American Fraternity Man (64 page)

Wednesday night at Texas Tech to

*

To Thursday night, when I get so drunk that I have to cancel the Alcohol Responsibility workshop that we’d planned for Friday afternoon. “It wouldn’t be right, talking about alcohol abuse when I look like this,” I tell their president, rubbing my eyes and sipping water. “You guys got lucky. It’s a long fucking presentation.” We understand, we understand, he says. That’s cool, bro. You’re the best. “Just don’t say a word of this to anyone,” I tell him. “I don’t ever get drunk on chapter visits.” No, no, he says. Not a word. “And I can transform back into a Fun Nazi in a heartbeat,” I say. “Then it’s workshop workshop worksop. Investigations. Infractions. You know what I’m talking about.” I know, he says, and we’re both referring to the kegs that they hide in the chapter lodge, an offense which could end them…if I pushed the issue.

Thursday night in the Texas Tech lodge, to

*

To sometime after 1 AM, and I’m standing outside the lodge in the chilly darkness of a mid-September night, MGD in one hand and cell phone in the other. Inside, the brothers are blasting Kid Rock and howling together in a sloppy chorus of voices that they’re “Drinking whiskey out the bottle, not thinkin’ ‘bout tomorrow, singin’ ‘Sweet Home Alabama’
all summer long
!” Jenn has been leaving messages all week, but I’ve avoided the call-back because I’m afraid of how I’ll sound when we speak. Is it possible that she’ll sniff out the
other girl
still lingering on me? Each of Jenn’s messages has grown more frantic than the last, and out in Florida the bars have closed, she’s home, so finally I call her back, though I try to give the impression that I’m tired, that my days have been filled with meetings, that I’m living in constant jet-lag, and that my hectic schedule has made it difficult to find time for a phone conversation. A real conversation. You know, Jenn? One of those talks that
matter
, where we talk all night about
Seinfeld
and
Futurama
and fathers and future families and all that? Jenn’s voice, by contrast, sounds scratchy, and she explains that it’s because she cheered so much at the Homecoming Spirit Rally the night before. “Do you even realize what time it is?” she asks.

“I didn’t,” I say. “I forgot about the time difference.”

“I forgive you,” she says raspily. “What time does your flight get in tomorrow night?”

“My flight? I don’t leave here until
the weekend.”

“
Well, I’ll be at the game on Saturday. Who’s picking you up from the airport?”

“I haven’t thought that far ahead,” I say.

“You haven’t been calling me back. You don’t tell me things.”

“I’ve been busy,” I say. “I don’t have my Explorer, so I can’t get a second to myself.”

“Is that Kid Rock in the background?”

“Huh? Oh, right. These guys love that stuff.”

“So what time”—she coughs, clears her throat. “So what time are you flying in?”

“Not sure. Noon, maybe?”

“Who’s picking you up?”

“I need to call the guys at Fresno,” I say. “I don’t know.”

“Fresno? What does that have to do with anything?”

“My next visit is Fresno State.”

“That’s…” she starts, scratchy voice suddenly inflamed with emotion. “That’s not what we’re talking about, Charles.”

“That’s what
I’m
talking about. I’m in Lubbock, and I’m flying to Fresno.”

“Homecoming, Charles.
Homecoming
here at Edison.”

I rub the stubble on my cheeks, run my fingers along my smooth forehead, perhaps waiting for the world to offer some interruption, a car horn, a plane overhead, but although an occasional breeze rolls past there is only quiet here in Lubbock. Homecoming. In
two days
. The single mid-semester weekend on which I’d promised Jenn that I’d return home. I’ve forgotten to clear my schedule, to book plane tickets. And while I know that what she
should
really care about is seeing me, and while I
could
promise to fly back three weeks from now instead (a compromise!), I also know that this weekend has become symbolic for her.

