“Stepped to me?”
His cigarette has fallen to the ground. He ambles backward, crushing it.
And, for some reason, the rest of the Pledge Clump is shrinking away,
too, faces white with terror. One of them has turned around, is digging his fingers into his hair with the sort of stressed-out “I’ve lost everything!” panic that I’d expect of a stock broker after a market crash. Another has closed his eyes, is breathing super-slow, gripping his chest.
“Oh
God,” I say. “What just happened? It’s all right. Don’t worry.”
I feel like I knocked into a fire alarm accidentally, like I just set something in motion that cannot be taken back,
sounded an evacuation and killed the entire workday.
“
My life’s over,” Michael says. His knees have gone weak. He’s shrinking.
“Yo, yo,” someone says. “Michael’s a little slow. He’s not usually like this.”
“He doesn’t usually make these kinds of mistakes,” Tony says. “He’s a good kid. He just has…you know…issues. We’ll work it out, man,
really
.”
“The brothers are good to us,” someone else says. “They don’t do nothing wrong.”
“No, I’m just here to have a good time tonight,” I say. “I’m not spying on you guys. I’m not here to get you in trouble or tell the brothers anything. All right?”
Silence from the Clump. They don’t believe a word I’m saying.
Michael still isn’t moving, breathing, so I repeat, “All
right
?” and finally he nods and some color appears to re-enter his face. All around me, I see the same debilitating and senseless fear on every face. Maybe I did pull an alarm, and this is the resulting loud-speaker blare that this fraternity chapter
hazes
with reckless abandon: Etiquette Dinners are the
fun
activity, but on any other Saturday night? Maybe the pledges are woken up in the middle of the night, herded here to the house backyard for hundreds upon hundreds of push-ups and jumping jacks and dehumanizing drill instruction, then briefed on how to keep secrets from authority figures, how to protect their own suffering. I should ask questions, right? I should take Michael aside, ask him if he’s been hazed, if he’s suffered physical abuse? I should stop this charade immediately, call LaFaber, find the necessary forms—
But inside the house are Maria and Shelley, and
maybe the Etiquette Dinner isn’t over…and these kids have only been in the fraternity for weeks…they wouldn’t be hazed yet. That was the Fun Nazi talking, and he’s not here.
“Oh fuck me,” Tony says. “Look. It’s Sam.”
And we all look back to the fraternity house, all of us at once, as though we’re a group of high school kids caught smoking in the bathroom by the campus rent-a-cop, and Sam Anderson stands in the open doorway of the house, a featureless silhouette framed by the muted orange light of the dining room. The pledges back away from me quickly—I’m the cigarette butt they’ve tossed into the urinal.
Nothing to see here
, smoke hidden behind puffed-out cheeks.
“
Gentle
-men,” Sam says. “You may now re-enter the house. And let’s make this quick, ‘kay? No pussy-footing around.”
The pledges form a single-file line, myself at the back, and smiles are finally—
finally
—returning to their faces. Like the threat of push-ups and air chairs and whippings has ended because there is still an Etiquette Dinner to be finished. There are
girls
present. Brothers can’t haze when girls are present. I breathe easy. Sam wouldn’t haze, I’m thinking. Jose wouldn’t haze. Much too disciplined. Not reckless. I was wrong, I’m wrong.
*
We march through the front doors, myself at the end of the single-file line, and when I pass Sam at the doorway he gives me a handshake and says, “I hope they haven’t been
too
much trouble for you, man,” and I shake my head and manage a good-natured shrug, and then I’m inside the living room again and it has changed considerably in the last ten minutes. Sorority girls gone. Tables folded up, shoved against the wall.
The eerie emptiness of this chamber is broken only by a single chair in the center of the room, sloping brown plastic and uneven rust-eaten metal, a piece of furniture that looks as if it was swiped from a condemned elementary school. A single broken chair at the center of a dark room: looks like the scratchy minimalist poster for a
Saw
movie.
