That's Fair

The third Saturday in October, I woke up to a text from my sister, Shannon. She let me know that she and her husband, Aaron, were headed to the State Fair of Texas with my four-and-a-half-year-old niece. I screamed to Paris, who was in the shower, that as soon as he was out, we were headed to the Fair. It was closing weekend, and the weather was perfect – a cool 75 degrees, no clouds in the sky. It’s what we called “Fair weather” growing up. Not meaning “fair” as in temperate; we meant capital-F “Fair” as in, the type of weather perfect for going to the Fair.

We went to the Fair every single year when I was a kid. We had a route we’d always walk, always parking in the same lot, exchanging our coupons for foods at the same stands. It marked the beginning of the fall season for us, and for me, meant that my birthday was around the corner.

It also meant we got two days off school and a free ticket to the fair. Every year I’ve been in town, I’ve gone back to the Fair. In 2019, the first year Paris and I were dating, I went with my family but not with him. As a non-native Texan, Paris doesn’t quite have the same attachment to the Fair as me. It makes sense, really. When you try to explain the Fair to someone not from here, you sound absurd.

“There is a giant cowboy named Big Tex who used to be a Santa, then he burned down, but now he’s back. He wears jeans with a twenty-foot inseam. There are buildings filled with cars, and you can just, like, sit in them. Then in another building, people will try to holler at you until you buy stuff. Like live action infomercials. Also, there’s a place with glass cases full of people’s art projects. Yeah, like homemade quilts and dolls and puppets. The rides are great. The best part? They’re the exact same ride machines that were there when I went as a child. I am 35 years old, why do you ask?”

In 2020, the Fair offered a COVID-safe drive-through experience, but I had no interest. I didn’t want to see the shuttered buildings and closed food tents. So, earlier this year, when a Facebook targeted ad offered me seasons passes, I snatched them up. I went on opening day with my cousin, Ami, a Fair aficionado.

With the gates reopened, I decided to shake up my usual McKinney Family Fair To Do List. Instead, I let Ami lead the way and let myself spend coupons on things I never had before. I tried a caramel apple covered in nuts. I had to keep my tradition of Texas-shaped nachos from the Hass family booth. To change it up, instead of a small boat of chips and plain cheese, I went with Nachos Grande, an order that came on a plate and was covered in salsa, sour cream, guacamole, and finished with a little Texas flag set onto a toothpick.

On my second visit this year, I went with my dear friends Gypsy and James. Gypsy was born and raised in Mesquite like me, so she also has a deep love for all things Big Tex.  We happened to go the weekend before I had a combination colonoscopy/endoscopy. On the hunt for whether celiac disease was causing my severe stomach illness that had only gotten worse since July, my doctor told me to have some gluten on Sunday.

“Just don’t go crazy,” he said.

Sorry, doc. I had Deep Fried Chicken Fettuccine Alfredo, which tasted exactly as it was described.  A ball of fettuccine noodles and chicken, slathered with Alfredo sauce and fried into a ball. It was disgusting and amazing all at the same time. I also followed Gypsy and James to their favorite funnel cake stand where I ordered a red velvet funnel cake.

This was my idea of “not going overboard.” The gluten worked. I got my diagnoses (non-celiac gluten intolerance and some other stuff). I was only sick for about 48 hours since the pre-treatment for the colonoscopy flushed out everything I’ve ever eaten. The funnel cake was worth it, even though I got covered in so much powdered sugar I looked I sneezed while doing cocaine.

(Honestly, I’ve never done cocaine. I don’t know if it’s the same consistency as powdered sugar. I’m basing this totally on what I’ve seen in movies.)

Another day, I went with my high school pals. Sean was in town from Austin, and we met Jeff, Emily, and their baby, Canyon, for a day of fair fun. We ventured toward the beer garden area where I sampled the Fair’s version of frozen daiquiri for the first time. Not bad. Just as you would expect, like a Slurpee with some wine in it.

We also headed down the Midway where they took Canyon on the carousel. He squealed and cried, and honestly, I’m not sure what else he did. That thing spun so fast, it seemed like it could whiff off its axis at any moment. I didn’t see the ride operator’s panel, but I am sure the speed was cranked up to eleven. Just watching it was enough to make me dizzy.

The Fair only runs from the end of August through mid-October. When Shannon texted me that weekend, I was eager to go one last time before it shut down for the year. Paris and I met her, Aaron, and Sydney at around 11am on a bright and sunny Saturday morning. There were folks milling about the main area around Big Tex, and Paris and I navigated the crowds to find my family.

People watching at the Fair is one of the best parts. Walking through the hoards, we passed a man in a black t-shirt, printed with neon green letters asking the age-old question: “Do I Look like I give a fuck?” Paris and I read the shirt at the same time.

“We can’t know from the back of his head,” Paris said. We walked faster to pass him and saw the shirt was printed with the same question on the breast pocket.

“He does not look like he does,” I said.

We found them though the mess of folks, and started off for some food and rides. After getting her face painted, Sydney was most excited about the funhouses. At the State Fair, the funhouses are portable metal structures, between one and two stories tall, with various lights, mirrors, obstacles, and optical illusions throughout. They’re also machines of death and destruction.

When I was about ten years old, my dad and I went through one of these funhouses. The entrance contained a set of mechanical stairs that slid back and forth. Walking up these steps, my left foot was swallowed whole. The cerulean canvas shoe I had been wearing was torn to pieces, leaving my foot bare and smashed between unceasing pieces of moving wood.

I screamed to the point that Fair medics showed up and carted me off to the first aid tent in a golf cart. They ended up duct taping my shoe back on my foot, and my family continued our Fair visit. We couldn’t waste a good Fair day just because a foot was crushed, could we?

