American Fraternity Man (66 page)

“Always a surprise with my parents,” I say. “I never know the real story, do I? I never know the
real you
, do I?”

“What are you talking about, Charles?”

“Nothing.”

“She thinks you’re shutting her out. Shutting
us
out. Have you booked tickets for Thanksgiving yet?”

“Can’t afford it. I’m on my own now, remember?”

My father sighs. “Charles, I told you. I’ll buy your ticket. We want to see you.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Well, anyway. They’re boarding.”

*

Cal State-Highland to Long Beach State.

To San Francisco State, where I spend a full day at an outdoor café, thinking about typing up chapter visit reports for Walter LaFaber but really just page-hopping on Facebook, following links to
Daily Show
clips and watching and re-watching Katy Perry videos and pretending that I’m doing it in an ironic way.

“Charles is…loving the Tina-Fey-as-Palin skits. Whoever said that SNL was dead?”

“Charles is…now friends with Sam Anderson.”

“Charles is…now friends with Tamara Jones.”

“Charles is…waking up at noon today.”

Answering questions about national dues payments and alumni relations programs via
Facebook chat with the officers at Pittsburgh, Grand Valley College, Texas Tech, St. Joseph’s.
This is so easy
, they say.
Why haven’t we
always
done this
?

*

Then, back on a plane to Philly for my visit to Delaware.

Cross the country. Two connections, two airport bars.
I even find Ethernet connections.

When I roll my luggage through the parking lot at the Philadelphia airport and finally spot my Explorer, I stop for a moment, afraid to approach the door.

Finally I walk closer, touch the surface of the vehicle, warm but not hot, the handle of the back hatch, dusty but not dirty; it makes a crackling noise when I lift the door, sleep crust snapped upon opening. I slide into my seat and behind the steering wheel, the leather so familiar, the snap-shut cases, the scattered hangers and fallen backseat rod and it’s a mess but it all feels right, only takes a moment for the seat to conform to my body once again, and I start the car and the air-conditioning blasts out and Britney Spears screams from the speakers, and I shiver and cough and…I realize I’m crying, also. I don’t know why, but for a full minute, I stare at the center console…the maps, the goal sheets, the blank flipped-over business card, the rearview mirror, and I cry. There in the parking lot of the Philadelphia airport, in my Explorer, crying, to

*

To an afternoon at an auto shop in Philadelphia as the new tires are installed, the mechanic telling me that he’s worried about the condition of my wheels. The metal, he says, is so twisted that it could destroy the rubber; he’s surprised, in fact, that the spare isn’t already toast.

“This is like a ticking time bomb, kid,” he says.

“I wish I could afford new wheels,” I say. “My credit card is maxed out.”

“Cost you now or cost you later,” he says. “I’m telling you now, cause this don’t look good
. You’re going to want to get them.”

“Just the tires for now. That’s all I can do.”

After my Explorer is repaired, I drive slowly and carefully to a hotel, eat and relax at an Applebee’s a block away because it’s already 7:00 PM, and I won’t drive nights. Not anymore. The stress of the potholes is bad enough during the day. So I will be a day late to the Delaware chapter house, but I don’t think anyone will stay up waiting for me.

Several times throughout the night, I part the drapes and stare out at my car.

It looks pained, still, and I want to ask if it’s all right. If the tires were enough. But just like a dog after a visit to the vet, you can ask questions but you’ll never get a response.

I spend three days in Delaware (a
Dogfish Head chapter), then drive to Marshall (a Yuengling chapter) in Huntington, West Virginia.

My Explorer rattles worse than it ever has before, hangers shaking, the framed Illinois charter from 1921 banging against my suitc
ase, and I try to ignore it all.

*

“Charles is…out for a night at the Hall of Fame bar and grill!”

“Charles is…THUNDERRRRING HERRRRDDD!”

“Charles is…now friends with Randy Jung.”

“Charles is…now friends with James Neagle.”

“Charles is…ha ha ha! WHOOOOO!”

*

“Dude,” the Treasurer says. “Don’t tell me you’ve never jerked off while driving.”

“No,” I say, laughing. “Jerked off? Come on.”

“Oh, you gotta. All the driving you do?”

“How do you even…the logistics of it?”

“You buy a pack of tube socks, is the thing.”

“When did you do this?”

“When I drive back to Cleveland for the holidays. On the road for how many hours? You need something to occupy your time. Anyway, listen: you buy a pack of tube socks. Don’t just grab some old sock from the bottom of your drawer. Don’t be cheap. Buy the full pack. You need at least two.”

“
At least two socks. Got it.”

“Roll the sock over the cock, see,” he says, “and do your thing. Jerk off and don’t worry about it, you know? Don’t worry about getting anything on you
, don’t start looking down or anything. You don’t want to crash while you’re jerking off. Talk about tragic, man. So let the tube sock do its thing. Roll it back off, stop at a rest area, a McDonalds, whatever, dump it in a trash can. Boom. No worries.”

“Okay,” I say. “So why do you need
two socks?”

“The other sock,” he says, “that’s for
the trip back.”

