Fire Shut Up in My Bones (27 page)

From the moment we crossed over, older Brothers had groomed us—to change us from victims of hazing to perpetuators of it. They often shared hazing stories over drinks, explaining to us how important the practice was to proper pledging, how transformational moments had to be forced, how it was each Brother’s duty to continue the practice. Brothers had to make pledging physically difficult so that the bond would be stronger—the bond between individual pledges and the bond between them and us. Unspoken in it all, the subtext, was that the hazing, with its brutality and physical hardships, was supposed to connect us to ancestral suffering, providing a generational through-line of punishment and perseverance, from bondage to fraternal bonding. Thus, the Brothers saw no wrong in it, only honor and heritage, and we were easily indoctrinated into that warped way of thinking. The only dishonorable hazers were the Massive Hazers, whom everyone had an obligation to constrain.

Since the no-pledging decision came down while I was president, I had to help find a way to balance Brothers’ desire to “follow tradition” with our directive to follow the new rules. It could not be done. In the end, the other officers and I, blinded by the brotherhood, voted to perform the entire pledge process “underground,” so that we could retain much of the hazing and our local rituals. The pledging ban only served to make the entire process more unsupervised, uneven from chapter to chapter, and dangerous. Now many of our fraternity’s chapters increasingly focused on massive midnight hazing sessions, like the ones our chapter carried out at the oil field.

Inviting other chapters to hazing sessions was a way of building bonds among schools—pledges rarely forgot a visiting chapter—and of assuring other chapters that traditions were being upheld at the home chapter, that “your boys” were being “made right.” It was also how outlawed hazing practices spread—chapter to chapter, in the dark of night, like a virus.

I wasn’t a major hazer—it was not my temperament, and as president, it was not my job—but neither was I a minor one. I never hit boys with paddles or sticks or two-by-fours, but I did haze with my hands when pledges didn’t try hard enough or failed at a task. I took no joy in it. I was simply lowering myself to what was expected of me, what we had been convinced was required. And by hazing only in the promotion of training, I crafted for myself a digestible rationale.

The truth was that the hazing worked as advertised—it broke a boy to the point that he was forced to lean on his line brothers to survive it. It was a group trauma, and it bound people together the way trauma often does. Hazing reduced pledges to their weakest and most vulnerable and demanded that they rise from it, forcing them to summon strength greater than they knew they possessed, the way it had done for me. The process would produce some of the most durable and loyal friendships of my life.

The problem was that for those being hazed it was also terribly hazardous, and occasionally deadly. And for those doing the hazing it was just as troubling: it was morally corrosive. The intentions sometimes may have been honorable, but the actions were not. Hazing unleashed the beast in a boy, granted unbridled permission to do the unthinkable, shielding heinous behavior behind a screen of righteousness. The truth is that no one is held harmless in the commission of cruelty. With every blow, I surrendered a bit of myself.

At a hazing session at the University of Louisiana in Monroe, nearly forty miles east of Grambling, the local Brothers assembled us in a wide-open field off a seldom-traveled road. The dean of pledges gathered his charges—a knot of bowed heads and stiffened bodies standing as close together as possible, for whatever protection or solace that might provide. I was standing with the president of that chapter, planning to help him keep a watchful eye so that no pledge was injured. After a few formalities, someone gave the signal for the session to commence. As it did, one of the pledges broke and ran. Coward!, I thought, and ran after him. I hadn’t planned on hazing before the boy bolted, but I was sure now that his fleeing must not be tolerated. Our fraternity could not abide the chicken-hearted.

But the boy was faster than I was. I couldn’t catch him. As I saw him pull away, something struck me. The way the boy ran reminded me of the way my father had run to flee my mother’s gunshots: not flat-out running but a casual quickness, like he was smiling through his fear. Something about it chilled my anger and slowed my stride. Just as it did, I heard a jet overhead, the deep roaring whistle of the engines like a breath blown across the mouth of a Coke bottle. The plane was flying so low I was sure a sharp-eyed passenger could see us. I stood stock-still as it landed a few football fields away.

