American Fraternity Man (16 page)

And so, like a criminal returning to the scene of his crime, I tried to wipe the internet clean of any trace that I’d been here, that I’d been there. A post on a Ft. Myers newspaper forum, lamenting the change in tailgate areas for EU football games? Deleted. An old string of back-and-forth comments about Eminem’s rap feud with Ja Rule, posted on an entertainment gossip site? Deleted. How had I even ended up here, I wondered? How was it possible that these traces of myself were so widespread? Snapfish photo albums, Ancestry.com photos, Kodak.com photo albums, years and years of accumulated internet settlements, all of them open to the public.

I sent emails to the web technicians of the EU Intramural Sports Page, the Annual Shamrock Chicken-Wing-Eating Contest, the Memorial Day Drink Around the World Challenge: take my “Finishing Times” off your web sites, please, I’m no longer affiliated in any way with your organization.

Taking a towel to my fingerprints across the web, sweeping the floor, mopping my muddy footprints from the ground, finding any hint that I’d ever existed anywhere but right here, right now.
MySpace account, deleted. Rivals.com profile, deleted. And soon, I’d eliminate my beloved Facebook account, too.

*

“You keep talking about how much you need to change,” Jenn told me during our final day at EU, the two of us in the parking lot of the fraternity house packing my Explorer, arranging each suitcase and duffel bag and CD case into what I’d decided would be the perfect spots for easy access while I spent the next two days (and then sixteen straight weeks) on the road. Later, we’d stretch across the futon in the presidential suite of the house—my final night in my own bedroom—and Jenn would commandeer the television, force me to watch a
Sex and the City
marathon (“It’s painful, isn’t it?” she said, “But don’t tell me you actually want to watch TV right now.”), Carrie Bradshaw’s voice-overs our porno soundtrack as we forever spoiled every square inch of the bedroom in anticipation of Todd Hampton’s forthcoming presidency. But that—the TV, the ripping-off of clothes, the
Sex and the City
opening theme song playing again and again and again—would come later. After the packing.

“I’m graduating,” I said. “That’s what people do. They grow up. They change.”

It had been two weeks since my father told me that he knew the
real me
, but I’d told Jenn nothing of our conversations. She didn’t need to know. About them or about me.

One afternoon when we were first dating, Jenn had stopped by the fraternity house to ask if I knew how to change the oil in her car. (
Me
? Perform an at-home oil change? Obviously she didn’t know me very well yet.) No, I said, but I’ll go with you to the shop, and then we can grab a drink while the professionals do their thing.

“I should know how to do an oil change,” Jenn said at the Ale House. “My father would be disappointed.”

“Why’s that?”

“He drove a semi,” she said. “When I was a kid, I’d actually ride with him. Summers, Spring Breaks.” They’d lived in Dallas back then, she said, and she’d tag along with her father from Dallas to Chicago, or to Kansas City, or to El Paso. Long trips that her mother didn’t want to see her take, but what could she say? Daddy wanted to spend time with his two daughters the only way he could, and so Jenn and her sister would fight over who’d go next.

“We wore trucker hats before they were cool,” Jenn said, “and we wore the
real
ones.”

She’d share booths with her father at diners that smelled equally of hash browns and cigarette smoke, and they’d load their plates with chicken-fried steak and mashed potatoes at the Flying J dinner buffet. Jenn would sleep in the doghouse, sometimes curled up with her father if it was cold; sometimes he’d sleep in his driver seat and let her have the tiny bed all to herself. He’d stop at rest areas to show her their position on the map, how all of the roads of Middle America were connected, how one city fed into the next, how the highways (and before them, the railroads and the rivers) determined where and why the cities had grown in the first place. She saved a jar of sand from New Mexico, dipped her feet into the Mississippi, brought home Chicago sausage and Georgia peaches for her mother. Her father wouldn’t let her touch the CB, but by the end of each trip she’d be speaking trucker language, pointing at highway patrolmen and calling them “smokey” and laughing at the local police, the “city kitties.”

