-> MY SLIGHTY HIDDEN GLASS HOUSE
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NEW ORLEANS - She said: "It's getting better. Passable."
I said: "But."
"But you're a better writer than you're even showing yet."
I rolled over and rested my head on my hand, elbow akimbo. "And your suggestion is?"
"Colors. Scents. The noises on the streets or just downstairs from your flat."
"Have at it."
"Prick."
"It seems that everyone who knows me has a nickname for me. I'm gratified."
"Asshole."
"That one belongs to Flashman. Just call me 'Prick.' What I like about that one is that it is biblical: 'Thou shalt not kick against the prick' -- or at least something to that effect. I can never quote chapter and verse."
She clubbed my head with her pillow.
The last thing I would do here is tell the scent of her hair. Her skin smelled damp, as you'd expect. Everything smells damp in New Orleans. We are a city below sea level with the highest humidity in the contiguous forty-eight states. Winds gust over us and hit Florida instead.
Did she want me to talk about the exquisite scent of jasmine on Esplanade Avenue, the border between the French Quarter and the Marigny again, as I had three years earlier in my magazine? Did she want me to recount again the fecund smell of Bayou St. John or the streams through City Park?
Re-telling my own descriptions bores me to tears. I don't care if it is the first time some new person comes to the words. They are yet old words to me.
"So what's the plan?" she asked, looking deeply into my eyes. "You told me you have already charted the New Orleans novel in your head. Tell me."
"If I tell you, I'll never write it. The act of telling it is a completion I can't afford. So settle for this: it will blossom like a flower. The plan is to show you a leaf on the stem, then a petal, then the entire bloom in all of its color and glory.
"In the end you'll see the flower, pistle, stamen and root, down to the root hairs snaking into the dirt."
"You even talk like a writer, you know."
"I'd prefer to talk like a lover."
"We both know you're the type of person even a mother couldn't love."
"Don't go there."
She grinned. "Button?"
"Needle."
"Yes, I know." And she smiled again.
I was enamored of Ji (pronounced "Gee") and so I pursued her in my usual way, the way a fly pursues a spider. She was the most exotic flower in New Orleans (we said, "Nawlins") at the time. She liked me as long as I was a bartender. She brought all of her friends to my bar to drink Pimm's Cups. The Pimm's Cup is a signature drink of the Crescent City and she and others claimed I made the best one in town. I said they just liked the fresh cucumber, a garnish for the British inspired drink, that I ordered thrice a week.Ji was on my arm the night of the "Iron Chef" party down in the Marigny. The night I left her there with cab fare, among my friends -- well, not friends for the most part; they were really my customers at the bar, I can only think of one person there I'd call a friend today -- to dash off with Mary to save Ian from another of his diabetic comas.
We'll revisit Mary and Ian later, when I wander back into the French Quarter, that part of the reservation that attracts reprobates and bohemians the way a spider attracts flies.
I'll just say this, Pete calls Mary "Eva Braun."
Ji lived at a wonderful house on Rue Dauphine for a while and I would visit her there. No one knew this except she and I. Actually, no one knew that I would visit her there, everyone in that little village that surrounds or is the French Quarter knew she lived there; the secret, until now, were my visits.
The visits came about because Ji and I are both writers. Her writing, in my view, are brooding character sketches of the sort one might think of as channeling. All of her characters, as far as I was concerned, were depressive and extreme. She felt that I was too much of the traditional writer, too concerned with form, structure, the architecture of a story. "You build cathedrals of words," she said.
"You never build a narrative," I responded.
I regret ever having been so honest with her.
Ji would drag me to spoken word readings around town, poetry slams. She and the other hipsters would stand behind the microphone in these circle jerks and read their latest screeds while the non-poets and non-writers in the crowd sucked down cocktails and f elt like they were cool or admitted they were bored to tears while the people in rotation behind the mike thought they were the rock stars of words. I despised these sessions but abided them because I was with the exotic flower and other men were not.
Once I wasn't a bartender anymore, Ji had no time for me. She wandered off with a skinny white boy until Nawlins ate her up and spat her out and then she fled back to New York, broken and emaciated. She was already a small girl, with fragile Korean bones. She did not wear emaciation well.
Look at this medium, as I say, Black man, just turned fifty, at that point, walking down the street, some street in Nawlins, with this short Korean girl. She is lovely and looked to be in her twenties, though she is nearly twice that age. Asian women wear their years well. They are talking about words, debating about words. She insists that he read her latest piece and he tries to demur because he knows she will not like his critique; she never does. He also knows that he will not like the way the story is not a story. But he smiles at her and, finally, says yes of course.
