No more Cluck-U-Pac.
The 26-year-old Tupac Shakur look-alike who slung orders of wings at Cluck-University Chicken on Route 1 for more than 11 years and sold thousands of his rap CDs out of the same store is now just Lee Majors.
“They didn’t get a chance to fire me … I quit before they could do that,” Majors says over lunch at the South Campus Dining Hall. “I worked with these brothers for more than 10 years.”
So it goes. Majors, the self-educated rapper who is frequently spotted on the campus and in classes, says he quit his job at Cluck-U Chicken after a new owner came in and fired two members of his “team.”
“When we ran it we didn’t have to talk … we had it clicking,” Majors says, wearing his signature diamond-stud nose ring and brown bandana, tied in a knot and hanging over his eyebrows like a bow on a Christmas present.
Current store owner Mike Ghiglieri says otherwise.
“This place is run so much more professionally [now],” says Ghiglieri, a Maryland graduate who acquired the College Park Cluck-U Chicken three weeks ago and owns two others.
For Majors, the move was more serious than a job change.
“We treated the store like it was our own,” Majors says. “We fed our babies and kids off that.”
The campus celebrity added, “I used Cluck-U as a homebase to promote my stuff.”
Majors says he sold nearly 13,000 copies of his two-volume album Verse4Verse out of the store. He says will continue to promote his CDs with flyers, but his current job at Santa Fe Café, where he had worked for six months before leaving Cluck-U Chicken, will not serve as the same homebase.
FePac just doesn’t have the same ring.
Most students on the campus know him by one of his numerous monikers, Cluck-U-Pac, UPac and 2Pac. Many say they spotted him as recently as the past day or two.
“He doesn’t work at Cluck-U anymore, what happened?” says junior family studies major Austin Nogales, echoing a common reaction among students.
“Oh no, did he get fired?” says sophomore English major Steve Fowler. “I’ve known about Cluck-U-Pac for years … [since] he used to visit my friends.”
But what is Lee Majors without the atomic, thermo-nuclear and nuclear wings and yellow and purple store colors?
“It’s like Homer Simpson without the rest of the ensemble,” Fowler says. “He should go work at Danny’s and he can be ‘WuPac’ or something.”
Fowler suggested Cluck-U Chicken would likely see a drop in business without Majors. Store owner Ghiglieri says business has increased about 30 percent since he took over about three weeks ago.
Majors says he now has more time to work on perfecting rapping and promoting his work. Also, he wants to continue studying martial arts, which he says he has done for 10 years.
Majors says he would have liked to have kept working at Cluck-U Chicken. One wonders if it bothers him to let go of his Cluck-U-Pac identity.
“Nah, it don’t,” he says. “With every ending, there’s a new beginning.”