Even after a decade of wrangling jobs with medical benefits and galloping from one office job to the next, Arvin Temkar was no cowboy. Here he writes a fond remembrance of the ill-fitting Stetson hat that helped him feel free from the daily grind.
By Arvin Temkar
These days, cooped up in my apartment, far, far from the range, I’ve been thinking about a cowboy hat I once owned.
My cowboy hat was too small. It sat awkwardly on my head, like a Tupperware lid mashed onto the wrong container. I’m not confident it would have stayed attached if I rode a horse out on the ranch or ambled off into a breezy sunset.
Of course, a real cowboy would know how to choose a well-fitting hat — but I’m not a real cowboy. I’ve never been on a horse that wasn’t bolted to a coin machine. I haven’t spent time in an outback that didn’t serve bloomin’ onions or wrangled anything more impressive than a desk job with decent dental benefits.
I’m not a real cowboy, but I loved my cowboy hat. I bought it in Fredericksburg, Texas, during a road trip through the Lone Star State with an ex. We stayed at a motel that had a sign in the lobby warning, in big saloon-style letters, “We don’t dial 911.” Affixed to the sign was a silver-barreled revolver.
Not too far away was a store that sold hats and boots and denim vests with American flags sewn to the backs. That’s where I saw it: a Stetson made of hardened shantung straw, off-white like a polar bear’s belly. It had a leather-braided hatband with diamond-shaped silver conchos. Now, this was a cowboy hat. I reached for it, placed it on my head, and checked myself out in the mirror. It looked like it fit, but I was too embarrassed to ask anyone for help. After all, what was I — a half-Filipino, half-Indian American, coastal city slicker — going to do with such an ornament? But I had to have it. Though I felt foolish buying it, I also felt liberated.
Wearing my hat, I imagined I looked a little like Paul Newman’s Butch Cassidy, or — if my hair was longer — like the late, great Texas country singer Townes Van Zandt. In it, I felt closer to the cowboy life, or at least what I envisioned to be the cowboy life. That’s why I bought the hat. It embodied those starry cowboy ideals of independence of romance, of rebellion. Of freedom.
It’s strange to think how the meaning of that word, freedom, has changed since the pandemic. Today simply leaving the house can feel like an act of liberation. But in the before-times, I had loftier visions of freedom. I saw myself as something of a cowboy. For a decade, I lived an itinerant, lonely life, taking jobs where I could or where there was promise of adventure. I rambled from Boston to Berkeley, to smalltown Hawaii, to Tokyo, to New York, to the island of Guam, to Monterey, and finally to San Francisco, where I hung my hat (so to speak) for several years. I got used to packing up and moving on, leaving possessions and people unceremoniously behind.
The one thing that stayed with me was my beat-up, acoustic guitar. On lonesome nights I plucked slow, sad Hank Williams and Merle Haggard tunes in my bedroom and smoked Marlboro cigarettes out the window. (I happened to see Haggard play an Independence Day concert at Billy Bob’s Texas, the famous Fort Worth honky-tonk, a few days after buying my hat. I wore it in public for the first time, both thrilled to be there and painfully self-conscious of being the only brown person in sight.)
But despite my travels, I didn’t think of myself as free — not really, not like a real cowboy. I was, as a friend once put it, a “21st-century knowledge worker.” In other words, a cubicle-dweller. A white-collar stiff. An office drone chained to my sit-stand desk. Far from free.
In one of my favorite songs, country singer Ed Bruce warns, “Mamas don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys.” Cowboys aren’t easy to love and they’re harder to hold, Bruce sings — they’d rather give you a song than diamonds or gold. Encourage your children instead to “be doctors and lawyers and such.”
I suppose “marketing content writer,” the job I had in San Francisco, falls into the “and such” category. But sometimes I’d get fidgety in my small, windowless cubicle, churning out marketing copy. My mind would wander and my head would fill with cowboy songs. I’d wonder what it’d be like to be a cowboy — to inhabit Bruce’s world of smokey old pool rooms and clear mountain air, where the currency of love isn’t diamonds or gold, but songs.
On one restless workday morning a few years ago, facing the prospect of eight hours in a swivel chair, my mind got to wandering and my head filled up with cowboy songs. I decided on that day I’d wear my cowboy hat to work.
It was cold and rainy when I left my house. I felt silly in my outfit: skinny black jeans, a dark gingham shirt under a wool sweater, a puffy North Face jacket, and my big crooked Stetson. By the time I got to the bus stop, my Keds were damp and my hat had nearly blown off twice. But no one seemed to notice me. Pedestrians hurried past with their umbrellas and Fjallraven backpacks. When I boarded the bus the driver ignored me, as did the passengers. I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the bus window, my face and my hat in shadowy profile like a Marlboro Man ad.
I trudged up a hill to my office, a four-story building with a distant view of the San Francisco skyline. I was early, and no one was in. I sat in my cubicle and powered up my Macbook without removing my hat. It didn’t seem appropriate to wear indoors, but I wanted to see what it felt like. At home, I’ve often sat in front of my laptop with my cowboy hat on, looking up the words to songs or typing out lyrics I’ve written, but this experience was different. In the office, where a colleague might walk in at any moment, I felt inauthentic and exposed. Who was I kidding? I was no cowboy.
I started to remove the hat, but, momentarily emboldened, changed my mind. I went into the break room to brew a cup of Earl Grey tea and as I sipped it I envisioned myself crawling out of a sleeping bag in the brush and heating a tin mug of cowboy coffee over the coals of last night’s fire.
I went into the bathroom, lifted the toilet seat, and imagined the coals sizzling and spitting as I extinguished them. It felt liberating.
When I got back to my desk, my coworkers were filtering in. I took off my hat, and set it down on a stack of papers. I opened up a web browser to check my email, but before logging in I went to the search bar and typed in the word “sunset.” I found an image of the sun sinking brilliantly into a black mountain range. I admired it for a moment, inhaling the sweet, clear air. A taste of freedom. Then I put on my headphones, settled back in my chair, and got to work.
Of course, that feels like forever ago. Now as I sit in my apartment day after day after day without even an office to escape to, I wonder: If I wasn’t free before, what am I now?
So I’ve been thinking about my cowboy hat. I no longer have that hat. I left it unceremoniously behind on my next move, to Atlanta, where I live now. But I find myself missing it. I’ve been browsing cowboy hats online, comparing materials and bands and brim sizes. I think to myself: If I could wear a cowboy hat one more time then maybe, just maybe, I’ll remember what it’s like to feel free.
And maybe this time, I’ll buy the right size.
Arvin Temkar is a writer and photographer in Atlanta. Follow him on Instagram and Twitter @arvintemkar.
