Ghosts
METRO NORTH, MAR 2024 — On the gray way back from New Haven, Tom Waits rasps through my headphones:
Well my time went so quickly, I went lickety-splitly
Out to my ol’ ’55
Pulled away slowly, feelin so holy
God knows I was feelin alive
Sometimes “Ol’ ’55” brings me to a desert road, but this time it brings Tom to me. He spreads over the space across the train’s aisle, hazy-eyed, feet crossed by the window. There’s a smell of stale cigarette smoke as he plucks his guitar clumsily, muffling the strings, swinging the rhythm. Then his voice rises and crackles like a hearth:
Now the sun’s coming up
I’m ridin with La-ady Luck
Freeway cars and trucks
Stars beginning to fade
And I lead the parade
Just a-wishin I’d stayed a little longer
Oh Lord, the feelin’s gettin stronger
He wails, celebrating and lamenting the pace of life—too fast and too slow—as the melody drags him along. One moment you’re with your lover and the next you’re speeding away, one of many carried along as the sun pushes through dawn...
A metallic thump brings me back. Some cars on Metro North are smooth—this one rattles like a covered wagon. I feel the stiffness of the machine in my bones as it tears a scar through the New England coast.
I came to New York a month ago after a period of restless travel, and now I find myself, remarkably, shuttling back-and-forth from New Haven, where I lived a previous life as a college student. Life has been strange to me lately, keeps moving me along, bringing me back.
Now the sun’s comin up
I’m ridin with Lady Luck
Freeway cars and trucks
Freeway cars and trucks
Wolves
SANTA ROSA, CA, JUN 2024 — We came far to get here, out and away from our lives. It’s a yearly gathering of friends on a 70-acre property, a DIY electronic music festival complete with loudspeakers and smoke machines and lights. I come a few days early to help set up. The next morning, fog fills the valley, and when it clears, the day is hot and dry. Then another day.
On the morning of the festivities, people arrive in their camper vans and hatchbacks. We spend the day lounging and meeting each other, some already in their space-themed costumes. After sunset, as the music begins, blaring loudly into the night, I go out back and watch the full moon rise over the pines.
Then we dance, all of us, until morning. As dawn light begins filling the scene, we notice the moon, big and orange, sliding back under the hills. There’s something so human about shunning the authority of the heavenly bodies.
The next night, when the moon returns, we howl.
People
The word “person” comes from the Latin for to sound through. It’s necessary, at times, to peel back the life that you’re clothed in and let your body resonate.
Some forms of music are easy to enjoy; electronic music is not. It’s terrifying, dark, and abrasive. You listen through it to come to terms with the fractured world as it is. It’s about dancing, sweating, moving to the rhythm of abstracted noises, isolated rings and thumps, out-of-context snippets of sound. Finding a place for your body in the roar of machines.
Form
A fish is molded into a streamlined shape by the movements that its life requires: forward, always forward, through water—toward food, away from danger.
What is the shape of a human life? Hands that grasp and touch and gesture, lips that speak and blister and kiss, feet that run and dance and stomp. Minds constellated with metaphors: to grasp at an idea, to speak of the devil, to run into a wall. The shape of a human life is an endless turning into itself, a descent into a hall of mirrors, a fractal of emotions and ideas and movements.
Rainbow
Growing up, says Julio, his race, his sexuality, his politics, didn’t matter. His face as he speaks is covered in a regal mask of sequins. It’s my first time talking to him, the only way that I’ve ever known him.
Born to a seven-times-married Mexican father and an Italian mother, he has grown up all over Latin America, Europe, China, the U.S.—more places than he can count. I laugh when he says earnestly, in an unplaceable accent, “Oklahoma—those are my homies.”
To me, California will always be home. The way the hills move, the way the fog sets in, the way the trees layer over the horizon. But when I ask Julio where his home is, he smiles and looks off to the side. Then he turns to me and says simply:
“Home is where my friends are.”
✤
