Every voice was a companion.

Every voice was a companion. Some mornings I called the time and temperature man a dozen times just to see if anything had changed. Most afternoons I called the school homework line, an answering machine service that allowed me to leave messages for my seventh grade teacher. I confessed that she was my favorite. I sang songs I had written for her. I told her my parents had separated or gotten back together and we were moving again. The TV was never not on. My best friend got a karaoke machine, and we locked it in echo mode. We stood on the toilet, ears angled to the ceiling to hear the muffled murmurs from the apartment above. Vampires, I deduced. Who else would shuffle all night? We traded the microphone, deejays of a show that never aired. We recorded all of 1996 that way, one voice behind the other. Even now I can’t stand quiet. I wake up to the radio, to the cats meowing as you mumble a sleepy good morning. You fall back into silence, but I carry the public radio voice of the world in my work pants pocket. The answering machines don't exist anymore, but I can hear them -- the time, the temperature, my seventh grade teacher's "hello" -- the soundtracks that carried me from there to here, echoing still.

Mood v.14 We said yes and we said yes

Summertime, trying to pretend the end isn't near.

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Mood v.13 But honey, I'll be seeing you down every road

Started saying goodbye way too early. Honey I'll come get my things, but I can't let go.

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Mood v.12 I'm better I'm better I'm better

March music, crossing the country twice. Boston was Big Sean and both the Future albums. By the time I reached Miami, Drake's dance hall versions were the perfect backing sounds.

Or listen on Apple Music.

Southern (Dis) Comfort

The short film I produced and co-directed is now online. Aubree Bernier-Clarke and I filmed "The Ballad of Little Pam" in Delhi, Louisiana. The short has played in film festivals in New Orleans, Jackson, Miss. and Sydney, Australia.

When her mother falls ill, Pam Sykes returns to rural Louisiana to care for the woman who kicked her out 40 years ago. They coexist, as long as Pam follows one, now unspoken rule: She can't date women.  When Pam's mom starts dating a new man, Pam decides to see what's out there, too.

After the raid

At the restaurant El Sarandeado, where breakfast is served with a side of free shrimp ceviche, Ramon Ramirez was sly with his movement-building. Between ordering huevos rancheros and coffee, he persuaded the waitress to post signs advertising a 1-800 number people can call if they see an ICE raid in progress.

He pointed across the street as he asked for Splenda. ICE had raided that corner, he told the waitress. Two men were waiting in front of a convenience store for a van to take them to work. Federal agents picked them up before the van did. 

The waitress, an hour into a 12-hour shift, left with a flier and returned with six packets of Splenda.

Mood v.11: Stick to the Plan

Or listen on Apple Music.

TriMet to truckstop: A homeless man's four-hour journey to shelter

The temporary shelter booted the homeless at 8 a.m., so Rickie Wright passed the morning under awnings and other dry spaces. At 11, he decided to shoot for some place warmer.

"Does anyone know when the 77 comes?" Wright asked a group of people at a bus shelter on Northwest 5th Avenue and Everett Street. "I need to get to Troutdale."

Four homeless people had died from hypothermia this month. Wright, 36, might have found another night at a shelter, but the Love's truck stop in Troutdale seemed a safer bet. It had wireless internet and showers, amenities the Imago Dei emergency shelter run by Transition Projects in Southwest Portland did not.

"The 77 is the only bus that goes from here to there," Wright said.

A 30-something in Patagonia gear pulled out his cell phone to check.

"I'm looking at PDXLiveBus," he said and showed Wright website that gives TriMet schedules. "It tracks the GPS of every bus. The 77 just fell off the map."

Another woman checked TriMet's app and spotted one due in 35 minutes. That could mean anything, she explained.

The governor had declared a state of emergency. Every bus line had an alert. The MAX wasn't crossing bridges, and TriMet had canceled routes. But Wright was homeless and carless. He had to hope a long-delayed ride would eventually show.

"I guess I'll wait," Wright said.

Two 8s, a 35 and a 44 passed. The bus shelter cleared out. At 11:40 a.m., a driver stopped to ask Wright, by then the only one waiting, where he needed to be. Wright said Troutdale. The driver was headed somewhere else, but he told Wright to hop on the 8.

The bus chugged over the Steel Bridge then stopped at Rose Quarter Transit Center. The driver left, then returned and told Wright he'd be better waiting outside.

