I’m looking at a gone girl right now, with a platform smile and legs all the way to her hips. She’s got peanut butter eyes, and for some reason she makes me think of Memphis. Not the Memphis in Egypt where the cats built the pyramids under the same starlight that we’re living under, but the dirt-real little town that sleeps on the side of the Mississippi.

I’ve never seen the girl before, and I’ll never talk to her, but I know her heart is made of butterscotch and her thoughts are a taffy pull of rainy autumn days and polished hardwood floors. And she makes me think of Memphis.

She doesn’t know I’m watching her. I’m sitting in a little room, surrounded by the subtle and pleasant hum of machinery and fluorescent lights and I have the time and the peace to write little things like this. She and I have actually talked a few times in the last few hours, we’ve exchanged pleasantries and shy smiles, but there’s nothing else. And now I’m thinking of Memphis.

What does Memphis mean to you?

Memphis means everything to me.

Memphis is the highway unfolding in front of me and diners sided with old refrigerator doors, nestled at desolate country crossroads. Memphis is removing the plastic cover on your motel glass and letting it fall to the shit-green shag carpeting and pouring two fingers of bonded Kentucky bourbon into it. Memphis is the ache in the delay of a transoceanic late-night phone call with not much to say for itself. Memphis is drinking tea in the afternoon until you can meet your friends at the mahogany paneled bar where famous writers didn’t drown their livers in rivers of authenticity, just you and me. Memphis calls me late at night to sit silently on the phone while we ponder Memphis is the most beautiful word I’ve ever heard. It even looks attractive there on the paper. Look:

Memphis

Do you see how it looks attractive, with peaks and vertical rules and a rounded flourish at the end? When Memphis and I are together, everything around me slows to a crawl. Memphis is due south on major highways from everyplace I’ve ever lived. It’s waiting for me, and I’m waiting for it. Eventually, we’ll meet on the side of the road.

The sound of Memphis is the warm hum of an old amplifier. It’s the wind whistling through the high pines on a moonlit Appalachian night. Memphis is the Chatterbox Lounge, which has red carpet on the walls and served warm Schmidt and Grain Belt, slightly flat, to old men wearing farmer’s overalls who play the same scratchy Frankie Laine 45s over and over again on the aging and wheezing jukebox. Girls who wander in there by mistake always wear too much lipstick and mascara and not enough smiles.

When I used to drink at the Chatterbox in St. Paul, white people all sat one side of the bar and black and Mexican people sat on the other side. I sat in the middle and no one talked to me but the bartender. I would tell him about Memphis and I, and how we would meet as soon as my ship came in, how I would fall to my knees sobbing at the gates of Graceland and he said "Why? It’s just another grave."

No, that’s a romanticization of it. The way it really went was that my friend Dave and I refused the opportunity to buy a new bike from a guy in a booth at the Viking Bar on the West Bank of the Mississippi River in Minneapolis. "It fell off a truck," he told us. "No thanks," we told him. "Then how ’bout buying a joint?"

We did. The transaction took place under the table, and then we were faced with some uncomfortable moments. Emily Post never mentioned post drug-deal etiquette. What do you do? We made small talk, and I told the thief-dope dealer about how I wanted to get to Memphis and see Graceland some day and he said "Why? It’s just another grave." There was silence.

Then Dave and I walked out of the bar and onto the pedestrian footbridge across the Mississippi and we stood in the middle, under a light, and got giggling stoned. We talked about the dope dealer who turned out to be a philosopher-king and we talked about renting a fast car and driving to Memphis that weekend. The water flowing beneath us was on its way to Memphis, too. It hummed like the machines in the room with me now.

Once, I dated a girl who hated me most of the time, but she kept dating me anyway because – well, I don’t know why exactly. She drank too much and told everyone, including me, how miserable I was as a human being, much less as a boyfriend. I didn’t mind much. I viewed the whole experience as important somehow.

One weekend, I left our love nest and traveled to Minneapolis and back. I returned late at night and crept into her room and into her bed. She didn’t wake up. Her hands were balled into little fists. In the morning, I told her how I had driven back along Highway 61, along the banks of the Mississippi, through Hastings and Red Wing and Winona, and when 61 separated from the river, I kept following it as closely as I could, past ramshackle houses that were flooded away every few years and their attendant cars, serving as royal court on concrete blocks. I told her how, at a crossroads, I sat through three sets of red and green lights, wondering if I should turn left, and back home, or just keep heading south to Memphis. She burst out crying and I never figured out why. I would say her crying sounded like Memphis, but that’s corny. And anyway, her crying sounded more like York, Nebraska on a Friday night when all the high school kids dress up and cruise Main Street.

She had been out of my life for quite some time when Dave and I got stoned on the bridge, and I bring her up now only because, like everyone I’ve ever met, there’s a little bit of her in every story I tell. There are bits of Memphis in every story I tell, too. Watch:

I’ve heard that in Memphis there is a hotel, the Peabody, where ducks are honored guests, with red carpets and doormen and everything. The ducks intrigue me. I went to high school in a drab suburb of Minneapolis. The high school was on the shores of one of Minnesota’s ten thousand lakes, a lake that was probably a very pretty place until real estate men subdivided the surrounding area and put up an astoundingly bland collection of split-level ranches and ramblers around it. When enough houses were sold and occupied, traffic necessitated the sort of engineering marvel we love to pat ourselves on the back for – a bridge bisecting the large lake for our town’s main drag. The lake was big and shaped like a diamond that had been stretched on one axis. As if to prove their engineering prowess, the planners made the bridge start and finish it’s traverse of the lake at the furthest possible points.

The bridge itself wasn’t the sort that spans things. It was actually just dirt and slag heaped in the center of the lake until it rose from the bottom and a road could be laid on top of it. I didn’t see the engineering to it, really, but our town was very proud of it.

I didn’t much like it. One day, to my everlasting horror, I watched as a mother duck tried to herd her flock across the road at noon. In a puff of feathers, her family was halved and mashed into the pavement. I had just finished reading "Catcher In The Rye" and immediately thought of Holden Caufield wondering where the ducks in the park go when the water freezes. I’ve always thought of that part of the book. I’ve thought about it so much that I’m no longer certain it’s in there. I guess there’s a little bit of those ducks in every story I tell, too. And some of Holden’s ducks and some of the hotel ducks and even Susie the Duck in Lodi, Wisconsin, where I spent an eternal night in the hotel bar drinking with ex-Yankee hopefuls, college girls and my best friend who was about to fall in love with my best girl.

Do you understand any better about me and Memphis now? No, me neither. Do you understand any better about just me, then? No, me neither. And it would probably take a fast car, a lot of beer, and a long night drive to Memphis to explain it any better.