American Fraternity Man Read online

  A Novel by

  NATHAN HOLIC

  Published 2013 by Beating Windward Press LLC

  For contact information, please visit:

  http://www.BeatingWindward.com

  Text and Illustrations Copyright © Nathan Holic, 2013 All Rights Reserved

  Cover Design: Copyright © KP Creative, 2013

  Book Design: Copyright © KP Creative, 2013

  Cover Photo: Studio Peck Photography, http://www.StudioPeck.com

  Author Photo: Ashley Inguanta, AshleyInguanta.com

  First Edition

  This book is available in print at most online retailers

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  What Others are Saying about American Fraternity Man

  Dedication

  Part I

  Part II

  Part III

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  What Others are Saying about American Fraternity Man

  “The culture of Greek life is both skewered and embraced in this take-no-prisoners coming of age novel from debut author Nathan Holic. Here, you’ll meet one character who has reached the conclusion that goodness is just and that evil is easy to spot. But for Charles Washington, the dynamic hero of this compelling story, right and wrong are slippery things. In the end, it’s a pleasure to tumble into Charles’ world, even as we watch that world pulled out from under him. American Fraternity Man is, at once, satire and seriousness itself. But, more than anything, it is a compulsively readable book, a thrilling ride, beginning to end.”

  -David James Poissant, author of The Heaven of Animals (Simon & Schuster)

  “Nathan Holic writes with the precision and confidence of a true badass. Hide your valuables and DIG IN.”

  -Lindsay Hunter, author of Daddy’s (featherproof) and Don’t Kiss Me (FSG)

  “In a transnational tour of the college scene, it’s Man versus the Fraternity World, and even the parents are too drunk to drive. Nathan Holic offers a fast-paced and multifaceted look at campus Greek culture and what it might take to effect change from within.”

  -Alex Kudera, author of Fight For Your Long Day (Atticus Books)

  For Heather, whose eventual book on the life of sorority consulting will be much sexier than this one.

  And for Jeanne Leiby, who knew nothing about fraternity life, but damn, did she know how to tell a story and how to bring out the best in a writer.

  PART I

  CHAPTER ONE. The Wine Bottle.

  Three months ago, about the time that Florida’s summer was overtaking spring, about the time that Obama was emerging from his slugfest with Hillary to assert himself as the change we could believe in, I was hoping I might be able to do the same: convince everyone—my girlfriend Jenn, my fraternity brothers at EU, my parents—that I’d become a new man, the very definition of “role model” and “leader.”

  I was graduating. I’d taken a job half a country away. I’d be leaving everything and everyone behind. And I had only one night when they’d all be gathered together: it would either be the most hopeful night of my life, a celebration of who I was and the great things I wanted to do, or it would be a confirmation of everything I’d hoped was not true about myself. Because that was the question, wasn’t it: was I ready to be a leader, or was I just pretending?

  *

  On the afternoon of my final day as president of Nu Kappa Epsilon fraternity, my father appeared at the front door of the house, cradling a bottle of red wine tight to his chest and glancing about nervously, as if some National Lampoon’s Frat Guy stereotype—able to detect alcohol the way a police dog could sniff out pot—might come zipping through and snatch the bottle from his hands. It was early afternoon on a Friday, several hours before the start of the Senior Send-Off event I’d planned for the graduating brothers in the fraternity house, and my father was here alone, my mother nowhere in sight.

  “Wine for the party,” he said. “From our trip to Napa Valley.”

  “Wine for the party,” I repeated. He wasn’t yet holding it out for me so I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to take it. “You shouldn’t have.”

  “I know how much you fraternity boys love to drink,” he said.

  “Come on.” I smiled to show good humor. “This is a family event.”

  Ordinarily, of course, the Senior Send-Off was anything but a family event. It was the final event of our Spring semester, the night when our fraternity would gather in the chapter room to toast the new graduates, to share old stories and drink long into the night. Sometimes the seniors drafted “Senior Wills” and bequeathed to the young members their old memories, their old hook-ups, their old nicknames; sometimes the seniors brought gigantic Tupperware bins full of old fraternity t-shirts and jerseys and tossed them out to the crowd, one at a time. We ordered a stack of pizzas and sent someone to Super Wal-Mart to clear the shelves of Natty Ice, and we sat in the chapter room drinking and chanting and cheering and immersing ourselves in crude in-jokes and embellished narratives of past adventures, all of us smelling like spilled beer and Crazy Bread by the time the sun came up the next morning.

  But this year, Nu Kappa Epsilon had won “Chapter of the Year” at Edison University’s Greek Awards banquet. We’d also won the “Champions Trophy” for overall dominance on the intramural fields, and Florida Leader magazine had recognized our chapter’s intense campus involvement. “That’s a hell of a year,” our campus Greek Advisor told me. “Invite your parents. Invite your families. This is a chance to celebrate the positive aspects of fraternity life, to really change some minds about what it is we do.”