Wright smoked a Camel full flavor cigarette, the cheapest he could find. He had a red beard and light blue eyes, a camouflage green coat with a camo green vest on top.

"I read that book the Portland woman wrote," he said. "Wild."

Cheryl Strayed's account of hiking the Pacific Coast Trail had sustained him, he said.

"I read it twice while I was in the hole, solitary some call it," he said. "I done 10 years total. I wrote one of them free book shops, and they sent Cheryl Strayed. Reading 'Wild,' being locked up, got me to wanting freedom. I would do the PCT Trail, but I don't have anyone to send me packages so I don't die along the way. I came to Portland instead."

Wright watched as half a dozen Latinos shoveled out the sidewalks that led to Moda Center. He had lived in Arkansas, Nebraska, Arizona and Texas. Every state had one thing in common.

"No matter where I go, Hispanics are are always willing to do the work no one else will," Wright said. "That's commendable."

He had looked for work on Craigslist. He messaged a man who said he needed help loading a U-Haul.

"I told him I was homeless," Wright said. "He didn't write back."

Desperate, he had "flown a sign" for two hours. Portlanders like a seemingly honest panhandler, he said, so he had written, "Why lie? It's for beer" on the cardboard. He had made more in two hours than he had working two weeks of Craigslist jobs.

"The irony is I don't drink," Wright said. "I will smoke weed if someone gives it to me. But I don't like drinking alone. What I really want is a big bowl of chili, a mug of hot chocolate. You can't buy hot food with food stamps."

He waited 45 minutes at the Rose Quarter. No eastbound 77 showed. At 1 o'clock, he spotted one heading west.

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Mood v.10: Remember the time

Rounding out 2016 with all my favorite junior high dance hits.

Or listen on Apple Music. 

Best songs of 2016

I waited all year. No song ever rocked the world the way "Formation" did. A few came close to knocking me off my axis, though. No New York Times narrative or Donald Trump campaign promise came close to capturing Chicago the way "Summer Friends" and "Casket Pretty" do. I cried when Tribe rolled out that Phife banner on Saturday Night Live. And every time "Ultralight Beam" filled my headphones.

I tried to drink it away. I tried to put one in the air. I tried to dance it away.

It took me a month to appreciate Frank Ocean's songs. Then I spent two more rewinding one line over and over again: "Wish I was there, wish we'd grown up on the same advice / and our time was right." If "Ivy" were the only song I was granted in 2016, it would have been a good year for listening.

Some of my favorite songs were important. Some were dumb catchy fun. "With You" is dancing around the living room on Saturday morning. "Frankie Sinatra" is jumping down my street on my nightly walk. Every story I wrote this year included one binge listen of dvsn's album. 

(Listen below -- though Beyoncé is missing from all the streaming sites, as is "Serpentine Fire.")

