Fraternity Read online

  Not hazing bc he’s an active. But personally my heart goes out to this guy, his brothers should have taught him to be a man, not submit to degradation.

  The guys said:

  Cant see his face but dued looks like hes having a good time.

  I say bring it on this guy gets to practice on a professional and and no doubt he would pay to be abel to do this

  Truth personally myself Im jealous you might be getting herpse in the mouth virtually any time you go down on a beocth

  The problem is the idiot who posted this theres nothing inaprropriate about this but keep it IN THE HOSUE. Whats the point of having one? Its so you can do fun shit and maintain your discretion.

  Some of the guys, he suspected, wrote their comments normally and then added typos and misspellings. That was what he usually did.

  After he’d inspected his body and held portions of it in both hands and reassured himself that he was still himself, he decided to stop sulking and put on his clothes. The thing was, if all you saw was the video, what you saw was the dancer pressing his head into her crotch and pretending to come. You didn’t see the dancer wrinkle her nose in her reluctance to climb the front steps. Was it not possible for two people to sort of rape each other at the same time, with success? What had happened between him and the dancer was a transaction. She was a businessperson and he was a future businessperson.

  He went to Electric Blue’s website to see if it had any information on Jane. There was in fact a page titled “Dancer Profiles,” though there were only two dancers listed.

  PORTIA:

  The daughter of three generations of eminent businesspeople from the Old Saybrook area. She represents both the eros and ambition of the cafe.

  ERIN:

  A practitioner of arts and crafts, Erin operates her own web company. She enjoys pressing flowers and genealogy.

  A knock at the door. Gavin, in his white pajama bottoms and his white T-shirt with green sleeves and shamrocks that said HAPPY EUROPEAN N-WORD DAY. It was a shirt Gavin tended to wear, Pete knew, when he felt scared or vulnerable. He’d worn it after his autistic brother had visited the house and played foosball against himself for two hours, and then he’d worn it on and off the week before elections. He held his laptop open in front of him and kept his eyes on the screen even as he cracked the door and walked sideways into Pete’s room.

  “This shit on Facebook,” he said. “I mean—” He closed the door behind him, shut the laptop, and put a hand on Pete’s shoulder. “Tell me honestly, man. Do you feel like you got raped?”

  To Pete’s surprise, he hesitated. He considered the warmth of Gavin’s hand on his T-shirt. For a second, he thought about trying to tell Gavin what it had been like.

  “No,” Pete said.

  “Right?” said Gavin. “You know you liked it, dude, don’t lie. When I was pitching it to the committee, I was like, ‘You know Petey will love it.’” He sat on Pete’s bed. “People need to respect your perspective. You see what they’re saying about you?”

  Pete grunted.

  “The thing about it is, who cares? But if some girl who’s pissed about some mildly ill shit that might have happened here a while ago sees that there’s a video that’s supposed to be evidence that we’re the kind of guys who…” Because Gavin’s voice was quiet, he could make it trail off gently. “You see what I’m saying? I’m getting kind of paranoid.”

  “Don’t be,” Pete said. For some reason, he laughed.

  “Thank you,” said Gavin. “Thank you for saying that. What I was thinking is, let me take you out to Electric Blue. What I did, according to some people, crossed the line, so I want to make it up to you. I would like to do that. Also, I was thinking, if you don’t mind, while we’re there, I could take a picture of you looking normal, so that I can post something on the group that’s like, ‘Hey you all, this is the guy you’re saying got raped by that stripper, but does he look like that’s how he experienced it? Does he want to be anonymous or something, like, what the actual fuck?’ But mostly to say thank you.”

  “You don’t have to take me to Electric Blue,” said Pete. “I’m actually good.”

  “You’re getting a lap dance on Delta,” said Gavin. “End of conversation. If you need to move some funds from the social programming line, you can do that. You have an okay from me.”

  To give a foretaste of the lap dance, Gavin plucked Pete’s headphones from the floor, plugged them into his own laptop, set one bud in Pete’s ear, retained the other bud for himself, and played a track about bottle service, tan lines, and making it rain. They stood cheek by jowl, listening. It was, Pete had to admit, a good song. His head bobbed diagonally, in sync with Gavin’s.

