by Nathan Holic
And all around Sports Nation, the tables are filling. A woman in a black pant-suit sits and opens a trashy-looking airport novel, one with a pink cover and glistening torsos. Two fat men in navy suits pull out chairs at different tables, debating which has the best view of their gate, before finally settling on a booth. And I’m wearing a polo and sitting with a man in a short-sleeved button-down whose every foul-mouthed comment makes me flinch, and I find myself constantly glancing around to see if we are causing a scene. When he says “Mexican,” one of the fat men in the navy suits raises his head, but it might have been a coincidence.
“Well,” I say. “It’s New Mexico. I think it’s always been…Hispanic.”
“The fraternities there. Shit. Probably all Mexicans, too, huh? Saying our oath in Spanish. Can you imagine being a brother to someone who doesn’t even speak English?”
Mercifully, the drinks come and the bartender asks Ben for his credit card. He tells her to start a tab because we’ve both got some time to kill before boarding. Then he tells Mindy that the University of Pittsburgh game is on ESPN2, so if she wants a tip she should probably change the channel. Amazingly, she does so happily.
“Mindy’s the best,” Ben says.
“You know her?”
“Been here a thousand times. You take care of Mindy and you’re in good shape. Ain’t that right, sweetie?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says without looking at him.
“Course you don’t. Eagles fans. Fucking clueless.”
“So,” I interrupt, trying to prevent more obscenity, “there’s a Pittsburgh game on today?”
“Fuckin’ A. It’s Saturday. College fucking football, brother.”
I look around. “Right.”
“I forgot. You went to some small school, didn’t you?”
He gulps his Jack and Coke, so I take a sip of mine.
“Who do you play?” I ask.
“Some sucker school,” he says and chokes on his drink, coughs, then laughs. “Every year, they bring some poor cupcake school to start the season, televise the game, give our team a victory. This year I think it’s some Florida school. Probably your school, for all I know.”
“Heh,” I say and suddenly I hope I don’t have to watch EU get creamed on television in this bar. I take a larger sip. “So where are you headed, Ben?”
“Same shit, different day. Out to Boston this afternoon, then Hartford for most of next week. Back to Pittsburgh next Friday.”
“I didn’t know you traveled so much.”
“Not that much. But it gets me away from everything.”
“Everything?”
“The wife, the kids. Everything.”
“Oh, right. I forgot.”
“Forgot what?”
“Nothing. I thought…Isn’t it nice to just slow down, though? Settle in one place?”
“Are you smoking crack?”
“Am I smoking crack?”
“I got these friends, they spend every night at home. They’re dying, brother.”
“Dying?” Sounds like a rough word.
“Life is all about moving. You stay still, you’re fucking dying. Sharks, they don’t ever stop, don’t even sleep. The second they stop, they drown. Sharks got it right.”
“For some reason, I thought you said you worked a desk job.”
“Nope,” he says. “All the chumps work behind desks, am I right? No, listen. Really. Desks are entry-level work. A fucking monkey could do half the work that they have college graduates doing.”
“Down economy, though.”
“Fuck that. There’s jobs out there. I don’t give a fuck what anyone says. Recession, economic downturn, blah blah blah. Look at me. Senior year of college, my parents both died within a year of one another, so I had to find a job. Quick. Take care of my younger sister. I just made sure to take the best one, best money, instead of settling like so many of these kids are doing today. Just a BA and I started off at 45 grand. My advice: don’t settle. Be fucking aggressive. That’s how you got this job, right?”
“Sure,” I say. “No settling.”
“Sweet job. You’re not cooped up in a cubicle. You know what I’m sayin’?”
“But traveling, you’ve got no time at home to, you know, see the people you love.”
“Ha, good one. My other advice. Don’t get married.”
Silence as we both stare at the television.
“Are you satisfied, then?” I ask.
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
I look behind me. No one has moved, no one has registered his comment.
“With your career, I mean,” I say. “Are you satisfied with who you work for?”
