American Fraternity Man (32 page)

“Got my room cleaned up,” he says. “You can stay on my couch.”

“Um,” I say, “excellent.”

“You probably want to look through our house. Don’t you?”

“I’ll, you know, need to document some things.”

“Phhh,” he says, blowing smoke everywhere. “Figured.”

Neagle stands a full six inches taller than me. His traps are large enough to make him look like he’s wearing granite shoulder-pads.

“Lot of guys still sleeping?” I ask.

“Some.”

“
Well.”

“Well.”

“I suppose I’m a little hungry right now. Have you had lunch?”

“Naw.”

“Are you hungry?”

“Phhh,” he says, flicks his cigarette. “I could eat.”

“We could take a ride, then. Give your guys a chance to wake up.”

“I’ll drive,” he says. “I know a place.”

And I stare at the closed door for a moment, wondering why I need lunch and why
I
suggested it and knowing I should be inside the house, but I follow him down the rickety porch steps and slide into the passenger seat of his mud-splashed pickup, and I think,
there’s still time
. The pickup gives a healthy cough and a deep
vroom
-ing grumble as he gases it and drives us out of the gravel parking lot. The conversation is one-sided for most of the drive: I ask him how he likes Shippensburg, why he joined the fraternity, why he decided to become president, what’s his major and what are his career aspirations, and his answers crackle with disinterest. Quick sentences. Youngest of four children, the first to go to college. Others went into the military. He’s a business major, wants to work in Philly. Bank, maybe. Deeper probes—do your parents like the idea of the fraternity? what do they think about you as president?—elicit shrugs.

I imagine his fraternity brothers cleaning the house at this very moment, disposing of evidence while I’m gone.
I imagine that LaFaber would’ve muscled his way into the house, said “We’ve got a problem,” and would’ve immediately set about recording the damages while Neagle stood watching. I wonder why I couldn’t do that.

*

Only two roads in Shippensburg, and their intersection forms the center of town. Along one road is the university, but along the other are little one-and-two-story houses and shops smashed up against one another, white and baby-blue paint peeling from the exteriors. House after house, it’s all the same: gift shop, antique store, gift shop, antique store, like the repeating background of an old
Tom & Jerry
cartoon.

Neagle takes me to a downtown restaurant called Little Philly Bagel, and it’s one of those order-at-the-counter-and-get-a-number-and-then-a-waitress-comes-to-your-table-and-delivers-your-food sort of places. The kind where I always wonder whether or not to leave a tip. It bothers me because it’s impossible to budget; I leave 17% at restaurants, always, and I need to know what I’m supposed to do at a place like this. We sit in silence and wait for the waitress to deliver our lunches.
When she comes, it feels as if the bitterness lifts, even if only slightly.

“Your house,” I say, “is a real mess.”

The waitress places my ham sandwich on the table, smiles.

Neagle makes a clicking noise with his jaw. “Sure is.”

“Is that just because it’s the start of the semester?”

No response. The waitress slides something deep-fried before him.

“Were there
things in your house that would violate rules?”

—and then the waitress is gone. And the bitterness resettles.

“Phhh,” he says, as if still blowing smoke. “What rules?”

“
Rules
rules. University rules? IFC rules? City ordinances, laws?”

“Phhh,” he says again. “Listen. Thing you got to understand is we don’t worry about that. Our house is off-campus. The land is in dispute between city and county
, so police don’t come by. They don’t want the hassle. We’re golden: anything goes on the Row.”

Satisfied, face chiseled into a case-closed expression, he bites into his fried sandwich
and an oozing glob of orange-white sauce splashes onto the wax paper. His mouth is so full, chewing so strenuous, that he looks like a predator, a tiger tearing into a tackled zebra.

“We’ve got Headquarters rules, you know?” I say. “No matter where you are.”

I open my portfolio notebook, show him the Circles of Danger diagram:

“
You’re in the most dangerous circle,” I say. “You guys could get in a lot of trouble for this stuff. Haven’t you read the alcohol policies in our Sacred Laws?”

“Do what you got to,” he says. Stares me in the eyes.

I look down, look into my notebook and shuffle through papers. Anything suspicious, report it, LaFaber said. A well-meaning mandate, but LaFaber doesn’t have to sleep on the couch in James Neagle’s bedroom for three nights, down the hallway from forty alpha males without mercy for guys in shirt and tie, smarmy “Nationals” consultants “out to get them.”

“Let’s go over the schedule for my visit.”

He shrug-nods, continues chewing.

“Did you complete the scheduling worksheet?”

He raises his head, eyes zero in on mine, and it looks like he’s got rocks behind his cheeks. Doesn’t nod, doesn’t swallow, doesn’t move. “You mean, you’re not here just to count our kegs?”

“The visit schedule was in one of the emails I sent you
.” I look for an acknowledgment that I spoke, but when he doesn’t respond I keep going: “I guess you didn’t check it?” No response. “Well. I mean. I’ve got some workshops that I
need
to facilitate, and some paperwork that’s essential.” No response. “So I guess the thing is, you know, what’s most important is to figure out times,” no response, “and sort of find the best time to meet and get these things done and to talk with everyone?”

He swallows. “Don’t got a chapter meeting till next Sunday. Till after Rush is over.”

“Right. Rush.”

“We’re busy. This is a bad time for a visit.”

“This is my scheduled visit. I can’t just leave town.”

He swipes a French fry through a patch of collected orange-white sauce. “I’ll do what I can for you,” he says, and he pops his last bite of fried matter into his mouth.

