American Fraternity Man (86 page)

I consider
all of this, and again I feel like screaming, like punching the wall. Like I want to bring Todd Hampton into this room and make him my piñata for every fucking thing I’ve learned this semester, for my every failure, for my every frustration. But—

Charles…knows this will never end. Never the right thing, always a fuck-up waiting to happen.

Charles…just remember, buddy, it’s all for the greater good! Illinois! Grad school! You can do it, buddy! Change the culture! Change the institution!

Charles…wants to punch the fucking wall.

Charles…wants to break every bone in his hand, in his body.

Charles…wants to punch the wall so fucking hard that his wrist breaks, too, that every bone in his arm is pulverized,
ground to chalk, that his insides are liquefied and he’s a puddle on the floor and better yet: he’s blank space, and he can—please,
can he
?—start over, just motherfucking
start over from scratch
? Clean slate. A
new
Charles Washington, the man he’s wanted to be all this time, without this fucking footprint following him,
please
, can we just…

Charles Washington…will do what he’s always done, won’t he?

Charles Washington…remembers an old t-shirt from National Convention, back in 2006. On the front, “If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.” On the back, “Nu Kappa Epsilon: Re-Defining Fraternity, Re-Defining Excellence.”

Charles is…

Charles is…?

“I know exactly what to do,” I tell Brock.

“Okay, good.” He slaps my back. “What are we doing?”

“Grab Todd. Bring him in, and follow my lead.”

Brock nods, lumbers to the door and tugs Todd into the room.

“Sit,” Brock says
, and Todd tumbles into the chair like a man about to be executed.

“This is what’s happening,” I
say. “You’re going to turn in your pin.”

Todd holds up his palms, makes a half-smile/ half-s
hocked face. He thinks I’m joking. “Oooo-kay,” he says and laughs. “Well, um. What’s really—”

“You’re finished
,” I say. “I’m serious. No discussion. You, every one of your officers, all finished. We’ll collect the pins and your membership placards before we leave, along with the pins of every brother involved in 237. And we know who was there. The photos are on Facebook. You tagged ‘em. You made my job easy.”

“You can’t do that!” he screams. “That’s half the chapter!”
He looks to Brock, like the pitbull is going to save him, but Brock is following my lead. Brock might never have done anything like this, but you know what? He likes it, and he’s not going to give a fucking inch.

“Eyes on Charles,” Brock says. “
He’s talking to you.”

“Your other option
,” I say, “is to surrender the charter. Your choice. But if you surrender the charter, remember that this university co-owns these houses, and there’s a waiting list a mile long for new fraternities here at EU. Lose the charter, we lose the house. And do you want to go down as the man who
killed
Nu Kappa Epsilon at Edison University? Call me Pledge Lover all you want, Hampton, but do you want
that
to be your legacy?”

“Charles,” he says. “There’s got to be some other—”

“Choice is yours, Todd. Turn in your pins and placards, and shit, we’ll even offer you this deal: instead of marking you as ‘expelled,’ we can make you ‘alumni’ in our national database. Ten years from now, no one will know the difference.”

“Alumni?”

“That’s right,” I say. “Your time as an undergraduate member of the fraternity is done. You aren’t worthy of it. You’ll clear out of the house. You’ll never attend another social event, another chapter meeting. Never talk to another pledge, never participate in another initiation. Nothing. And if you push it and choose to appeal before National Council, I’ll make sure that they revoke your charter, your brotherhood pins, erase any trace that you were
ever
a member…You’ll be disowned, Todd. A bigger disgrace than you could ever imagine.”

And just minutes later,
Brock is walking Todd from bedroom to bedroom to collect the brotherhood pins for all 33 members whose names we’ve gathered, Todd explaining—through tears—that this is their only option. “I’m gonna fucking
appeal
!” I hear from upstairs more than once, but there is no chance of that. Really, we don’t even need the pins or the membership placards in order to take action; I just
wanted
them, wanted to hand them over to Headquarters so there would be no chance of turning back.

