The original date of publication for this essay is Sunday, November 22nd. It is the 19th of what’s intended to be a year’s worth of essays, published on Sundays. That intention, like everything, is subject to change.
Last week’s essay: On Winning, and Having Fun
A few weeks ago, I saw a photo on Twitter of a few sportswriters—or whatever we’re calling them now, those internet personas through whom we follow the world: writers, podcasters, tweeters, instagrammers. Whatever they are, it was an old picture, and it caught my eye, because it was taken on my street. My old street. My old street’s old self. In the before times.
The photo must have been taken during South by Southwest, probably within the last few years, in which SXSW’s grown from, as someone described it to me upon moving here, an Austin thing to a Texas thing to an American thing to a global thing. The photo was a candid—friend-colleagues talking to each other outside The Liberty, everything lit in red at some indeterminable time of night. Down the street, Licha’s might have closed, but if it was still open, tacos would have given way to quiet margaritas while gravel rolled into patrons’ sandals. Further down, Shangri-La was rolling onward, maybe doing that heavy metal thing where a significant portion of the bands seemed to be, for whatever fateful reason from Manhattan, Kansas. To the other side, Whisler’s was enchanting some visitor with mezcal. Past there, Lazarus was fueling some beer-filled yarn.
These bars were not in the picture. They were in the context. I knew the context. I missed it.
When the pandemic began, we were still living on East 6th. We watched the plywood go up at Ah Sing Den. We scoured the new Target on 5th a couple times a day for wipes. Most nights, we walked the ghost of 6th, from our gentrifying cube of an apartment building down to where the HEB interrupts, then back. It usually wasn’t just us. There’d be scattered neighbors, and folks just making their way through. But some nights—the foggier ones—it sometimes was just us. Just us, and often a cat: a well-fed auburn thing who’d lost the tip of their ear sometime back (her ear, I believe). She spent her nights guarding The Liberty, waiting for the little metal bowl they kept her to be filled, requesting scritches as her toll from passersby. We called her the Queen of East 6th, and anytime we heard a catfight, I’d worry off and on until the next time I saw her.
I saw her again the other night. I hadn’t seen her since we moved. I was back on The Liberty’s block, grabbing takeout from a food truck. She was at her bowl, under one of those big signs they put out on the sidewalk—the ones that look like easels. The sign advertised that their patio was open. People were coming in and out, and noise was coming from the back. But it wasn’t all the people. And it wasn’t all the noise. It was some of it. A rallying sample, the same folks who yell for a bit about afterparties after the bars close on nights when no one’s really feeling an afterparty. The Liberty was operational, but it wasn’t alive. Not the way it was in the before times.
East 6th sprung back towards life in May, and shuttered again in July, and now lives in some warped parody of itself, where it’s almost all outside and so it’s almost all probably safe, but it doesn’t feel safe, and it doesn’t feel right, and I don’t mean “right” so much in a moral sense as in a comfortable sense, like when your stomach doesn’t hurt or anything but it just doesn’t feel right. So much of the joy of East 6th—in the before times—was the energy: carefree on weeknights, revelous on weekends…especially in the spring. Bar after bar after bar, dotted with restaurants, dotted with the other places still holding on or just waiting to be torn down. Transplants and tourists filling the corners—not the Dirty 6th crowd, wiping vomit off of cowboy boots, and not the West 6th crowd, wearing the collared uniform of the office class, and not the Rainey crowd, on a fierce hunt for Instagram likes, but an eclectic, hopeful mix, one of hipsters and dreamers and the rare local, like the middle-aged guy who told me one time I needed to do my part to keep Austin the way it used to be. “Sell some acid. Join a band.”
In the before times, I didn’t go out all that much on East 6th. I’d go for hurried walks sometimes at night, down far enough to make sure it was 15 minutes (my Fitbit’s threshold for an official day of exercise) but rarely further. I liked Revelry. I only went there once. I liked Shangri-La. I doubt I went there a dozen times. I went on special occasions, or when Kalvin called me out of my lair. I was mostly working then. I’m mostly working now, too. But now, no longer living there, and seeing it every few weeks as just this ashen zombie version of itself, I miss it. I miss being around it. And I miss those rare times of being out in it, out participating in the masses.
When the pandemic began, I’d often roll my eyes when people talked about the first night back out, as though it would just happen one night, something black and white and final. I don’t roll my eyes at that anymore. But I don’t hear about it anymore either. Some have gone back—treating the zombie bars like their fully alive selves, or at least muddling through. Some won’t go back—maybe they never went to begin with, or they’ve moved, or they’re waiting, and maybe for good reason. But most of us, I’d imagine, will have some night when we go back. Some night when the cases are low, and the vaccination rate’s high, and the restrictions are gone but we know now we can wear a mask during flu season if we’re going to go see Grandma soon. I’d like that night, for me, to be on East 6th. I’d like to eat a big dinner at Licha’s, and split a pitcher of margaritas, and grab one more at Whisler’s just to see if they ever brought the matchboxes back after we almost burned the place down by lighting the whole box at once. I’d like to grab a few Lone Stars at The Liberty, and I hope the cat’s there on the way in. I’d like to mix in Topo Chico’s down at The White Horse, on 5th, and talk about how we really should go do those dance lessons there like we always talked about when we lived around the corner. I’d like to wind up at Shangri-La or La Holly, sitting and laughing and sobering up on Coors Lights while we watch some overstimulated dog try to steal a cardboard boat of fries. I’d like to take an Uber home, and look half-drunkenly out the window and get all mesmerized by the skyline, like I’m in that McConaughey Lincoln commercial where you can see the Frost Tower in the background.
I don’t know when East 6th will come all the way back. I suspect it might take until 2022, when South By returns, to really purge it all. And who knows what of East 6th will still be there to flush the scar tissue this year has built?
I don’t know when it will come enough of the way back, either. Enough of the way back to feel the way it felt. Enough of the way back for us to go there as a release, and not some exercise in ignorance. A release. The way it used to be.
I know there won’t be a night where we all go back. I don’t really want that anyway. The lines would be too long. I just want a night when I can go back. A night when I can feel that magic again. I hope I make an effort of it. I hope I wring the guts out of the thing. I hope I look around and love people, the way you do coming out of church at midnight on Christmas. I hope some stranger makes a good joke at a urinal. I hope we buy too many Lone Stars in a round and half of us have to hold two. I’d like to give East 6th a hug, when it’s safe to do so once again.
I hope I do.
Next week’s essay: On the Light in the Window, and Participating in the Beautiful