The first one she chose was not my nemesis funhouse. It was a whimsical structure and cost seven coupons to enter. That should have tipped us off as to its complexity and intensity. Though she passed the height requirement to get in, she was the littlest person in there by several feet. No matter, she walked the same steps as the teenage boys in front of us without hesitation.

We slid down the final slide together, and she marched in a straight line to her parents, asking to go through another one right away. The next two we tried only cost five coupons, followed shortly by one that only cost four. It seemed we had leapt off the seven-coupon cliff and would be chasing that high until the Fair next year.

As we rounded a corner that final day of the Fair this year, I came upon it. The funhouse that ate my foot. Shannon and I exchanged glances and told the story to Aaron and Paris. I looked at the admission: five coupons. I felt ashamed that I had been bested by a five-coupon funhouse all those years ago. Sydney was determined to conquer them all, so we turned our coupons over to the grizzled man at the entrance and headed toward the stairs. I silently swore an oath to shove my foot back into the stairs if I needed to in order to protect her.

My dramatic plans were unnecessary. She hopped up and over them with no issue. Same with the spinning barrel. She just ran right through. We made it across a bridge and over some unstable platforms that spun beneath us. Halfway through the very funhouse that had chewed on my limb all those years ago, she looked up at me and said, “They’ve got to make these harder for me.”

Sure, kid. Great idea. The last time I set foot in here, I was actually devoured by the machinery, but yes, let’s crank up the thrills, limbs be damned. I’m proud of her every single day, but I was overwhelmed in that moment. So little and already so brave. Turns out the best way to beat something like that is just not to flinch.

We ventured back through the Midway where Aaron and I decided to ride The Magnum. Listen, I know out of context saying I decided to “ride The Magnum” with my brother-in-law sounds very backwoods, but let me tell you – it is very backwoods. It’s just not sexual

The Magnum is a long-time State Fair staple. In operation for at least 30 years, this metal machine whips riders around in small circles, strapped into carts that extend from a four-armed piece that itself also whips around in circles. Then the carts aren’t even secured in place. They rock back and forth on a center axis.

It’s hard to explain, but I imagine it’s like a homemade version of what they used to prepare astronauts for G-force in space.

We both walked onto the ride with full knowledge of what could happen to us. We weren’t fraudulently induced. Not only is the ride operating in the open in broad daylight, we’ve both seen it there for decades. It’s the same hunk of metal that has occupied space on the Midway since the Reagan administration, beckoning riders to hop on board with the enticing imagine of an airbrushed Tom Selleck.

We handed over our fourteen coupons each – if you’re playing at home, 1 coupon = $1 – and walked onto the metal platform toward our waiting coffin. We took our seats and clicked the shoulder bars into place.

“You know you don’t realize how rusted everything is until you’re strapped down,” I said.

We both noted the bolts, the very ones that kept our cart attached to the rest of the ride, and how rusted and crumbling they were.

“Nice knowing you,” I said.

“Why did we do this?” Aaron asked. We both looked at my sister, ever the good decision maker, staring back at us from solid ground. She waved.

The machine revved up. They played some song like “Highway to Hell” as we began to spin. Then we spun some more. Then we flipped. We would get stuck halfway through a flip, suspended in the air, parallel with the ground, before we whipped back the other way.

I think I handled it pretty well, screaming, “This is how we die” multiple times in a row.

For the record, we didn’t die. It was only about a 2-minute ride. Not even a full song, but it felt like plenty. We got our fourteen-coupons’ worth. And we both managed to walk away without losing consciousness or the food we had just ingested.

“Did y’all have fun?” Shannon asked.

“Too much,” I said.

It was getting late in the day, and the Fair started getting crowded. They headed for their car while I told Paris I wanted to ride one last ride.

It was a ride we would beg to go on as kids, and sometimes we did. But as we grew up, we adopted a new Fair route. See, the Fair has something like eleven different entrances. Depending on how you get there and where you park, your route through the place will change. A long time ago, we began favoring a parking lot near an eastern entrance, which meant we hit certain booths and food stands in a certain order, following a well-trodden path.

Now, with the Fair reopened, knowing how much there was I missed out on when it was closed for the pandemic, I wanted to branch out. As a creature of habit, this is hard. I can’t always bring myself to deviate from my rituals. I like what I like.

I am, on the other hand, marrying Paris Brown – the king of Let’s Just See Where This Path Takes Us and emperor of Let’s Try This New Thing. It’s both exhausting and thrilling.

So, in the spirit of going where the path leads, I asked to ride the haunted house ride, the same one that had been around since my childhood. The last time I had ridden it was probably 20 years ago. Paris, ever eager for an adventure, jumped in the fiber glass cart with me. We squeezed beside each other and filled the entire space.

“Tight fit,” he said.

“Fun fact – these are the same carts they have used for the past thirty years,” I said.

“What?”

The cart began to move.

First, we slammed through a set of swinging doors, wood dented and paint chipped from years of use. The walls at various points were covered in aluminum foil, glow-in-the-dark paint, and mirrors. We rode through artificial fog past a skeleton with its pants down. Paris asked if it had also been there when I was a kid.

“That’s a new addition,” I said. No funds for new carts, but sure, add a pervert skeleton.

After bends, curves, and a short drop that took us outside past the waiting line, we rolled out the exit doors. We disembarked and another couple scrambled on as our cart slammed into the one in front of it.

