Drinkin’ My Baby Goodbye

It’s late in my life. My time should be given over to fishing and grandchildren rather than a re-examination of morals and values that have always been fluid anyway. But changes in perspective and perception create reality both in an intellectual way and in a sensory way as well and are very likely to make a person stumble, losing balance momentarily and then having to struggle to right oneself before the fall. You see, based on the current attitudes around me, I have developed the actual physical and emotional symptoms of Xenophobia—the intense fear of foreign people, their customs and culture. At first, I didn’t recognize this terrible flaw for what it was, especially since I have lived among many races and traveled quite comfortably all over the world. It all began when I attended a concert in 2015, not one of those hoity-toity philharmonic venues in some erudite urban area, but rather a Miller Light production of the Charlie Daniels Band on the Ohio Riverbank in Louisville, Kentucky. It was during the presidency of Barak Obama.

What generated my disdain for strange cultures, along with some fear and loathing in the former hometown of Hunter Thompson, was this conflicted fact. The foreigners that both frightened and enraged me were not illegal immigrants from Mexico or members of a Middle eastern terrorist cell but rather products of the same rural, white-bred, homespun heritage as I was. Like me, most were descendants of Celtic Scotch-Irish or Western Eurocentric immigrants to the United States many generations past. It seemed conceivable that I might be forced to admit a genetic, even direct familial, relationship to some of them and that knowledge alone intensified the sudden onset of my atypical symptoms—cold sweats followed by hot flashes, caustic nausea, strange urges to strike people with my cane, an impulse to puncture my eardrums with an ice pick, trembling, and the existential dread of drowning in stale beer.

I was waiting in a cacophonous maelstrom of drunken hillbillies and faux- motorcycle outlaws for Charlie Daniels to appear beneath his white ten-gallon hat and start wailing the opening verse of Drinking My Baby Goodbye. I stood inside a tent that housed various brands of bourbon, two sweating bartenders who looked as if they had just been granted parole from Angola State Prison deep in some bayou—if you’ve ever stopped at a gas station in south Louisiana in the wee hours, you know exactly what I mean—and surrounded by a couple of hundred shit-faced country music fans with five teeth between them. That was under the canvas awning. When the crowd fanned out onto the riverbank below the stage, it became thousands, as if Jesus had blessed two first cousins saying, “be fruitful and multiply.”

My daughter, a young woman of beautiful spirit and infinite patience, waited beside me with several of her friends. They had come to the concert, not as country music aficionados, but rather out of love to protect me from myself. I know this because as the evening wore thin and my symptoms progressed, Leslie kept asking, “Dad, are you okay?” Jackie kept saying, “It didn’t used to be this bad.” They both stumbled over my cane several times inquiring whether or not I would like another shot of bourbon. And, Regan, tallest lady of the group, offered, “Would you like to sit on my shoulders so you can see the band, old man?”

Their concern did nothing to alleviate the physical indicators of xenophobia that by now were so distracting that Charlie Daniels sounded off key when he finally began to warble. “Pour me another one just like the other one. I’m drinking my baby goodbyehihihihi.”

The first thing to overwhelm me was paranoia, not the vague fears that drifted in and out of my mind forty years ago when addicted to amphetamines, but the palpable and specific terror that if one of the fat, bearded, alien-eyed, inbreds wearing army surplus boots and bumping me around could accidently read, he would notice my Veterans for Peace tee shirt and ram a deer-skinning knife through my heart. The paranoia exploded into a cold and clammy sweat and forced me to fold my arms across my chest rendering the words invisible.

Just as I began to get my ragged breathing under control, a snake line of tattooed bikers with shaved heads danced past me. The scent of wet leather and the stench of sweaty crotch made me light-headed and drained the color from my face, causing these remarks “Are you okay, Dad?” “It didn’t used to be this way” and “Do you want on my shoulders so you’re above the crowd?” to replay. I wanted to answer yes but couldn’t make myself heard above the omnipresent roar that rose as Charlie, who never went to war, reminded everyone how the war against Moozlams saved all true patriots on the Louisville riverfront from terrorists.

Later, those terrorists would morph into liberals and plan to invade Appalachia and steal that good ole coal from Charlie’s mine-owning corporate sponsors. It just wasn’t Amuricun. It wasn’t fair to the coal-miner fans that made up the first few front rows that socialist elites wanted to deprive them of their eastern Kentucky and black lung, or something like that. I couldn’t fathom all the specifics because of the chanting. I’ll insert a writing tool I rarely ever use here, onomatopoeia. “Nobama Nobama Nobama…”

I backed away from the herd to a small island of empty space, hoping my symptoms would subside and I might enjoy the rest of the concert. Charlie is quite a talented musician and the rhythmic pulsing of his boogie-woogie music can cure xenophobia if you don’t listen to the lyrics. Unfortunately, when I display weakness at large gatherings, it has the effect of chum in the water off the Great Barrier Reef. Any shark in the vicinity smells a fresh, bloody, meal. It happens to me at ball games, movies, plays, and graduation ceremonies, as well as concerts.

