American Fraternity Man (26 page)

“Most definitely
. When you become an alumnus”—I savor the word—“that’s, like, the most important thing. Tradition. How everything, everyone, fits together.”

He reache
s into his pants pocket, digs around for a moment, and then his hand re-emerges with a thick gold coin the same size as the rim of his coffee mug. He holds it up for me, lets the sunlight catch its side to shadow the embossed script across its polished surface: “A New Beginning,” it reads, with the voluptuous outline of a white carnation below these words.

“Do
you know what this is?” he asks, voice dramatically low, as if he’s looking into the lens of a camera, prepared to inform the world about the death toll from a South Pacific tsunami.

“It’s a coin?”

He shakes his head. “This…
this
is tradition. One of just fifty alumni medallions produced to commemorate my chapter’s founding. You’ve never seen an alumni medallion?”

“I don’t think so.
”

“You appreciate tradition, Mr. Washington, but you don’t seem to know very much.”

“I, um. I try to learn.”

“Experience is the best teacher,” he
says and points his spoon at me. “It was an all-Southern fraternity in the early century, that’s what you can’t learn from reading those manuals. And Penn State was
vital
.” He clears his throat and lets out another “Mmm, mmm,” like the low motor hum of a failing weed whacker. “You see, you’ll learn a bit when you visit my boys at Penn State next week.” He smacks my knee again. A moment, this knee-slapping, that I can’t figure out. An old-man quirk, the same as when my grandmother used to call the ladies at her church “her girlfriends” and the kids on my block “my boyfriends?” Or an awkward attempt at youthful masculinity, like when my father wears a Red Sox hat on company picnics?

“I don’t visit Penn State this semester,” I
say.

“Mmm,” he
says. “Well. We were the first chapter established north of Mason-Dixon’s line. The
first
. The original founders at Carolina Baptist were hesitant about expanding northward, you understand. In those days, young men still had grandfathers who’d served in the Civil War. Try to tell some Confederate soldier that you’re now
brothers
with a young man in Pennsylvania.” I shift in my chair, open my mouth, gas building again. Close my mouth, sit still, hope he won’t smack my knee again. “It was Lesley Cohen, more than the others. The manuals praise him, but he didn’t want to colonize outside the Carolinas.” Dr. Wigginton sits back, looks at the porch railing and shakes his head. Laughs. “He died early, that’s something else the manuals don’t say. The joke is that he visited the University of Illinois, saw that they had a Negro brother in their fraternity, and had a heart attack on the spot!” Laughing harder now, but still with that newscaster look, like he’s watching video of a squirrel water-skiing.

“Are you
joking?” I ask.

“Oh,
no no. You should read Cohen’s early speeches at conventions.” He stops, looks at me, trying to decide if he can trust me with a secret. “The number of times he uses the word ‘nigger,’ a Klansmen would be embarrassed.” Closes his eyes and chuckles again, face overtaken by wrinkles. “Had an alcohol problem, too, did Lesley Cohen. Fell from a bridge in his early thirties, and”—now Dr. Wigginton is wagging his finger, laughter subsiding—“probably a good thing, too, for the national fraternity!”

“This is all true?”
I ask. “Where is this…”

But Dr. Wigginton still
isn’t listening to me. “Truth be told, we only started at Penn State because…Roger ‘the Rooster’ Redding, they called him, a Nike from Charlottesville…fled the University of Virginia because, it’s rumored, he impregnated the daughter of the local sheriff! Rode out of town with a shotgun firing at his heels! Enrolled in Penn State, found five other men who would form a new chapter of Nu Kappa Epsilon with him, and the rest is history. First chapter in the North.”

“He got her pregnant and just left town? That’s the story behind Penn State?”

“It’s legend, young man,” he says and waves away my question. “Don’t question it too much. This was, oh, 1913, 1914, I believe, and once the Penn State chapter was going, they spoke with friends at Penn, Cornell, Pittsburgh, Delaware. The schools, in those days, they all played one another in baseball, see, so our brothers—all of whom played for State—knew the outfielders at Pennsylvania. And the brothers, they just started all of these chapters across Pennsylvania and even as far west as Miami University in Oxford.”