Headed back toward our car, we passed the official Midway Barker of the State Fair. He’s a talking optical illusion – human torso and head (a real guy) from the chest up suspended on a long brass pole. It gives the illusion that he’s missing everything from his ribs down, which he takes as an opportunity to gather a crowd and sing parody versions of popular songs, replacing the lyrics with references to his pole or lack of body. It

I glanced at the Barker and kept walking. Paris stopped, awestruck, and listened to a few of the jokes. He caught up to me and took me by the hand.

“How did you walk by that so nonchalantly?” he asked.

“Walk by what?” I asked. “The Barker? That’s just the Fair, babe.”

***

This piece first appeared in Sunday Morning Hot Tea. Subscribe so you don’t miss another piece.

Bye Bye Bike

I’m stupid with my money, but that’s pretty obvious about me considering I went to law school. Not only that, I also just buy stupid stuff. The award for stupidest purchase likely belongs to the brand-new motorcycle I bought in 2018.

This purchase was deemed medically stupid by an actual doctor. That year, before beginning my annual lady-bits exam, my gynecologist asked if I had made any lifestyle changes since we’d last spoken. I told her I bought a motorcycle.

She was not impressed. She told me to get rid of it, then narrowed her eyes and warned, “You wouldn’t believe the damage I’ve seen.” I was horrified. Who crashes a motorcycle vagina-first? Not me, that’s for sure. Namely because I ride side saddle like a lady.

Despite the constant threat to my female reproductive organs, having a motorcycle has been great. As long as it’s not raining or hot or windy or cold or too perfect of a day where you just want to lay outside and read in the hammock. I’ve found the best reason to get a motorcycle is if you have a spot in your garage that needs occupying.

If you ask anybody who doesn’t ride – and, honestly, you don’t even have to ask, they’ll just tell you – they’ll say the only reason to get a motorcycle is if you have some nice organs you’re looking to get rid of. Trust me. The instant you get a motorcycle, you’ll be inundated with people telling you, “I hope you filled out your organ donor card!”

Yeah, Margaret, I did fill out my organ donor card. I did it years ago when I first got my driver’s license and was purposefully bursting through orange construction barrels in a ’95 Oldsmobile. Donor cards or not, no one wants what I’m carrying anyway. The way I’ve been living, these babies are single use organs. I have been exhausting them to their maximum capacity. They are not packaged for resale. If my organs were listed on eBay, they’d be described as out-of-the-box, played-with, and no-longer-mint-condition.

The organ donor comments aren’t surprising. People just let their opinions fly when you have a motorcycle. It’s the same thing when you have a kid. I don’t have a kid, but plenty of my friends do. While they were pregnant, everybody loved giving them unsolicited advice. Have a natural birth. Take ginger for the heartburn. Don’t go on so many rollercoasters. Don’t buy a motorcycle.

They may have a point on that last one, given that I broke a bone in my wrist and a couple of ribs falling off my bike. The crash really wasn’t so bad at the time. In fact, my last thought before the pavement collided with my head and body was, “Hey I think I’m getting the hang of this.”

Crash sounds more dramatic than what happened. I’d like to think I just involuntarily skidded to a stop in the alleyway that leads out onto my street. On the ground. Underneath the bike.

I had only moved into the house a few weeks prior and didn’t yet know my neighbors (still don’t – whoops!).  The guy next door was out front tossing tennis balls at his kid. When I say it like that, it sounds like he was playing fetch with his 12-year-old, but that’s because he basically was. Unbothered by the sound of metal on concrete or my groaning, neighbor man simply looked over his shoulder, saw me crushed beneath a 500-some-odd pound motorcycle, and continued his game of kid fetch.

It was January at the time and cold. I worked myself out from under the giant hunk of metal and stood beside it. Determined and probably in too much shock to know I’d broken my wrist or ribs, I hoisted it up using leg strength. Then I drove 30 miles to the Harley dealership for a routine maintenance appointment, stopping to meet up with my brother-in-law, Aaron, along the way.

At the dealership, I don’t particularly remember any pain in my hand or chest. That could have been from either the cold or the shock. It also could have been sheer denial, knowing I’d have to turn around and ride 30 miles right back home. That’s the real downside of a motorcycle. If it’s a pain in the ass getting somewhere, you’ve got to undertake that same pain in the ass to get back home.

That night I was scheduled to perform two comedy shows. Before I left for the theater, Aaron stuck around my house and helped me with a few things. This included helping me lift a solid wood dining table, which I did with a broken wrist. As for my ribs, I told him it only really hurt when I breathed or coughed or laughed. He suggested I visit the urgent care.

I got my money’s worth out of my insurance that night. The doc at the urgent care performed x-rays on both my wrist and ribs and sent me on my way with a brace and a wrap and some ultra-strong IB Proufen. Rather than go home like a normal person, I drove myself (in a car, I’m not that much of a masochist) to the comedy theater and did two shows, braced and wrapped.

Broken bones aside, I got the bike in the first place back in 2018 for a good reason. It was after I broke off my engagement. I was tired of feeling trapped, feeling like I was being told what I could and could not do. I also got a fancy law firm job that paid a stupid amount of money, a dangerous thing to couple with my lack of self-control.

Weeks earlier, I had completed half of my grand plan of freedom in a three-day motorcycle training course. Held in the parking lot of a now-defunct shopping mall, each day of class was scheduled to be eight hours long. That schedule didn’t mean much to our instructor. He would peter out just after lunch, leaving us to “take the day” for ourselves. Super cool if you’re a kid in high school or working a job you don’t much care for. Kind of dangerous for a class meant to keep us from propelling our unshielded sacks of meat and bones down a highway at 70 miles per hour.