1. Beyonce - Formation

2. Chance the Rapper - Summer Friends

3. Kanye West - Ultralight Beam

4. Frank Ocean - Ivy

5. BadBadNotGood - Confessions, Pt. II

6. Frank Ocean f/ Andre 3000 - Solo (Reprise)

7. A Tribe Called Quest - We The People

8. Solange - Mad

9. Anderson .Paak - The Season/Carry Me

10. Blood Orange - Best to You

11. Solange - Cranes in the Sky

12. DVSN - With Me

13. Frank Ocean - Self-Control

14. Kevin Gates - Pride

15. A Tribe Called Quest - Solid Wall of Sound

16. Beyonce - Sorry

17. Drake f/ PartyNextDoor - With You

18. Kaytranada f/ Anderson .Paak - Glowed Up

19. Kamaiyah - How Does It Feel

20. Beyoncé - Hold Up

21. A Tribe Called Quest - Black Spasmodic

22. Kendrick Lamar - untitled 06

23. Chance the Rapper - No Problem

24. Kamaiyah - Swing My Way

25. Blood Orange - Squash Squash

26. Drake - Feel No Ways

27. Lil Yachty - Out Late

28. Young Thug - Kanye West

29. Mura Masa - What if I go?

30. Childish Gambino - Redbone

31. Noname - Casket Pretty

32. Anderson .Paak - Heart Don’t Stand a Chance

33. The Avalanches f/ Danny Brown - Frankie Sinatra

34. Kamaiyah - Out the Bottle

35. DVSN - in + out

36. Desiigner - Timmy Turner

37. Partynextdoor - Not Nice

38. BadBadNotGood - IV

39. 070 Shake - Sunday Night

40. James Blake - Radio Silence

41. Makaya McCraven - Butterscotch

42. Kendrick Lamar - Untitled 02

43. Frank Ocean - Futura Free

44. DVSN - Hallucinations

45. Lil Yachty - Minnesota

46. Rihanna - Love on the Brain

47. Anderson .Paak - Silicon Valley

48. Joey Purp f/ Chance the Rapper - Girls@

49. Young Thug - Wyclef Jean

50. Drake - Fake Love

51. Danny Brown f/ Kendrick Lamar - Really Doe

52. DeJohnette / Coltrane / Garrison - Serpentine Fire

53. Kamaiyah - Ain’t Goin Home

54. Chance the Rapper - Blessings

55. Jaylien - We Fcuk

56. Theo Croker - This Could Be

57. Noname - Diddy Bop

58. Kevin Gates - Really Really

59. Desiigner - Panda

60. Mitski - Happy

61. Travis Scott - through the late night

62. Hamilton Leithauser & Rostam - A 1000 Times

63. ZAYN - Pillowtalk

64. D.R.A.M. - Broccoli

65. The Avalanches - Because I’m Me

66. Isaiah Rashad - Free Lunch

67. Travis Scott & Young Thug - pick up the phone

68. Schoolboy Q f/ Kanye West - THat Part

69. GTA f/ Vince Staples - Little Bit of This

70. Anderson .Paak - Come Down

71. Miranda Lambert - Ugly Lights

72. Jidenna - Little Bit More

73. Bruno Mars - 24K Magic

74. Drake - Controlla

75. Vince Staples f/ A$AP Rocky - Prima Donna

76. Kanye West - Real Friends

77. Partynextdoor f/ Drake - Come and See Me

78. Hamilton Leithauser & Rostam - When the Truth Is

79. DVSN - The Line

80. Chance the Rapper - Same Drugs

81. A Tribe Called Quest - Dis Generation

82. Clams Casino f/ Vince Staples - All Nite

83. Miles Davis & Robert Glasper f/ Erykah Badu - Maiysha

84. Rihanna - Same Old Mistakes

85. Kaytranada - Lite Spots

86. NAO - Bad Blood

87. Miranda Lambert - Pink Sunglasses

88. Makaya McCraven - Tomtom

89. Childish Gambino - Me and Your Mama

90. Ariana Grande - Dangerous Woman

91. Jimi Tenor - Tropical Eel

92. NAO - Girlfriend

93. DVSN - Angela

94. Anderson .Paak - Lite Weight

95. Khalid - Location

96. Aminé - Caroline

97. Waldo - Kobe’s Room

98. Gucci Mane - 1st Day Out Tha Feds

99. River Tiber - West

100. YG - Who Shot Me?

Or listen on Apple Music.

Best Albums of 2016

1. Frank Ocean - Blonde

2. A Tribe Called Quest - We got it from here … Thank you 4 your service

3. Anderson .Paak - Malibu

4. Chance the Rapper - Coloring Book

5. DVSN - Sept. 5

6. Kamaiyah - A Good Night in the Ghetto

7. Blood Orange - Freetown Sound

8. Solange - A Seat At The Table

9. Kevin Gates - Islah

10. Drake - Views  

11. NxWorries - Yes Lawd

12. BadBadNotGood - IV

13. The Avalanches - Wildflower

14. Lil Yachty - Lil Boat

15. Beyonce - Lemonade

16. Makaya McCraven - In the Moment

17. Noname - Telefone

18. Young Thug - Jeffrey

19. Hamilton Leithauser + Rostam - I Had a Dream That You Were Mine

20. Theo Croker - Escape Velocity

Mood v.9: Daylight / I wake up feeling like you won't play right

All the feels.

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Mood v.8: The days after

The day after, I talked on the phone for 12 hours. I apologized for the hangover. I stopped my car on the Interstate while protesters clogged the routes. I waited to crash.

The radio played Tupac. I tried to return to the Miles Davis I'd been stuck on before. Then the voice from beyond came barrelling back. Phife and Tip, right on time.

Or listen on Apple Music.

You got the light. Count it all, joy.

October is mild and golden here, fast-shifting, too. I'm in writing and walking mode, listening to these songs all month. 

