by Jim Grimsley
“What does it look like I’m doing, Benjamin.”
“You take my job you shit fuck?”
“I got stuck with your job after you left it, is what happened. I was on days till you stopped showing up for work.”
Miss Sophia, heart bumping against her ribs, hurried out the back door, ventured upstairs along the back gallery, though she always hated walking up those stairs into funnyland, where the women did all kinds of notions with the big and important men in the suits and ties. She went past the rooms where the girls were laid out and groaning and performing every sort of mess you could think of, till at the end of the gallery she found Lafayette and stood in front of him and said, “That rat-head boy come downstairs.”
Lafayette slid up from the chair, very broad-shouldered and tall. “Is that a fact?”
“Yes, sir. That rat-face boy. And you know what Mr. Mac said.”
“He making trouble?”
“Sure is. All behind the cash register.”
His dark face darkened. She had accomplished her mission. So she turned around and shuffled away, hurried downstairs to get a good spot, since she could trust a man like Lafayette to know which side of the bread to butter. To know to get right down here and clear Ratboy Ugliness out of the bookstore. Newell was standing between Ratboy and the cash register, and Ratboy was just bending down to get his knife out of his boot, the customers backing away from the register, confused at this turn of events, when Lafayette come rumbling through the curtains from the storeroom, pulled Ratboy over the counter by his shirt, took the knife out his hand, slammed him against a couple of walls, and then threw him right on the street. Good as any Western movie Miss Sophia ever saw.
The customers lined up to get their quarters, looking at one another like they had seen a good show. Lafayette stopped off at the counter to show Newell the alarm button under the counter, the one he already knew to use if the police walked into the bookstore. “Once is for the police coming in,” Lafayette said. “Twice is if you need help down here. You got it?”
“Yes sir.”
“I never knew a white boy to call me sir before.”
Newell shrugged.
Lafayette clapped him on the shoulder in front of the person who was trying to buy a copy of Hunk Rider in Motor City, one of the new paperback porno novels displayed with the all men’s calendars. Lafayette squeezed Newell’s shoulder some, Miss Sophia noted this. Then Lafayette went back upstairs.
Newell seemed shaken to Miss Sophia, but she offered no sympathy, since all she might have done was to take his face between her hands and stroke it, or some similar touch of tenderness, and he would never have accepted this from her, so she said nothing to him, had no idea really if he even realized it was she who had fetched Lafayette, and in the end that hardly mattered. Newell seemed shaken, and Miss Sophia let him be.
When she was watching Newell rearrange the novelties in the cases after she had dusted, she realized that he was the one who had always rearranged the shelves when she cleaned, even when he was on day shift, and that he was responsible for the harmony of the arrangements of plastic sex toys, harnesses, straps of leather with metal studs, black masks and steel tit clamps, bottles offering sexual potency, Newell was responsible for the arrangements that Miss Sophia had always admired, and when she realized that, she respected him all the more.
That night in her bed in her two-room apartment on South Bunny Friend Street, she was picturing the bookstore in her mind, reaching for herself with her hands, that part of herself that was a man’s part, which never struck Miss Sophia as odd in the least, that she had a woman’s breasts but a man’s penis, that she could still think of herself as she, even though she went to sleep caressing her penis with her hands. She hardly thought about that. What she thought about was all the men coming in and out of the bookstore, Newell at the cash register so young and ripe and pretty, his gentleness and care as he shelved the magazines, as he built a display of bottles of Rush inside the glass counter, and all those men lined up all night to give him green money and get quarters to play the movies, back in the rooms that Miss Sophia would later clean, all those hunks and studs in the stalls making little messes for Miss Sophia to remove. It was a grand life. What had she done to deserve it?
She was bad to drink on a weekend, though. On a Saturday morning she would take the St. Charles streetcar to Martin Wine Cellar where the liquor was cheap, and buy two half-gallons of vodka, not the worst but not the best, and two big cans of tomato juice, Worcestershire sauce if she was out, Tabasco, and take the purchase to the register where several cashiers were arguing about what color fingernail polish was the best for the girl named Tyesha, who was Miss Sophia’s cashier. Tyesha said, “Good morning, Grammaw, same thing this week, huh?”
