One does, periodically, have to go back home, doesn’t one?
The pandemic was over, I guess. I popped a 15 mg edible right before passport control, put on Avatar: The Way of Water, had a rough encounter with a loud fellow Amurrican on an escalator at the Doha Airport (him: “SERIOUSLY?! Well, FINE, go ahead, SPEED RACER!”) and flew over two oceans to O’Hare (more ugly upper middle class Americans in golf apparel, do these fuckers reproduce by mitosis?), wondering why the hell I was in transit, to arrive on someplace that seemed as familiar as a much-loved hoodie and as remote as the surface of the moon.
I sit, on a beautiful and perfect Middle American autumn day, on the patio, with my iced jasmine tea. I’d probably sat at this table before, how could I not have? Back when sitting at a vaguely trendy cafĂ© was still a complete novelty in this part of the world, and back when this very same iced jasmine tea – cold and unsweetened and smelling more like perfume than anything I was ever expected to drink -- seemed like a portal to something I could barely conceive of, but something which seemed important.
"I took it in my hand, tilted the shell back into my mouth as instructed by the by now beaming Monsieur Saint-Jour and with one bite and a slurp, wolfed it down. It tasted of seawater . . . of brine and flesh . . . and, somehow . . . of the future."
– Anthony Bourdain on
eating his first oyster.
Memories of memories – that’s what your hometown is, right?
I look over at the couple next to me – a time warp, the two of them. A girl with blonde braids and oughties Paris Hilton-style oversized sunglasses, a guy still looking like Chuck Klosterman wearing a cringe ironic graphic tee. And with that sip of jasmine tea, with the sun filtering through the cedars, golden retrievers playing in the fallen leaves, it was as if the weird times had never happened. The world, here, at least for the moment, and for many moments over the course of the next week, seemed fully a place where the weird times had never happened, an eternally sincere 2014, an outlier in a world far scarier, in which pessimism had long since been superseded by nihilism.
And my god is that hookah bar left over from the mid-‘00s still open?!
Even if I’m just a little too irony-poisoned and a little too insincere for this particular world, I appreciate the diorama. The sign reads “spice up your hair, pumpkin,” presented without comment.
So I walked and walked, biked and biked. I drank local gin and met strangers, people I probably would have wound up being friends with if I’d stayed around this part of the world, autodidacts and grad-school dropouts, snarky young farmers with excellent taste in whiskey and sad-eyed small town queer artists. A bartender saluting my taste in ordering a Last Word, instead of groaning about me taking up part of the world’s dwindling Chartreuse stock. I smoked far too much weed with good people in a house I once trick-or-treated at and watched the latest Maison Margiela runway and bummed an American Spirit on the porch and felt the presence of myself on another timeline, his aura overlapping mine.
But the more I walked, the darker I felt the aura to be. The Marine Corps recruitment center in the same strip mall as the Gamestop and the donut shop, across the street from the tobacconist loudly advertising kratom -- all of the supposed antidotes to the creeping misery.
And perhaps that single windswept strip mall, where I had once rented Poltergeist movies and bought Sour Patch Kids, was the skeleton key. After that, the more apparent the fundamental rot became.
It became apparent in the newly empty lots of the streets I had once walked, wastelands of cracked asphalt and crabgrass, the blank storefronts, the increasingly peeling paint, the usual Spirit Halloween dead mall, the gas station where I had once bought countless bottles of Sobe on summer nights, now feeling like a trap house, the chattering meth-teeth, the all the manifestations of the slow, general immiseration of the American populace over the past few decades. Even the solitary sneaker in the parking lot of the pharmacy seemed a horrifying portent.
To be accompanied conversely, of course, by the polyp-like clusters of HOA cul-de-sacs and Chevy Tahoes on the margins in what had once been field and pasture, where there had once been a darkness on the edge of town that had felt so comforting, distant lights flickering from town on one side, infinite fallow fields and thin strands of hickory and red oak beyond.
Enough to make me call into question the reliquary quality I had once seen. Because even if it’s there, it’s not my reliquary.
And that is why it’s a
memory of a memory. The memory itself is gone. Somewhere that aura remains.
