American Fraternity Man (80 page)

Unemployable: a future where
I’m pulling up to my father’s driveway in my Explorer, stepping out as he waits for me on the front porch, his head lowered, one hand in his pockets and the other holding a mug of coffee, entire body radiating with I-told-you-so. A failure with no money and no home, forced to return to the father I defied with a job I couldn’t handle. Just another kid in his quarter-life who crashed and burned when he thought he was soaring through a Compassion Boom. “You’re on your own now,” he said, and there would be no recovering from such a pathetic homecoming.

When I pull onto Founder’s Road, the scene on National Fraternity Row is much different than when I arrived for orientation in bright cheerful May
…The road is dim, the parking lots mostly empty at this hour, only a workaholic financial director lighting a front window of ZTA or . Each Fall, once consultant training is over at each headquarters and the semester begins for colleges, the consultants disperse across the country and the Row becomes silent, populated only by full-time secretaries and chapter services directors and CEOs and interns. And damned if they’ll work consultant hours during the semester.

At the far end of the road is NKE
, that stealth fighter of a building, concrete triangle pointed directly at you. In summer, the front lawn was colorful, blooming, but now the fountain is ice on metal, the plants and grass just fossil versions of former selves. The “Headquarters Lodge” (the residence hall for NKE consultants, interns, and visitors) sits a hundred feet behind the Headquarters, behind a smattering of now-bare trees and beyond a gravel parking lot empty at 6 PM save for a single car. My Explorer bounces more than usual as I grumble across the gravel.

W
hen I first step into the Lodge, I’m blasted by nostalgia.
The Lodge
! The fraternity house for professionals. Where every NKE consultant stays during summer training, where
I
spent two months of this past summer, where I slept and ate and read once training had finished for the day. Two months. My belongings (the few things I brought from Florida to Indianapolis that I couldn’t fit into the Explorer) still stacked in cheap plastic storage cases in the basement: some CDs and DVDs, my bed sheets, an extra pillow, some leadership books, and extra clothes.

The nostalgia is brief, though.
We left Indianapolis in August, and now—the end of October—the Lodge walls are already covered in different posters than I remember—Linkin Park, the Cal Golden Bears, a Barack Obama “Hope” poster with a Hitler mustache drawn on—probably because the summer interns have gone back home to their own campuses, and new fall interns have attempted to impose a new personality upon the place, the Lodge a constant patchwork project of always-new residents. Nobody stays here longer than a year, so the Lodge is never completely cleaned, and never completely lived-in. The living room’s three sofas do not match in size or color, and the television is an old 27-inch CRT monitor likely gifted to the Lodge when some full-time staffer no longer wanted it, a black bar encroaching upon the picture and advancing a millimeter toward center each day; the kitchen is a Goodwill mess of mix-and-match silverware sets, of steak knives and spatulas. Dust and carpet-fuzz is ancient, and old porno mags sit sticky beneath the second-floor sink like the sad reminders of long-gone adolescence you hope to never stumble upon again.

I drag my suitcase through the empty living area, bump it up the stairs.

No, I never called this place “home,” never could. The Lodge might as well be a hotel or another chapter house; I still have to unpack when I arrive, find my sheets in the basement storage, find an empty bunk bed and prepare it for my stay. “Home” should be comfort. The Lodge is just empty space.

As I
push my suitcase onto the second-floor hallway, I hear a quick thumping noise, increasing in frequency and in volume, and when I look up I’m broad-sided, lifted, slammed into the wall and into a bear-hug embrace, and I can’t breathe and I’m choking—

“Charlie Washington!”
A bellowing Texas voice.

“Ugh,” I say.
“
Brock
.”

He releases me and I flop back
ward, catch my breath.

Brock London
, everyone’s favorite cowboy consultant, bred on red meat and whole milk, a childhood of smashmouth sports and hunting, face like a hammerhead shark. Brock London is here, has unpacked already, and apparently there’s something in his Texas blood that converts all of the steak and ground beef and bacon into pure muscle, because now, three months into his life as a road warrior, he looks as dense and powerful as ever. “How the hell are you?” Brock asks.