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It ain't no plan set out for you

My home state is the incarceration capital of the world. I am loving this podcast from New Orleans Public Radio documenting the Louisiana lives affected by prison. An episode about rapper Jahi Salaam really moved me.

“You grow up – you living in a shitty house, like your house broke down, you go to school, your school broke down, you feel me, like there’s people getting shot, there’s people getting locked up. That’s what I mean by struggling,” Jahi Salaam said. “You know, it’s hard to grow up. Like it ain’t just – it ain’t no plan set out for you or nothing. It ain’t no road you can just walk down, like, ‘Oh, I know I’m going to be straight.’”

A fond farewell to a friend

My grandma Louise wanted to die four years ago. My pappaw had already gone, and she spent her days without him watching Fox News and smoking in the carport. She stopped eating for a while, slimmed from 135 to 80 pounds, and told me she was ready.

“I wouldn’t care if it was tomorrow,” she told me when I flew from Portland, Ore. to Monroe, La. to visit her that year.

Much of her belongings were already spoken for, she said. The cast iron pot would go to her sister. Half a dozen others had laid claim to an old paint palette she used back in her crafting days. She gave me odds and ends that nobody wanted. An old bra, my grandfather’s tie. She sent me home with months-old HGTV magazines and a roll of pennies from 1983.

When she found out Portland had banned plastic bags, she began saving hers for me. One night that spring, she spent two hours carefully analyzing 100 bags for holes. Then she folded and smoothed them into a pile small enough to go unnoticed in my suitcase.

She was anti-liberal, she said, but had a country way of conservation. She composted by feeding raccoons her table scraps. She recycled by sending those bags home with me. It had been years since she stayed in a hotel, but she stockpiled cabinets full of travel soaps.

“Here,” she said, pressing one against my nose. “They still smell.”

She gave back jewelry she had been keeping for me, a pair of diamond earrings I wore as a baby and a brooch she said I had been given for Christmas.

“You could have your grandpa’s ring,” she said.

“Why don’t we wait?” I asked.

“Honey,” she said. “You wait too long and there’ll be nothing left.”

***

Few people get to know their grandparents as adults. My childhood memories of her are spare. I remember the night she woke me up from a dead sleep, hunched over and hissing, “Casey, you’re restless. Get up and go pee.” Everything else is a fragment -- four letter words she said in four syllables, a red-and-turquoise outfit she once forced me to wear.

I kept my distance from her and everyone else in the family. At holidays, I read a book or wrote in my diary while relatives talked meatballs or medicines, unplanned pregnancies and prison stints.

I always planned to move far away some day. I just felt different than the rest of North Louisiana. I thought back then it had something to do with books or music, but as soon as I left for college in Mississippi, I realized it’s because I’m gay. I told my mother that Easter Sunday, inspired by the intensifying chords of praise songs to confess.

The preacher prayed I would repent and die immediately: “Save her and take her.” My mom sobbed and wrote all my professors an email, told them college was a cesspool that had ruined her daughter.

That summer, I went home. At the Fourth of July barbecue, an uncle peered at me over the meat.

“You know about Sodom and Gomorrah, right?” he asked. “God destroyed a whole nation to wipe out homosexuality. He’ll destroy you, too.”

My mom jumped up and ran to the bathroom, a tiny half-bath barely big enough for one. I followed her in, squeezed against a wall and tried to promise I wouldn’t be gay anymore. My grandma knocked then jigsawed in without waiting for an answer.

“Rhonda Jean,” she said to my mother. “Life is a buffet. Some people eat hot dogs. And some people eat fish. She likes women, and you need to get over it.”

Somehow my being gay made my grandma and I grow closer. That summer, she handed over the only thing I ever needed to inherit. She gave me a story.

We were sitting that day at a little wooden table, her fiddling with a pack of Virginia Slims, me with the hair I had just cut short.

“I grew up across the street from a woman who lived as a man,” she told me.

I begged her to say more.

Roy was born in the 1920s, she said. His parents, or at least the parents my grandma knew, had kidnapped him from an abusive family. They changed his name from Delois, she said, cut his hair, then ran. My grandma met him in 1950, the day she moved to town. Roy played “the most beautiful music,” she said, by which she meant he played the first banjo she ever heard. She didn’t know much else. Roy had died before she had a chance to ask.  