“If it’s a Saturday it’s time to buy my liquor,” Miss Sophia said.
“Where you get that wig?”
“I had this wig.”
“I ain’t ever seen you in it.”
“I don’t like to be a redhead on the weekend much,” Miss Sophia said, “but I felt like it today.”
“Where you get that dress?”
“Magazine Street. I might go down there shopping today. To get me something nice to wear for the Mardi Gras this year.”
Tyesha elbowed one of the other cashiers and asked, “Miss Sophia, what ball you plan a go to this year?”
“I believe I might get invited to Comus.”
The girls hooted and laughed and slapped hands on the tight jeans over their healthy thighs. Tyesha loved to hear Miss Sophia say she might get invited to the Comus ball. Funny every time, no matter what. Miss Sophia picked up her brown bag and said, “I’ll bring you the invitation, let you look at it. But I don’t know what I’ll wear.”
She rode back to Canal Street on the streetcar with the bag in her lap and caught the Desire bus to her stop near South Bunny Friend Street. She got to her apartment and set the bag onto the counter. Her hand was shaking as she pulled down a glass from the cupboard over the sink. All week she had nothing to drink at all. But she mixed a strong tomato juice and vodka with a big splash of Tabasco and drank it down like water, and the rush of the sugary liquor flooded her and filled her head with a roaring sound, and she was on her way again.
It was a good idea to eat before she got to the point that she ought not to be working the stove, so she got out the pot of gumbo and scooped out enough for a bowl and set it on the stove in the pot, and a hunk of French bread smeared with butter. She was weaving some as she stirred the gumbo, singing under her breath, “If ever I cease to love, if ever I cease to love,” the same snatch of tune over and over again. “Used to be my mama could sing that song,” Miss Sophia said to the pot.
When she had eaten and when the roaring in her head was sufficiently loud she went for a walk, most of the time winding through the neighborhood streets with some of the vodka in a flask, which she carried today in a nice patent leather purse, maybe a bit worn; she was dressed in a purple tulle cocktail dress with a brown stain down the skirt, and for the walk she put on one of her hats, a pillbox with a bit of black veil. Walking in the sunny day along the neighborhood with the fog in her head and people looking at her, making remarks about her, more than likely, but at least today there were no loud boys to torment her, to call her old hag or witch or mop woman or any of the names the boys used for her. For Miss Sophia was well known in that part of town, part of the color, and she herself was aware of her status, which she maintained by showing herself on the streets whenever possible, as drunk as she could make herself. That was her only trick. Not like Ruthie the Duck Lady, who roller-skated around the French Quarter, not like the Bead Lady, who would use a carpet knife to threaten a person who refused to buy one of her Lucky Beads. Miss Sophia was more genteel.
Up Ramparts she walked, a promenade along the boulevard, singing the song again, the world like some kind of flat image bobbing this way and that in front of her, past the bars where the studs and the hunk
s went, the boys the age of Newell. Maybe she’d even see Newell today. She waited at the corner of Bourbon and St. Peter and looked down at the church, that bit of a boa wrapped around her arms and her perky flat shoes so pointed at the toe, everyone was looking, all the gewgaw tourists with their flat Alabama and soft Mississippi accents pointing to her, noticing her. Nobody took a picture this time, but plenty of times people had taken Miss Sophia’s picture. “What is it?” one teenage boy asked another as they passed, and Miss Sophia thought a curse at them, not a bad curse really, just that they would both get old one day and that they would arrive at old age looking every bit as funny as she did.