“Ugh,” I say again
. “Hanging in there.”

“Nick’s somewhere in Indiana right now,” Brock says. “Crossed over the border from Kentucky
, last time I talked to him.”

“Oh,” I say, huff. “Super.”

Brock likes to wrestle, to bear-hug, to fart, to eat six hot dogs in a single setting. But I know that he’s also the kind of guy who hasn’t taken a drink all semester, the kind of guy who’d pin me against the wall if he knew what I’ve let so many undergraduate chapters get away with, if he knew what I’ve done on my own time.

“We haven’t talk
ed in weeks, buddy,” Brock says, slapping my back and leading me downstairs to the lifeless living room, his arm around my shoulder and determining my direction. “You sound so busy whenever I call you. Like you never have time to talk.”

“
I’m not a big
phone
guy,” I say.

“You look tired,” Brock s
ays, and he slaps my back again. It’s something he does unthinkingly and without after-thought, an impulse that—if I told him to stop—he might question whether he’d ever done it. “We need to get you some caffeine? Some eats? Grill House has all-you-can-eat on Wednesdays, remember?”

“I’m not hungry,” I say.

“All right, all right, that’s fine,” Brock says, and now we both sit on the clashing sofas of the Lodge living room. Despite Brock’s enthusiasm and attempts at friendship, the two of us will always remain as different as these couches. He has the Ashton Simon Tragedy, a best friend lost to binge drinking, a world colored by heartbreak and then by the undeniably productive reaction to the heartbreak. He lives in a fraternity world as black/white, good/evil as a
Lord of the Rings
movie:
evil
is always easy to spot and must be punished, and the punishments imposed by the
good
are always appropriate, just, effective. To even say that I watched a (potential) hazing activity at New Mexico State, or drank a Tecate with Sam, would be to peg me as evil as Sauron himself. “Tired or not,” he says, “just good to see you. Heard you had it rough, busting up the bad guys.”

“The bad guys?”

“
Charles Washington
takes no prisoners. We all heard how you stomped into Illinois at the zero hour, gave them what-for. Dirty Harry hisself. Never would have expected that from you.”

“Thanks.
A real compliment.”

“
Wasn’t an insult,” Brock says. He raises his hand as if to slap my back, but I’m too far away and so he slips it back onto his lap. Again, I wonder if he even knows that he’s done this. “It’s just that you didn’t seem like a hard-ass during the summer. Always reading those leadership books? I didn’t know you had it in you, closing chapters and what-not.”

I stare at him emotionlessly, scratch my chin scruff. I don’t know what he’s heard, who’s been giving him his information, but I
’ve certainly never known Brock London to be sarcastic. He honestly believes I’ve been a model employee. “Tough job,” I say, “but someone’s gotta do it.”

“Hell yeah, buddy,” he says and smacks his own knee. And then he
asks about my semester, my stories. “Come on,” he says, “you gotta have some good ones. I want to hear what else you got into.” And sure, I’ve got stories. But they’re nothing like his: he is
truly
Dirty Harry: like, probably he walked into the University of Houston chapter house and found a keg in the living room and picked it up with his bare hands and tossed it into the dumpster and grabbed a mop and made the chapter president clean the muddy tiled floors. “Unacceptable!” I can hear him shouting. Or maybe he stomped into McNeese State University and ripped down the Budweiser poster from the wall, replaced it with an inspirational Lance Armstrong poster. Or maybe he roared through Colorado State University’s basement and commanded the brothers to sweep the floor, take out the garbage, repaint, stand up straight no slouching, have some fucking respect, act like men.

