My, Oh My, How You’ve Grown

Growing up in Azle, downtown seemed like Gotham City to me. My first few trips to Fort Worth, that I can remember, were to come in to town to see the Home Alone, Rocky and Batman movies. As a kid I memorized every line of dialogue in the first Home Alone movie and watched it on repeat, while reciting the lines standing directly in front of the TV. My favorite favorite line in the whole movie, which I can still recall at will is, “I’m gonna give you til the count of 10 to get your ugly, yella, no good keester off my property, before I pump your guts full of lead,” as voiced by Ralph Foody in a fictional parody of a 1938 Warner Bros movie titled Angles With Filthy Souls.

I can still hear the sound of the electric lock on the car doors singing into place as we rolled into downtown off hwy 30 having to slow down at Texas St. Back then you really did “only get mugged if you go downtown”. In the 1990’s no one went downtown, and there was nothing to do in Fort Worth until the Bass brothers started renovating, but really I was too young to know any of that. The downtown I knew was from the Batman movies, full of crime and darkness, poverty and rich people. Or from the Rocky films with poor Catholics and shop keepers and bums by burning barrels in scenes reminiscent of the last verse of John Hartford’s Gentle On My Mind. My life back then was truly closer to that of Macaulay Culkin’s character, Kevin. Not as affluent, but living out in Azle back in those days wasn’t too bad at all. There was little crime or danger to a kid, and me and most of the youth spent our afternoons and summer time roaming the streets til dark and swimming in Eagle Mountain Lake or riding our bikes up to K-Mart.

On the special occasion my brother and I were taken into the city to see a movie and get dinner at The Spaghetti Wearhouse, the safety of my middle-class suburban reality was always called into check with the click of the locks coming in off 4th St. “Mom, but why are you locking the doors? We are about to get out,” my 7 year old mind was filled with wonder. We passed the first homeless man I ever saw while stopped at a traffic light. “Joey, just don’t look at him. He could be aggressive.” but me in childlike amazement, hypnotized by the yellow jaundice eyes of the weary traveler staring into our car through my window, through me and my soul, staring at my mother, can’t help but stare back. “What’s he want, mom? Why is he just staring like that?”

“He probably needs money, Joey. Now leave him alone.”

”Why were his eyes yellow, mom?” and I never stopped with the questions. My beautiful mother always answered. I remember the feeling of long drawn out adult conversations with her during my younger days and especially while she was a single mom. She was the best. I thought she was the smartest person on the planet and I never tired of asking her about the world. I’d go to school and tell my friends on the playground, “Did you know your eyes can turn yellow from drinking too much beer?” and the other kids would gasp in amazement at my worldly knowledge.

Other than the movies, our family trips out of the burbs were mostly to Six Flags (at that time ‘Over Texas’ and now called Six Flags and Texas). We’d drive in coming down 199, hitting 30, and I’d watch with every ounce of my strength to see the big red tower. An hour and a half drive from Azlewood alway seemed to take an eternity, but seeing the shining watch-tower stemming from the park grounds out over the skyline meant we were almost there. Other than that, I didn’t really go anywhere aside from a few family vacations and sporting events. Even well into my first years living on my own, there was nothing to do in Fort Worth and really nowhere to go, except those world class museums and the Bass Hall.

Back in 2001, when I first moved out on my own, I worked and went home. I had a few friends and we’d sit around drinking and smoking in the apartment. At 17, we weren’t allowed to drink as many of our parents had, and we were also way too old to go to Showbiz Pizza anymore. Cowtown bowling alley was the only place for us to really hang until we turned 21. And even then the only cool bar in town was the Black Dog Tavern and then maybe City Streets. That’s a very hard maybe.

When I started drinking in the bars and meeting new people, travel came up more and more. A subtle dislike for Fort Worth, and for Texas also, was espoused from many of the servers and bartenders in their after-hours-drunken-rap-sessions complaining about low tips and a shitty life. I had moved over off Beach street and Western Center and had my own 1 bedroom apartment costing only $600/mo. I was happy and content to live my little meaningless life, taking classes at TCC and paying my way. I was debt free, had a nice car with a superb stereo system. I could afford all the music I wanted and had my binder of CDs on the floor to the passenger side, along with various holders attached to the visors with all my top tracks and most played albums. I kept my apartment clean, and even accumulated some nice furniture and finally paid off that damned TV and surround sound I naively bought from Rent-A-Center.

I didn’t know shit about shit about shit. I took classes because I was bored and liked school and I was vaguely meandering toward some associates of arts degree. I went to the mall and bought nice clothes from Structure, Banana Republic and Hollister. I’d search out little trinkets to add to my shelves and bookcases, all but devoid of any actual intellectual substance. I read non-fiction books about psychology and sociology, and watched endless amounts of movies. I practically lived at Movie Trading Company.

