On Sunday morning in downtown Brownwood, Texas, I stayed in bed late for me and then sat around and drank coffee. Later, I slipped out and the heat was already sitting hard on downtown, and I walked down to the corner of Baker Street and Brown. There’d been a big, loud wedding party at the Vault on Saturday night but now the streets were empty, and I looked northwest to the intersection of Baker and Center and the light changed to green but there were no cars. I cut across Baker to Lucille + Mabel, the restaurant and bar where I now serve as bar manager, and it was hard at that moment not to imagine a morning here 110 years ago when this building was a bank. On that morning there would have been no horses and wagons on Sunday morning instead of no cars.
The 100-degree heat has been a constant thing now since early May. It’s already in the 80s on this Sunday morning and the heat seems to radiate from the pavement and the stones of the building as I twist the key in the lock of the restaurant and push into the bakery. The cold blast of the air conditioning meets me, and it feels good. Brute force comfort. For Danielle and me this is our first Texas summer with air conditioning since we were in our 30s. 2004 was the last full summer where we lived with air conditioning. Eighteen years ago.
Sometimes I forget about the men I’ve been, and it takes someone or something else to remind me. Scattershooting here, but it’ll all make sense in the end.
One hundred years after the fall of Rome, goats grazed in the Coliseum and goatherds looked up at the imposing historical structure and wondered what manner of men could have built it.
There are two bank vaults from a past world standing in the main dining room of Lucille + Mabel. They are huge and solid and physically imposing, like time itself. Installed in about 1909, they weigh about twelve tons a piece – 24,000 lbs. – and they were delivered to this place by a horse and wagon from Cincinnati in the first decade of the last century when there were no highways as we know them between Central Texas and Ohio. Almost none of that trip would have been on paved roads. Just spend some time in your mind and pick out one day of that journey with twelve-ton bank vault doors on wooden wagons pulled by horses. Maybe you’ll imagine a day of that trip camped near some southern Arkansas swamp or some river you had to cross the next day, and if you think on it long enough, you’ll get yourself some perspective of what work is really like.
I’ve fallen in love with entrepreneurs, and I’ll get to that part of the story in time. There are ladies and gentlemen out there doing heroic things and a lot of people hate them for it.
But the thing is that someone took that job. Maybe a telegram came into the bank vault company offices there in Cincinnati – a city filled with German immigrants and breweries – and some clerk went into his boss’s office and said “Sir, a new bank down in Central Texas needs a couple of twelve-ton bank vault doors. Are there any roads between here and there?” Boss says, “No, but we’ll find a way. Tell them we’ll do it.”
I’ve had a few almost out-of-body experiences in the past week when it comes to discussions about my endeavors. A lady came into the bookshop while I was working. She’d heard about me, and she wanted to be a writer. She couldn’t believe I’d written so many books and that I’d had some success. She wanted to write her first novel and she was full of doubts and questions. She asked about my “writing process,” which at this very moment is as foreign to me as a company manufacturing bank vaults. That seems to be another me that writes books and jokes that ‘I’ve written more books than most people have read.’ That’s another me that’s written more than a million words just in Bible commentaries, and another million or so in fiction and non-fiction books.
The next day I’d just left from working at the bookshop and I was over at my second job at Lucille + Mabel getting ready for a shift when a cook they call Tuna stopped me in the kitchen.
“I was talking to a friend, and he said, ‘Hey, you work with Michael Bunker. That guy is famous. I watch his survival videos on YouTube and love the stuff he teaches about preparedness and off-grid living.'” I’m not famous. Not remotely.
Right now, sitting in this air-conditioned room, I forget about that part of my life, even though it has been my work for the last few decades. At that moment, when Tuna stops me in the kitchen, I’m preparing for a shift as a bartender. Not long after that, I get a private message on my phone from an old friend.
“Where can I find your logic lessons online?”
Me: “About a third of them are archived on my website. Go check them out.”