  * * *

  Electric Blue Cafe stood at the crossroads of Route 195 and I-84. Pete had passed its billboard twice, driving south on 195 to watch the Minutemen play UConn. The first time, it had been a painting of a woman with blue skin in a black bikini, reclining on a stage with her head thrown back and her hair, midnight blue, pooled on a sky-blue floor. The second time, the full-body portrait had given way to a close-up of the blue-skinned woman’s face in the throes of pain or ecstasy. There was an electronic device embedded in her scalp, partially obscured by her hair; it was possible she was a sex machine. Now, the blue-skinned woman was gone altogether. In her place, three black silhouettes cavorted before a wallpaper of flames: one stalked feline on her hands and knees; a second scaled a pole like a monkey in a tree; a third squatted frog-like with her hands on the floor, her fingers spread.

  Gavin took the picture when they got out of the car. It was of two boys in sunglasses in the parking lot, the club behind them, and behind the club, the setting sun. Electric Blue looked like a bunker: single-story, stucco, with blacked-out windows. In the lower branches of the trees that framed the awning there were constellations of blue Christmas lights, dim in the early evening. The facial expressions of the boys were essentially identical. Their arms were thrown around each other’s shoulders, their lips were curled, their sunglasses had slipped down their noses. Their necks canted so that their foreheads touched. The members of the closed group gave the photo likes, including two of the girls who had posted that what had happened in the video was rape. It was hard not to like the photo, what with the contact between the two foreheads, the boys’ open display of mutual affection, enabled by the presence of the strip club.

  They showed IDs at the door and, crossing the threshold of the room, Pete had the sensation of using his face to break a cobweb. The walls were black. Blue was reserved for accents. The blue bow tie of the waitress who stood with a vibrating knife beside the carving station. The blue currency, Electric Bills. The blue backs of barstools, the blue glow of the liquor shelves, the blue light that fell from the ceiling onto silver poles, the shreds of blue ribbon glued to toothpicks. The bars that winged from either side of the stage reflected whatever color was on the flat-screens, now the whiteness surrounding the Dunkin’ Donuts logo, now the tropical flash of Patriots FieldTurf. He didn’t know how you could receive all the goods on offer at once—the meat, the music, the drinks, the dancers, and the sports—without them cross-contaminating, like party smells, like foods heaped from the buffet onto a single plate. He ordered a beer and made everything fade but the contents of the spotlight.

  The spotlight was the shape of an eye. It lit the dancer’s skin. She was not Jane, but a fatter, darker, round-faced girl, a girl whose navel was a slit in a shivering belly. A creature more like Pete. Crouched all but naked with your body glowing, in a room full of people who wanted to look at you—that was what she did for work. That was her so-called job. He would do it for free.

  CASSIOPEIA

  The grass on the Common was long and soft. You could lie down in it and sleep, and people did, with their dogs curled up beside them. If hippies had dozed off in public like that in my suburb on Long Island, the police would have shooed them away, but here you could do whatever you wanted, look however you wanted, sta
gger around stoned and homeless. I liked that about the town, initially. I was thrilled by the local girls my age, walking down the street on an August afternoon, their backpacks massive, their hair and nails dirty, their legs and armpits unshaved. In my high school there had been a small clique of girls whose clothes and grooming were androgynous, but people screamed at them, teachers belittled them, and the other girls were allowed to throw things at them, as long as they didn’t do it very often. Here, it was normal to look like that. Everything was considered normal, here.

  Sometimes, in the sweltering afternoon, a troupe of bearded men gathered on the Common in tartan skirts and danced to live accompaniment: drums, fiddle, and a flute. They were in their fifties and sixties, and there were easily twenty of them, maybe more. As a crowd gathered to watch, they greeted each other with kisses, hitched up their skirts, and kicked and pranced. In my hometown the elders professed a love of freedom but enforced a simple set of rules regarding how to spend your time, how to maintain your house and yard, how to talk, how to carry yourself, whom to sleep with, and under what circumstances. They would have grumbled at these Celtic gays, and anyway would not have preserved a village green on which a dance performance could be staged. Here you could do whatever you wanted and the townsfolk smiled. Rebellion was impossible.