  I was the outgoing President. It was my event to plan. So I figured, why fester in a stinky chapter room with cheap beer and pizza; why not celebrate in a way that mattered? And I invited the mothers and fathers of every member, our first parent-themed event in three years. We’d make it classy, mature. This would be a night for all of us to drink vodka tonics and give speeches and receive academic awards, a night to talk about how much the house had meant to our academic progress, our development as leaders and citizens, our futures. This would be a night that parents and students alike would remember for years to come, and I was a President whose legacy would be remembered forever.

  “A family event,” my father said. He ran his hands down the surface of the wine bottle. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  “Dad,” I said.

  “I remember last time.”

  Again, I tried to laugh.

  He stepped carefully up the steps to our front door, still holding the wine bottle close and looking down at the concrete as if there was sloppy danger everywhere at the fraternity house, as if he might slip on some errant splash of spilled beer or urine.

  “I’m sure the other parents will appreciate the wine,” I said. “Looks like a good one.”

  And I reached for it, but he held it back.

  “Don’t chill it,” he said. “Remember: don’t refrigerate reds.”

  “Okay. I’ll just put it on the bar.”

  “Well,” he said, still holding tight, “I’ll hang onto it for now. Why don’t you show me around the house before the party starts? Things look different.”

  He hadn’t been to the fraternity house in three years, and in that time we’d remodeled the first floor, adding a fireplace and a stone floor and a series of patio-style tables—it all had an outdoorsy look, as if the interior of our house was actually the backyard. The alumni had grown weary at having to replace
the furniture every three years; they’d reasoned that stone was easier to clean than carpet, and outdoor furniture less likely to be damaged by spilled beer than cloth or leather couches. But I didn’t mention any of that. My father was giving me the opportunity to impress him. Maybe he wanted to believe that his son had grown and matured, and telling him that we now had lawn furniture because we were too destructive for regular furniture: not a good idea.

  “Follow me,” I said, and I led him around the fraternity house, pointing out the things I did think were important: that the stone floors had been mopped, that the counters were Windex-shiny and that the wood shelves smelled of Pine Spray. Walls were patched, repainted, free not only of holes and gashes, but also scratches and scuffs. Artwork on the walls, potted plants (living!), new exercise equipment in the game room.

  Eventually we arrived at the bar, a stunning piece of furniture built by a group of alumni just one year before, the wood coming from a torn-down building in Naples, the original office space for a lawyer named Damon Jarred who’d founded the fraternity chapter at Edison University decades ago; the glass on the cabinet doors had come from the windows of our first fraternity house from the 1960s.

  My father stroked his chin. “So your alumni built this for you, then? One more entitlement.”

  “Here,” I said, “we can put your wine with the others.” I’d bought a shopping cart full of wine from the liquor store, some whites, some reds. I had no idea the difference in the colors or names; Merlot meant as much to me as White Zinfandel or Chenin Blanc. But my father wasn’t quite so nonchalant.

  “Up there?” he asked. “With all of that?”

  “Sure.” I’d gone for affordable brands, too, nothing over $10, because I wasn’t even sure if—given a choice between Yellow Tail Chardonnay and a Grey Goose martini—anyone at the party would even drink the wine.

  My father shook his head. “Do you even have a corkscrew?”

  “A corkscrew?”

  “This bottle isn’t twist-off, son.”

  “I guess I didn’t think about it.”

  “Well.” He was still holding the bottle tight. “I have one in the car. I’ll just need it back.”

  “No problem. I’ll guard it with my life.”

  “Charles,” he said. “I don’t want to have to search around for it tomorrow, or find out someone threw it into the pond.”

  “Dad, it’s not an issue. It’ll be all right. It’s not that kind of event.” I smiled, tried to give him the same “you can trust me” look I’d so recently used in my job interview. But he didn’t look convinced. In fact, my father was now wearing an expression of such deep skepticism that I wondered if he’d actually brought along the corkscrew with the expectation that I’d be unprepared. Was this a test of my ability to plan an event for adults? Had I just failed?

  “Not that kind of event,” he repeated. “So tell me, Charles. Spare me the suspense. What is in store for my visit this time around? What madness can I expect?”

  *

  Three years prior, on the morning after I’d completed my first great leadership role as a freshman in the fraternity, I woke up in a puddle of vomit and a scrap heap of broken chunks of drywall on the fraternity house floor, my father staring down at me with a look struggling at indifference. He tossed me a towel, a ketchup-stained rag that he’d found discarded in a corner of the room. “So this is responsibility, then?” he asked.

  It was 7:30 AM, and as usual, he was awake and alert, even held the signature metal coffee cup that he’d brought from home and had probably filled at his hotel’s continental breakfast. No doubt he’d even brought his own sugar packets, and—if the hotel didn’t have a carafe of 2% milk in place of creamer—had driven to the local 7-Eleven to buy a half-gallon, his coffee prep as precise and measured as any task in his professional life.

