Stop, 'Cause You're Killing Me

Sometime in 2021, I think, my youngest brother, who I have since been fighting with, made a post on his now deleted Instagram. It was a series of photos of our hometown of Fort Worth, Texas, at dawn. I think about those photos a fair bit. I didn't see them until much later, maybe a year ago. I don't really know if they were any good or if they were worth much to anyone, but they are, for whatever reason, a part of my permanent memory.

I can't accurately summarize them, but I will try: The First United Methodist Church of Fort Worth on 5th Street under streams of clean sunlight. Darkened neon signs. Empty bars and restaurants. The 7th Street bridge sans traffic. Lifting fog like pollution hovering over the pavement. No cars. No people.

I don't know when the photos were taken or what their purpose was. If they were taken with friends to document a random moment in time, or if they were snapped haphazardly. It doesn't matter much, I guess. The photos are gone now even if I wanted to know their secrets, vanished with a deleted account. Were they taken before COVID? During the lock downs? Last week? I could have asked about them but, as I said, we'd been fighting. It seemed a bit silly to ring him up and ask about the circumstances behind a handful of deleted social media photos.

But I remember seeing them once while scrolling through my Instagram feed and feeling suddenly,  powerfully nostalgic. I don't remember how or why I found them, just that I had. It prompted a kind of dislocation, with the softness of jet lag and waking dreams. That was Fort Worth, the place I lived for nearly twenty years. The place I had lived in the longest. But it always looked like that to me, somehow, even when I was there and it was full of people and car exhaust. 

My fondest memories of Fort Worth and the country of Texas, because Texas is a country if you're from there, is of its loneliness. I loved being out in Downtown on a Sunday morning to open up the restaurant where I worked at the time. Strolling Main Street alone on a Tuesday night and hearing nothing but the muffle of the music piped in from speakers in the square. The 7th Street shopping plazas when no one was around. Loitering around the Masonic Temple on Henderson Street and waiting for something to happen behind its black windows. Walking to the church down the road to vote when the polls first opened and watching the sun splinter between the bare trees that lined our block. Watching the smoke from the stacks of the plants that stretched down 1-35 and were visible from my house.

Fort Worth is lifeless to me.

I miss the lifelessness, the stillness, of the country of Texas.

But it was never like that, was it?

Stop, or You'll Make Me Cry

On April 1st, quite randomly, Melissa and I went to Miami to see the opening night of O, Miami's annual Poetry Festival. O, Miami is an important fixture here where I live these days. They do a lot of work with schools and local programs to enrich public life through poetry. In April, which is National Poetry Month, they put up billboards, stage activities, and hold events to ensure that every single person in Miami-Dade County encounters a poem. It's quite lovely, honestly. 

It event went something like this, per O, Miami:

Celebrate the beginning of National Poetry Month with O, Miami. Spend an evening with poet Hanif Abdurraqib and writer Alexandra T. Vazquez as they discuss how music and other cultural activities forge a sense of place. Conversation moderated by P. Scott Cunningham.

Melissa really wanted to go. I wanted to see Hanif Abdurraqib read because I follow him on Twitter. I find his writing on music really beautiful and compelling. Over the years, I keep picking up his books of poetry, reading them, enjoying them, and then putting them down halfway and forgetting about them. I do that with a lot of other poets, too, but among them, Abdurraqib suffers the most frequent disrespect. It isn't the work's fault that I keep rereading the same half-book over and over, unable to remember to finish it. The fault rests squarely with me and the ever-growing pile of comics and manga that wink their eyes from my bedside table.

And so we drove to the historic Lyric Theater in Overtown, got lost three times, received some help from a woman with stunning eyelashes, and tried to figure out where to park in the rain. 

Seated in a century-old theater that had staged some of the most important and influential Black artists in Florida's storied musical history, we certainly did poetry. 

(Please note that the embedded video plays from two different timestamps over the course of the evening but shares the same preview image.)

It's impossible to summarize a live reading and Q&A when you didn't take notes, so I won't try. But the night was about history,  time, and place. Vazquez read from the closing chapter of her book The Florida Room, which uses the architectural space of the Florida room to encapsulate Miami's vast and eclectic history in terms of its music, culture, diaspora. As a Miami native who escaped and never returned, despite her longing for her hometown, it was fascinating to listen to.

She also published the definitive paper on freestyle, Can You Feel the Beat? Freestyle's Systems of Living, Loving, and Recording, in March 2010. I definitely added that to my pile of reading. Next to Abdurraqib's various half-finished books.

