American Fraternity Man (20 page)

Up on stage, LaFaber nodded in confirmation. “Yes. We will
change
the
culture
.”

“We will change the culture,” we all said together. Taking my lead.

“I didn’t catch that,” LaFaber replied, scratching his chin, looking at the far wall. “This is your career now. This is your life. And that’s all you got?”

“We will change the culture!” we tried. And now Brock was struggling to say it as loud as I was; now Jeanna from Bowling Green was trying to keep up with
me
.

“Louder! This is your
life
!”

“We will change the culture!” we shouted, digging deep within our lungs to convince him that we were serious, 40 of us, 50, and it was the sort of chant that could make a believer of every
Animal House
Bluto out there. If we’d been singing a hymn in church, we’d have had our hands outstretched, convinced we could feel the Holy Spirit on our fingertips.

LaFaber nodded, perhaps satisfied for the moment. “What is most important,” he said from the stage, “is that
you believe
in
yourselves
. You can’t do a damn thing if you don’t believe that you are
leaders
!”

“We are leaders!”

*

During my first semester of senior year, I’d interned at Gulf Coast Communications, a Fort Myers-based marketing and public relations office whose main focus was on event planning. I’d been lured into this unpaid position at EU’s annual “Internship Fest,” where a man in a silver power-tie showed me a laptop presentation of the events with which I might assist: the Bank of America Southeast Regional Awards Banquet, the Sanderson Properties Parade of Homes, the Edison University Faculty and Staff Outreach Night. Ice cream socials, galas, chili cook-offs, barbecues, martini and mashed potato nights. Planning social events, mixers, dances, fundraisers? Hell, I’d been doing this for
three years
already. Now it could be my
career
?

But there was no way that the reality of daily office life at GCC could match what I’d imagined. It was long lines of cubicles, men in short-sleeved button-downs and ties who spent mornings emailing YouTube clips to one another, women who rarely moved from their computer chairs and their cubicle-shelf Beanie Baby collections, and who seemed always to be clicking through online photo albums. It was as if everyone at the office tried their damndest to avoid work, as if the 9-5 workday was no different than an average Spring day at a local high school, kids snoozing and passing notes and copying homework.
Why are you even here
? I wondered.

And, of course, my role at the office was to make copies, to update seemingly endless Excel spreadsheets one symbol at a time, to spend four hours searching online for novelty martini glasses for the Naples Health Care Association’s “Roaring ‘20s”-themed fundraiser. Just before an event, the office descended into a frenzy, swept up in gossip about table settings and life-sized Ray Charles cardboard cut-outs and the 25 different toppings from which guests could choose to create their own designer mashed potatoes. But only four or five employees were ever allowed to attend the events, and these were the elusive and well-dressed executive types who hid behind the tinted glass windows of their enclosed offices, or who spent days, weeks, out of the office on supposed “business trips” to LA or New York or New Orleans. “Gotta put in your time,” my fellow intern, a kid named Randy, told me. “This shit might be tedious right now, but someday, that could be
us
in those offices.” I usually just smiled and nodded out of courtesy, but I also wondered:
Why
? Years of toil, so that hopefully I could plan a bank’s holiday party, and then get the privilege of going to the party and eating the chicken fingers? Was this really it?

Often, I spent hours at GCC imagining others at their own jobs: had my father felt like he was accomplishing something important as he moved money from place to place, or were his tasks no different than when I moved stacks of papers from copy room to filing cabinet? The alumni who came back to visit the fraternity house during football season, who walked with such a profound sense of purpose as they inspected our furniture and our floors…what sort of jobs did they have?

And there in the Henderson Memorial Auditorium, body and voice seemingly possessed by purpose, I knew it: no matter what my father had said, no matter what the outsiders thought, this is a job that would actually mean something.

*

“Change starts with each one of you,” LaFaber said from the stage. “I have faith in you. I know what you’re capable of. I’ve read your bios, your resumes. But it’s no longer about what you did in college. It’s about what you’re going to do now. And what are you going to do?”

“Change the culture!”
we screamed.

“What are you going to do?”

“Change the culture!”

“You must be flawless. You must be angels. Wherever you go, students should be blinded by your haloes.”

Laughter from all around the hall, from the back rows of fraternity and sorority legends, from the CEOs and Foundation Presidents, from the secretaries and interns. Laughter from the front rows, too, from all of us consultants. And I want to think that, because we were strangers from across the country, we’d
all
been hiding behind defensive armor this entire time. Not just me. And in this moment, because we all knew that we were part of something special, we began shedding that armor, revealing ourselves, and there was no one who was any better than me, any worse.

“If you don’t have a halo,” LaFaber said, and he seemed to be looking directly at me now, as if he
feared that all the chants in the world would not change the man I was, the man I’d tried to erase, “you better hurry up and get one.”

So I chanted even louder the next time. Louder. Louder.

Until nothing else mattered but this moment, when I was one of them.

And by the time we left this first session, it felt
like we were all indestructible crusaders protected by God Himself, glowing and so full of energy that we no longer needed to breathe, we floated out of the auditorium. It seemed that so much of my life had been a search for some way to make myself matter to the world, some way to protect or preserve something I cared deeply for, a family, an organization, preserve it and make it perfect and pass it to others, and for this bright shining moment I knew I’d found it.