“But a sheriff? A shotgun?
Lesley Cohen on the bridge? It just seems so…not right.”

“That’s why they
can’t write it in the pledge manuals,” he says. “But we’re the reason—Penn State is the reason—that this fraternity flourishes from coast to coast. Oh, certainly, certainly. This is the reason that these medallions were issued: to honor the first decade of Penn State brothers, those who made this a truly
national
fraternity. We’d have been a strictly Carolina fraternity, otherwise. And can you imagine that?” He pats my knee again.

I remember talking with Walter LaFaber a month or two ago,
back at Headquarters, when he first discussed the esteemed Dr. Wigginton. LaFaber had a general’s look in his eyes, the sort of sharp edge that says, “When we speak of Dr. Wigginton, we speak with reverence.” But was there something else in that look?

“So how did
you
get one of the medallions?” I ask.

“An interesting story,” he
says. “Long. But very interesting.”

Shit.
So quickly I try to steer the conversation away from odd fraternity legends, guide it back toward
me
. Only a short while left before I take off to find a hotel somewhere, and I need to make an impression. “I bet,” I say. “You know, it’s going to be tough to leave Nike when my contract expires in May. I don’t even know where to start looking for jobs.”

“Mmm,” he
says. And thankfully he deposits the coin back into his pants pocket. “A common enough problem. What’s your degree?”

“Organizational communications.”

“Vague field.” He stares into the clouds. “Difficult to find quality careers.”

“That’s what my father said. But my advisors told me that vague was better.”

“I would have advised you toward a different major.”

“I can’t go back now.”

“You graduated in Spring? You’re fortunate to have found a job so quickly.”

“I worked hard in college. I’m, you know, confident about the future.”

“Organizational communications.” He inhales and seems to taste the afternoon air. “My colleagues have grown fond of filtering resumes, you see. They receive large stacks, hundreds, and so they try to make candidate selections more efficient. There are some degrees that…due to the reputation of a program’s difficulty…they discard the resume if they see these degrees.”

“They do that? Filtering?”

“Mmm,” he says, shrugs. “But there’s hope with the path you’ve begun. Continue to wedge yourself into the world of college administration. Most of these consultants I meet, they’re climbers. They use this position to get something better. That’s what you should do.”

“
Well. That’s not why I took this position, to be a ‘climber,’” I say.

“
No? That’s not why you’re on my porch right now?” he asks. “Ahh, that reminds me! Walter told me about the…Wait, have you visited Illinois?”

“Not yet.
”

“Have you at least heard about the problems at Illinois, then?”

“No,” I say. “Something serious?”

“Yes. But if Walter hasn’t told you yet, I shouldn’t elaborate. I can only say that you might be enlisted to avert catastrophe at that university.”

“Oh,” I say, the bowl of chili gone cold in my hands, and now he’s talking about something else, and I consider trying to redirect the discussion back to my career, but it seems futile. Afternoon in Kinston, Pennsylvania, and I have nowhere to go but the porch, with a smiling old man who still takes tiny bites long after the food is no longer worth eating.

“So you’ll be staying with me tonight, I’ve been told?”

“What?” I say, and the comment is so sudden that I can’t stop the next run of gas, and here on the porch in a world so silent that I can hear a car door shutting from some anonymous corner of town, I rip a fart.

Dr. Wigginton swirl
s his chili.

Maybe d
idn’t notice? “Walter LaFaber told me that you’d canceled your hotel. That you wanted to stay here.”

“
He told you…” What
had
LaFaber told him?

“It
is short notice, but I suppose I can make the accommodations.”

I just farted on the front porch of a multimillionaire Pennsylvania icon,
but worse: he now think
I
am imposing on his summer home, that I just
happened
to drive four hours out of my way, that I’m some uncouth road-weary drifter who needs food and shelter before returning to a sun-beaten life of hitchhiking and odd jobs on old farms. Alumni visits are supposed to be opportunities to impress important people; I’m supposed to hand him my resume, talk to him about his connections, and he’s supposed to call me a Diamond Candidate and tell me that he’ll find me the best damn job he can when my NKE contract expires. “Well,” I say. “If that’s all right that I stay here?”

