Drinks Are Really Cheap Here.

Going home is fun for three days. Maybe it doesn’t cease being fun altogether on the fourth, but think about the last time you went back home and I guarantee, by the end of day three, you could have safely walked away maintaining some sort of positive opinion on the place that created whatever that sad hole is inside of you.

You can imagine by day ten, I was feeling pretty reckless.

I half wanted to be at that bar. I think any time you know you’re going to run into everybody you went to high school with –

And let me elaborate on that. When you go to a bar like this, you know you’re going to run into everybody you went to high school with that had an arguably OK experience. The others no longer require that validation.

- any time you’re going to run into everybody you went to high school with, you kind of half want to be there. The other half hopes for a train wreck. You always hope to leave that bar saying, “This is why I left.”

And the bar was pretty much divided that way. Towards the front of the bar stood those who had made the great “escape”, symbolically close to the exit. Those that became namesakes of the town sat at tables in the heart of it all, roots deep in the floor, high school sweethearts still at their side. In the middle, a sort of neutral zone, becoming more populated as safe levels of BAC had been reached.

“Where are you now?” was the echo that bounced off the wood paneling and Tiffany lamps.

(It's also a very emotional Britney Spears song. Take a listen.) 

The answer to the question never really mattered, the point being to buy just enough time for a size-up from head to toe, checking for weight gain, hair loss, and any sign that you had become a different person.

And as far as we may have escaped, I don’t think any of us had become different people. Or maybe we had become different people, learning how to play into our current societies where we were now, but at our cores we had the same souls. It was palpable.

That guy who was an asshole in high school? Still an asshole. At least in his soul.

As I clung to the-one-friend-I-had-left from high school who still came to this town for the holidays, I calculated my turns and paths to the bar so that I wouldn’t have to be faced with anyone who might be made uncomfortable by my bleached hair and perceived lisp, or I by their Midwestern stability and sense of belonging.

Then, just to my left, not much higher than my shoulder, I caught the eye of the-girl-I-wasn’t-friends-with-in-high-school. I call her that because she reminded me almost immediately that we weren’t really friends in high school. At first, I thought it strange, because living in Los Angeles nobody I am friends with was my friend in high school. Yet back here, in this bar, it felt acceptable to point out before beginning a conversation.

I remembered her well. No, we were not friends, but we were in choir together. We were on the same trip to Germany. Her brother played baseball with me. On my new scale in my much bigger world, I would say we knew each other well. On the scale of that bar in that town, no. We did not really know each other I suppose. In high school, she was what an adult at the time would call “eccentric.” But now, all of her eccentricities seemed to have found their time and place in some weird form of “told you so.” She looked radiant. My favorite thing about her was that she still maintained that air of self-awareness that paired so well with not giving a fuck. She’s the kind of girl gays are drawn to. You get it.

So I was quite pleased she struck up a conversation.

“Where are you now?” she asked. I, of course, was ready for that question to bounce off the walls and be directed at me. I had practiced my response. I knew that I was not the celebrity actor, television writer, or Broadway star I had so confidently promised I would be in 2007. I quickly reviewed my path across the country from Chicago to New York to Los Angeles. I placed caveats where caveats were needed and abridged what felt too personal. I rolled my eyes in strategic places and gesticulated appropriately as if to say, “Oh you know. LA.”

“But are you having fun?” I almost choked on the suddenly stronger whiskey as the question pierced my ears and shattered the wall of justifications I had successfully built to avoid further conversation on my life. Here, in what felt like the smallest bar in the smallest town in America, I had just been reminded by the-girl-I-wasn’t-friends-with-in-high-school what mattered most at the core of my soul inside the different  - or maybe the same - person I was.

I sat my drink down on the on the high top table to my right and wiped a streak of condensation across it with my index finger, considering. I turned back to my left and looked through her oversized frames into the smiling eyes that suddenly appeared to give a genuine fuck, still waiting for an answer.

“So much. So much fun.” I realized in that moment. 

With one quick swoop of my hand, I dried the streak of condensation from the high top table, picked up my drink again, and bit down on my straw as I sipped, staring out over the crowd of people with something new to size up.

“That’s all that matters.” She put her hand on my arm before moving away to do a round of shots with the-people-she-was-friends-with-in-high-school.

I glanced to the-one-friend-I-had-left and gestured at her drink. She nodded her head as she continued to listen to another “Where are you now?”

I moved towards the bar to order more, uncalculated this time, almost hoping to run into another person I wasn’t friends with in high school. I perched up next to the eccentrically radiant one. She smiled, raised her shot towards me, and turned to the circle of cheers.

Then I kind of blacked out, but oh my God I had so much fun.

Always have a DD,

TJB: Making It