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Friday, January 02, 2009
STRANGER IN MY OWN HOME TOWN
Elvis Presley
From Elvis In Memphis
BMG : 1969
[Buy It]
GOIN' BACK HOME
John Fogerty
Eye of the Zombie
Warner Bros. : 1986
[Buy It]
One of the things about this time of year is that it involves lots of time in houses. For me, this year, that meant lots of time spent in one house, as a long-term guest, for a period that spanned from just before Christmas to just before New Year's. I was there long enough to bring about a slight shift. One of the last days, I was out driving with my kids and my older son got tired. "I want to go home," he said. There was a moment of uncertainty. "Home home or home here?" I said. It was a question that meant nothing because it meant too many things.
The house where I was staying was my wife's parents' house. It is in suburban Miami. It is the house where she grew up, and I'm sure she has a different relationship to it than I do. Whenever we visit, she takes a walk through the place to see what's changed since the last time, how it is growing incrementally more distant from her. We stay in the room that was her room when she was a child, and while I'm told that it looks nothing like it used to, the resemblance is strong enough to trigger a cascade of memories. My seven-year-old son likes to hear about how the house used to look, and once or twice he asked my wife what would happen if he walked into the bedroom and saw the ten-year-old version of her there. She had no good answer. These Twilight Zone-style displacements are reliably exciting for seven-year-old boys, but somewhat less so for the adults who have to accept the fact that they are impossible.
The house where my wife grew up is a few miles from the house where I grew up. More than once during my time in Miami, I drove by my old house and parked on the street so I could look at it. Once, I had my kids in the car, and I pointed at the window that used to be my bedroom. The plants just outside the window are different. There aren't asparagus ferns that lizards can run across. The shutters are different so I'm sure the lighting inside is different, not to mention the furniture, the wallpaper, the smell. The people who own it now have a boat in the driveway, which we never did. It's hard to look at it and think it's the same place. I drove home and my younger son, who is four, leapt out of the car excitedly and went to tell my wife that he had seen my house. I didn't punish him for the lie. Later, I asked my wife whether she thought it was stranger to drive by your old house and be put off by a new paint job or to sleep in your old house surrounded by deceptive familiarity. "This bed squeaks," she said, either answering or avoiding.
The house where I grew up is near the houses of lots of other people who grew up with me. I think that's what "where" means. One day, I was going out bike-riding, and I thought I'd probably be going by the childhood house of a friend, so I wrote her to mention it. She said that as far as she knew, the house had been totally renovated, but had since been redone a second time into something that more closely resembled her childhood home. She told me a story about a fire that had once broken out in the yard of the house next door. I started to tell her about the things I was thinking about the insides and outsides of houses, but then I stopped. I was on vacation. She was, too. Why bother her with lots of theories? Instead, I took a picture of her house. It was a picture of the outside of her house but I am sure that for her it is a picture of the inside, too. One person's photograph is another person's X-ray.
The house where my friend grew up is near another house, entirely nondescript, where I once found myself, a few years ago, paying a visit to a friend of a friend who had moved to Miami. While I was in the house, I needed to use the bathroom, and while I was in the bathroom, it suddenly occurred to me that it was the same house where I had spent a few summer afternoons more than a decade before, during college, with a girl from high school. A strange-shaped window in the bathroom tipped me off. I had run into the girl at a movie theatre. We had gone on a date, just one, at a restaurant where the waiter was unfathomably incompetent, and then we had returned to her house and taken up a series of compromising positions on the couch. (I had wanted to go to the bedroom--the couch was the compromise.) Eventually she relented and we went to the bed, where there was a poster of Iggy Pop. "This is a fun house," I had said, as a joke, and she had laughed and buried her face deeper into the side of my neck. In the house years later, I dared to open the door to that bedroom and look inside. It was an office now, with a big wooden desk and a computer and no poster. This past week, I didn't go by that house. Why bother? Houses are hosts rendered unrecognizable by parasites, and that's no fun to hang around.
If I hadn't been on vacation, I am sure that I would have been able to put together a trenchant examination of location and memory as articulated through songs about domestic spaces. In songs, home is a highly elastic term that stretches from the spiritual end of the spectrum (Blind Willie Davis's "I Believe I'll Go Back Home") to the carnal (Alex Chilton's "Take Me Home and Make Me Like It"). Home is proof of presence except when it's a felt absence--sometimes it's where you are, and sometimes it's where you aren't. Figuring all the psychological, metaphorical, and erotic complexities is like counting the rooms in an infinite house. But in Miami, I couldn't even get started. I felt out of place, not to mention out of songs: I was having trouble with my iPod and had to use my wife's, which had almost no music on it. It didn't have Joe Hicks' "Goin' Home" or the 13th Floor Elevators "Slip Inside This House" or Lefty Frizzell's "I Was Coming Home to You" or Grin's "Hi Hello Home" or X's "In This House That I Call Home" or Sarah Vaughn's "Baby, Won't You Please Come Home" or the Shangri-Las' "I Can Never Go Home Anymore" or, most damningly, Sam Cooke's "Bring It On Home To Me." It didn't have them, and so I didn't have them. They were at home without me, and so I wasn't at home without them.
As a result, I didn't write the piece I should have written and I didn't even think about it in any productive, anchored manner. I just rode up and down the streets of suburban Miami, listening to the few songs about home I had managed to locate on my wife's iPod--one was a Elvis Presley soul shouter about home towns rather than homes, the other a beautifully evocative and evasive John Fogerty instrumental about returning home rather than being unable to return home--and looking at the houses of people I no longer knew. Then I flew back to New York alone; my family was following a few days later. I got back to my house late at night and tried to come in like a stranger, but the week or so that had passed hadn't introduced enough unfamiliarity. I sat on the couch, trying to remember what about the place I had remembered when I had sat there before, trying to anticipate what I would remember later. One of the things about this time of year is that it involves lots of houses in time.Labels: ben, elvis
posted by Ben
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