Part IV--Deepening Despair, Salvation by Tapas

It was dark already when I finally stumbled out of the shuttle.

It sped away and suddenly I was alone, bags in each hand, standing at the corner of Dauphine and Esplanade. There I was, finally and actually in New Orleans, standing outside of a bar even, and if I wanted to, if I dared, I could drink. Smoke and warmth billowed out from inside, people laughed and crowded together.

At that point I was still glad that I was staying with Bboywriter, but horrified by my decision to walk there. Already, I had forgotten the way. One of the curses of having once had a good memory is that even as the excesses of debauch erase it, the habit of relying upon it remains. . .hence, I never write down directions, and manage to nearly always forget them immediately, my mind sometimes abandoning its object while the person giving directions is still speaking. . .

I stood for a long time at the corner, pining for a bloody mary and a cigarette, and the peculiar comfort that only a worn barstool can provide (a well worn barstool has all the comfort and sentimental wonder of a mothers lap).

Finally, I dialed Bboy’s number. While he stammered and spat directions, with the phone smashed between my shoulder and ear, I picked up my luggage and began wobbling toward his place.

Bboywriter did indeed live in an art gallery. Located in the Marigny, the bohemian locals neighborhood just north east of the French Quarter, his place was auspiciously located directly across the street from Mimi’s. A place forever famous in my mind not only for the $2 mimosas, but also for the late night hours when the Fierce Hunger strikes, and they serve up their jaw droppingly good mushroom tapas—small piles of sautéed mushrooms swimming in some sort of cheesy gravy sauce plopped on a couple of crackers, which despite what they must sound like now, are simply amazing.

I arrived, pondered the nearness of all those tasty things waiting at Mimi’s, but instead of bolting for them, grudgingly knocked on the gallery’s door. There wasn’t any response, and it was dark inside, so I called him again.
”Hi, I’m outside.” Pace and peer inside, past the cold steel bars which run up the windows. The street was quiet, the shadows were lengthening. I spoke into my cell phone quietly, like a fugitive.
“Oh. Okay. Let’s see.”
I kept the phone to my ear while listening for the sounds of steps in the distance. Finally, the walking, the shuffling of movements, and to my dismay I realized that he was unlocking the door from the inside with a key. Another bad omen.

Slowly, one by one, metal locks slipped open, latches unlatched, bolts unbolted and in the doorway there appeared my host, a large and glooming shadow. Bboywriter, frumpy and forty-ish, peered at me from behind thin black spectacles, while a mustache like the unholy love child of Hitler and Ned Flanders bobbed above his thin upper lip. His obviously re-gifted sweater was ominously reminiscent of A Charlie Brown Christmas. In short he had the grace and bearing of a brownie fundraiser, with just the slightest dash of Dahmer.

“Hi, I’m David.”
“Sterling.”
“This is quite a surprise. I wasn't expecting you today. From our emails.”
“Yeah, I’m sorry, You see, the weather—I thought, you know, just a couple days. . .It's supposed to rain, you know.” The porcelain and the juju, he wouldn’t understand any of it, not yet anyway. I had hardly begun to misunderstand it properly myself.
“Come in. I’ll show you what I have. I don’t remember what I told you in the email, but the guest room is taken and what would be your room—well, it’s pretty small, if you want to take it.”
“I want to take it. I’m taking it.” I would rather take a dive in the Mississippi than try and find another place to sleep this late at night. I was committed to whatever he had to offer.
“You should probably see it first.”
Oh fuck.

The room was a seven by four foot concrete cell, a squalid gray space lifted from the design specs of some Hitlerite freak with an Alcatraz fetish. A thick Southern draft seeped in through the slatted door, causing the cobwebs stretched across the ceiling to flutter and sag. My lungs began gently seizing up—filling with blood or spores, something in the air was getting at me badly.
“It’s not very big. But here’s a mattress, and you can come and go by this door.”

Unbidden came visions of houses stretched full of Mississippi, their roofs toppled over, slung like lopped off and rotting scalps, the attics silently filling for months on end with the stink of bloated corpses.

