BlackNotBlack.com: The One Right Way

Thursday, October 12, 2006

The One Right Way

I've gotten pretty good at listening. This isn't in any way a boast—it's just true. Everyone seems to have something amazing to say. I've become an expert at cocking an ear and picking up these bits of human song. I listen even when I feel it may be a complete and total waste of time. Tends to drive my girlfriend a little crazy, because some people aren't used to being listened to, which means some truly flaky people have grown attached to me just because I was willing to sit still and hear what they had to say. But here's the thing—though many of them are indeed flaky, some are also quite wise.

The person in the photo at top is named Bo. He ran an after-hours tequila joint in Antigua, Guatemala. His place was dark wood and candles, maybe twenty by ten feet in size, and strictly for experienced drinkers (that means people who can hold their booze without being loud, obnoxious, or annoying to women). Bo told me he left home when he was seventeen and never went back. Check the picture, and check the white hair—he’s been away from home (I’m guessing) sixty-five years. Two things were clear as I spoke to him—he loved traveling, and he loved running his bar. He helped me to understand once and for all that home is a mental construct, nothing more or less, and it has no inherently beneficial or detrimental qualities.

The person pictured second is named Miguel. Originally from El Salvador, he spent some years in the States, worked a bit, gangbanged a lot, and eventually murdered two people. U.S. policy on illegal immigrants who commit felonies is to deport them. At the time of this photo Miguel had served his sentence and was free, but was begging for change on the streets of San Salvador. In his closed right fist he’s holding his four front teeth. He told me they’d been knocked out long ago, but he hated to part with them. From him I learned that home is a real place, not a construct, and leaving it may be the worst mistake you ever make.

Two people—both left home young, experienced opposite results. What it indicates to me is that there is no one answer, and no one way to live. Everyone wants to shout answers from a mountaintop. I’m here to say there are no answers. Daniel Quinn discusses this in an interesting book called Ishmael. He suggests, and I agree, that one of our biggest conceits as human beings is the belief that there is one right way to live. There isn’t. And the refusal to accept that there isn’t is a contributing factor to the millennia of warfare and misery our species has suffered.

My way is not the right way, it’s just my way. My way is about escaping the ghetto of the mind. Bo and Miguel are two of the people who await outside the walls. In other circumstances, in another place and time, I believe Miguel could be the person running the bar, and Bo could be the street hustler. That belief is the reason I see them as equals, and it's why I give equal weight to their diametrically opposite forms of wisdom.

Bo died a couple of months after I left Guatemala, but the news off the wire is that he died in bed and they found a condom and an unredeemed coupon for a Swedish massage in his pocket. The most important thing I learned from Bo was Bo’s rules, which I discovered applied equally to his bar and to life. They were posted on the wall for all the customers to read. I hope they’re still there. Highlights:

#1: This bar is for drinking.
(substitute “life” for “bar” and “living” for “drinking”)

#5: If you want to drink the minimum for your candy-ass friend, that’s okay.
(nothing to add to that, really)

#8: If you have a lick of sense you’ll drink and learn a thing or 2 from Bo.