One of the skinniest, best-dressed drug dealers in Hidalgo County was throwing himself a birthday party, and I was drinking his beer.
It wasn’t really my intention. First we were just trying to interview him. Photographer Shaul Schwarz and I were roaming outside of McAllen, Texas, in between flights with a drug interdiction unit of the Border Patrol, looking for a man we heard was helping bring the bales across the the Rio Grande.
When I finally pulled up to his home—after texting a friend across the country with the address and telling him to call the police if I didn’t text again in an hour—the drug dealer was standing there, young, lanky, smooth-shaven head, crisp white tank-top and bootcut jeans. He was in the middle of preparations for a big party in an empty lot next to his house. A tent with tables underneath. Long charcoal grills. Giant coolers. In one corner, a massive bounce castle. This was going to be a family affair. “Time Magazine?” He grinned. “Cool. The party starts at five. Come back then.”
Reporting is, at its heart, a long glissade through forced social situations. And I’m not always very good at it, not naturally anyway, and there are times when alcohol can fix this.
So when we came back and the party was in full swing already, and the narcocorrido singer with flaming fringe on his jacket was singing ballads to the host’s heroism, and the drug dealer’s grandparents were eating refried beans and roast chicken from paper plates, and the bounce castle was a balloon filled with children’s screams, and a lineup of young goons with pistols in their waistbands stood next to shiny pickup trucks alongside, and then the host himself entered grandiloquently in a snow-white suit and fedora with a boutonnière, as if he was not only throwing himself a birthday party but also taking himself to prom, I needed a beer.
Tecate was there for me. I drank it, and I started talking in Spanish to any and all of them. The gift of tongues, 12 fluid ounces at a time.
Franz Kafka once said that drinking was like cheating on his beloved loneliness—”it is all that I have”— and once the carousers around him sobered up, loneliness would be all they’d be left with as well. That may be true, but for me it’s all the more reason to drink. I welcome the warmth of drink, the feeling that we can throw an arm over the shoulder of another person and be known and be loved, even if just for the tide of an evening.
To celebrate this fellowship of booze, we’re starting a daily series of drinking dispatches here at Roads & Kingdoms. We’re calling the series Five O’Clock Somewhere, a name we chose out of a desire to free alcohol from its velvet evening-cage and also as a nod to the fact that our readers are spread across too many time zones to reckon with. So we will post these stories—little essays from our far-flung contributors about drinking, carousing, communing in all its forms—at 5pm daily in New York, and trust that our readers will catch up to them whenever they are ready to pour, drink, read, and cheat on their own loneliness for a moment with us.