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.

Intermissions and Violent Plagiarisms:Not Getting Anywhere Slowly, New Orleans Diaries Part 3

The shuttle driver, this big smooth black man being entirely too nice to the curly headed dim wit from L.A. (who, to my immense surprise, had a face blatantly and brutally plagiarized from Picassos’ Guernica)—he maneuvered wildly, took quick turns and sprints down clustered and ancient alleyways, careening and jerking to grinding halts throughout our mad dash through the streets of downtown Nola, desperately trying to avoid the looming parade routs. The mounting pressure was palpable,—the streets were packed with cars and we were nowhere close. Seven pairs of beleagured and expectant travelers plus yours truly needed to be dropped off at eight different hotels in the Quarter, and if the parade arrived before we made it through we’ve agreed to a mass suicide. At that very moment the parade was very slowly moving along St. Charles. . .the minute it hit Decatur we’d be hopelessly screwed, paralyzed and buried by festivities, trapped and sober like convicts awaiting our last meal. . . I would have hopped out of the van and made a run for it if I wasn’t burdened with a cunningly arranged mountain of crap struggling to burst from my tortured and sagging suitcase.

What I brought:
3 pairs of pants.
6 long sleeve shirts/sweater things (what to wear? I had been beating my head over this very question for weeks—though mostly over the most difficult problem of the costume—Something Lee had insisted was of crucial importance. “Don’t be a goddamn spectator man.” I bought the damn costume, and for good measure picked up a couple of shirts incorporating colors, purple and purple-like--the official colors of Mardi Gras are purple, gold, and green, gold being a terrible, evil color, and green being too easy.)
A Hoodie. (Brown, Cozy.)
Many short sleeve shirts
Many socks, underwears
Toiletries
FLANNEL UNDERWEAR, AKA LONGJOHNS (for extraordinary protection in extraordinary conditions!--I should be an ad man.)
A TENT (A Coleman 3 person tent: the thing is packed tight in a rectangular box with a handle popping out the top. . .Amazingly, they let me check it like a piece of luggage.)
A SLEEPING BAG (almost unbearably warm, tight, and comfortable. In Portland, freezing and terrible Portland—California boys often die in temperatures like these—the air freezing and cracking, breath inflating the space like miniature gas explosions, I opened my bedroom window and climbed inside the bag, just to make sure it would keep me toasty in Nola. It was too warm, halfway through the night I had to unzip it a little, then more and more, until finally I shut the damn window and crawled beneath the blankets. But at least I knew I wouldn’t freeze to death)
A SELF INFLATING MATRESS THING
A HEADLAMP (yes, like a coal miner, but sportier)
A FREAKING CAPE (for the rest of my life, anytime anybody asks if I have a costume, I will, say, “Why yes! I do!” and I will be referring to The Cape.)
A MASK, EYES WIDE SHUT STYLE, GLITTER AND BLACK FEATHERS (Yes, we was ready to rock.)

And, perhaps most crucially,
A TOWEL
(from the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy)--A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker can have. Partly it has great practical value - you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you - daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.
More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have "lost". What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

Part 2--Airport Anxiety--An Extreme Need for Sedatives and Bloody Mary's

Communism is alive and well in the American airport. Forget about waiting in lines for stale rye bread. . .in the new promised land we wait in lines just to move. Lines of security, lines of luggage, lines checking in, lines to take off your shoes, get stripped, get dressed, to get into lines devolving into lines leading to the last line, the fiendish goal of which is to make you so sick of waiting and standing that you’re actually fucking relieved to be in that seat that’s always two inches too small and forget that the bastards aren’t even going to try to feed you. By the end of that long, sad procession, the noble soul is so beaten down that you're ready for positively anything.

And boarding the plane, everybody with their plane face, shuffling, groaning, waking up all over again and fighting for overhead compartment space, waiting while some shmoe fights with his luggage, attempting to force it to be twice as small as it is. . .doesn’t anybody check anything anymore? Post modern pack mules, is that a goddamned fanny pack? The fuck?

The head is stuck on auto rewind and slow motion forward, the scene with the cute taxi driver keeps replaying with directors commentary, I haven’t slept, and the plane, it seems like it just won’t ever go.

The puking, the stress, that awkward goodbye. . .

I’m fading now, it’s all so tired—like an etch-a-sketch held upside down, reality dripping sandy streaks of quicksilver.

