Taco Time and Failure

There used to be a vacant lot in the business district of the town I grew up in. For the first eight years of my life it contained nothing but a pile of dirt. I always thought it would’ve been the ideal place for kids to meet after school or hold an impromptu game of stickball—a place we could escape to and call our own. It never happened, but I like to tell people that it did.

So it was no great tragedy to anyone then when the lot became the site of our town’s first Taco Time. Never mind that there was already a bevy of fast food restaurants within a 100 meter radius. Teenagers with high metabolism and divorced dads needed someplace to eat, after all. And besides, this wasn’t just another instance of a corporate franchise sprawling itself over independent businesses that specialised in the field of vending grease and carbohydrates for a questionable price; this was a corporate franchise vending Mexican grease and carbohydrates. There had been McDonald’s, Subway, and A&W in my town since before I could remember, so it stood to reason in my prepubescent mind that so too would Taco Time grow to become an integral and profitable element of the community.

Of course, being that I had only the barest knowledge of mathematics at the time, it goes without saying that my understanding of economics was only slightly better. The town was only slightly more populated than the cast of a Robert Altman film, and already the market was flooded with fast food grease. But like any child, this wasn’t something I bothered myself with thinking about. At the time my thoughts were primarily concerned with escaping to my own rich fantasy world of wonder and possibilities—just like the ones I saw on TV! When I had free time (which was most of the time) it somehow felt right to spend it imagining myself going on adventures and overcoming adversity despite the odds being stacked against me. The fact that I was an adolescent and ill-equipped to handle such tasks needn’t have mattered—Batman’s boy ward Robin did it every afternoon at 19:00, and I had way more personality than that kid. Yet he was the one adventuring and fighting crime while I battled with such lofty concepts as “long division” and “supply and demand.”

It was something of a surprise then to arrive at school one morning and hear from a classmate that no sooner had Taco Time opened that it would be closing. I was shocked—you hear of these things happening, but you never expect them to happen to restaurants that you know. The idea was as foreign to me as the supposedly Mexican food they were selling. I had eaten there, didn’t particular enjoy myself, but chalked my negative feelings up to my unrefined childish tastes. I was dismayed. Taco Time had the potential to become a symbol of our town’s growing prosperity. It could’ve been our town’s Canadarm, but instead it became our Ookpik. How could you possibly replace something that was shot down before it had the chance to become beloved?

The answer, it turns out, is with a Dairy Queen. As if pulling itself up by its proverbial bootstraps, almost overnight the previously vacant lot seemed to take a long, hard look at itself and said “Of course! Ice cream. It’s so obvious!” It was not, in fact, time for tacos. And apparently that was okay.

Taco Time had failed before my eyes, and the experience was fascinating. It had seemed like such a grown up concept, to fail completely. It’s safe to say that nobody wants to be Taco Time—for a variety of reasons both obvious and obscure—but mostly because nobody ever wants to fail. Failure, it seems, is an admission that we are not the super humans we wish were and a reminder that we will never be fully satisfied with everything we do. Complete success is the goal, as well as an impossible standard to consistently live up to. In this regard, failure may be the most human experience of them all. It, and not achieving success, is the great leveller amongst people. And there’s something rare and beautiful about having a universally shared experience.

Indeed, I had spent many a year looking at the Robin character as something of a child role model, but now I can only see him as an example of how failure reaches even the ones we least suspect. Here is a preteen boy essentially raised by a surrogate father (dressed as a bat, no less) who expects him to be 50% of a vigilante group and puts in grave danger of being killed by lunatics in themed costumes on a regular basis. How could Robin possibly become a functioning adult without years of therapy? Did he even have friends or hobbies? He could only become a mess of an adult, yet he was designed to draw children into the franchise. Is it any wonder that the character was dropped when the movie series became less campy and more realistic with 2005’s Batman Begins?

Few people are wont to admit their failures publicly, opting instead to ignore them in the hope that no one else will notice them either. The fear is that our failures will put us in a negative light and push people away. Dairy Queen closed down a few years later. I never went there.

I once again heard about the restaurant closing while I was at school. At the time my classroom walls were adorned with “motivational” posters (not so much a product description, as an intention). One of the most popular series of posters were the ones featuring Garfield spouting sage advice such as “The best computer is the one between your ears,” which besides being wildly out of character for Garfield also struck me as preachy and ignorant. Motivational posters are strange. To be motivated is a very personal feeling and the things that provide inspiration are very specific to each person. They also raise the question of just who exactly is writing them. Is the person, or more likely the committee of people, really proud of the work they’re doing? Is this what they dreamed about doing, while they were growing up? The great irony of a motivational poster is that they fail to perform their sole function every single time.

