The last philosopher in texas
Daniel ChacónI heard about a job at McDonald’s that paid 50k for forty hours a week, not as a manager, but just a worker. Managers made like 90K. All you had to do was make burgers and fries, and housing was included. You had to move to Pecos, Texas, which at the time I knew nothing about, but what else was I going to do? My degree in philosophy didn’t help me get a job, and although I was always writing, the one book that I did finish nobody wanted to publish. I ended up making it an e-book and selling it for ninety-nine cents on Amazon, but no one bought it, not even my siblings.
So one Saturday I borrowed my dead mother’s car that now belonged to my sister (but should have been mine) and I drove the three and a half hours from El Paso to Pecos, for an interview. I pictured a desolate desert town, tumbleweeds flying across Main Street, school houses with windows busted out.
To get there I had to pass through desert so barren the cell service kept going out. I couldn’t listen to philosophy podcasts or playlists and had to settle on AM radio, a Christian station with a preacher on fire sounding far away in space and time, like the recording was from the 1920s when revivals came into towns and put up circus tents. He kept yelling, Lord, where’s MY path?!
The town turned out to be much like I had pictured. Main Street, the heart of downtown, looked like the apocalypse had come and settled. You hardly saw anyone on the street but an occasional meth head walking zombie-like between the buildings and across abandoned lots, or you would see a cluster of them
gathered against a brick wall, all of them bunched together but looking off in different directions as if they were alone.
I wondered how such a town could even support a McDonald’s, but then I found the highway that cut through it, going from Big Bend in one direction and El Paso in the other. There was enough of a traffic stream to support the McDonald’s as well as a Subway and Chester’s Chicken. The gas station that anchored them was packed, the lots and pumps filled with cars, trucks, RVs, a stream of people walking in and out of glass doors.
The McDonald’s manager was a white guy named Tom from Waco, and I could tell right away he wanted me to take the job. Ever since the pandemic that killed so many people in El Paso, restaurants were having trouble hiring enough people to work in the city, let alone out here in the middle of nowhere.
Tom treated me like a guest, offering me something to drink, coffee, a soda, maybe a milk shake? I felt like I was the one interviewing him.
He thanked me profusely for driving all the way out there.
It was a nice drive, I said. It gave me time to think.
He told me it was hard to find locals to work, because they either left town when they turned 18 or became meth heads and drunks, and the few rich families that lived in the surrounding ranch houses didn’t need fast food jobs to make a living.
He looked at my application like he was reading my future.
His eyes went wide. Wow! Says here you got a degree in philosophy from C . . . S . . .
Fresno State, I said.
Wow! Why would you want to work here for?
The isolation could give me time to think, I said. Like being in exile.
There you go again! he said, slapping the table and exclaiming with delight. You like to think. You’re a thinker!
Yes, sir! And I’m thinking that being isolated from everything I know is a chance to think about things.
You could do philosophy right here in Pecos! he said, and that was the first time I noticed his slight Texas white boy accent.
A philosopher needs distance, I said, and although I knew I was being pretentious and that Tom would believe anything, once I had said it, I kind of believed it too. Maybe being away from everything I knew, away from my failures and regrets and the one or two hopes that might still be lingering in my heart would give me time to write. I could finish the novel, my book of essays, all those things I’d been wanting to write for so many years going from job to job, sleeping on the couches of my brothers or sister. Between jobs I used to be able to stay with my mother, but right after she died, my siblings fixed up and sold her house. We split the money, but it was a tiny two bedroom in the Mexican hood, and they sold it long before the pandemic had made the real estate market boom. Not only that, but my younger brother owned a construction company and he fixed up the house, new roof, landscaping, and said it cost tens of thousands, so after he was paid for his services, my share of the money was about $1,500, which I went through pretty quickly. When the money ran out, I got a job tending bar, and things were going well and I could rent a small apartment, but that job didn’t last. I started to use the money I was making to party a little hard, and then too hard.
When I was fired, I didn’t have a car, so I was out of work for a while going from the couches of my brothers and sister, from one house to another. Finding a job in El Paso was not easy without a car. My mom’s car should have gone to me, but what can you do?
