STARTING OVER (36 page)

Don squirmed in his bucket seat and peered out over the hump in the hood that housed the oversized Mustang motor, as the house came into view on the right.  He noticed that the grass still needed cut, tree branches still needed cleared, and the house still needed a fresh coat of white paint.

By force of habit, he took the single-lane driveway as fast as possible.  As his car hit the gravel at the end of the drive the Mustang skidded slightly right and around the corner at the rear of the house, then slid to a stop in front of the coach house next to the large maple tree.  There were already a couple cars in the lot, and he didn’t know if they belonged to the new brothers or the older ones.  He unbuckled his seat belt, opened the door and stepped from the car.

It had always been part of its colorful history that the coach house started life as a garage for the two horse-drawn hearses on the right side and four stalls on the left for the horses.  Tradition held in the fraternity that the two most senior actives parked their cars inside the garage side for protection from the elements.  The implementation of this tradition had a few rough spots depending on the most senior brothers’ cars because the width of a fancy hearse from the early part of the twentieth century was about the same as an MG or VW bug in the 1960s.  Any larger cars presented a problem, as well as larger actives because his waist size was almost as important as his car size as he would have to be able to slip between the frame of the coach house and the car in the narrow confines.

Don took a moment to look at the old house.  It was easy to imagine pallbearers and caskets, followed by grieving friends and relatives leaving through the double front doors of the funeral home as those had been the guests of the day. The front door when he had lived there was still reserved for live guests to come and go as need be. But it was the rear door where the brothers and their girlfriends had entered and exited.  Both entrances had covered porches.  About 15’ x 40’, the front porch was large enough for ten large wicker rockers.  The two large oak doors with beveled glass windows led to the foyer that not only opened wide enough for caskets but on occasion for small cars, practical jokes being the specialty of all fraternities since time began.  Don was still amazed at how few young men it took to carry an entire VW bug into the house or to carry an occupied wood-framed bed outside to the lawn.

The main floor rooms were large enough for either multiple viewings on a busy night eighty years before Don’s time or they worked well for parties or studying alone or with dates.  The back porch was about half the size of the front porch.  Its door opened directly into the commercially retrofitted kitchen.  Don knew this route well as he had never missed a meal.  There had been an ever-changing cast of cooks who, no doubt, hadn’t been appreciated or paid enough for their trouble.

No one had wanted to think about what had gone on in the basement in the far past, but when Don lived there, it had been a place for more intimate parties and storage.

As Don walked around the back of his car and headed toward the rear porch, a very muscular man, head shaved and in his early twenties bounded down the steps heading directly toward Don.  He looked like he had jumped off the cover of a romance novel.  He extended his right hand and said to Don as he glanced at the Mustang, “Hey, nice ride,
dude!  Can I help you?”

Don attempted to return the handshake but soon realized the student was either not a modern Phi Psi Kappa fraternity brother who knew the same secret handshake Don knew or the student was not expecting Don to be one.  Fumbling briefly as he withdrew his right hand, Don answered. “Yes you can.  I’m Don Williams.  I have a meeting with Jennifer Kist here today. Your name is?”

“Josh, Josh Miller.  Jennifer Kist?  I don’t think I know her.  Does she date one of my brothers?”

Don realized his added knowledge would not make Josh any better informed as Jennifer had specifically instructed him to not go into details about Brendan, his will or any plans, not that he knew anything anyway. “No, I doubt it.  She’s an attorney.  She asked me to meet her here at 2 p.m. today.”

Josh studied Don from head to foot and glanced again at the Mustang in an effort to unravel the mystery a little.  Finally, he commented.  “Attorney?  Interesting.  Is anyone else coming?”

Don smiled and shrugged.  “I don’t know.”

They both turned to look as a black Mercedes E350 sedan flowed around the corner of the house and headed toward the backyard parking lot. The raven-haired driver carefully maneuvered the car around the pot holes and away from other cars and shut it off.  The driver’s door opened and two long shapely legs exited and planted their expensive 4” heels on the ground.  A tall thirty-something woman stood.  Her clothes and the confidence she exuded perfectly matched the current model year $60,000 car.  She turned and walked directly toward Don.  With a smile, she extended her hand to him, “Mr. Williams, I’m Jennifer Kist.  Sorry I’m a few minutes late.”

Don nodded and was horrified to hear his voice crack as if he was back in college. “No worries.  I just got here, myself.  It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

Turning to Josh, Jennifer extended her hand.  Her gaze swept his shoes, pants and broad shoulders before stopping at his eyes.  “And you are?”

Josh,
cleared his throat, suddenly looking less cool than earlier when he had been dealing with Don.  “Josh Miller.  I am actually the President of the fraternity or what was the fraternity.” Josh glanced at the ground and shook his head. “I heard we’re losing our house.”

“That sucks,” Don added.  “Brendan did a lot for hundreds of guys.  He was a pain in the ass twice a quarter, but overall, he was very generous.”

Jennifer asked, “Josh, is there a place where we can get some privacy?  I’m expecting a few more people, and I have some things to go over with them.”

Josh motioned toward the coach house.  “Sure, upstairs in the coach house on the right is a large meeting room.  No one should bother you there.  Most of the guys are on campus right now.”

“Thanks Josh.”  Jennifer smiled and walked toward the coach house door that opened to the staircase to the second floor.  About fifteen feet across the uneven, partly graveled parking lot she glanced back and called back to Josh, “If anyone is looking for Jennifer Kist or maybe asking for Brendan Harrigan’s attorney, send them upstairs, would you please?”  Don followed her, leaving Josh standing alone and confused in the parking lot.