  I rolled over and tried to sit up, sharp pieces of drywall under my palms, my back against one of the new couches we’d just purchased for the living room. Later, I’d think of a thousand ways to respond—a self-deprecating joke, an eloquent rebuttal, even a heartfelt acknowledgment of my own failings…maybe something simple, so pathetic it was tragic: “Hey, Dad,” with heavy eyelids and a pained moan. But in the moment, my head was spinning and I still wasn’t even sure why I was in the living room, why my father was here in my fraternity house, and so I opened my mouth and tried to speak but only managed a couple coughs.

  “My God, what happened to your wall?”

  Yes, it wasn’t just the floor; there was also a powdering of drywall dust stretching from couch to wall like a light snow that refused to melt. Scattered throughout were fist-sized drywall rocks, all of them unnaturally bright in the direct sunlight of the foyer window. Follow the trail of the drywall pieces and you’d eventually find a crater in the wall (at that moment, I vaguely remembered two of my fraternity brothers wrestling the night before, one of them slamming the other against the wall), and above it, in the low hallway ceiling, a hole that you could have stuck your head inside comfortably. I hadn’t been involved in any of this, I know that, but still…I was the only one my father had found passed-out on the floor.

  “We must have gotten carried away last night after you all left,” I said. The evening before had been the “meet ‘n greet” portion of our Family Weekend, an event I—as a freshman—had planned as an effort to showcase to more than forty parents the benefits of life in Nu Kappa Epsilon Fraternity, and to dispel nasty misconceptions of “frat house” lifestyle. And the parents had been impressed, mothers commenting on our manners as they sampled from the tray of cheese cubes and crackers we’d set out, fathers smiling at the “Intramural Champion” banners hanging in the game room, clapping their sons on the back. My own fraternity brothers shook my hand and told me that this was the most important thing we’d done as a fraternity in years: bringing all of our families together to celebrate the brotherhood we’d built.

  But the parents had all left by 10 PM, and we’d kept drinking, and now it was morning.

  “Where’s your mop?” my father asked.

  “Dad,” I said, and I finally pushed myself to my feet but I wobbled and had to hold onto the couch’s arm rest for support. “You don’t have to help me. I can do this.”

  “All right. But where is it?”

  “I don’t know if we have a mop,” I said.

  “You don’t know?”

  “The house is, like, owned by the university,” I said and winced, held my head. “We pay a cleaning staff.”

  He exhaled with such disappointment that it almost didn’t seem possible that he’d even bother to speak again. “You can’t do these things yourself? In your own house?” At the time 49 years old, my father had adopted full-time the role of “hardened businessman,” his every feature edged, leveled, set to exude unwavering determination…That such an attitude and approach paid off in his business dealings, there’s no doubt: this was 2005, the height of the housing boom in Florida, but when the economy tanked my Senior year, he was still brokering deals to buy acres of scrub palm and convert it to Publix-anchored shopping centers that would service the new neighborhoods built at the farthest inland boundaries of Cypress Falls, all those neighborhoods and townhomes that no resident wanted but still were somehow built and sold. No money anywhere, but somehow my father came out all right, still had a boat, a screened-in Solar-heated pool, granite countertops, columns on his stucco house, timeshares across the country.

  And there, resting against the couch, head still spinning, maybe I actually expected him to tell me that he admired my fraternity’s savvy in having negotiated this arrangement with the university, the cleaning staff provided as part of our rental agreement. Maybe he’d say, “This isn’t such a bad deal, this fraternity.” Or maybe, “Congrats. Sounds like you guys have your act together.” But I should’ve known better. There in the NKE house on that Saturday morning, eyes locked on mine, he said, “A cleaning staff. That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”


  “But it’s a university requirement for all houses,” I said. “They’re the same ones who do the dorms and the classroom buildings.”

  “And you were just going to go up to your bedroom, then? Wait until they came by and cleaned this up?” He gestured toward the long puddle of slop on the living room tile; thankfully, only a small splash had tainted the red area rug, and nothing appeared to have hit the couches. “Hope they might patch up the drywall, even? While you slept it off?”

  “I just woke up. I hadn’t thought about it yet.”

  “Of course you hadn’t.” He walked toward our kitchen door, which was shut and dead-locked. “There’s got to be a mop or paper towels in here,” he said. “Windex and a sponge, at the very least.”

  I tried to stand, and managed shakily. “Dad, you can’t go in there.”

  “Excuse me?” he asked. The door handle shook but wouldn’t turn.

  “They lock the door,” I said.

  “Who locks the door?”

  “The kitchen staff.”

  He shook harder. “There’s a kitchen staff, as well?”

  “We’re not allowed in there.”

  “You pay rent here. More accurately, I pay rent here,” he said. “And you can’t even go into your own kitchen for a paper towel?”

  “Most of the equipment in there isn’t even ours,” I said. “It’s, like, a catering company. They cook for all the fraternity and sorority houses.”

  “Let me make sure I’m understanding correctly. You don’t clean. Don’t cook.”

  “We’re technically a university dorm,” I said, “so we have to use their vendors.”

  “Don’t clean. Don’t cook. And you keep extolling the virtues of this house. How it’s made you a better man? A leader? Etcetera.”