American Fraternity Man (44 page)

I gather what I need for the next three weeks. Suitcase, garment bag, laptop case.

Three bags: one over my shoulder, one in each hand. That’s all.

The Fun Nazi business card is wedged into the space below my odometer.

Three weeks, I’m thinking, and I could bring it along, pull it out during the inevitable late-night moments when the houses are all screams and club music and sticky liquor residue on my guest-room pillow, and the card can remind me of my purpose, whip me into shape, send me back out to the living room to stop the—

But I flip the card over, look into all that white space, and leave it.

CHAPTER
FOURTEEN. Insiders In, Outsiders Out.

At the National Airlines ticket counter just inside Philadelphia International, the e-ticket terminal spits out my credit card without reading it. “Insert a VALID credit card,” it says, the word “valid” capitalized and flashing like I wouldn’t have noticed it otherwise. I re-insert the NKE company credit card and the terminal spits it out once again, repeats the same message.

W
ipe my neck and forehead and try to smile for the long line of travelers switching back and forth behind me, and they all stare impatiently, like I’m the guy at McDonalds who’s never seen the menu and can’t decide between a regular cheeseburger and a Quarter-Pounder. I look around for someone at the nearby ticket counter, smile again, expect some burly Pennsylvania security guard to grab me by the neck and grumble into my ear, “Back of the line, buddy,” in the same voice he’d use if I was just some punk fucking with the machine. When I re-insert the credit card, the message changes: “Your credit card cannot be read. Please see a Ticket Agent.” I fumble through my wallet, searching for my debit card instead, and I find it and jam it into the machine but the message won’t disappear, just jeers back at me like I’ve committed a crime. “Fuck,” I say. “Fuck fuck fuck.” Then realize I’ve sworn aloud. Around this crowd, businessmen, families, and I’m wearing this NKE polo, this billboard.

“Sir,” I hear from somewhere distant, and behind the ticket counter someo
ne has materialized. Brown-haired woman in her 40s, tired eyes like she’s seen it all and has no time for this shit. “Sir, you need to come here,” she says, voice burdened by decades of two-pack-a-day cigarette addiction. “We’ll need to input your information manually.” She motions with one old-beyond-its-years hand, then smoothes her frizzy hair back into her ponytail.

I lug my suitcase, my garment bag, my carry-on laptop case to the counter.

Sixteen weeks, I’m thinking. Philadelphia to New Mexico State. New Mexico State to Texas Tech. To Fresno State.

“Sorry,” I say. “Airport travel isn’t really my thing. I mostly drive everywhere.”

“Name,” she says. “ID?”

“I mean, I travel a
lot
, you know? For my company. Just not on planes.”

“
Name
. ID.”

“Washington.” H
and her my license. “Sorry.”

“Flight number,” she says. Then: “Number of bags you’ll be checking today?” Then: “Siiiiighhhhhh.” She hands me my tickets, fastens stickers around the handles of my luggage, points to the security line fifty feet away.

T
hen it hits me: she didn’t comment on my Florida driver’s license. For the first time in over a month, someone was uninterested in the distance I’ve traveled. I could tell her that I’ve traveled from Fort Myers, Florida, to Indianapolis, to Kentucky, to East Tennessee, to the mountains of Virginia, to the big cities of Pennsylvania, to the heart of Illinois and back again, and now I’m headed out West…but surrounded by this crowd of middle-aged men in navy blazers and hastily ironed barley-colored dress pants, each of them smelling of hotel rooms and travel-sized bottles of facial lotion, each of them packing the same Jos A Banks travel toiletry bag, each of them representing a different state/ different business…to her, I’m like a junior version of
them
.

“Ugh,” I say.
Sharp pain in my stomach. “Could you, um…closest bathroom?”

She sighs, and it occurs to me that even her sigh—her indication to the world that she is weary—sounds as though it drains her of energy. “Right next to the checkpoint,” she says.

“Thanks. It’s just…too much fast food.”

“Sure,” she says.

Rush to the men’s room, enter the first stall and gag because someone has left sopping brown towels bunched up on the toilet seat, and so I back out and rush to the handicapped stall where I spend the next ten minutes gripping the cold toilet seat, stomach pains persisting. Just dry heaving, though. Nothing more. So look on the bright side, Charlie: now you don’t have to dig through your bags for your toothbrush.

When I drop my suitcase and garment bag off at the security center, two men in white dress shirts and black ties fling my bags onto a clinical table, open them—everyone in the airport
now looking, suddenly—and with latex gloves they sift through my boxer shorts, open my toiletry bag, hold up my razor, and it’s Charles Washington on display for everyone. And I smile and cough and pretend everything is ordinary, ordinary, but my suitcase was already disheveled before this inspection and now it’s worse. They sift through several pairs of dirty boxers (which I forgot to toss into my dirty clothes bag…and shit, I forgot my dirty clothes bag, and now how will I keep the dirty clothes separate from the clean?) and then find my other NKE polo and it registers to them that I’m wearing an identical shirt and they laugh.

I don’t see my goal sheets.
I thought I’d packed my goal sheets into my suitcase.

My bags—me, my things, my life—are zipped back up, dropped onto the conveyor belt, and they disappear into darkness.

*

At the gate, I learn that my flight has been delayed for mechanical reasons, that the next plane in line will not be ready for at least two hours, so I won’t leave Philadelphia until noon. I could try to spread out and sleep, but I refuse to allow myself to be perceived as a fraternity stereotype, so I find a seat and sit with remarkable posture, no slouching, open my laptop and nod at the Excel spreadsheets on the screen and read through old reports and type and save documents, and this feels good.

