Rod Amis - Unbound

NEW ORLEANS - 5 January, 2003: One of my fellow bartenders here in town, a woman who tends weekend days as I do, but at Checkpoint Charlie's, says that every bartender should have a stalker. I was surprised by this statement and asked for her reasoning. "Oh, it makes you feel important," she said.

I proceeded to relate to her the story of another female bartender I know who has had a stalker for a decade. This creeped her out. I don't think anyone needs a stalker. If you want to feel important, I suggested, do something you consider important. It's easier on the nerves.

I have a stalker, of sorts. She's a strange woman who comes to The Cat every blue moon. She never talks to me while she's in the bar. The first time she approached me I was on my way home from shopping. She asked if I remembered her. I asked if I should. She said, "You're the bartender at The Spotted Cat, aren't you? That's where I saw you."

I felt like saying, Lady, I serve drinks to hundreds of people. The only ones I remember are my regulars or people I've 86ed. But I didn't.

She asked if I lived around here and I said yes. She asked if I had a girlfriend. I said no. She asked if she could come over to my place.

"Look," I said. "When I'm not behind the bar, I usually don't want to see people. I get more than enough of people bartending. Today I just want to do my laundry and be left alone."

Her entire approach was a bit to forward for my tastes. I'm not inclined to have someone I don't even know suddenly knowing exactly where I live. Besides, this is an era when casual sex with a person of unknown history can kill you.

I thought that was that. Until last night.

As I got out of the taxi to go up to my apartment, she walked up. She asked how I was doing and if I wanted some company. I told her no. I said, "Every time I see you it's near my apartment and that's just weird, okay? I'm not interested, so why don't you just leave me alone?"

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7 January, 2003: I lucked out. Just as I was reaching the limits of my ability to handle public contact, my bosses at The Cat put me back on my regular schedule. I get time alone with you again, my little love. I get to enjoy the silence and the view of the trees from my apartment window. I won't make as much money, but what is money except a way of buying back my own valuable time? Be happy for me.

Trish and Ed would like me to get a telephone. People joke that I am impossible to reach when not bartending. I like that. I do not want to be reached.

Practicality tells me that I need to be "reachable" to get more freelance contracts, to be more independent of the bar, but my own love of solitude makes a telephone seem like an imposition.

I say everything I need to say to you, my love, here. I don't need more chatter than I get at the bar.

Sadly, I have learned that UPS is the shits here in New Orleans. ("What isn't?" you might ask.) Now that I am having mega problems getting a package Barbara sent me FOR CHRISTMAS, all my friends and customers are sharing their own UPS horror stories with me. It seems that UPS, like most institutions, falls apart as soon as it crosses the border into Orleans parish. I shall probably never see what Barb and Rich thought would make me smile during the holidays.

But I have some time off. This is good. "But what is best in life?"

I am pleased that I have begun the novel without The Woman. But it is coming slowly. There's no "fire" in it for me yet, it is rather like building a house for someone else. I do not inhabit it in the way I should; I still approach it slowly, as one would unfamiliar territory. It has been years since I put my hand into fiction. I need yet a long stretch of hours to be with the characters and get to know them better. Perhaps now that I have days to myself this will be possible.

I need to figure a way to visit a market. I have meat aplenty thanks to Lynda and Curtis but need vegetables. I will take this time to find potatoes, carrots, green beans, broccoli. I am thinking a stew would be good Comfort Food for the old man right now.

ELUSIVE CAME TO SEE ME AGAIN THIS WEEKEND. I am beginning to wonder if she is only another of my missteps. She is definitely a Bent Coin (my kind of woman). Daniel, the night shift bartender, says she seems to like me a lot. That is not necessarily a good sign. To paraphrase Mark Twain, I'm suspicious of anyone who wants me as a partner. Elusive likes me for the reason I told that bartender most women do: I listen. She talks for days and I listen. She is always "on" and I am Mr. Valium. I am most likely wasting my time hoping that she will catch me. She couldn't catch a cold in a blizzard.

Yes, I am disconsolate. I had high hopes.

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"What about The Dancer? The one who made you forget about Your Darling, Victoria, for a moment?"

