“You really should unpack. You don’t want someone breaking into your car, messing with your stuff.”
“No. No, I don’t want that.”
“You sure there’s going to be room for me in there?”
“I’ll make room.”
“Why don’t you come inside
now
, Adam?” she asks. “Fill up at the keg, then we’ll come back out later and, you know, take care of business. Light up.”
Head pounding, but finally in a good way. Pounds with possibilities: follow this girl, this sorority girl tanning lotion model with the tight body, follow her across the street and up the stairs of the front porch, in full view of the Nikes on the porch. And they’ll ask, “Is that the fucking
consultant
?” and I’ll laugh and shrug and follow her inside and we’ll stand in line for the keg and we’ll drink up, and in the hot, close crowd of the packed living room, I’ll be pressed up against her and we’ll drink, our bodies on top of one another, and later, hell, she could come back with me to my car, come back with me to my hotel.
“Tania!” someone screams from a distance.
“Oh my God!” my girl shrieks, and turns. “I didn’t think you were coming!”
“I told him I had to take care of something,” says the other girl, ten feet away, five, closing the gap, and now my single girl has become a group of five girls, all dressed to party, and they’re all hugging and making shrill noises, greeting one another, and one of them looks at my window and asks, “Who is that?” and my girl says, “That’s Adam,” and then, “What’s he doing in there?” and they all think I’m someone else, and I don’t make any noise, and suddenly I just want all of this to go away so that I won’t have to explain that I’m not who they think I am, that I am instead some creepy guy in a dark SUV hovering outside the party, and now Tania asks me, “So are you coming inside, creepster? Or you just going to sit out here all night?”
“I have to make a call,” I say. “Be inside in a second.”
“All right,” she says. “Find me.”
And they’re gone, across the street and into the line without me, up the front porch without me, wrist bands and red cups, disappearing into the strobe lights of the party. One by one, new packs of girls stream into the house, new groups of guys, and I‘m still alone, and the way the night continues to move, so quickly, it feels as if the previous five minutes never even happened.
And, I realize after awhile, my hand remains
on the door handle. And I stay that way until the long line outside the house dwindles, until the party’s energy has been sucked inside, until there are only a few people left on the porch, drinking beer and chatting casually. One of them looks like Adam Duke, could be, and he stares directly at my Explorer with such a concrete-hard expression that he might as well be shaking his head.
I watch the party awhile longer, but eventually I return to the hotel.
*
Sometime after 3 AM, I wake up because I’ve got to piss. I’m still fully-clothed, my head hurts, and I walk into the bathroom and pee for two full minutes. I think I dreamt about urinals for the past few hours. Urinals and college bars.
As I piss, I’m thinking:
where am I going tomorrow
? And when I come out of the bathroom, I rummage through my papers because my head is mixed up and I forgot what school I’m supposed to be at next after
St. Joseph’s
, details slipping, and I discover—
holy shit
—that I’m supposed to be in New Mexico next, in Las Fucking Cruces, and my flight leaves out of Philadelphia on Saturday morning. I booked that flight because I was supposed to be at St. Joseph’s, so now I’ve got to drive all the way back to where I came from, Philadelphia, all twelve hours, and my head still pounds and I’m dizzy and still drunk.
First thing
tomorrow morning. Drive.
Illinois to Philadelphia.
Flight out of Philadelphia. Flight to New Mexico.
I’m supposed to pretend that this day never happened?
CHAPTER
THIRTEEN. Vacation Visit.
“Consultants have a tendency to feel broken-down at the halfway point of the semester,” LaFaber told us in our summer training as we all sat in the conference room at the National Fraternity Headquarters building. He’d just handed us—Brock, Nick, and me—our travel schedules. “Right now, I know that you’re all ready to take on the world, but this can be a rough job. You visit places that aren’t exactly tourist destinations.”