As much as I had liked collecting and organizing my baseball cards as a kid, I did the same with DVDs. now as a young adult. I loved to come home to a bookcase full of my alphabetized collection, heat up a chicken sandwich in the microwave, load a bowl, and fall asleep on the couch during the movie. For some reason I loved to sleep in the living room and with the TV on for nearly the first decade of having my own apartment.

Waiting tables really did introduce me to so many different characters in life. Even back then you could find a Phd working side by side with an ex-marine or some junky wanna be rocker. Hey, it takes all kinds. I was a do-gooder and thrived to compete and crush my fellow servers in the sales competitions. Back then I learned real quick by doing what the corporate manuals tell you, you can maximize your profit share, or I mean, tips. So that’s what I did. I became head trainer of the Macaroni Grill off Western Center in what used to be called Brinker Plaza. There was a movie theater and a Chili’s right next door. It was heaven, or to me anyway. On team retreats and company training sessions I got my first bits of compliments and feelings of acceptance from the higher ups. I had my first long relationship with a woman 5 years older than me who I met at work. We moved in together at some point. We’d sit out on the balcony and drink homemade margaritas and talk shit about president Bush. We had a few friends and Erin liked poetry. I felt important. I kept a sheet of my feedback from one particular training which read, “You have a contagious and absolutely beautiful smile. Never stop using it to delight your customers.”

I hadn’t really thought about smiling, or anything I did, really. I was completely self-unaware; persona non grata, an uncultured sleuth at best, and filled to the brim with everything the 1990s had to offer. Its blind hope and questionless ambition drove me to the top of a shit-show-of-a-wait-staff where I made $4/hr instead of the normal $2 while made to wait patiently my turn at the managers table for my opportunity to continue to ‘move up’. I had vague aspirations of becoming a GM or even opening my own spot and I took business and hospitality classes and TCC and made all A’s.

This drive and ambition is what I now assume was the attractive force in my personality. I was a lot chubbier back then, like a good American and so, it was definitely not my looks that got me by, but maybe it was my smile. Anyway, some of the guys I would train started to be nice to me. Even though I was a stickler for the rules and regulations, did the training manual by the book, and expected my trainees to really learn the stuff and pass the tests, they took interest in me. Here I was descendant of a police man, and a long line of military men on my dads side, finally having the humanitarian, dare I say, liberal (in the American sense of the word) side pulled out of me by strangers. My mother, who received a social work degree from UNT would be proud of my anthropological morphing. A guy named Scott who had just graduated from The University of Texas came in to his first training-one-on-one with me wild eyed and looking like a character out of Rumble Fish. He got a philosophy degree, and probably to make it easier on himself during training, he befriended me.

At that time, I was every bit of the definition of the word pseudo-intellectual. Scott took one glance at my bookshelf and record collection and scoffed while sipping his whiskey, “Man, I have lot to teach you,” and he started in at it. Being a recent graduate and philosophy major from UT, most of his reading recommendations fell on deaf ears and unwilling eyes. The headiness and jargon ridden language was way too advanced and saturated for my dull novice lump of mesh I called a brain. So we drank together and he’d ask me about this or that, and I’d say, “No, what’s that?” or “I have no idea”, and he’d go off lecturing in his best impression of his favorite university professors all right there in my living room. It was my first glimpse into what a real education could be. How much had I been missing?, I wondered. I took English 1 and 2 at TCC and we read and wrote papers about Old Man and the Sea, but it didn’t do anything for me and none of my ideas ever sparked even the slightest curiosity from the professor. I got all A’s on my essays which were returned to me accompanied with filled margins of little comments in red ink that said, “keep up the good work,” and “Oh, yes! Very good point!” I went along with my life.

But here was Scott telling me about The 5 Monkeys and convincing me further that my childish idea of God, and Jesus, was rudimentary and ignorant, at best. He wrote out on a bar napkin while we were taking in some Confusa-tron on a Thursday night at The Black Dog, “GODISNOWHERE” and told me to read it out loud. The music in the background blaring and a singer singing, “Who has a sexy hairy man chest? David Hasselhoff, David Hasselhoff” in a weird Tom Green-esque performance with wild electric music full of guitars, drums and synths, the singer standing on the monitors ripping open his button-up and playing with his nipples and simultaneously singing into the microphone. The place was packed, Tibetan prayer flags were draped across the front of the stage hanging above the players and there was a literal hole in the way back of the bar where a door used to hinge. It had a constant wafting draft of cold mysterious air coming out of it fueling the Thursday nights Confusatron shows and the jazz soaked Wednesday and Sundays.

