"From New York City to Juarez" by Alex DiFrancesco
“But I recall
All of them nights down in Mexico
That’s one place I’ll never go
In this life again.
Was I off somewhere?
Maybe just too high.
I can’t remember if we said ‘goodbye.’”
~Steve Earle, “Goodbye”
A few nights before Brian and I left for our cross-country drive, we were sitting in a diner near Times Square, high on Percocet, trying to eat eggs and bacon, but just poking with our forks at the runny yolks that shone under the bright overhead lights, sick to our stomachs. Brian had just had a cyst removed from his hand, and in the early 2000s, before the official opioid epidemic, this was still cause for a good, healthy-sized prescription of painkillers from his doctor. We abused them, or rather, I, not at all in pain and a few years out of a heroin habit that Brian had helped me ease away from, abused them. We had moved to Bushwick, Brooklyn, earlier that year from Wilkes-Barre, PA, and with a drug dealer friend who lived just down the hall we spent a lot of time on substances that cost us less than a six pack of beer at the bodega on the corner. “Softer” drugs than heroin and cocaine, mostly pot and Ecstasy pills that we popped one after another, late into the early morning.
I loved Brian with all my heart, and drugs had nothing to do with it. In the small town we’d come from, he was the most interesting person I’d ever met, full of art and passion and big dreams. After we’d gone out a few times, he invited me to a party at his house. His basement was full of broken, common things pieced together beautifully in boxes visitors were meant to stick their faces into to observe. His life was full of bright futures, plans, goals, things he knew he could make reality, and he talked about them incessantly. They were not the bright futures of the rich or professional—they were black stages with transcendent voices singing on them. When we moved to New York, we wandered the streets looking for people to fit into these dreams. We frequented the performances of a street artist named Thoth who had created his own alternate world that he sang hymns in service of; we picked up our favorite homeless street singers and they slept on our couch for months as we asked them to just in return, one day, play songs at our wedding.
Brian and I decided to drive to Mexico on a whim. I was 19 and read too much Beat Generation crap, Brian didn’t read at all but liked the unexpected. We were going to ditch our jobs for the summer, pay our $300 a person rent twice over with what we’d saved up from our part-time jobs and just drive around, camping and exploring. We’d go to Juarez first, then make our way up the West Coast. It was a small dream, the adventure of a broke kid who’d grown up with a frequently unemployed father and a secretary mother, and a middle class kid who hadn’t been uncomfortable but still hadn’t been to too much of anywhere. But it was a big dream at the time.
I won’t bore you with the memories of a 19-year-old’s road trip, that is not what this essay is about, anyway. I will just say that when we reached Mexico, after driving for three days, some of them in Texas heat with no air conditioner in my car, we lay on a bed in a cheap motel and watched a woman with a long, light blue wrap over her head and shoulders beg on the street below us. We drank and cried and fucked, and Juarez, where I will likely never go again, will always hold my memories about this love that was so big and breathless, and that I had to lose.
*
Legendary singer and songwriter Steve Earle, who wrote the song “Goodbye,” has been married more than half a dozen times, and that fact alone would probably make him an expert on heartbreak, even without his history of alcoholism and drug addiction mixed in for good measure. While heartbreak is not an uncommon theme in his work, I have long held that “Goodbye” is his greatest song of lost love. It might’ve been tempting to make the full line the title here, as in, “I Can’t Remember if We Said Goodbye,” but the single, common word that draws less attention to itself is actually the perfect one for the song. It’s got all the hallmarks of an alt-country lost love song: liquor and drugs, a partner who’s left the singer to moan his misery, romantic visions of Mexico. It’s simple lyrics are delivered matter-of-factly, but not at all casually. There is deep feeling even in the song’s unadorned, every-sad-man opening lyric, “I remember holding on to you / All them long and lonely nights I put you through / Somewhere in there, I’m sure I made you cry.” But then, the kicker, where the narrator truly descends to the levels he reveals himself capable of: “But I can’t remember if we said goodbye.” What kind of person wouldn’t recall such a thing? Maybe it was someone who, as he understatedly claims was “just too high,” or maybe that’s a smokescreen. It was certainly someone like Steve Earle, and, less notably and for so long, someone like me.