It was supposed to have been symbolic for me, too, I realize suddenly. Just months ago—was it only
months
?—I was imagining a crowd of fraternity brothers surrounding me to sing the Sweetheart Song, Jenn crying as she ran her fingers over the lavalier. I’d imagined sour milk over my head. Hog-tied. A glorious ass-beating. I’d imagined myself tied to the light pole on Greek Row, with Jenn working furiously to free me so that we could go back to the hotel room I’d booked across town…I’d imagined something nice, the Ritz-Carlton, even though I don’t have money for plane tickets let alone for a nice hotel…and I’d imagined the kind of sex I would remember. Not the hot tub kind, not the tequila-drunk kind. Not romantic-comedy sex, either, or ‘80s action movie sex, blue-light special with drapes blowing in the breeze and silhouettes making window-shadows while “Take My Breath Away” breathed behind us. I’d imagined the kind of sex where maybe I’d shower the crap off myself, the yolks and the OJ pulp slipping into the drain and Charles Washington feeling cleaner than he’d ever felt, renewed, and Jenn would be waiting in the room in a hotel robe with only the lavalier around her neck, and then she’d walk slowly to me and I’d slip my hands beneath the folds of the robe and brush it back from her shoulders and it would just be her and the necklace and before I pulled her face to mine and pressed my body against hers I would say, “This is the start. When I get back to Florida, I’ll have a different piece of jewelry for you.” And then—oh, you can imagine the sex
then
.

“I can look up some prices,” I say. “Hotwire.com. Bad flights, crazy expensive at this point, but I’m sure there are spots.”

“Oh please,” she says. “I just want to hear you say it, Charles.”

“I can make this happen. I’ll get back there.”

“I want to hear you say that you didn’t book your tickets,” she says.

“I’m looking for solutions, Jenn,” I say, and there’s a sudden urgency
to my voice that I didn’t anticipate. “
Solutions
. Come on, help me out here.”

“I want to hear you say that you forgot.”

“No, I remember. I was just waiting.”

“Waiting for what?
You don’t care. Just say it.”

“I do care, Jenn. I’m trying to take care of this right now.”

“Are you high or something?” she asks. “What’s so important about your fucking job that you can’t even call me, that you can’t visit on the one day I care about?”

“I’m not on drugs, Jenn.”

“Just say it, Charles. Say what it is.”

“Jenn,
really
.”

“You never booked the tickets. That should tell me something, right? This isn’t like, ‘Hey, remember to call my sister for her birthday,’ and then forgetting. You could have bought tickets back in July, when you
were
at your office. And you lied about it.”

“I didn’t know the itinerary for my other flights yet.”

“Keep telling yourself that.”

“I’m telling you the truth, Jenn. This is…you don’t understand life on the road.”

“Here we go. Really, Charles, I’m through with this crap.”

“
Through with what crap? This is my life.”

“You’re really not coming?” she asks.

“Just…it’ll be fine. Homecoming will be
fine
without me, okay?” And now
I’m
angry, like she’s the one who ripped the dream from
me
. Look at what I was willing to put myself through: a flight from Texas, the baggage, the lines, the security checkpoints, the Blazers and their leadership books, the take-off, the landing, the decompression headache, the hotel room and rental car, the lavalier, the eggs, the swollen wrists and rope-burn and near-suffocation from the hog-tie. Look at what I was willing to do, to go through, and she didn’t appreciate it? “You’ll be just fine. Dancing, drinking to your heart’s content. You’ve got the
Jenn Outlook
, after all.”

“
Are you making fun of me?”

“I want
you
to hear yourself,” I say. “This isn’t the Jenn I know. I’m offering to come back, to make this work. If you don’t want me to, that’s on
you
.”

