American Fraternity Man (2 page)

“Not that kind of event,” he repeated. “So tell me, Charles. Spare me the suspense. What
is
in store for my visit this time around? What madness can I expect?”

*

Three years prior, on the morning after I’d completed my first great leadership role as a freshman in the fraternity, I woke up in a puddle of vomit and a scrap heap of broken chunks of drywall on the fraternity house floor, my father staring down at me with a look struggling at indifference. He tossed me a towel, a ketchup-stained rag that he’d found discarded in a corner of the room. “So this is responsibility, then?” he asked.

It was 7:30 AM, and as usual, he was awake and alert, even held the signature metal coffee cup that he’d brought from home and had probably filled at his hotel’s continental breakfast. No doubt he’d even brought his own sugar packets, and—if the hotel didn’t have a carafe of 2% milk in place of creamer—had driven to the local 7-Eleven to buy a half-gallon, his coffee prep as precise and measured as any task in his professional life.

I rolled over and tried to sit up, sharp pieces of drywall under my palms, my back against one of the new couches we’d just purchased for the living room. Later, I’d think of a thousand ways to respond—a self-deprecating joke, an eloquent rebuttal, even a heartfelt acknowledgment of my own failings…maybe something simple, so pathetic it was tragic: “Hey, Dad,” with heavy eyelids and a pained moan. But in the moment, my head was spinning and I still wasn’t even sure why I was in the living room, why my father was here in my fraternity house, and so I opened my mouth and tried to speak but only managed a couple coughs.

“
My God, what happened to your wall?”

Yes, it wasn’t just the floor; there was also a powdering of drywall dust stretching from couch to wall like a light snow that refused to melt. Scattered throughout were fist-sized drywall rocks, all of them unnaturally bright in the direct sunlight of the foyer window. Follow the trail of the drywall pieces and you’d eventually find a crater in the wall (at that moment, I vaguely remembered two of my fraternity brothers wrestling the night before, one of them slamming the other against the wall), and above it, in the low hallway ceiling, a hole that you could have stuck your head inside comfortably. I hadn’t been involved in any of this, I know that, but still…I was the only one my father had found passed-out on the floor.

“We must have gotten carried away last night after you all left,” I said. The evening before had been the “meet ‘n greet” portion of our Family Weekend, an event I—as a freshman—had planned as an effort to showcase to more than forty parents the benefits of life in Nu Kappa Epsilon Fraternity, and to dispel nasty misconceptions of “frat house” lifestyle. And the parents had been impressed, mothers commenting on our manners as they sampled from the tray of cheese cubes and crackers we’d set out, fathers smiling at the “Intramural Champion” banners hanging in the game room, clapping their sons on the back. My own fraternity brothers shook my hand and told me that this was the most important thing we’d done as a fraternity in years: bringing all of our families together to celebrate the brotherhood we’d built.

But the parents had all left by 10 PM, and we’d kept drinking, and now it was morning.

“Where’s your mop?” my father asked.

“Dad,” I said, and I finally pushed myself to my feet but I wobbled and had to hold onto the couch’s arm rest for support. “You don’t have to help me. I can do this.”

“All right. But where is it?”

“I don’t know if we have a mop,” I said.

“You don’t know?”

“The house is, like, owned by the university,” I said and winced, held my head. “We pay a cleaning staff.”

He exhaled with such disappointment that it almost didn’t seem possible that he’d even bother to speak again. “You can’t do these things yourself? In your own house?” At the time 49 years old, my father had adopted full-time the role of “hardened businessman,” his every feature edged, leveled, set to exude unwavering determination…That such an attitude and approach paid off in his business dealings, there’s no doubt: this was 2005, the height of the housing boom in Florida, but when the economy tanked my Senior year, he was still brokering deals to buy acres of scrub palm and convert it to Publix-anchored shopping centers that would service the new neighborhoods built at the farthest inland boundaries of Cypress Falls, all those neighborhoods and townhomes that no resident wanted but still were somehow built and sold. No money anywhere, but somehow my father came out all right, still had a boat, a screened-in Solar-heated pool, granite countertops, columns on his stucco house, timeshares across the country.