So with no adult supervision and a newly issued Class M motorcycle license temporarily printed on paper in my pocket, I marched myself into a Harley-Davidson dealership and bought a brand new Harley. It was a 2018 Sportster Forty-Eight Special. It had a black body, chrome pipes to make it rumble real loud, and a white peanut tank with a throwback vintage Harley logo.

Come on, this is cool as hell

It was low enough to the ground that I could comfortably put my feet out beside me but fast enough that I was terrified as I rode it through the adjacent shopping center parking lots for a test drive.

I was terrified for a good reason. Crashing bikes is genetic in my family. My daddy rode a Honda, though he would’ve loved a Harley. I think it was no coincidence that I got mine a couple weeks to the day of the first anniversary of his passing. The rumble of the motor and the whoosh of force when I hit the accelerator made me feel close to him in a way I hadn’t for a whole year.

Daddy wrecked his bike back before me or my sister were born. He missed a curve in the road and was thrown face-first into the pavement. His face shield cracked, knocking out some of his teeth and leaving him with an upper lip scar he covered with a mustache for the rest of his life.

I didn’t crash in the test drive. Instead, I waited about six months after getting started. Luckily, the crashing was where the family resemblance ended. I kept all my teeth and suffered no scars. Any mustache I may have grown since is likely hormonal.

The months after the crash, I didn’t ride as often. I was struck with a nervousness and hesitation that makes riding a bad idea. Recently, as the weather has been getting nicer, I realized I hadn’t ridden in more than a year.

It’s easy to write off riding as silly and frivolous. It’s dangerous and reckless and bad ass in a way that lots of folks will never experience. But seeing things you don’t normally see from behind a set of handlebars is what I miss the most.

Before I finally sold it this weekend, I sat on it one last time. I put the key in and cranked on the engine. I shut my eyes. The sound of the rumble and the smell of the exhaust took me back to one of those experiences you only get on a bike.

It’s one of my clearest memories of riding, from a sunset ride out in East Texas. I saw how the sun moved at its own pace out there. The orange glow hung stubborn and stuck around much longer than it should have. The dark had to shove its way down toward the horizon while the daylight languished there, refusing to move, screaming from between the tall thin trunks of East Texas pine trees.

I remember seeing a water tower hoisted on a hill, backlit by the fight between day and night. It stood outlined, looming over the land like a referee. The shorter oak trees, which in November had already given up their leaves, stretched their bare branches wildly in every direction, lined up along the highway like black pencil sketches scratched on a bright orange canvas.

I can still feel how the fresh air forced its way through the bandana covering my face and into my nose. It smelled outdoorsy, like wood and grass and occasionally skunk, but also delicious like bonfire. It hit me almost at the exact moment I saw some smoke curl up into the dark, taking the night’s side while the sun still refused to set.

Most roads out there are two lanes, and you can go miles before you come across another vehicle. The best road curls out of Palestine, a smooth black top that snakes between the swatches of East Texas pines. We passed a big fat hog along the way, the biggest I’d ever seen, slumped lazy on his side, unconcerned with the growl of our bikes’ pipes.

I remember an old man in a straw hat with black cracked skin and a Hawaiian shirt waving to the line of bikes sliding along the turn beside him. He wasn’t excited because he thought we’d stop to buy some of his yams. He was just overwhelmed by the noise and the glow of the lights, a parade of leather and steel, ripping past an otherwise quiet vista.

As we roared on back toward Dallas, the curtain of pines started to pull back, replaced by more cars, erratic turns, and stops. We bumped over chug holes so deep it looked like someone dropped bowling balls from the sky. The sun had given up by then, retreated under the horizon so that the only light left was the round glow of the headlights and the neon promise of Dallas 100 miles ahead.

I opened my eyes, still in my garage. I killed the engine, knowing I’d never ride this bike again. The deal was done. I’d already sold it to a dealership online. Their guy was on his way to pick it up. I stepped off and patted the seat one last time.

In short order, a handsome man with a biker’s tan arrived at my house with a truck and trailer. He had arms full of tattoos, a tight powder blue t-shirt, and jeans that fit like they were made just for him. He handed me a check and some paperwork to sign. While I scribbled my signature, he asked why I was selling. I told him about the accident.

“Ahh and you got scared?” he asked with a laugh. “That’s ok. You’ll miss it. You’ll be back.” I didn’t tell him about the parade of mangled vaginas my gynecologist had warned me about.

Before he took it away, I asked him to remove my gremlin bell. The little charm bell zip-tied beneath my handlebars meant to keep me safe was a gift from Aaron. I also removed the key from its keychain, a round leather fake FBI badge I’d gotten as a souvenir in DC on a tenth-grade field trip.

The man backed my bike out of the garage, kicking the engine into gear with this snakeskin boots. I held it together while the bike’s engine ripped through my quiet alley. I watched as he disappeared around the bend.

When I turned back around to head inside, I caught sight of the Harley-sized hole in my garage. A 3x6 foot space, aptly about the size of a coffin. Without warning, my face crinkled up, and I began to cry. Hard. I headed through the house to the front windows so I could watch the man load my bike into the trailer parked out front. He pulled around and came to a stop. Its engine still running, he put the kickstand down and parked my bike to prep the space inside the trailer. Then he rode it up a ramp, and they were both gone.

Paris had taken his car around the block so we could get the bike out. By the time the trailer pulled off our street, he was back in the garage. He entered the house to find me inside, a sobbing mess, squeezing the gremlin bell in my left hand and the FBI keychain in my right.

“I don’t know why I’m crying,” I said.

“Doesn’t matter,” he said, hugging me. “It’s ok to be sad.”

We walked out into the garage to see how the space looked with his car parked back inside.

