The Crimson Carpet Treatment in Alabama

It turns out nobody knows what's in a Yellowhammer, the house drink at Galette's, A Gameday Tradition. What's outside of a Yellowhammer, though, is a barely reusable plastic cup that now sits in my apartment in Chicago, a tombstone from an excursion into Alabama, a state I once presumed I’d never visit.

I never planned to visit all 50 states just for the sake of it, because I didn't see any value of showing up somewhere, scooping its dirt, and knowing nobody. The flip side of this, though, is that I assume I only need one friend to wrench open a new place for me.

My pal Harry is in grad school in Tuscaloosa, so I figured the entire University of Alabama would welcome me with open arms if I visited him. I expected the football team, the marching band, and all of the fraternity brothers to put on the song and dance to grant me the pledge's-eye-view of SEC Gameday.

Growing up in New York, I skipped out on American regionalism. I have been surrounded by people living in or visiting the Northeast. Even now in Chicago, most of my friends have spent time on the East Coast, enjoying its old houses, bad weather, and fall foliage. I never appreciated the ties that bind and what brings people home, stoking local allegiances in places like Tuscaloosa.

'Bama Football dominates the NCAA and Tuscaloosa both. Bear Bryant, who led the Crimson Tide to six national championships, graces streets, bars, and stadiums with his name. Following his death, his family trademarked his iconic houndstooth pattern. Since 2007, Nick Saban has led the Tide to another five championships. Until Tua's injury this year, it seemed a given that 'Bama would participate in each of the first seven College Football Playoffs. Only time will tell what pattern Saban's family might buy, but smart money is on a moisture-wicking golf shirt.

With this history conveniently available as a distraction from the deeper, darker histories of Alabama that began with chattel slavery, continued through George Wallace's vision of perpetual segregation, and live on today in its cruel and unusual prison system, it's hardly shocking that the whole town wears its crimson all day Saturday.

The appeal of supporting the best college football team in the nation cannot be overstated. Once a week, for thirteen weeks a year, this city of 100,000 feels like the center of the universe. This is where football happens, even if the team is on the road. This week, eight good friends and I found ourselves right in it, wearing our newly purchased crimson, hoping to feel a slice of this belief.

Alabama-Arkansas, while an SEC matchup, was not much of a game. It is, though, the opening two words in the song "Home" by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros. Had we come for competitive football, 'Bama's five consecutive scoring drives and four forced turnovers in the first half might have disappointed us.

As luck would have it, the game was just an excuse. In reality, a gaggle of Yankees wanted to parachute in and live for a day like we thought they lived 'round these parts. Some of our acquaintances indulged us, while others proved less open to having us walk in their shoes as tourists.

The Uber from the Birmingham Airport to Tuscaloosa was too expensive, but I discovered that a train running from New York to New Orleans stopped in both Birmingham and Tuscaloosa. The taxi driver who brought me to the station offered to bring me all the way to Tuscaloosa, tax-free and off the books. I declined because the $16 train ticket and its 59 minute travel-time looked like a free lunch. He said something cryptic about paying for lunch, the train clientele, and timeliness.

An hour later, I stood on the non-elevated platform as a miles-long freight train took twenty minutes to roll past. My stomach grumbled, missing its free lunch. A few more minutes, and nobody acknowledged how late the train was.

The conductor seemed surprised I hadn't splurged for the sleeping car. He then scolded an elderly man who moved his wheelchair with his feet while using both hands to light a cigarette. The conductor drawled: "If you get off again at Tuscaloosa, that'll be your final destination" and the gentleman offered me a shrug and a toothy smile as if to say, "We've all heard this before.”

In the waking car, people spoke on the phone in thick accents about how the new Cook Out in town was too close to the Bojangles and the Waffle House. We creaked past a junkyard heaping with rusty rails, discarded doors, and corroded cars. Three men sat in a storage container, warming themselves over an oil drum dumpster fire. On a 60 degree day, I wondered whether this scene of cartoonish desolation were performed for my sake alone.

Lifetimes later, I joined my friends at Turbo Coffee Shop, armed with a couple of stories. Nobody had known there was a train; perhaps there hadn't been one. Turbo, I thought, had the same exposed brick and pour-over apparatus as anywhere else. Don't be fooled, Harry's buddy Trent told me, Turbo's based in Tennessee and always comes alongside a barber shop.

Local chains peddling global ubiquity are still small businesses, I reminded myself, as I taped over my webcam and microphone.

The next day, we joined Trent and his Law School chums at Jackie's Lounge, a bar with a Crimson-and-white painted outside as well as pool, darts, wall-to-wall carpet, and smoking on the inside. The doorman had a few words to say about all last names containing three syllables or the letter Z.

