I force myself to breathe easy.
According to Sam,
several
pledges actually made the drive to Juarez at 2 AM so that Sam’s and Jose’s cars would not be left in Mexico. And when we arrived back on campus, Sam—craftily, cleverly—asked the pledge driver to drop us off at Hanson Hall. “Maria and Shelley
had
to invite us back up to their room after that,” Sam says. “Our ride was gone.”
“They didn’t want us to come up?” I ask.
“They probably did. I just needed an insurance plan.”
Our conversation is interrupted briefly when Sam stops at Jose’s apartment so I can pack. Thanks to yesterday’s mall shopping spree, I’m leaving Las Cruces with more clothes than I brought, and my suitcase feels heavier, lumpy in certain spots. When I toss my luggage into Sam’s backseat,
my bag crunches and rattles (notebooks breaking? shampoo bottle cracking open?), and I have to force myself to not check the damages.
Jose is at work, so I don’t get to say goodbye. Apparently, though, I gave him a bear-hug last night and told him he was an amazing president, he was my “dog” (“Yes, you actually said that,” Sam informs me). Last thing I do before I leave, I change shirts and give myself
the “Axe shower”: a quick spray of deodorant.
“Those were tiny beds,” I say when I get back into Sam’s car. “Back in the dorm?”
“Shit, yeah,” Sam says. “Dorm beds are the worst.”
“Move an inch, and you’re on top of someone.”
“Shelley slept on the floor.”
“You hook up?” I ask, but I realize that in the heat of last night, I never stopped to think about what I was doing and if Sam might have been watching. And as I ask, “You hook up,” I’m also aware that I’ve lapsed back into college-speak, into the sort of slang that came so naturally as a student—“that’s tight,” “just made hella cash,” “what up, yo?”—but that I tried to banish from my vocabulary as soon as I spent my graduation money on that Ralph Lauren suit.
“I barely hooked up,” Sam says. “She was damn-near passed out.”
“Oh.”
“Obviously
you
weren’t paying attention,” Sam says. “You were busy. I don’t even remember how it happened, but Shelley crawled onto the floor just a little while after we got back to the rooms. I passed out, too. Didn’t even realize I’d passed out until
you
got up an hour or so later for the bathrooms, woke me up.”
“When I puked?” I ask.
“You puked?”
“I mean…I’m not sure.”
“You puked,” he says and nods. “You covered all the bases last night, didn’t you? Went to Mexico, got wasted, hooked up, puked. Grand Slam, bro.”
“Well, I try.”
“Got a question for you, brother, a serious one,” Sam says as he pulls to the curb beside the Departing Flights doors of the El Paso International Airport. “Why are you doing this?”
“Why am I doing what?”
“Consulting. You say you don’t make any money. So what made you decide to do it?” His voice is disarmed, low and confidential, so honest that I don’t even know how to respond.
So I say that:
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” he asks. “Seems like a hell of a hassle, all this flying and the meetings and what-not, if you don’t even know.”
Others have asked, and for the last several months I’ve had a script from which to read my answer: “I believe in the mission of this fraternity. I believe that a fraternity is something powerful and influential in the lives of young men. I believe that we needed to protect the institution, save it from those who have the wrong priorities.” That is the recorded response that so many have heard. And it was true. But now things feel more complicated, missions and motives not so clean.
“There’s a lot of reasons, I guess.”
“Why did you take the job to begin with, then?”
“Fraternity,” I say, looking at the dashboard, where the vinyl has begun to peel away at the edges, cracking and wil
ting under the constant sun. I don’t ever admit the real reasons, do I? “It was my life. For four years, it was all I cared about.”
Behind us, someone revs his engine, honks.
“I could recite
The Marathon
backward and forward. I could tell you the GPA of every member in our house. I went to every intramural game, showed up at every Dead Week study session to help our pledges. My degree should have been fraternity. That’s the only thing I was really pursuing in college.”
Sam doesn’t move, doesn’t speak, the fever of realization slowly burning through him.
He rubs his chin and stares out the windshield, where a baggage handler is mouthing “What’s the hold-up?” and is holding his palms out impatiently. But Sam raises a finger in a just-a-second gesture and continues to rub his chin. “It’s funny, you know?” he says. “Cause I keep thinking about it, ever since you first got here.”
“Thinking about what?”
“We’re similar, you and me.”
“Are we?”
“Yeah, bro. We’re practically the same fucking guy. I mean, we woke up in the same place together this morning, know what I’m saying?” And he smiles and hits my arm.
“W
e did.”
“This is
my
life, too,” Sam says. “This is like the only thing I care about.”
“
But I don’t know that this is a good thing,” I say. “There’s a lot more…”
“
No, fraternity is the only thing keeping me in school, bro. This is it. If I didn’t have the fraternity, I don’t know where I’d be. If I’d be anything. Fraternity is the best thing that ever happened to me.”
“Sam,” I say. “I’m sure that isn’t true.”
“This is all I care about,” he says again. “And it’s over come next semester.”
My God: he sounds just like
me
, back in the hot tub.
“It’s never over, Sam. The friends you have, the house, it’s always there.”
“But I’m not living in it.”
“No. But you’ll get a place off-campus. You’ll keep your friends. Then you’ll get married or whatever, and you’ll get a good job, real money.”
“You think I’d make a good consultant?” he asks. Quiet and patient voice, not the loud wise-cracking smartass who forced each pledge to stand on a chair and absorb his insults at the Etiquette Dinner.