“There’s so much room,” I said, standing in the negative space, moving around, stretching my arms out around me. He attempted to do the splits to demonstrate our newly expanded area, but probably more so to make me laugh. It worked. I stopped crying and started laughing. Then I picked up my helmet and put it on. It’s a full-face helmet, white with orange and black stripes. It looks like what Neil Armstrong wore on the first moonwalk.

I smiled at Paris through the clear plastic shield. He pulled out his phone to take a photo. The resulting image showed my face red, eyes puffy and wet. When I lifted up the shield, he tried coming in for a kiss. We awkwardly tilted our heads trying to make it work through the crescent-shaped hole.

“That’s it,” I said. “If I can’t kiss you with this thing on, I’ve just got to get rid of the bike.” A pause. “Oh wait.”

We went back inside, laughing, leaving our newfound garage hole empty as we dreamed of what may go there next. Boxes full of wedding decorations? A baby stroller? A Sea Doo GTX 300 jet ski? Who knows. Like I said, I am awful with money.

***

This piece first appeared in Sunday Morning Hot Tea. Subscribe so you don’t miss another piece.

Have A Day (Happy)

Early last summer when the virus reemerged even worse than before, people tried finding safe ways to connect with those most vulnerable. I ended up involved in one of those ways by virtue of an outdoor parade at a retirement community. Paris and I stood, mask on, among a crowd of volunteers on a street corner. Encouraging sign in hand, I found myself once again asking, How did I get here?

The community’s activities director had solicited volunteers from a post on Facebook. When we arrived that afternoon, the director met us outside, her face covered by a bright pink mask. She stood beside a speaker on wheels the size of a carry-on suitcase.

Her father was there, too. His car decked out in a handful of American flags, he asked if we “also” went to church with his daughter. This question explained the other volunteers standing around, two with handmade signs, and one with a bunch of balloons.

It also confirmed for me that my choice of sign wording: “Stay Safe! Stay Strong! God Bless!” was on-brand with the crowd we found ourselves in. Not that I would have otherwise written, “Hail Satan!” or anything. But it did take a few choices off the table including, “Life is Short, Hump Around!” or “YOLO!”

I explained, no, we were not from church, but Facebook friends. The director told the now sweaty crowd of sign bearers that we were waiting for “just a few more” volunteers to arrive. A few minutes later, two couples approached, waving, from down the block.  

Aside from the heat, it wasn’t a bad place to wait. This retirement community, I should mention, was not a dilapidated dumping ground for unwanted grandparents. This was basically a luxury resort with four stories of residences and countless amenities. As we were driving in, Paris and I marveled at the immaculate landscaping and surrounding fountains and statues.

“Even rich older people need visitors,” I said, rationalizing our mission.

“Agreed,” Paris said. “Age doesn’t care about money. It’s the one thing that gets us all.”

Of the two couples arriving, one was younger and looked like an alternate universe version of Paris and me. The other was older than us, likely in their early fifties. Throughout the rest of the afternoon, I would never once hear the man speak. His wife, on the other hand, would not stop talking. She had a close-cropped blonde bob and sunglasses with rhinestones. She wore a white linen shirt with cropped jeans and platform sandals. She was also, most notably, not wearing a mask.

“I hope I don’t COVID anybody,” she said with a laugh, using the highly contagious virus that is spread by breathing as a verb.

As the parade began, we marched forward with the music from the suitcase speaker blaring. I noticed the maskless blonde woman had two plastic packages in her hand. They were five-packs of gum, one Juicy Fruit and the other Big Red.

Walking past the residents on their patios and balconies, the woman began hurling the gum packets at them. Curious geriatrics would crack their doors only to be met with a blasting rendition of “Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch” and pelted with purse gum.

“Didn’t quite make that one,” I said of a Big Red pack that came to a stop on the ground below a woman in a house dress peering down from a second-floor balcony. The blonde stuck her hand in her purse and pulled out more gum that she thrust into my hand.

“You throw some,” she said. She walked quickly ahead to bean a small fragile woman with some Juicy Fruit. We’d only just met, yet she expected me to participate in this absurd reverse Mardi Gras parade.

“God really provided for us with the weather today,” she called out gleefully. Yes, what fun would it be to aim candy at grandparents if you had to balance an umbrella in the other hand while doing it?

“Hey!” she called out to the director. “Hey! Hey! Change the song! Play some ‘Good Vibrations’ why don’t you?”

The director was being blasted in the ears by the speaker but managed to turn her head and catch Gum Lady’s wild arms waving. “CHANGE! THE! SONG! Play something more upbeat!” The director gave a thumbs up and pulled out her phone.

Suddenly the clink and chant of Sam Cooke’s “Chain Gang” began.

“Not the song I would have chosen,” I said to Paris. “But ok.”

The woman with the gum was not enjoying this jam either. “Hey!” she called out again. “Change the song!” The song changed again, this time to the “YMCA” which seemed to get her engine revved. She started dance-walking.

I want to tell you now that this next part makes me sound like an asshole. This lady was really excited about the parade. She was overjoyed to be out in the world, screaming with no mask on, whipping chewing gum at people. In my defense, it was about 95 degrees out there. I had not seen more than a handful of any human beings in months. The sun was bright. The music was loud. Therefore it was inevitable that I would decide in that moment that I hated her.

As we rounded the corner, we came upon a large puddle and all navigated our way around it.

“Look, you guys,” Gum Lady yelled while walking near the puddle. She had taken a break from her aggressive candy distribution and was now waving her homemade sign she had taken from her husband’s hands. “Look! They’ve got a pool!” she joked.

Would someone shut her up? I thought. The Lord had delivered on the weather. Was it too much to ask for another miracle?

I turned my head toward Paris, probably about to say something snarky, when behind us, I heard a splash.