They only ever talk about one of the other men in her life, the British musician. She asks why he even notices the man and he explains that it is impossible not to when the guy plays with a band at his bar. She says she doesn't like the man anymore anyway so he, I, should forget about him. She says that he, I, am the sweetest and wisest man she knows in New Orleans and I should be satisfied with that.
"Where are you going?" she asks.
"I have to meet Matt and Flashman at the R Bar."
"Did I say something wrong?"
"No. I promised I'd show up."
"Okay. Will you call me?"
As the most public celibate on the World Wide Web, because of my magazine, it was always difficult to talk about the women I was close with, to, for. The last thing I needed to explain was that I could be in the same bed with a woman and not proceed to coitus. All my male friends insisted, year after year, that it was about time I get laid. No one understood that caresses were enough and not a single person understood how much I am capable of concealing while pretending to reveal my all.After having been celibate for ten years, it became easier to remain so, even in a city infused with sex and death. It was the death part of the equation that always chastened me.
New Orleans has one of the most interesting skies in the subtropical South of the United States. There are seldom stratus clouds, but the cumulus are lush and present on the days when there are clouds. The nimbus clouds usually come as signatures of the gods at the end of the good days. They wax pink or orange on the horizon; they hang over the river like ensigns. Nimbus can take your breath away when they want to, in conspiracy with cumulus clouds transforming into horses, ducks, the face of Charles Manson.The cumulus clouds unload on the city in violent torrents of dark grey fury, accompanied by ear-splitting cannonades of thunder and lightning so close that your eyes go blind for an instant before you see the smoking tree split in half yards away from you. It doesn't just pour when it rains, it inundates, soaks, smothers, washes your pores clean and all the detritus down to the river, the legendary Mississippi of Mark Twain's wet dreams --- beer bottles, half a po' boy sandwich, condoms, a tennis shoe, crotchless panties, the body of a guy stabbed last night --- and then the sun blazes everything dry in fifteen minutes. Because the rainforest has been smitten away, replaced by avenues, boulevards, alleys, old renovated houses and ramshackle huts, the sun bares down, beats down, and leaves you breathless after only fifteen minutes.
The rain makes things cooler, we say in Nawlins. But that's only true for fifteen minutes. Your rain-drenched self is replaced by your sweating "like a pig" self again and you go on living for the next cooling rain. That's what we say. But it's just another of many versions of how someone tells a story about New Orleans that you know is only a version and not to be relied upon.
You can't rely upon a damned thing in this city and everybody knows it. Let the Saints keep on losing.
The key to survival in New Orleans is to stay away from the French Quarter, its throbbing heart of excess and decadence and debauchery, its field of ghosts who walk. The further away the better. In the Quarter, everyone is either a tourist hell-bent on getting a thrill from being unlike themselves at home or someone with a dark story they need to play out tonight. You are just the scenery to either of these actions. You are an extra in someone else's movie unless you have some dark action to play out of your own and in public.
"Flashman! Flashman!"
No response. He is sleeping like the dead.
"Flashman!" I don't want to touch him. I rattle his mattress. "Flashman!"
He stirs. I reach for his alarm.
His eyes flutter.
"Dude, your alarm is going off. Didn't you say you have to be to work for nine?"
"Oh shit! Dude, you're a life saver."
"No problem." I turn his alarm off. "I heard your alarm while working on a story ... "
"Fuck! I gottah go to work."
I wander back toward the front room, where I sleep and where I was pecking away on the computer.
Flashman wanders out a few minutes later, opens the refrigerator. "What's the story with these beers?"
"That's the six pack you bought. You pounded most of the ones I bought last night." (I'd had two, he'd drank the other four sometime when we were supposedly both asleep.)
"Oh yeah. I remember now. You can have some of these beers, Dude. I needed your beerage to sleep."
"That's not called sleep. That's called 'pass out.'"
He grunted and wandered back toward the shower.
Everybody thinks they know everything about everybody else. That's a lie that none of us want to admit is a lie. I learned something about Flashman, who I've known for five years and lived with twice, that I never knew before.
I was sitting in the Tremé, drinking a beer with Matt, when I heard the story of the house Flashman had lived in in San Francisco before he retreated here to New Orleans.
Flashman had lived in one of those typical group houses in San Francisco when he was in his twenties. Four or five people sharing a flat in the Haight district of that city and trying to make ends meet. The proximity made for friendships and changing sex partners and working on whatever project you said was your obsession. Back in the 1990s, everyone you met in San Francisco had a project. That was before the dot-communists --- what everyone called the computer geeks who worked for Internet companies --- came along and raised the rents and drove the last wave of bohemians out of the city by the Bay.
