American Fraternity Man (7 page)

Once every couple months, she drags a whole crew—you, maybe Edwin or James Hawke, and a gaggle of sorority girls who would otherwise be hotly pursued at
the Sigma Chi bar by well-muscled slicksters—she gets these whole crews together and re-directs them to ‘90s Grunge Night at Supernova, this ordinarily lame bar on the outskirts of Campus Town made bustling by Jenn and her entourage, and it’s her favorite thing in the world, bands covering Pearl Jam and Nirvana and Soundgarden and Alice in Chains, maybe more morose than you’d picture for Jenn, “Black Hole Sun” and “Jeremy” and “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” She was in elementary or middle school when these songs came out, but they all feel like the soundtrack for a high-schooler who spent his days draped in blacks and chains and world-doesn’t-understand-me sadness. It doesn’t seem very Jenn Outlook, but still, Jenn doesn’t miss these nights. The best ‘90s Grunge Nights start with DJ request and move on to some featured cover band, the best of which has always been the Presidents of the United States of America Cover Band Cover Band, so bizarre because the Presidents of the United States of America weren’t really grunge, and probably weren’t ever deserving of one cover band, let alone another cover band to cover the cover band (?). For all you know, the old guys on the stage are the original band itself. They don’t even restrict themselves to the Presidents of the United States of America, sometimes going off on wild tangents of hip-hop and early-‘90s dance, but who can resist the wackiness of “Peaches” morphing into “Garden Grove” morphing into “Gin ‘N Juice” morphing into “All That She Wants” morphing into “Lump.” It makes no sense, but Jenn stands at the front of the room when the band takes the stage and she is a smile and an exclamation point in a bar that is mostly scowls and tortured ellipses.

She dances in these two worlds,
happy-proper-girlie vs. dark-grunge-whacky, strange though the juxtaposition may seem, but she is honesty personified. Jenn is Jenn is Jenn, and somehow she makes you feel like you should be proud to be Charles Washington even when you’re not sure who that is.

*

At some point over the past year, Jenn and I moved beyond the superficial quirks and platitudes of a college relationship’s early days. We moved beyond sitcom discussions, and drove straight into full-speed-ahead discussions about family and future.

And n
o one else knew, but on the night of the Senior Send-Off, I was planning to give Jenn my fraternity letters.

It was called the “
lavalier
ceremony,” and the act itself was simple. I bought the silver charm online, the letters NKE dangling straight down, and I’d get down on one knee and clasp the charm to her current necklace. Simple. But it was universally acknowledged at our campus: the lavalier was a promise of engagement (no one got engaged
in
college, of course), forever merging your girlfriend with your brotherhood, and even though NKE tradition mandated that the chapter was supposed to physically destroy any member who gave up his letters to a woman—they’d mob me, beat me, rip off my clothes, tie me to a street light on Greek Row, and dump sour milk and raw eggs and shaving cream and beer and toilet water all over me, good clean fun, just like Jerry O’Connell in
Scream 2
except without the unfortunate kill scene afterward—I wanted my parents to see that, too. To know how dedicated I was to taking such a step in my life. What I was willing to endure to do the right thing.

I’d be leaving for a full year on the road, but my parents loved her, and we already knew everything we needed to know about one another, Jenn and I. We knew the good and the bad, the nitty-gritty and the nitty-grittier, and we were still excited by everything we saw. There was no reason to delay the inevitable: when you know, you know.

She’d be at the Senior Send-Off, probably standing there with my parents, and then moments later she’d be wearing my letters.

*

“Charles, I’ve got something to say,” Jenn told me as we arranged the final stack of napkins on one of the long fold-out tables in the dining room.
We’d booked a caterer for the Senior Send-Off, just a local barbecue joint, but we’d gone to great lengths to make this as classy as BBQ could be: we wouldn’t simply have plastic condiment packets, nor even cheap squeeze bottles, but decadent
serving bowls
,
ladles
, the barbecue sauce glistening in the glass like refrigerated pudding. There would be no torn and discarded packets across the floor, no errant squirts of mustard to ruin some mother’s white shirt. We’d even arranged on the table—or rather, Jenn had arranged—stacks of napkins in alternating geometric designs, alternating colors.
“And I just wanted to say it now,” she said, “before everyone gets here and this whole house gets crazy.”

