by Nathan Holic
Every aspect of my life organized, planned.
Maybe it was as simple as separating egg white from yolk, as simple as scraping congealed fat from the top of refrigerated gravy, the bad from the good of Charles Washington, the Frat Star from the Leader, a separation, a focusing—like the Jenn Outlook—on the best and not the worst.
I didn’t want to think about the Senior Send-Off anymore, either. I wanted to believe that my memories were just the strobe light flashes of some different man that I could leave behind in college, the same way I could leave behind all the old college bars, all the booty music.
Leave the night behind. Leave the old family behind.
Create a new profile. New man. New status updates:
Charles is…going to do this right.
Charles is…going to do everything right.
Charles…doesn’t care what his father said, doesn’t give a damn, because who is that man anyway? What do I really know about him? About either of them? They’re not who they’re supposed to be. Nobody is who they’re supposed to be. But I am. I can be. Charles Washington is Charles Washington.
Charles…doesn’t need to lie.
Charles…just needs to start over.
I clipped a long metal rod to the hooks above each window in the backseat of my Explorer. The package claimed it would provide “order” and a “comforting sense of home” for my year of cross-country travel, my Explorer becoming my bedroom closet, my office, my whole life. I decided upon just the right clothes to bring and to buy, and just the right sequence in which to hang them: (from far right) my silver-black Ralph Lauren suit, two pairs dress pants (one pair black, one gray), four dress shirts (two white, one navy, one light blue), one black wool winter coat, one navy-and-white windbreaker, one pair jeans, two pairs khaki pants, two business-casual polo shirts (the letters NKE embroidered above their hearts).
I planned how to perfectly organize every square inch of the Explorer:
One full year as a role model; and starting in August, four straight months of fraternity house hopping. I would not drift back into the college lifestyle, into drinking games and late-night pizza and waking up at noon on someone’s sofa. No slip-ups. Hell, I would eliminate the opportunity for slip-ups. I would be the man I was always supposed to be.
*
“It doesn’t matter who you really are,” Walter LaFaber wrote in the “Preparing For Life as a Fraternity Consultant” email that I received just days after the Senior Send-Off, “it only matters what people think you are.” Just google yourselves, the email told us, so you can truly see what the world knows of you, how you might be perceived if anyone grows curious. “Think about Facebook profiles, twitter accounts, online photo albums. What was fun and cute a year ago is now professional suicide.”
How true.
The first time I’d googled myself (back during freshman year of college, just for the hell of it), I wasn’t expecting much. My name stretches back centuries, has been chiseled onto a thousand gravestones, and I’ve always relied on how easily I’ve been able to slink into anonymity should the need arise (“You must have the wrong Charles Washington,” I can say. “There are quite a few of us.”). At other times, I’ve relied on the more “famous” Charles Washington (the younger brother of America’s first president) to steal attention and web traffic from me. Hell, I share a name with a hero, a patriot, a founder. We were Google buddies, and he wasn’t going anywhere. But during freshman year, I found my own name on the third page of the Google results, an old high school web site I’d created for a world history project. I remember looking at the search result, the bold hypertext that would lead me to an online ghost town I’d built years before, and wondering if—like some abandoned general store, crumbling under stinging desert winds—it would ever disappear.
By my senior year at EU, I was on the second page of the search results, the fraternity letters “Nu Kappa Epsilon” following, image results accompanying, further demarcating this Charles Washington from all others.
So when asked to search my name online, anything seemed possible: was I on the first page by now? And what new results would await? Could the world know more about me than I knew about myself?
“You’ll want to make sure that the image you’ve given the world is truly the image you want the world to see,” the email said. “Everyone leaves a digital footprint, and it’s hard to accomplish a mission—any mission—when you’re sabotaging yourself.”
Had anyone at the National Headquarters searched my name?
It scared the hell out of me.
After the email, this is what I found, in descending order of relevance, the first page of 49,400,000 results:
1. First, as expected, Wikipedia’s entry for President George Washington’s younger brother Charles, dead at age 60, shortly before his older brother passed, though records are sketchy. Also, some Google Image results displaying Charles Washington’s only known portrait: his face feels vaguely recognizable, a blurry Xerox of a more famous patriot.
2. Next, a series of pages dedicated to 18-Century Charles Washington’s various historical markers across the Virginias, the Shenandoah Valley.
3, 4, 5. Scroll down the page. A few other Charles Washingtons, attorneys whose names are remembered in law reviews, actors whose names are preserved on imdb.com, authors catalogued on Harper’s Magazine’s database.
25. Then…keep scrolling down the page…ignore everything until you get to the very bottom of the first page. “Charles Washington,” the search result tells you, offering a link to our national web site. “Educational Consultant, Nu Kappa Epsilon National Fraternity Headquarters.”
Yes, that sounded respectable. A few weeks before, the Headquarters had posted a news release about my hiring, had created a full profile page on their web site to tout my college accolades. How exciting to find my name here on—
But, wait. Scroll back up.
Stop here. Right here.
6.
Because that listing at the bottom of the page was not my only search result. Here was another one. Much earlier. The sixth entry! My Facebook page and a choice selection of party photos blinking like a “red alert” sign in the center of the web page. Oh, you could still see the original historic photos right above mine, the Charles Washington oil painting, the place markers, the words “Charles Town” on an olde tyme hand-drawn 1770s map, and you could still see the professional Nu Kappa Epsilon site far down the page, but you wouldn’t see any of it without also seeing a description of my full Facebook profile, my name and age and education and hometown, all paired with the digital images of the supposed “diamond candidate” standing on the arm rest of a sofa with beer bottles in each hand. Giving the thumbs-up sign at Bang-Shots while standing under a banner that said “Wet T-Shirt Contest,” and behind me a girl shaking her slippery tits to the approval of the crowd. Pouring Everclear from a bottle and into the cut-out hole of a watermelon.
And a dozen other photos just like these.
Oh, and if you clicked onto the second page of search results, there was an old MySpace account, too. Hadn’t been used in over a year, but full of vulgar Anchorman quotes (“I want to be on you!” “Mr. Burgundy, you have a massive erection!”), a profile page now stamped and spammed with comments from strippers and porn sites, bare-breasted women licking the web cam and asking me to visit the link below for some action. The sort of comments I would have deleted if I’d still cared about MySpace. But here was civilization left to the wind and snow and rain of the internet: junk comments piled high on my forgotten profile, one after the next, like weeds and topsoil over cold and irrelevant train tracks. And there was even a comment from Renee, my cousin in Georgia: “Wow, Charles. Haven’t checked your MySpace in awhile?”
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 gam
es? 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 s
he 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?”