  The result was something that I came to call the illness, in the privacy of my thoughts. Young men and women, bare-armed, tan, circulated slowly through the streets. It wasn’t only that they were idle. It was that they couldn’t stop performing. A girl walked a mountain bike down the sidewalk, improvising a song about a mountain trail. Sitting on a bench in front of CVS, a boy in tie-dye beatboxed. A girl sat with her back against the Unitarian church, painting with Chinese brushes on her arm. A few feet away, a boy as young as I was, his button-down slick with sweat, tried to make passersby take an anarchist pamphlet from his hand, calling out, “Free newspaper.” Whenever someone took him up on it, he asked for a donation of five dollars, in exchange for six pages, smudged, stapled, and illustrated with stick-figure cartoons. I imagined that, wherever these kids had grown up, they’d found their friends by refusing to conform. They’d belonged to tight little bands of persecuted weirdos. And even if they hadn’t belonged to tight little bands, at least they’d had their persecution, which was a form of attention. Now that they found themselves in a place where nearly all behavior was acceptable, they were lonelier than they’d ever been at home.

  I could feel the illness come over me. It didn’t hit me right away, but by the third day of first-year orientation I could hear a change in the way I talked. In my high school I’d been regarded as unusual because I preferred Raging Bull to Rocky, progressive Democrats to moderate Republicans, Willie Nelson to Dave Matthews. I had friends who felt the same way, three boys and a girl, and the other kids called us the snobs. We walked the hallways five abreast, nursing a sense of superiority even as we kept our shoulders hunched and our faces downcast and submissive. Here, a snob was as common as a dandelion, and I began to present myself to the other kids in my dorm as a guy from Long Island; I emphasized the g in Long, and called myself a guido, neither of which I had ever done before. I wasn’t even fully Italian. Most of my mother’s family was Irish and Czech. But it was a handle to hold: Italian American Long Islander.

  In the evenings I drove out into the farmland, past the tobacco fields on the flats near the river. The soil up here was so rich it could grow crops that grew in the South. Back in Suffolk County, I realized, the grass and trees had the spiky look of things that grew by the sea. The ocean breezes scoured the land and kept it clean. Now I was in a valley. The woods were thick as jungle, the air was half steam. Holsteins stood dazed on the hills that dribbled down to the corn. Everything was calm and cloudy, like the voices of the hippies and the water in the ponds. I stayed in my car, driving fast but in no hurry to get anywhere, singing along to the radio with the AC blowing in my face, a can of Red Bull sweating in my hand.

  On my third night in town, I found a dialogue written in chalk. It was at the corner where two fraternity houses, Pike and Delta, lorded over a motel, a Korean church, and the new economics building. The exchange began at the foot of Pike’s wooden Greek Revival porch, in red block letters with purple borders:

  RUSH WEEK

  ARE YOU IN?

  HELL YES WHEN IS IT

  NEXT WEEK CHIEF

  The rebuttal was forest green. It started where Delta’s front yard met the sidewalk. The letters were tall, straight, and plain, all virtuous simplicity.

  SHUT DOWN

  THE FRATS

  THE SYSTEM

  MUST DIE

  I’d never given frats much thought. But it was nice to see that there were people who lived here who were hated by some other people who lived here.

  I mentioned this to a girl in my orientation group named Adrienne. As our group leader drove us from the swimming hole to the Emily Dickinson house to the bakery, we slumped in the back of the van and exchanged complaints about the things we saw, our feet pressed against the seats in front of us, picking at the name tag stickers on our chests. We’d been struggling to find things to say: How could people eat burritos with yogurt in them? How could there be enough terrible people, in this small town, to sustain a typewriter store? She had thick dark eyebrows, olive skin, and shoulder-length hair that was straight and heavy, as if its natural oils had been allowed to accumulate. It made me think of the word languish. It was languishing.