I’m not sure I know the guy who writes the Bunker Logic Lessons at 3 a.m. to post them on Facebook where no one will read them or miss them when they’re gone.
That night a couple came in and sat at the bar. The gentleman says, “Honey, this is Michael Bunker. He’s the guy I was telling you about. I watched him rolling cigars over at CJs Cigar Lounge last year. It was amazing. Best cigar I ever smoked.”
Sometimes I don’t remember that I’m that guy, too. Then last night my new next-door neighbor and co-worker Michael stopped by the apartment. “I want to try some of this Bon Couer bourbon you’ve made and that I’ve heard so much about.” I poured him a short glass with a block of ice, and we sat and talked. He sipped the bourbon. “He looks at me slant. How is it that you’ve done all these things?” he said. “I need to know how you’ve done so many things in this life? Tell me about mesquite coffee and bourbon and… I’m just trying to get it all in my mind who you really are.”
We’d spent a couple of hours that afternoon discussing theology and philosophy.
We went and sat outside and sipped bourbon and talked about math and bourbon and the surface area of oak barrels. While we were talking, a new neighbor lady friend saw us out enjoying the evening and she stopped by.
“I went by the bookstore, and I had no idea you’d written all these books.”
In my mind, I said “Me too.”
So, all of that is an awkward me-centered lead-in to my love affair with entrepreneurs. Although none of this explains anything.
The one thing all of these things have in common, is that sometimes someone gets a passion to build something or do something revelatory and dangerous… not because it is easy, but because it is hard. And they want to be great at it. They want to build something generational. I’ve watched them and I’ve come to know these people. They risk it all to build something, and they do it in a climate of open hostility – even in a current culture where people will reflexively hate you if you try to succeed. A large portion of the society is now bent on destroying the builders, taking a sledgehammer to the foundations of civilization. They are way more concerned with pronouns and culturally punitive behaviors than they are with if people can actually eat and survive.
Downtown Brownwood during this revitalization is a perfect study in creators and entrepreneurs trying to make a go of it despite all of the odds. Looming inflation, supply chain disruptions, diminishing quality of supplies, a scarcity of anyone willing to actually do work, hostility from a culture of death and destruction that revels in misery and failure and division and in canceling anyone who disagrees. A generation of workers who are stewed in entitlement, do not have any concept of sacrifice and labor, and who will steal from you directly if possible, or indirectly through their elected representatives whenever they can. And they will expect you to like it. Not to mention an endless army of cartels paying bureaucrats to invent more legislation designed to erect ever higher barriers to entry for entrepreneurs. Swarms of regulations and mandates so numerous and inscrutable that they can seem to be apocalyptic.
Despite all of this there is an ethic of work and determination that inhabits some rare people, and I can’t help but admire that in them. I love them for it. God bless the creators and the builders and the doers.
What am I, an agrarian survivalist cigar-rolling, bourbon-making, book-writing, logician and philosopher doing living downtown tending bar and selling books?
I’m studying people. That’s what I’ve always done. Watching and helping and learning. The air-conditioning part makes it nice, so long as it doesn’t make me lazy or stupid. Later today I’ll be at the bookshop and at the restaurant and I’ll see all the work that went into building those places. I’ll admire anew the people who built them. I’ll pass a dozen or so other businesses struggling to make something in this world and to employ people and to build a community together.
On that particular Sunday morning, after I did some inventory at the bar and cleaned up a bit, I cut through Coursey Park on the way back to the apartment. There is a grackle there who likes to swoop down and barely miss my head when I walk through the park. I call him Chuck. He’s always there. I mostly ignore him and laugh when he does his swooping thing and then flies up to the power pole to cackle and laugh. Chuck doesn’t know me though.
I’m not sure I do either.
(Note: This was written on June 21st. Since then, I have regrettably had to stop working at the bookstore. Not enough hours in the day and I needed rest.)
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Michael Bunker is a local columnist for BrownwoodNews.com whose columns appear periodically on the website.
