Finding roots and defining home in the midst of quarantine
Sit down. Think.
Stand up. Think.
Pass out. Think.
Wake up. Think.
Pour up. Drank (you knew it was coming eventually).
Faded. Think.
Quarantine mostly has felt like this for me. Yes, like the warped introduction to an old Kendrick Lamar song. One where we never actually get to the song – we just repeat variations on the intro over and over again.
Springtime in Knoxville usually is my busiest time of the year, and I traditionally spend it running around in the sweet spot between headless chicken and headless horseman. Erratic, terrifying … delicious? You get the idea.
When I’m not at my full-time day job, I’m an opera singer. If you’re one of the handfuls of folk who regularly attend operas in town, you’ll know me as the round black guy who’s always near the front of the stage because he’s short. Not to be confused with the tall black guy (he is not round). Or the one with dreads (also not round and … with dreads).
Spring usually means that two operas are scheduled, and they typically need me to be a priest, soldier, cowboy, townsperson or some combination of all of the above. One in February, and another in May. In between operas, festival season starts something fierce with Big Ears, Rhythm N’ Blooms (#rip), Dogwood Arts and Rossini, and in a typical year, I’ll have my hands somewhere, involved with several – if not all – of them.
I also am second in command for a small nonprofit opera company in town (because yay! more opera). In that capacity, I do a little bit of everything from marketing to fundraising to singing in the shows if needed. When my schedule permits, I also work as a freelance vocalist for church services (see: Black History Month) and events, as an emcee for concerts, weddings and fundraisers and as a narrator for documentaries.
In my free time (laughs hysterically), I like pretty, dark-haired women (and the occasional spicy blonde or redhead) and breakfast foods. I can be found on any number of downtown patios pursuing mischief on any given night of the week. No, I don’t sleep much. No, I haven’t mastered time travel. And no, I don’t have a clone with whom I split gigs. An arch-nemesis? Yes … (dramatic music plays) but not a clone. That’s just my life. I have a strong Google calendar game and varied interests. The first half of my year right up until my birthday in June is a flurry of events and shenanigans, and I love it. I LIVE for it.
Enter COVID-19. I was well on my way to another super busy spring when the world began to shut down. I spent all of February starring in a world premiere that my nonprofit produced. Rehearsals started the day after it closed for the next show in which I was set to appear. A festival for which I serve on the board of directors was swiftly approaching, and even my own nonprofit was re-racking to get ready for our next show.
Things were moving as they always do and then … full stop. INDEFINITE full stop. I had no idea that when I met with friends for beers (the first ones that I’d had a chance to grab in 2020) on March 7 that anyone that I didn’t see then, I wouldn’t. That the world, as I knew it would shut down completely.
By now, we all know how the story fills in. First the NBA season, then March Madness. Then a handful of events … then ALL of them. Soon, the world itself was shut down. Everything that I loved placed on indefinite hold. Everything except my boring … the-first-thing-that-I-mentioned-because-it’s-the-least-important-to-me … non-arts … Monday-through-Friday … 9-to-5 (cue Dolly) … survival … suddenly-categorized-as-“essential” … I’m-extremely-grateful-to-have-you-still (seriously) … day job.
For the entirety of my post-college and so-called adult life, “work” has merely been something that subsidizes my “career.” Something that I could stomach for eight hours a day with enough energy left over to do what matters. That didn’t entirely drain my will to live and had a schedule that allowed for collaboration. That paid me enough to buy the occasional PBR with the boys. Also, health insurance is helpful.
In an instant, though, all of the extra was gone. For the first time in my life, the day job was all I had. Go to work. Come home. Repeat ad nauseum. The first week was OK. I probably needed to slow down anyway, and there were several things that I’d meant to catch on Netflix. The second week was more of the same. I picked up video games and finally got some toilet paper from the grocery store. In the third week, I finished that video game and, I don’t know … “Tiger King?”
It was at this point that things began to get fuzzy. Literally fuzzy because the salons had been closed, and I don’t care how good the YouTube video is, I don’t trust myself with my own haircare. Also, metaphysically fuzzy because … what day is it again? Any of them? All of them? Is it midnight? Oh crap, it’s 9 a.m., and I’m supposed to be there now? Fuzzy.
From the fourth week on (for reference, I think I’m officially on week nine or 10 as of this writing), I realized that I was going to have to fight. Not to “not wear a mask” or to “go out to eat” … but rather for my sanity. I’m single. No real family to speak of. No pets. I’m as extroverted as they come. I don’t even like to drink alone, so becoming a proper alcoholic wasn’t even on the table. I realized that I needed to do something. I’m not gonna lie; for a while, I pouted. I stared at my walls. I did the sad Charlie Brown walk from “Arrested Development” from room to room in my apartment. I stared at my walls. I did some video chats and video happy hours with friends (marveling all the while at how quickly my booze tolerance had wholly evaporated). I stared at my walls.