I realized that we were in a field on the approach path of the city’s airport. Seeing the plane and imagining its passengers and the folks milling about in the terminals—just those images of humanity—stopped me for long enough to ask myself, What am I
doing?
I was not pleased by what had become of me. This was not the me I knew. I slowly walked back to my car, got in, and waited for the hazing session to be over.

This wasn’t right. This wasn’t me. I was better than this. Was this what it took to be one of the real boys, a man, to remain silent and give participatory approval to something that I knew in the pit of me was wrong? Was this the cost of other folks’ respect: the loss of self-respect?

I had gone from the bottom of the male hierarchy to the top of it, and all it had required was the complete suffocation of my soul. I was at the apex of the crushing mound of social subjugation that had caused me to squeeze my seven-year-old hand into my pocket in search of a bottle of pills and a way out. I had traded a public shame for a private one—hypocrisy in place of ostracism. And somehow, in the twist of my mind, that was better. Wrestling with myself was easier than fighting the whole world. Easier. That was the word. Cowardice is always easier than bravery. Always. Bending over is always easier than standing up. Playing a man is always easier than being one.

After a few more fraternity episodes, each one seemingly more unconscionable than the last, I called a meeting near the end of my junior year and resigned my post as president. Enough.

It would take many years for me to come fully to terms with the whole of what I engaged in in the name of brotherhood. Everything about my life had made me pliable. I was fully engaged by the idea of fraternity after I became immersed in it: the focus on achievement, the idea of Brothers of my own choosing, sworn to stand with me and stand up for me, the comfort of boys and men who I was confident wanted only to befriend me and never betray me. My longings had numbed me to my wrongs. It would only be in the cold gaze of hindsight that I would be able to comprehend that while in flight from pain, I became an agent of it.

11

I don’t remember exactly how the CIA came to recruit me—or precisely when—but they did, around the time that I resigned as fraternity president. I was being chosen, again.

What I do recall is that the CIA came to our school each year to recruit, and once an agent came to speak to a history class I was taking. When he was done, he was peppered with silly questions, like the one from the boy who asked, “Did you guys kill JFK?” The agent responded with his own brand of deadpan humor: “I can’t tell you, because if I did, I’d have to kill you.”

I remember thinking that an internship with the CIA would look good on the résumé of someone who still wanted to become a lawyer before becoming a politician. They wanted me—they seemed to delight in the notion of a smart boy from the middle of nowhere—and I wanted them.

I was soon being summoned to CIA offices in Virginia for a final round of interviews and tests. My only fear was that Uncle Henry’s time at Leavenworth would show up on one of the background checks and disqualify me.

The plane I took to Washington was only the second one I had been on, after my first to the international science fair.

That weekend at the CIA was a blur of serious faces and conservative suits. We prospective interns sat through meetings in which square-jawed men gave soporific speeches about what the agency stood for and what our likely jobs would be—analyzing a country or region and writing a report on it. We were interviewed and given basic physicals. Our sight and hearing were checked, mine for the first time. I was sailing through it all, sure that the internship was a lock. Until it was time to take the lie detector test.

I sat in the chair and the agent asked me a round of questions to calibrate the machine, simple questions, like what was my name. Then he began with the real ones. They were things like, “Have you ever cheated on an exam?” All seemed to be going well until two questions came, the second more stressful than the first. The first was, “Have you ever used drugs?” I answered “No,” which was true, but I could hear the needle of the machine scratching “lie” on the paper and could hear the man’s papers rustle as he wrote. How could this be?, I thought. Was it the guilt of sharing the weed-filled locker with Russell and Alphonso in high school? Was it my belief that I’d likely gotten a contact high from the weed my fraternity brothers smoked? What had caused the anxiety at the asking of that question?

And before I could truly recover, the second question came: “Have you ever had sex with a man?”

