Mark Parent
Opinions Editor

If you’re a student at UNC-Greensboro and you have even a hint of a social life, then you’ve undoubtedly crossed paths with Allen Carpenter.

Allen is a real fish out of water on campus. He’s a self-described country boy who loves hunting, fishing, God, Marco Rubio, Kappa Delta Rho and America. In fact, he’s like a cross between Duck Dynasty and Larry the Cable Guy.

So, obviously, I was interested in scoring an interview with Allen and letting him deliver some of that homespun wisdom to the readers of The Carolinian.

As I walked into his quaint apartment atop Tate Street Coffee, I couldn’t help but take notice of the decorations on the wall. There was a poster depicting a Pabst Blue Ribbon beer can, a “Don’t Tread On Me” flag and some nice family photos.

Allen, of course, was quick to point out that his girlfriend is responsible for the interior design.

However, it was clear that something was different about the place. Then it hit me, there were a bunch of candles lit in the living room.

Almost seamlessly, Allen turns my first question into an answer about the candles by saying, “Well, I’m real particular about the way I smell.”

As if he sensed my confusion over the candles, he continued, “If I smell bad, my day is ruined. That’s why I have five candles and four air-fresheners in here right now.”

At this point, I’m even more confused as to why he’s so funny about the way he smells, so I come right out and ask him a simple question: “Why?”

His answer is almost too good: “I sat beside a guy in my second-grade class, and he smelled terrible. And he had zero friends and, like, he was a nice kid, and I got to know him. I thought everyone didn’t like him because he smelled bad. So the last thing I want to do was smell bad.”

At this point, I knew this was going to be anything but a typical interview.

Now, one reason Allen is so well-known around campus is that he’s as talkative as a tipsy freshman at his first party.

When I ask him how long it takes to walk to class, his fishing buddy Frasier interjects, “I’d say it takes him at least 15 minutes extra.” You see, Allen has a habit of talking to just about everyone.

The sad part is that he just can’t help it. He confirms that he just likes to “talk a lot and it’s loud, too.” He suspects that his “vocal chords must be amplified.”

How do these conversations usually go? “Well, every time I meet somebody, I just say: ‘Hey, who are you?’”

He elaborates, “I don’t mince words, or nothin’. I don’t wanna waste none of my time; I figure, at the rate I’m goin’, dippin’ and drinkin’ Pepsi and stuff that I ain’t gonna be here too long, so I ain’t gonna mince my words.”

Certainly, Allen’s extraverted nature can bring him a group of friends that are rather unique in that he doesn’t know them.

Whenever this happens, he says it’s no big deal and he just plays along. In fact, just last week he remembered, “a girl came up to me and she said, ‘did you used to have a beard?’ I’ve never seen this girl before a day in my life.” From this point forward, he just carried on the conversation like he’d known the girl for years.

Roughly halfway through the interview, I couldn’t help but realize that Allen had subtly mentioned his love of dip multiple times; so, I casually asked him about his habit. It turns out that he goes through about one can of dip every couple of days.

When I ask him if he still gets a buzz, he says, “No I ain’t had a buzz in a while. It’s just about having something to do. I actually got some coffee dip not too long ago. It’s just like you brew coffee in your mouth.”

After this statement, I wondered if he liked coffee more than the whiskey and coke he was sipping on during the interview and his response was priceless. “Yeah, beer, Pepsi, dip, marshmallows, chocolate, chicken, all kinds of good stuff.”

Upon hearing this list of goodies and knowing Allen’s fondness for food, I questioned him as to what his dream meal would be.

He told me, “We’re gonna start off with this: we’ll go to Applebee’s and they’ve got these beer pretzels with cheese, we’re gonna start off with that. We’ll then move into bacon-wrapped, fatback covered 25-ounce T-bone steak with mashed potatoes, corn and my daddy’s green beans. We’re gonna go from there into a big old gallon of Bruster’s lime sherbet ice cream, and we’re gonna finish the night off with Corner Bar, and we’re gonna get a Jack and Coke and a Horse-Piss.”

Come on, you want to know what a horse-piss is, don’t you? Well, according to Allen, he doesn’t “even know what’s in it. It’s like apples and peach, or something. It looks like piss, but it doesn’t taste like piss.”

Toward the end of the interview, I had to ask Allen to share one of his great stories that he so easily tells his friends. After some thinking, he decides to offer up one of his favorite fishing stories.

This story takes place at a lake up in Rockingham County, which is just north of Greensboro.

He tells the small crowd of people in his apartment, “You go to this place called Washburn Lake; it’s a real mystical place. It’s as long as College Ave. and as wide as from the Bryan School over to Stone.”

Now, “it’s a real spooky place.” But, he concedes, “you always catch fish there; it’s a real good place to catch fish.”

The only problem with Washburn Lake is that “there’s a catfish and his name is Bob. And if I’m lyin’, I’m cryin’, and I ain’t shed a tear, that fish is 25 feet long and 475 pounds. And Bob the catfish is an albino catfish. He’s got blood-red eyes, like neon, that glow in the dark; they’re just nasty, demon lookin’ eyes.”

Of course, all of us are laughing as Allen continues the juicy story.

“I believe that Bob is the son of the Devil. Bob has to be. Cause the thing about Bob is down there at the end of the lake they say it’s only about ten feet deep, but I know it’s deeper than that. I think it’s a mystical portal to the underworld, you know. It goes to the underworld and the devil tells Bob what to do with the person he’s on the line with.”

After this interesting detail, I nod my head in agreement and continue waiting for the point of the story to finally appear.

“Well, a couple of years ago there was a murder up in Rockingham County and somebody drove right through the trailer park and into the lake. Anyway, a Navy diver went in there to gather all the evidence. And, I’ll be darned if he didn’t get out of the water and say, ‘I’ll never get in the water again.’ Now this man swam with sharks, whales, sea lions, tunas, you know, this man has seen it all. He gets out of the lake and says, ‘I’ll never get in there again; y’all have never seen a fish like that. It looked into my soul.’”

And then came the kicker: “Now here’s the thing, if you ever get pulled into the water by Bob, it takes your soul right out of your chest.”

Almost on cue, I ask Allen if he’s ever seen the beast and he tells me, “No, that’s the problem. I still have my soul, so I’ve never seen him.”

By now, everyone in the room is giggling and wondering how the hell Allen contrived such a dumb story. But, nevertheless, it was pretty entertaining.

Then again, it served as a nice segue to our final topic of conversation, which was what Allen planned to do with his future.

It turns out that he’d love to go home to Monroe, North Carolina, where “it’s just laid-back and there’s nothing but good country people.”

One day soon he hopes he’ll “get a boat, a house, and a good job.”

Yet, I wanted to end the interview by gaining his perspective on self-expression, which he epitomizes at UNCG.

He told me, “You’ve got to be who you are. I just get to do it in the woods.”

Then he leaves me with something deep about self-expression and acceptance: “At UNCG, sometimes it’s the people who claim to be open-minded that aren’t so open-minded.”

One thing is for sure, though, Allen Carpenter is an interesting man and UNCG is lucky to have him.