Tom was happy to show me around the restaurant, introducing me to the other employees, letting me watch them make the burgers, how fast they were slapping the cheese on the meat. He
introduced me to Ana, a chola-looking woman with tattoos up and down her arms. She nodded to me, as if it to say, What’s up? I got a sense that she resented me, and later on I would put it together. I made $50,000 a year for doing the same thing that she did for an hourly wage, and I was a man. I’d be resentful too. Afterwards, as Tom and I sat in a booth and ate Quarter Pounders, he told me that meals would be included as well, two per shift. But that’s not all, he exclaimed, proud of what he was about to tell me. Once a week you can have lunch at Chester’s or Subway and not have to pay a thing. We have a little deal going with their employees.
I pictured myself eating a bucket of fried chicken with mashed potatoes and corn, sitting near a window watching the desert highway.
If you want me, I said. I’ll take it!
Oh, we want you! he said. We really want you. This town could use a philosopher.
I figured I could work there for a while, save some money and then go away, live in whatever city I wanted to, maybe even some small town in Mexico like San Miguel de Allende. Maybe Sandra Cisneros and I could be neighbors, and in the evenings after a good writing day, we could read to each other what we wrote, give comments, suggestions.
Or I could go back to graduate school and get a PhD and become a professor. All I had was that worthless bachelor’s degree and about thirty units of graduate courses from different departments at various universities, never deciding on any one path. I had no path, just a vague vision of being a successful writer. But being a professor would be amazing. I could see myself in front of a lecture hall, wide-eyed undergraduates pondering questions they’d never asked themselves before.
I convinced myself that being in Pecos would make my life so much better. I would write with the windows open, feel the
warm breath of the desert go through me as words appeared on the white page like footprints on a Harry Potter map.
I want the job! I said.
I regretted my decision the first week.
I hated my hours, 5 a.m. to 2 p.m. By the time I was done with the day, I was too tired to read or write, or to do anything but plop on the bed. I thought I would only make it a month, that is, until I got my first paycheck.
I couldn’t believe the numbers.
Other than a few student loans, it was the biggest check I had ever gotten in my life. And I was going to get this every two weeks!
I happily walked to the Pecos County State Bank and opened up a checking account.
The teller was a white woman in her fifties, with a lot of hair, and she looked at my check, looked at me, and she said, You must be the philosopher! What?
There’s a philosopher in town. That’s you, right?
I guess. . .
Well, I hope you like our little town. You’re more than welcome here.
Thank you, I said.
So, what is the meaning of life? Hahaha. I’m just kidding. But I really wouldn’t mind someday talking about life. You know? Why are we here? Makes you think!
Yeah. It really does.
How much cash you want?
I just looked dumbly at her hands, her fingernails tapping the counter, and then she said, 100? 200?
Two hundred is fine, I said, and she counted out ten crisp twenty dollar bills. I could actually smell the cash. I thought that was weird.
There wasn’t much to do in the town, and I didn’t have a car, so I didn’t have the opportunity to spend a lot of money. Some nights I would treat myself to the best restaurant, order the top sirloin steak medium rare and mashed potatoes, but it didn’t cost much. I had a middle-class salary and didn’t even have to pay my own rent.
The “free housing” was a cheap motel, but what did I care? It was free, and it didn’t matter to me where I was when I was asleep.
There were other full-time workers like me from El Paso, Dallas, Houston, some working at the Subway or Chester’s, but I didn’t hang out with that crowd. They were either middle-aged loners who gave me the creeps or boys and girls in their twenties, a motley crew of kids like the cast of The Breakfast Club. I nodded at them and every now and then got a ride with one of them to the highway where we worked. There was one white boy named Seth from Austin, and he was cute and I liked watching him, but even when he noticed I was paying attention to him and kind of gave me the signal that said maybe, I shut it down. I needed the alone time.
On work nights, right before bed, I sometimes took a walk around town, sometimes going into one of the bars, having a beer and a shot, careful not to drink so much that the next day would be miserable. I tried to pace myself, stick to just a couple of beers, but sometimes I went too far, especially when some people started to get to know me. Every time I walked in the bartender, a thick Mexican woman named Beatriz, called me the philosopher. She had spent so many decades smoking cigarettes and being in the desert sun that her face was wrinkly beyond her age.
The philosopher is in! she would announce, and the others would look at me, hold up a drink, sometimes even buy me one.
On my walk back at night, I sometimes saw zombies coming toward me from out of an alley or behind a garbage dumpster. I knew they wanted money and I had a lot on me. Every time I took
my paycheck to the bank, the teller would seem so happy to see me, and she would count out ten twenty-dollar bills, but since I didn’t spend that much, the stack got fatter in my wallet.
