“Gotcha,” Daniel says.
“You guys don’t go out?” I ask. “Out to bars? Clubs? No parties or socials?”
Bradley sighs as if distracted. “Sometimes. Not really.”
Then silence again in the room, as they all hunch over their computers.
“Oh,” Bradley says. “Chris”—the live-in Graduate Assistant—“wants to have a meeting with the Executive Board on Thursday. Everyone can make it, right?”
They all nod, never tearing their eyes away from their laptops.
They don’t leave the house, don’t leave the room. This is a cave for them.
After awhile, I drive to a local gas station, buy a six-pack of Yuengling, sneak it back into the guest room and drink by myself, and it feels forced, routine. I don’t even know if I’m buzzed by the time I finish the six-pack; I have no point of reference, no one to talk with. I sit on the bed, typing out a joyless report,
Warcraft
sound effects echoing from down the hallway.
*
Monday morning, sometime after I shower, I notice the voicemail indicator on my cell phone blinking, so I check my messages. There is only one:
“Yes, yes, um, Mister Charles Washington,” says a clumsy male on the other end, “this is Donnie Ackman, from the Office of Greek Life at New Mexico State University. Yes. Well, I was referred to you by Sam Anderson, the…what was it? The New Member Education Chairman? Of the Nu Kappa Epsilon chapter here at State? Well, it looks…and I don’t know if you’ve heard about this, but it looks like we’ve got some real issues with the chapter here. Some hazing issues that I fear you—and your entire Headquarters—may be interested in. Or, rather, concerned about. If you could give me a call back as soon as you get this message, hopefully we can get this worked out. Thanks a lot, Mr. Washington.”
*
Before I can return Donnie Ackman’s call, my phone rings again: Walter LaFaber.
“You missed our scheduled one-on-one call yesterday,” he says.
“I’m sorry, Walter. I had car trouble.”
“Yesterday wasn’t a travel day.”
“No,” I say. “I…I’m having trouble remembering what day it is. Where I am.”
“Yesterday. Start with yesterday.”
“I was…I needed new wiper blades? And an oil change. So I forgot to call.”
“You weren’t overdue, were you?”
“No. Well, a little. A couple hundred miles.”
“Take care of your car,” he says. “That is your office, Charles. Take care of your body, take care of your car. You’ll find it difficult to accomplish much without either of those. Dr. Wigginton always says: you can tell everything you need to know about a man from his shoes and his car.”
“Yeah, I—”
“And do not miss another one-on-one call.”
“I won’t. It’s just—”
“I get the feeling that you’re slipping.”
“Slipping? No. I’m fine, I’m fine.”
“We’re deep into the semester. Are you slipping?”
“Walter, everything is—”
“I don’t have your last several reports.”
“Right. I’ve just been jam-packing my days with meetings, so it’s been tough to find extra time to sit down and type. But I think I’m winning a lot of battles out here, Walter.”
“Are you?”
“Definitely.”
“We haven’t talked lately.”
“I know.” I walk toward my suitcase, toward my laptop bag and my paperwork, but LaFaber continues responding so quickly that I barely have time to process/answer/move/think before he’s snapping back once again.
“I haven’t received any reports. So tell me. What battles you are ‘winning?’”
“Um. Organizational stuff, mostly? Budgets? Goals? You know.”
“Do I?”
“Winning hearts and minds, Walter.” Scrambling through a series of print-outs, but don’t even know what I’m looking for. Something I can read back to him? Something tangible that will prove that I am who I should be? “Accomplishing the mission on a personal level,” I say. “It’s not always the workshops that are, you know, going to reach everyone. Sometimes, it’s just the one-on-one conversations—”
“I still don’t have a report from your visit to New Mexico State University.”
“You didn’t get that?”
“No.”
“I thought I emailed that to you.”
“No.”
“I have it on my computer. I can email you.”
“Tell me about New Mexico State,” he says.
“Why?” I ask. “That was, like, a month ago. I barely remember.”
“Barely remember? A month? I hear you shuffling through papers. Stop that. Just talk.”