Nick and Brock pored over their own schedules with curiosity, nodding and pointing to various destinations
as if discovering the names for the first time. “The Deep South Territory,” Nick read from his sheet. “North and South Carolina, Alabama, Tennessee, Virginia, Florida, Georgia…” Nick had graduated from UCLA with a tan as deep as mine, and so it seemed only natural that he’d be assigned a travel region that included schools where real “winter” remains forever a state away.
“A great territory,” LaFaber said. “The Deep South. The fraternity’s most historic and influential chapters. Quite the honor.”
Brock, a graduate of Central Texas, received the “Gulf Coast Territory,” a wide-stretching and amorphous territory including chapters in Mississippi, Texas, Arkansas, and bits and pieces of the Rocky Mountain states. Perfect for a boy built like a tractor. A cowboy consultant for cowboy fraternity chapters.
“The Great Midwest,” I read from my own sheet, confused. “New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania? That doesn’t sound like the Midwest.”
“A geographically misleading title, certainly,” LaFaber said, “but it’s the most challenging territory, without a doubt. States where fraternity life hangs by a thread. Some tough schools, tough chapters. I thought you’d want a challenge, Charles.”
“Oh. Definitely, definitely,” I said.
Of course, this was the moment when I should have realized I’d never be able to drive home to Florida on weekends, and any promises I’d made to Jenn would go unfulfilled. Maybe I could have been realistic, and that night called her and told her that I’d work something out for Thanksgiving, but a quick jaunt from Delaware to Florida was not in the cards. But I’d written my goals, and I wasn’t about to abandon any of them to something so silly as reality.
“
Each of you will also notice that we’ve given you
vacation visits
,” LaFaber told the three of us as we ran our fingers down our travel schedules, coming inevitably to a series of California or Washington or Arizona colleges. “Costs way too much to have you
drive
all the way out to the West Coast. The gas, the hotels, the man-hours spent driving cross-country, back and forth. That’s pure fantasy when you’re working for a non-profit, gentlemen.”
“So,” Brock said, squinting at his paper, “you divide the West Coast between us?”
“Correct. We want you to get a breather,” LaFaber said. “Enjoy the sunshine. Enjoy traveling by air, stress-free, leaving the highways behind for a couple weeks, accumulating frequent flyer miles. Vacation visits. Perk of the job.”
So the National Headquarters books flights to Los Angeles or Phoenix or Seattle, and when we arrive, the chapter brothers drive us around for the duration of our visit.
Stress-free, he said, but we’ll have no cars. No rentals. Our lives in the hands of fraternity boys to whom we have not yet even been introduced.
*
Late Friday afternoon and I’m standing on the side of the highway waiting for AAA. Sun high over the horizon. Ninety degrees, no shade. Been parked here along I-70, somewhere south of Pittsburgh, for hours. Behind schedule to make it back to Philadelphia by tomorrow morning for my cross-country “vacation visit” flight, my front tire a gashed rubber mess torn apart by a deep pothole several hundred feet back.
A semi-truck roars past me on the interstate, eighty miles per hour, its windy wake rattling my parked Explorer on the road’s gravel shoulder. Each passing semi (and there have been hundreds so far) feels
deadlier than the last, faster, closer, each rumbling along so effortlessly to its destination…
Earlier today, I left Illinois in a hung-over haze:
the Midwestern landscape rolled with anonymous hills, receded to jagged strip-mining, then became green and lush again; mile after mile, landscape shrinking, growing, rising, falling, flooding, emptying, melting, as though I was watching millions of years of Earth-change in minutes, hours. Making good time, ready to forget the past week, thinking I could stop soon for lunch. Then—
Potholes. Until today, they’d been nothing more than a minor frustration, weather-induced stretch marks on the smooth
paved skin of Indiana and Ohio. But as I entered Western Pennsylvania two hours ago, a series of ever-sharper and deeper cuts opened in the highway, and suddenly the car in front of me switched lanes, and there—before me—coming at me quickly, unavoidably—no chance to switch lanes—a dark hole in the pavement, and my first thought was that all of those images I’ve been picturing—stuffed in my Explorer, topping a hill, speeding downward toward something black and unknown—had come true. Front tire fell first, fell hard like a ballet dancer misjudging her steps and tumbling into the orchestra pit. Then the back tire, a crunching metal noise, Explorer tilting. Steering wheel slipping from my hands, assuming control of itself, and I swerved into the center lane, then into the shoulder, where my lopsided SUV finally slowed, kicking up dust and gravel as it came to a rest.
