wherever they go

This is about 3000 words about Memphis. I’d like to write something about the places I went in 2020. I’d like to write this regularly this month! I feel extremely attuned to what people are writing or saying out there, and somehow too invested in my ambivalence about some of it. I’ll always feel weird about a newsletter, and yet happy I have it. But maybe people with cred or followings should maybe not write whatever in a newsletter without an editor? Who can say! But I read anyway. I don’t know.

It’s bad out there. That’s another thing. Why write the things I do in these times? I’m trying to read the plaintive missives of people smarter and better and more alert or vulnerable than I am. Still. One thing I guess I won’t let go is that I think people should write and make things and I would like to still have those. The beginning and the end of the world, ourselves or nothing, I might as well fucking write. But I don’t know, and I don’t feel great, having takes or the sheds of my own despair. I want to be here for it as I can. I don’t know. We’ll see. I’m not that articulate.

In any case, I hope maybe you keep reading, because I care a lot more about this and worked on it (should have worked on it more!). I work in a law and policy nonprofit and it’s dire. Most people I know are currently being actively fucked or put into terror or threatened by what is happening (lucky and unlucky included). I try to do things: delivering food boxes, going to the local food stuff, bringing cash around to hand out, not internetting, reading about Chile in the 1970s and lots of other countries, reading, generally, that doesn’t involve a screen, books. Trazodone, sadly, gave me tachycardia. I hope to find more of my friends’ music and art and the summer, soon. It is not going to get better for some time. It is going to be hard. We have to live. That’s I guess what I got. What do you got?

What has hit: Pedro Lemebel, Odetta, Violeta Parra, kava kava tea, walks, no Instagram, introducing myself sincerely, local candles, being able to talk to far away friends every once in a while, the Orange line, trying. Country Western music, too. Thanks for being here.

1st in a series

In a bar with someone who I like a lot but gradually stops talking to me, I said I had a good song for his theme of “Unexpected Sadness.”

"That’s How I Got to Memphis”, I said. “But that’s because of a girl.” I digressed into the sad songs about Memphis, landed on Chuck Berry’s “Memphis”, another song searching for the lost, sweet Marie. Memphis: some sad, mythic home to girls you can’t quite find again.

“That’s How I Got To Memphis” was not sad five years ago. It was restless and impulsive to sing in the first few days of March when I drove out of Chicago for the weekend. I slipped through the corner of Arkansas, pulled off a highway to see Johnny Cash’s childhood home which was akin to most of the tired homes I’ve seen in states like Arkansas, which is to say, it’s neighbor, Oklahoma, and the homes half of my blood grew up in. Another small abandoned town with a highway leading back east, the sun in a long descent with blue about Dyess and it’s small theater. I turned back with car wheels on an empty gravel road, the sound of it sweet in my ears.

-

My friend lived in Downtown Memphis, where if you walked a mere few blocks the lazy and murky Mississippi gleamed off the Bass Pro Shops pyramid. Either you know about the Bass Pro Shops Pyramid or I guess you don’t, but having been into enough Bass Pro Shops, I didn’t need to step inside with it’s indoor stream and what I assumed was a range. Better to shoot outside.

She moved back there, after we met in Chicago, and then returned. I drove in on a balmy night and we walked the dog, my stiff shoulders in a cutoff tank top. Around midnight we opened the loft’s windows and let the humid air in around the last legs of the grassy white wine.

We smoked out the window into the haze around the streetlamps and I felt as I often did around her: thrilled in the space of excess, the edge of an intense conversation, the incandescence of someone’s attention on me, only me.

-

If you do not fall in love, at least a little bit, with the beings that are mostly voltage and hot tattoos and beauty and good hair and mean and funny jokes and the ability to cycle between tequila and shitty rose and sneaky cigarettes from a girl bike gang, then you’re a stronger man than I. I got a few summers of being in this girl bike gang and I was saved and the better and the worse for it. (The joke? Turns out we were not actually all girls!)

The apartment my friend lived in seemed to be the headquarters those summers. Everyone lived in Humboldt or Logan or Avondale and so it worked. Not me, who cherished the wobbly, bike rides home alone, the bruises collected on my shins and the chime of gang text messages late-late or in the morning - U get home?

My friend seemed to be the leader, who chose to cross our wires, adjust our knobs to shift currents. We were underemployed or mad about our jobs, we were mostly fucking mad, we were in shitty relationships or frustrating ones, we were treated like shit by men often, we wanted to ride our bikes together, we wanted to gossip, we wanted to be able to walk into bars and coffee shops and bike parties and pizza places and smile at each other. For a time, there was an actual gang. That no one ever initiated me in remains a great regret.