My seat is center, sandwiched between hovering silent newspapers all the way from Portland to Atlanta, only the gentle flapping of the pages lets me know that the humans next to me are still breathing. The eyelids sag, reality grew soggy and slow, I struggled to remain seated upright--I've fallen asleep on other peoples shoulders before. Hi, my name is Sterling.

The stewardess—everytime the sweet quiet came and the great dark descended like a holy balm, her voice burst out behind me like a large duck being strangled in an old mechanical clock. The movie was awful and punishing. Switch to the classical station, mysterious strains of some ancient violin concerto filtered through the headphones, magically maintained my increasingly egg-shell-fragile mind all the way to Atlanta.

Stopovers. Changeovers. Between flights—caught slacked over in a bucket seat, drooling tobacco flavored dreams, watching the daze parade of CNN on a t.v. stapled to the ceiling. The news is so typical—death and horror in plasma vision, who did the vice president shoot this time? I munch on the remains of an egg salad sandwich, flown fresh from Portland Oregon that very morning.

I made a phone call to the Guy with the Art Gallery. . .he wasn’t expecting me. Truth be told I was nervous as hell about staying with him--his email address is BBoyWriter@aol.com--would you stay with a person with a name like that? I was positively begging to be molested or robbed, but what choice did I have? I was playing my cards as quickly as I was dealt them. . .feeling the path out as I walked it. . .at any rate I had already made up my mind the night before while gripping the porcelain, and you just can’t deny a moment like that.

He said okay, he had space that night, but he was weirded out that I was calling him last minute. . .which was good. I wanted him off guard. No time to plan anything.

Finally the plane, pick up and go, and land, seemingly all at once. A short sweet flight if there ever was one. I raced from the plane to the taxi line and sucked down two cigarettes in rapid succession as though they were divine nipples excreting sacred milk.

Saving 15 bucks by taking an economy shuttle sounded like a fabulous idea, despite my zombie fugue and unholy itch to have a decent bloody mary as quickly as possible.. The catch is that it won’t take me directly to where I’m going—there will be a 12 block walk to BBoyWriters den of terror. 12 blocks sounds fucking flyable, like my heels will never touch asphalt I’ve already come so far that day. My suitcase and tent feel light in my hands, my backpack is feather light. I was ready to go, the sacred alcoholic itch was working wonders on my nerves already, having landed in this most sacred city.

For an hour and a half I watch taxi’s and hotel shuttles whiz past me with demonic regularity while waiting for the Economy Shuttle. The line I’m in is growing. . .we’re restless, we demand to know what the fuck. Some of us give up and leave, take taxi’s, fuck the money. We strategize mutinies. It is discovered that Pre-Katrina they had a fleet of over 60 vans. . .post Katrina they only have 8. . .A shuttle arrives and an old tired black man hops out, chats with the lady on the radio. He returns to the van and discovers he’s locked his keys inside. This is starting to make too much sense.

Finally, on board another shuttle, what seems like hours later, a whiny Valley refugee from L.A. managed to justify and fulfill every L.A. stereotype for stupidity, prattling to the driver about all the silly New Orleanians who stayed behind during the storm.. . .I kept angling behind me trying to get a look at this girl--a girl of such monumentally stupid proportions must be a looker—right? Other wise natural selection would have taught her to keep her mouth shut earlier. The driver, a big smooth champion of a black man, he took it all in stride, interrupting her occasionally to point out a wrecked house or the waterline. . .a thick brown swathe six and seven feet high. . .like God took a brown crayola to the city. . .churches, trees, electronics stores boarded up and empty. . .telephone poles like snapped match sticks, jutting out at ridiculous angles to the ground. . .the girl from Los Angeles, she’s on the phone, “And oh my God you wouldn’t, like, BELIEVE the devastation!” and the driver, he said, “Well, you know this area wasn’t really hit. . .the place that got hurt is down a little ways. . .”)

Washed Up and Wrung out: A New Orleans Diary: Part 1

Oh Lord, why hast Thou forsaken me?

Lower the head, kneel, put your forehead to the filthy concrete on Chartres. . .Now, in this storm wrecked place the bordello is still standing and it’s at the foot of the throne of the Lord and you have sinned very badly. It’s the Wednesday after already, the gutters are stuffed with beads, the sky is clean and warm, the camera records your every movement, ask the Lord, while there’s time, for the blood of the Lamb to wash your sins away. . . The blood of the Lamb? The blood of the bar is sweating out through every pore, the body is shaken, raw and broken from a week in this putrid, luscious city. . .

Three days later, at home again, survived but broken, the head is stuffed, the lungs working over time, beating, wheezing, it’s all running out my nose can’t seem to catch it. Abandon school for a week of trial and debauch and suffer the consequences—three essays due by weekends end, a test, and my head is full of snot drenched cotton.