The woman was fully on her back in the “pool” she had discovered, jeans and white linen shirt drenched. The sign she had been holding was floating face down in the water. Pockets full of now-soggy gum, ruined. I felt a gut punch of secondhand embarrassment for her with a side of shame for my own shitty thoughts.

Paris sprinted over to help, but she refused his outstretched hand. Instead, she plunged her hand in the water and pulled out her sign.

“I’m fine. I’m totally fine,” she said, laughing and steadying herself. “Here, you carry this now.” She thrust the sign into Paris’s hands before standing up and dusting herself off. She was perhaps a little embarrassed but not injured. My heart softened to her as I watched her shake the water from her foam platform flip flops.

Paris held the dripping poster board away from his body and tried showing it to the residents watching from their balconies. They leaned forward and squinted at its running ink.

The left side of the woman’s sign read, “Have a Day!” Next to that, she had drawn a traditional smiley face. Beneath it all, she had written “HAPPY!”

Paris smiled at me under his mask and held the sign for me to read. Have a day we did, and we were happy.

***

This piece first appeared in Sunday Morning Hot Tea. Subscribe so you don’t miss another piece.

I Love You, You Monster

On the Pulaski stop of the orange line, headed toward Chicago’s Midway Airport, a man stepped into my train car wearing no pants. From the waist up, he was quite dapper, wearing a beige sport coat, a matching button down, and a dark tie, neatly knotted. His hair was a bit wild, a mess of black wiry strands pointing in all directions. He had a thick dark mustache. From the waist down, however, he wore only white underwear, dark dress socks, and finely shined leather shoes. It was business on the top, no pants party on the bottom.

He stepped onto the train and began to sing, which I only knew by the movement of his mouth. I couldn’t hear him with my headphones in my ears. All I could hear was the Dallas traffic and weather from an MP3 recording of The Russ Martin Show on Dallas’s 105.3FM.

I gripped my pink iPod Mini and turned the dial up, drowning out the pantsless man even more. At the time, I think the guys on the show were blowing something up or shoving fireworks down their manager, Gavin’s, pants. Probably pulling the cork from a bottle of whiskey, letting the small squeak and glug noises play into the microphone.

Nobody on the train ever noticed the times I doubled over laughing or cried from homesickness while listening to the recordings of this show. How could they? There were more pressing things, like today, a man with no pants singing an Italian aria.

Earlier that year, at 20 years old, I had headed off to Chicago for college, ready to leave the city of Dallas in my dust. Goodbye, you trash heap, I thought as I pulled away from my hometown in a red Dodge Ram dragging a U-Haul trailer behind me. I will never, ever come back.

It only took six months, maybe a year before the nostalgia and intense homesickness set in.

I should preface this by saying I love Chicago. It’s an amazing place with wonderful people. It’s one of my all-time favorite cities. Talking about Chicago, for me, is like talking about an ex who you parted with on really good terms, but who you know, ultimately, is not right for you. But damn, you had fun while you were together. And no hard feelings, but you’re just really happy with who you’re with now. That’s the love triangle between myself, Chicago, and Dallas.

The first few months up there were a whirlwind. I loved every single thing, from the snow to the busses, to the people on the busses, to the comedy theaters, to all my new cool friends with their Midwestern accents. I loved the food and the museums and the parks and the random street performers and the cyclists who took extremely dangerous risks with their lives. I even loved the nude cyclists who rode, balls out, down Michigan Ave.

Then I noticed the winters were too cold. There was never any parking. Traffic was horrendous. I couldn’t get cream gravy ANY FUCKING WHERE. No place served Dr Pepper. Tex Mex did not exist there except at one single Uncle Julio’s off the North/Clyborn red line stop, which was only just ok. Everybody loved the Bears. Nobody gave a shit about the Cowboys. Pretty soon, it started to feel a little lonely.

Heaven on Earth and yet WHERE IS MY GD CREAM GRAVY?!

In my desperation for a little piece of home, I figured out that I could listen to Dallas radio. For a recurring donation to the Russ Martin Show Listeners Foundation each month, I got access to an archive of MP3s of previous episodes of The Russ Martin Show.

I loaded up my iPod, and when I pressed play, I was not on a crowded bus or trudging through slush, a thousand miles away from home. I was in the treehouse with Russ and Dan and the gang. I was laughing at their less-than-appropriate jokes and clinging to every single word of the traffic report. 635, 35, 75, 30. My highways. My traffic.

I listened all the time, not just on my commutes. When my boyfriend and I broke up, I began living alone, but not really. By myself in an empty apartment, I would turn the guys’ voices up on my stereo. Neighbors probably thought a fraternity had moved in, with constant sounds of men laughing, the squeak of whiskey bottle corks, explosions, and that opening guitar riff of “You Shook Me All Night Long” by AC/DC, which always finished off the show. 

Russ was a polarizing figure in Dallas radio. Sometimes, he was flat out silly. When beloved Dallas icon Big Tex was set ablaze, Russ gave him a dramatic church eulogy backed by “Amazing Grace” on bagpipes. Sometimes he used a voice changer to become “Little Russ,” a child version of himself that asked inappropriate questions under the guise of innocence. He tortured his old boss, Gavin, by sticking fireworks down Gavin’s pants, putting sheetrock up over the man’s office door, or straight up stealing his pants in well-choreographed but real-sounding bits.

As Russ said, he was taken by a fire that burned him nekkid. RIP!

On Fridays, he left airtime open for local no-kill shelter Paws in the City to adopt out homeless pets. When police officers or fire fighters were killed in the line of duty, like the 2016 mass shooting in downtown Dallas that left five officers dead, Russ wrote checks to the families via his foundation to cover funeral expenses, mortgage payments, and other immediate needs.