I yelled over the music, “God is now here,” and watched Scott roll his eyes in laughter as he yelled back, “God is nowhere.” I gasped in astonishment. The paper did say the two things at once. In between drags off his cigarette and sips of whiskey & Coke, he went on to point out older languages are written with no spaces between words and sometimes only use vowels. The rest is up to the interpretation of the reader. In his mind, this was the basic problem with reading the Bible or any book from the past. In Scott’s quest to disprove the existence of God, he really did enlighten me, and sent me off questioning everything about reality, and more importantly about myself, from that point on.

I made plans to move to Austin with my waiting tables job and enroll into UT. No, even better, I’d move to Ithaca, NY and enroll in the Master’s International Program that involved 2 years of peace corps service along with completing the BA and MA in a chosen field of study. Scott, with all his worldly knowledge, and despite his much higher socio-economic station in life, liked me and taught me many things, especially and most importantly, that I could never make it at a school like Ithaca. I had no idea what he meant, although it seemed to be written across my forehead.

At this time in my life, I was, indeed without a doubt, suffering from the Dunning-Kruger Effect. I had no idea about anything, but as I gained more mastery over some of the concepts Scott was dawdling out in front of me, I grew to recognize my own ignorance and in turn, that people viewed me as an dumb S-O-B from a podunk town in the sticks. Scott and I had a falling out one night while sitting in the car drinking and getting stoned. He was especially irritated about his overbearing parents and their expectations for him now that he’d graduated from university. Sitting their with his beer and cigarette, turtle neck and scarf, he was ranting about the ease of poverty and folks like me.

Like most rich and affluent parents I know, hid let their kid get s liberal arts, philosophy, theology or English major degree because they know it’s the best way to get into a good law school and/or graduate program. I knew nothing of these things back then. Scott was still wishing he had some kind of struggle. However, he was a handsome white man from a connected family. He had no real burden, and he saw in me a struggle he felt he could identify with. I was smart, but not from a connected family. He was hard-pressed to quit hanging out with low-lifes like me and to get a real job or to go to law school and make the family proud.

Our worlds were so far apart I had started to pick up on the subtleties of just how far out of Scott’s league I really was, and rather than deal with it like a friend, it pissed me off. I cussed him out that night over some petty bullshit and never saw him again. He quit the Macaroni Grill job and never drank with any of the staff again. No one in our small circle ever heard from him. I’m pretty sure he went and enrolled in law school, found a beautiful woman, made some grandchildren for his rich and overbearing parents, and now lives happily protecting whatever fortune their name had amassed over the generations. I wonder what he will suggest his kids get their degree in.

Thanks to Scott I changed so much and so quickly. My friends changed, and I was drinking more, staying up all night and experimenting with party drugs and sex dice during the all night staff parties we were having. I met some military veterans and even more college graduates and then some ex-corporate people. I kept soaking it all in like a sponge. I quit Macaroni Grill eventually, my new learned approach to life had pointed out some obvious character flaws in me, and ironically to me at that time, those qualities were the exact ones keeping me in good favor with the corporate over lords. The regional manager would come through for a visit and tell me how well I was doing training everyone. Between snorts of cocaine and with a reeking halitosis, the GM would also promise me a promotion, “any day now.” The kitchen managers loved me, I sold more food and worked more hours than anyone there. I wasn’t a go-getter so much as a brown-noser.

“What a piece of shit, I’m becoming,” I thought. The guys from work, who brought me to the TCU parties, were playing guitars and captivating the entire group for hours on end. The girls swooned and they never had to pay for their drinks as I stood there thinking of the copy of the Complete Works of Charles Dickens I was begrudgingly trying to read during laundry days. “What a putz,” I thought.

When I moved over to Pappadeux’s to work, I met Jesse and David and Mike. These three guys took me in like brothers and convinced me, in a round about way, moving to Austin wasn’t the right thing. I should go on a backpacking trip to Europe instead. “Europe!?” I thought. That would be something. Around that same time another waiter, Colin, who I trained at Macaroini Grill was keeping contact with me and we’d go binge drinking when he was between girlfriends. He was feeding me Hemingway and Kerouac novels and exposing me to The Grateful Dead and Miles Davis. My mind was blown. I was changed. Different.

I couldn’t look at the bills coming in and see them as a legitimate part of life any longer. I had never even traveled outside of Fort Worth. I didn’t even have passport. This Europe thing would have to happen. I went about planning it and with some help from my parents, who were mostly just proud I wasn’t a complete dumbass anymore, and a stand-by ticket from my cousin Chris who works for American Airlines, I made it safely landing in London in June 2005.

I’d never be the same.