I knew you'd ask that. Well, I didn't manage to reach her and then I lost patience. I'm not a very patient person, actually. I only pretend to be. I stopped calling her as my radar screen focused on Elusive. It has crossed my mind that I was too fickle and unfocused. Perhaps I shall call her once more. I'll keep you posted.

For right now my hunt is in abeyance. I need to regroup after the marathon bartending during the holidays. And there is the novel. It requires a bit of research. I need to find new Web design gigs, too, so that I can afford to go back to being only a part-time bartender. Ideally, I think I'd like to bartend no more than five days a week. Maybe four. The Rod Show is too exhausting for me. I don't enjoy being "on" that much.

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WHAT I SHOULD BE DOING is scheming how to get out of the United States again. This country makes me ill.

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I AM BEGINNING TO THINK OF NEW ORLEANS the way one thinks of quicksand. If you stay here long enough, you will be sucked under the surface.

Everything here moves at a glacial pace, even when the weather is cold, as it is right now. When someone in New Orleans says they will do something tomorrow, you automatically plan to give them up to a week before asking about it again. They have been working on a highway addition here in town for over a year and people joke that it will be about two years before it's completed. In our elections, you always vote twice. Once in a free-for-all and then again in the run-off. The typical story about most events in New Orleans is that nothing happened. People just get too drunk.

Everybody talks about it - over drinks. I know a man who has "lost" his truck twice in a month's time. He was too drunk to remember where he left it on his trawl both times. Because God is merciful, both times he eventually "found" it again. Both times it was not ticketed nor had it been towed away. The other day this guy gets a phone call from a cabbie who has found his wallet. The guy didn't even know his wallet was gone. The cabbie, a true Samaritan, brought the wallet to the guy's job. It still had over a hundred dollars in it. The guy had forgotten about that money, too. You hear stories like this one - though most don't end so nicely - every single day in New Orleans. Everybody laughs knowingly. Then you hear that subject of the story is going on the wagon for awhile. Everybody laughs knowingly and then some wiseacre cracks: "But it won't last."

It never does. I've lived in this town less than two years and watched several of the habitues of the French Quarter and its environs go on the wagon, for a couple of weeks, maybe a month. Then they come back off with a vengeance and the cycle starts again.

There's always an open bar in New Orleans, seven days a week. Igor, the guy who owns Checkpoint Charlie's, is legendary for something he said during the last big flood in the Quarter. Checkpoint's was open, of course. People were getting drunk, ordering burgers. A group of cops came in, ate and then told Igor he had to shut the place down. "Fuck you," he said. "Why didn't you say that before you ate my food? Besides, I can't shut this place down 'cause I don't have the fuckin' keys. I lost 'em. I don't know where they are 'cause I never have to close this place."

Everyone laughs when this story is told because it makes New Orleans sense. There are bars here that have never closed their doors, so why would they need locks or keys?

Nothing happens because people are too busy getting drunk.

That's what I referred to as "The New Orleans Trade-off" to my friend Scott. Everything has a price. The New Orleans Way is that the plantation system is maintained by keeping everyone drunk and broke. If they weren't semi-literate (New Orleans educational system might as well be the brunt of the national joke) WHO would you find the clean all these hotel rooms for the tourists from all over the world just dying to see Bourbon Street? You don't have to actually keep slaves anymore. All you have to do is keep a group of addicted people getting exactly what they want in exchange for cutting them more slack than they'd get in an American city where they might be expected to be consistent, efficient and professional.

Let the Saints (the football team) keep on losing. Let people sport bumber stickers on their cars that say "New Orleans: Proud to Crawl Home". Laugh when one of your workers shows up two hours late because he/she got a good heat on last night. They ain't going anywhere, Bubba. How could someone like that survive outside of Orleans Parish?

"There's only one reason to show up late for work," Jim Monaghan, Sr., of Molly's at The Market, used to say to his bartenders. "You were goin' after some pussy."

And that's the New Orleans Way: sex and death.

If I stay here and keep bartending, people will queue up to be in my Second Line.


CONTINUE "Stalkers" by following this link.

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