The next morning we slept in. I woke up and immediately looked over at my stack of $130 to make sure it was still there. It was not a dream! We didn’t have a show until 7 that night in Texarkana. We love doing poetry shows for night time crowds. This one was a poetry slam put together by the Texas A&M Texarkana Campus Programming Board. I remembered meeting Celeste and Keith in Little Rock, AR at the APCA conference. We were excited to a do a dedicated night show, and we knew their activities board was going to put together a great spoken word poetry show.
We grabbed breakfast in the hotel, near the casino. It was ok. Courageous had a conference call to make, and I had some writing to do. I posted up in the lobby and got to work.
Courageous wrapped up, and the road to Texarkana lay ahead of us. It was wide open highway, and a little over an hour away. No rain, white cumulus clouds over head, and virtually no traffic. C-Rage had just downloaded the Chris Stapleton album. Tennessee Whiskey played as the highway rolled on. It reminded me of home, and made me miss Tennessee a bit. I got to listen to the album almost two whole times. Chris Stapleton is much better than a lot of the country artists that are out right now, he sure says “Whiskey” a lot though. We stayed in a Holliday Inn that practically straddled the Texas and Arkansas border.
Upon check in, a small boy sloppily munching on an ice cream bar stared Courageous down. It really got to him, he talked about it for the rest of the night. I didn’t get to see the kid, but he must have been very annoying looking.
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Texas A&M-Texarkana, TAMUT for short, was a small campus. About 1500 students, with about 150 living on campus. It was comprised of three major buildings and two large bodies of water. We got a phone call from student programmer Christen, and made our way to the building.
We entered into the student actives room, kids playing pool and cards were all around the room. We like going to small campuses. Big campuses are fun, but there is something to be said about campuses that have a dedicated campus with no city interspersed in between. It creates a community on campus that you can’t find at bigger colleges.
We saw the performing space and were instantly impressed with the planning that the programming board went through. Seats, lights, sound, stage. Absolutely fantastic.
The students that performed were great. The internet has made it possible for people that aren’t in traditional poetry hot beds to pick up on styles that might have otherwise not been available to them. It showed at TAMUT. Not a bad poet on that stage. Otherwise the show was good. We had some sound issues that threw us off of our game, nothing that the CAB at TAMUT could’ve prevented.
Afterward, Keith took Courageous and I out to eat at a local restaurant. They’re serving hand crafted pizzas, delicious fried chicken, and other various bar food items.
We got the chicken fried chicken, in Texas fashion, and it did not disappoint. It was crispy and moist in all the right places. Gravy was made in house, as were the mashed potatoes. We talked stories of our “previous lives” with Keith. He used to manage logistics for a trucking company, C-Rage used to collect student debt, and I used to collect trailer payments.
Keith told us a story about a time when one of his youngest truck drivers said he had to make it to California. He set the young man up on a cross country trip to Cali. As soon the trucker got to Cali he said, “now send me as far from Cali as you can.” Keith got him a new load way away from Cali. Keith later learned that the driver had picked up an underage girl in Cali and “smuggled” her our of the state. He could possibly still be in jail to this day.
We advised Keith that we were going to Galveston. He said it was a nice place, but the water may not be swimmable due to bacteria. He told us we HAD to go to Gaido’s seafood restaurant. I get frustrated when people back home go out of town and don’t listen to my food suggestions. Our buddy Edwin from Miami always texts me when he’s on the road and asks me where to eat, I appreciate that. I’m not sure if I’m not fat enough or what, but so often I make recommendations for people and they never go. It frustrates me, and because of this, when people make recommendations for me, I always try to go. And after Keith picked out this restaurant for us, we knew we were going to hit Gaido’s.
We headed to bed early as Galveston was calling our names. We had a couple of days off, so we booked a house on the beach on Galveston island. We were ready for some R&R. We turned the lights out and Courageous once again reminded me of how much he wanted to punch the kid from yesterday. As I drifted off to sleep, I contemplated how long it felt like I’d been gone. I left the show that night in a t-shirt and shorts. When I left Knoxville it was 33 degrees out.