But we don’t get
as far as his stories, not even as far as my own, because Nick bumbles through the Lodge’s front door just a few minutes later. He isn’t unbridled energy like Brock, doesn’t lift anyone off the ground, doesn’t bear-hug the life from us. Nick is a five-ten California boy, laid-back but not timid, gay but low-key about “gay pride”; he doesn’t have an Equal Rights bumper sticker or talk-squeal like a sorority girl; often, Nick tells people that he doesn’t want homosexuality to define him, and in the fraternity world maybe it doesn’t. So what if he reads
The Advocate
? So what if he owns the entire DVD collection of
Queer as Folk
? So what if he has a poster of a shirtless Abercrombie model tacked to his cubicle wall? He’s a dime a dozen, one gay man among a sea of higher-ed gay men. No, homosexuality doesn’t define him in the fraternity world, but—as much as I don’t like to admit it—it
does
define Nick for
me
, because his motives as an Educational Consultant are as pure as Brock’s. Homosexuality, in fact, is the very reason that he’s a consultant. Like many fraternity men across the country, Nick came out during college, sophomore year, after he’d already started living in the UCLA chapter house; there were 55 brothers in the chapter, and together they negotiated and worked through a situation that elsewhere might have descended into the blackest of hate. What did it mean to have a gay brother? What did it mean—as an 18-year-old who’d always told gay jokes and squirmed whenever he saw two men holding hands—to live with a gay man? The results weren’t always happy and sunny, of course: and in other chapters, sometimes the gay brother is forced to move out of the house, surrender his pin, give up the fraternity. But because Nick’s experiences in college were so positive, so encouraging, he’s made it his mission to help other college men through this transition, to work with chapters to understand rather than judge; after his consultant contract expires, he’ll move on to another job in higher-education: a lifetime of helping young students to realize themselves without the harassment or negativity they might have encountered in high school or in their myopic hometowns.

Nick
tosses his duffel bag onto the hallway floor, wipes sweat from his forehead, oscillates a hard stare between Brock and me, on the living room couches. “So-ooo…” Nick says. “Here we are again.”

It takes Brock a moment to summon his unrestrained enthusiasm, but when he does, Nick doesn’t stand a chance. “Get your ass over here!” Brock says, shoves himself from the couch and
wraps his arms around Nick, squeezes. “Aw,” Brock says, tousling Nick’s hair, “you look like you’ve lost that California tan.”

“Okay,” Nick grunts, prying at Brock’s hairy arms, “okay, okay. Playtime’s over.
I get it. You’re glad to see me.”

Brock finally lets Nick loose, and Nick tumbles toward me, bumping his hip into the
armrest; he stands upright, then, and brushes his long-sleeve t-shirt, brushes his jeans.

“And you,” Nick says to me, waving his hands to indicate my ensemble. “Looks like we’re really gonna be mistaken for brothers now.” That was the running gag over the summer
: the California boy and the Florida boy, both of us with dark Caucasian skin and short, black hair. For the old ladies who’d worked as administrative assistants for thirty years and had seen a hundred consultants (and who would forget about us the moment our contracts expired), it was just easier to lump us together into one man: “Nickorcharles.” The more perceptive Headquarters staffers would describe Nick as the “Laid-Back Consultant,” the one who rarely tucked in his shirts, who styled his hair with a bit more wild college zest. By contrast, I suppose I was the “Uptight One,” though no one ever said that to my face.

Now, though, except for his two-day-old facial hair overgrowth, we look nearly identical.

“Never seen you wearing jeans before,” Nick says. “Looks like you turned over a new leaf.”

“That’s one
way of putting it,” I say.

Minutes later, we’re at the dining room table so Nick can open the sliding glass door and smoke.
This has always been an unspoken agreement: our conversations follow Nick wherever he goes, wherever he can smoke. “Tell me about your semester, Charles,” he says, words mumbled through the cigarette. “How’s Jenn?”

Oh, she’s fine, I say.

“Fine?” Nick asks, cold air swooshing inside as he opens the door wider. “You get back to Florida to see her at all? You never call us. I have no idea what you’ve been up to.” Nick taps the ash of his cigarette out the window where it likely falls into a patch of dead vegetation. “Hope you’ve been calling
her
, at least. Gotta make sure you hit your two-call daily goal, or whatever.”