American Fraternity Man (15 page)

And
aside from scattered “How are things?” phone conversations, that was it: the last I’ve spoken with either of my parents before leaving town for Indianapolis.

CHAPTER SEVEN: Goal-setting.

After the Senior Send-Off, the Edison University campus emptied for the three-month summer break, dorms and apartment buildings and fraternity houses going silent and dark. The EU staff members and professors—what few remained—hung up their blazers and ties and came to campus wearing seersucker shorts and Tommy Bahama button-downs, zipping in and out of their offices only to sign year-end paperwork and lug boxes of student portfolios to the dumpster. EU is a private university, its enrollment always bobbing above or below 7,000, the classroom buildings ultra-modern three-story structures with reflective ground-to-roof glass facades which glaze over with air-conditioning condensation in the humid summers. Filled with students, the campus is lively and you hardly pay attention to the architecture; but without students wandering on every sidewalk and through every green, it feels instead like an office-park, like you’re working on your Saturday off.

For my final two weeks in town
, I slept in the fraternity house President’s Room and each morning woke up to say goodbye to another carload of brothers who were heading back home till August. The left-over liquor from the Senior Send-Off lined the bar’s countertop, sticky and heavy and unwanted, like a collection of extra pecan pies and fruitcakes after the end of the holiday season. For the first few days after the party, I found discarded cups and forks in the living room, in the bathrooms, in the courtyard, and I spent mornings Windexing the glass of the framed photos and paintings in our hallways, wiping away fruit-punch-colored fingerprints and spit-out Sprite; in the summer months, the cleaning staff came only once every two weeks, and the house would stink and fester if I didn’t clean.

Jenn wasn’t around
for those two weeks. Over summers, she worked as a lifeguard in St. Pete, stayed at her sister’s place and bought groceries in exchange for rent-free living in the guest room. She was coming back down to Fort Myers for my final two days in town, and we were going to spend a full forty-eight hours together before I left for Indianapolis: out at the beach with a cooler full of Miller Lite and Seadog Blueberry, out for dinner and drinks at one of the hotel steakhouses, lunch the next day at a tiki bar, then finally packing my car together on the last evening, keeping one another awake from dusk to dawn for our last night together in the President’s Room. I still had the lavalier in a box in the glove compartment of my Explorer, but I couldn’t give it to her. Not now. Not anymore. The letters required ceremony; they required that my brothers bruise me and bloody me, that they dump sour milk over my shoulders and crack rotten eggs on my scalp; to give her the letters while everyone was out of town…it would rob the moment of meaning, render the lavalier as procedural as a Tuesday afternoon courthouse marriage. I could hope for Thanksgiving, perhaps, or Labor Day, or Homecoming, sometime in the Fall semester when I might return to town and make my commitment with all of my brothers present and get my ass beaten to make it official, but for our last night in town, it would just be the two of us, no speeches or ceremonies or jewelry.

*

For those two weeks alone, I thought long and hard about the changes I needed to make in my life. I wanted to be this—

—but I just seemed to keep fucking it up.

Two weeks alone
in the fraternity house, and I spent my time creating goal sheets for my new professional life. I created key categories, “Exercise” and “Healthy Eating” and “Leadership Development,” with individual goals like “Fast Food only four times/ weekly,” “Jog three times/ weekly,” and “No gas station candy purchases/ EVER.” All of it printed out, easily accessible in my notebook, right beside the original form email I received from the National Fraternity Headquarters.
Save the World
.

Every aspect of my life organized
, planned.

Maybe it was as simple as separating egg white from yolk, as simple as scraping congealed fat from the top of refrigerated gravy, the bad from the good of Charles Washington, the Frat Star from the Leader, a separation, a focusing—like the Jenn Outlook—on the best and not the worst.

I didn’t want to think about the Senior Send-Off anymore, either. I wanted to believe that my memories were just the strobe light flashes of some different man that I could leave behind in college, the same way I could leave behind all the old college bars, all the booty music.

Leave the night behind. Leave the old family behind.

Create a new profile. New man. New status updates:

Charles is…going to do this right.

Charles is…going to do
everything
right.

Charles…doesn’t care what his father said, doesn’t give a damn, because who is that man anyway? What do I really know about him? About either of them? They’re not who they’re supposed to be. Nobody is who they’re supposed to be. But I am. I can be. Charles Washington is Charles Washington.

Charles…doesn’t need to lie.

Charles…just needs to start over.

I clipped a long metal rod to the hooks above each window in the backseat of my Explorer. The package claimed it would provide “order” and a “comforting sense of home” for my year of cross-country travel, my Explorer becoming my bedroom closet, my office, my whole life. I decided upon just the right clothes to bring and to buy, and just the right sequence in which to hang them: (from far right) my silver-black Ralph Lauren suit, two pairs dress pants (one pair black, one gray), four dress shirts (two white, one navy, one light blue), one black wool winter coat, one navy-and-white windbreaker, one pair jeans, two pairs khaki pants, two business-casual polo shirts (the letters NKE embroidered above their hearts).