“Enjoy the fucking desert,” she says and the line goes silent, and I’m standing outside in the eerie stillness of West Texas with the phone pressed against my ear
, Kid Rock having faded to Uncle Kracker or the Zac Brown Band or something. Seconds pass, then minutes, and I know I’m not talking with anyone anymore and I know that there’s no reason to continue standing here like this, but a month ago this would have shattered me, my future consumed in a destructive blaze: all those mature images I’d dreamed of the way life was supposed to be post-college, Jenn as my sorority-girl wife, the two of us living in a downtown condo and driving back to EU for Homecoming every year, wearing NKE and  “Alumni” shirts, young professionals, world figured out. But now, here where the sky is crisp blackness stretching from one horizon to the next over the undeveloped curvature of the Earth, I breathe deeply and try to convince myself once again that blank space is better. If we work it out, we work it out.

Thursday at Texas Tech to

*

To Saturday night, which passes without a single phone call or text from Jenn.

Convince the brothers to drive me somewhere with cheap drink specials.

Wedge myself into a crowded college bar called “Moonshine,” blonde hair and skirts and glitter everywhere, girls in cowboy hats and boots
, asses bursting from the bottoms of their shredded jean shorts, near-riot breaking out on the dance floor when the country music makes way for Rihanna. Keep myself surrounded, MGD in hand, head nodding, so that I don’t think about her, so that I don’t think about the way my life was supposed to be when I returned home. Saturday night at Moonshine, then Sunday morning at Lubbock’s airport to

*

To Fresno State, and now I’ve arrived at a Bud Lite chapter.

Loosen up, loosen up, you don’t want to be the only guy in the house without a drink.

By day, I help the Fresno State brothers create and fine-tune their budget, help them fill out Delinquent Forms for members past due, help them research collections agencies for members who owe more than $500, help them research online dues-paying sites, OmegaFi. We update their decades-old chapter bylaws to comply with new university regulations on membership and housing, and I collect checks for National Headquarters dues and national insurance. “We just got more accomplished in, like, two days, than we had all year,” their president tells me, and I nod and tell him that I’m happy for him.

“Friend-request me,” he says. “Join our fraternity’s group page.”

“You have a Facebook page for the chapter?” I ask.

“It’s a forum. We post questions, updates, that sort of thing. I’m sure our officers will have, like, a thousand questions about the budget.”

“I’m not on Facebook anymore,” I say.

“Dude,
” he says. “Get with the
times
. You don’t have internet or text messaging on your phone? You don’t have a profile? Even my mother is on Facebook.”

LaFaber’s speeches about digital footprints seem less dire now, articles in the
Washington Post
and
New York Times
chronicling Obama’s social media strategies, the first political candidate to fully embrace and absorb himself in Web 2.0. I’ve gone from a world where Facebook and MySpace are liabilities, dirty autobiographies to drag you down and ruin whatever future you might want to write for yourself…to a world where the technologies are Potential! Potential! Potential! “Yes we can!” speeches reprinted in their entirety atop photos from the civil rights era, photos of white and black hands clasped together, shared and re-shared and re-shared, 20-year-olds changing their profile pictures to the Obama “Hope” graphic. Friendships suddenly blossoming between kids and their corporations, all at the click of a “like” for MSNBC and FoxNews. Amazon.com and Microsoft and MTV and Kellogg’s, “liked” and friended and shared. It’s clear now: there is no way other than this.

“You don’t even have any mp3s on this shitty laptop,” the president says. “How do you survive?”

“Our Tech Director warned us,” I say. “He told us not to download anything, that they could track it when we got back to Headquarters.”

“You’re shitting me,” he says. He clicks a few buttons, weasels his way through my internet setting
s and my control panel. “Well, this laptop probably doesn’t have the memory for iTunes anyway. But I can change a few settings, download Kazaa for you. Then you can listen to songs on the Windows Media Player, at least.”

“I don’t know,” I say.

“Just delete the program before you give the computer back,” he says. “Transfer your songs by flashdrive or Ethernet cord or something. Simple, brother. A man without mp3s can hardly be called a man. Do you even have an iPod?”