American Fraternity Man (68 page)

This is a campus dripping in browns and oranges, the “BGSU” banners flapping from lampposts and the football posters taped up on windows
all printed in colors that match the slushy piles of dead leaves collected along the sidewalks. The concrete buildings are stained dark with rainwater, seeming to glower down at students instead of welcoming them inside; the library—a towering building, eight or nine floors—is decorated along one exterior concrete side with some sort of funky, graffiti-like artwork that feels like a foolish experiment in modern art rather than a striking and inventive “statement.” On another day, perhaps, this campus might convey the same historic authority as Michigan or Illinois, but today it seems only a pale and depressed distant relative.

It is a cold Sunday in Bowling Green, and before I leave the warmth of my Explorer to walk a puddle-spotted sidewalk to the Nu Kappa Epsilon fraternity house, I rummage through my backseat for my Edison University windbreaker. Since I left the Headquarters in late August, I can’t remember a single day of rain, and I can’t
even recall if I stuffed my windbreaker under the seat or into my duffel bag or if, maybe, I left it in Indianapolis. But finally I find it, then make my way through a rain that seems to grow heavier and louder as I walk to the front steps of the NKE chapter house, a non-descript brick structure identical to several other non-descript brick structures across campus, each of them bearing Greek letter combinations.

The president of this chapter, Bradley Camden, meets me at the door and invites
me inside. Bradley is short, slouches as he points me down a long hallway to a special guest room that actually says “GUEST” on the door. “In there is where you’re staying,” he says, but doesn’t lead me to the room, doesn’t help me with my bags.

Not a frat star: Bradley has the sort of pudgy face and stomach that come not from excessive drinking but from a lack of exercise, from all-night video-gaming
, posture shaped by office swivel chair, spine curved perfectly to fit the seat. And I don’t know why, but I’m disappointed.

*

After I’ve dropped off my bags, I meet Bradley in the chapter room where he paces with Harvey Pekar jitters, hands stuffed in pockets, occasionally touching a couch’s armrest before turning around and walking ten steps in the opposite direction.

“I’ve got a strange question,” I say and sit, but
still he stands and shuffles about, still can’t make eye contact for more than a split second. “You all right?”

“Huh? Yeah.”

“I’ve been wondering since I got here. Why do all the houses look the same?”

“Huh?” he asks.

“Sit down,” I say. “You’re making me nervous.”

He does, and I ask again.

“The school owns the fraternity houses,” Bradley says. “They’re just converted dorms with Greek letters on top.” Each house, he tells me, eyes darting about, has a live-in Graduate Assistant and a Resident Advisor—two paid staff members—on the first floor. Bowling Green likes to refer to itself as a “learning laboratory,” he says with a shrug, and so the fraternities and sororities and clubs and organizations are supplied with seemingly limitless resources and graduate student advisors who are completing Master’s degrees in College Student Personnel.

“Do you have guests very often?” I ask him. “Enough to justify a guest room?”

“A lot of grad students.” Bradley scratches his neck. “Every time they have a conference or something, they use all these guest rooms to house the attendees.”

“Just random people, staying with you on random nights?”

“Huh? Yeah, sometimes.”

“Do you have
any
control of this house?” I ask, setting my laptop computer onto a plain table so smooth and scratch-free that I wonder if anyone has ever used it. The cinderblock walls throughout the fraternity house are painted off-white, the color of used-up toothbrush bristles, the texture bumpy and sloppy.

“The university owns it,” Bradley says, words melting into mumble. “They think the house is, like, one of their resources. So they tell us when they need to use the chapter room or the guest room. Then they come and use it.”

“They can use your chapter room, too?”

“Sometimes,” he says again.

“They just tell you, and then they take over your house for a night?”

“Huh? Oh. Yeah.”

*

Later, I sit with the Executive Board in a pizza restaurant near campus. Bradley kept suggesting Subway for dinner, but I wanted a place that might serve beer on a Sunday night. Loosen this kid up. Loosen them all up, because they’ve all got the jitters, the shrugs, the nervous eyes. But we
wait twenty minutes for a table to be cleared; they stare at the floor, scowls on faces, looking a bit like 7-year-old boys dragged to the dentist.

“Do you want to just order a pizza take-out, then?” I ask. “Grab a 12-pack, chill out at the house? We can have our meeting there. More casual.”

“Huh? University doesn’t allow alcohol in the fraternity houses,” Bradley mumbles.

“We can be discrete,” I say. “We’re not getting a keg.”

Bradley shrugs, says he doesn’t care one way or the other.

So we stay at the restaurant to eat pizza, but
after I pour out a glass from the Miller Lite pitcher, the undergraduate fraternity brothers shy away from the beer as if a mere touch might burn them. I asked for seven cups, and all the others remain empty.

“So, um,” I say, “what does everyone do for fun in Bowling Green?”

Huh? Oh, there’s a lot going on at BGSU, they tell me. All the time. But over the next twenty minutes of conversation, they never get specific. Parties? Football tailgates? Bars? They just shrug, tell me that the university is always doing “stuff.” They’re always busy, they say.

*

On my laptop in the guest room. Everyone else in the house asleep. And I’ve never been in a guest room (or a fraternity house) so quiet. Doesn’t feel right. Where am I?

“Charles is”—and I’m typing my status—“bored in Bowling Green.”

Earlier, Bradley and several of the other officers asked if I wanted to watch some
Clone Wars
cartoons they’d downloaded on one of the computers upstairs. “We’ve got, like, a thousand movies on this computer,” someone told me. “
Battlestar Galactica
episodes,
Lost
episodes, every episode of
Adult Swim
…” “No, thank you,” I said. “I’ve, um, got work to do.”

Three more
Facebook friend requests awaiting my approval.

