A vision while driving: a band of mariachis on the subway in Manhattan, crowded by their instrument cases and other passengers, holding the handrails. They end up outside some apartment building on the Upper West Side; a four piece lodged in the throat of pavement traffic; apparitions among street signs and parked cars and garbage bags. A man, the arranger of this display, stands with flowers in front of them. The band plays, the guitarron swallowing or being swallowed by the low rumble of traffic on Broadway, like from the belly of a beast. They look up at a window beneath the stars that twinkle like the silver trim of their charros, a window full with the silhouette of a woman, both of her arms extended to the edges of the frame, her body a quivering flame on an altar, her bare skin drinking in the moonlight, joined soon after by another shadow, darker and more solid, weaving itself around her waist, under her arms, pulling at and closing the curtains, and in the squeal of the trumpet there is a tearing pain, a cry of agony, washed away with the band’s calls of endless love and devotion.
In that way you used to kid yourself, passing by Her apartment when you’d find yourself in that corner of the city, watching the window from across the street, seeing the light through the kitchen and living room, wondering what the odds would be that she passed by and looked out and saw you, if she would even recognize that it was you, what you would do if she did, what would she do, if there was anything left to be said or done. Something died. Useless and limp it laid before you and you just had to get used it and keep walking around it until it didn’t feel like it was there anymore.
“I’ve hung around too long, listening to the old landlady’s hard luck stories.”
Distance is a way to measure success.
Scott Walker was a singer-songwriter from Ohio who died in London in 2019. He broke onto the scene in the sixties as a member of the Walker Brothers (they weren’t really brothers; his real last name wasn’t even Walker), and would continue working as a solo artist, record producer, and scoring films (notably for Brady Corbet) for the rest of his life. Walker’s music is incomparable in the strictest sense of the word. Because people couldn’t place it, at least in the United States, he never got the widespread critical attention he deserved, although those who could (particularly in the United Kingdom, where he was best known, but even then you couldn’t call it more than a cult following) were quick to call him a genius.
Whether his intent was to land in the UK and spend his final days there or not, the trajectory of Walker’s life and those of so many, famous or not, are examples of the mileage racked up from forward movement. Crossing an ocean or a continent has never been easy, despite how efficient transportation has become. Distance doesn’t change. You owe it to yourself to go as far as you can, as far as opportunity and your feet will take you, riding on the momentum of circumstance. Where you’ve been is an inextricable part of who you are, much more than where you are going. Where you’re going doesn’t matter because it hasn’t happened yet, and should only be of minor importance (perhaps a little more to you, in relation to direction: a lighthouse to beat on ceaselessly towards). You could go an inch; you could go a thousand. Distance, in this case, being achievements, goals met, family, friends, lovers, memories, pictures, paintings, books, records, scars, tears. A snail trail of testaments to your being. Not in the sense of leaving them behind, but looking back and seeing how they’ve marked everything you’ve done. Not saying that someone can’t live and die in their hometown, leaving for long periods, living around and travel the world and coming back. Ibn Battuta did that. But draw that trajectory on a map, see how long the line is. Draw a line from Ohio to London, and consider all that passed in between. Where you end up is as important as where you started, they inform each other, despite what little bearing the latter may ultimately have on one’s life, it always has some.
You once wandered the Royal Mile in search of soul food and a place to eat. In the days prior you’d had haggis, swimming in a rich moat of its own juices, and drank whiskey until the meat of your eyes throbbed. Not a vegetable in sight, not that it had gotten to you yet (it would be nothing compared to the Balkans). Perhaps all roads truly lead home, in your cells you may have been screaming for it, who knows, but somehow you ended up at a Formica table holding a cheeseburger. A man like a ranch hand— Stone Cold Steve Austin with long hair spilling from under a camouflage cap, blue jeans, and boots— served it on a tray with tufts of fries atop checkered paper lining. He had twang to his talk, warm like the strum of a campfire song, familiar like the house across the street: you’re well aware of it although you’ve never seen the inside, which is probably as foreign to you as one in a house at the other end of the world. You’d been running from exactly this, wanting to find the furthest thing from it, from American, from such insularity, but the revenant always finds you, in whatever form and no matter how soon, so you had to ask how. A Missouri man, a cowboy, brought across the pond by his duty to his country, staying for the Highlands, the hunting there, and his business, the restaurant. He was dying to go home, he said. He’d been saying that for twenty years.