“And none of the garbage mouth in front of your mother or your teachers,” he’d warn her, even though he’d allow the CB to expand her swear-word vocabulary:
Bunch ‘a bullshit up ahead
, and
Some asshole on a crotch-rocket cut me off
, and
Goddamn these Utards, worst drivers in the country
.

But by the time high school came, road trips were no longer fun: life on the road was cramped, gross, and who wants to sleep with their father or eat those runny eggs or use those awful showers? For years, Jenn’s mother had complained about the time away, how he was never home for the girls, and so the daughters now joined forces with their mother; the entire family was complaining about the absent father, and why couldn’t he find a job where he could see his wife and children every night, because look at all the things he was missing, etc., and so they moved from Dallas to Tampa, where he could now work with his wife’s brother and the family would be perfect.

“It was supposed to be better for us,” Jenn said at the Ale House, swirling her glass of Cherry Wheat. “We were together. My father had a job in Tampa, a management position in some mattress store. My uncle pulled all sorts of strings to get him the job.”

“So what happened?” I asked.

“He resented my mother for it,” Jenn said. Became increasingly bitter and mean during his time at home, she said, and so he found some way to lose the job at the mattress store, then took control of a semi once again, and he was off, and they became a family of three. At first, he was just absent. Then, her mother grew exhausted and called it quits. Family split up, and then it was two Christmases, two Thanksgivings. “He’s the kind of guy who needs to be moving. Always moving. The second he settles down, he’s miserable. Maybe it rubbed off on me, too. Before high school, I loved my time in the big-rig. I loved moving to Tampa. I loved moving down here for EU. My old friends from high school…most of them just went to USF, right down the street. I don’t know why you’d stay in any place for longer than four years.”

“Exactly,” I said.

“What about
your
parents? Still together?”

“Still together.”

“Please tell me that
they
have a storybook romance,” she said. “I need to be reassured that it’s possible.”

“They’re about as close as you can come for old people,” I said. I took a long drink of my beer, trying to decide what to say and what to leave out. She’d been honest about her own family dysfunction, but hers was real; mine, it seemed, was negligible. Helicopter parenting? Circumnavigation? My complaints seemed so minor, so I figured: if she wants storybook, I’ll give her storybook. “My mother doesn’t work anymore, and my father makes his own hours. So they’re always taking trips. He golfs, and she shops.” I was telling her the truth, really: they’d bought a couple timeshares after I graduated high school, their own “empty nester gift to themselves,” and they seemed to be heading to a new state, a new golf club or lodge, every time I called home. Asheville, North Carolina; Kalispell, Montana; Hilton Head, South Carolina. A dream life: who could argue?

“They’ve been together 25 years?” Jenn asked. “Shoot. That’s what marriage is
supposed
to be. Two people who will stick together for a lifetime.”

Later, when I brought Jenn back to Cypress Falls for Labor Day Weekend, everything she saw seemed to confirm my characterization. My father grilled turkey burgers in the backyard, mother cut tomatoes and peppers for salad, sliced gouda cheese and avocado for the burgers. There were four or five other couples in the porch, too, friends from around
the neighborhood, and there were Amstel Lights and Newcastle Browns and cigars and those amazing jalapeno-cheddar potato chips and someone’s Labrador retriever belly-flopping in the pool, the
Clemson – Florida State
football game on the big-screen, and my father sliding a burger onto Jenn’s pre-sliced deli-fresh sesame-seed bun, and she told them that this was such a fun little party and she always wished her own parents could’ve had parties like this, but she hadn’t gone home for Labor Day or Independence Day or Memorial Day since her freshman year at EU, because “back home” for her was just her mother’s dumpy two-bedroom rental house in Hillsborough County that always smelled like Cheerio’s, or it was her father’s double-wide on a plot of gravel-weed-palmetto-scrub land and there were oil spots everywhere from his truck. Raccoons and fire ants. And Jenn told my parents that she didn’t even like going home for Christmas or Thanksgiving, doing the whole drive-all-the-way-back-to-Tampa-and-then-spend-five-hours-at-my-Mom’s-place-and-then-three-hours-at-my-Dad’s-place-just-watching-CourtTV-or-USA-Network-and-then-driving-out-of-town-feeling-like-I’ve-been-robbed-of-a-good-family thing.