Watching her coalesce us all impressed me and I felt something I often did not: I desperately wanted to be a part of it. I wanted so much to be her friend. These feelings are rare. They are so easy to miss, fervently.

-

There’s not room anymore to be taking off or moving between places as my way of life, or at least I’ve told myself this in middle age. The thrum of bolting roars it’s loudest if I’ve been put for about six months. A year ago I took off in a warm spell down to Indianatucky, to sleep and dick around on a bike in the Hoosier National Forest. It was daylight savings time and also St. Patrick’s Day and after not sleeping well, I packed up my gear in my headlights, made my way to a Waffle House a few miles from the Kentucky border. The waitresses were ebullient and pretty, their butch manager or girlfriend just grouchy enough, one of them handing out green plastic necklaces and Red Bulls.

A waffle, coffee after coffee, hashbrowns and American cheese. I wrote in my journal: Waffle House, shy of Kentucky, and I miss _ I guess. 

-

On the brink of it all smashing into what 2020 ended up being, I went down to Memphis and followed her around in the same amazement, the same feeling of fortune, the same confusion of relief and envy and pride at being there, with her, in those moments.

In the Tennessee sun we blinked off the white wine and drove out to Waffle House. Grits and coffee and waffles and Coca Cola, her excruciatingly good sense of humor working off the hangover. We drove to Graceland, because she knew I’d want to go to Graceland and love it, with her.

Together we wandered through the house of green shag carpet, white colonnades, the John Stamos version of the life of Elvis Aaron Presley. Karate Aficionado with the Nickname Tiger. Photos of Priscilla. His plane, the Lisa Marie, that we wandered up into. Graceland is also sort of a trap, and costs extra for all the Elvis paraphernalia. My friend murmured Elvis’ true into my ear in her dusky voice, worth every penny.

She wanted to drive my car down Elvis Presley Boulevard into Mississippi, and I let her, happy to be her passenger. She showed me where she’d grown up, her high school, stories of what I of course knew were the stories of a girl I would’ve been desperate to know in my own adolescence. Someone who would bring the tequila and I’d be thrilled to designated drive and drop her somewhere else. Some part of me always loyal to women like this, their stories I always want to hear, their pretty speed and charm, their cunning and smarts and knowing always where to go. I don’t even like Paul Simon, but she was the one to take me to Graceland.

-

I’d come off a month in San Francisco of my own careful making, not sure how to talk about it to anyone, making a point while I was there to explicitly not talk to anyone, trying to write. On my last night I wandered the few blocks from where I’d slept on the couch of my friend and mentor’s house into Club Deluxe. I listened to a band play the B-3 organ and some horns. My friend and I loved the music of Stax Records. When she told me she’d spent time working at Sun Records, as we laid on the carpet in her dark garden apartment drinking tequila, I begged to hear the stories.

After Graceland we went to Hernando’s Hideaway that night because there was a Booker T. and the MG’s cover band. She drank martinis and I drank whiskey and I smiled at how she and her boyfriend loved each other, this actually beautiful couple. I knew I was a third wheel. I knew I was alone. I knew this was what happened.

There’s fortune in being in those beams, in the light people share even as you just can’t quite get inside its edges. Why be dishonest? Just because I wouldn’t know how to say it, still don’t, and probably couldn’t untangle those feelings, I’m sure I felt it then - how I would not know how to shift, because I wouldn’t know what to do, and because it’s a terrible feeling to admit but to have: that you are alone, that you love someone and will for a long time, and they are not alone, but you still are. This feeling that will not move and will not ever be untrue. This feeling to carry and hope to find something on the other side, even as you admit there are times you cannot stand being next to that light, that you wish you would not be able to say it to yourself, to know it.

She had a list of names for her future children, and I knew them. I knew she wanted children, to get married, to raise a fucking cool daughter. I knew these things and I wanted them for her and I listened to some of the travails of that path as best I could. The confusing pride and pleasure in feeling like an adolescent boy next to her, but one she loved and was sweet to, and who she listened to. I listened. She went back to Memphis and that night, again in the late dark, I heard again about what could be. It would be.

I was so happy that Saturday with the music all about us, awash in dark lights and her smile, the kindness of her soon to be husband and his sweet company, and “Time is Tight” and how I knew she was happy. I had three nights there. Time, tight.

I want this to be about Memphis, how I keep thinking about it here, in March, with the winks of warm weather and the long silence between us. Here’s the part where I tell you we don’t talk anymore. I think it’s probably my fault, or it’s everyone’s fault, but we don’t, and it was not an easy way to part. I gild and weigh down the hazy memories of our twenties and 2020 to shine. I know it’s stupid, and I do it anyway.