The lot’s next attempt at reinventing itself was as a Dunkin’ Doughnuts, as if to express that you can be a doughnut shop in Canada without being Tim Horton’s. At the time my primary concern was with women, and even though I never went in there I know I ran past it. Now in my teens, the quietly desperate adolescent James Joyce character I had been was no more, him now replaced with something resembling Charles Rocket at his peak. No longer would my Best of Barry White CD collect dust, I thought. Because my hormones were twitching and my mind alternated from overconfidence to incompetence second-to-second, I decided (with more thought than I usually put into my school work) that the best way to exert my pent up energy and articulate my burgeoning manhood was to run across town for the sole purpose of running past the house of the girl I was mildly attracted to. On some level I knew she didn’t want anything to do with me, and had I known anything about her I would have felt the same way. Did I do this because I wanted her to see my rogue attitude? Was I waiting for her to be on her front lawn? Would I acknowledge her, or purposely ignore her to illustrate how busy I was? Is this how I thought all relationships started? I can’t answer any of those. Dunkin’ Doughnuts closed down before the year was out.

When it comes to what constitutes a successful life, there are two basic camps of people. Half of society believes a rich, full life is a successful one. The other half believes a quiet, deliberate one is. The former have lofty aspirations and dreams and believe with all of their hearts that success comes from experiencing as much as you can and accomplishing something. Conversely, the quiet, meditative people wonder why everyone can’t just stop, take things easy, and find joy in the simplest pleasures of life. All human behaviour, and therefore the decisions we make, seem to stem around the dichotomy of whether we should desire more or take pleasure in what is available to us. Yet to adhere to one of the other does not appear satisfactory, at least on paper. Perhaps discovering the kind of life you want to lead, even if it’s by figuring out what are you aren’t, is its own reward. Who’s to say which camp is really failing if they’ve found what works for them?

I lost track of what the lot became next. I had stumbled into a lead position with my high school cross country team due to years of unintentional long distance training. My run route didn’t include going past whatever the plot of land was now.

However, I do know that sometime later a building was erected with a sign that simple read “Joe’s Place.” I don’t know what Joe’s Place business plan was—it could have been a residence for all I know—but it did have the curious distinction of leaving its neon “OPEN” sign on despite there never being more than 50% of its indoor lights on. What it did or didn’t sell was of no interest to me. I loved it the way I loved the animals in Planet Earth that fall behind the rest of the pack. It was a building greater than the sum of its parts. It was both The Washington Generals and Linda McCartney’s music career. The McDonald’s across the street had and always would be pink-bricked, its golden arches looming over the block, bragging about the billions of burgers it had sold. Joe’s Place, if that was its real name, had a storied past and experience in all sorts of fields, like an acquaintance who could never hold a job but is happy to tell you about their new one all the same. Joe’s Place tried, dammit. Today it may be Jimmy Carter’s presidency, but tomorrow it could be his post-presidency. It seemed unlikely that McDonald’s would ever be anything more; as a part of the largest restaurant chain in the world, its success was handed to it. But Joe’s Place? It felt alive, even if it could potentially turn into a vacuum store next week.

And it did, actually. I first took notice of it when the limousine I was riding in drove past. It was high school graduation and I was desperately trying to convince my friends that the end of one experience is merely the beginning of another one, or some page-a-day calender wisdom like that. I didn’t have a lot of faith in the vacuum cleaner store myself, and I may have made a well-intentioned pun about the store being “doomed to ‘suck.’” Still, there had never been a vacuum cleaner store attempted on this avenue, and I thought the possibility might as well be explored. My mind wandered onto other topics and I spent most of the night confirming that the vast majority of the people graduating with me were folks I could comfortably live without ever seeing again. The next morning my grad date moved back to Japan. I never kissed her. Maybe I should have.

I attended University the following autumn and moved away from my home town. This is where my extended metaphor falls apart, since I don’t know what became of the vacuum cleaner store. I would be kidding myself if I thought the symbolism would follow me through to the end of this essay—things rarely go as smoothly as you’d like them to. But that’s not a bad thing. The land that was vacant so many years ago was a symbol for as long as I needed it to be. Those past failures were not in vain. After all, they got me this far.