“No, I remember. It’s just…why do you want to hear about it? Why now?”
“Is that a problem?”
“Listen, I’ll get the report finished.”
“I thought it was finished already.”
“They were fine, Walter. They were good kids. I’ll get more specific in my report, but they seemed like they really had it together. There’s nothing to worry about, so I didn’t feel like I needed to be in a hurry to finish the paperwork.”
“That was your impression, Charles? Good kids?”
“Maybe some little things to work on. We made a budget.”
“No evidence of hazing?” he asks.
“What?”
“Hazing. Physical violence? Harassment?”
“Of course not,” I say. “Walter, I would have told you right away if I’d seen—”
“I didn’t ask whether you’d
seen
it. I asked for your impression. Often, as consultants, we’re forced to piece together a picture of a fraternity chapter based not simply upon observations, but also nitty-gritty research and investigation. Interviews, reactions.”
“I didn’t have a bad impression, then,” I say. “No.”
“What about their New Member Educator? Sam Anderson?”
“Sam Anderson?”
Hangers shaking. I smooth my pants. Eyelid twitching.
“I don’t, um, think I remember him…specifically.”
“That’s too bad.”
“Too bad?” I ask. “Too bad that I didn’t find evidence of hazing? Or too bad that I don’t remember Sam—um, what’s his name?—Sam Anderson?”
“Both,” he says and exhales, a noise that—through the phone—sounds like nails falling against particle board. Hundreds of nails. “I received a phone call this weekend, Charles.”
“A phone call. From who?” I miss Donnie Ackman’s call this morning, and Ackman
immediately phones the National Headquarters? “Was it the Greek Advisor who called?”
“The Greek Advisor,” LaFaber says. “I haven’t talked to him yet.”
“You haven’t?”
“Not if I can avoid it. Not yet. You know by now, Charles, that these Greek Advisors are a bunch of hacks. No need to stir the pot until we know what we’re cooking.”
“I thought…”
“You thought?”
“Never mind,” I say. “Who called?”
“I received a phone call from an irate mother of one of the pledges.”
“A mother. Something serious?”
“Nothing terrible, not from what I could understand. No deaths, no injuries.”
“So there’s no problem? Just something minor?”
“No problems, as long as we take the proper actions.”
“But even then, we’re not talking about anything major?”
“We cannot afford another lawsuit, Charles.
Not with the Sandor suit hanging over us. We’ve got to act quickly, but we’ve got to take retroactive action, as well.”
“You never even told me what happened,” I say.
“No, I did not.”
“What did she tell you, the mother?”
“You don’t need to know.”
“Did she give names? Was it…I mean, how specific did she get?”
“I can’t tell you. Rest assured, I can handle the situation, but we need your assistance with that visit report that you haven’t submitted.”
“All right, all right,” I say. “I’ll email you the report. But I told you, I never saw any indication of hazing while I was in Las Cruces.”
“It’s not what you see, Charles.”
“Okay. I get it. It’s all about the ‘impression.’”
“You’re not hearing me. Give the report extra-special care. Print it. Overnight it to me by tomorrow. Do not email it.”
“I hear you, Walter. But email is easier—”
“You’re not hearing me.
Do not
email the report.”
“Why not?”
“I want the report to be dated as it should have been. The day after your visit. If you email it, the current date becomes record.”
“So what? It’s the same report.”
“It might be the same report, but the date of the writing is what is most important. With a mailed package, I can lose the envelope.”
“Still not understanding. Maybe I had too many beers last night.”
“Excuse me?”
“Joke. Just
joking.”
“Listen to me, Charles. You saw something in New Mexico.”
“I didn’t see anything. I told you.”
“You saw something. You saw several things that were unsettling. The way that the brothers spoke to the pledges
, perhaps. Maybe they made embarrassing jokes at the expense of the pledges. Maybe they seemed capable of physical cruelty.
Capable
. Maybe you saw paddles at the fraternity house. Maybe you saw a box of blindfolds.”