“The fuck are you asking that for, all of a sudden?”
I look around again.
“Stop that,” he says. “These fuckers…what do they care about what I say?”
“It’s just, I try to be professional.”
“Professional. Professional,” he says and shakes his head.
“There’s a certain way that I try to present myself.”
“Do I look satisfied? Shit. I’m just like you. Just like any of these pricks around here, all lying to each other. Nobody likes doing clean-up work for some executive making twice their salary. But it’s a job. You’re not supposed to like your job. You just shouldn’t hate it.”
“Interesting perspective.”
“Mindy,” Ben says. “One more Jack and Coke for both of us. And a little extra pour pour, if you know what I mean.”
“That might be a bit much,” I say.
Mindy smiles, and it’s the first time I’ve seen her smile. Doesn’t seem right. It’s like watching a former linebacker—one of those guys with jutting chins and rock-solid jaw lines and angry black eyes and countless scars and blood blood blood constantly on his mind—sitting in shirt and tie on a morning talk show and talking about his crème brulee recipe.
“We have a tradition back at the frat house,” Ben says. “Game day tradition that’s been going on for years. We call it Big East Bellybuster.”
“Big East Bellybuster?”
“Yessir. We give a toast to every team in the Big East. Well. A toast to their opponents, whoever we need to win. The conference has changed a little in the past couple years, but it’s the number one reason to look forward to game day. ”
“That could be seven drinks,” I say.
“Start of the year is always rough, out-of-conference play,” he says. “God, I miss college. Mindy.” Mindy returns and Ben slips her a twenty. He mouths something to her. “They don’t like you getting rip-roaring drunk before your flight,” he says when she walks away. “So it’s good to know people.” A moment later, as we watch the college football scores scroll across the bottom of the television screen, he pushes a plastic Starbucks cup—the kind usually used for Frappuccino—in my direction. At the bottom is something light yellow, like watered-down honey, and he says, “Isn’t too strong. Drink it, but don’t make a scene.” He’s got his own Starbucks cup, and when he sees the score for the Temple-UConn game, he says, “Godspeed to you, Temple,” and we drink the shot.
*
“I got held off a flight at Dayton Airport because I got so drunk, but that place is small potatoes,” Ben says. We take a shot to East Carolina, playing West Virginia. Then another to UCF, playing South Florida. Then another to Oklahoma, playing Cincinnati. I realize that I’m slouching in my seat, totally unprofessional, so I straighten up, look around, and as always no one pays any attention to me because they’re all absorbed in their laptops, and Ben’s pushing another shot in my direction, and we’re toasting to Tennessee Tech, I think, and Ben tells me to be quiet when the ESPN Gameday crew discusses the Pittsburgh game, which is coming later in the day, and I nod along with the commentators even though I’ve never watched a Pitt game and things are starting to get loud and hazy.
“Kicked out of an airport?” I say, and Ben just nods. “I actuall
y got kicked out of an American Cancer Society fundraiser during my junior year.”
“Killer,” Ben says, sips his Jack and Coke and stares at the television and squirms in his seat when ESPN replays a bone-jarring tackle from last week’s Rutgers University football game. The program cuts to a shot of a football player on a stretcher, then to another shot of the coach near tears at a press conference.
“This could be his career,” the coach says. “He could be done.”
“We bought tickets for fifty bucks,” I say, “and it was all-you-can-eat grouper and an open bar. I went with a couple of my fraternity brothers. Bad idea, right? We made t-shirts that said, ‘Drinking for charity,’ and we each finished off seven or eight vodka tonics before some guy in a tuxedo came up to us and said we’d had enough.”
Somewhere a child screams about G.I. Joe., and I don’t bother turning around.
“This is the right idea,” Ben says, pointing emphatically at his drink with his cocktail straw. “You’ve got the right idea now, kid.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just a couple drinks, you know?”
“I’ve never had anything against drinking,” I say.
