American Fraternity Man (48 page)

But I’m breathing again. Still tight, but I’m breathing again.
Just numbers.

With numbers, at least I know.

My Blazer-Neighbor munches on crackers, makes “hmm” noises as he reads Covey. Dog-ears a page, and now he’s looking at a diagram of something, some “success model” or something. Quadrants to divide his workday goals.

Overhead bell dings. C
aptain tells us that it’s safe to move about the cabin, and all around me Blazers unbuckle their seatbelts and stand and stretch as though this—the take-off, the flight—is some task they’ve completed and can now scratch off their daily task list. They stare at me, these Blazers, and I loosen my grip on my pants and stretch out and breathe easy, because it’s Saturday,
Saturday
, and I’m not opening my laptop case again.

H
igh above a patchwork system of interstate-farm-community, and I’m picturing all the universities in the distance, all the white-columned houses, all the students and alumni and administrators. Up here, it’s all so distant.

*

Somewhere over Oklahoma, it finally happens: I wake with a violent stomach-clenching. All those Big East shots, whatever they were, have been gathering in my stomach like a drafted army, training while I’ve been complacent, waiting until we’re over the most sickeningly bland section of the country to really charge and baton-thrust my stomach, and it’s sharp pains and –

I unbuckle my seatbelt, push myself up, stumble through the aisle, bump into Blazers on their laptops, mutter “sorry sorry,” bump into sleeping women and children, bump hard
into a Blazer writing on a yellow legal pad and think briefly that he’s looking
very
productive right now and
look at me
and what’s everyone going to think if I just yack across the aisle, all over their pleated dress pants. Will they think I’m airsick? Just something I ate? Will I be forgiven, or will they only see the fraternity letters on my shirt? What’s the airline procedure for
that
? Do they draw this in the airline pamphlets in the seat-backs: what to do when frat boys are puking on flights?

S
lither into the cramped bathroom, shut the door. Hang my head over the sink and try to focus on my blurry reflection in the mirror.

L
ow rumble of the engine. Smooth out my polo shirt, smooth my pants.

The engines…head feeling lighter…stomach pains passing…just want to sit on the toilet, just in case…hang out here…close my eyes…just in case, just in case…

*

A knock at the door.

I lift my head from my hands. World refocusing. With weak knees, I stand; limbs fuzzy, but I’ve purged something awful, something toxic, more than just the alcohol. When I open the collapsible door and clunk out, two men in shirt and tie stand in the aisle outside the bathroom. “Oh,” one of them says. “Sorry. I didn’t know if anyone was in there.”

“No problem,” I say, but there’s a gurgle in my voice.

“You all right?”

“Fine,” I say. Fingertips sliding down the door. Trying to steady myself.

“Are you drunk?”

“What?”

“Are you drunk? Were you puking in there?”

“No, it’s…” I say. “Airport food.”

“You smell like liquor.”

“That’s, like, the toilet. Just wait a minute before you go in there. Wait for it to clear up.”

“You’re drunk. We should tell the flight attendant.”

“Please. I just had to shit.”

“A twenty-minute shit?”

“Nu Kappa Epsilon?” one of the men says, deciphering the letters on my polo. “You’re in a fraternity, huh? Big surprise.”

“You want to let me by?”

“I was in a fraternity,” he says. “Thought I was tough shit. Then I grew up.”

“I’m not in a fraternity,” I say, and stumble forward a step. “I
work
for a fraternity.”

“Can’t even stand up straight.”

“The plane turned,” I say.

“We never used to drink in our letters,” the man says, leaning into my face. His breath smells
of onion. Face is clean-shaven, but he’s so close I can make out the nicks, the long red marks where his razor scraped his flesh too deeply. “You wear your letters, and the whole world’s watching you. You’re a fucking disgrace.”

“I’m on my day off,” I say. “I work for a fraternity, and I’m on my day off.”

“Right,” the man says, shaking his head, and then he turns to his partner. “You’re first, buddy. You got hand sanitizer, right?”

“Fuck you both,” I say.

“Just walk,” the man says, and he doesn’t turn to face me. “Just walk.”

When I return to my seat, my Blazer-Neighbor is sleeping, his Stephen Covey book wedged into the seat pocket below his tray table. He looks like a bad sleeper, like he’s going to burst out in a series of booming snores to rival the plane’s engines. I sit down, struggle to stretch out, wish I could turn on my cell phone to check the time; I hail the flight attendant, wondering how much a Jack and Coke runs. Five dollars?

Outside, past my neighbor, Oklahoma continues. Or maybe it’s Texas by now. Maybe we’re about to head into our final descent. Reddish green land, the hair-thin gray stripes of two-lane country roads sectioning it off. Vast. Red, green. And suddenly, I don’t want this flight to end. “Fuck them,” I say, louder than I should.

*

Connection in Dallas. Four hours until departure. Hungry, thirsty.

I find a Chili’s in the airport, one of those miniature versions sized to fit in whatever open space the airport had available, and I grab a stool at the bar, order a
cheeseburger and fries. Then check my messages. Jenn left several, and I listen to her tell me that she doesn’t know if this is working out but she wants to try, really, she sees her future and she sees that I’m in it and she wants to keep this thing going but she needs something from me, and I smile and laugh because what does it matter? She’s back at EU. Parties every night. Homecoming week.