But as my eyes adjust to the darkness, I
see that there are at least ten older fraternity brothers standing behind the chair, grouped together along the room’s far wall near the entrance to the kitchen, some with their arms crossed over their chests, others with their hands on their hips. Jose, chapter president, foregrounds this thick side-by-side mass of intimidation, this Brother Wall, collective glares fixed intently on the line of pledges entering the empty room.
As soon as he sees the chair and the brothers, Tony skids to a stop and says, “Aw, shit.”
Jose steps forward and waves his hands in a calming manner, smiles in a friendly way to reassure the line of pledges, but somehow he still looks military, unimpressed with the sudden burst of terror the young men are feeling; somehow it still feels like a “quit acting like pussies” smile, a “be a man” smile. As if the fear is unwarranted, and the brothers have done nothing to deserve such a reaction. And maybe they haven’t: no matter how innocent the fraternity chapter, a pledge semester can be scary, rumors and stories of other chapters’ horrendous physical and emotional tortures constantly circulating, parents and friends and fellow students sharing clipped newspaper articles detailing the Big Brother Night mishaps from Arizona State or Southeast Missouri, movies featuring ultimate pledge humiliation seeming to play endlessly on HBO —
Van Wilder, Revenge of the Nerds,
old episodes of
Tales From the Crypt
where pledges are locked inside haunted houses and then disemboweled by malevolent spirits. No matter a student’s safety, the pledge drifts through his semester in a culture of fear and paranoia. That happens everywhere. And here in this room, even if nothing bad happens, these young men are processing thousands of embedded mental images from Court TV,
USA Today
,
Rolling Stone
, each concocting different scenarios for his own imminent abuse.
But it’s just an empty room. Just a chair. It’s nothing.
“Everyone, if I could have your attention please,” Jose says from the Brother Wall, his accent more pronounced now that he’s projecting so loudly. “I would like to introduce you to our Educational Consultant, Mr. Charles Washington. Everyone is familiar with the duties of our national consultants, yes? He will be staying with me for the next few days. Attending our meetings, observing our fraternity. Please make him feel comfortable.”
And it feels as if he says “comfortable” like a warning to all of the brothers:
The
Nationals Spy is here
!
Watch what you say
!
Watch what you reveal
! My hands fumble in an effort to loosen my tie, but I realize I’ve already loosened it. Now that everyone knows that I’m a consultant, the suit works against me, widens the age gap between us all. When I try to smile, only half my mouth will cooperate.
“Thanks, Jose,” Sam says. “All right. For all our pledges who don’t know what an EC is, make sure to read up in your pledge books. There’ll be a quiz later.”
Laughs from the Brother Wall. Big heaving laughs from the shadowy figures.
“‘Kay,” Sam says. “You might be wondering what happened to the girls. That’s a legitimate question. Here’s your answer: they’re gone. While you were out back, their sorority sisters picked them up in the front parking lot. Poof. Gone. So the social part of tonight’s activity is over. Before they left, though, we asked each of them to fill out a short questionnaire so we could
assess
”—he lets the word linger, like he’s proud of using it—“your progress as pledges.”
Tony, the stocky pledge in front of me, says “shiii-iiiittt,” grinds his teeth together and forms his hands into such tight fists that he eventually has to shove them into his pockets to retain some composure. “I knew it,” he whispers to no one. “I knew it. This was a test. Whole time, this was a test.” He looks like a student after a final exam, bolting out of the classroom to confirm his answers in the textbook and then learning that he was dead-wrong on more occasions than he’d expected.
“Without further adieu, we will begin with my favorite douchebag pledge,” Sam says, holding the stack of etiquette questionnaires. He reads from the top sheet: “Michael Garcia, step to the front.”
Michael, he of the spiky hair and the red shirt and black pants and white socks, gives a
who me?
look, eyebrows raised in utter disbelief, and Sam responds with his own twisted facial expression, the intractable kind that says,
yes, Retard, YOU
. Sam points to the chair and Michael shuffles over with heavy feet. “Stand on the chair,” Sam says.
