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When I left Austin back in '85 it felt like an escape. It was the first of many, really, but as the first it has a special significance. I felt restless and rootless. I felt no allegiance to the town(or anything) back then. It was time to take the show on the road.
And that's what I did. First to LA, and then to Italy, and then to Spain, and then to Greece, and then back to Spain and then back to Italy and then to London and then back to Italy and then back to Spain, and the next thing I knew nearly 10 years had passed. I'd had it all, I'd lost it all, and I was stuck in a dingy one room apartment below Sunset near the Guitar Center with nothing to show for it all but the cold sweats and a bad habit.
There'd been a lot of extraordinary experiences and adventures through it all, but they were probably wasted on me because the main thing I was after was quiet and calm. Of course, I went about searching for quiet and calm with fervent and frantic abandon, and it goes with out saying that this led not to quiet but chaos, which made me search for calm with that much more frenzied desperation, The adventures seemed the unfortunate consequence of the chaos, not at all what I was looking for.
Home was a completely alien concept. My family was small, my parents estranged from their sisters and parents. I was born on the move, or maybe the run; by the time I'd landed back in that squalid little apartment in Hollywood I'd moved 26 times between 14 different cities, 8 countries and 3 continents, and that's not counting traveling or just getting a new apartment across town. I'd been married and divorced twice, hadn't seen my immediate family for 7 years, a half brother and half sister I hadn't seen in 43 years, aunts, uncles and cousins I've never met (and likely never will). If home is place specific or family centered, there was no home for me.
On the phone in the motel on I-35 someone said "Welcome home". And then she corrected herself...but maybe she was right.
"Austin's changed," my old friends with whom I'd recently reconnected said. "You'll barely recognize it" But I did. I hopped in the car and drove around by memory. Yeah, plenty had changed, but plenty more hadn't. The Riverside area of cheap student housing was now run down and hard looking ghetto. The old shack off 3rd and Liveoak now with fire-engine red corrugated metal add-ons & a weird and utterly pointless sheet metal tower sticking up 3 stories high in back; the place on Eastside Drive torn down for a McMansion, but the decrepit old place on 21½ street still there, wedged between cheap and ugly condos, not a single repair made in 25 years, a wonder that it hadn't collapsed on it's own. It was abondoned, the doors open. Stella and I walked in and looked around. Just the way I remembered it, but more so. Stella'd never visited me in that place, I don't think - we got to know each other later - but she did have some peculiar interactions with the dominatrix who lived upstairs, and it was Stella actually who found it again. I didn't remember addresses, only approximate locations, and all the condos had stripped me of my landmarks.
I hooked up with old friends I hadn't seen in 20 plus years, and made peace with old enemies. It was odd and a bit humbling to realize that there were people from so long ago who still meant something now, and surprising, too, to realize that there were people whose importance to my life today is so out-of-proportion to the amount of time we actually spent hanging around, and that the amount of time between then and now diminishes nothing
I realized in that motel room that I was home. Finally, something had come full circle. Finally I was back. And this part of the story ends.
These photos, starting in 1989 and ending in early 2005, basically cover that time between leaving Texas and returning some 21 years later.