I am surprised by the sign proclaiming that I have landed at the Amarillo International Airport, considering it does not service flights farther than Las Vegas. People around these parts employ a literal interpretation of the Texas state slogan, “It’s like a whole other country.”
As I start my seventy-five-mile drive up Route 60, I turn on 101.9 FM, the Bull. Amarillo’s New Hit Country is playing “Some Beach,” in which Blake Shelton sings about driving down the highway in his truck when a “foreign car driving dude” on his cell phone gives him the middle finger. I nervously look down at the logo on my steering wheel. It’s even worse than I feared. Why would the people at the Amarillo Avis curse me with me a Hyundai? Is this the “international” part of the airport experience? There’s no more foreign-sounding vehicle than Hyundai except Le Car.
As I approach the town of Miami, Texas, I pass a huge wind farm. This seems out of place for one of the most conservative areas of the country unless they are gasoline-powered windmills designed to blow the smell of cow manure toward Austin. As the sky darkens into night, I turn off the empty two-lane highway into Miami. I pass the sole traffic light in town, which is permanently set to blinking red on two sides, making it an expensive stop sign. I drive over railroad tracks, past a herd of cows, and down a residential street toward a long, brown ranch house. A wrought-iron sign says COWBOYS AND ROSES B&B. There’s a lasso over the word “Cowboys” and the word “Roses” is painted lipstick red. I park on the street, not sure if the owner or the other bed-and-breakfasters will need the driveway. I walk to the front porch, my heart beating harder than it should be for an adult male checking into a bed-and-breakfast.
Of the more than 3,100 counties in the United States, Roberts County had the highest percentage of Trump voters in 2016, at 95.3 percent. Located in the Texas panhandle, Roberts County is so rural it has more square miles than residents, and about 600 of the 925 residents live within the borders of Miami. I’ve come because, in the past, I’ve been found guilty of maligning people in print before meeting them, which taught me a valuable lesson: meet first; malign second. So I’m here, in person, to listen to real-life populists explain their political philosophy. After they ramble for a few minutes, I will teach them a little history, explain the fallacy of their arguments, and refuse their kind offer to become their leader. In the process, I’m certain to learn things from them, too. Not important things that will improve the world, but homey little sayings you can cross-stitch onto doilies and hang in your kitchen.
As with any diplomatic mission, I began by requesting an invitation from Miami’s head of state, Mayor Chad Breeding. When I first called his office, his receptionist answered the phone by informing me that I’d reached “Miamuh,” which made me sure I’d chosen the perfectly countrified place for my mission. As we talked, I noticed that she herself was not a person with a thick Southern accent mispronouncing “Miami” but a person correctly pronouncing the name of a town founded long ago by people with thick Southern accents who mispronounced “Miami.” She told me that Mayor Breeding was traveling out of town for business, which seemed like an elitist thing to do, until I realized that he needed to leave town unless he wanted to do business with only 600 people. Mayor Breeding runs B&C Cattle Company, which breeds high-end Hereford cattle that are shown in contests and purchased in order to breed other cattle. I wondered if Miami is so backward that they give out last names based on occupation, like they did in the Middle Ages with Smith, Cooper, Mason, Baker, and Torturer.
A few weeks later, Mayor Breeding got back to me, offering to show me around town, saying it would be a “an eye opener,” which didn’t sound like a great tourism slogan. It’s not as if there are posters proclaiming “Paris, the City of Eye Opening!” or “Florence: We’ll make you confront reality!” He suggested I stay at a Holiday Inn Express twenty-five miles away in a town called Pampa, which made me think that the whole Texas Panhandle is a distorted version of Florida, possibly with a “Poorlando” and “We Don’t Believe in Affirmative Jacksonville.” But after searching around online, I booked a room at the Cowboys and Roses B&B right in Miami. I emailed Eva Creacy, the owner, telling her about this book and asking if she’d introduce me to people in town. Eva responded quickly, writing, “Happy to have him!” I explained that I am “him” and again asked if she’d be willing to facilitate some interviews for my work project. “No problem,” she responded, followed by another message: “Are you coming to town on business?” I was wondering if six days were going to be enough to get anywhere with these people.
