This is based on a trip I took to Austin, Texas coming up seven years ago.
Although I’m beyond mid-life, 60 is the new 40, meaning I fit very rationally (as in rationalizing) into the first of six stages of mid-life crisis: DENIAL.
I’d been thinking I should embark on a marathon cross-country road trip yet the more I get around to planning it the less enthusiastic I become about the prospect of eight days on the road doing generic interstate without quality time in any one locale.
Rationalizing further, I decide to abbreviate my trek on the basis that I’d already covered the first third—from Santa Barbara to Texas—on previous road trips, so why not fly to Texas and carry on east, take in New Orleans with its voodoo culture and famed cemeteries (a metaphor for death) and roll to St. Augustine on the Atlantic coast in Florida where Ponce de Leon discovered the Fountain of Youth (a metaphor for rebirth).
Yet the more I research Austin (my intended first stop) and its “Sixth Street live music scene” the deeper I rationalize that this city’s historic downtown and nightly live music is an ideal setting all on its own for mid-life crisis because it is about re-experiencing young adulthood in a zone full of music and merriment—or REPLAY, the third stage of mid-life crisis.
Tagline: Mid-summer, midlife, writer and artist—Van Stein—flux off like snakes shedding skin to renew their lives.
“It’s going to be filthy hot,” says author Thomas Sanchez over coffee at Starbucks in Montecito, attempting to divert me northward to Seattle or Vancouver.
But the Pacific Northwest sounds awfully sedate and, anyway, what is summer without hot weather? And though I dislike the heat I think of Native American sweat camps and saunas and how some folk revere heat for its healthful and spiritual qualities to detoxify the body and boost endorphins, a natural purge.
And so on the second day of August, Van Stein And I launch by air to Austin.
American Airlines has a long-winded boarding ritual with more stages than midlife crisis starting with Platinum members then Gold members then Emerald members then Priority members and then Armed Service Veterans before reaching Group One, Group Two and Group Three until finally getting around to our category—Cheese-its.
The Big Seedy we soon discover is not just hot but also grim and grimy like most American cities, having grown (and still growing) without any kind of building oversight, aesthetics and community-planning, thus, shot to hell like cancer cells run amok.
The historic and reputedly haunted Hotel Driskill offers refuge from intense heat and provides novelty when I opt for their “LBJ Suite” just for the hell of it because they offer me a super-duper discount and with Lyndon Baines Johnson it’s definitely the hell of it.
This is where the old bull-crapper stayed when he visited Austin and also the room in which he watched the 1964 election returns roll in. And I sure hope his ghost resides here and appears before me because I’d like to give it a swift kick in the ass.
The artist and I park ourselves at Driskill’s famed bar to absorb the vibe and clink glasses of their “house cocktail” Bluebonnet (Tito’s vodka, Crème de Violette, St. Germaine).
It is already dark out when we take our first run at “Dirty Sixth, the temperature hovering around 93 degrees Fahrenheit, a street illuminated by colorful neon signage and heaving sound waves courtesy of conflicting rock bands and booze barkers trying to drum up biz (“Two dollars a shot!”).
At Bobalu we purchase cigars, light up and evade boulevard beggars while searching for a speakeasy called Midnight Cowboy.
When we find it a hostess slams the door in our face.
I turn to Van Stein and say, “I think we just experienced DENIAL.”
Feeling dejected (and old) we trudge back to the Driskill (a refuge from tattooed and pierced youngsters) and, after running into Dan Rather…
…drown denial with fine pinot noir.