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For Taz, everything is livable through laughter

BY JUSTIN WAGNER

Taz loves people. But that’s not what he tells everyone.

“Oh, I hate people,” said Charles “Taz” Rison, a grin lighting up his face. “But I love ‘em! But I hate ‘em. I love ‘em ‘cause they’re human. I hate their ways.”

Taz’s wry wit would have you believe he’s cynical — that he’s grown surly after decades in Nashville’s homeless community. But he’s quick to concede that seeing so much has inspired far more compassion than resentment.

“Well, OK. I tell everyone I hate people, but I actually love people, OK?”

That and humor, of course — because even when life on the streets is at its most dire, Taz finds the best cure-all is to laugh it off.

“I try to make life funny. That’s livable,” Taz said. “They say, ‘you gotta make life funny to live?’ Yes — it ain’t fun to live if you’re gonna live in misery. I see a lot of ‘em out there, too, in their vehicles. They don’t wave at you, don’t even smile, you can tell they’re livin’ in misery. But hey, people are gonna live the way they live.”

He’s found this to be the way of the city going on four decades now.

Taz has lived in Nashville for 35 years, and sold The Contributor on and off since the street paper first began. He watched Nashville bloom from a slipshod yet historic country city into a booming, trendy maw, hungry for tourists.

“When I was a kid, this town was tiny. Tiny, tiny. In the last 20 years, this town has switched up a lot… all these high rises, and all these Yankees,” he said, chortling. “I’m married to a Yankee, that’s why I’d say that.”

And though he’s watched development whip up around him as the city has grown, he’s always had a more personal stake in the homeless encampments coming and going than skyscrapers and coffee shops. Wellversed in Nashville’s roughest corners, he’s seen the city at its most human — and at its most fraught.

His first interaction with Nashville’s unhoused community was when he was 10 years old and saw a man outside flying a cardboard sign, asking for food.

“[My dad] handed me $20, I said ‘here you go. God bless you.’ I handed it to him. He said, ‘thank you, God bless you, you have a wonderful day.’ He went straight into Walmart and got himself some food. My dad asked me, ‘now, why’d you go and do that?’ I said, ‘Dad, people ain’t all bad.’”

By the time he was a teenager, he was using what money he had to prepare meals for people at local encampments. Now, nearly four decades later, Taz still counts himself among Nashville’s unhoused community as a member and a steward.

He finds happiness the same way he’s always found it — in the people he meets. But that’s grown to include a wife, a son, and five daughters.

“They call me all the time. [My daughters] are in Louisville, Indiana, Ohio, New York, and one here in Nashville … two of ‘em’s about to graduate at the same time. I said ‘how am I gonna be in two different states?’”

Keeping in contact with so much family over the phone is as chaotic as it is worthwhile, Taz said.

“I hate these phones. But I gotta have it for my kids! If [we] had pagers, this’d be a lot better,” he said, laughing. “They love to bug the heck out of me. They bug me every week!”

Whether his family, other homeless Nashvillians, or strangers on the street when sells the paper in Old Hickory, Taz keeps going for the sake of the people he meets. Because even if he tells you hates people — he really loves them.

“I love talking to people. I love hearing their life stories… people are what keeps me goin’.”