“
Talk to me,” I said.

“I don’t ever want to tell you what to do,” she said. “The second that happens, a relationship—a friendship, even—is already over.” Her hand on my chest, and she closed her fingers around the bottom of my collar, pulled me closer, kissed me, and how long had we been together at that point?, a year and a half?, and so it should’ve just been an average
mid-afternoon kiss, an action no different than a handshake or high-five or chest-bump with a fraternity brother, but it somehow seemed like something more. Yes, I’d be leaving her soon. I’d be leaving all of this. Starting over sounds exciting until you realize that you’re
ending
one life to begin the other. “But,” she said, “I know how you get about this fraternity. The hours you spend with it. The energy.”

“That’s why it’s the perfect job,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “But listen. You need to promise that you’re going to call me.”

“Of course I
’ll—”

“And you need to promise that you’ll visit. That’s the only way this will work.
I’ve got experience with this sort of thing, someone I love hitting the road for weeks at a time.”

“Plane tickets are expensive, gas is expensive,” I said, “so I’ve got to be strategic.”

“I understand that,” she said. “But seriously, what else are you gonna spend your money on? A new TV? Can’t lug that around in the Explorer, can you?” She laughed.

But I was thinking about engagement rings. My father had been right about how little money I’d pocket; already I’d done the math in my head and I knew I’d been
too eager to believe Walter LaFaber when he told us that we’d save a ton of money on the road because our food and rent and electric and water was all covered by the National Headquarters. A thousand bucks a month in salary, and I was supposed to buy an engagement ring
and
plane tickets home? Already my head was caught in a loop of thought, but it was the night of my Senior Send-Off: I didn’t
want
reality.

“Jenn
,” I said. “You know I’ll do it.”

“For your good as much as mine,” she said. “Charles, I know how you get.”

“How I get?”

She stopped, fingers now curled around the back of my neck. Closed her eyes and shook her head. “I know how frustrated you get when things don’t work out the way you want them to.
You try so hard.”

And I said something, and then she said something else, and I know we kept talking, but damned if I r
emember what either of us said because my head was a frozen computer with hourglass spinning, and then Jenn was gone so she could shower and attend some early-evening sorority function for her own Senior sisters; she’d be back in a couple hours with her camera, ready to be our official photographer and capture our event and make permanent every shining moment, but for a minute—the short stretch of time before any of the parents arrived, and before any of the brothers emerged from their bedrooms upstairs—it was just me and the house living room, an image so lonely it belonged in some end-of-the-world zombie-apocalypse movie, the man who wakes up to discover that the world has died off while he slept.

CHAPTER FOUR. The barbecue.

By the time my parents arrived back at the fraternity house for the Senior Send-Off, most of the other parents had already filtered inside, fifty or sixty total. They came two at a time, husbands wearing polo shirts tucked into khaki pants, a few still in shirt and tie, having driven here straight from work; wives in Florida weekend wear, skirts or jeans or white pants, all of them walking around our house hesitantly, led by sons unsure how to introduce them to their college world; mothers eventually stopping at the giant framed composite photos of the entire chapter, touching the glass, trying to locate the individual photos of their sons, saying, “Oh, why didn’t he
tell
me he had his picture taken in a tuxedo? He looks so
nice
! I would have bought one!”; or touching the hanging portraits of our founders, or the charter, straightening the frames. Some of the fathers commented on the wicker couches, on the big-screen TV where the Magic game flashed with high-def crispness. They stepped over discolorations in the area rug, unaware that these were beer and vomit stains from their own sons. And over and over again, I heard parents repeating the same two questions: “Where’s the bar?”, and “Where’s the food?”