I won’t tell you how long I stared at those walls before it began to hit me. I’ve lived in the same small apartment for nearly five years now. Two bedrooms and one bath of a bachelor pad of a “most-of this-furniture-was-given-to-me-by-a-nice-adult” man in his early 30s. At some point, I bought a bed. The couch I got from Goodwill with my parents when I moved in. The TV I purchased at a Black Friday sale this past November. The PS4 that I splurged and brought after a gig one year. The record player I bought when I turned 30 because I drink PBR and have a beard. The curtains I put up because my Mom said to be an adult. That was it, though.
No further creature comforts. No knickknacks from my travels. No pictures of any kind on any of the walls. No keepsakes. No memories. I pack light on purpose. I was a military child, and we moved just enough for me to be wary of roots, of complications. So it went. I kept staring at my walls. Torn between feeling grateful for my health, my relative safety and my continued employment. Feeling bitterness at opportunities lost. Realizing how trivial it all was in the face of deaths like we’ve never seen on a global scale. With little to distract me from this swirl of emotion, I kept doing what I could.
Going to work. Coming home. Staring at my empty walls. Staring is, in itself, a funny thing. They tell you not to do it when you’re growing up, and I used to think it was because it’s considered rude or impolite. After a few weeks in isolation, I realize that it has nothing to do with decorum … that it’s for your own protection. You see, the longer you stare at something, the longer it stares back at you. The more opportunities your mind has to fill it with things that you’d rather not see. Rather not deal with.
Splayed across the ecru canvas of my blank apartment walls, I saw the tear-streaked face of a little black boy in rural North Carolina. His grandmother had raised him up until he was 9 years old. He didn’t want to leave the familiarity and comforts of her home to move in with his mother and new stepfather. That little house in that small town was all he knew. He saw that little face eager to make new friends, crying as he left elementary school after elementary school with each Navy-mandated move.
That same face, this time with the hint of a mustache, crying as found out the day before the last day of eighth grade that his family was moving yet again because the owner of the house they rented was selling it and they had 30 days to vacate. Half a day to let the friends he’d spent middle school making that he would not be joining them in all of the classes they’d painstakingly picked out for high school. He saw a boy, now a fuzzy, almost middle-aged man, who was still afraid to put down roots. A man who was in the business of making grand and fantastical memories for others, afraid to experience his own. Ouch. I see why they tell you not to stare now.
So what was I to do? Throw a picture of grandma’s old house up on the wall? Dig out my middle-school yearbook and have some stuff enlarged? No. Flashback Brandon (his I’m-so-cute-and-you-can’t-tell-me-nothing self) wasn’t telling me to live in the past; instead, he was imploring me to live in the present. Actors, coaches and practitioners of mindfulness all will tell you that the most important thing you can do in big moments is to be “present.” In effect, to not think about what you’re going to eat later or that zinger that you should have said last week or whatever else that isn’t happening right now.
Think about what you’re doing right now, as you do it. Make that the most critical thing in your mind and everything else will fall into place. The free throw, the pitch, the line, the note … whatever. As a professional performer, I’m great at that … onstage. In real life? Eh, not so much. Though still surprisingly difficult, it’s “relatively” easy to be in the moment when you’re standing alone in front of thousands of people. To be “present” at that moment on the couch in your sweatpants, watching reruns of “The Big Bang Theory,” though? It’s too easy to zone out, to gloss over those moments. Yes, obviously, there are hundreds if not millions of levels in between, but the message to me was clear.
I could keep going from busy moment to busier moment. Stay, the little boy too afraid to make and enjoy his own memories because it was safer to prepare them for other people. Or keep staring at blank walls until you end up with a shiny, used – but barely broken-in – life. In a day and age where lives are being lost at unprecedented rates and each healthy moment that you have is more precious than the last, to go on living that way seemed selfish and dangerously cavalier. It seemed to mock the struggle of all of those poor souls who right now want for the simplest of human desires: an unassisted breath of fresh air.
Is there anything I can do that would give it to them? Sadly, no. For what they are worth, they have my continuous prayers. If it’s true, and the prayers of a righteous man availeth (fun word) much, then the prayers of one who’s not but tries his best have to count for something. The other part of that scripture says to confess your faults one to another, and so I will admit this: I have not been the best version of myself in quarantine. I have pouted. I have whined. I’ve been patently ungrateful at times. In staring at enough blank walls, though, I’ve come to this conclusion:
You’ve got to try. You owe it to your past self, your future self and even to your fellow man. It’s become a cliché in today’s vernacular, but it still rings true that you must try to live your best life. It won’t happen by accident. What is trying for you? I don’t know; we all have different things to stare at. Different walls up. After five years in my first “without-roommates” apartment, for me, it involved FINALLY unpacking the plastic containers full of random stuff that I’d carried with me since college. The ones that I stashed away in my spare bedroom/office as soon as I moved in. It meant buckling down and buying/hanging some art on the walls. I’ll be 34 in three weeks, and it was about damn time. Both for some personal growth and to mention the thing that I told Rusty I was writing this article about in the first place (and in the final sentence): the art I bought for my apartment.