And there, resting against the couch, head still spinning, maybe I actually expected him to tell me that he admired my fraternity’s savvy in having negotiated this arrangement with the university, the cleaning staff provided as part of our rental agreement. Maybe he’d say, “This isn’t such a bad deal, this fraternity.” Or maybe, “Congrats. Sounds like you guys have your act together.” But I should’ve known better. There in the NKE house on that Saturday morning, eyes locked on mine, he said, “A cleaning staff. That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”

“But it’s a university requirement for all houses,” I said. “They’re the same ones who do the dorms and the classroom buildings.”

“And you were just going to go up to your bedroom, then? Wait until they came by and cleaned this up?” He gestured toward the long puddle of slop on the living room tile; thankfully, only a small splash had tainted the red area rug, and nothing appeared to have hit the couches. “Hope they might patch up the drywall, even? While you slept it off?”

“I just woke up. I hadn’t thought about it yet.”

“Of course you hadn’t.” He walked toward our kitchen door, which was shut and dead-locked. “There’s got to be a mop or paper towels in here,” he said. “Windex and a sponge, at the very least.”

I tried to stand, and managed shakily. “Dad, you can’t go in there.”

“Excuse me?” he asked. The door handle shook but wouldn’t turn.

“They lock the door,” I said.

“Who locks the door?”

“The kitchen staff.”

He shook harder. “There’s a kitchen staff, as well?”

“We’re not allowed in there.”

“You pay rent here. More accurately,
I
pay rent here,” he said. “And you can’t even go into your own kitchen for a paper towel?”

“
Most of the equipment in there isn’t even ours,” I said. “It’s, like, a catering company. They cook for all the fraternity and sorority houses.”

“Let me make sure I’m understanding correctly. You don’t clean. Don’t cook.”

“We’re technically a university dorm,” I said, “so we have to use their vendors.”

“Don’t clean. Don’t cook. And you keep extolling the virtues of this house. How it’s made you a better man? A leader? Etcetera.”

“That’s just, you know, two little things.”

My father shook his head. “The first week I lived in my co-op in college, I had to replace a toilet. We had water coming out under the baseboards in two of the bedrooms, and the screws were stripped around the bottom of the toilet. We didn’t have vendor lists, Charles, and we didn’t have cleaning ladies. We were 19, and we had to work together to make things happen.”

“I know, Dad.”

“You don’t know, Charles. I try to tell you, but you don’t listen.”

But I’m not entirely sure that was true. My father never talked much about his own past, except random memories (a stint as a farmer in the late ‘70s, a 9-month business trip to London in the mid-80s, a nagging pain in his shoulder about which he’d say only, “Use your seatbelt,” or—here, now—his broken toilet at his co-op in college) revealed during pivotal points in conversations when he wanted to prove a point.

“I can clean this. Please. It’s nothing.”

“So this is what we’ve been paying for, then?” he asked. “I trusted you to do the research, Charles. But the big-screen TVs? The pool table? This is what the semester dues pay for? This is the ‘leadership development’ you brag about?”

He made it sound as if this was a new realization he’d just come to, but really, the fraternity had never stood a chance with my father. As a high school senior one year before, I’d worked out a deal with him so that I could attend Edison University, an expensive private school on the Gulf Coast. I’d pay tuition (student loans), and he’d pay room and board at the campus dorms for all four years. “I still think you’d be better off at the University of Florida,” he said. “Hell, you’ve got scholarships that would cover the full tuition there. But this is the same deal I had with my father. So: room and board it is.”

T
hen I joined a fraternity during the first week of classes. Didn’t tell him. And—because the university owned all housing facilities and approved most transfer requests—I quietly moved to the freshman floor of the fraternity house. The cost of rent, which now included a full meal plan, National Fraternity insurance, and social budget dues, tripled. I kept my father unaware until Thanksgiving break in November, when I drove the four hours back to Cypress Falls and my father held in his hands the first semester’s fraternity house bills. “Room and board,” he’d said softly. “Really pushing this deal, aren’t you?”