The first question was easy to answer.
“Right this way,” I said to Mr. and Mrs. Cambria. “Right this way,” I said to Mr. and Mrs. Simmons. Over and over, a handshake and a modest bottom-of-the-throat laugh when they said, “You’re the president? Good work, son.” And then I watched them shrink in awe of the grand display of alcohol at the bar. “Where’s the bar?” they had asked, and my response had stunned them to silence.

F
or some reason, though, our caterer—a local barbecue restaurant—was late. “Still gonna be another hour,” they told me when I called. “Sorry, bro. We’re backed up.”

“I’ve got over a hundr
ed people waiting for food,” I said. The house was full by this point, any minor error magnified, and I’d imagined a rigid schedule for the night: cocktail hour, barbecue, awards and cake, lavalier, ass-beating, immortality, all before midnight. “If you’re late, there better be some sort of discount.”

“You gave us a window,” the clerk told me. “Your sheet says 7-9 PM. So we’ve got another two hours to fulfill the order. Like I said, busy busy busy over here.”

“I never said anything about a
window
. That’s the time of the event!”

“It was on the paperwork you signed.
It said ‘between these times.’ That’s how we plan ahead for use of our kitchen space, the times that our customers give us.”

“I need the food,” I said, summoning my presidential voice, something I wasn’t very good at. “If we’re satisfied, we’ll use you guys for all our events. If not? We’ll let everyone on campus know about our dissatisfaction. Trust me when I say that there will be no one ordering from Old Smoky ever again.”

“We don’t like threats,” the man said. “You’ll get your order in the time frame promised.”

Click.

“Where’s the food?” Edwin Cambria asked me. He’d helped me plan the night, might have even filled out the catering paperwork, and now that I was on the phone
he
was fielding those two questions over and over:
Where’s the bar?
(easy) and
Where’s the food
? (tougher). “It’s coming, it’s coming,” he told them, trying to then introduce one set of parents to another, or trying to steer them all toward the bar instead of toward the long empty tables where the plates and napkins were stacked in anticipation of the barbecue.

“I just called,” I told him, holding up my cell phone. “Running late.”

“Don’t worry, brother-man. As long as the bar’s stocked, everything’s kosher. I’ll play bartender!” So here was Edwin, going from family to family to continue his assurances that food was coming, pointing out the bar and the beer tubs, then slipping behind the bar and conjuring a martini shaker and pointing to one mother and saying “I know
you
want a chocolate martini, am I right?”

And
the minutes ticked past.

E
ventually, Edwin’s parents joined him at the bar, a semi-circle of genetic inheritance—the father’s pointed nose on his son, the mother’s comically round eyes. The entire room, in fact, had become a case study of shared traits, of parental features—hair colors or styles or texture, shoulder size, even clothing preference—passed onto children. Blonde hair came from
you
, thick forearms from you, freckles from you, bushy eyebrows from you. My mother with a drink in her hand, my father stolid and humorless. But everywhere, the same look of hunger.

Our Senior Send-Off featured only a short awards ceremony, planned for after dinner, but there were really no other activities on the agenda
that I could cram into this empty over-long cocktail hour. I couldn’t turn this into a college party, after all, and put on a Kanye CD, dim the lights, and let lust take over. I couldn’t roll out the beer pong table, couldn’t gather all of the brothers together to sing the dirty “Yogi Bear” song. And so—with no food yet delivered—the tiny father-mother-son clumps milled around, then drifted back to the bar with greater frequency, as if there was a riptide in the otherwise-stagnant waters of the living room that compelled them all to constantly circle back to the bar. And soon enough, the trashcans were full, sixty Baby Boomers holding beer bottles or cocktail cups, forty or so drinking-age children seizing the opportunity to grab alcohol and make sure their parents knew that—
yes
—they could drink casually too, they were capable of it, they did it well.