Next, Abdurraqib took the stage to read from a chapter of his upcoming book. He spoke about his hometown of Columbus, Ohio, and the vibrant, nearly mythic, yet unheard and undocumented histories of its East Side neighborhood. The conversation that followed was beautiful. From hanging out with kids who fashioned themselves as demi-gods to championship boxers returning home as kings, he cements his neighborhood, the place where he still lives, as a place worth documenting and historicizing. Defending. Dissecting. 

To see people from vastly different zip codes writing and speaking about their hometowns, to come to the same calling from such different avenues, it made for a fulfilling conversation. One escaped from home and the other remained, both living with, working within, and working through those respective literal and psychological borders. Homes are strange like that. Melancholy like that. Beautiful and maybe harrowing. 

For me, home is the Kingdom of Texas. A place so large that you could walk hundreds of miles in any direction and never see anything else but Texas again. It's a country made up of hundreds of little countries, its cultural landscape vast and varied. Music. Food. History. Wars. Storms. Fires. Technology. Movies. Paintings. Dust. It all runs together in this river of limerock and sky and you just feel so tiny when you look out on the horizon and see only Texas.

All of which to say, that show made me miss Texas, but not for its people. Maybe that's sad. I think it might be.

Here We Go, Searching for Gold

The last time I crossed the border into the Kingdom of Texas, it was a week before the COVID lock downs. I got on a plane and listened to passengers whisper conspiratorially about anyone heard coughing or sneezing in the next row. There were small, sporadic conversations about masks and government conspiracies. These things were usually spoken with sneers or laughter. I knew COVID was scary the way swine flu and avian flu were scary. The vibes in that cramped cabin were rancid, as they say. Still, I got on a plane to go back to Fort Worth and see my family. I had bought tickets two months prior, before we started getting really scared. 

I hadn't seen them since 2018 in 2020. I haven't seen them since 2020 in 2023. I don't know when I can go back.

The trip was unremarkable. However I remember it is probably different from how it was remembered by my family. That's usually how these things go. I managed to avoid everyone I used to know and not run into any old friends or coworkers from my days in the restaurant industry. I may or may not have burned some bridges on my way out of the country. Going back to that dusty town was peaceful enough that I don't regret the going.

Sometimes I miss its silence. I used to go places by myself back then. Walks. Drives. Runs to the store. Sunsets on the ridged horizon and slow drives over the worn-down cobblestones of Camp Bowie Boulevard in Old Fort Worth. Sunny afternoons looking at bleached buildings in the North Side. Empty places examined on foot. Burned-out shopping plazas and derelict apartments on apocalyptic days when everything smells like melting sidewalk. The Will Rogers Coliseum. Museum Walk week. Number 1 Chinese Restaurant across the street from my old community college campus. 

I say all that like Fort Worth wasn't threatening as a queer person sometimes. Like I wasn't harassed on the street. Like there weren't dangerous people. Like the cops didn't threaten people. Like people didn't lie to the cops to get my neighbor's dog seized and put down. Like there weren't shootings and stabbings in my neighborhood. Like people weren't scraping by just to live when things got scary, and they got scary quite a few times. Like my family and my relationship with them isn't a psychic minefield.

Sometimes I want to go back to Texas and feel small as the country rambles on forever everywhere around me.

But I don't miss the people. 

I wish I did.

There are people worth missing. I still talk to and keep up with them. Everyone else just disappears into my memories of home. My not-home, former home. Anti-home. A place I have to remember in deleted photos just to miss it. Florida is not my home, either. I live here because it houses me. When I listen to people write odes to Miami, they're lovely, but I can't relate. Miami-Dade County is a ten-minute jog away and Miami city limits is close enough to call the block on the other side home. 

I didn't grow up working through this place. I think that's okay. Miami does what it needs to do, in giving me streets to drive down when I want to see the ocean. The city lets me drive around the lived-in, well-loved neighborhoods to see what all these poems and songs were written about. Train tracks and chicken joints and Bad Bunny blasting out of every car window. There are scars on the land from floods and hurricanes, and the city never hides them out of shame. I came here because Melissa came here twenty years before me, and because I couldn't be in Texas anymore without screaming. It's been kind enough to let me rest here for now.

Miami can stay belonging to Alexandra T. Vazquez the way Columbus belongs to Hanif Abdurraqib. I'll keep Texas for myself, even if Texas couldn't keep me.

Someone let me know if Texas changes its mind.

A Final Note

So, in other news. On April 1st, I also appeared on the Rite Gud podcast with Raquel S. Benedict to discuss the seminal queer text, auteur Robert Hiltzik’s 1983 film Sleepaway Camp. This was definitely not an April Fool’s bit. Not at all. I very seriously discussed this film in complete sincerity as the powerful piece of queer cinema that it is.

It was great to hang out with Raquel. Hopefully one day I will get to do so again under less shitposty circumstances.