by Nathan Holic
“Today,” LaFaber said, and I could tell from his voice that he was smiling. On the one hand, he’s a supervisor dedicated to employee morale, slapping backs and issuing compliments, gripping shoulders, clapping high-fives, making you feel like he’s just done you a favor or given you a hook-up (“I’ve got a treat for you”). But on the other hand, he also revels in maximizing his staff’s every free second. “This isn’t a problem, is it?”
Last weekend, he questioned my dedication because I’d told him I was unable to drive 300 miles to Virginia Tech to investigate complaints of an unsanctioned party. “I’m all the way in Pittsburgh already,” I said. “Can the school investigate?” But LaFaber told me that the National Fraternity needs standards, that if we don’t hold ourselves accountable, we might as well become Animal House. “We’ll see what becomes of the situation,” he said sadly. “We could have handled things ourselves, kept the school out of it. I just hope this isn’t a recurring issue with you, Charles. You are in this for the right reasons, correct?”
“I can make it to visit Dr. Wigginton,” I said this morning. “I can do it.”
“Excellent. Smart decision, Charles.” He cleared his throat. “You’ll need to be on your best behavior, of course.”
“Of course.”
“Spotless in appearance. You are our representative.”
I rubbed my eyes, looked at myself in the mirror once again. “Don’t worry. I’ll finish up here, and…I spent the last three days with a bunch of frat stars. I’m sure they were a bigger challenge.” I was hoping for a laugh, but I heard only the tapping of his keyboard.
“He’s the type of person who makes things happen, Charles.”
“I understand. This is the sort of networking opportunity I signed up for.”
“He’s a tough man to impress,” LaFaber said.
“I can do it.”
“Yes, well,” LaFaber said. “It’s a bit of a drive, of course. So you better get started.”
So. New plan.
I packed myself into my car, began driving Interstate 79 north even though I have to drive to Shippensburg University tomorrow, which sits squarely in the center of the state. The opposite direction.
*
This is what should happen on an alumni visit: No forms or spreadsheets. Just a few hours to (as LaFaber says) “show some love for the men who made this fraternity possible. Chat ‘em up. Make ‘em feel appreciated.” A few hours with a man who has authored books on investing, or who runs his own Foundation, whose name I can casually mention when I return home after my year on the road. “That reminds me,” I can say, “of the time I met Dr. Wigginton, and he told me…” and, of course, it won’t even matter what he tells me, only that we’d spoken. Full afternoons to experience a small part of the greatest social network in America, the Grand Tradition, and Dr. Wigginton—whom I visit today—knows everyone worth knowing.
When I visit the fraternity houses, I’m there to help the students. But when I visit the alumni, they’re supposed to help the consultant: this is what redeems a life on broken futons.
*
Dr. Wigginton lives in Kinston, Pennsylvania, a quiet mountain town far removed from the commerce and industry of Pittsburgh, from the sprawl of the suburbs. Far removed from the convenience of the interstate, too. I rumble off the highway sometime before 11 AM, slow onto a two-lane country road bordered by overgrown grass and cut with deep potholes. Soon the towns disappear, the scenery melting into an endless expanse of cattle-grazing land.
I scroll through my cell phone, leave a voicemail with Jenn. Call a few old fraternity brothers who have graduated and moved on to office jobs; call a few young fraternity brothers probably enjoying their Saturday at the pool or at a football game; call the other two NKE consultants, Brock and Nick, who are probably enjoying hotel days in Memphis or Austin or wherever their travel schedules have deposited them. Nobody answers. For fifteen minutes, I leave voicemails and stare at the empty landscape.
Later, I try to text Jenn to tell her about an edge-of-the-highway t-shirt store I drove past called Hooliganz. Apparently, it’s dedicated entirely to slogan t-shirts, most of them offensive, hanging in the windows: “Sex: do it for the kids!” and “Sweatshops…another day, another dollar.” We’ve always disagreed about the novelty of these shirts; I think they’re annoyingly over-clever, a waste of money (“You can only wear them once,” I said, “and then you’ve used up the joke”), but Jenn insistd that, on the right body, they’re timeless. Carefree youth. As long as you’re smiling, who cares what anyone else thinks?