And, here he came, swimming through the sea of flesh straight for me. He must have been about six feet tall and was topped, like a vanilla ice cream cone, by a cherry-red cowboy hat. He wore a brand-new cowboy shirt with pearl buttons and carried a beer in each hand. Stumbling to a drunken stop directly in front of me and blocking my tinyman’s view of the stage, he started a ritual in time with the twirling of Charlie’s fiddle bow. A twirl—a scream of “WHOOO-HAA” and a toss of the right hand in the air. Another twirl—a scream of “HELL YES” and a toss of the left hand into the air. I knew the weatherman had predicted rain. I just didn’t know it would consist of Pabst Blue Ribbon.

I’m no longer a violent man. Maybe age and humility have sedated my righteous and sometimes arrogant indignation. But, at this point, I was already so intolerant that vicious urges shivered through me. This thing in front of me seemed less than human, worthy of a sound beating with my sturdy mahogany cane. Why did our government allow foreigners like this into my neighborhood? He must be illegal. I started to crack him on the shoulder with my walking stick and force him to produce a government ID before allowing him to listen to any more music and be happy. It was my duty as a patriot. I kept pushing these unwholesome thoughts from my mind until I no longer could. They overwhelmed me like a Grand Mal seizure, and I asked my daughter to take me home where I could rest and recuperate without facing an assault charge. Charlie had begun his third song. We were fifteen minutes into an hour-long show.

During reflection on the ride home something occurred to me. I’m an empath, not really xenophobic. I can’t help it. I’ve suffered the blessings and the curses of this facility for most of my life. This has blessed me with some of the best sex imaginable and cursed me with several ex-wives. They in turn suffered with a mediocre husband at best.

I can feel when someone expects me to buy a round of drinks. This has blessed me with many friends and cursed me with poverty. I’m aware of being articulate, sarcastic, and too loud. This has blessed me with the ability to find work but cursed me with the inability to keep it.  I’m curiously pulled into any number of depraved situations sensing a vacuum I was meant to fill. This has consecrated me with a painful sort of wisdom and frustrated me with memories. And, this was another one of those situations. I was feeling the same things as the crowd around me, not with them but rather because of them.

These white, Anglo-Saxon, mostly protestant, Americans were sick, frightened, enraged, and confused. Each day of their lives became more and more impoverished as corporations outsourced jobs, as schools dumbed down education, as right-wing politicians convinced them that a Democrat government would herd them off into relocation camps. The reality that by the time their children were grown they would be a minority in their own land was sinking in. Jesus had abandoned them to the mercies of atheists and Muslims. Communists and fags controlled their schools. Their children no longer pledged allegiance to a nation “under God.” Soon, liberals would make it legal for people to marry their own gender. This would lead to marrying sheep and other farm animals and possible large fruits like watermelons, which would raise their taxes and health insurance rates. All these threats were real to them because someone had to be blamed for their misery. It had to be someone else’s fault. Right? The only freedom that remained for them to take advantage of was the freedom to hate.

I told myself that not everyone in that concert crowd fell victim to this hyperbolic odium that seemed to saturate the riverbank here in the 21^st century. My old man used to say, “No matter how thin you slice bread, it always has two sides.”  Some goodness remained in most of these people. Some of these people were mostly good. So, I summoned up vast reserves of sadness and sorrow for the great unwashed mass of humanity who had come to hear Charlie Daniels. I imagined they had no idea that the very people they worshipfully and absolutely supported—the ones that condescended to them, lied to them daily, stole from them, those CEO’s, politicians, and right-wing pundits that pretended to love Jesus—actually bowed to different gods, to power and money, and were the people spawning their misery.

Still, I must admit that life in America has changed at a grassroots level, not just my perception of it, not just my romantic delusions about it. The basic core of values regarding how humans relate to humans has taken an ugly turn in the last three or four decades. Oscar Wilde once quipped, “The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple.” I believe that, and I can’t explain all the complex reasons for this downward societal spiral. On the other hand, I must be careful that my empathy doesn’t devolve into sympathy for my blue-collar brethren too much. Sympathy leads to justification.