He would start to think of himself as a he for a while, when he was drunk. He would remember that his real name was Clarence Eldridge Dodd and that he was a man inside this dress and these support hose, these shoes that he took such painful care of, these pretty baby doll flats that he loved to wear because the higher heels hurt his ankles. He couldn’t strut around in those spike heels like he used to, oh no. He found himself walking to the church up Pirate’s Alley, and his skirt was drooping, dragging into the gray, slimy water that in the French Quarter could be pretty much any kind of liquid known to man, this good tulle dress that only had one stain on it to start with, and now he would have to hand wash it and very carefully dry it, because he could not afford the dry cleaners and anyway they never took care of your clothes, you paid good money to have people ruin your clothes for you when you could easily ruin them yourself for free. Up here was the square where President Jackson and his horse were having the usual good time standing there with everybody walking around them. It was easy for Miss Sophia to get a good sip from the vodka now and again, and people noticed but they thought it was cute to see, a man dressed up like a woman getting drunk in Jackson Square, weren’t these New Orleans drunks all so cute and colorful? But a man in a purple dress, you didn’t see that everywhere, and real breasts, too. He could almost see himself as if he were outside himself, and the spectacle he made, the wig and dress and boa, the shoes, the purse, the liquor, the walk, the whole parade, that gave him a feeling of soaring over all the rest of these people, of carrying himself grandly through the crowd as if he were a procession all by himself, because he had invented Miss Sophia, after all, and she was far more interesting to inhabit than nearly anybody he could see.
Except for the prettiest. The boys. The beauties on the street. He would become one of them, if he could. But you couldn’t buy that in a used clothing store, nothing to make you look like that. Nothing to make you look like pretty Newell, with his long, tapered fingers, with his pouty lips and fine, clear skin. No, but Miss Sophia will do, will carry you through, this runs through his head like a jingle in a commercial about himself, Miss Sophia capers drunkenly across Decatur Street singing Miss Sophia will do, will carry you through.
To the river. She had walked here all her life. Clarence had. Come to stand at the edge of the river, the muddy water so broad, the distant line of Algiers on the opposite shore.
By then he was good and drunk and everything was soaring inside him, as if it all made sense, a babble of voices, darling this and darling that and where y’at and by your mama’s house and everybody your friend, a nice afternoon on the Moonwalk looking at the Venture Queen sail past, her decks loaded with containers so high he wondered how the ship could float, the day easing down, afternoon already here, and him having only to go home now, nothing else to do, because he had the weekend like normal people, to do what he pleased.
In the morning he woke up with a cottony feeling in his head, not entirely sure where he had been or how late he had returned home, though he always found home sometime; he was Clarence for a moment before he went back to being Miss Sophia. She struggled out of bed with the feeling that her head was stuffed with something, especially behind her eyeballs, and she poured herself a glass of tomato juice and vodka and drank it fast to get the feeling to go away.
While she was waiting for that first slug of vodka to hit, she cleaned. She kept her house immaculately swept. “Anonymity produces pigdom,” she said, to no one; a phrase which, when she had first thought it, made her laugh. When nobody is looking, we are apt to do anything, make any kind of mess, and leave it for others to attend to. A person who is apt to do anything even in front of other people is a psychopath, a further stage of anonymity than most people can achieve. But Miss Sophia used to read a lot of true crime magazines and felt she could spot a psychopath, where others might see only an ordinary person like herself.
Miss Sophia drank the tomato juice and dressed for church. Tomato juice to settle her stomach. For church she dressed as a man, as Clarence Dodd, whom she once knew, a lawyer who worked in a fine office on Gravier. In the Whitney Building? A fine attorney from an old New Orleans family, Clarence Dodd.
She put on his trousers and his coat. Without makeup and wig, she looked so much like a man, it was amazing even to her. It never occurred to her to question the logic of this, that she, a woman, should dress in clothing of the opposite sex in order to go to church, but even more deeply she understood that this was necessary, and at moments would remember that she was a man, that her name was Clarence Dodd, that she was he. Fine to parade the streets in a dress but for mass she wore a suit, no wig, dark socks, a neatly tied silk tie, and a white starched shirt perfectly pressed. She wielded the steam iron and spray starch herself, her head spinning from the night before, her throat dry. On the way out the door she looked at the bottle of vodka. She never drank before mass, except the one slug to clear her head. But she looked at the liquor.