From the outside, the coach house appeared to have undergone more renovations than the exterior of the fraternity house itself.  Don pulled open the door and allowed Jennifer to enter the building and climb the single set of narrow wooden stairs.  A wave of aroma from years of beer-soaked boards flowed down the stairs and hit them as they entered the building.  As Don walked up the fifteen steps, he automatically counted them.  The exact number had been a pledge test on oddities and trivia about the fraternity property.  He also recalled the number of windows in the house, the steps leading to the front porch and how many trees were in the backyard.  All critical
knowledge needed to be recalled at times of duress like hell week and was, even after all this time, still stuck in his memory.

The stairs entered the second level through the center of the floor.  The old basketball half court remained on the left side and the right side had been carpeted since he had been here forty years earlier.  There were folding tables arranged in a giant rectangle shape for meetings.  The far wall was covered floor to ceiling with the signatures of all the seniors who had ever graduated Kent State as a Phi Psi brother.  Jennifer and Don gravitated toward it, drawn by all the voices from the past.

Together, they stared at the signatures written with scores of ball point pens, felt tip markers, colored pencil and even quill pens that had been the weapon of choice by those who had graduated from the very demanding architecture school.

“What’s this all about?” she asked as she walked along the wall.

“It was a tradition that all seniors had to come up here on graduation day and sign the wall.  As you could guess, there are hundreds more now than when I left.”

Don slowly shuffled his way along the wall, carefully touching the inked signatures with his fingertips.

“You’re looking at those names like you’re at the Vietnam memorial in DC.”

Don turned to Jennifer and blinked against the tears that welled up in his eyes. “You really get to know someone when you go through college, growing up with them.  Being with them as they met and lost
girlfriends, pass and fail classes and especially the hell we all went through our senior year.  They were always there for me.  But we’ve lost touch.”

“Did Mr.
Harrigan sign it?” she asked.

“Sure.  He’s way over to the left and toward the top,” Don said as he pointed her in that direction.  “He was in one of the first classes to live in this house.  I guess he bought it after he graduated and got rich.”

“Whose is this?”  Jennifer pointed to a mostly illegible autograph that included a rough drawing of the iconic
Playboy
bunny logo.  “What’s with the rabbit?”

“That was Cliff Baker.  His nickname was
Hef.”

“
Ahh, I see.  After Hugh Hefner, right?”

“Yeah.
  Cliff used to be a photographer.”

One perfectly waxed eyebrow arched with the unasked question that would naturally follow such a confession.

“They were art shots,” he defended his brother without apology.  “Remember, it was the Sixties.  It was all about freedom and beauty and love.”

“Where’s yours?”

Don pointed to a spot about five feet off the floor and left of the window overlooking the parking lot.  “Right there.”

“The one with the little rocket?”

“Yeah, that’s it.”  He smiled at the memory that invoked.  He hadn’t thought about that in years.

“You’re living in Texas now, aren’t you?”

“Yes, for the last few years.  My wife grew up in Austin.  She had to stay behind with our daughter who’s expecting our first grandchild any minute.”

“That must be nice.”  Jennifer glanced at her watch, clearly moving her focus back to the meeting.  “Do you know who is planning on making it?”

Don shook his head and shrugged.“I have no idea.  I never even heard who was invited.”

Jennifer walked over to the meeting tables, and laid her briefcase on one of them.  “I didn’t send you the list?  My assistant must have forgotten to put that into your package,” she told him as she shuffled through her briefcase.

“I guess we’ll both know soon enough,” Don commented.

“I left my phone in the car.  I’m going to run down and call the office and make sure the food I arranged for is on the way,” she told him.  “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

Don turned back to the wall.  He moved slowly, looking for familiar names and stopping to touch the inked signatures with his fingertips.  With each one he recognized, he’d stop, smile and sometimes nod as he recalled his experiences with every brother whose name he found.

Larry Reed with a small baseball drawn over his name.
  Stanley Freeman.  Jeff Tallmadge accented by the faces of comedy and tragedy.  Frank Pucci.  Ted McCoy.  Barry Smith next to a drawing of two sticks that no one but the class of 1970 would understand.  Ira Schwartz.  Rick Rogers.  Alfonso Garcia and a paw print of a monkey with the name Carlos, inked above it.  Someone, probably Jeff, must have added the tiny paw print after Alfonso signed because Alfonso and the monkey’s hatred for each other had been legendary.  There was Kevin Nash and Mike Anderson with an airplane drawn near his name.

Those guys had been his best friends, and yet he hadn’t heard from any of them for years, not since the day they closed the campus.  He was overcome with all the memories that flooded back.  It was as fresh as if it was.

Suddenly he heard the sound of a basketball bouncing, then something hit him in the back of his knees so hard his legs almost buckled.

“Hey,” Don yelled as he whirled around to see who else was there.  “Watch what you’re doing.”  He hadn’t heard anyone come up the stairs.

From the dimly lit basketball court about fifty feet away he heard someone yell “Come on, Don!  A little help here.  We want to finish our game before registration.”

Chapter One

“It’s Your Thing” – The Isley Brothers

Kent State University – September, 1969

“Ball, Don! You’re holding us up.”

Don picked up the ball and dribbled forward and made a shot.  The ball swooshed through the bare hoop and his team cheered.  The ball hit a warped board on the old wooden floor and rolled toward the tables on the other end of the room.

“Hey, Hef, throw it back.”

Cliff Baker looked down at the basketball and reluctantly picked it up.  Not being coordinated enough to dribble and walk at the same time, he tossed the ball toward the group of young men waiting on the basketball court.  It took an errant bounce,
then shot out the open window.

All the guys who had been playing basketball rushed to the window and peered out.  “Shit!” Frank
Pucci grumbled.  “Bet you couldn’t do that again.”