The Jenn Outlook.
But today, she doesn’t respond to my text message.
*
Sometime after noon, after an hour of driving that feels like a full day, I finally arrive in Kinston, a town seemingly built along a single road. Old men sitting outside downtown diners so quaint that they were probably built before quaintness was ever an aesthetic consideration, every store and every business built into old houses, every wooden store-front sign hand-painted or hand-carved and marking the houses as “Family Dentistry” or “Attorneys at Law.” In the distance, the blue outlines of modest mountains zig-zagging across the horizon.
The air feels different in Pennsylvania, too, sun farther away. Rural Florida is all swampland: thick briars and low palmetto scrubs. Hot, dark places where things slither and snap and burrow. Rural Pennsylvania doesn’t feel as if it is packed so tight.
When I pull into Dr. Wigginton’s brick driveway just past downtown Kinston, everything seems so promising. He sits on his front porch reading the newspaper and drinking from a dark brown coffee mug, same thing my father does every Saturday morning, and as soon as he sees me, he stands and buries one hand in his slacks pocket, lifts his mug gently in my direction. I’ve seen his portrait at the Headquarters along our Hall of Fame wall; I’ve seen him at conferences; Dr. Wigginton is the kind of man who still dresses like a gentleman from a bygone era, like a character in a Godfather flashback. Button-down white shirt, brown jacket, dark pants. He is sixty-five, probably, with the happy-smooth skin of a man who’s never known failure. Wears glasses, but seems in such good health that his eyesight might be his only deficiency: stands tall, slender, doesn’t hold his back as he walks, doesn’t creak with rusty joints. He approaches the car, shakes my hand as soon as I clear my door, and before he says a word or gives even a hint of an introduction, he laughs with an intellectual huff, then looks at me like I should be laughing, like we shared some inside joke.
“So you’re the one,” he says, voice rich with network news anchor gravitas.
“Charles Washington,” I say.
“You’re the lucky traveler, are you? You took the Headquarters bait this year?” And then another round of huffing laughter.
“Bait? No, no.” I force a smile. “This job is a dream come true.”
“Mmm,” he says.
“The fraternity had an incredible impact on me as an undergraduate,” I say. “I want to share that with others. Help them achieve all they can.”
“Yes, yes, no need for explanation.” He sips his coffee, and I stand still for a moment while he tips his mug back and makes a straw-at-the-bottom-of-a-milkshake slurping noise for five or ten seconds, the slurping growing so loud at one point that it scares some birds from his porch railing. “The Explorer,” he says and pointes.
“My car,” I say, “my best friend these days.”
“Mmm. Seen better days, by the look of it.”
I look back over my shoulder. Big-city grime on the wheels, dust from the country roads all over the body. And I washed it last Saturday. “It’s dirty, I guess. And packed pretty tight. But I spend most of my time in there. I try to keep it clean.”
“Take care of the car.” He jabs the mug at me. “Don’t let the car take care of you.”
“Ha. Right.”
“I don’t particularly approve of sports utility vehicles.”
“Oh, I—”
“Yes,”
he says. “You travel. Quite a load to carry. I’ve heard it before.”
“That’s right,” I say.
“What year is it?”
“Three years old.”
“Warranty expired, I assume.”
“Just expired, yeah.”
“Bad news for a man who travels.”
“Well.”
“Did you purchase the car yourself?”
“Um. My father helped me with the down payment, but I—”
“Your father?”
“It’s just a car,” I blurt finally and hold my hands up, then remember to attempt a good-natured smile, just the same as when I was a freshman in high school and the juniors on the JV team would toss sunflower seeds at all the newbies, tell us that our shoes were untied. Just pretend you’re in on the joke, the sophomores would say. Just laugh and check your shoes.