On my days off, Wednesday and Sunday, I lay in bed until 11 a.m. I imagined I could go to El Paso and have fun, eat, drink, maybe cross into Juárez, or I imagined going all the way to Houston and spending my entire paycheck in one night.
But I had no car, and to take the bus would require more days off than I had.
This was the hardest part of being exiled in that town. Days off.
If I woke up and started drinking at 11 a.m., by 2 p.m. I was miserable and tired, and I had to wait all day for night to come, and when it did, I would lay in the dark for hours trying to sleep, regretting that I had drank so much, and thinking of other things I could regret about my life. And there was plenty.
Day drinking wasn’t what it was like on TV, where powerful men in an office have a scotch or two; for me, it meant my whole afternoon and evening would be wasted just feeling tired and brain-empty. I would spend so many post-drunk hours just waiting for the dawn, hating where I was—not Pecos, Texas, per se—but physically and emotionally where I was.
Occasionally I would get inspired to write, and I would work on my novel, and a few days I think I even entered flow, but that was rare.
One Sunday, on my day off, I was determined to have a great day.
For some reason I got dressed up like I was going to church.
I wore my best black pants and collared shirt and the only good shoes I had. I was sitting on the bed lacing them up, humming a song that was stuck in my head for no logical reason.
It was summertime but I was humming,
Joy to the world, The Lord has come!
I had no idea what I would do that day or why I was dressing up. Maybe I just wanted the day to be special, and I think I even pictured myself walking into a church, a little humble church with the wooden pews filled with worshipers wearing their Sunday best. Maybe afterwards there would be a picnic and some nice old grandma would ask me how I liked the potato salad.
I walked out of the room into the morning sun and sighed, like I was at peace with the world. Some of the kids from The Breakfast Club were getting into a car for the day shift. Seth was getting into the backseat, but when he saw me, he asked if I wanted to ride with them. There’s room back here, he said. But we’ll have to squeeze in. Day off! I said.
He looked at me a little longer and said, You’re all dressed up today.
I shrugged my shoulders and he got into the car. I started walking, sin rumbo, no path. Just walking.
I walked down Main Street looking into storefront windows at the empty spaces or businesses that were barely hanging on. There was one storefront for a taekwondo dojang, and there were a few little kids sitting cross-legged or stretching before the class. I walked past the train station, and I looked down the railroad tracks and saw a frame of an old brick building, a longabandoned factory. It was huge. I walked with the railroad tracks, wobbly over the rocks, and got closer to the brick factory, which now loomed over me like a great wall about five stories high. There were window frames but no glass, and there were no doors, just doorways. I walked inside, and it was dark but the sun was shooting in. Pentagrams and 666 were spray-painted over some walls and Satanás written in red.
Who knew from how long ago the Satan graffiti appeared on the walls, maybe generations ago. The building seemed to have been abandoned for decades. I sat on a pile of bricks, crossed my legs and got into a lotus position. I closed my eyes, and started to breathe in and out slowly, in and out, over and over again, trying only to concentrate on my body, on my breath, thoughtlessness, but of course they came, the thoughts and images, buses, street corners, sheets. I thought about the death of my mother, how she shriveled up on that hospice bed, and how in spite of being surrounded by her children, the air was not full of love, but desperation, greed, anger. I saw a gathering of meth-head zombies inside of the building, as if they were surrounding me, and then I saw them from a distance, by the railroad tracks, smoking, waiting for their turn at the pipe. There were five of them but then I blinked and there were two, and I realized they were ghosts. I remembered Carlos Castaneda writing how Don Juan showed him that when he looks into a crowd some of the faces he sees aren’t there, that they appear only to him; they are spirits.
I imagined my dead mother sitting next to me, but not how she looked when she was living, but gross, like she had unburied herself from the grave, flesh flaking from her lips, spiders in her hair, and she looked right at me and said, Where’s your path?? I believed in you!
I opened my eyes.
I had to get out of there.
I got up and walked into the sun. It was hot now, and I was at the brink of losing my faith in the day, believing that it would be anything other than a regular day. But I kept going. I kept humming, Joy to the World.
The Lord has come!
By four o’clock I was at the bar. Bea shouted, The Philosopher’s in!
I don’t remember everything about that night, but I see myself going from table to table talking philosophy, although I have no clue what I was saying. I remember I made a table laugh so hard they bought me drinks and something I said so stunned a man with a cowboy hat that he took it off and shook his head and said, You are literally blowing my mind!