I scoot a couple barstools down, next to a middle-aged woman who looks to be chain-smoking but doesn’t even seem like she’s inhaling, just holding the cigarette between her fingers, smoke tendrils climbing from a collection of stubbed-out butts in the ashtray inches away.

The bartender returns, asks what she can get me. “Jack and Coke,” I say.

“ID?”

I’m happy she asked, and I’m happy to show her.

The woman beside me is drinking a light beer, one amber shade removed from clear
. No foam, no carbonation, no condensation. Might as well be a lukewarm last-night left-over.

I sip my drink and watch the
Sportscenter
college football highlights on the television at the back of the bar, and I’m thinking that I could talk to this woman next to me, listen to her old-woman problems or whatever. Sip after sip of my drink, my pounding headache loosening with each sip and almost
gone
now, I’m thinking that Jenn would talk to another man on the next barstool, would place her hand on his chest and laugh at his jokes. So finally I grab the bartender’s attention, and I say, “Two Jack and Cokes, please. One for me, and one for my friend here.” And the old woman looks at me through squinted eyes and shakes her head and the bartender says something to her, followed by “frat boy,” and I laugh and ask the woman if she’s sure. No drink? It’s on mee-eeee. She tells me that I’ve
got
to be kidding her.

“Fine, I’m kidding,” I say. “Ha ha.”

Retreat to my original seat. Remind the bartender that
I
, at least, want another.

*

There are text messages from Jenn, also, but they’re blurry, and there are so many abbreviations—“u” and “2nite” and “4tunately” and “gr8”—and I don’t know what I’m looking at anymore. I type something, but the auto-complete feature keeps placing the wrong words in the wrong spots. “Mission,” when I tried to type “miss you.” “Workshop” when I tried to type “waiting.” Eventually, there’s a text message finished, but when I try to send, my signal is lost and the text drowns in a quicksand of error messages and circular “try sending again?” notices.

*

Flight to El Paso: red-brown West Texas desert rising and falling, collecting and crumbling, a giant sandbox of bucket-shaped hills and shoveled-out holes, and I don’t know our altitude but this is the first time I can actually see
tiny
details from the windows. Individual stones on the ground. Footprints. Scratch marks on the rocky walls of steep mountains. Tumbleweed. No neighbor in the seat beside me—this connection flight is a smaller plane, two seats on the right and just one on the left—and at one point I press my face to the glass for a good five minutes.

S
leep for a bit, wake up re-energized on final descent, and devour the bag of peanuts left for me. When we land, I buy a pack of Trident to cover the alcohol smell sizzling on my breath. At the baggage claim, I wait for my two checked bags to spin around the dizzying conveyor belt, wait with all the same people whose heads I saw on the plane but who all look so different now that they’re standing.

Bl
ack bag spins around, not mine. Blue bag, not mine.

But
there
…my red monstrosity!

After I grab my suitcase—and I’m not sober yet, and I don’t want to
be
sober, either, I want to go out on Saturday night at New Mexico State, keep this up—someone confronts me. Wearing a red t-shirt with “NKE” across the front, a slogan that says, “When it comes to JUST DOING IT, accept no substitutes,” and he says to me:

“Hey, is your name Charles Washington?”

“Huh?” I say.

“Your shirt. Are you the Educational Consultant?”

And I imagine saying
no
, walking away…four days to myself… wear jeans and roll up my sleeves, escape the workshops, the mission statements, the sweat and the energy that has led to nothing, maybe just grab a hotel room and fudge some reports and find a college bar and saunter past the dance floor, the bodies pressed against one another, the smell of department-store perfumes and colognes and keg beer, the dim lights and Flo Rida and “apple bottom jeeee-ans, boots with the furrr-rrr, got the whole club lookin’ at her-rrr” and girls in tight pants getting low low low low, and another drink in my hand, standing at the bar and no cigarette-smoking old woman muttering “frat boy” disdainfully under her breath, no blazers or ties, no talk of leadership or stereotypes, only head-nods and high-fives, fist-pounds…

It’s a fantasy
. I know that. But this is a college kid standing in front of me, and I also know that I’ve been going about this all wrong.
Loosen up
, Benjamin said.
In a fraternity house, nobody ever listens to the guy without a drink.

“That’s me. Charles Washington.”

“I’m Sam,” he says. “Sam Anderson.”

“Nice to meet you, Sam,” I say.

“I’m the New Member Educator.”

“That’s great, Sam.”

“How was your flight?”

“Oh, super,” I say. “A little short, but…super.”

“You got your bags, right?” he asks. “We’ve got dinner plans.”

“Dinner,” I say. “Super. I could use a drink.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN. Las Cruces.

It’s Saturday evening, about the time my parents are sitting down for dinner back on the Gulf Coast, about the time my fraternity brothers back at EU are just starting to make plans for their night, about the time Jenn usually steps into the shower for her hour-long “going out” makeover, and I’m sitting in the passenger seat of a styrofoam-smelling Toyota Corolla, riding the dry highways of southern New Mexico.

“Whole lot of
nothing
out there, isn’t there?” Sam asks from the backseat of the car.

For the entirety of our drive, I’ve been staring out the passenger-side window.

Sam Anderson, who met me at the El Paso baggage claim and escorted me to this car, knows that I’m from Florida, that this is my first time in the deserts of the Southwest, but he doesn’t know that my head still swims in a pleasant half-drunk buzz, that I keep blanking out, snapping back to consciousness.