American Fraternity Man (35 page)

—but suddenly someone is in the doorway.

—Danny, the Vice President of Recruitment. “Time for our one-on-one meeting, right?” And he’s shutting the door halfway, just halfway, and it’s the two of us in the bedroom and I can barely hear the music now, and Danny’s saying, “I been thinking, you know, and I got a lot of things I want your opinion on. A lot of different ideas for Rush.”

And I’m saying, “Yes,” and
now it’s business as usual.

*

Wednesday morning. Late. I haven’t talked to any of the brothers this morning because it’s pack-up-and-drive time. It’s rearrange-my-items-in-my-suitcase time. It’s straighten-up-my-Explorer time. Pittsburgh to Kinston. Kinston to Shippensburg. Shippensburg to Saint Joseph’s.

I shove my suitcase into the back-hatch of my Explorer, carefully removing stray items and finding new homes for papers and materials that have somehow come loose from their previous pos
itions. Replace several shirts on the backseat rod. And, packed up tight, I drive, making sure to tear out of the Greek Row parking lot, making sure to leave a heavy cloud of dust to coat the parked cars.

“Charles is…excited to get out of this shitty little town. Fuck Shippensburg.”

“Charles is…driving to Philadelphia!”

“Charles is…driving, driving, driving.”

“Charles is…!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

But sometime around noon, the green Central Pennsylvania countryside slowly morphing into the gray outskirts of big-city urbanization, my cell phone rings. I turn down the stereo volume, diminishing Britney Spears’ voice, and I answer the phone without checking Caller ID.

“Charles,” says an urgent voice on the other end.

“Walter LaFaber. So good to hear from you again.”

“Yes,” he says. “Listen, Charles…”

“Good news again, I hope. Good news because it’s me?”

“Not quite, this time. Unfortunately. Where are you, Charles?”

“Driving east to Philly.”

“You’re already on the road?”
“Yeah.”

“Get off on the next exit, Charles,” he says. “Get off on the next exit and turn right back around, just the way you came.”

“What—” I say. “What are you talking about?”

“Emergency
. Extreme emergency at the University of Illinois.”

“Um,” I say. “So?”

“You’ve got to get to Illinois by tomorrow morning, Charles.”

“I’m in Phila-
del
-phia.”

“You’ve got to get to Illinois, Charles,” he says again. “You are a
traveling
consultant
. This is the job. This is what you live for.”

“That’s…how far is that? I can’t just turn around!”

“You can,” LaFaber says. “Nobody plans emergencies, Charles. Nobody plans on a kid going to the hospital for blood alcohol poisoning.”

“That’s terrible,” I say, “but what am I supposed to do about that?”

“That’s not all of it. We found a Facebook event page. Open keg party at the Nike fraternity house: six bands, Jell-O shots, water slides, a
Girls Gone Wild
camera crew. This Thursday, the page says. We need you there before this happens.
Need
you. It’s rough, I know, but it’s something every consultant has to do at some point.”

“
You
stumbled across a Facebook page?”

“We’re lucky we caught this when we did.”

“You’re kidding, right? This is all a big fucking joke, right?”

“Charles,” he says, voice rigid again. “Show some professionalism.”

Drive. Turn around and drive. Shippensburg to Philadelphia, u-turn, Philadelphia to Illinois. To fucking
Illinois
. To Champaign-Urbana, Central Illinois. Approximately 147 miles between Shippensburg and Philadelphia, according to the Yahoo! Maps directions I printed and store in my snap-shut plastic case on my passenger-side floor. One set of directions for each trip, from university to university, chapter house to chapter house: Pittsburgh to Shippensburg, Shippensburg to St. Joseph’s, St. Joe’s to Delaware? Or is it Marshall? All the way through December at the University of Iowa. But no directions from Philadelphia to Champaign-Urbana. No mileage. No telling how long this drive will take.

Three days at Illinois, an emergency visit.

Rush Season. Anything suspicious, report it.

Why bother
? I’m thinking, but I set my Explorer to cruise control.

CHAPTER TWELVE. Emergency Visit.

Thursday morning. Early afternoon of my second day of travel toward the University of Illinois. Shaky from caffeine and sugar. Coffee, a sausage biscuit, orange juice, coffee again, Mountain Dew, a glazed donut, all the things I swore I would
not
eat while I traveled. My hands shake on the steering wheel as I drive. Past noon, but a giant styrofoam cup of cold coffee still sits in my cupholder, the liquid muddy brown from powder creamer. One of my goals for this Fall Semester was “No Coffee in Mornings,” because I read a
National Geographic
article which claimed that apples wake you up quicker than coffee, and they’re more nutritious, but comparing apples to coffee is like comparing apples to oranges: a fucking
apple
while driving? Holding the core in your hand, fingers sticky all over the steering wheel and the stereo volume, waiting for a clear spot on the highway to toss it. No, on the road coffee is the only solution. And on Hour Four of my drive last night, I even drank a couple sodas. Broke another Fall Goal, stopped at McDonald’s, ate a 20-piece Chicken McNugget as I drove. Every fucking nugget.