Billy Goodwin, a brother from the University of Delaware.

Ray Hudson, a brother from the University of Michigan.

I accept the requests.

But the third request: Maria Angelos, from New Mexico State University. A thumbnail-sized profile picture accompanying the name, a brunette girl in pajama pants hugging her blonde roommate and beaming at the camera, pink clothing mounds surrounding them, purple and black posters on the walls behind them, all of it looking like the bedroom of a high school cheerleader. “Confirm,” it says, or “Ignore.”

Maria Angelos.

I click on the picture and follow the link to her Facebook profile, but her page simply tells me that I’m not allowed to view Maria’s pictures or information due to advanced privacy settings. She has more sense than I do, it seems, because when I check my own privacy settings, I see that all of my information—my employer, my interests, my educational history—and all of my friends, all of my wall posts, all of my photographs, all of the collected Facebook information for the last five years…all of it is viewable to the general public. But I thought I’d…? And so Maria has seen everything. Maria knows my age, Maria knows that I’m a fraternity consultant.

I ignore the friend request.

*

“You’re a consultant,” Bradley says when I see him in the kitchen the next morning, “so you should check out the CSP program at Bowling Green.” He’s dressed in the same ash-gray hoodie he
wore yesterday, and he’s eating one of those fast-food productions that includes several different breakfast foods—eggs, cheese, sausage, and pancakes, I think—all smashed together. I’ve scoured the kitchen for cereal, for orange juice, for granola bars, anything, but I find only discarded McDonalds and Burger King bags.

“Grad school?” I say. “No, I’m not sure I want to do that.”

Bradley shrugs, tosses his McDonalds bag into the trashcan where it lands on a heap of other fast-food bags. “Didn’t you say you had a Communications degree?” he asks. “What else can you do? Don’t you
have
to go to grad school?”

I force a laugh and say, “Not at all, bro.”

He winces when I say “bro,” so I say in a slightly more stilted tone, “Not at all, Bradley.”

*

The living room of this Bowling-Green-owned-and-operated NKE house carries all the warmth of a DMV lobby. The three couches—green-cushioned blocks situated in a sort of amphitheater square around a 32-inch TV—are so exceedingly ugly that they almost seem like a sketch-comedy joke, something from the set of
SNL
. It’s an indestructible room, meant to withstand fifty years of annual move-ins and move-outs: doors and walls that can never be broken, couches and carpet so bright and hideous that their very ugliness makes them stain-proof.

Just the same as in the hallways at the New Mexico State girl’s dorm, though, the brothers of this fraternity house have added touches of humanity, wherever possible. A metal tube runs the length of the wall around the living room—interrupted only by two red doors, one which leads to the main hallway and the other which leads to the live-in Graduate Advisor’s room—and encased within the metal tube is a thick strip of cork. The cork, apparently, is the only part of the wall on which the brothers may hang any wall decorations, and in a straight line around the room are hundreds of social event photographs and multi-colored flyers for various campus and Greek Life events (“Welcome Back Expo,” “Swing Club Dance-Off,” “Greek Anti-Hazing Speaker”).

It’s now Monday night, and it is in this living room that I again sit with the fraternity Executive Board, all of us eating our Burger King drive-through quietly, dabbing our mouths with our napkins, clearing our throats, munching softly. They look at me with “you’re not one of us” distrust, something that has lately been easy to shake. But not here.

“So,” I say eventually. “Do you guys cook very often? You have a kitchen, right?”

“No,” says Bradley.

“No?”

“No, we don’t really cook.”

The living room TV is on, playing old
Seinfeld
reruns.

“Why not?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” he says, shrugs. “Time?”

“What do you mean?”

“We don’t have a time to get together. Everyone’s got different schedules.”

“You could still hire a cook, though. Late plates for anyone who works.”

“University won’t let us. They told us that we’d have to use the campus meal plan, have it delivered. Meal plan sucks.”

“Why don’t you take turns cooking? You can buy food in bulk.”

“You serious?”

“A lot of alumni tell me that this is how some houses were run just ten, fifteen years ago,” I say. “You guys have all this kitchen equipment in here. Industrial stoves and what-not. You could put it to good use.”

“None of us can cook,” he says.

“You can learn, right?”

“Did you ever do that at your house?”

“Not exactly,” I say, and I suddenly have this image of my father searching the hallways
of the EU house, trying the doors and looking for Windex and a mop, asking me if I could really call this
responsibility
if I couldn’t even get into my own kitchen. “We had a cook.”

“Listen,” he says. “I can’t even make scrambled eggs. We’re not the kind of guys that are going to cook meals for each other, okay?”

And after we finish our Burger King, these kids spend their night immersed in video games. All of them, it seems. Seven or eight of the fraternity brothers drag their wireless laptops into the living room, plug in power cords, and they play
World of Warcraft
together. “Who’s going to GAMMA tomorrow?” Bradley asks as a scream erupts from his laptop speakers. Then the sound of swords clashing. Then a gurgle. GAMMA stands for “Greeks Advocating the Mature Management of Alcohol,” and it’s one of the many weekly programs that BGSU mandates for each fraternity.

“I killed the fuck out of this guy!” another of the brothers yells.

“I’ll go to GAMMA,” someone else says. “Got nothing at that time.”

“You guys don’t drink. Why are you going to GAMMA?” I ask. But when I speak, the entire living room suddenly feels like the quiet floor of a library, the silence punctuated only by the completely-in-synch video game music of
Warcraft
.

No one answers my question.
It’s as if, in this setting, I’m not allowed to speak.

“Intramural flag football tomorrow, too,” Bradley says, explosions blasting out of the computer. “Daniel, could you make a flyer for the bulletin wall? Remind everyone of the game?”