Two seats down, a man shouts into his cell phone, “I don’t
care
what Anderson told you. Is
he
the General Manager? Listen to me. Cancel that order. Hear me? We’d lose our
ass
-es.”

Actually, several other blazer-wearing travelers are doing the same. “Friedman, ha!” one yel
ls into his cell phone. Tall, overweight, spilling out of his seat. Looks like he hasn’t paid attention to health or fashion since the day he took his first big job, just keeps shopping at the same men’s store, buying new navy blazers when the old ones go into disrepair, only trims his moustache after he realizes it’s dangling into his coffee. “Ha ha!” he says. “That guy doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground! Wait till December, I’m telling you.”

And I’m typing a report that says, “My meeting with the Greek Advisor at Illinois yielded little insight into their chapter operations. She seemed unfamiliar with both the local chapte
r and the National Fraternity. Sadly, she didn’t seem to take the entire party situation seriously.” And it doesn’t feel like something that any of these men—these Blazers—would be writing.

“No, we had a conference here in Philadelphia,” one of the men says into his phone. “Yep. Looks like the whole airport was there, couldn’t wait to get out. Ha!”

Indeed, some of the men around me are still wearing nametags over their blazers, the conference logo—“Business 2.0”—in heavy letters.

“Sure,” another one of them says. A different man, but it feels like he’s continuing the exact same phone conversation. “Wave of the future, my friend. Talked to someone whose business doubled after he integrated a social media page. Don’t laugh.”

Still more than two hours until boarding, the woman at the gate tells me, and I’m tempted to shop in Philly’s “Air Mall,” tempted to find a new shirt or new shoes, but I’ve got nowhere to put any of it. Stuff it in my suitcase, my garment bag? No room. I’ve got a pre-assigned shirt for every day of the week, and any new additions would fuck up my system.

S
it in silence. Grab a discarded newspaper so it looks like I keep up with current events.

In less than two months
there is a presidential election, but ever since I shut down Facebook, I’ve barely followed. Don’t know what anyone’s thinking, which Sarah Palin videos are being posted and shared, which anti-Obama commentaries are being linked, which friends support which candidate, which issue, who “likes” whose status updates, who is fear-mongering and engaging in comment wars over Obama’s “socialist plans for America,” or McCain’s secret desire to start a war with Iran. I don’t know anything, and I don’t even know how I’d
start
to know things again.

*

After awhile I relocate to the Sports Nation Restaurant & Bar a few gates away. I can’t tell if I’m hungry, don’t remember the last time I had a meal “on schedule.”

F
all heavy onto a stool far removed from any other travelers. Slick brown bar-top, and underneath the lacquer are zany cartoon drawings of airplanes taking off and soaring, like the airport has to reassure us—even as we order drinks to calm our nerves—that we have nothing to worry about when we board our planes: no twisted landing gear, no ice on the wings, no terrorists brandishing box-cutters.

The bartender, a late forty-something woman,
has the same tired look as the woman at the ticket terminal, the look that says, “I’ve worked in too many different places to even pretend that I enjoy working anymore.” When do you first develop such a look? And once it takes over your body and your face, can you ever shake it? Have I developed it? She punches numbers on a computer screen, scribbles something into a calculator-sized notepad, glances back and forth between the computer and the rows of liquor bottles against the wall-length mirror at the back of the bar. It’s barely 10:30 AM, the slow hours, and she’s taking inventory.

I clear my throat, squeak my stool, and the bartender turns around. She’s wearing a gold nametag on her maroon polo shirt, and it says, “Mindy.”

“Hello, Mindy,” I say.

“Give me two seconds.
”

A lone man in a gray suit sits at a six-top table in the Sports Nation dining area,
has his laptop open on the tabletop, an extension cord dropping from the computer to the floor and extending twelve feet—under several other tables—to a wall outlet. Like so many of the other Blazers, he’s holding a cell phone to his ear and speaking loud enough for everyone in the airport to hear: “You don’t do that in this business,” he says. “At the end of the day, we’ve got to make a decision, don’t we? It’s like comparing apples and oranges, so I don’t even know why we’re having this discussion.” His waitress, the only waitress working, steps carefully over his extension cord, smiles at him even as he turns away and speaks
louder
into his phone, and she points to his empty glass and mouths “another?” and he nods, disinterested.

Mindy is still taking inventory.

I clear my throat, but she doesn’t look my way.

So I think,
fuck it
, who’s this guy talking to, anyway? Could be anyone. His brother, his father, his mother, his wife. Could be anyone, but he’s got the Look, like He Matters, so I open my own cell phone, scroll through my call log for someone to dial. LaFaber? No. I haven’t even told him about my flat tire, and that’s a conversation I don’t want to have. Brock? No. He never shuts up; that’s a conversation that would be too one-sided. Jenn? And before I know it, I’m dialing Jenn, dialing her from a Philadelphia airport, and she’s answering the phone
, actually answering
for the first time since the Greek Life Office in Illinois —

“I was wondering when you’d call me,” she says.

“Oh,” I say. “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

“Both.”

“Okay? Did I just wake you up or something?”

“No,” Jenn says and there’s a ru
stling noise. “I was getting up. Where are you? It’s loud. What’s that beeping noise?”