*
I wonder why we value goodbyes so much. As a concept they don’t change our experience. There’s nothing wrong with leaving a party by sneaking out the back door, and sometimes it’s even necessary. But, irrespective of this, we often find a need for closure. For sealing a time in our life with parting well-wishes. When my father died when I was 19, I lived in New York City. He passed away sitting in front of a baseball game, in a wheelchair, disabled by a stroke, in the house I’d grown up in. I never got to say goodbye. Our relationship had been fraught—and maybe that’s where the real need to say goodbye comes in, when things have gone up and down and around, when there’s been so much else unsaid. A goodbye can break your heart, or it can be a gift. It’s a gift people expect, and mourn the absence of when they don’t receive. I live in the Midwest now, where goodbyes often last comically long, an extended period outside a bar or a party where you say the word ten times before you act on it. Maybe this is better than cutting and running. There are so many ways to say goodbye, and notably, just one to disappear into the night with silence.
*
Brian passed away from multiple sclerosis in January of 2019. A few weeks ago, almost a year later, a friend who had come along with us on our road trip to Mexico posted some pictures to Facebook of him and Brian in the Redwoods, and in a national forest in New Mexico. The friend messaged me shortly after with two more photos. One was the three of us, in California, taken by someone who was passing by on one of our hikes, a lost-to-memory stranger behind the camera who will never know what they preserved. The other was of me, a skinny teenager in a ringer Budweiser t-shirt from 1981 and a pair of wide-legged 90s jeans, perched on top of Brian’s shoulders, the base of a redwood making us both look smaller and younger even than we were. The friend sent them to me privately with the message that he didn’t know if I’d want them to be public. So much had passed between the skinny, young lovers in that picture and the people we were when he died. I’m glad, in some ways, that the friend didn’t make the photos public. I feel like an interloper, often, even remembering. Brian’s life had moved on. He’d found love and purpose. I was a memory, maybe one best left in the past.
After our trip to Mexico, after we lived in New York City for years, Brian had convinced me to move back to our hometown, where he was planning on opening a bar with his family. He wanted to add life and culture to the desolate downtown we had known in our youth. The minute we got there, I lost my absolute shit. I couldn’t be back there, with my abusive family, with the town that had always felt like a coffin around me pressing back in on all sides. It was different for him. He had a vision of a place that would be, one day, that he could help move towards its potential faster. He had a vision of creating a space for arts and music and the black stage with the transcendent voices. I did not. All my dreams involved running far and fast from that place. We broke up a few days after we moved back.
I hated him, then, hated him with such fury that I fucked every last person who had tried to get me away from him while we were together while still fucking him. I was cruel and drunk and I started using heroin again, just to show him how he had ruined my whole life. I packed every last thing that reminded me of him in the hiking backpack we’d taken on our road trip and drove by his house, throwing it into the driveway, listening to the glass smash and the pictures crumple under its weight.
*
I first heard Steve Earle’s “Goodbye” in the 2001 film Big Bad Love by Arliss Howard. The film is based on the work of working class southern writer Larry Brown, and follows an alcoholic writer and Vietnam veteran as he navigates the PTSD-riddled fantasies strewn through his life, his addiction, and his divorce. Though the film was panned by a lot of critics, the twenty-something, addicted, love-lorn person I was then fell in love with it at first viewing. The soundtrack contained all my favorites: Tom Waits, Tom Verlaine, RL Burnside. The first time I heard “Goodbye,” I cried and cried. I put it on a mix for Brian, who I was still sleeping with and antagonizing as cruelly as I could with other sexual exploits. I wrote a long, self-indulgent letter about the associations I had with each song. I don’t remember what I said about “Goodbye,” but I know it must have been about our nights in Juarez. I know it must have been full of things I couldn’t even begin to express back in those days, but that I am trying to now.
It was a few months after that that Brian, who had always been slight, who broke ribs with ease, whose nose bled when we play-sparred with boxing gloves in our loft and I tapped his face lightly, was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. I went to his family’s house in tears the day I found out. It was 5 am. I was ill, too, in and out of mental hospitals regularly. His mom looked at me as she made coffee. She said she just wanted for Brian and I to talk, and she would go wake him up. We sat at the kitchen table, and I said, “I hated you so much, but I never wanted this for you.”