On the other hand, he sometimes said racist, sexist, and homophobic things. Some coworkers hated him and claimed he was a tyrant with a horrible attitude. He was arrested and pleaded no contest for domestic violence. He struggled with substance use and health problems.

And this past weekend, he died.

I’ll be totally honest. I had not listened to the show in earnest in many years. On one of the episodes after Russ’s death, Dan, a co-host who has taken over as the de facto leader, mentioned Russ’s waning health in the past few years. Russ had stopped performing every day, and the show’s time slot had been cut down from four hours to just two.

Tuning back into the treehouse this week, you can hear how the guys were shaped by Russ. At the same time, it is apparent how they have evolved beyond him. For one, Russ absolutely hated crying and showing emotions. But this week, when one caller choked up, Dan told him, “Let it flow, buddy.” The guys talked about telling their guy friends how much they loved one another. They listened as widows of fallen police officers spoke about how much the foundation’s support meant and cried along with them.

It’s hard to reconcile my love for someone who meant so much to me, who was a constant companion when I felt so desperately alone, with the flip side of his personality and his actions off the mic. When I heard he died, I was devastated, remembered all the times the show made me laugh, and began replaying my favorite bits in my head. For the people he hurt, his death probably felt like a sigh of relief, which is fair. We all have our own experiences with the people who shape us.

This week, Alfie, another member of the crew, played one of my favorite bits. It’s from a time Russ went on a rant backed by an instrumental version of “God Bless Texas” by Little Texas. I remember hearing this bit while I lived in Chicago and playing it so often I once had it memorized.

It had faded from my brain over the years, but when I heard it this week, I started screaming in my office. When my boyfriend, Paris, walked in and asked what was happening, I burst into tears.

“They’re playing it,” I said.

The rant begins, “I am Dallas!” and reads like a love poem to our city. A truncated version appears below.

“I’m the flying red horse.

I’m the majestic Dallas skyline.

I’m the Dallas Morning News. (I was the Herald.)

I’m Central Expressway. I’m Schepps Dairy.

I’m the Old Red Courthouse.

I’m Union Station.

I’m the reflecting pond in front of City of Dallas.

I’m the star that glistens on the chest of Dallas police officers.

I’m White Rock Lake.

I’m the Dallas Mavericks. I’m the Dallas Stars. I’m the Dallas Cowboys (muffled).

I’m the pissy city council. I’m the lack of city management.

I’m buffalo-sized potholes.

I’m the Dallas North Tollway. I’m Big Tex. I’m Southwest Airlines.

I’m the zoo where the gorillas run free!

I’m the West End. I’m the great Tom Landry Freeway.

I’m the freaks in Deep Ellum.

I’m SMU. I’m Love Field.

I didn’t have nothing to do with Kennedy.

I’m John Steely Dan’s cabin.

I’m the dead bodies at the bottom of the Trinity.

I’m Reunion Tower. I’m the Adolphus. I’m that lipstick building on Stemmons.

I’m John Carpenter, LBJ, Marvin D. Love. I’m RL Thornton.

I’m the strength that took us from John Steely Dan’s cabin to the shining star of the Southwest.

I’m the sights. I’m the sounds. I’m the smells. I am its essence.

I am Dallas.”

He spoke with a self-deprecating reverence for our town, and it softened my heart. When I first heard it a thousand miles from home, I thought, That’s our town! That’s my town.

From Russ I learned the magic of getting on a mic and putting on the show you want to make. I am a better comedian and podcaster because of the hours I spent in my empty apartment in Chicago listening to him. I was also a lot less lonely because of it, too.

One of the best compliments I can get is from people in faraway places, even other countries, saying they want to come visit Dallas because of the things we talk about on the show. When I get on a mic now and talk about my town, I try to do so with that same unassuming pride I learned from Russ. It’s like, look, we know parts of it suck, but, dammit, its ours and we love it anyway and we’re doing our best to be better. It’s how we feel about Dallas and how I feel about Russ.

She ain’t much, but she’s ours.

You can never replace your hometown. And a hometown may not even be the city where you were born. I’m talking about the city that made you, the one that shaped you. It’s who you are. You can play pretend, sure. Try to adopt a new one. But no matter what, your hometown will always be in you, even if you try to move away or turn it off.

The years taught me that no matter where I lived or how hard I’ve tried, I am Dallas. Russ was, too. Rest easy, boss man.

***

This piece first appeared in Sunday Morning Hot Tea. Subscribe so you don’t miss another piece.

Won’t You Be My Helper?

This week, amidst the Texas freeze, I found myself crouched in front of my house in the snow with my brother-in-law, Aaron, absolutely vexed by my water meter cover. It’s a circle of metal, about the size of a personal pan pizza, and can be removed with an aptly named “water meter box key” which I do not own. Aaron, unsurprisingly, does own one of these. This is because he can make/fix/build/do anything and already has all the tools to do it with.

We ended up out in the cold yard that day because of Pete Delkus, the local weatherman who my Uncle Jerry says “stands too close to the TV camera which makes his head look enormous.” I’ve never met Pete Delkus in real life, but I’m sure he has an average size head and that’s just an optical illusion. Pete fancies himself as THE weatherman of DFW. He tweets “I told you so” when his predictions come true, like some vindictive meteorological Nostradamus. Weary of disregarding his advice and finding myself on the business end of one of his tweets, I panicked, and for good reason. Pete called the upcoming winter storm “PIPE BUSTINGLY COLD.” That’s pretty specific.

