TPC – I like tequila with my anti-depressant...
And maybe whiskey with my Tylenol...
I don’t know who told me that, by the way. Can’t remember. It was a few years ago, and I was sitting at a rundown bar in the middle of bum freak who knows where. I was running the political gauntlet, racking up miles on my car or someone else’s. And I was single, single as a button on a two-dollar shirt, when I spent the night in a mountain town just outside Santa Fe.
You’d have all these preconceived notions of what you’d expect to encounter in people around Taos or Las Vegas (the New Mexico one, not Nevada), and everyone that loves you would tell you to be careful, incessantly, as if you were taking a road trip with Charles Manson.
But I sat at that bar in that rundown city, concealed .45 nestled on my hip, and felt not a care in the world, free as a two-year-old running on a carpet fresh out of the bath towel.
I was the only Black person in sight. Probably the only Black person for miles. Alan Jackson hummed in the background. Laughs were louder than an old man’s snore. The younger gals tried to prop up their chest, and the older ones stopped wearing bras a decade ago, sagging be damned. Every woman called me baby. Every man was skeptical about why I was there, until we chugged a beer, and all was right in the world.
Dusty wooden floors and neon-lit Budweiser wall placards decorated the place alongside pinups of a century’s past. If not for the flat-screen TVs and cell phones in everyone’s hand, you’d think it were 1987.
I started talking to Tammy and Bubba (pseudonyms) about life and about all she had to offer, good and bad. Monumental times of triumph and deflating seasons of tragedy. We shared war stories for what seemed like hours, though probably no more than 90 minutes. I tried to cut myself off, using the excuse that I had a long drive to finish in the morning, and was offered a canned Coke and a Valium. I accepted the former and declined the latter. I was in between experimental drug phases in my life, I suppose.
Tammy poured us all a shot, snatched the Valium I so politely declined, and cheered us all to life. This wasn’t a place you felt uncomfortable being Black, but you damn sure were gonna get kicked out asking for a lime with a tequila shot. I sucked it up.
I bid the night farewell much sooner than anyone else did, driving the ten minutes back to my hotel.
As the years start to go by, it’s the simple things that matter. The memories of nothing tug at your heart in ways everything memories tend to turn cold as stone. Sharing an apple with my three-year-old niece while watching the World Cup. Binge watching the 1968 docuseries in one sitting with my big sister. Standing outside a restaurant and holding my other sister’s hand for a minute, just because. Lounging on the porch eating a ham sandwich on white bread with lemonade that’s too damn sweet in every sense of the word.
We spend so much time thinking about the moments in life that we anticipate. In reality, it’s what we often consider routine, mundane, or nothing that turns out to be monumental.
People often ask me what I do for fun. I guess I would say a lot of things, but I’d also say nothing at all.
Where am I most at peace? On a mountain with a notebook and a pen, or in the arms of someone I care deeply about.
What terrifies me the most? Nothing, because everything I’ve ever been afraid of has already happened.
Where is life taking me? I don’t know, but I know that with my faith, my family, and an ongoing belief in my many sayings (like keep grinding, boy, your life can change in one year), I’ll eventually be everything God has for me to be, and then some.
Tammy and Bubba, and everyone else I encountered in that bar that night, are freer than birds. They know who they are and never feel compelled to pretend. In the truest form, it’s a matter of setting your feet where they are, good or bad, and finding a groove to this thing called life.
That night in question was about six years ago, and I still think about those people, how welcoming they were, how liberally the drugs were shared, and how, if I hadn’t taken the time to lean into a moment of discomfort, I may have never learned one of the most important lessons in life.
The greatest arbiter of your maturation is you.
Tammy took her Valium, and she did it with pride. Bubba chases his Budweiser with well tequila most days, Don Julio on the 15th and 30th. The fellas at the pool table still like Newport Menthols.
And me? Well, at the time, I was just a workaholic, running away from unresolved trauma in unknown campaign offices and College Democrat meetings on campuses, trying to piece together a socially acceptable vice for all the ungodly things I’ve seen.
You see, I, you, Tammy, and Bubba – we ain’t all that different.
My exaltation today is to be you, good, bad, or indifferent. Find your ethos, declare your values, enforce your boundaries, and never look back at people or things that leave.
Seasons ain’t all bad. Some shit is forever. Some shit is temporary. As Ingrid Michaelson once famously said, “All the broken hearts in the world still beat,” and that broken ass heart is going to heal eventually - you might as well know who you are by the time it does.
Oh, and if you need it, damn it, take your Valium or Celexa or whatever; just don’t do it with tequila, please.
Bless you, Tammy — wherever you are.