It was depressing, she said, and she didn’t like going somewhere that she knew she’d be depressed. And my mother told Jenn that she was welcome here at their house for any holiday, for every holiday, and Charles,
we love Jenn
, bring her back for Thanksgiving! We have an extra bedroom! And my father slid a burger onto my plate, patted me on the back. And shit, of anything I’d ever accomplished, it seemed that acquiring Jenn was the only thing that had impressed him.

Jenn told my parents that their marriage was perfect, their family was perfect, and this was everything she wanted her own family to be someday. You two should, like, give lessons on marriage, she said. And all the neighbors laughed, even the Labrador retriever laughed as it snatched a hot dog from someone’s plate.

So I
couldn’t
let her know that my parents were now divorced. To have a fractured family, here on the eve of my new life as a role model, here on the eve of our new life as a “long-distance couple,” was not an option.

“
I can change, too,” Jenn said in the parking lot as we packed my Explorer. “Do you want me to start dressing more like some 40-year-old office secretary?” She was wearing a black Britney Spears concert t-shirt and a pair of black yoga pants, the form-fitting kind with the bright teal waistband. Same as she always wore whenever she spent the night, so she could head straight to the gym the next morning for muscle toning. Maybe the ensemble was comfortable for her, easy, but it showed her figure so completely that I appreciated the still moments—like this one, as she stood at my passenger-side door and searched for a place in the car where the tiny first-aid kit she’d made for me might fit—when I could listen to her, look at her, appreciate all that she was. “Or maybe I could dress like an elementary school teacher?” she asked. “Bad sweaters and
Golden Girls
pants? Mom Jeans?”

No, I couldn’t
imagine any change in my girlfriend, didn’t even want to picture her in anything but these kitschy pop t-shirts. And right now, the sun was setting behind the pine trees at the edge of campus, and in this light her hair seemed perfectly straight and fairy-tale-golden.

For some reason, I stopped moving and just stared at her; Jenn brushed her hair from her shoulders with the grace of some actress in a Shampoo ad who models the silkiness of her strands as she runs along the beach and into the breeze.
My God, this was a perfect woman.

Oh, sure, she was messy.
Left bowls of half-eaten cereal in odd places in my bedroom until I had to investigate the source of the sour-milk smell. Wore lip gloss always, and was constantly drinking from my Tervis Tumbler cups and then leaving them half-full with water throughout the first floor of the fraternity house, each crescent-marked with lip gloss.

But she was perfect.

“I wouldn’t change a thing about you,” I said. “Well. Maybe your taste in TV shows. In movies.”

She gasped dramatically. “I thought you
loved
my movies.”

“I loved
Ferris Bueller
the first fifteen times I saw it. And
Sixteen Candles
, and
Uncle Buck
, and
Home Alone
. Back when I was in middle school.”

“Be careful,” she said. She owned only a dozen or so DVDs, and for some reason, all of them seemed to be John Hughes comedies. It was as if she’d refused to leave behind the PG-13 world of 1980s teenage suburbia and enter the R-rated world of ‘90s and 2000s pie-fucking gross-out comedies. Her sorority house roommate had bought her a book of social criticism called
The Twisted World of John Hughes’ America
as a gag gift, but Jenn had never opened it.

“I rescind the comment. Wouldn’t change a thing.”

“That’s all cosmetic stuff,” she said. “Movies, clothes. But seriously, Charles. If you were a bad person, I wouldn’t be with you. You know that.”

“It’s not about being a bad person,” I said,
pulling out my heavy suitcase to make room for the gym bag—tennis shoes, shorts, a few sweatshirts and pairs of sweatpants I’d bought so that I could jog outdoors in the winter. “I’m trying to, like, better myself.”