American Fraternity Man (79 page)

“I don’t know if I can do that,” I say, and let the drapes fall shut.

I don’t kno
w if I can smooth out the paper:

“You need to finish the Spring, also.”

“The Spring? But I want to apply
now
. I need to get out of here.”

“Are you really
serious
about this opportunity?” he asks, and for a moment I can almost hear the smile in his voice, the demanding lilt of those final words speckled with the same cruel delight as when Walter LaFaber asks a question that is really no question at all: just another chance to let everyone know who’s really in charge.

“Very serious,” I say.

“Then you’ll finish the semester. And you’ll lobby for that Illinois expansion in the Spring,” Dr. Vernon says. “Lobby hard.”

“You know about the Illinois colonization?”

“A small world we have here in higher education,” he says, again too gleeful, and I think of Grant Farmor, the Greek Advisor at Purdue, the kid who seemed to burst with excitement over the nitty gritty gossip of the national fraternity world. After he learned about the interest group, did he immediately call Dr. Vernon, fill him in as if he was Vernon’s little frontier outpost spy? Or has Dr. Vernon known all along, even before Farmor told him, even before Farmor told me, even before I met with Dr. Vernon last week, even before…even before I was sent on an emergency visit to close the University of Illinois chapter to begin with? How long has Dr. Vernon known? How
much
does he know?

“I don’t know that there’s going to be
an expansion, not officially,” I try. “No one at Headquarters has told me anything about it. For God’s sake, I still have the old charter in the back seat of my car.”

“Oh, it’s coming, the colonization,” he says. “No doubt about it. Just convince your superiors that you would make a phenomenal Lead Expansion Consultant at Illinois.
You closed the chapter, after all, so you’d make the perfect consultant to organize the colonization.”

“I…I’ll try.”

“Get that position, and you’ve got a guaranteed spot here for summer,” he says.

“If not?”

“We won’t talk about that,” Dr. Vernon says, lower by several octaves. “We want to document the inner workings of these colonizations, from a national fraternity perspective. Everything. In order to change the culture, we’ve got to change the institutions.”

“Change the institutions,” I say.

“You’ve got it, Charles Washington. You’ve got it.”

*

Charles is…packing up his bags on a Sunday morning.

Charles is…leaving his hotel room, missing it already.

Charles…has two months left. Pack up and drive, pack up and drive.

Charles is…heading south to Bloomington. Indiana University. Hoosier Country.

Charles is…breathing. Two months. Smoothing his pants.

Charles…has one last chance.

Okay, here goes. Pound chest.

Charles…will walk straight into that house at IU, yessir, no question, his pants dry-cleaned and pressed and looking just as crisp as the day he bought them, and he’s got a new belt now, too (and maybe his dress shirt is still
tainted by pizza stain but who will notice?), and he will walk straight into that house, and they will say “MARATHON MAN!” and Charles will nod in the affirmative and he will step from foyer to chapter room, running his finger through the dust on the mantel, unacceptable, unacceptable, and Charles will gather the brothers in the chapter room and he will ask them why they have let their house go, and why they are drinking so much beer that the trash cans out back are over-filled, and…and…shit…they will not quake with fear at the sight of the Big Bad Consultant, will they?, probably won’t say “MARATHON MAN!”, might not even quiet enough to let Charles speak a full sentence at the Alcohol Responsibility Workshop, might even say “Aw shit, the fucking consultant is here” and might drop stacks of “Fun Nazi” business cards in his suitcase, but does it matter?, because no, Charles is not out to change the culture, not today, not tomorrow, not at Indiana University. That much was clear before Charles ever began typing this status update.

But
Charles can pretend. He’s good at that.

So.

Charles…will go to bed at a reasonable hour from now on, and he will wake up at 6 AM each morning, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and he will salute the National Fraternity Headquarters and Walter LaFaber will look out his window and he will see Charles and he will be proud and he will think that Charles is doing a bang-up job out there, writing reports, facilitating workshops, etc., bang-up job, and then, later this week, Charles will drive north once again to Indianapolis, back to the Nu Kappa Epsilon National Fraternity Headquarters, to the office, khakis and dress shirts, and it will be such a magnificent reunion with his fellow consultants Nick and Brock, with Walter LaFaber himself, the mission of NKE, a three-day “debrief,” three days, where everyone will talk of student potential and achievements and “I stormed into that chapter house and I told them that we would not tolerate this destructive behavior anymore” and “We have standards, we have values!” and “We are not stereotypes, that’s what I told them” and Charles will smile and smooth his pants and nod and hope that they trust their eyes and the image they see before them, the flesh-and-blood image, the thunderous voice and the passionate fist-pump, and not the images they might see on their computer screens should they perform a 0.13-second google search, all those digital images—jpgs and bmps and gifs—all those kilobytes and all those thousands of colors and all those faces and arms and hands and beer bottles and balled-up socks and naked Charles Washingtons in second-floor hallways that tell the true story about the students he has failed, the Pittsburghs and Shippensburgs and New Mexico States, images that tell the true story about how he has failed himself most of all, but he will never forget that it wasn’t
really
his own fault, this mess, no no no, because—somehow, for some reason—he still believes he is capable of great things if only everyone would stop stealing his clothes from him, if only the computers everywhere would crash and cripple google and the search results would vanish, and hell, maybe he can call Jenn and summon the energy to sob and tell her that he’s so sorry and that he’s been a wreck, a real wreck ever since his parents revealed their divorce and you’re the only one I can talk to and I’ve been keeping this to myself and I’m sorry I never told you about the divorce but I’m telling you right now and I need you, Jenn, and maybe this will work, and maybe he will be honest for once, and then Charles will argue to become “Lead Consultant” at the Illinois expansion and he will keep quiet about the Master’s program at Bowling Green where he’ll tell Dr. Vernon everything he wants to know about the “inner workings of national fraternity colonizations,” and by next year maybe he can change his entire Facebook profile again—photos, career, everything—and who will even care about the footprint he left from some other life? This is possible, right?