The month before I leave for my trip to Texas, several of my friends, most of my family, and my accountant repeat the same phrase: Be careful. My mom asks me to stay in contact while I’m in Miami and not tell anyone there that I’m Jewish, which seems tough, considering that I have to introduce myself as Joel Stein.
“Are you scared for your life?” asks my sister, Lisa, which is particularly worrisome since she is a divorce lawyer in New Jersey and therefore is familiar with dangerous people. She is particularly concerned that I’ll enrage the locals with my elitism, which has long bothered her. “You have this belief that if someone has a certain type of job they’re not worthy of your time,” she says. I know exactly what kind of job she means: divorce lawyer. “If someone didn’t go to one of fifteen colleges you deem acceptable, you think they’re not in the same league.”
“It’s not called the Same League,” I say, correcting her. “It’s called the Ivy League.” Though I also deem a dozen other schools acceptable, including Stanford, where I went to college, a fact that I have worked hard to hold off mentioning this long into the book. Lisa is right. As soon as I meet people, I try to figure out how to work in a question about where they went to college, often resorting to “Where did you go to college?” Assuming it is one of the twenty that it almost always is, I then search my memory for people I know from that school we might know in common. This means I care so deeply about where people went to college that I’ve memorized where everyone I know has gone. Meanwhile, I input the names of my friends’ kids into my contact list because I cannot remember them. Which is particularly pathetic of me since they work so hard to pick memorable names, such as Jagger and Rocket.
My sister thinks the Texans will reject me after one look. “You wear tight pants and skinny jeans,” she said. This is true. My two pairs of jeans are so uncomfortable I will only wear them for date nights with Cassandra, like my version of high heels. I did not want these jeans. If the Levi’s salesperson in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District had asked if I wanted hurty or not-hurty jeans, I would have definitely picked not-hurty. But the Levi’s salesperson made it clear that the only way to get baggy jeans was to get a time machine, start a hip-hop career, or gain a lot of weight. I was definitely not packing those Levi’s on my trip to Miami.
But my nondenim pants were also suspect. “You wear salmon-colored pants. Nobody here would wear them. All the men here wear cargo shorts,” Lisa adds. I would love to wear cargo shorts all the time, though I would worry about not having things to put in all those pockets besides pens. What Lisa is not-so-subtly implying is that I’m not manly enough for Texas. Or the New Jersey suburbs. Being insufficiently masculine has long been an elitist tell. In the 1950s, the elite were called eggheads, a term first slung during the 1952 presidential election to emasculate Richard Nixon’s opponent, the intellectual Adlai Stevenson II, who had a bald head shaped like an egg. Both Marvel and DC Comics created genius villains named Egghead, the latter of which was played by Vincent Price, who campily cackled puns such as “egg-zactly” and “egg-cellent.” In Louis Bromfield’s essay “The Triumph of the Egghead” he gave this definition:
Egghead: A person of spurious intellectual pretensions, often a professor or the protégé of a professor. Fundamentally superficial. Over-emotional and feminine in reactions to any problem.
It’s not merely my lack of masculinity, my clothes, and my obsession with résumés that worry my sister. My elite traits sprout from every pore, and the people of Miami are going to shun me for them. I have so many elite attributes that the most efficient way to list them is in a word cloud. Ironically, this is the least elite way to present information other than painting one letter on your stomach and standing in a line with other shirtless men with letters painted on their stomachs.
The greatest shame I feel in seeing this word cloud is that I only have silver status on United.
I regret my decision to come here. Mayor Breeding has texted me that he’s going to be busier than he thought during my stay and won’t be able to show me around. These people don’t want me here. Nearly every person in every house as far as I can see voted for Trump. They hate the media. They want to drain the swamp. And I am a swamp monster.