And I realize that I’ve been speaking so much that I’ve barely touched my sandwich; when I attempt to scarf it down in one quick minute, he looks at me as if I’m uncivilized, so I only finish half of it and throw the rest out, pretending I wasn’t hungry. And then we’re back in his pickup, dented Coke cans and plastic water bottles at my feet, swishing with chewing tobacco spit. When we arrive back at the house, the yard is still garbage and party pollution, but several fraternity brothers lean against the unsure railings of the wrap-around porch, the nearby dumpster overflowing with black trash bags.

“I’ll get the schedule together,” he says and jerks the gearshift into park.

I ask him if I can maybe take a look around the house, and he steers me to a fire-hydrant-shaped guy on the porch named Chris, who wears plaid golfer shorts and a white polo and has a hat that says simply, “SHIP.” Neagle tells me that Christopher here will show me around while the officers are gathered in the chapter library for our meeting. “Show him the sights,” Neagle says. “Take care of the big guy,” and he slaps me on the back.

*

We wander the muddy lawn, and Chris—shorter than Neagle, but much thicker—tells me how
bad
Teke is, how
dorky
the Kappa Sigs are, how Pi Kapp just got booted from campus, how every sorority just
loves
Nu Kappa Epsilon and this is the best fraternity in the world and they’re going to kick ass during Rush. He’s looking down Greek Row as he talks, looking at the other houses not as neighbors, but as enemies, and he goes into maniacal blinking spasms every minute or so, laughing non-sensibly. Each fraternity house has a bright two-color banner hanging from its second-floor window, strung up with bungee cords, which says “Rush Kappa Sigma” or “Associate with the BEST!”

“I spray-painted a penis on Fiji’s front door last Fall,” Chris says. He laughs, blinks rapidly, and as we walk to the back side of the house, he points at the sloping roof of the NKE chapter house and says, “This is balls to the wall, man.”

And
holy shit
the
roof
! And suddenly I feel like I’m in a demented carnival funhouse, and he’s blinking and laughing and saying, “Gonna get at least twenty pledges this Fall, maybe thirty,” and someone has painted the words “Fuck the Bullshit: See
NIKE
City” across the shingles in bright red paint.

Chris laughs, blinks, laughs. “We had the biggest party last night!” he says. “Ha!”

And the words on the roof,
Fuck the Bullshit
, each as tall as a basketball player…a rusty red…and I could never have imagined anything like this…

“At
least
twenty pledges,” he repeats.

“Is that…” I start. “I mean, shit. Is that
perm
-anent?”

“Oh, it’s so fucking tight, yo,” he says. “Everybody loves it. It’s like those old Rock City barns, you know what I’m saying? See Rock City? Ha! It’s throw-back, like,
Mad Men
style.”

“I mean, shit,” I say. “You do know who I am, right?”

“The guy from Nationals,” Chris says.

“Yes.”

“We should win some kind of award for Rush this year,” he says. Blinks, laughs. “Like, you guys have awards at the conferences every year, right? Most pledges Rushed? That kind of stuff? We should win some of that shit this year.”

“Do your alumni know that you’ve
defaced your roof?” I unbutton my shirt’s cuffs. Alumni disapprove when pool tables fall to three legs or when bedrooms go into disrepair, but as long as the house is spick ‘n span during Fall football season, little bits of destruction are fine. Hell, alumni like Ben Jameson probably
contribute
to the minor destruction. But the house is a representation of the past, present, and future of the fraternity chapter, there for everyone to see: “Fuck the bullshit,” the graffiti says.

“Alumni,” Chris says. “What do
they
care? Not like they do anything for us.”

“They bought the house.”

“They never fix anything. Never donate money.”

I could lecture him. I could spout off the Top 100 Reasons Why Alumni Don’t Donate Money (house irresponsibility topping the list), attempt to do missionary work on Chris, this gruff ball of muscle. Help him
get it
. But he’s already pointing to some other features of the house, laughing, flexing his biceps as he points to a few broken posts below the porch.

“Fuck the bullshit,” he says to me. “Oh, we’re fan-fucking-tastic!”

*

There are three toilets in the upstairs bathroom. One doesn’t have a seat. The other two don’t have doors. None of the stalls has toilet paper. And where else can I go? A gas station down the road? An antique shop? It occurs to me that I haven’t used a bathroom that I would call “my own” in several months, that I never know what to expect, and that I’ve been holding my breath before opening bathroom doors in fraternity houses because I’ve been harboring the fear that one will eventually look and feel like the Shippensburg bathroom.

*

H
ours later, I’m in the Shippensburg basement for an Executive Board meeting, surrounded by eight pissed-off fraternity officers.

Maybe I didn’t expect boardroom professionalism—conference tables and TV/VCR combos and dry erase boards and padded gray chairs and suits and ties and absolute attention when someone speaks—but when Educational Consultants came to visit Edison University, our house was spotless, the books in our chapter library laser-lined on the shelves. Even Pittsburgh attempted an orderly meeting area. But this is what I’m given here: a
dark basement that feels like a medieval dungeon, complete with a distant dripping noise, the vents opening into the bedrooms upstairs so that the basement echoes with 50 Cent’s “Many Men” over and over again, interspersed with grunts and clanks like someone upstairs is working out with free-weights and this is his
get pumped
song. In the corner is a warped ping-pong table covered and stacked high with yellow and red plastic cups. The smell of urine-soaked burlap hanging over all of this. And the officers all wear board shorts and stained wife-beaters and make such productive comments as, “When is this gonna be over, yo? Told Jess I’d meet her at the pool.”