I hadn’t thought consciously about Chester’s betrayal since I joined the fraternity and began to entertain the never-ending stream of girls, but there it was now, most present. How to answer the question? Both Chester and I had been boys, not yet men at the time. It wasn’t consensual. There was no penetration, so was it technically sex? The anxiety rose in me like dust from a thing long neglected and abruptly disturbed. I could hear the needle of the machine begin to move even before I opened my mouth. I had a hundred questions, but I had to give one answer. “No,” I said. The needle scratched wildly on the paper—lie.

As soon as the test was over, I turned to the man and the things that I had never let spill from my lips came pouring out. All of it. Chester and his betrayal and my guilt. But I said the words the way one speaks to a mirror, not to him, but to myself. There was no emotion in it, no release, only a search for words. When I was finished, the secret still felt kept, still balled up in my gut.

The man looked at me the way Roseanne had the day we tried to have sex and I didn’t know what to do—with a mix of disappointment and disbelief. I begged him to test me again. He reluctantly allowed it.

This time I answered yes to the sex-with-a-man question, but the machine still scratched “lie” onto the paper. I thought in that moment, I will never be free. It took a machine designed to catch liars to help me see that I didn’t yet know my own truth.

In that moment my dream of becoming a politician vanished. How could I be a governor if the government thought I was a liar? How was it that I had no yes-or-no answer for what had happened to me? Chester’s betrayal not only had destroyed my past, but was destroying my future. I went back home and told no one what had happened, only that I would not be getting the internship. And the male figures that had largely been absent since I joined the fraternity were now back, like a pack of dogs sniffing around a kitchen door.

Soon after I returned from Virginia, our fraternity had a party. I was despondent. I didn’t feel like going, but Nathan was visiting from Houston and he wanted me to take him. So I went. But I couldn’t be bothered to dress up. I wore a T-shirt, shorts, and sandals, a wanton violation of our fraternity’s dress code, one I’d upheld to deny hundreds of people entry to our other parties. The Brothers were befuddled and disapproving, but no one complained. Protocol dictated that an ex-president was owed the utmost deference. No one would deny me entry or chasten me. The only person who said something was Clay. He simply asked, almost under his breath, while scanning me head to toe, “So you never gonna wear hard-bottom shoes again?” He didn’t need to say more. I knew that I had to snap out of it.

With only a few weeks left of school, and only one year remaining of my college life, I began to panic. I knew now that I wasn’t going to law school or to pursue a career in politics. So the mass communications major I had never taken seriously, the visual communications concentration I had decided on as the easiest way to keep my scholarship and my commitment to the fraternity, would be my way to a career. But I had never tried to get work in a real newsroom. The summer of my sophomore year I had helped my brother reroof houses under the blaze of a Louisiana sun. And although I had found some things about the work fulfilling—the physical release of repetitive toil, the way it clarifies thinking—I didn’t care to repeat it. So I typed up a résumé, gathered the few clips I had from the student newspaper, and sent them to the
Shreveport Times,
requesting an internship in the graphics department. At first they told me they didn’t have an internship for me, but I called every day and created new charts and graphs like the ones I saw printed in their newspaper, which I sent in to impress them. Eventually they relented and granted my request.

I dove into the work that summer. I figured other people might have more training than I did, but no one had more hours in the day. I always got to the newsroom early and stayed late. And I always tried to edit and improve the little bits of copy that the news desk sent over to be included in the maps and charts and diagrams that we created on our first-generation Macintosh computers. I took on as many projects as I could, anything the permanent employees didn’t want, and tried to make them sing.

The graphics boss, a soft-spoken man named Frank, encouraged me and appreciated me. He started sending me to the news meetings on behalf of the department. I loved this. Deep down, I considered myself more reporter than artist.

One day I had the epiphany that I could combine the two. I’d shown up one morning for a news meeting to find the newsroom abuzz about the death of an entire family in their home: carbon monoxide poisoning.