And I know this isn’t what LaFaber wanted, but
you know what? EU is still alive, still kicking, and once the reports are written, LaFaber won’t be able to complain. Maybe this kills my shot at the Illinois expansion, at grad school, and maybe one good action doesn’t make up for all the wrong that I’ve done—shit, maybe it was even wrong to demand that New Mexico State be left alone, maybe it was selfish and dangerous, maybe this one good decision is canceled out because I defended another group of hazers—but I also know that right now, I only have control over this moment, and
one good action
is a hell of a lot better than making
one more mistake
.

Whatever happens, I’ll figure it out.

Whatever happens, I know that I’m not willing to crumble ever again.

W
hile Brock and Todd are upstairs gathering pins, I’m on the phone with the pledges, one after the next, to tell them that this is their fraternity now. It’s theirs, and they can make of it what they will. There’s no more dead weight, I tell them, no more trouble-makers. This is it, I tell them. Your chance to change the culture.

*

Our flight leaves the next morning, but there’s one more place I’ve got to go before I can leave town. I leave Brock at the hotel to finish the final paperwork and catalogue the pins and placards he’s collected, leave him to draft the formal memo to the alumni which will instruct them to evict the punished brothers. “I’ll be back,” I tell him, “but I have to…”

“I know,” he says. “You want to see
your girl, don’t you?”

“Jenn,” I say.

I know it’s over, know that the things I’ve done have made it impossible for the two of us to ever have the life I’d imagined. But I can’t leave things the way they were. I need to see her, convince her that the good things she saw in the old Charles Washington do still exist. That I’m capable not just of mean disappointment and injury, but also of…something better.

Jenn
doesn’t know I’m coming for her, but Facebook has made it impossible to hide. “Bored at the KD house,” she wrote ten minutes ago as her status update, and so that’s where I go.

Park, ring
the doorbell, and a girl named Elizabeth Safron answers the door, recognizes me, puts hand to mouth. “Oh my God,
Charles
.” She’s wearing a bright orange t-shirt with a black screen-printed jack-o-lantern face smiling wide and gap-toothed, the shirt three sizes too large and sweeping down over her black leggings like it’s a skirt. “What are you
doing
here?”

“Hoping Jenn was home,” I say.

“Well,” Elizabeth says. She closes her eyes, likely searching her mind for an alibi, somewhere Jenn can be instead of right here, but she wasn’t prepared for this.

“Can I come in?” I peek my head
through the doorway. There are plastic pumpkins lining the hallway, each stuffed with Lemonheads and snack-sized Snickers, each pumpkin painted with the letters of a different fraternity. Beyond the hallway is the living room, and from this angle it’s all hair spilled across couch cushions, legs on arm rests, flashes of denim and cardigan.

“Um. Sure,” Elizabeth says, but I’m already inside, not even waiting for her to walk me to the living room and the couches and the TV and the girls.

I know this house almost as well as my own, remember when the wallpaper was stripped away and the walls were re-painted lavender, remember when the plantation shutters were installed in the new cafeteria. I remember each couch, the way they feel when you’re the only man on them surrounded by a dozen sorority girls. I remember evenings after date nights, watching
Eight-Legged Freaks
or
Scream 3
, and I remember the drunk girls who would walk into the house late-night, coming home from the bar with boys they didn’t know, douche-bags who’d plop onto the couches and make comments like, “This is what a sorority house looks like?” and “What’s it gonna take to get some three-some action, eh?”, the other girls on the couches going nervous until I said, “He tries to get past the stairwell, I’ll tackle him,” and then the relief. Charles to keep us safe. Charles the good boyfriend. Charles the Protector. I remember the boxes of Cap’n Crunch that seemed to appear magically whenever the girls sat down and turned on the TV, conjured from hiding spots behind the couches, Goldfish too, and Oreos, the accompanying “I’m such a fat-ass” remarks while girls stuffed face with Crunch bars. Other comments, too: “Ahh, these panties give me such a freakin’ wedgie!” and “Oh my God, Dana is passed out naked on her bed upstairs! Can someone go wake her up or something?” Days when they forgot a boy was present, days when I was transplanted into the sorority world, followed by nights when Jenn faced the same at the NKE house: dozens of dudes watching Monday Night Football and throwing Doritos at one another and farting and wrestling one another in the grass of the backyard, comments like “I’m
soooo
gonna fuck that Ashley girl. Oh, shit. Forgot you were sitting there, Jenn.”