Walking in, I questioned whether my coastal sensibilities had again led me to miscalculate: the law students, celebrating homecoming, all wore tailcoats and a kind of neckpiece that looked halfway between an ascot and a regular tie. A few even wore bowler caps. Were it not for the environs and their faded bootcut jeans with bean boots — for hunting, not for snow — I might have thought I had stumbled into an Oxford sub-basement.

Joe, the proprietor of Jackie's Lounge, set us straight in this as he did many other ways. Tuscaloosa, he alleged, still has an obscure law allowing gentlemen wearing tailcoats to publicly imbibe. And so the law students dress annually in their tails and bring out with them their beers, strutting around town yelling "Roll Tide," knowing they will soon become everybody's favorite DUI cure.

Joe offered more wisdom, both solicited and unsolicited. His bar was too small to become a Walgreens. The square-footage would satisfy a KFC, however, so he decided to woo them with a building painted to be white and crimson, friendly to Colonel and Tide alike. I won't steal some of Joe's other jokes and lessons, but he played his role as wise Alabaman Barkeep with aplomb.

Not all of my new acquaintances appeared as keen to offer local amusements. I shocked many by not realizing the mascot was an elephant. Another friend and I found ourselves later in the evening talking to a couple of local girls at Galette's, A Gameday Tradition. At one point, we all began telling jokes. He and I stole the floor with consecutive rambling, four minute dirty jokes with unrewarding punchlines. Our company left so fast their barstools spun behind them.

Later in the evening, I decided it was time to finally track down one of the large red-and-white "DG Hearts the Tide" or "Pi Phi Loves Nick" sorority buttons I had seen all day. I took a seat on a bench next to a gentleman wearing one, taking no notice of his solitude and unwelcoming body language. I asked him what a guy had to do to come by one of those mighty fine buttons.

"Do you know what this means?" He asked, pulling around the sleeve of his Nike 'Bama polo to show me the crimson-embroidered Greek letters on it.

"Nope, no idea." I benevolently offered.

"It means I was an absolute hound when I went here.”

"Oh, that's neat. You graduated? How can I get one of these buttons? What's a hound?”

"It means get out of my face. Now.”

"Ahh. Roll Tide!”

I forget what fraternity our alumnus represented, but he carried it with him deep into post-grad life. Astonishingly, he tore up my resume when I handed it to him. All weekend, I had hoped to engage with this exact sort of person and drink too much or do whatever it was they did. Only now did it crystalize that they had no interest in engaging with me and saw no novelty in my person. My interest in them came, admittedly, from their contrived campus social position, itself a result of exclusivity. Exclusivity is not achieved by handing out buttons to strangers with the wrong accent, especially those who tell four minute jokes about mermaids.

My experience with this slice of Fraternity Life proved more realistic than if I had managed to talk my way behind the wrought-iron gates guarding the fraternity mansions between the Moe's Southwestern Grill and the Denny Chimes on University Boulevard.

Sunday afternoon, we drove back past Moe's, the Chimes, and these houses. A brother sat on the steps out front of DKE having a cigarette and surveying his lawn. He looked over the remnants from the prior day's festivities while I read a historical plaque off to his left. I didn't think to ask if he knew what it said.

After visiting Yale in 1847, 18 years before Reconstruction, a handful of students decided they ought to start their own chapter of Delta Kappa Epsilon. Those students almost certainly enslaved and denied the personhood of other humans, a legacy from which the socioeconomic position of the organization and its members here in Tuscaloosa can never fully be disentangled.

I cannot speak to the extent to which the current members of the fraternity engage with, disavow, or even embrace this legacy, but it's inescapable if only because of the house's plantation-style architectural heritage. The student stamped out his cigarette and walked back through the house's gratuitously large front door, and I drove off to Birmingham. I passed the nation's priciest sorority house and gave this brother no more thought than he gave me.

In the car, we discussed our weekend and Alabama at great length. We wondered whether we all were out of line for coming down here hoping that an entire college campus would dance for us, recreating our stereotypes, and whether it's legitimate to glorify one aspect of a place, its football, while doing little beyond verbally disapproving of its other aspects, its history of slavery and racism.

This University educated many of the architects of slavery and segregation and will continue to educate both those who fight for and against civil rights and equality in years to come. Roy Moore's portrait allegedly hangs in the law school, but I also think Trent might just go on to become somebody.

We never could have showed up immersed in the middle of our 'Bama fantasy because there's no free lunch. We could only ride the train as the locals switched off conducting us in circles.

Back in Birmingham, we laughed as we waited for another endless train. Harry told me that Birmingham is rebranding from the Steel City, the "Pittsburgh of the South" per Veep's Gary Walsh. Henceforth, it is Magic City, a name I had thought was already taken by the renowned Atlanta gentlemen's club.