“No?”
“It’s just our consultant Code of Conduct.”
“You take that shit too seriously, brother. You loosen up, you’ll get somewhere.”
“But,” I say and pause and my head sways and I have to steady myself, “I’ve got, you know, a job to do. I can’t be a role model if I’m drunk. I can’t.”
“And you’ll never get anything accomplished, either, if you’re so fucking uptight.” He taps the cocktail straw against the rim of the glass, silent for a moment, staring down into the ice cubes. “One thing I’ve learned: in a circle of smokers, nobody trusts the asshole who won’t light up. You actually care about your job, kid? The fraternity?”
“Of course. I’m on the road. I’ve given up everything to—”
“Then you do what you need to do in order to see results.”
“I can make a difference without…” and my head is swaying again and I forget what I—
“In a fraternity house, nobody ever listens to the guy without a drink,” he says. “You want to look back and say that all this was for nothing, this whole year you’re spending in this job, that you couldn’t make a difference because you refused to drink a goddamned beer?”
Charles is…thinking he has a point.
Charles…should have gone into the Illinois party, unpacked in the guest room.
Charles…will not make that mistake again.
How different would it have been, I wonder. Pittsburgh, the alumni dinner, Shippensburg, even Illinois. If I’d rolled up my sleeves, if I’d sat down with a drink. Would it have hurt? Would they have been more willing to listen when I talked about the mission?
“You can have some fun,” Ben says, “and still do your job.”
I see what you’re saying, I say, or maybe I don’t.
“Just loosen up, you know? Good things will happen.”
I’m picturing those hangers in the backseat of my Explorer, those hangers swaying as I grumbled over potholes, the entire Explorer thrown into chaos when I fell into that final, deep gash, hangers shooting from the backseat rod. I never cleaned it all up, not completely. I never cleaned myself up today, but suddenly there’s something reassuring and fresh about letting it all slip away just as easily as those hangers. About not cleaning up. About falling into darkness.
We take a shot to Akron. I think?
*
And Ben is telling me about a room in the basement of the Pittsburgh house, a secret room whose door is hidden behind a bookshelf like in some old Batman cartoon, and I say that he’s got to be shitting me, the brothers never showed me any “secret room.” And he says that I’d be surprised the things they wouldn’t tell me, and in this secret room is where they hold “formal chapter meetings” once a month, everyone in shirt and tie and brotherhood pins and full fraternity ritual regalia, and they take it so seriously, don’t allow anyone to even bring a cell phone or a Gatorade into the meeting. Pittsburgh? I ask. Can’t get into the secret room unless you’ve been initiated, he says. Part of the Pittsburgh family. Insiders in, outsiders out.
*
And I’ve forgotten where I am, and I look around and spy all the Blazers and everything, and I swirl around on my stool and knock my laptop case onto the floor and Ben Jameson beside me is laughing as I stoop to collect the bag, and I search through the side pouch and check my ticket and the clock on the wall and it’s blurry, not just swaying but blurry. I’ve only got a couple minutes until boarding time.
“Thank you so much for the drinks, man,” I say, standing. I shake my head. “Sir. I mean sir, not man. Sorry. You know how it goes? Talking with undergrads all day, and shit, I start speaking like them. But seriously. Thanks for the drinks. I mean…I shouldn’t have, you know? But it is cool to let loose, I’ll admit it.”
“No problem,” he says, and he sips a water now, and I never even saw Mindy drop it off. “I’ll tell you what. You coming back to Pittsburgh anytime soon?”
“Not this semester,” I say, and I grab his water and take a gulp, place it back in front of him, stumble a little, and he laughs. “Maybe in the Spring.”
“Tell you what. Here’s my card.”
He hands me a silver business card, foil-etched name and position below a bright red logo: “ED-TEX INDUSTRIES.” Ambiguous but sleek, like a high-tech defense contractor, a company deciding the future of the planet, and I’m downing shots with this guy, this alumnus, in a Philadelphia airport. And isn’t this better than if I’d just declined the drinks?