Although every part of my body wants to get back in my car, drive to the airport, and fly to another country even though that would require a layover, I softly knock on the door of the Cowboys and Roses B&B, hoping no one answers. Less than five seconds later, Dee Ann Burkholder opens the door. She’s a smiley grandmother with short blonde hair, funky blue eyeglasses, and three earrings, one of which is a large diamond stud on the top of her left earlobe. Dee Ann is white, as are all the people I will interview in Miami unless otherwise noted. There will be no noting.
Dee Ann waves me in, covers the microphone of her phone with her hand, and whispers that she’s in the middle of a video conference call with fellow saleswomen from Rodan + Fields, the multilevel marketing cosmetics company everyone in the suburbs works at on the side, including my cousin. She asks if I know how to mute her conference call, immediately establishing our elite/anti-elite roles. I take her phone, swipe a few obvious buttons, and demonstrate that I do not know how to mute a conference call. Even though I signal with both of my hands not to, Dee Ann hangs up on her work call.
She offers me a seat on the red-and-blue-striped couch while she settles into a suede BarcaLounger in this museum of the 1950s, with its row of teapots, thick carpet, and TV that is not at all flat. Dee Ann is cheery, extroverted, and fast-talking, punctuating her sentences with either an explosive laugh or the approving phrase “flippin’ whippy,” which I eventually figure out means “fucking whippy.” She takes care of the house for the owner, Eva, who works in Dallas as a nurse and has unorthodox investment strategies. When I tell her about my book about elitism, she promises to introduce me to all her friends the next day, relieving nearly all of my stress.
She makes me so comfortable that I slip in my first question about life in Miami that I figured I wouldn’t ask for a couple of days. Dee Ann assures me that everyone in town has a gun, though she’s not sure where hers is. Which is weird because her friends thought she was crazy for coming here at 9:00 p.m. to meet a strange man from California. He could be dangerous! Possibly a rapist! Or a terrorist! The idea that a terrorist would target Miami, Texas, suddenly seems as dubious as my mom’s fear of my religious persecution. So, less than an hour after arriving in Miami, I reveal that I’m Jewish. Dee Ann laughs at my mom’s concerns. It’s like the scene from E.T. when Elliott and the alien see each other for the first time and both scream in fear, if a few minutes later Elliott tried to sell E.T. some cosmetics for his wife.
Dee Ann gives me a tour of the bed-and-breakfast, strongly suggesting I take the Cowboy Room instead of the Rose Room. As the brochure says, cowboys are “tough, honest and benevolent” while roses are “beauty, delicate and feminine” and have trouble discerning nouns from adjectives. There’s a huge master bedroom where I assume Dee Ann will sleep, until she informs me that she is not staying here. Neither is anyone else, making the place less like a bed-and-breakfast than a rental house, turning this into a real bargain and an even less solid retirement plan for Eva. Dee Ann shows me the Keurig coffee machine and the stocked fridge, saying she’ll be back in the morning to cook me my choice of a Wagon Boss, Cow Patties, Yellow Rose of Texas, or the Maiden’s Prayer. I assure her that I can make my own breakfast and come up with my own ridiculous name for it. Before Dee Ann leaves to drive a few blocks to her own house, where she lives with her husband, Bill, a former reverend, I ask her for a key. Oh, she explains, we don’t lock doors here in Miami. This confuses me. It seems like Miamuhians are skipping a lot of reasonable security steps and going straight to “gun.”
After she leaves, I open the sliding glass doors in the kitchen and sit at the table in the large backyard and depressurize, looking past the mesa and up at the wide, star-filled sky. Dee Ann is more familiar than I expected. She’s not an opioid-addicted unemployed coal-worker mawmaw. She’s got cool ear piercings. If the other townspeople are at all like her, I’ll be able to persuade them to embrace immigration and trade and reschedule my return flight a couple of days early.
I wonder if the people I’ll meet tomorrow will surprise me as much as Dee Ann did. What I don’t consider is whether they’ll convince me to rob a church.