MAGAZINE STREET
I’ve been in New Orleans since Sunday afternoon, and though I’ve spent my days bicycling up and down familiar avenues, I’ve firmly kept my mind on the present.
But on my way home last night I couldn’t help myself, and I went many streets out of my way to pedal past a house at 1217 Magazine Street. I know this space well. The tilted front porch, the moldering bathroom, the sagging ceiling. I stood outside it, trying to figure out how to best photograph it in the dead of night, with no flash handy, when a man walked briskly past me and went through the gate. I meekly justified my presence: “I used to know someone who lived here.” He shrugged, and went inside.
The house on Magazine Street. I’ve sent countless letters there. Postcards. Packages — a few. Taken cabs to and from it. Drunkenly bicycled home to it. Flown a few hundred miles to get to it. It’s just an old falling down New Orleans house, not much different from its neighbors. In this house I felt safe, I felt welcome, and I felt certain. That I experience the remnants of those feelings now is a perfect example of the creeping vine we call memory, nostalgia, or wishful thinking.
I didn’t come to this city expecting to be overwhelmed by memory, and I haven’t been. But there’s something special to this little facade, the four columns and the dormer windows, that permits access to a past I’ve largely avoided thinking about.
It’s a strange thing to hinge emotion on place, especially in my case, where places — cities, states, homes — come and go at a rate of about one every two years. In 2004 I drove a rental truck through Louisville, Kentucky, on my way to New York and decided to stop by a childhood home. It is a dark grey two-story stone house, with a large backyard that abuts railroad tracks on the left side, a convenience store at the back, and the main road on the right. While I’d only lived in this particular house for a year or so, I remembered exactly how to get to it without knowing the street names or even glancing at a map.
A new family lives there now. There was probably a different family before them. I have no idea how many times this property has been bought and sold or rented. But I do know that at some point in the mid-1980s I sat on the back porch with my BB gun and shot at milk jugs suspended from trees. My brother and I found a hole under fence that we could squeeze through to get to the railroad tracks. We’d pretend we were train hoppers, or put pennies on the tracks and wait for the train to come through and spit them out as thin brass curls. I have a moon-shaped scar on my wrist from the time I fell from the stone wall at the entrance to the subdivision. Because the cut was on my wrist, I was convinced I was going to bleed to death and everyone would think it was a suicide. I bought baseball cards and Lemonheads at the mini-mart. There used to be a liquor store next to it, but it burned down and I told everyone I suspected arson. Then there was the time I found a dead squirrel in the drainage ditch and decided to bury it. I made a school friend dig a hole while I lifted and pushed the tiny corpse to the grave site with a stick. All the while a local teenager looked on and spat insults at us.
I sat in the rental truck mulling over these memories until a suspicious look from a neighbor made me feel guilty, as if I were casing the house for a robbery. Whatever sense of ownership or belonging I felt about the property had long before been usurped. I put the truck in gear and went on my way.
I wish there were a better way to deal with memories. A scientific wave of the hand that made them inert, ineffectual. Memory has a wildly hallucinogenic power over me that I consider unfair. Just as the grey stone house in Louisville turned a snapshot of a year of my childhood into a vivid moving picture, standing outside the house on Magazine Street activated another slide show. I could see myself standing on the porch, waving to a girl pedaling away on a bicycle. I was terrified she would be hit by the city bus roaring past her. I remembered that in the winter I could see my breath inside just as well as outside. And how the red walls in the bedroom absorbed candlelight, causing the high ceiling to appear as an ever-diminishing dark horizon.
Strangely, these recollections now make me feel as if I have intruded on something profoundly private or forbidden.
How can that be? They’re my memories; those scenes belong to me. Or do they? In Louisville I cased a property for remnants of the past; in New Orleans I take poorly-lit photographs of a home I only ever visited. These places are packing crates for memory. Convenient placeholders. Perhaps that’s why I feel so guilty for remembering — I am claiming tenant’s rights on spaces that cannot be claimed. Trying to raise something real and graspable out of muddy nostalgia. My cheeks are suddenly hot. I am embarrassed by this — my affection for the past, and the way it takes hold of me.
Finannly, though, it occurs to me that this deep conflict over memory, place, and identity is exactly what my trip (and my graduate thesis) is about. Possession, past and present, the familiar and the foreign. All the ways we know and think we know ourselves.
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