I wonder what I told him.
I wish I knew how to be that way when I wasn’t drunk, talkative, gregarious, but I never talked philosophy with anybody, not even other philosophy students when I was still at State. Every now and then my little brother would say, Come on, let’s talk philosophy. Tell me about all those books you read, but I just shook my head and acted as if I wasn’t interested in sharing ideas with him, that it was all too esoteric for his little mind, but really, I didn’t know what to talk about. I read and I read but I still couldn’t say much about what I read. I would think about ideas, and there was some deep personal satisfaction in knowing that I could interact with great minds, but I never talked about it.
After the years working job to job, I still had the books in a box in my sister’s garage, but I forgot most of the details. I confused Hume with Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard with Berkeley, and although I was at once in love with Nietzsche and thought his ideas were mind-blowing I didn’t remember much except for the clichés, God is dead, etc. And sometimes I wasn’t sure of the difference between ideas that I came up with and an idea that I’d encountered in philosophy. I sensed there was something wrong with not being able to share the ideas that I read, like taking a beautiful lamp that could illuminate an entire room and putting it in the closet, where it gave light to no one. What was the point of having it?
I drank so much that night that the next day at work was torture, and all I wanted was for it to end.
Eight hours seemed like it would take a week, and we were real busy, so I was afraid Tom would ask me to stay overtime. I just wanted to go back to the motel and drop on the bed like a sack of onions.
So here I am having a bad hangover day at work.
I was at the register taking an order, trying to focus on punching the items into the keyboard, and I remembered the preacher on the radio yelling in that scratchy recording, Lord, show me the path!
I felt so heavy with regret and fatigue, and I closed my eyes only for a second and screamed in my mind, Lord, show me the path!
When I opened them again, I saw two meth heads walk into the restaurant.
I mean real zombies.
They were acting like they were trying to be invisible, as if we wouldn’t notice them, but of course everybody did.
I guess I didn’t recognize anything special about the man I was about to fall in love with, because he was just a junkie. I was so hung over that I wasn’t noticing any other details but how my stomach felt, how my head throbbed, and how tired I was.
Later, as I tried to recall the details of the first time I saw Martín (let’s give him a name!) I remembered very little.
He was in his twenties, dark skinned with full and thick black hair, and the weird thing is, even though it was all messy, it was beautiful, shiny like the hair of a prince, at least that’s how I picture it when I recall it. He had beautiful hair and the more I go back to that memory, the more beautiful it becomes, rising up like a horse’s mane. I see him as a dark-skinned prince from a Disney movie. His teeth were somehow perfect, or that’s how I remember them, straight and white and strong as pearl, and his nose was perfect.
And when it was his turn at the register, he almost bowed, like we were meeting face to face at the royal palace.
Good afternoon, good sir, he said.
Welcome to McDonald’s, my Lord, I said, bowing. What can I get you?
Well, let’s see. If you could be so kind. I would like a . . . Let me have . . .
My Lord, I said. May I recommend the Big Mac? It’s especially good today.
My good sir. Thank you!
That’s when Ana came back from break.
She walked over to the register to let me know that I could go back to working in the back, frying things, restocking shelves, but then she noticed the prince with the beautiful hair standing there.
Martín! What are you doing here? she asked. You have to go.
Then I heard somebody say, Oh, God!
At the self-serve soda machines, the other zombie was pressing a button, his head underneath the spout, like a kid at a faucet, gulping up the strawberry soda that poured into his mouth.
Martín looked at me, said, Good day, sir! and ran out the side door.
Tom came running out.
Get out of here! he yelled, as he ran towards the soda machines.
The zombie stood up, red soda dripping down his mouth, and he said, I was going to pay for it!
After it was all done and things went back to normal, Ana was working the second window at drive thru, and I came to bring more cups to put in the container behind her. I asked how she knew Martín.
He’s my brother, she said.
I made a firm resolution that I would not drink, not on my days off or at night before bed, not one drink. I would read, write, wrestle with ideas like I used to love to do, and I would take walks.
After I read all the books that I had brought with me, I started to look on Amazon for more, and I ordered some, but because we were so isolated it would take a while for them to get to me. One day at work, I asked Ana if she had any good books I could borrow.
Have you ever read Love in the Time of Cholera? she asked.
I don’t think so, I said.