It took me a moment to realize what had happened. Adrenaline was animating my every tired muscle, but still I couldn’t move because I d
idn’t know where to start. Hanging rod in my backseat had come loose, sending shirts and pants into the shadowy corners of my floor; Atlas and CD case had disappeared from the seat, bags and suitcases rearranged throughout my car, under or on top of one another. Smoke rising from the front of the car, from the back, a combination of hot rubber and disturbed dust, and I worried what else might have happened in that dark pit. Severe damage to the undercarriage of my car, some one-in-a-million gas tank puncture? It took me five minutes to finally open my car door…clumsily, head pounding…I stayed close to my car, shivering or flinching each time a semi passed.
A little over five hours of driving left to Philadelphia for tomorrow morning’s flight, and I’d been hoping for a hotel room tonight. Just outside Philly. A place to stretch, to sleep, to beat this headache before I hop on a plane and fly across the country.
And now another semi passes, its accompanying wind gust shaking me so vigorously that I wonder if any of these drivers are coming
closer
just to scare me.
Philadelphia to Champaign-Urbana. Champaign-Urbana to…here, somewhere in southwestern Pennsylvania, some grassy spot without mile markers, no distinguishing landmarks that I could list for the AAA
call center. “Might take longer than usual,” dispatch told me when I called. “Are you in a safe place?”
“I’m fine,” I said,
but that was a mistake which put me at the bottom of his list.
But
there—out in the distance—a single willow tree far out in the valley, a pack of cows huddling together under the only shade for miles in this hot September field. So I called back AAA and told the dispatch operator that
yes
, there is a landmark here. There is. A single tree and a group of cows. She sighed, told me she’ll make a note of it.
I thought about calling LaFaber,
too, but what would he say? Maybe he’d tell me that the National Headquarters still believes in me, that they’ll pay for any damages to my vehicle, that they can change the time of the flight? No. He’d tell me to “tough it out,” to get to Philadelphia by any means necessary. That he’s disappointed in my driving, that I sound hung-over (I brushed my teeth twice this morning at the hotel and still my mouth tastes like Jack Daniels; I stopped for gas station coffee and a package of powdered donuts, but the alcohol aftertaste still festers).
LaFaber would know this, can stare out his window and see my hangover. Maybe he even saw me lurking on Facebook last night, lurking outside the NKE house.
I think about straightening the mess in my car, but I still don’t know where to start.
*
There is something else, too. Something else I did this morning. When I pulled out of the hotel’s parking lot, I made a wrong turn but didn’t realize where I was headed until I was almost there: the Nu Kappa Epsilon house. Yes. It was 7:00 AM when I parked at the same curb where I
’d watched the party from afar last night. A lingering morning mist wrapped around the wet exterior like a moth-eaten shawl; and the Pepto-colored sunrise made the house feel sickly, as if it was ready to puke all the empty kegs and cups and snoring frat stars out that heavy oak door.
And I don’t know why I did it, either. I don’t know why I left my car and walked the front porch, shoes crunching over wrist bands and flyers. I don’t know why I walked through the open front door and into that humid foyer, that dark, visqueene-covered living room. Who was I hoping to find? There was indeed a couch in the living room now, and there were two young men sleeping on that couch, but I didn’t wake them…I headed for the stairwell instead, for the basement, for the library, and I pulled the fraternity’s original 1921 charter from the wall, and walked back the way I came…up the stairs, out the front door, back to my car.