“Two things can tell you all that you’ll ever need to know about a man,” Dr. Wigginton says. “His shoes, and his car.” He looks me up and down. I’m wearing brown dress shoes, no laces (so at least they aren’t untied…), but they too are coated in big-city grime and country dust. I’ve never polished them.
“It’s a Saturday,” I say. “A little more casual today.”
“Well. Come inside,” he says. “Have you had lunch yet?”
I scratch the back of my neck. “No, I guess not.”
“I’ve got chili on the stove.”
“Chili. That’s…” Going to give me terrible gas. “That sounds good.”
“I’ve got a lot on my mind, Mr. Washington. I hope you don’t mind if I pick your brain a bit. So much to talk about with these Pennsylvania chapters.”
“I don’t mind at all.”
“That’s what you’re here for, of course. To answer questions.”
“That’s what I’m here for.”
But when I begin walking up the steps to his porch, he stops me. “Don’t you want to bring your bags inside?”
“Oh?” So I open the Explorer’s passenger-side door, grab my laptop case. “Got it.”
“That’s it?” He’s looking at me with a puzzled expression, as if I told him that this is the only bag that I carry in my car, as if I told him that I pack all of my clothes and all of my toiletries into a single laptop case.
“Sure.” I shut the door. “I don’t think I’ll need anything else, right?”
He shrugs. “All right? Follow me.”
Predictably, Dr. Wigginton’s house is old, the type that makes haunted creaking noises. And instead of the steep odor of rotten beer-urine-demon-piss to which I’ve become accustomed, everything smells of coffee beans and toast, the faint tomato aroma of chili wafting from the kitchen. Not the sort of house you’d find in Florida, though. It’s tall off the ground, has a deep basement and high ceilings, is so roomy that it’d cost a Florida fortune to air condition in the summer. And inside, it’s brown, the color of bad 1970s leisure suits or Midwestern flannel, the clothing you might see in The Deer Hunter or Amityville Horror. Brown and yellow carpeting. Brown and white walls.
“You can leave your bag in the guest room,” he says.
“Is your wife home?”
“No wife, no wife. Right this way, Mr. Washington.” And as we walk past the office on the way to the guest room, I notice that it, too, is drowning in brown. A dark brown desk so gargantuan that it looks like a piece of construction equipment ready to grind to life. The room itself is like a church sanctuary washed in the colors of its stained-glass windows, aglow under the illumination of fraternity shrines and relics: a maroon-and-blue NKE flag hanging on the wall, a gigantic framed portrait of Dr. Wigginton standing against a mantle (pressed white carnation under the frame), a framed oil painting of the Penn State chapter house. The sort of display—plaques, composites, awards, banners—most fraternity men dream about and try to build during college. Dr. Wigginton has done it: he’s created a house dedicated to NKE. And no, this certainly would not have been possible had a woman taken residence here.
*
This was the plan: on my “free day,” I’d not only get some R&R, but I’d also choose my meals carefully, try to get back into a normal digestive rhythm. I was healthy in college, jogged regularly and lifted weights three times a week. Now, living on the road, I needed a free day, where I could order Subway or Chick-Fil-A, a garden salad or a turkey wrap, anything to offset the sausages and cheesesteaks and French fries I’ve been eating with the fraternity brothers. That was the plan. But this is what I get: bacon-and-beef-heavy chili. And you don’t refuse home-cooking from a millionaire.
We sit on the porch together, Dr. Wigginton in a rocking chair and me in a matching wooden porch chair.
The chili is the same brown as the house, a lumpy mass of tomatoes and ground beef and kidney beans so thick and over-boiled that bean is indistinguishable from beef. I crumble a palmful of crackers and rain the crumbs throughout my bowl. The color doesn’t change.
“If I was part of the original chapter of Nu Kappa Epsilon Fraternity,” he says solemnly, rocking, “I would offer you a glass of sweet tea. As a common Yankee, however, I hope artificially sweetened iced tea does not offend.”
On a small table between us, he’s left a pitcher of tea and two rocks glasses. It’s an incredible pitcher, too, an ornate metal top and spicket, sliced lemons floating throughout. Any man that can put so much money and effort into his iced tea, I think, has a great deal of both to spare. “I like artificial sweetener better, anyway,” I say. “Love the pitcher, too.”