Flashman had moved to San Francisco from Los Angeles at the beginning of the '90s and settled in the Haight. He played with a godawful punk band for a while. He lived in a group house. Then there was the fire. It ripped through two houses on his block and tore around the corner to pick it up its third meal.
Flashman ran through the house waking everyone up and getting them outside. Everyone except one friend -- one friend who was passed out or whose door was locked or who he couldn't carry out bodily.
Days later, there was that guy's mother. She wanted to know why Flashman had managed to save everyone else except her son. What kind of asshole was Flashman to let her son burn alive? What did he have against her son? Had he, Flashman, set the fire to kill her son?
Jerry told Matt that Flashman had never been the same since that guy died. Flashman had gone into a spiral. Flashman left San Francisco and moved to New Orleans and got an apartment above a bar which he never gave up and got a job as a dishwasher which he never gave up and he became a stone. "Flashman is delicate," Jerry told Matt.
Matt told me.
Oddly, Flashman and Matt are friends. I say "oddly" because, when we are alone, Flashman says he is always angered just thinking about Matt. He thinks Matt is not a good man; he thinks Matt is a user. He holds a silent grudge -- silent in front of Matt, at least -- that he has not let go in five years. When he talks to me about Matt, it sounds as if he doesn't even know the guy. He asks me about my friend Matt. He asks me why Matt hasn't dumped his asshole girlfriend or what Matt's latest hijinks are.
Then, when he and Matt and I are together, as on my birthday, he acts as though Matt is his friend.
Matt thinks that Flashman is his friend. He conveniently forgets the times he might have hurt the guy in public, embarrassed Flashman by denigrating his intelligence and his job as a dishwasher. "They could get a trained monkey to do what Flashman does for a living." He forgets that it was a friend of Flashman's who facilitated Matt's getting a job in New Orleans, the job he has today.
When confronted with this type of callous abuse of a friend, Matt says that it was just a joke, that it was not serious, that he never means to hurt anyone. Matt says that Flashman is too serious and insecure about his job. Matt doesn't think of what he was doing as cock blocking --- making light of another guy in front of women in order to make yourself look superior --- because it is inconvenient to admit his own faults. Matt despises doing anything that is inconvenient to himself.
I have the good fortune to know who my friends are; they are people who I owe money.
When you go for long periods of time without any money at all or any food or cigarettes, when you do get that first dollar, that first meal, that first cigarette, it slips through your hands like water through a sieve. The world reaches out and pulls that dollar from your hands. Your stomach cannot get full. That cigarette burns faster than a wildfire through dry grass. Faster and hotter. And then it's gone, all gone.No one will hire you because they smell the desperation in your sweat, it oozes out of your pores like lava down the side of a volcano. They have x-ray vision, like Superman, and see that you only have thirty-two cents in your pocket. No one wants to hire somebody who needs a job that desperately.
So you walk down the street until you find the next "Help Wanted" sign and you fill out the next job application. What the hell do they want to know what elementary school I attended for? Are they really going to go back and ask the principal what my Permanent Record (heh!) says I was like at age seven? I don't think so
Sometimes it is difficult to avoid putting down that I attended Ashahola Elementary School is Cloudcuckoo, Montana. But I keep my sarcaustic personality under control. I act as if these details of a life so distant as to be almost a fairy tale to me are crucial for the person doing the hiring. I allow the lie to go unchallenged.
I run into a woman I know on the street.
"Hey! Wassup?" she asks. "When did you get back to Nawlins?"
"Months ago. How are you?"
"Really? I haven't seen you until now."
"I've been avoiding the Quarter."
"Good to see you!"
"Good to see you, too."
"So what's going on? Where did you go?"
"Phoenix."
"Arizona? Oh wow! How was it?'
"Okay. Desert. Mountains. I've always liked the desert."
"But you're back in New Orleans. They always come back."
"Yeah, I guess."
"I've gottah scoot. Good to see you, though. Let's hook up for a drink sometime."
"Good to see you, too!"
"Later."
She pedals off on her bike, down Royal Street and away.
I wave good-bye. I'm sure I'll run into her in some bar weeks or months from now, again, if I'm still alive, if I'm still here. She didn't ask for a telephone number or an address, so I figure she's thinking the same thing. It was so good to see me that she didn't need to know how to stay in touch, after all.
I had applied for every crappy job I could think of that first week at Flashman's: dishwasher, construction laborer, cashier at a corner store, "kitchen help" in an Ethiopian restaurant, bar back, tinker, tailer, candlestick maker. No one called back. None of my friends called to make a referral. I was starting to feel miserable and hopeless. Homelessness, it appeared, was only days away. I figured I should start looking for a shopping cart ...
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