Hot Dogs and Cold Beer

I graduated from college years ago and have been successful and become wealthy in the oil industry. I often meet other wealthy oil people and rarely a week goes by that someone does not look me square in the eye and palm my hand in some secret fraternal handshake.

My parents demanded that my brother and I attend college. Neither of us really wanted to go, but they would have it no other way. It cost very little to attend a Louisiana state college at that time - seventy-four dollars per month, as I recall, for room and board, tuition, and books another three-hundred dollars, or so. It did not matter because my Dad was a construction worker. He had barely enough to send us to college; little remained for much else.

Brother Jack and I had no money to join social fraternities. Neither, consequently, did most of our friends. The frat rats, as we called them, wore the most expensive clothes, drove the finest cars, and had the best pedigrees and prettiest girlfriends. We couldn’t even afford ugly girlfriends. The rest of us were just the street curs, and it did not matter much who possessed the largest brain.

We are all social animals so Jack and I joined a ROTC precision drill team called the Fusileers. Other nerds, misfits and social throwbacks populated the Fusileers’ ranks, but every one of us, down the line, was a smarter-than-average individual.

The campus of NLSC was several miles from downtown Monroe and none of us had a car. The downtown movie theatre was a converted opera house and I remember watching many a movie there. Often, after studying well into the night, we would catch a bus and go downtown to a little hole-in-the-wall café called Coney Island Hotdogs. The owner was Greek and sold us a hotdog and cold beer for about thirty cents. We each usually had enough money for a couple of both.

People grow up and they change. My business partner is a former frat rat and he is a good and caring person. Still, every time someone grasps my hand in a secret fraternity handshake, I wonder if that person is sincere, maybe a bigot, or worse.

Me, I have never been anything but a common street cur, and I still love hot dogs and cold beer.

Fiction South