T
he living room—the long sweeping couches, the HDTV mounted to the wall but still surrounded by a massive and unnecessary espresso-colored entertainment center, shelves and cabinets lined with stuffed animals and framed photos. This feels more like home than anywhere I’ve been in the last six months.

When I turn the corner and enter the frame,
there are only three girls seated before me, and all three gasp.

“Charles,” Jenn says. She might be the last to see me, to register that it
is
me, as she was looking down at her cell phone and typing out a text. She has an iPhone now, and I remember some September conversation when she told me she was going to the Apple Store, but this is the first that the unseen moments of time away have connected with the visible, the here, the unexpected now. Her hair is shorter, so light that it’s damn-near platinum, bangs falling over her black headband and slashing down her forehead like icicles. “What…what are you
doing
here?”

“In town for the day,” I say.

“Yeah, but…” And she looks at the clock on the wall, as if it contains the answers she’s struggling for. In her mind, she is flipping the pages of a calendar, finding the holidays. “Thanksgiving is not even until…why
now
?”

“Not glad to see me?” I force a sheepish shrug, my posture and face
suddenly like the Monopoly Man when forced to pay his poor tax.

“Charles, I…
” She’s wearing an old Eddie Money t-shirt and a pair of black yoga pants; the hair has changed, the purse has changed, but maybe there’s more
same
here than I thought.

T
he other girls are still staring with the same faces they’d have if someone came into the house and told them that Florida had split from the continent and was now drifting on a collision course with Cuba. Ten minutes before, they were thinking of Halloween parties. Spread out on the empty cushions are the bits and pieces of half-costumes, a tall pair of clear heels, a Hooters shirt, a pair of bunny ears. Ten minutes before, they were timing the exact moment they’d need to leave the living room and head upstairs to start getting ready for the night’s parties, cramming their tight bodies into fishnets and long white gloves and three inches of glittery top or bottom. And then: Charles Washington appeared.

“Maybe we should
get out of here,” Jenn says. “Talk somewhere else.”

“I’ve got a car in the parking lot,” I say. “I’ll probably get a ticket if I don’t move, so…”

The Lindsay Lohan girl—Edwin’s girl from the Senior Send-Off—is sitting on the other couch, wearing a set of vampire teeth in her mouth. She spits them out into her hand. “Don’t go with him, Jenn,” she says. “Nikes are all assholes. Your boy”—and she’s pointing at me, now, spit-strands from fingers to still-clutched vampire teeth—“your boy
Edwin
never calls me back.”

“Edwin,” I repeat.

“Edwin,” she says caustically. “Your best friend.”

“Well, he never calls
me
back, either,” I say. “So you won’t get any arguments from me. Not about Edwin, not about any of those assholes.”

She sits back, makes a “harrumph” noise, and stuffs the teeth back into her mouth.

“Jenn?” I ask. “Wanna go?”

Jenn looks at her sorority sisters, unseen thought clouds bubbling throughout the room. It’s a moment that no one saw coming, and there’s something to be said of such surprises in life. No one can form a
ny other defense to stop Jenn from leaving—they never thought they would need to, that I would ever be back, perhaps thinking that I’d actually taken some
real
job in Indianapolis and I lived there and had a real apartment and did real adult things—and so Jenn’s moving from couch to hallway to door to front porch to parking lot to passenger seat of my car, and I am cranking the A/C and we are leaving her sorority house.