I planned how to perfectly organize every square inch of the Explorer:

One full year as a role model; and starting in August, four straight months of fraternity house hopping. I would
not
drift back into the college lifestyle, into drinking games and late-night pizza and waking up at noon on someone’s sofa. No slip-ups. Hell, I would eliminate the opportunity for slip-ups. I would be the man I was always supposed to be.

*

“It doesn’t matter who you really are,” Walter LaFaber wrote in the “Preparing For Life as a Fraternity Consultant” email that I received just days after the Senior Send-Off, “it only matters what people
think
you are.” Just google yourselves, the email told us, so you can truly see what the world knows of you, how you might be perceived if anyone grows curious. “Think about Facebook profiles, twitter accounts, online photo albums. What was fun and cute a year ago is now professional suicide.”

How true.

The first time I’d googled myself (back during freshman year of college, just for the hell of it), I wasn’t expecting much. My name stretches back centuries, has been chiseled onto a thousand gravestones, and I’ve always relied on how easily I’ve been able to slink into anonymity should the need arise (“You must have the wrong Charles Washington,” I can say. “There are quite a few of us.”). At other times, I’ve relied on the more “famous” Charles Washington (the younger brother of America’s first president) to steal attention and web traffic from me. Hell, I share a name with a hero, a patriot, a founder. We were Google buddies, and he wasn’t going anywhere. But during freshman year, I found my own name on the third page of the Google results, an old high school web site I’d created for a world history project. I remember looking at the search result, the bold hypertext that would lead me to an online ghost town I’d built years before, and wondering if—like some abandoned general store, crumbling under stinging desert winds—it would ever disappear.

By my senior year at EU, I was on the
second
page of the search results, the fraternity letters “Nu Kappa Epsilon” following, image results accompanying, further demarcating this Charles Washington from all others.

So when asked to search my name online, anything seemed possible: was I on the first page by now? And what new results would await? Could the world know more about me than I knew about myself?

“You’ll want to make sure that the image you’ve given the world is truly the image you want the world to see,” the email said. “Everyone leaves a digital footprint, and it’s hard to accomplish a mission—any mission—when you’re sabotaging yourself.”

Had anyone at the National Headquarters searched my name?

It scared the hell out of me.

After the email, this is what I found, in descending order of relevance, the first page of 49,400,000 results:

1. First, as expected, Wikipedia’s entry for President George Washington’s younger brother Charles, dead at age 60, shortly before his older brother passed, though records are sketchy. Also, some Google Image results displaying Charles Washington’s only known portrait: his face feels vaguely recognizable, a blurry Xerox of a more famous patriot.

2. Next, a series of pages dedicated to 18
th
-Century Charles Washington’s various historical markers across the Virginias, the Shenandoah Valley.

3, 4, 5. Scroll down the page. A few other Charles Washingtons, attorneys whose names are remembered in law reviews, actors whose names are preserved on imdb.com, authors catalogued on
Harper’s
Magazine’s
database.

25. Then…keep scrolling down the page…ignore everything until you get to the very bottom of the first page. “Charles Washington,” the search result tells you, offering a link to our national web site. “Educational Consultant, Nu Kappa Epsilon National Fraternity Headquarters.”

Yes, that sounded respectable. A few weeks before, the Headquarters had posted a news release about my hiring, had created a full profile page on their web site to tout my college accolades. How exciting to find my name here on—

But, wait. Scroll back up.

Stop here. Right here.

6.

Because that listing at the bottom of the page was not my only search result. Here was another one. Much earlier. The
sixth
entry! My Facebook page and a choice selection of
party photos blinking like a “red alert” sign in the center of the web page. Oh, you could still see the original historic photos right above mine, the Charles Washington oil painting, the place markers, the words “Charles Town” on an olde tyme hand-drawn 1770s map, and you could still see the professional Nu Kappa Epsilon site far down the page, but you wouldn’t see any of it without also seeing a description of my full Facebook profile, my name and age and education and hometown, all paired with the digital images of the supposed “diamond candidate” standing on the arm rest of a sofa with beer bottles in each hand. Giving the thumbs-up sign at Bang-Shots while standing under a banner that said “Wet T-Shirt Contest,” and behind me a girl shaking her slippery tits to the approval of the crowd. Pouring Everclear from a bottle and into the cut-out hole of a watermelon.

And a dozen other photos just like these.

Oh, and if you clicked onto the second page of search results, there was an old MySpace account, too. Hadn’t been used in over a year, but full of vulgar
Anchorman
quotes (“I want to be on you!” “Mr. Burgundy, you have a massive erection!”), a profile page now stamped and spammed with comments from strippers and porn sites, bare-breasted women licking the web cam and asking me to visit the link below for some action. The sort of comments I would have deleted if I’d still cared about MySpace. But here was civilization left to the wind and snow and rain of the internet: junk comments piled high on my forgotten profile, one after the next, like weeds and topsoil over cold and irrelevant train tracks. And there was even a comment from Renee, my cousin in Georgia: “Wow, Charles. Haven’t checked your MySpace in awhile?”