November 13, 2005
Ryan Adams and the Chili Cook-off Queen.
"You three boys are sweethearts." she said as she canted over on the barstool.
Drool started to percolate through her teeth and down her chin, and her words were joining syllables on both ends.
"Hereiam, hangingout withyouyoung men." she continued as she spilled her margarita on her well kept and color coordinated clothes. What spilled on her pale green vest repelled well, but the tequila that dripped down her collar was soaking into her turtleneck, and her gold charm necklace glistened in the dampness.
I leaned over on the bar with my can of beer. "How old are you, 35?" i asked, with a smile.
She stared up over my left shoulder. i think she was trying to look me in the eyes.
"fifty8" she smiled.
I soon found out that i had found my way to a house party in Silver Strand California. There is an annual Chili Cook off there, and custom has the previous year's winner to host the forthcoming contest.
"Well where is the Chili?" i asked when i found out the premise for the party.
"You missed it. The contest was earlier this evening." I was told.
"Well who won?" i asked next.
The girl pointed to the bar. "The lady in the pale green vest." she said.
My 2 roommates and i were the youngest in the room, aside from the teenage sons and daughters of the cook-off contestants.
A short time later i was sitting on the living room couch when the chili cook off winner in her pale green vest got up from the barstool and walked across the room. She went to the corner where a man was standing and leaned against him and began talking into his face like it was a broken pay-phone.
She had, - or was,- pissing in her pants.
Zach and i sat on the couch and watched the wet spot grow down from between her legs and run down the left leg of her slim fit jeans, nearly reaching her leather clog.
"I guess you can't blame her." I said. "After all, she is the Chili Cook-off Champion."
Soon after we made our discreet exit as the Silver Strand Chili Cook off contestants continued blending their margaritas while their kids shot pool in the next room.
Much later that night, after the chinese restaurant karaoke, after the downtown bars, the conversations with girls who didn't get my jokes, the low-cut jeans, tattooed backs, and pretty girls i didn't talk to; i found myself at home on the couch in the middle of the night.
Zach had fallen asleep in the other room. Josh picked up a lighter and went into the kitchen. Prada was curled up beside me, with her nosed tucked under my hip and her ears covering her eyes like a soft scarf in a snowstorm. The house was quiet and dim with incandescent light. The only sound was the breeze blowing in the through the open door to the back yard. It blew over the lettuce fields and seeped in through the curtain like cheese cloth on top of a mason jar.
the album i bought earlier in the night was sitting on the coffee table. I put it on and played it low. It was Ryan Adams & The Cardinals: Jacksonville Nights. The pedal steel and proper snare played in waltz time and melted into the air. Prada shifted her weight and let out a sigh. I leaned back and let the music paint a mural in my mind of a different place and different time.
I thought about Chili Cook-Off Queens and low cut jeans. Pretty girls and bar lights and how most things are never as important as they first seem.
Growing up isn't an age, nor a physical condition. It isn't a wardrobe nor what you own or have accomplished. It is just the comfortable acknowledgment of consistent disappointment that leads to the clarity that nothing, not even growing up nor pretty girls, or pissing your pants is really all that important.
Every once in while, often in the middle of the night when the backdoor is open, fleeting glimpses of clarity and levity blow through. Life is just 6 or 7 decades consecutive individually inconsequential events that add up over time to a sublime, if not outright beautiful personal legacy that becomes evident about track 12 of a Ryan Adams album in a quiet house in the middle of a november night.
When you drive past one mile marker in the interstate, sound of the air makes a small whir, then falls silent again, barely a noteworthy marker of any distance traveled. But at high speeds over great distances, the individual whirs build to a steady hum then crescendo into a roar. So long as you have the windows down, or the back door open, to hear it.
On Repeat: Track #7. (iTunes)