Michael obeys; he steps reluctantly up, stands atop the seat of the chair—creaking noises as he climbs, the sound of strained
metal—and glances over his shoulder at the dark figures behind him—they snicker, and one says “What the fuck are you looking at?”—and then back at his pledges, searching for support. Spiky-haired Michael is on display in the center of the room, a limp shadow of a man standing at Sam Anderson’s mercy. More accurately, of course, he stands at
Shelley’s
mercy, since Sam holds a paper filled with her questionnaire answers.
“Heard you were giving our consultant a tough time tonight, Garcia,” Sam says.
“Wha…?” Michael asks, trembling hands rubbing his red shirt. “Wha…?”
“Being a little troublemaker.”
“Wha…?” Michael asks again, wobbling. “How’d you…?”
“No,” I say from the back. “No, he—”
“Don’t need to defend him, brother,” Sam says, and the Brother Wall laughs, shadows bouncing. “Just giving him a hard time. Only way these fuckers learn, you know?”
“Well,
” I say.
“We will keep it clean,” Jose says. “No need to worry.”
I close my eyes for a moment, rub them. Many of the hazing stories that earn headlines— whether it’s a college lacrosse team, a high school soccer team, or a fraternity—are the sort that involve physical abuse, that result in injury and lawsuits. The true definition of hazing, though, includes not only “bodily harm or danger or disturbing pain,” but also any activity that “causes embarrassment or shame in public” or makes someone into “the object of malicious amusement or ridicule.” Name-calling, silly late-night tasks (“Go get me a burrito, pledge!”), scavenger hunts. This type of hazing generally goes unreported, but it’s just as illegal as paddling or push-ups or thumb-up-the-ass “elephant walks.” As a consultant, I should raise my voice. Stop this.
But then again, this could be nothing, right? Back at EU, the fraternities were heavily monitored by the university. We could host parties, sure, but
the RAs would have noticed any hazing. We joked with our pledges about the terrible hazing that they’d endure (“Better watch out, pledge, we make you eat your own shit during Hell Week!”), but it was just jokes, just boys being boys, never anything serious.
This is nothing, I tell myself finally. Just loosen up and go with it or else—once again—
I’ll find myself in a dark backyard surrounded by orange construction netting, bass thumping from the chapter room inside and signaling that the party is just moments from becoming reality. I’ll find myself once again yelling desperately at Adam Duke—six-pack in hand—to just end it,
please
, just end it,
I need this
! “All right,” I say. “Okay. You’re fine. Keep going.”
“Excellent. So, Michael Garcia,” Sam says, reading from the paper. “Your date for the evening was a girl named Shelley DeJesus.” Sam looks back at the Brother Wall. “Pretty fucking hot, too, tight little ass. Got a good look at her when she came in. Garcia here is a lucky cat. Even got to sit right by the consultant, so he should
’ve been able to get some pointers. So let’s see how well you did tonight, Mr. Garcia. ‘Kay?”
Michael holds his breath. Maybe choking. Chair straining.
“The first question on this sheet. Did your date introduce himself and shake your hand? Let’s read what Shelly wrote.” Sam pauses for dramatic effect. “‘No. He just matched up with me and told me to come inside with him. Didn’t know his name until after we sat.’”
Atop the chair, Michael stares at his shoes, says “Heh,” swallows.
“That’s not very good etiquette, is it, Garcia?”
The Brother Wall laughs, but the Pledge Clump manages only thin smiles, tension relief against their own approaching fear of the chair.
Michael, still wobbling, lets his shoulders drop, his own smile fading. Up on the chair, he stands high above everyone else in the room, but somehow I still feel as though I’m staring down at him.
“The next question on our
assess
-ment. Did your date help you into your seat?” Dramatic pause. “Hey. I’m no psychic, but I bet I can guess this answer, too.”