This should be about Memphis. It should be about the walk we took down to the river and the fried chicken and bottles of High Life after the line at Gus’s World Famous, and how her accent returned and I swooned, a bit, watched her amongst her new friends, the beautiful houses with verandas and stone steps, the bridges over the muddy water at dusk.

It should be that I’ve figured this out by now or at least known how it’s supposed to be, but I don’t. It is not as though she is an anomaly: there are other dear friends with children and homes and commitments in my life. I am very aware that I am the one still alone, lucky to know whatever hues people share that I work to move in between. I am very aware I have no partners or children. I am very aware. There’s not really much to say, that we don’t all necessarily know in our own skulls, our own unspoken conclusions. There’s not much I want to say. I don’t think it’s very interesting, not to write about, certainly, and it is equally uninteresting to cast it in opposition to every other situation I am not in. Yet I still understand why the stories and writings and advice columns roll out over and over again. I am so ashamed that I have heard and know what I am supposed to do, and yet I still don’t do it, or I don’t know how to do it, equally, with everyone.

The days of March lengthened so we took in the long bridges in the golden hour of evening and in a few days all of us would not be going anywhere and my friend would talk on the phone and text until we stopped, even as the world shifted cadence, again.

I don’t know why I cannot brook these things. There’s a metaphor here, about how the Mississippi starts so small, north of the place I moved away to where I missed her, and then blooms out near Memphis. There are bridges there.

Another friend who repaired bridges with me told me to reach out to her. I think about it. I would not expect her to reach back. The Delta starts in that corner, hundreds of miles wide. An old song about rivers being wide, but you can’t cross over.

-

A few months before I left Chicago we went down for a long bike race that we both didn’t give a shit was a race, named after another big race that seemed sort of dumb to me. I ended up mad at her for leaving late, for wanting to cut off our course, for stopping so much. But she made me laugh anyway as we yelled at rocks that were not gravel and ate energy waffles. She took good pictures of me. She made me stop at Cracker Barrel on the way back from Southern Illinois and worked away my shitty attitude with peg games and nostalgia.

If I just got angry, if I ever got angry, sings Bill Callahan, one of her favorites, who we watched sing in his sexy and deep voice, who she literally introduced me to, blessedly.

It took me too long to get angry. Here are the scales being added and subtracted to: the foolish, fierce and pitiful remembrance of summers you just have to know were fucking glorious, the anger I would not let go and could not be understood, the regret and shame, and the uncertainty it would be muddied, stretched, end up empty anyway.

-

My last day in Memphis we went to a beautiful house owned by a beautiful friend of my friend, because at the time what I wanted was beautiful and cool people. I still do. It was a Polish party, but I don’t remember why. We made potato pickle soup and brought it over, toasted pilsners and drank vodka.

Her friends had an in-ground pool behind the beautiful house, slightly mossy and verdant. It was still too cold to swim but I imagined life there. There’s a good photo of us next to the pool. I don’t have it in my possession, but I never deleted the ones of Memphis. I don’t think I deleted it from the internet, either. Which is more than I can say for so much of what I collected, visually, over the past 10 years.

My friend told me to move to Memphis. I did apply for an artist’s residency, once, and like all the rest of them, I didn’t get in. There was a lot to love: music, the weather, my friend, the idylls of the geography I was taken with. I’ve done this once: moved closer to a place my friend was and hoped it would work out, and it didn’t. It was like any other time someone I love very much told me to just move to where they live. I don’t know what to say. What about where I live? I say. What about what I am supposed to find? Yet here we are. I reaped, I sowed.

We sat in the sun and drank probably too many Miller Lites and ate pirogi and watched kids speed around on training wheels. The next day we rose and rode the streetcar, stood silent before the Lorraine Motel. I stretched out the hours as far as I could go over barbecue and sweet tea. Then I went back up 55, listening to Country Western.

A week later nobody started going anywhere, and then people got married and had babies and I let my heart go hard, and stopped talking eventually, and two years or so later probably listening to Tom T. Hall probably I made it worse.

She would get mad and she’d used to say she’d go back to Memphis one day except, my friend, she’d already gotten there. I never have got back there.

It’s March now, and mild. For a moment the golden hour and gilded weight of a few days and the memory of her sharp sheen makes me think we could erase the shame and lonely and anger and differences between us. That it would be enough of the hue and light I could swim towards, over the gulf of how life works with not just houses or vocations or committed partners or children. Maybe it could be.

I keep crossing back and forth over all the bridges, regain enough breath to keep crossing to the shores of others, remember it is honorable and kind to follow. I still wonder one day if I could get back to Memphis.

-

This is the cover I have been listening to mostly, lately, that has me feel more optimistic, and I also like his version of Link Wray’s “Fallin Rain”:

But also, do yourself a favor, because this is the one I’ve sung up and down highways and byways: