Sam brushes sweat from his forehead, knocks his baseball cap sideways, leaves it like that. “Yeah
. The guy kept saying he was tired. Exhausted from all the traveling.”
I chug my
water, still thirsty. “Well, that’s not—”
“So we thought it would be nice,” Jose says, “if you had some privacy tonight. We have some things to take care of, so we will leave you at my apartment to relax.”
“Leave me at your apartment?”
I can watch his DVDs, he says. They know a great taco-burrito delivery place and they’ll order me some dinner. I can watch TV, read a book. I can play X-box, fool around on the internet, get caught up on reports. I can go to sleep early, he says. The place is all mine, and I can sleep as late as I want tomorrow. Wake up refreshed.
“I don’t…” I say. “It’s Saturday night.”
“Don’t worry about us,” Jose says. “We have many things to take care of.”
Sam’s baseball cap is sideways still, and he doesn’t care, still hasn’t fixed it,
hasn’t fixed it
, and it is a certainty now, isn’t it? I couldn’t get a read on these guys before, but I know now that Sam is not just a joker but a full-fledged
frat star
who had this whole abandon-the-consultant thing planned…But there are different types of frat stars, I decide: those at Pittsburgh and Shippensburg whose every movement bespoke the “drinking club” lifestyle, those at Illinois who had money and power and didn’t give a damn about the world outside their house, and now…this. Someone who hates not just the National Fraternity and its consultants, but also his own school, his town, perhaps his entire state.
Sam’s hat is sideways, and he is really, really fratty, frat-tastic even. I see this now. The hat, the jokes, the planned attempt to
drop me off: there was never a question how to categorize the chapter at New Mexico State University.
“So what are
you
guys doing, then?” I ask. “While I’m, you know, resting?”
Silence in the car. Sam scratch
ing the hair under his hat.
A week ago, I would have appreciated silence and sleep, a welcome retreat from the madness of my daily schedule, time to—yes—recharge for the next grueling week, but now I’m thinking, You two are going out on the town tonight, aren’t you? Hitting up that one hidden college bar in this entire dusty town, some shack-in-the-woods dive with plank floors and two-by-fours for walls, but giant beer tubs lining the interior, and 20-year-old college girls in short black skirts and low-cut sex tops, and Kanye’s “See You in My Nightmare” bumping loud enough to shake the ne
on Budweiser signs on the walls.
“Tonight,” I say. “What are you guys doing?”
“Nothing exciting,” Jose says. “We have some planning and details and things. I think that I would probably rather stay at home if I had the choice.”
“Yeah,” Sam says. “Whoo. I’m exhausted.”
“No, really,” I say. “I’m
not
tired. I’m
not
sitting at home.”
“
Um,” Sam says, and now he corrects his hat.
“We
do
have an event for our pledges tonight,” Jose says. “That is where we will be.”
“An event for your pledges
?”
“It’s not a big deal. It’s just a stupid little thing,” Sam says.
“It is nothing that we were trying to keep secret,” Jose says, his slight accent giving the words a strange foreign appeal, as though New Mexico State’s pledge event is special because it is unlike anything I have ever experienced before in the States. “It is nothing bad. It is actually an educational event. An Etiquette Dinner. We got the idea from National Convention.”
“And I can’t come?”
“Naw, it isn’t that,” Sam says. “Naw, we just…”
“It would probably be very
boring
for you,” Jose says and then laughs humorlessly, face like a mob-movie background goon who wants to convince the boss that he didn’t fuck up. “We use the
Marathon
as a guide for the etiquette lesson. Conduct of a gentleman. We talk of things like pulling out chairs for ladies, working from the outside in when using silverware.”
“Yeah,” I say
, measuring their expressions, gauging their fear. I
am
still the Educational Consultant, the Fun Nazi who can make misery of their happy fraternity functions. “We had pledges who’d eaten TV dinners their whole lives. Sure, they need these sorts of events.”
“Right
,” Sam says from the back. “They come to college
so
rough. We got guys who grew up in military families. Love hunting, hiking, but no indoor manners.”
“Most of our brothers,” Jose says in his slow English, and he turns the steering wheel—hand over hand, absolutely textbook again
(
but only to the untrained eye
, for the Fun Nazi can see his reluctance to speak too quickly, to look me in the eyes as he speaks) and we pull down a choppy road that leads to a mud-colored apartment building, “most have grown up in either the military or as first-generation immigrants. Homes without fathers. Very poor.”
“It’s an awesome event, really,” Sam says
, maybe excited because—as New Member Educator—the Etiquette Dinner is
his
event to organize. Maybe he thinks the Authority Figure in the front seat is enthralled by his creation. Maybe he’s willing to say more than the tight-lipped chapter president.
“What makes it so awesome?” I ask.
“We get them together, our pledges, and they’re all dressed up in shirt and tie and everything,” Sam says, “and we invite a sorority to come over as their dates—”
“A sorority?” I ask.
“Right. They, um…they come to the house…”
And now he’s gripping the bill of his baseball cap, wondering if he’s said too much.
Etiquette Dinner, I think, still turning the words over in my head, and attempting through a waning state of inebriation to process images of the night. Sorority girls. The bodies in their tight white pants waiting to enter the front door of the fraternity house. When I close my eyes, though, I see only numbers and spreadsheets and then the Code of Conduct and “three times/weekly” and “No Dating, Drinking, Drugs, or Digital Footprints” and “NEVER,” and I rub my eyes, smooth my pants, try to make it all go away.
“This sounds like fun,” I say. “I think I want to do this.”
“You want to…” Sam says. “You want to watch?
“I want to
do
this.”
“You want to
participate?”
“Definitely.”
“Well. Like. This is for our pledges?”
“Etiquette dinner,” I say again.
“This sounds fun. So what’s the deal? When’s it start?”
“You really want to do it?” Sam asks, voice sinking. “No joking?”
“Of course, of course.”
“Hmm,” Sam says. “‘Kay. Well. Guess we can...” He looks to Jose.
“It is…”
“There’s a few…”
“…a detail that needs…”
“…but, shit…”
“I did not think that…”
“I hope this isn’t going to be a problem,” I say. “I don’t want my visit to be
too
serious. I can get serious, if you prefer?”
“No. Of course. We change things,” Jose says. “
This will work.”
“All right,” Sam says, not visibly upset, not displaying the look of a man in the heat of competition whose best-laid plans have been spoiled, just continuing to run his fingers over the bill of his hat, staring at the ceiling of t
he car in strong contemplation, morphing from
Man With the World’s Greatest Event
to
Man Who Must Fix Now-Flawed Event
.
“I’ve never done anything like this during a chapter visit,” I say. “Usually it’s just meetings. I like to have fun, though. Really. I’m a consultant, but I’m
still
your
age. Still young.”
“I guess you are,” Sam says.
*
At Jose’s off-campus apartment, I drag my bags to his living room and then
scarf a bag of his potato chips and watch the USC game while he’s in the shower and, mostly sober now, I open my suitcase and stare at the inside, at the shirts, the socks, the shoes, the belts, the toiletry bag. Just as when I stared into it at a hotel in Illinois, nothing is where it should be. And after a careful inspection, I realize that—yes—I definitely left my goal sheets behind in my Explorer. They’re nowhere to be found. And I’m thinking that these black shoes in this corner of the suitcase could be easily moved a couple inches, and this stack of undershirts could be easily straightened, this bottle of vitamins lifted, shifted to a better location.
But I grab only what I need from the suitcase, from my garment bag, shut both of them and try—eyes closed, straining—not to think about
how I will organize them later.
Before I shower, I check my cell phone’s voicemail and discover that Jenn has left three more messages since this afternoon. The first message is confused, cryptic, sounds like she called for a reason and then forgot (“I, uh…listen, I called Charles, because…I’ve had these weird feelings lately”), and it’s all rambling build-up with no payoff. The second message is more focused, but still Jenn doesn’t seem to say much; she tells me that she wants to make plans
now
; am I getting a hotel room, because I know I can’t stay at the sorority house, right? And what was I thinking about for Thanksgiving? I get the whole week off, right? She’ll call my parents, is that okay? This second message is all questions, a feeling-out, but underneath I hear a tremble of emotion that finally surfaces in the third message: “Charles,” she says, no accompanying happy high tone in her voice to counter the upset low, “we need to talk. Really. Where are you? Things are not good, Charles. Where are you?” She sounds drunk. Bravery fueled by alcohol. The middle of the afternoon and a gameday six-pack helped her to find the words that she hasn’t been able to speak in the last month.
“Where am I?” I ask. “Where
am
I?”
I call her back, not even willing to
stifle the rising anger because I want it to match—no,
exceed
—that sharpness I sensed in her messages.
Where am I
?
Things are not good
? I’m working. Out in New Mexico.
Working
while she’s drinking.
“I was in an airplane, Jenn,” I say as soon as she answers. “I was in the
air
.”
“What are you…” she starts, then switches to, “Charles, why are you yelling?”
“Why am I
yelling
? I’m not yelling.”
“You’re shouting.”
“I was in an airplane, Jenn,” I say again. “That’s where I was.”
“Okay? What are you
talking
about?”
“You kept asking where I was. In your messages. I was in an airplane.”
“All you had to do was tell me—”
“I’m trying to tell you.”
“All you had to do was tell me what you were
talking about
. You just call me and start saying these random things. How am I supposed to know what you’re talking about?”
“Why leave the message, then?” I ask. “Why leave a message like that if you don’t want an answer?”
“How…” she says. “What’s going on here?”
“I’m answering your question, that’s what’s going on.”
“You’re yelling again.”
“I’m not.”
“You’re yelling. And you make no sense.”
“I make sense, Jenn.
You’re
the one...”
“You call me and you start yelling?”
“I was calling you back because
you
—”
“I got emotional today,” she says. “What do you expect? The way you’ve been talking to me? Texting me? You told me you’d call me, and I didn’t know you were flying all day.”
“I told you this morning.”
“No,” she says. “I knew you were flying, but not all day.”
“You were preoccupied. You didn’t care.”
“Charles,” she says. “Please.
I’m
preoccupied?”
“You’re always preoccupied.”
“I texted you, like, ten times today. Did you check your texts, or did you forget to even turn your phone on when you landed? This fraternity has become your life.”
“You’re preoccupied,” I say again. “You’ve got your socials. You were at a football game all day, weren’t you? Tailgating? What do you need a phone relationship for? You’re just doin
g me a favor by staying with me. Humoring me. Don’t do me favors.”
“Charles. You misunderstood me.”
“Were you at the tailgates today? With another fraternity, right?”
“What does that have to do with anything?”