“Mmm,” he says disappointedly, looking away as if I’ve failed some sort of test. “So you’re from Florida, I’m told.”
“I am.”
“Have you been to any of the original South Carolina chapters?”
“No, I never got the chance.”
“You work for the Headquarters and you’ve never been?”
“I graduated from Edison University. A private school on the Gulf Coast? Probably ten or twelve hours away from South Carolina.”
Dr. Wigginton shakes his head sadly. “The Alpha Chapter at Carolina Baptist is a thing of true historical beauty. Cobblestone roads throughout campus. Sycamore trees. Wrap-around porch at the fraternity house.” He closes his eyes. “It’s a tiny school, but the house is magnificent. Mag-nif-icent. If you call yourself a Nike Man”—and he smacks my knee and leaves his hand there too long—“you are incomplete for never having been.”
“I’ll, um, have to get down there.”
“This is what makes fraternity so endearing,” he says. “The tradition.”
I think of several different responses. Maybe “You bet” or “Absolutely!” or “I love tradition, too,” a full thesaurus of affirming comments. But eventually I just settle with, “My travels have been great so far. I’ve seen quite a bit.”
I take another bite of the chili, thinking as I swallow that the calorie count probably exceeds the daily allotment I’ve set in my personal goals, thinking that my stomach is going to start gurgling at any moment, thinking that—just as I work myself into a conversational groove and Dr. Wigginton finally warms to me, just as he’s about to say “You, sir, are indeed a Diamond Candidate”…at that precise moment, I will be unable to hold back an earthquake-strength chili-fart. And from that, there can be no recovery.
“You’ve seen quite a bit?” Dr. Wigginton asks, and for the briefest moment he seems interested. But then: “It’s nothing compared to the things I’ve seen, I can assure you.”
“Sure. I wasn’t saying—”
And then he tells me that he’s seen every East Coast chapter house. He and several other Penn State alumni, he says, took a summer retirement trip along the coast several years ago, stopping at every school at which a Nu Kappa Epsilon chapter house had been erected. “When we walked into the houses,” he says, “the first reaction was confusion.” He makes a face of mock perplexity, and suddenly a system of wrinkles ravages his once-smooth cheeks and forehead. “Who’s the old man, they as
ked. But when they found out who we were…” Burly laugh. “The reaction turned to terror.”
While I was an undergraduate back at EU, alumni would sometimes stop by the house wearing faded NKE polos tucked into pleated khaki shorts, and they’d walk the hallways pointing out tiny defects in the crown molding or paint. Lou Forester, a Board member for our Housing Corporation, stopped by each Spring with his wife and—as he led her to each room of the house—asked her if she would ever live here, if she would allow her son to live here. “You’re an alumni,” I remember telling Lou, “and we’re just kids. Of course you can live better than this.” I thought it was a clever response. “First of all,” Lou said without even turning from a small scratch on one of the built-in bookshelves, “I am a single alumnus. The word ‘alumni’ refers to a group, the word ‘alumnus’ refers to an individual. Until we can make that distinction, we can never have a productive dialogue. Second, my name is on the wall of this fraternity house. Under ‘Diamond Donors.’ Until your name is listed anywhere on the Donor Roll, your input is not taken seriously.” I was just a sophomore when I questioned Lou, and so I quickly learned to shut up and let him make his inspections. But still, from that moment, the word “alumni” burned in my mind. Alumni…donor…the pinnacle of fraternal and professional excellence. Never once did we have an alumnus stop by the house wearing a torn AC/DC shirt and cut-off jean shorts, smelling of fish bait and rum: every single alumnus seemed wealthy and powerful, confident and comfortable, so much that we undergraduates felt like their subordinates, like we were interning in their fraternity. I’ve always pictured the day when I could finally sit with them, talk with them, compare careers and cars and clothes and wives and sons. I’ve always pictured the day when that word “alumnus” would be bestowed upon me.