*

Marshall to Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and most of the fraternity brothers are out of town for some football-related road trip, so I have the house to myself. Fridge full of Samuel Adams. Then north, through the down-and-out Great Lakes cities of northern Ohio and eastern Michigan. Miami University to Toledo (Wild Turkey, unfortunately). To Central Michigan in distant Mount Pleasant (Mickey’s malt liquor), where the brothers get me a hotel room near the local casino. To the University of Michigan, where I visit five different college bars in one night, probably a personal record, and I’m never even sure what type of beer I’m drinking.

*

Here in the Midwest, away from the t-shirts and flip-flops and sunshine of the West Coast, away from the stacked-on-top-of-one-another cities of the mid-Atlantic, the universities feel different. The campuses themselves are secluded kingdoms of limestone castles and thick brick buildings, rocky facades emblazoned with donor names, wide open grassy spaces graced with statues of past presidents and administrators, each campus encircled by neighborhoods of fraternity and sorority mansions as old as the school itself, then surrounded by hundreds of square miles of cornfields. Though the schools burst with Chicago and Indianapolis and Cincinnati and Cleveland kids, these Midwestern universities feel far removed from the crowded urban centers of each state. Worlds unto themselves.

But the weather is turning now.

The sprawling green campus quads have gone autumn yellow, ready to be frozen and covered in snow. Trees are changing, shaking off red-orange leaves, afternoon air growing cold, smoky. Living in Florida all my life, never having experienced any season but endless summer, this has happened quicker than I imagined. And everywhere I go, I’m the only one who regards this change of season, this cold, as…as anything to be regarded. It was always supposed to be one way, and I’m the only one who wonders why it doesn’t stay that way.

The students are changing with the season, also. The once-naïve freshmen have donned an extra layer of clothing, thick university logo sweatshirts, thicker skin after having suffered humbling first-year embarrassments, the excitement of
FREEDOM!
and
INDEPENDENCE!
settling. The world no longer sparkles with newness. Now, college is life, that’s all. Midterms approaching. Homecoming Weeks ending at campuses everywhere, the semester’s final stretch before Thanksgiving.

Excitement over. Unpack that peacoat I bought, those gloves and that sweater, prepare for my first-ever winter. The past month—plane-hopping the West Coast, then region-hopping from Atlantic to mid-Atlantic to Midwest—seemed to pass more quickly than I could’ve imagined, but now the cold is coming and I’m slowing down.

*

Todd Hampton, the new President at EU, has posted a McCain photo as his profile picture. Every few hours, he posts a new status about war heroes and patriots,
“Ted Nugent is so fucking right” and “Obama isn’t even a citizen!!!” and “A vote for that man is a vote for terrorists.”

Everywhere there are arguments
, long comment threads of vitriolic virtual finger-pointing, socialism and Godlessness and stupidity and hockey moms and Vietnam and Muslim faith and “I can see Russia from my house,” an election approaching and the Facebook world suddenly a room full of hungry zombies fighting over the squirming-dying man on the floor, yanking out his intestines and ripping scraps of flesh from his face. It’s nearing the end of October, and I don’t want to hear this shit. I don’t want any of it. This is not what it was supposed to be. This is like going home to Cypress Falls on holiday break, seeing some new area where I played as a kid now gobbled up by a condo development or a Wal-Mart, bull-dozed, chain-link-fenced, world of Florida hotter, pavement multiplying, power lines multiplying, Facebook no longer a magical portal back to the wonderful world of college but instead a window to the world beyond.

The future President of the United States of America with his own
Facebook page? Has he ever visited, do you think? Would he update the page himself, the occupation title, when elected? Does he even know his own motherfucking password?

I try to ignore it all, try to focus on the comments about food, about vacation, about movies, about last night, about

*

And I
am driving south once again, Explorer making noises so loud that I have to crank up my stereo to an unhealthy level and I don’t even hear when someone honks behind me; I drive south, away from the lakeside industry and smokestacks and back into the quiet cornfields of northwest Ohio. To Bowling Green State University.

And I’ve still made no attempt to organize my car.

Just keep moving, just keep moving, just keep...

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE.

As I finish my drive to Bowling Green, I receive a phone call from Sam Anderson at New Mexico State, the first in three weeks (except for a few Facebook messages). The roads here in southern Michigan are mostly flat, sometimes rising/ falling in prairie rolls, but the hangers suddenly rattle on my backseat rod.

“Got a question for you,” Sam says, no pleasantries.

“Would love to hear it,” I say.

Sam
could
be calling to formally ask for his letter of recommendation, to ask questions about the job, to seek advice, or to give me an update on his chapter…these could all be reasons for the call, positive news…but somehow I doubt it.

“I just read that blindfolding is considered hazing.”

“That’s correct,” I say.

“
Blind
-folding?” he asks, a high-pitched Jim-Mora-
Playoffs
!?-style squeak in his voice that I’ve never heard from him before, the sort of desperate voice crack only possible when you learn something completely unexpected, the truth behind some long-kept lie. “Just a piece of fabric? Just a shred of a bed sheet? Or a sock?”

“Sam,” I say and I pull off the highway, onto the shoulder, hoping the hangers stop shaking. I try to speak gently, delivering the law as a friend and not a policeman. “The by-the-book definition of hazing mention
s blindfolds. It doesn’t say anything about
material
. Just the blindfold itself is considered—by those who developed the definition, not me—they say it’s a way to demean someone psychologically. To scare them.” Gentle, supportive: “Is there anything you need to tell me? Anything I can do?”