Mass she went to here and there various places, often taking the bus to St. Louis Cathedral. She liked the ceremony, the Holy Sacrament, Jesus dissolving like a kiss on her tongue. Sometime she went to confession, too, and confessed to various things that appeared to confuse the priests, but she said her Hail Marys and counted the rosary but always lost track, even with the beads, and sometimes she forgot to bring the rosary anyway, so it was hopeless. But she said the prayers. Sat in the churches. Perfectly prepared for God to speak.
Afterward she went home and made a drink and changed into her clothes for Sunday afternoon. Today she wore one of her conservative outfits, a long brown skirt of fine wool challis, a cream-colored silk blouse that tied in a fetching bow at the front, a nice wool jacket that looked like she was riding in the hunt, fitted at the sides, black Frye boots and a fedora. She looked smart, especially with the little brunette Mary Tyler Moore girl-on-her-own wig. Never mind these clothes were all too young for her and fit on her ungainly body in an even more ungainly way. She drank another tall drink, the ice cubes chattering in her glass. She looked at herself in the mirror.
Sunday was God’s day, meaning it was the hardest day to live through, when God’s eye was most watchful, God who sees even what the psychopath does when alone, God who sees even the tiny penis balled up in Miss Sophia’s panties. She had to be most careful on Sunday, especially toward sundown, and on the best of all possible Sundays she arrived at dusk so drunk she passed blissfully into unconsciousness until the crisis of God’s eye passed. God’s eye on her all day Sunday as she walked through the streets, looking somehow even more a spectacle in the lumpish new clothes she had bought off the rack, the nice wool skirt making the legs beneath appear mannish to her, but she walked on the legs in the good boots that she loved, walking walking, stopping now and then to sip from her flask.
Once on Sunday she had been courageous, rode the streetcar all the way down to Audubon Zoo to look at the animals, the monkeys in the cage, the parrots in the cage, the lion in the cage, but she got lost in the park, among the live oaks spreading their enormous branches, old spirits hovering over the ground, she thought, tough old spirits risen out of the ground and flinging out their arms. She read about the great cotton exposition of 1884 that had been the occasion for the building of the park and of many buildings, she read each plaque carefully, word after word, but none of the claims made any sense
to her. If someone had built such beautiful structures, where were they? If somebody opened a mercantile exposition and fair here at one time, where was it now? What on earth was a cotton exposition? What did you do, lay out a lot of cotton in a line and let people look at it? Ridiculous it seemed to her, but by then she was weaving badly, the day getting late. She found a bar, sat in it, drank a Dixie beer, found her way over to Magazine Street, took the Magazine bus to downtown, and changed buses for home.
Today she had the memory of her adventure in the park vaguely flitting through her mind, wondering whether she could find the zoo if she tried, and for a few blocks she did head down Bourbon Street toward Canal, where she could catch the streetcar, but pretty soon she got tired and sat on the banquette.
To keep still was to invite God’s attention, that eye was sure to focus on you if you were still, so she took a short rest but kept moving. So much to see. She walked to the old Mint to where the Desire streetcar was on display at the end of the market. Miss Sophia thought it a fine thing to display a streetcar like this, right out in the open with no sign or anything to explain it, but people nearly all the time pointed and said to one another, “Look, there it is. It says ‘Desire,’ right on the front.”
At the end of the day she felt its heaviness no matter what. She had outrun her liquor, drunk it up. Now it was time to go home, the sun going down, the dark descending, the hardest time of all, when she would have to go home, look at what was left of the vodka and slug it down and crawl into bed for the night.
But for just a moment standing outside the Café du Monde, powdered sugar on her skirt, she wondered what it would have been like to go to the Audubon Zoo again today, to read the signs about the long-ago buildings that used to stand under those trees.