developed photographs scattered everywhere.

L
umber forward, head spinning, and finally bump into what I thought was the bean bag, but when I lean to touch it I discover that it’s actually a waist-high clothes pile. Dirty, clean, I don’t know. These girls either don’t have a hamper, or they don’t have a dresser. Stick my hands into the clothing mountain, hope my jeans and my shirt lay somewhere on its slopes.

I grab a white skirt. Toss it. A black halter top, a studded belt. Toss them. Girl’s clothing: all of it. I toss each item into a separate pile so that I don’t keep searching through the same clothes over and over again, but soon
I realize that I
am
grabbing and inspecting the same clothes, and I’m spinning and can’t tell one pile from the other.

Across the room, the blinds are shut tight, not a single slip of sunlight sneak
ing through. And there are sounds on the other side of that window, cars driving past, distant lawnmowers, the noise of the world grinding back to life for the Wednesday work day.

Something in my stomach gurgles. Almost a full week of Mexican food and beer and mixed drinks coursing through me, and I need to get back to the bathrooms. In a hurry. But—oh for fuck’s sake—I can’t run through the girl’s dorms
in just my boxers.

S
tomach groans again.

I give up on my clothes. They’re lost, at least until the lights come back on. But I’ve got to get to the bathroom, quick, so I look for a temporary solution.

Across the room, Maria turns in the bed, makes a mousy noise, and finally comes to a rest facing me. She can’t wake up now. Let me get my head straight, get to the bathroom, purge whatever is rebelling against my insides, clean up the mess I made so the entire floor doesn’t notice, and then let me figure out how to sneak out of here.

Maria moves again, this time brushing away the blanket.

Eyes still closed, but she faces my direction as though watching my every move. Meanwhile, I’m standing in a stooped position in the center of her dorm room, one hand in a clothing pile and the other holding a pair of her panties—a lace thong?—and so I fling it away and make an innocent face in case she wakes. She doesn’t.

I toss aside a pair of Capri pants and finally find a
t-shirt, a small powder-blue baby T
.
Why not? I struggle into the shirt and it’s so tiny that every flabby curve of my chest pops out. The shirt barely covers my stomach, stretches only to my belly button.

But no matter how much I rummage through the clothing, I can’t find any pants large enough to manage around my waistline, so
this baby T and this pair of boxers will have to suffice. I head across the room to the door, remember that—because this is a university dorm—it’s the sort of door that automatically locks as soon as it closes. I grab a sandal from the floor, turn the door handle softly, and as I squeeze out—hallway light flooding into the room—Maria wiggles her nose and coughs—I hurry out into the hallway and stuff the sandal into the crack between the door and the doorframe so it stays open.

*

Another snapshot from last night develops in my mind. Brief, indistinct, the sort of photo taken with blinding sunlight in the background. Perhaps useless?

After the dancing, there was a corner booth. Maria’s tongue in my mouth, my hand on her ass. Looking out across the bar, Jose staring directly back at me as he sipped a drink and nodded to the beat of
an Usher song. Shelley dancing in front of him, but he barely acknowledged her: he was looking at me, face as humorless and unforgiving as a sand-trap.

Sipping the drink, staring
at me like an
outsider
.

So I moved my hand up Maria’s back, let it rest on her shoulders instead of her ass, and finally he turned his attention elsewhere.

*

The dorm’s hallway is lit orange
by overhead lights, the same exhausted pharmaceutical color of over-the-counter cold medications. Doors run both walls—heavy metal bedroom doors, so strong they could survive a battering ram attack (this is the type of “security” that fathers demand for their college daughters, but it’s rendered pointless when a daughter
invites
a young man to her room). To break the industrial intimidation of the hallway, the RAs have lined the cinder-block walls with colorful bulletin boards; they’ve taped cut-out construction-paper New Mexicos just below each door’s peephole, occupant names written in bubble letters within the cut-out: Maria and Shelley on the door I just closed, Christy and Angel on the door across from me. Many of the girls on this floor have also decorated their doors with glossy photos taken in these first few weeks of school, sprawling collages of party-time craziness, nights at El Sombrero and afternoons at Aggies football games, snapshots of long lunch tables at the campus cafeteria, ten girls to a photo, hugging, cheek-kissing, “sorority squatting,” making their fingers into
Charlie’s Angels
guns, holding red plastic cups and smiling like their days never have dull moments or tiring routines, and it’s college college college, some of the photos cut in cute shapes, in hearts or circles or zig-zag outlines, and some of them have thought-cloud and word-balloon stickers stuck to them, too, with smarmy captions like “Who needs boys when you’ve got the girls?!?” and “Girl’s Night Out!”

But my stomach tightens: posted on the door across the hall, a weekly class schedule: Christy (the room’s occupant) apparently has class at 8:00 AM on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.
My cell phone is stuffed in the pocket of my lost jeans and I have no idea if it’s 7:00 or 8:00 or 9:00, but I know—just from the sunlight and outdoor sounds—that it’s Wednesday morning, and even though I journeyed to Mexico last night, the rest of the world went about its usual business and the work/school day is definitely beginning. Christy and the rest of the freshman girls on this floor are ready to enter this hallway to head to class, and they are
not
ready to see a 22-year-old man standing here in skimpy boxers, gut hanging out of a powder-blue baby T with a screen-print Anne Geddes photograph of a little boy wearing an over-sized suit and holding out a flower to a girl in a sundress.

I place my hand on the wall, steady myself, and—running my
fingers over bulletin boards and doors and posters—I make my way to the end of the hallway, several times stepping barefoot on discarded staples and tacks, several times biting my tongue to keep from swearing. And when I’m mere feet from the bathroom door, an electronic beep rings out from the opposite end of the hallway: the patient and unnerving noise of an elevator changing floors. Followed by the clinical swoosh of the elevator doors opening, someone coming home.

I dart toward the bathroom,
baby T ripping under the arms as I run.

“Totally bombed that test,” says a girl from inside the open elevator, keys jingling in her hand. “Like, none of that shit was in the notes. How am I supposed to know what a
macro
is?”