Tequila at Ten

Fertilizer, suspicion, and a surprise barstool truce at Gate H

July 15, 2025 – O'Hare Airport – Gate H – Rush Street Bar – 9:47 AM

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The flight’s delayed. Plane’s still somewhere over Indiana, and I’m already two Guinness deep at the Rush Street Bar.

Five stools. One hot dog roller. Two beers on tap. You could bottle the anxiety and sell it back to TSA. The kind of place built to be forgotten. Just the basics. You don’t want to overwhelm a traveler on the edge of a meltdown.

John says I've been sandbagging this farm season. Since it's not even ten yet, I figure I might as well act like it.

Navigating the narrow O'Hare corridors felt like swimming upstream through a school of dazed salmon, half of them British, or at least disoriented enough to seem that way. I finally ping-ponged into the last open seat, wedged between a fake brick wall and a guy who looked like he'd been marinating there since Saturday.

I parked my overpriced Ridge suitcase—olive green, hard-sided, and just pretentious enough to make me look like a consultant who'd charge farmers $200/hour to tell them their soil is dirty—dropped the CPAP case and the overstuffed backpack like I was settling in for winter.

Just as I sat down, the guy next to me got called for boarding. Maybe I smelled like beef jerky and road grime. Who knows.

Next guy slides in and immediately starts talking about tequila shots.

Jesus. Chicago doesn't screw around.

We don't say much at first, he’s just sipping a beer while I'm scribbling on a digital notepad like I'm rewriting the Gettysburg Address. Trying to dial in this speech for the Champions Alliance Group kickoff in two weeks. My stylus keeps circling back to the same opening line, deleting it, rewriting it, deleting it again. The blank page stares back at me like a judgmental ex-wife.

The place is packed. Everyone westbound and cranky. Our Salt Lake flight is now an hour late, thanks to backed-up traffic and general O'Hare dysfunction. I'm wired for this kind of chaos maybe twice a year. Three times, max, before I start Googling jobs in the Yukon.

That's when the guy next to me leans in. I feel the shadow before I hear the voice. A fog of hops and Listerine hits me first.

"Whatcha writing over there? Novel or something?"

"Nah," I say. "Prepping for a talk. Couple weeks out."

"Oh yeah? What about?"

I point to the Sound logo stitched on my 1/4 zip.

"Sound Agriculture. Been working with them the last couple years."

He squints. Then clocks the Source logo on my right shoulder.

"Sound Source … What the hell is that?"

Here we go.

I ease into it—fertilizer efficiency, biological activation, less synthetic input—but I can already see the regret creeping across his face.

"Yeah yeah," he waves me off. "Chemicals in the soil. Not into that. Not interested in anybody poisoning the Earth."

"Hold on …"

His hand goes up like he's stopping traffic on Clark Street during a Cubs parade. Eyes close. Head shakes.

"Not interested, man. You want a shot?"

For half a second, I want to tell him to go pound sand. The kind of simmering fuck-off that's been brewing through two years of being written off by the locals as the snake oil guy. The villain in some lazy greenwashed fairytale where I torch the land for profit while twirling my mustache from a lookout tower.

But I pause. Breathe. Try that mindfulness business I've been working on. Don't torch the whole damn field just because you hit a rock.

"A shot," I say. I check my phone. 9:58 AM.

"Can't drink all day if you don't start in the morning."

He grins.

"Reposado or Añejo?"

"Your call. I never caught your name."

He extends a catcher's mitt of a hand, limp as shaking hands with a soggy burrito.

"Gerald."

"Adam. Good to meet you."

He orders two 1800 Reposados. Between that and the Guinness, I'm flirting with a nap on the plane tray table.

"Where you headed?" I ask.

"Spokane. Buddy's got a cabin. No return date. Just … seeing what I can find."

He’s dragging a fingertip through the sweat on his pint glass, tracing circles like he’s divining the future. Keeps checking his phone, even though it hasn’t buzzed once. There’s something anxious in it. Like a guy pretending not to wait for something.

Then it surfaces.

I’ve heard North Idaho’s crawling with Nazis. Bleeds into Washington too. Gives me the creeps, but if it comes to cracking fascist heads, so be it. I’m a Black man from Chicago. This ain’t my first rodeo.

The bartender slides our shots across, her smile still intact despite the chaos. We toast. No lime. 1800 goes down easy. My early-40s palate has finally matured. I let it roll through my system like jumper cables for the soul.

I exhale, watching the bar swirl around us.