She said it was good and she had a copy and could let me borrow it.
And the next day she brought it.
Let me know what you think, she said.
When I got off work that day, I went back to the motel, closed my eyes, opened them, and started to read. I read for a couple of hours until I got hungry. Then I brought the book with me and took a walk down the street to a little Mexican restaurant where I ate tacos, still reading.
After I finished that book, I gave it back to Ana and told her I liked it. There’s more, she said. A stack of books that belonged to Martín, she said.
Your brother?
He used to like to read. When he was in high school everybody thought he would go to college. He was like a rock star in high school. I mean, everyone thought he was going to do great things.
What happened?
Pecos happened.
I was happy to find out that there was a Pecos Public Library, a brick storefront next to a flower shop.
I don’t mean a separate building with a flower shop, just a different door. I liked passing by the shop, because of the smell of the roses.
I went into the library and would read the next book that she brought me, mostly short novels like Catcher in the Rye and House on Mango Street, but even if I had read them before I read them again and liked them. Reading good writing made me want to write something good.
I read two or three of Martin’s books a week, and the funny thing is I didn’t feel like I learned anything about him, because he didn’t underline anything or write comments in the margins, and in fact some of the books seemed like they had never been read before, the spine in perfect condition, the pages so white.
I decided I wanted to read great works of literature, because that’s what I wanted to write, so I would get some from the library and some from Amazon and I would read in bed or at the library.
I read Faulkner and Toni Morrison, more García Márquez, Amy Hempel, Edgar Allan Poe, Cormac McCarthy, Kafka, Benjamin Alire Sáenz, book after book.
And sometimes reading left me in such deep thought that I would walk down the streets of town oblivious to the landscape, noticing only what I needed to not bump into a wall or to step out into the street and get run over. My life was that interior, and I loved it.
I had saved $15K so far, because monthly expenses were low, and the wad of twenties in my wallet got so big I had to start hiding some in various parts of my motel room. I ordered a new laptop to write on and there was no greater joy than unboxing that thing and installing MS Word.
These were the happiest days of my life.
And then one day on my day off I was walking out of the library, and I was happy, because I had written a few good pages— No! Great pages!
I walked past the flower shop and it was hot, maybe 101°F. The sun was about to go down, so everything was orange and dreamlike. I felt connected.
And it happened.
I felt something amazing.
I can’t describe it, this is only trying to make sense of it later, but it was some sense of connection to everything.
Everybody has this experience once or twice in a lifetime, and this was my moment.
I felt one with God, with all existence. I was beautiful and whole.
I didn’t want the feeling to end, didn’t want the scent of the roses from the flower shop to go away. I wanted this to last forever, but I knew that if I kept on walking, I would get back to my motel room, and ordinary life would greet me like unwanted children.
So I stopped walking.
I stood against the brick wall of the flower shop and looked out at the expanse of the street. I sighed. I felt gratitude.
And then, from a side street without sidewalks, lined by shabby houses, I saw Martín walking in the middle of the street, right towards me.
As he crossed to my side, the orange light of the sunset hit his beautiful hair. He had a smile on his face to see me, and although no one may believe this, I knew that I could love him, that I maybe I was in love with him. I wanted him, every part of him.
When he got halfway across the street, and we were still looking at each other, he yelled, Hey! like he was happy to see me.
Hey! I said back, just as happy.
And he crossed.
Can you help me out, brother? I need to get something to eat.
He patted his pockets.
I pulled out my wallet and opened it.
There were several twenties. I held them up for him to see. Can you score? I asked.
He smiled big, nodding his head and saying, Hell, yeah. Come on.
I followed him across the avenue and down a little narrow street lined by beat up houses, some of them boarded up, many of them crumbling. A few houses still had people inside of them and lights and dogs barking from the windows. In the darkness of the street, you could make out human ghosts walking directionless, some of them moving zombie-slow towards me, but when they came into the light that held Martín and me, he held up the palm of his hand and they moved away. They got out of our way, eyes bulging. I smelled cigarettes and onions and a nauseous cloud of body order.
We walked on the side of an abandoned house through the back and into an alley, narrow, dark, but you could see lighters flickering up and down and flashes on mouths taking a hit. Meth, right? asked Martín.
Whatever you want, I said.
I hope you’re ready to celebrate like you never have before.
We can dance like no one’s watching, I said.
We’ll eat, pray, and love, he said, and we both giggled at that one.