And now I’ve stopped at another gas station, a 7-Eleven on the outskirts of Champaign-Urbana, home of the university. More soda, a bag of Cheeto’s, a prepackaged turkey sandwich with squeeze-on mayonnaise. I sit in my Explorer, chewing, headache growing, and I stare at the Fun Nazi business card stuck below my odometer. I’ve stared at it for hours, off and on, flipping it around to the blank side sometimes.

I pull out my cell phone, inhale, and I force myself to be patient like LaFaber. Aside from voicemails and texts, Jenn and I have now gone five days without meaningful conversation. I dial and the phone rings three times; I flip the business card to the blank side, and I’m already thinking that she won’t answer. Maybe I
should
just hang up, pretend she isn’t—

“Hello?” she asks suddenly.

“Jenn,” I say. Smooth my pants. “Jenn. Hey.”

“Charles,” she says.

“How, um, how are you?”

“I’m good, Charles,” she says, and her voice is not high-low, not sorority-girl happy. A silence follows our opening remarks, the type I’ve been encountering so much lately, where both parties in the conversation seem to realize that there is much to be said but where to start, where
to start? “Too busy to call me lately?” she asks finally.

“Yeah,” I say. “I’m sorry. It’s been pretty bad. A lot of phone tag.”

“I’ve been pretty busy, too.”

“Oh yeah?”

“It is possible for me to be busy, too, you know.”

“Yeah. Of course. I just…you know?”

“A lot of sorority stuff. Senior year stuff. I got nominated for Homecoming Chair, so things have been crazy.”

“Oh, cool. I didn’t know about that.”

“We haven’t talked.”

“Right.”

“We’re doing Homecoming with Kappa Sigma,” she says. “Did I tell you?”

“Kappa Sigma. Good stuff.”

“We like those guys,” she says. “They came to our house and made us breakfast the other day. We came up with a great idea for the Homecoming float.”

“Breakfast.”

“Breakfast,” she says. “And a rose for every girl.”

“Interesting. Breakfast and roses. Real gentlemen, those guys.”

“Charles, I hate to do this.”

“Do what?”

“Cut us off. But I’m supposed to go to lunch with some of the girls.”

“You can’t talk for a couple minutes?”

“Things are hectic. Homecoming. You remember. You
are
flying back for the weekend, right?”

“Plane tickets are so expensive,” I say.

“You have a job, a salary. You haven’t been back here in more than a month.”

“This job is non-profit. I can barely afford my car payments.”

“You promised you’d come back,” she says. “Next weekend. Homecoming is a big deal, Charles. You can get a
weekend
off, for crying out loud. You want me to call your parents, see if they can come into town to see you, too?”

“
No. Don’t call them. I’ll look into the tickets.” How else can I give her my NKE letters, clasp the charm around her necklace and confirm once and for all the seriousness with which I’ve burdened my life? Of course, how can I plan ahead to make it down to Florida when I’m being shuffled around, when I don’t know where I’m going on any given weekend? I’ll check ticket prices later, when things slow down.

“
Okay. They’re calling my name,” she says. “Text me later.”

“I’m almost out of text messages.”

“God, you’ve become a difficult guy to communicate with.”

*

I pull out of the gas station, grumble along the interstate toward the university.

Six hours of driving last night before a sharp detour into northern Ohio to find an alumnus who, LaFaber told me, had a guest bedroom where I could stay for the night. LaFaber gave me this guy’s number yesterday afternoon, told me there was no need to blow $80 of Headquarters funds on a hotel when he’d found a place I could stay for free. “Life in a non-profit is
never
easy,” LaFaber said. “It’s a labor of love.” So he hooked me up with this alumnus, Paul Bennett, a former Educational Consultant now studying Student Personnel at Toledo. Six hours of driving…plus two more hours to get to Toledo. At one point, I missed an exit, drove twenty minutes out of my way. When I finally realized that I was heading in the wrong direction, I also realized that I couldn’t remember the last hour of driving. Not a single second. The last hour of my drive had become a blank.

“How’s the road treating you?”
Bennett kept asking last night while I tried to fall asleep. “What’s been your favorite visit? Your favorite school?” And then he asked about the National Fraternity, about any big news, about his alma mater, the University of Kansas, because “I can’t get back there as often as I’d like.” Eight hours of driving last night and another seven hours of driving this morning.

So much caffeine, my head pounding all the way. Shirts on the hanging rod in my backseat swaying on their plastic hangers, like they could slip off if I hit a bump
. Last thing before we left Indianapolis, LaFaber drew this on the dry erase board:

Told us to face the hangers the same way, just like the drawing, and
if we placed them the wrong way, they’d twist around and shoot off the hanging rod if we braked too suddenly and then our backseats would be a mess, utter disorder. Even if just two or three hangers slip off, I’ll lose count of my shirts and the days on which I wore them (some can be worn twice before washing) and I won’t be right, no, and I’m wondering if I placed the hangers in the right direction, even, if I mixed up the drawing in my head, if I’m arranging my life under the wrong system. This Explorer is packed so tight that it’s hard to move, hard to breathe.