The “brother” is a fascinating animal. Despite common assumptions, he does not always find his herd by being the most brazen or horrifying of his species. No—to reach full maturity, his life cycle necessitates ritual humiliation. His existence begins not as a conqueror, but as the conquered. Instinct propels him to seek the approval of crueler peers, who reward his blind obedience with a lower station among them. Though he may transcend his station nominally, the scars and bruises of maturation seldom fade. Often, for as long as he lives alongside his superiors, these wounds are continually inflicted.
The coffee is cold, and suspended pitchers of orange juice settle to chalk and yellow bile. It’s no fault of the hosts; you arrive over an hour late in a conscious effort to delay the symposium, and the accommodations afforded by your two-hundred-dollar tickets are running out. Stale muffins, plastic strawberries—all picked over by the National Organization’s more timely adherents, those to whom one o’clock really means one o’clock. You try to judge people by conversation before anything else, but because one can only endure so much, you now judge them by those baser metrics: what kind of life leads someone to that haircut, to those manners, to this bullshit? Never before have you seen such unselfconscious whiteness, such ubiquitous assurance that the straight and male and white ways of being are complete answers within themselves. The world seems, to your fellow attendants, a solved problem.
Three hours earlier now. East Coast flies fester the antebellum porch as Blake From Virginia confides in you—an insult, you understand—sensing, prudently, that he might strike some chord of kinship with the Californian by charting his sexual exploits, cocaine-induced cantos of a college epic where Blake From Virginia is always the hero. Luke tells you between chops from his bong that as a pledge—crackle, huff—he was waterboarded with beer. He shows a video of a damp basement and you don’t know whether or not to laugh. How does that make you feel? Your therapized upbringing has no prescription for this behavior.
A desperate piss leads to a bathroom without shame. Sinks peppered in mold, wastebins bursting with condoms and dirty floss. It dawns on you that the mazelike hallways are made for a sinister purpose. They are the arteries of this swampy Georgian beast, pulsating with malice and just marginally less repulsive than the gutchambers of its architecture, herding god-knows-who to deeper dungeons than this. You make for the exit but your co-delegate is cool and political, wearing a practiced smile, as working in congress trains him to do. With his help you blend in a little longer, watching now just for the horror of it. Your jaw slackens, your voice drops, you kill another beer.
To some brothers, fraternity membership promises dignity: alumni connections, scholarships, social capital, respect—all benefits owed to the diligent and the dignified. This promise works as the organization’s visage; a doctrine by which it justifies its endurance, generation after generation, even as its professed values are undermined by the conduct it encourages.
Dust eddies into fractalized, bismuthine shapes that follow your Uber down the dark lane. The country club looms above Lake Seneca like a prison ship. You and your co-delegate swim through shimmering jewels of doubt, pushing past security men with lizard eyes and worried lips who cannot stop you or your 200 micrograms of LSD because you were both formally invited to this all-male banquet. Robbing a seat at New York’s table, you might appear calm behind your cocktails and polite words, but in reality they are all staring at you—the students and the old boys—you and your dilated pupils and your comical sweatpants to their black polyester vests.
A drunk Wisconsinite interrupts the toast, addressing you. “Can you feel it, man? This is what it’s all about… Whatitsallabout… Are you paying attention? I had a… ugh… one point eight GPA before I had this, sport… Don’t be a prick… He’s from California, probably working on some Silicon Valley bullshiiiiit… He thinks he’s better than me?” He gets hushed, and turning toward you, “Keep it real with me, man. The sororities over in Cali… they hot?”
His lean, hasty face tessellates into oily quadruplicates. But you look further, through the smoke of embarrassment to the ringleader of it all who still stands at the grandest table. He smiles, beaming at the ruined men like his own sons. How many lies can one doughy skull hold? How many more will buy them?
Fraternities must fill a void for their members. A young man lonely or otherwise deficient in validation from other men is offered a space to practice a particular kind of manhood, in which his frustrations are channeled through a cycle of abuse that defines masculinity in the negative, i.e. in contrast to his necessarily emasculated inferiors. Without functioning as an explicit behavioral guide, the dogma of fraternity membership crushes a brother to his least empathetic self. This insurmountable pressure makes self-improvement impossible, generating an ego that must impose harm upon others to stay alive.
The parties are over and you sit in the backseat of a car driven by the Vice Chairman of the National, stacked atop three others with splashing cocktails and no seatbelts. Your chauffeur has had far more drinks than it first appeared when he suggested driving you and your co-delegate back to the hotel. He can hardly keep his boot on the gas and his shivering hands on the wheel. You will eventually make it home, board a returning flight and sleep it off like a bad dream. But sitting there as wheels distract and defy oncoming headlights for a moment you imagine that you don’t—that your story ends here, spun upside-down, throttled down the throat of eternity in a flash flood of gore and vodka and gasoline from an automotive waffle iron, itself so much afire, welding cloth and bone to the institutional seventy-year-old on whom blame will ultimately be placed. Blood mist mixing and mingling somewhere far above the trees.
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