“You’re all right, kid,” he says. “Good head on your shoulders. Drop me an email when you come for Spring. I’ll get some basketball tickets, gather some alumni in town.”
“Alumni,” I say. “I can’t drink in front of alumni.”
“News flash,” he whispers. “You’re wrecked right now.”
“No-oooo,” I say.
“I’m an alumnus,” he whispers.
“No-oooo,” I say.
“I’ll sweeten the deal,” he says. “Barbecue at the house before the game. I buy the kegs. We’ll stack ‘em high in your honor. Show you how we do things in Pittsburgh.”
“Hmmm.”
Then Ben Jameson pats me on the back. “In the meantime, live it up. All this you got in front of you. Young and shit. Probably got a hot little thing back home, too, don’t you?”
“I have a girlfriend,” I say. “Jenn.”
“Piece of ass with ‘bend me over’ written all over her, am I right? Live it up.”
“Sure,” I say. “No doubt.”
“Everything changes, is my point,” he says. “You get a job. Wifey gets fat. You get a couple brats running around the house, never see your friends anymore. You lose your goddamn hair. You wonder how all this happened, you know? So all I’m saying is, live it up. You’re young right now. You come to Pittsburgh, you’re going to live it up. What do you say?”
“Yes,” I say.
“We can show you the room, even. I vouch for you, brother.” He pats me on the back again. “We’ll make it happen.”
“Yes. I’m there. I’m sold.” And we shake hands. I thank him again for the shots, tell him this was a great time, and I speed-walk to my terminal, not thinking about where I’m going or the steps I’m taking.
*
I remember when the Educational Consultant visited Edison University during my junior year, his tiny Hyundai Accent occupying the chapter’s “Reserved – President” parking spot for four days. Wore the same Nu Kappa Epsilon polos that I wear now, same blue dress shirts, same backseat rod. At the time, just as with LaFaber, there was something otherworldly about this guy: how he spoke of his pristine chapter house back at the University of Washington, how he looked at our budget and within seconds had found a massive error in our Treasurer’s spreadsheet, how he spoke of the National
Headquarters as if it was the Emerald City. His posture, his carefully chosen words in each workshop he facilitated, his perfect responses to even the most inane questions that my chapter brothers asked (“How can we amend Sacred Laws to, like, make it legal to have kegs at the chapter house?” “What’s your name?” “Jonathan.” “Okay, Jonathan. Well, first of all, it is legal to have kegs at your house. But as members of Nu Kappa Epsilon, we believe that it’s our responsibility to battle the fraternity stereotype of binge drinking, and a regulation prohibiting kegs is one way that we strive toward this goal. On a different note, though, it’s important to understand that the fraternity supports your right to drink responsibly. Along with several other fraternities, we actively fight any college or university that forces campus housing to go dry. In fact, studies have shown that students are safer when…”). And yes, I was transfixed, amazed that someone could have his life so neatly ironed.
But after the consultant left: “Homeboy needs to pull his pants down a little,” my friend Gavin said. “His belt was at his fucking nipples. Looked like my grandfather.”
And: “You hear what he said about our guest room? That it was unacceptable?”
And: “Saw me drinking in the foyer and asked if I was underage. You believe that?”
And: “Guy was a fucking douche bag. The fuck does he know?”
And for all the perfection, maybe I was the only one impressed?
CHAPTER FIFTEEN. Flight to El Paso.
Walking in a single-file line behind ten or fifteen Blazers, each of them processed by the attendant. On the plane, each Blazer navigates the center aisle to his seat, deposits carry-on bag in overhead compartment in one swift motion. Scattered families/vacationers stall the overall progress, but the Blazers stream inside like high-speed internet, and I’m so drunk and bumbling that I feel like outdated dial-up.
I knock into someone. Try to apologize but can’t enunciate. Plop down into Seat 13.