I began to think my hatred must be poison, and I had to be careful with it.
*
Ten years passed. I thought of Brian every time I listened to “Goodbye.” I thought of the woman in the pale blue shawl in Mexico, begging on the street. Brian got sicker. He kept doggedly pursuing his dreams until the end. He got engaged. He opened a music venue. He brought life and music to a formerly desolate place that so desperately needed it. By the time he passed away, the once-empty street he’d opened his business on was now called “Restaurant Row.”
I moved back to New York, then to Cleveland when the New York I loved was all but a memory to its current tech-and-banker-laden current incarnation. I wrote books. I published them. These were the dreams that I’d charmed Brian with when we were young, and now they were my reality. I transitioned genders, got married, got divorced. I heard about Brian getting worse. I couldn’t get that one line of “Goodbye” out of my head. “I can’t remember if we said goodbye.” I’d been back home less and less since my transition, but every time I’d been there, when I’d seen the people we had in common, I’d said, “I think about Brian. But I can’t see him the way he is now.” I felt so selfish, but that’s on par for the sort of person who can’t even remember if they’d said goodbye to the person who defined their young life and love. That’s the sort of person I can be.
*
In December of 2017, a year before Brian died, his cousin, who I’ve remained friends with over the years, got married. It was a beautiful New Year’s Eve wedding, and their entire family was there. The night was cold, the ballroom was flawless, the couple sang John Prine’s “In Spite of Ourselves” as part of their first dance. I drove from Cleveland and my date, a dear friend, came from from New York to Wilkes-Barre to join me. Brian’s mom, who I’ve never stopped thinking of as a second mom, came over to our table again and again, telling me that Brian was there and wanted to talk to me, but couldn’t make it across the room. I waited. Could I see him? I had to. I kept waiting. So much had changed. He was so sick. I was mostly sober, testosterone had changed my body, I was differently entirely. Maybe it was best to let the past be past.
Finally, I went to where he was seated across the ballroom in his wheelchair.
“Hey, Kid,” I said, using the nickname we’d often called each other when we were young. We weren’t young anymore. I hugged him. His body felt thinner, more fragile than I ever remembered it. I met his fiance, a beautiful woman who I had people in common with from growing up there. I held his hand for a second. He told me what he thought of my family’s decision not to speak to me after my transition—“Assholes,” he said—and smiled when I told him I was publishing two books in the coming year.
“And you,” I said, “you’ve done so much. Everything you wanted. You made it come true.”
“Well, not all of it,” he said. I knew exactly what he meant. For a moment, the black stage, the transcendent voices, the visions he used to whisper to me late at night, as we lay in bed in our dirty Brooklyn loft, as we lay in a sleazy Mexican motel, flashed between both of us. “I don’t know if it ever will now,” he said, gesturing to his body in the chair. “Not with this.”
A year later, he was gone. The day that his cousin called to tell me he was slipping out of life, I knew suddenly why he had been so insistent on talking to me that night. He knew he was close, then. He knew better than I did that there wasn’t much time. And he knew what it would mean to me, surrounded by the life and people I’d had to give up for my own vision of what my life could be, to give me a chance to, without question, say goodbye.
I am grateful for this gift, a gift which people fight for and mourn when they do not receive. I am grateful that the person I once loved would not let me hold onto the idea I had of myself, the narrator of a sad song who was too fucked up to know whether or not they’d made a proper end to something that had resonated through their entire life. In the end, I was not such a disaster, I was not so cold, I was not all the worst things I can be—solely because a person I once loved refused to make me live with that self forever.
Alex DiFrancesco is a writer of fiction, creative nonfiction, and journalism who has published work in Tin House, The Washington Post, Pacific Standard, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The New Ohio Review, Brevity and more. Their essay collection Psychopomps (Civil Coping Mechanisms Press) and their novel All City (Seven Stories Press), were published in 2019, and their short story collection Transmutation (Seven Stories Press) is forthcoming in 2021. They run the interview column “We Call Upon the Author to Explain” at Flypaper Lit, and are an assistant editor at Sundress Publications. They can be found @DiFantastico on Twitter.