“Walter, I didn’t see any—”
“I don’t give a damn what you
did
or
did not
see, Charles,” he says, and now his breathing is hard, grating, the fuming nostril exhalations of a dragon, and there is a crackling noise. He wants me to hear these things, to picture him in his office in a way that I’ve never before seen or heard him. Suddenly, he wants me standing on the chair in the center of the room as he paces and screams behind me. “When I see that report in my office, I want to be scared of what that New Mexico State chapter might be doing to its pledges. I want your impression of that fraternity to convince me that—even though you saw nothing directly incriminating—I should suspend them.”
“You want me to lie?”
“For the good of the National Fraternity, for the good of thousands of young men across the country, you will emphasize certain features of this chapter that we know to be true. And if the report is dated properly, I’ll be able to claim that all suspension paperwork was filed at least a month ago. I can convince that Greek Advisor that I sent him a copy of the report weeks ago, that he must have lost it…with the dysfunction at some of these schools, that isn’t too hard. If we can claim that we suspended this chapter a month ago, we can tell our attorneys that we acted out of obligation to our mission
prior
to any hazing allegations. We can tell the mother that punishment was swift, that she has nothing to worry about.”
“Wait. This isn’t right.”
“It isn’t right or wrong. It’s just paperwork.”
“Walter, I can’t. F
or God’s sake, I can’t do something like this.”
“They did indeed haze,” he says, words breathed with fire. “The dates are just numbers on a page, and you
will
make those numbers work for us.”
“But if they didn’t? If they didn’t actually do anything?”
“Get to work, Charles. I look forward to reading your report.”
*
Tuesday afternoon, and I have a meeting with the campus Greek Advisor in a building that looks like a brown flying saucer. When I enter the lobby of the Greek Life Office, I’m greeted not by one lone Graduate Assistant at a receptionist-style desk—as is usually the case—but by a crowd of graduate students, a full Last Supper of seated disciples at a long wall-mounted computer desk, and all of them rise and rush to me and shake my hand and tell me how much they admire what I’m doing, that I’m making such a big difference in the lives of students everywhere. Saving the culture, saving the world.
“I wish I could travel to different universities,” one blonde guy says sadly. “My fraternity didn’t select me as a consultant.”
“That’s too bad,” I say.
“It’s always exciting to meet new consultants, though,” a curly brunette reassures me. “It’s so
ex
-citing.”
“You look excited,” I say.
All around me. They’re all around me.
“We are excited!” she says.
Someone is gripping my shoulder, slapping my back.
“So this is, um, a full office,” I say. “What do you all do?”
“I’m Todd, and I’m the GA in charge of IFC,” the blonde guys says. “And that’s Lisa, the Special Events GA. And Tamara, the Panhellenic assistant. Rodney is the GA for NPHC. Shannon is the Department assistant, and Sheryl is the Recruitment assistant.”
All of them surrounding me, a funhouse of smiling faces everywhere.
“That’s a lot of assistants,” I say and they laugh and continue smiling. Wider now, and after I say it, I realize that this is probably a comment that every visitor makes, that the GAs probably laugh every time it’s said, have learned how to laugh with appropriate volume and vigor at this specific joke.
Everywhere
, these Bowling Green GAs, all around me since the moment I arrived: in the fraternity houses, in the dorms, on every floor of this building, in every office, these graduate students who still look awkward in their suits and ties, who scurry about with clipboards and portfolio binders and to-do lists for their departmental supervisors. It’s consultant orientation
all day everyday
in here. Every major “student life” department at Bowling Green is the same, they tell me, from Homecoming to Orientation: GAs, GAs, GAs. The best program in the country for student personnel! You’re guaranteed to get experience and good job placement. Whether you want to become the Director of Orientation at the University of Maine or the Coordinator of the Office of Student Involvement at Memphis, BGSU is
the place
for CSP. And, like me, these graduate assistants were all students who’d been tremendously involved in campus life during their undergraduate college careers. They were all Diamond Candidates who chose to fashion their undergraduate social activities into their careers, and now—whooooo, hold on!—they’re
climbing
!