But I’d bullet-pointed the benefits of fraternity life to him as if I was an infomercial host (“But that’s not all! We also have a chapter library full of old textbooks, so I can actually save money on books every semester!” “But that’s not all! We designate two brothers each week as Sober Drivers, so we can call any time, any place, and get a safe ride!”). I’d insisted that the fraternity was the logical continuation of my old days in high school, a new leadership activity to take over for Varsity Baseball and Key Club and the Honor Society. But for every benefit, he’d countered with a news story about hazing, or alcoholism, something to suck the positive energy from my
speech. The evening before had been his first visit to the fraternity house. First chance to see it up close, to document the
wrong
that had before been unseen, intangible, always elsewhere. And there on the floor at the end of my freshman year, I knew that he’d have enough ammunition to keep firing for my full college career.

I couldn’t look him in the eyes anymore; I just made an “Unnh?” noise, the sort that someone makes when every available response feels wrong…the exhale of defeat.

“The things you learn,” he said, “when you find your son sleeping in puke.”

“I don’t…” I started. “This isn’t
me
.”

“Who am I looking at, Charles?”

“I don’t know. But this isn’t…it’s me, but it isn’t me.”

“I’m going back to the hotel,” he said. “Your mother and I will be back at 10:30 for your Awards Brunch
, as your Family Weekend schedule indicates. I assume you can find a way to clean this up before then.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Good. I’m not bringing your mother back to this.” And my father walked down the hallway, through the foyer and out the front door, taking a sip of his coffee while on our front porch, and then he was off and it was just me and the mess. It wasn’t until fifteen minutes later, when I finally found some Windex stored in the upstairs bathroom, that I took the time to look at myself in the mirror and see what my father had been looking at during our conversation: at some point in the night, I’d rolled over into my own vomit, and now it was caked in my hair, caked in my sideburns, smeared across the front of my red polo. Yes, here was the model young man who’d just planned a splendid end-of-the-semester Family Weekend, full of presentations and live music and meet ‘n greets and—soon—a Saturday brunch. Here was the young man who was supposed to win both “Freshman of the Year” and “Leader of the Year” honors at the upcoming brunch, the young man who wanted so badly for all the world to know how ambitious he was, even as a freshman, how responsible and dedicated, how smart and full of potential. I picked a piece of floor fuzz from my eyebrow, brushed some drywall from my forehead, and headed to the bathroom’s paper towel dispenser, dutifully restocked the afternoon prior by a woman named Sonya who sometimes smiled at us, and to whom we sometimes nodded.

For the next three years, I
tried to pretend that this moment hadn’t happened, that maybe my father had never even come to visit the house, had never seen me on the floor, and that I was indeed the young “Leader of the Year” I was supposed to be.

For those three years, I worked my ass off to maintain a near-perfect GPA, to turn those grades into solid internships by my junior and senior years, to win spots in the Edison Student Government and on the fraternity’s Executive Board. Freshman of the Year became Sophomore of the Year became Junior of the Year. For three years, whenever I’d talk to my father, my voice would sound like a bad Christmas letter, a list of updates on my leadership activities, my academic progress, my career development. Sure, I kept a few things to myself: no mention of how many 25-cent Beer Nights I’d conquered, how many Bladder Busts, how many Power Hours, how many Beer Pong tournament wins. I was a Public Relations expert when it came to
my own persona. And whenever possible, fraternity took the spotlight: when we appeared on the front page of the campus newspaper for organizing a Toys For Tots event, I sent my father the cut-out article; when the EU school web site posted on their front page a photo of our Executive Board receiving the
Florida Leader
magazine “Organization of the Year” award (I stood dead-center in the photo, holding a framed magazine cover while my brothers crowded around me and held up #1 fingers), I captured the screen shot and convinced my mother to make the jpg into his computer’s background image so that he’d see it every single day.