  “The thing about it is,” I said, “everything here is so, ‘I’m cool with you, you’re cool with me,’ and it’s good to have a break from it. I don’t want to join a frat, but when everybody’s tolerant of everybody else it’s like—” I struggled to explain. “They’re talking past each other.”

  Her eyes widened with pleasure. In bringing up fraternities I’d brought up something to rant about, and a rant promised to cut through the awkwardness of our conversation. “Fuck those people,” she said, twirling a blade of grass between her thumb and forefinger. “The thing about them that annoys me most isn’t even necessarily the hating women, because that’s everywhere, it’s that they’ve built these little worlds for themselves where they’re kings of shit.” She was suddenly beautiful and seemed to address the passing scenery outside the window, rather than me. “They’re like nerds playing Dungeons & Dragons, calling themselves knights and wizards, but they think they’re these major players. ‘Did you know I’m the grand president of Phi Alpha Epsilon?’ ‘Did you know I’m the hottest guy in the world, because everyone in this house agrees I’m vice chancellor of Gamma Zeta?’ It’s the same with sorority girls. ‘I’m not just some girl from Wayland, I’m Queen Cassiopeia of Kappa Delta, and everyone else in this little house I live in agrees I’m the most significant person of all time.’ It’s like, have fun in your little playpen where you’re all noble rulers of your little turd mountain.” She thrust her hand through the van’s half-open window, released the blade of grass, and flexed her fingers.

  The van stopped in front of Barts Ice Cream. Everyone in the group went inside and lined up beside an old-fashioned gumball machine and a nearly life-size statue of a cow. “Barts,” said Adrienne. She sneered. “Here in Amherst, they think Barts is what it’s all about.” She listed the ice cream parlors of her native Boston, counting them off, as if the slow recitation of their names—J.P. Licks, Toscanini’s, Christina’s, Emack & Bolio’s—could convey the superiority of their product. She shook her head in a pantomime of melancholy. That was the real thing, she said. Barts was the one choice they had here, so they had to love it. Did we have good ice cream on Long Island?

  I racked my brain. Surely I could come up with a family-owned ice cream parlor when I really needed one. There must have been some white clapboard shack with a line of parents and children waiting their turn with sandy feet, snaking down toward the Sound or the open sea. There must have been some marble-countered soda fountain with an operatic Italian name or a vaudevillian Jewis
h one. The problem was that I had only decided a few days ago that Long Island was important to me. I hadn’t cared all that much about Long Island while I was living on it, so I hadn’t paid close attention to what it was like.

  Adrienne stood there looking up at me, neither my superior nor my inferior in magnetism and looks. We emitted the same amount of charge. We were both beaverish white people with prominent teeth and pouch faces, both of us on the short side, with wide hips. Perhaps this accounted for our loneliness, and therefore our susceptibility to the illness, her shoddy Bostonianism and my shoddy Long Islanderism. We weren’t ugly. It was just that God hadn’t set us down on Earth to be main characters. Think of a romantic comedy—there’s often a secondary couple, a funnier, less important one, sometimes lustier and more cheerful than the primary couple but always less graceful, less aristocratic in bearing. We each knew ourselves to be fit for membership only in the secondary couple, I think, but neither of us had been resigned to that fate for long. The knowledge of my secondariness still stung. I felt that my soul was the soul of a main character, but that my mediocre face and body had begun to deform its growth, the way a constrictive shoe will deform a foot over time or a corset will deform a rib cage. I wondered if Adrienne suffered from this pain as much as I did. Sometimes I still stared into the mirror and hoped that a main character would stare back at me, someone tragic, sleek, and bony, someone whose appearance wouldn’t stunt his soul.

  “Itgen’s,” I said. Itgen’s was an ice cream parlor an hour’s drive from my parents’ house, and I had never been there, but its name had the oddness necessary for the game we were playing. I said that an Itgen’s sundae required a long spoon, because it was served in a long, old-fashioned glass, not some kind of cup or dish. I had no idea if this was true.