And I see him perhaps for the first time. A world opens up. A whole life flashes before me. This is a boy whose father served in Iraq or Afghanistan, died probably, whose high school years drifted by in a haze of duplexes and double-wides and six-week stints at the houses of sympathetic aunts and uncles who quickly wearied, a boy who squeaked into college but never really wanted to be there, only went because he needed to get away from wherever he was, and then suddenly he was in a world of 100-person lecture halls and professors demanding papers and RAs patrolling dorms as if the 10 PM quiet hours were a life-or-death matter, and fee deadlines and a mother back home who said only
, Don’t ask
me
for no help, you made your choice what to do with the money your father left you
, and recruiters calling and a world collapsing and then…fraternity was there. Jose and Brandon and all the rest of them, best friends delivered by God himself, and the implosion halted, his life saved.
I see him. For the first time this semester, I’m seeing someone.
“Be honest,” Sam says. “This is all I got, brother.”
“It doesn’t pay well,” I say. “And it’s tough on the road. Away from everyone.”
“I don’t care,” he says. “Look. You come out here, you have a blast. It’s like a second family for you, and they listened to every word out of your mouth. They took notes. We made a
budget
for the first time ever. That’ll save us…how much money?”
“Over ten thousand a year, the way we have it structured,” I say.
“All I’m saying is, you made a difference, you know?”
“Are you being serious?”
“Totally. What could be a better job? Working with fraternity brothers. It’s all win-win. This is my life, and I just…I need it.”
And I shouldn’t say it, but he looks as fragile as a sand castle on a shifting dune, and I owe him.
“If you apply to be a consultant,” I say, “I’ll write a letter of recommendation.”
“Thank you,” Sam says. “Oh God, thank you.”
And as I make my way to the airline counter, as I’m processed from one checkpoint to the next, a long line of Blazers, I wonder how any of this happened. None of it feels real anymore. How did I get here? Alone? El Paso, in the middle of September, holding this luggage? All of it—the Etiquette Dinner, Mexico, alcohol, sexual intrigue, bathroom hijinx, Sam Anderson in the car, near tears—feels like the sort of thing I’d watch in a bad
American Pie
rip-off, not my own life. I hand over my baggage to the woman at the United counter, and for a flash of a second, as I lift my suitcase, I worry that all the extra clothes I bought at the mall, the bottle of souvenir green chile salsa from Café Ranchero and the six-pack of Dust Storm Amber Ale (brewed in Las Cruces) will push the weight of my bag past the allotted 50-pound limit that the airlines set…that I will have to pay a $50 or $75 extra fee for this flight…and then again for the flight to California…and again for the flight back to Pennsylvania.
But there’s no problem at the counter.
As I head to the security checkpoint to walk through the x-ray machine, I briefly worry about my necklace, too, about my shoes, about getting selected as the random passenger for a full search…and then I worry—as they screen my laptop—about what criticism I could possibly write in my report for NMSU (How can I write anything negative? When I was there, when I was participating the whole time?)—
—but I’m through the checkpoint without a beep.
*
Just before boarding, my cell phone rings: Walter LaFaber.
“How was New Mexico, Charles?” he asks.
He is picturing me in shirt a
nd tie right now, isn’t he? He’s standing at his window and staring out and picturing the Diamond Candidate, just finished with a chapter visit, just finished with workshops, set to write reports on his flight from Las Cruces to Lubbock.
“Fine,” I say.
“You sound tired.”
“No,” I say. “That’s the sound of life, Walter. Hard work.”
“You must have gotten a lot accomplished, then?”
“Some big strides in Las Cruces
.”
“It’s always great to be exhausted,” LaFaber says, “but in a
good
way.”
“Right.”
“Just wanted to drop you a phone call. Make sure all is well with you. When you’re so familiar with the driving lifestyle, taking a detour through airline country can be jolting.”
“I’m good,” I say. “Healthy. Listen, though. I’m about to board. Can I call you back? Later today, maybe? Or tomorrow?” And he agrees, and I hang up, and it’s that easy. There is no lecture, no “change the culture” call-and-response, no catalogue of fraternities-in-the-headlines, or alcohol infractions or famous alumni or lists of accomplishments from former consultants, no praise, no warnings, and I hold the phone in my hand and wait for it to ring again but it doesn’t.
PART III
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO. Onward.
New Mexico State to Texas Tech.
A thousand miles from Indianapolis, from the Nu Kappa Epsilon Headquarters, and now—back in Las Cruces—Sam Anderson likely daydreams a consultant’s life. Parties every night, he’s thinking. Girls’ dorm rooms in Pennsylvania and South Carolina and Colorado. Oh, living the dream! What could possibly be better? So he needs me, Sam Anderson does, and any talk of Charles Washington—
Charles Washington?
—cavorting about with sorority girls, shooting tequila in Juarez—
Charles Washington?
The guy with all the goals?—
any talk that would tarnish my reputation
will only tarnish the recommendation letter that I write.
Texas Tech.
After hours of surprisingly productive one-on-one meetings and database updates and an emotional “Confront Your Brother” workshop that sees old friendships in the chapter rekindled, old conflicts extinguished, the students whisper among themselves, planning and conspiring to take me out to the bars and get me wasted, and I respond with a lackluster protest (“No, no, I represent the National Headquarters, I’m responsible for enforcing alcohol rules”) but it’s mostly for their sake, so that the fraternity brothers—when they actually succeed in getting me loaded—can feel as if they’ve achieved some small victory against the rule-imposing Evil Empire of “Nationals.”
And f
or some reason, Texas Tech is a Miller Genuine Draft chapter, and so we split an icy bucket of MGD bottles at my Wednesday night Executive Board dinner in Lubbock, and down 2-for-1 MGDs during a Thursday night Happy Hour at Wanda’s (voted one of the top tequila bars in West Texas). “I can’t believe he’s going out with us,” I overhear one of the brothers say. “This has been the best consultant visit ever.”