“Mmm,” he
says.

“If you’ve got an extra bedroom, I mean.”

He swirls the chili. “You’ve seen the guest room. No trouble at all. Easy access to the bathroom, as well, if you need it.”

I
rise from the chair. “I suppose I should grab my suitcase.”

“Ahh, there
is
another one,” he says. “I didn’t think it possible that you could stuff so much into a laptop case.”

“Oh. Right. Ha.”

“Might want to take a walk, too, Mr. Washington. Let it all out.”

“What?”

“When you come back, I’ll add a little vodka to the iced tea,” he says.

“No, no, I couldn’t—”

“It’s Saturday, Mr. Washington. Don’t tell me you’ve made other plans.”

A
nother new plan, then: stay the night with the creepy old man. But how would Jenn look at it? Maybe I can avoid the iced tea and the vodka? Pretend to go to sleep early, and maybe even sleep well, batteries re-charging, before I drive to Shippensburg tomorrow and start over again?

I pull my monstrous suitcase through the living room, its wheels leaving espresso-colored trails in the high carpeting, and I unpack on a tiny, twin-sized bed, its comforter
smelling of a back-of-the-attic stack of sweaters. When I pull my toiletry bag out of the suitcase, a “Fun Nazi” business card flutters to the bed’s brown sheets.

“Tell me about this
Facebook,” Dr. Wigginton says from the other room.

I scoop
up the Fun Nazi card. “What?”

“The
Facebook. The thing that the kids are all doing.”

I me
et him back in the living room where he’s set up a surprisingly sleek laptop on the breakfast table. “You want to know what it is?” I ask. “Or you want to set up an account?”

“Both,” he
says. “Come. Sit. Are you on the Facebook?”

“Not anymore.”

“Why not, Mr. Washington? From the articles I’ve seen, it looks delightful. All the youth and excitement, the photos.”

“Um.”

“Tell me. Sit, sit.”

And so I
sit at the table with him, tell him about how it all started, a whisper of an idea as we EU students were spilling our lives into AIM messages, into daily quotes and photo albums and profile-page mp3 anthems on MySpace. It was something up north, “the Facebook,” an online yearbook at Harvard or Yale or somewhere, and it would never be as cool as MySpace. I mean, seriously. On MySpace, you could be friends with the Carver from
Nip/Tuck
; you could organize your top eight friends, give out the best spaces to the highest bidders, beers from bros and hook-ups from the ladies; you could be friends with Obie Trice, and you could hear the new T.I. joint via bulletin, the very second he released it. Facebook was just…it looked like a high school project. Just white and blue, no flexibility to the way you designed your page, no embedded songs to play as your profile’s soundtrack. And you could only be friends with
other students at your school
?
Lame. What about your twenty-something friends without .edu emails? Facebook: kids’ stuff. But then, maybe 2004 or 2005, just like the national fraternities of years past, it spread from the Ivy Leagues to the state universities, and soon it was moving from computer to computer at Edison University, inescapable as a virus, and you started to realize that the things that had made MySpace so cool—the songs, users of all ages—actually made it extremely uncool. You didn’t want friend requests from 13-year-olds, from gay 40-year-old men; you didn’t want your computer to freeze from loading so many advertisements; you didn’t want to listen to someone’s profile song every time you clicked on their page to see if anyone had posted a new comment; for that matter, you didn’t want to
have
to click on someone’s profile to see if they’d written anything new. You wanted the status updates delivered to your screen. “Charles is…heading to the football game!” Boom: now everyone knew. “Charles is…pissed that we lost again!” Boom: now everyone knew. Okay, so “poking” was pretty lame, but Facebook was suddenly
the thing
, everywhere, a way of life. You organized your day around Facebook, kept track of silly observations throughout the day so that you could write funny status updates when you got home.
You read more online articles now, simply because you wanted to share what you were reading. You saw yourself tagged in another girl’s photo album and you thought, “Damn. She
knows
me. She
tagged
me!” And you thought that meant something.