"So tell me," I ask. "Have you always been worried about chemicals in the soil?"

He furrows his brow.

"I help people build raised garden beds," he says. "All-natural. No chemical warfare."

"Right on. So what do you feed 'em?"

"Feed them?"

"Yeah. Plants need food. Otherwise they're just organic disappointment and broken hope."

He laughs.

"Well … it's in the soil. It's a 56% organic mix. No fertilizer. Just compost."

"Where do you get it? How's it workin'?"

I keep nudging. Not to corner him, but to understand. I like Gerald. He's thoughtful. Misinformed, sure, but who isn't?

Eventually, he leans back, gives me a squint.

"So what makes your little Sound Source thing any different from those dirty bastards at Monsanto?"

I consider correcting him and telling him Monsanto’s long gone, just a haunted wing of Bayer now, bleeding cash and lawsuits. But he doesn’t care about that.

He wants to know if I’m another suit slinging poison.

So I level with him.

"We're wasteful as hell in ag. Especially with nitrogen. We throw it on like confetti and hope it sticks. But only about a third of what we apply actually gets used by the crop. The rest? Leaches down or gasses off into the atmosphere. Or runs off and ends up in your drinking water or someone's lake."

Gerald's beer is getting warm in his hands. His eyes are doing that thing where they're not quite focused on me, but they're not looking away either. Processing.

"Phosphorus? Same thing. We apply it, but it ties up in the soil and the plant can't even reach it. Like downing a steak and wondering why you're still hungry."

Now he's watching. Still skeptical. But listening. He starts tracing patterns in the condensation on the bar.

“Source doesn’t feed the plant,” I say. “It just turns up the volume on the signal plants already use to talk to soil microbes. Like flipping on a neon sign that says: open for business.”

"Plants talk to microbes?" he asks, his finger still drawing invisible circles.

"Hell yeah. And microbes talk back. Soil is more than just dirt. It's a whole living economy. And we've been running it like a dictatorship."

He chuckles. "Well shit. That actually sounds … kinda cool."

"It is. But try telling that to most farmers. They're set in their ways. Pour it on. Hope for rain. Call it farming. And honestly? I get it. You don't think about your carbon footprint when you're underwater on your operating loan."

He nods. Slow. Thoughtful. Then I let it slip.

"I write about this stuff on Substack. Farming Full-Time. Try to explain what it's really like to be seen as some villain with a sprayer and a vendetta."

He studies me again. Less defensive now. He wipes the condensation away with the flat of his hand, like he’s clearing the slate.

"You know," he says, "You're alright. At least you act like you give a shit."

I do. A lot of us do. We're just trying to survive a system that was designed for extraction, not longevity. Mine it, ship it, move on. Doesn't matter if it's topsoil or a farmer's will to live.

There's a pause. No announcements. No hustle. Just two guys sitting in a corner booth, halfway to understanding each other and completely buzzed at 10 AM, which, let's be honest, is probably the only way real conversations about agriculture happen anymore.

"Well hell," I say. "We gotta have another shot. Can't fly on one wing."

"You buying?"

"Damn right. My treat."

We toast again. Another 1800. More warmth. More static in the cables.

As we wrap up, Gerald gives me his number. Tells me to send the link to the newsletter. “I'll read it on the plane. Might learn something." I sent it before he could change his mind.

Before we part ways, he tells me more about those raised beds and how he helps folks grow their own food. He's proud of it. He should be.

I don't bother pointing out that the compost he hauls probably started as corn grown with a shot of 32% liquid nitrogen and a herbicide cocktail. Doesn't matter. He's doing the work. That's more than most.

He never fully admitted he was lumping me in with the bad guys, but the tone shifted. The edge softened. The eyes stopped rolling. That was enough.

When they called our flight, I lugged my gear toward the gate, buzzed, but steady. Not because I'd sold him anything. Not because I changed his mind. But because I didn't lose mine. I stayed in it. Had a real talk with a real person. One who, for a minute, saw me as more than just another poison pusher in a company pullover.

He said he’d check out the newsletter. Maybe he will. Maybe he won’t.

But for once, I felt like I moved the needle, even if only a tick.

That’s the real work. Not the conferences. Not the PowerPoints. Not the white papers three people might skim. It’s convincing one person at a time that we’re not the enemy. That we’re just trying to keep the lights on while the whole system burns down around us.

For thirty minutes near the end of Gate H, Gerald saw past the logo on my shirt to the human underneath.

And in this business, that’s about as close to victory as you’re gonna get.