Once I heard that, I realized if I did have a pipe bust, I would not know how to turn off the main water supply to my house. I imagined water flowing from my walls like blood from the elevators in “The Shining.”

So I FaceTimed Aaron earlier in the day, scheming in the living room, as my boyfriend, Paris, worked, unaware, on the other side of the house. I asked Aaron how to open the box. He told me I needed a key. Having no such key, I checked online at Home Depot, Lowe’s, and Ace Hardware for any available. The nearest one was at a store in East Texas, over 50 miles away.

I’m an excessive prepper, but not drive-50-miles-for-a-tool excessive. More like a buy-a-weather-radio-for-COVID-quarantine excessive. To quell my fears, Aaron offered to drive over and use his key to open the lid. Once he got here, we ran into one tiny problem: his key didn’t fit. Well, it fit, it just wouldn’t turn.

“You should ask your neighbors for help,” he said, as if this were some easy task.

I surveyed the surrounding houses, looking for candidates I could approach.

“Well that one called the cops on Paris because they thought he was stealing a package from our porch,” I said pointing to one house. “Those people got mad because Buffy ate their kid’s football when it flew into our back yard,” I continued, pointing to another. “Found out online that guy is a registered sex offender for trading in child pornography, but we’ve never spoken. The woman in that house over there sits on her porch when the weather is nice and screams at her bird.”

“Damn, well, ok,” he said. Then we spotted him. Down the street, a neighbor who I have waved at on prior occasions, was de-icing his car.

“How about him?” Aaron asked. I had no clue of his name, but at least I had not overtly offended him (that I know of). We walked down and asked, but the man said sorry, he had no key.

“You really need to make friends with your neighbors,” Aaron said.

This is true. I moved into the house in December 2018 when I was working full time at a big law firm, performing comedy multiple times a week, and doing the podcast. I was barely ever home, much less free to mix and mingle with the people who live around me.

Then the pandemic started and, though I am now home all the time, I have no clue who anyone is. It’s not like I “just moved in,” so I no longer have any excuse to introduce myself. Now any effort to make connections makes me look like I am hunting for a handout.

With no help from my residential proximity associates (“neighbor” just seems too familiar at this point), Aaron tried determining how the locking mechanism functioned. I, on the other hand, kept jamming things down into the key hole. I tried his key, a piece of rebar, pliers, a wrench, fingers, kitchen spoon, old bowling trophies, etc. Nothing worked. The metal personal pan pizza just spun, stubborn in its place.

Suddenly, a man appeared on the street before us, crunching in the snow as he dragged his young son on a makeshift sled down the street.

“How’s it going?” Aaron said easily. The man smiled and waved. Aaron went for it.

“You ever opened one of these?” he asked.

The man walked over to take a look, hands on his hips, in a familiar “figuring it out” stance.

“Oh sure,” he said. “But you need a key.” We showed him what we had, and he tried it himself, to no avail. “The edge here is too big,” he said. “I’ve got one at home, though, let me grab it. One sec.”

He walked off, dragging his son behind him. The boy let out a “weee” as they got smaller in the distance.

Holy shit. Neighbors are bad ass.

The man returned key-in-hand and, with one strong twist, removed the meter cover. I thanked him and introduced myself.

“When did you move in here?” he asked. I told him 2018. “Whoa,” he said. “It’s been that long?” He told me his name was Brian, and I vowed to remember it.

“I live in the red house down the road,” he said. “Feel free to knock any time.”

“Thank you, ….?” I said, pausing for his name.

“Brian,” he repeated. Brian Brian Brian Brian Brian, I thought. I made a mental note: Send Brian a gift card. Bake Brian some cookies. At the very least, REMEMBER BRIAN’S NAME.

Getting the cover off was only half the problem. After that was accomplished, we (Aaron) had to dig out about six inches of dirt and locate the shut off valve. Once we did that, covered in mud, Aaron left to make it home before the melted snow refroze and turned to ice.

When we get a little chilly weather down here, we always hear things from smug folks who live in areas with a more consistent winter climate, like “LOL A LITTLE BIT OF SNOW? YOU IDIOTS!” It never fails.

If someone in a cold climate got 100 straight days of over 100-degree heat, I wouldn’t laugh at them for not having central air conditioning. Maybe they only have a window unit, not because they’re idiots, but because it makes sense for their climate. Similarly, here, we have nothing to prepare us for this kind of snowy madness because it rarely-to-never happens.

The storms this week were bad. People, including young children, lost their lives. It has been called “Katrina-like” in its devastation.

In the wake of this destruction, my biggest take away has been the helpers. There’s that Mr. Rogers quote about seeing scary things on the news. His mother told him, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.”

Texans are helpers. Cars stuck in ditches were yanked out by strangers in trucks with tow ropes. Local Jeep club members mobilized to give rides to stranded first responders and healthcare workers. Folks with no power or water were taken in gladly by those who had warm, lit homes and flushing toilets. Texans have mobilized to provide mutual aid and resources to one another via crowd-sourced lists.

We lent a hand when we saw where one was needed, and we accepted help when we couldn’t tough it out on our own.

Seeing all these helpers makes me grateful. Grateful for friends, grateful for family, and especially grateful for neighbors. We can’t control when disasters like this happen, but we can control how we act in their wake. We could all do to be a little more kind like my neighbor, Brad.

Wait, no, it’s not Brad.

Brett? Bartholomew? Barnacle?

Shit, what was his name?

Kidding – it was Brian. Thanks again, buddy!

If you have the means and would like to help Texans hit hard by the winter storms, you can find a list of places to donate here or here

***

This piece first appeared in Sunday Morning Hot Tea. Subscribe so you don’t miss another piece.