Eight days since morning mass at St. Luis Cathedral--and six days since I’ve had a drink or a cigarette. Watching the old men walk the aisles in their purple vestments, a grinning hangover clouding everything but the cold water bottle in my hand--I had no idea this would happen—it took longer than it should have, perhaps—this sobriety—two more full days of drinking and debauch before my body kicked my un-repentant yet quietly converted ass into saint mode—but this makes sense, I think. For us hard core sinners, life is more complicated and painful than our Christian brethren can know. Things take more time, even simple things, like waking up.

But perhaps I get ahead of myself.

Last summer I fell in love with that disease ridden whore of a city New Orleans. Her long hair full of lice and sperm wound its way into my heart and tangled there. Her tongue drips a hangman’s cocktail of opium and potassium chloride—she sweats—

She’s a city that makes you have thoughts like that. She’s beautiful, horrible, and dying. She’s always like that—the substance of her charm. . .

The tragedy of Katrina wasn’t that it ruined New Orleans—the maggots of poverty and neglect had been hiding in that attic a long time already—the real tragedy—or effect—was that it ripped away all the dross, the sham Disney lighting and special effects shattered to reveal the hurting, national cancer that has been New Orleans secret shame for a long time already.

I fell in love with her. She fvcks like a tigress on acid, what can I say?

And when Lee told me that he would be finishing his documentary over Mardis Gras, I knew that I had to be there.

And I was nervous. Like when you’ve broken up with somebody and you hear from friends that they’ve gotten into some spooky/heavy shit and you’re not sure what they are going to look like—it was kind of like that.

And of course, not knowing exactly what it would be like, after the very serious destruction that Katrina had wrought. . .

Thursday night was spent packing and feverishly trying to get as much homework done as possible. My flight was lifting at 6AM so sleep was out of the question. Pounding energy drinks and popping “smart” pills, steadily moving through everything—than queasiness strikes—first presentiments of horrible juju. While retching I decide to change my travel plans. I’ve bought a tent and sleeping bag and planned on pitching it behind a flop house in the Marigny, but I had had an offer to sleep on a mattress in the front of an art studio for sixty dollars a night. If the nausea is an omen of danger, I might want to push off using the tent for at least a night or two. Weather.com says to expect storms and my stomach agreed--wait--have a cigarette--the exhaled smoke froze and cracked in the cold--feeling for the karmic indicators--the nausea, it lifted. And I’ve made my decision. You can’t ever be too careful with the juju.

First thing outside I step in a puddle. It’s sinking all around me, up to the ankles, God is screaming at me to stay away—St. Christopher, patron saint of travelers, has he abandoned me already? I wave, gesture, it occurs to me I might be crazy, finally the cab moves forward, my stuff is tossed into the trunk and I’m in the back of the cab feeling it rumble off. I notice now that it’s a young, hot girl driving. An auspicious omen if there ever was one and the trip to the airport passes nicely not withstanding the sharp panic caused by her constantly nodding off. . . so, it’s going to be one of those kinds of trips after all. . .

She says it’s sad going to New Orleans for Mardis Gras.
“It’s like watching a cripple try to walk.”
Silence. It’s still dark like night outside.
I lean forward, “You’re a cynic, you know that?” I’m saying it like it’s a bad thing, because she doesn’t know me.
She laughs.
“Well it is! It’s sad.”
“No, it’s not.” And I realize that I mean this, or at least want it to be true very badly, “It’s like watching somebody who was crippled take their first steps again. It’s inspiring and hopeful, not sad.”
“Well, okay.”


Her eyelids fluttered like butterfly wings and the taxi strayed onto the rumble belt. . .

“Hey! You alright up there?”
She jerks the cab back into place. “Yeah? Oh! I’m fine really.” She’s blushing because she almost killed us. The omens are piling up.
“How much longer do you have till you go home?”
“I’m going home after this, I swear.”

At the airport I pull my stuff from the trunk and as I’m walking away we wave goodbye. Who waves goodbye to the cab driver? If she doesn’t spin off into the river maybe I’ll run into her sometime, who knows? Everything is confirming the strangeness of the mission. The juju itself is whack and confused, the divine guide is drunk and passed out in the toilet, the wheel is off. . . strange presentiments while lurching off to a French party town that was recently drowned and left to die. . . I check my tent and suitcase. . .strip for the man with the metal detector . .Boarding flight 947 gate A13. . .