Back to the Headquarters
.

Where they build the socially responsible citizens of tomorrow.

“Change the culture,” they will say and Charles will echo the words, but he will have something different in mind.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX. The National Fraternity.

Nu Kappa Epsilon was founded in 1910 at Carolina Baptist, but Dr. Wigginton was right: it didn’t truly become a “National Fraternity” until franchises swept North. In the first decades of the fraternity’s existence, there
was
no Headquarters, and only semester-by-semester postal correspondence between the brothers at their respective schools kept the fraternity from dissolving or from splitting into wildly different operations. But the National Fraternity kept growing, Carolina to Georgia to Virginia to Pennsylvania and Illinois and Nebraska, and so, to keep track of all of these new NKE chapters, Jackson Cohen (now 29 years old, the fraternity still his foremost concern) proposed in 1922 the creation of an “Executive Secretary” post, and a “National Headquarters.” Archives would be maintained, tradition written into record, correspondence between chapters formalized, conventions held, Sacred Laws voted upon. Like some towering and respected oak in the center of a sprawling woods, the National Headquarters would watch over and protect the entire forest.

National dues, of course, would
now be necessary.

And houses? The Headquarters would solicit alumni to help purchase fraternity houses at each campus. Housing
to entrench the groups into the campus culture, to make them permanent.

And
more new chapters? Like an empire establishing colonies, the Headquarters would establish new chapters at schools across the country. An NKE flag flying in every state, that was the original goal. Build the brand. Grow the HQ revenue stream.

And insurance for those houses, for intramural sports, for legal issues?

And more staff members to assist the Executive Secretary?

And a National Headquarters building, of course, of course. 1952.

From a tiny dining hall idea to strengthen friendships at a small college came a National Headquarters for a National Fraternity called Nu Kappa Epsilon. It seems improbable, this development, the math of chapters and members and alumni—multiplying from one tiny group of eight at Carolina Baptist—as explosive and surprising as the growth of the billion-dollar fantasy football industry from one tiny “rotisserie baseball league” in the early ‘80s. But it happened.

When I was a kid, my parents used to take me to the Thomas Edison House and museum in Fort Myers every summer; vacations, my father told me and gripped my shoulder, should be
enriching. We traveled to Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, also, and the fort in St. Augustine, and the Everglades. (It took awhile before I got Sea World or Busch Gardens, let alone Universal Studios in Orlando.) But mostly, it was the Edison House. And I hated the museum, the smell of sawdust in the old cabins, the yellowing note cards describing various artifacts, the moss and algae growing over Edison’s “historic” swimming pool behind the house. But out in the sprawling yards, there was a giant Banyan Tree that I’d spend the entire afternoon exploring. From one original trunk, the Banyan Tree had grown and spread to cover more than a full acre of land. Each time a new branch of a Banyan Tree grows and extends, vines drop from the branch and plant themselves in the ground and strengthen and thicken and form into new, sturdy, independent trunks capable of growing their own branches. Over the course of more than a century at the Edison House, the Banyan Tree had consumed the yard, had invaded and ruined some of the sidewalks when the vines and branches ran amok. And I’m sure
someone
knew the spot where the acres-large tree had started, but I wasn’t sure which had been the tree’s original trunk. It was impossible to sort out.

It’
s the same with the National Fraternity, I’ve decided. Those vines, those branches, those roots of power. As the Headquarters has grown its finances, its staff, and its influence, creating new programs and buying new properties, it’s no longer some independent oak keeping vigil, its motives single-minded, values-based. No, the Headquarters is that Banyan Tree, its origins forgotten behind a system of trunks and branches and vines that obscure 1910 and 1922 and 1952. The National Fraternity Headquarters, an institution made stronger by the thousands of lifelines dropped from branch to ground, thousands of alumni with competing interests, hundreds of chapters whose motives cannot be grouped so simply into “get it” and “doesn’t get it,” an interconnected manifest destiny that no one can slow, let alone topple.

The National Fraternity Headquarters: that’s where I’m headed right now.

*

On the night I drive into Indianapolis for our mid-semester debrief, the skies are the color of old German war helmets
, and the highways at rush hour are a long crackling strip of red lights one way and bright-white headlights the other, a thousand plumes of exhaust meeting the cold air and vanishing high in the charcoal sky. The “Mid-Semester Headquarters Debrief”—two days of meetings conceived, LaFaber says, to update Headquarters on what’s happening “in the trenches.” Not quite “mid-semester,” since November is just days away, but it gives me a shot to tell LaFaber in no uncertain terms that
I am his man
for the Illinois expansion. One last chance to step into a future bright with promise. Because if the worst happens and, while I’m here at the Headquarters, I’m fired for Code of Conduct violations, then I’m unemployable in higher-ed, only a broken hyperlink to a future at Bowling Green with Dr. Vernon.