My lungs were moving slower, heavier, but this had happened before. I scanned the walls closer and there it was—splattered clumps of black fungus crawling along the crack in the wall—it was the death mold I remembered from my childhood. This is the stuff, known in the depths of Hell as Strachybotrys Atra, which had kept me awake at night, knees clenched to my chest, rocking in the cold night air while everyone else slept, struggling to get a drop of air in the lungs. This was the stuff which made breathing desperate and vicious, and had sent me choking to the emergency room on more than one occasion. Even as I stood there, the spores were moving in and reclaiming old turf, settling into the nooks and crannies which they had finally abandoned years ago.

“That’s mold.” I pointed at the clotted, splattered death, oozing along the wall.
“No, uh, that’s actually. . .There wasn’t any flooding here. That’s not mold. This area wasn’t affected, by Katrina.” He didn’t stutter, he was just akward, and pauses inserted themselves like stumbling blocks in every sentence he spoke.

Like everyone else in this city, BboyWriter had already lost many things to Katrina. He didn’t want to lose the safety of his home and the small amount of cash a hapless traveler could provide as well.

But, while he worked to convince me of the safety of the room, damp greenish spores slithered microbially through the atmosphere, infiltrating and laying seige to the millions upon millions of smoke burnt capillaries in my lungs.

“Look, okay. But I have to sleep in the gallery. This, it just won’t work.”
Which is when he informed me that if I slept in the gallery I wouldn’t be able to come or go unless he let me in and out, which meant coming back before 3 in the morning.

Ditch work, bail on school, empty the bank account and buy a tent, all to fly across country in order to a attend a famously debauched catholic festival in a nearly destroyed French outpost in the wicked heart of the steaming South and get slapped with a curfew. Was this really happening? It’s moments like these that force a man to question the wisdom of an entire enterprise. . . perhaps I wasn’t supposed to be there? But accepting that, what was I supposed to do now that I was there?

The mattress was leaning against the wall in that little room bursting with disease. Together we pulled it into the gallery and laid it down on the floor between two old book cases full of ancient and tattered copies of National Geographic and Life Magazine. I wondered what strains of that black and toxic fungus were living in the interiors of the mattress, waiting to strangle me in my sleep.
He disappeared and came back with an arm full of sheets and blankets which he proceeded to fit onto the bed.
“Are you going out tonight?”
“What?”
“You must be tired.”
“Yeah, I’ve been flying since 6 this morning, no sleep.”
“When you called you said you were in Atlanta.”
“That was a stop over.”
“You’re still young, I suppose.”
"What? Okay, look, I’m starving, and it’s late, so I should get going.”
“Oh. You’re hungry huh?” He looked around, and patted his pockets. When he didn’t find anything he cast a glance at the coffee table, then to the couch, finally toward the kitchen.
“You’re hungry? I might have some nuts somewhere. Let me look.”
“No, uh thank you, but I, . . .I need some sustenance. . .”
“But I might have something here. . .”
“No man, I need sustenance.” The word was a three pronged dagger I want to ram into his head over and over again until he got that I needed to leave.
“I’ll be back before 3, but I’ve really got to be going.”
“But, if it’s after three, then. . .”

It was a short stumble to Mimi’s and before I knew it a tall Bloody Maria glistened and shown on the bar top like the Blessed Virgin Maria Herself. I took quick, greedy sips, lit a cigarette and let the smoke slither up my worn trachea, expand like a hot and sacred balloon in my creaking bronchi, and burst into crowded and fucked alveoli, to finally secrete its essence into my veins bringing sweet and dizzy relief. There is nothing in this world like sex, poetry, hard work, and long travel to rekindle the love of smoking and drinking.

I had hardly finished my Maria before I ordered again and a cold Abita sat in front of me and mushroom tapas were on the way.

Slowly, reality began to come back into focus, gain weight and presence, reclaim its integrity. The tequila was helping quite a bit.

The life returned to the blood, the chair beneath me became steadier and my feet began to squirm in their shoes.

To my right, a couple of feet away, was a man with glitter on his lips. What was remarkable about him, though, was that every breath he took sent his shoulders arching behind him, and his eyes fluttering, while he sucked the bars air in through his teeth as though every molecule of oxygen it contained created a ripping, violent orgasm which threatened to tear apart his entire body.

Oh yes, I was in New Orleans now.