After college, I moved to Oregon and became a journalist. Working at a newspaper taught me how to talk to strangers in ways that always evaded me with my family.

Distance has a way of burnishing the memories of home. The longer I lived in Oregon, the more I missed Louisiana. Finally, a few years after I left, I returned to visit my grandmother. I told her Oregon had taught me how to investigate. She said she had one mystery for me to solve. What had really happened in Roy’s life? Had anyone loved him? Did he ever feel like he belonged?

“It’s eaten at me all these years,” she said. “Am I gonna die without finding out?”

We decided a film documentary would be best. I assembled a little crew then flew down to meet my grandma on Hell Street, the road where her shotgun house once looked out on Roy’s.

Trailer homes had replaced all the houses, but I knocked on every door. Only a few remembered Roy. She was ornery and mowed yards, one neighbor said. She wore men’s clothes and kept her hair short. Kind of, a former neighbor told me, like yours.

I went to Roy’s nursing home and church then tracked down former Hell Street neighbors. I read Census records and microfiche. Mostly, though, I talked to my grandmother. We went over everything she remembered about Roy. When those stories ran out, we talked about her.

She told me about picking cotton and about the first time she saw running water. In her day, she received newspapers only a few times a month. They were always outdated.

She told me, three times, the story of the day she moved from a delta community she called Frog Island. Her parents could no longer earn enough sharecropping, so the family hitched a ride on a stranger’s truck.

“And I rode on top of a bale of cotton,” she said.

Later, my cousin and I drove round and round North Louisiana trying to find Frog Island. Google Maps, for all its flashback features, doesn’t go that far deep into the delta or the past. We stopped and asked a cottonfield owner for directions. He led us to a stranger’s driveway, one small frog statue left as a reminder.

My grandma told me about the delta quicksand that scared her and the UFO she swore she saw. I know the first time she ate a Chiquita banana was June 1952. The first perfume she wore was Evening in Paris. She used strips of tobacco cans to roll her sister's hair and fashioned Christmas tree ornaments out of candy wrappers she rescued from the trash. As a teenager, she saved all her money to buy herself a pair of red jeans but waited to buy them until she had enough for a pair of green ones for her sister.  

My grandfather wasn’t the first boy she dated, but once Troyce Carter drove down Hell Street, no other man mattered. They dated three months, she told me.

“Then we zeroed in on this,” she said and pulled out the little wedding book that had cemented their lives together.

“They put my name as Louise Huffman,” she said, squinting to read the fading ink. “And right here it started Louise Carter.”

She shared family secrets I wasn’t supposed to know, reveals she told me to forget until my deathbed or the afterlife.

I went down a few times a year to ask her questions and dig up whatever I could on Roy. I found Roy’s Bible and a poem he wrote, even a few pictures that showed a curvy boy with a guitar strapped across his chest.

“Did he ever date anybody?” my grandma asked me. No one knew, I told her.

“Can you imagine?” she said. And I could. She talked all the time about my brother’s girlfriends, but my grandma never asked about mine. Finally, three years into the film project, I told her I was getting married. She changed the subject, and I started crying.

“You never ask about me,” I said.

We avoided each other the rest of the day, but she insisted I share a bed with her that night. At 3 a.m., she shook me awake.

“Casey,” she said. “I do want to know you. Bring her down, and I’ll meet her.”

A married woman, she said the next morning, should know how to make biscuits, so she tried, in vain, to teach me. I filmed her three different trips working Crisco into flour then watched them all in Portland before attempting to make the biscuits myself.

“They’re delicious,” my wife told me.

“They’re not hers,” I said. Something was missing, the sour, soft crunch created by Bulgarian buttermilk, humidity and a hundred-year-old cast iron.

My grandma never called me on my birthday, never called me period unless I was in town visiting and she needed me to pick up something. But she knew me, the real me, in a way that made me feel like I could go back to Louisiana and slowly, over time, come to know myself.

The last time we talked, she told me she had a stash of plastic bags and maybe, no promises, a few memories left to drag up. I told her I would finish the documentary, but I had realized, finally, that the film was never the point.

“Just leave me your stories when you go,” I told her. And she did.

Mood v.6: Wish I was there. Wish we'd grown up on the same advice.

September was a rough one. I spent the days listening to jazz for calm, to Frank Ocean for validation. In Louisiana, I listened to dark rap. In Miami, Latin pop.

Or listen on Apple Music.