Two months of training before I was to hit the road, and
here I was—here I
am
, now on my final night in Indianapolis—ready to be what I never could before. Ready to be the Marathon Man that they expect me to be. Ready to change the culture. Ready to save the world.

Part II

CHAPTER NINE: Alcohol Responsibility Workshop.

At the National Fraternity Headquarters, we divide them neatly into two groups: the high-achieving leadership organizations who keep their houses clean and behave as gentlemen and raise money for charities and maintain stellar GPAs, and the
frat stars
, who seem to fuck everything up. And right now, at the end of my second week on the road as an Educational Consultant, I’ve fallen into a nest of frat stars.

I’m at the University of Pittsburgh now, in the Chapter Room of a crumbling two-story fraternity house so rife with a rotten-orange-juice smell that I’ve been fighting my gag reflex since I arrived two days ago. All around me, on deteriorating couches and rusty metal fold-out chairs, sit the twenty-five dues-paying, live-in brothers of the
house. During the day, this is simply the Living Room, but when the fraternity gathers for meetings, the brothers drag couches and chairs from all the first-floor bedrooms and closets and construct a haphazard meeting facility. The “Chapter Room,” they call it. Among my job responsibilities: document and report any damages to alumni-owned housing facilities. But where do I start? The burn marks on the front door, perhaps? The rotting railings of the front porch? The stagnant liquor-beer-trash-water in the dark corners of the basement?

And currently, I’m sitting on a sofa so saturated with beer, liquor, wine, soda, and cereal milk that the cushions are probably more liquid than solid. The assembled fraternity members are busy finishing an exercise I gave them ten minutes ago. I passed out Sharpie markers and tear-away sheets of paper from my portable presentation pad to every member. “I want you to create a timeline of your life,” I told them all (and I could almost hear the squishy noise of everyone rolling their eyes in unison), “but I want the timeline to focus on your life with alcohol. Like, your
birth
would be your first drink, and major events might include a drunk driving experience, or a night where you made a poor choice because of alcohol.” I checked my watch. “I’ll give you fifteen minutes.” Then I shifted from my front-and-center position as Presenter to my current position on the couch as Observer, watching the members attempt—with various degrees of awkwardness—to draw their timelines, using the floor or the couch as desks, sharpies bleeding into the cushions, poking holes through the paper.

Pittsburgh is one of those groups that sets the fraternity stereotype, that puts
Animal House
to shame. “Very
fratty
,” they say at Headquarters. “Frat-tastic.” Eight members on academic ineligibility, four members serving university probation for underage drinking, two live-in brothers who aren’t even enrolled in school. A group that lives in the ‘80s, a reckless lawless Wild West decade for fraternities.

And I’m staring straight up now, looking at nothing, looking at everything, while they draw. The ceiling fan rests motionless overhead, broken and beyond repair, its blades (and the ceiling itself) splashed with dried caramel-brown blotches. The chapter president told me that someone tossed an open beer into the fan as it spun, and instead of scrubbing the splattered mess with hot water and a sponge and 409, the chapter’s elected House Manager pulled a can of spray-paint from the supply room and drenched the stain with a coat of white paint. The stain recently broke through the paint, the chapter president said, and was now growing larger. My face remained flat as he told this story. In the moment, I was too shocked to really say anything, though later I imagined a more productive reaction. A discussion about “respect for housing,” about “personal responsibility,” about “pride in the fraternity.” I imagined unclasping my laptop and sitting down and working with the President and the House Manager to create a set of bullet-point action initiatives that could make this house into a clean and profitable unit.

“Yo, EC,” someone calls from across the Chapter Room.
EC
: Educational Consultant. In the world of higher education, everything is shortened or abbreviated. Educational Consultant isn’t tough to say, but no matter the title, someone will eventually acronym your position.

“My name is Charles,” I say.

“Right,” he says. “Sorry, man.” He’s wearing dirty gym shorts and an ash-gray shirt, cut-off sleeves, a faded slogan across the chest. Looks like it says
What’s My Name
or
Ain’t the Same
. Maybe
Play the Game
. When I met him yesterday he smelled like rusty barbells and weeks-old laundry, but we talked about the National Fraternity and the other Pennsylvania chapters for an hour. He
loves
this fraternity and all his brothers, he kept saying, but he
hates
“Nationals.” We’re always getting his chapter in trouble, he said. I told him that we weren’t
getting
them into trouble, only enforcing standards because we
do
care about them as individuals. But I’ve already forgotten his name. Could be James or Joe or Jason. So many names, so quick, and no system to remember them all. “How much longer we got for this?” he asks.

“
A few minutes,” I say, and I struggle to lean forward on the sofa, to look professional, but I slip, sink back into the cushions. The couch is broken and the springs squeak. I smooth my dress pants again and again to make it seem as if I’m comfortable, but it feels like I’m getting eaten alive by a soggy stack of laundry. “Don’t worry. I don’t expect these timelines to be artistic masterpieces.”

James (or Joe, or Jason) nods, goes back to darkening some gigantic black letters on his paper. And once again, even though the entire room looks like a kindergarten run by crac
k addicts, I have to tell myself that I’m making progress.

*

This is my schedule for the semester: