Most recollections tend to fade with time. This one didn’t.
During the first decade of this century, my publisher arranged for me to go on a series of book tours. This was before Zoom and podcasts and the demise of many bookstores altered the way new books are launched. There was a tour when the hardbound version was released, then another a year later when the paperback edition came out. There were five tours in all during those years, for three different books.
I was on the fourth of these tours, for the paperback release of Mexican Days, a travel narrative of journeys I’d taken around Mexico. This was around fifteen years ago. I could pin down the dates but it’s not important. The publishers had focused the tour around the western and southwestern United States, where interest in the subject would presumably be the highest: Texas (Houston, Austin, San Antonio), Colorado (Boulder, Denver), Phoenix, Portland, Seattle - and a dozen-odd stops in cities and towns along coastal California, from north of San Francisco down to San Diego. I may have omitted some locales, but again, it’s not important.
Much of what transpires on a book tour is inherently forgettable. You fly or drive to a town or city and check into a hotel or motel. There may be radio or television or print interviews during the day, or not. Then early in the evening generally, you are picked up and driven to a local bookstore. You do a reading of twenty minutes or so. Often you read the same passage from the book as the night before. Then you answer questions from the audience. After that, you sit at a table and sign books. There are small variations: you read a different passage on some nights; there is a larger or smaller audience than usual; someone you know shows up. Or one day it might be a panel at a book festival rather than a store. On occasion there is dinner or drinks afterwards, but more often than not by 9 pm you’re back in your hotel room. In the morning you’re on your way to the next town.
Sometimes these tours reminded me of my early road life as a musician, though compared to transporting and setting up a drum kit then disassembling it after three hours of strenuous performance, a book tour was a walk in the park. Just a copy of my book, marked at the page I was to read from, and I was armed and ready. These bookstore appearances, brief and benign, tended to draw audiences interested in what I’ve written about, or at least open to it. No drunks, no hecklers. And some were real fans who had read earlier books and even brought them for me to sign as well. To be honest, I remember little from that tour except for what happened near the end, which I can’t seem to forget.
It was the second to last stop on the month-long tour, a bookstore in La Jolla, California, not far from the border with the country I’d written about. A few dozen people showed up, as I recall. I probably read a passage from “La Frontera,” a chapter of reflections about the border while crossing it. Then I took some questions. One man sitting near the back raised his hand.
“I don’t get it,” he said.
He was pale, wiry, fortyish perhaps, with rimless spectacles. From his appearance, I could imagine him as an engineer or a tech person at a lab at the nearby university, maybe a guy who bicycled to work.
“You’re from here,” he said. “Why go over there? Why do you need to do that?”
This was his question, simply put. It was unexpected, and it disarmed me. I could have answered him in so many different ways. Curiosity. Desire. The simple delight of it. To widen the concept of my American self. To learn more about the earth I inhabit. To break the chains of the familiar. To distance myself from things that oppressed me back home. To write about it.
In a sense, the book itself sought to puzzle that out, decode an inexplicable restlessness that had impelled me on these voyages, examine displacement as a steady state. But then maybe that was not what he meant by his question. Or maybe it was.
We gazed at each other across some invisible divide. The man didn’t seem hostile, just perplexed. He truly didn’t get it and I truly didn’t have a simple answer for him. The truth is, I don’t recall what I replied.
Was he suggesting that for us natives of the great imperium, visiting lesser lands and peoples wasn’t worth the candle? Did he not wonder even a little about what lay “over there,” as he had put it, just 45 minutes by car from this bookstore? Was he simply a provincial, racially biased, smug white American, content with what he had here and dismayed at the confounding specter of immigration? It seemed too simple.
His question would linger and haunt me. I still chew on it, its import, its meanings. It’s a riddle that doesn’t resolve. He, incurious about the world beyond his purview. Me, who hungered for the distant, the foreign, to whom comfort was less about a fixed abode than a good set of shocks. Was there something lacking or broken in me? Or him? Or both of us?
The following night, the tour wrapped up uneventfully at a bookstore in San Diego.
Recently, developments in my life have brought me back to California for a while. As the country enters a contentious election year, with la frontera at the center of acrimonious debate, I see it from my double-sided perspective. Many here experience the rising tide of human difference, of foreignness, as a personal threat and retreat into entrenched chauvinism. Again, and too often, I think back to that man in the bookstore who found it inexplicable, mysterious that I would choose to experience and write about life across the border. In my head, I’m still formulating my answer to him.
Mon sembable, mon frère. My other.
This brought to mind Sen. Tuberville's comment about Mexicans last week, that they aren't Christians. I mean, how could anyone that ignorant be a US Senator, and earlier in life, a BCS-level football coach?
During my tavels and residencies abroad, people have asked m. why am I here? I never have a ready answer. Mostly, I'm here because I'm here. I only planned one trip in my life, from the US to Europe. All the others were acts of fate.