by James Sallis
Saturdays she cleaned house, beginning with the bathroom, finishing up with the kitchen. Every Sunday she listened to church services on the radio, read her magazines, wrote letters. Even the letters read like lists.
(Where was my father in all this? Out in his workshop, I guess. He spent more and more time there as years went by. Years ago, when Mom died, I tried to talk to my sister Francy about this. What was going on between them? What happened? What was wrong with her? What did he think about out there? Francy would only shrug.)
Wanting to be sure she'd received the new manuscript, I called my agent. Marlene was on another line, but her secretary confirmed that not only did they have the novel, they'd already sent it out. Had even had a nibble or two, though no strikes. Did I want to hold? No. And it might be a while before I was in touch again.
Next I rang Dean Treadwell's office to say that yes I had resigned my position and no I did not foresee returning, nor did I have reasonto speak personally with the dean.
I began sorting through bills I kept in a basket on the kitchen table. Wrote checks to pay eveiything off in full: credit cards (American Express, Citibank Visa, Dillard's, Sears), Maple Street Book Store, South Central Bell, NOPSI. Sent the mortgage company a check covering the next year. Then put all the rest away in a drawer and picked up the phone again.
Dialed one number and when I got no response, dialed another.
"Yeah?"
"Don there?"
"Walsh?"
"How many Dons you have?"
"Thought maybe you were calling up the Mob. You know?" At least he spared me the Brando imitation. "This Griffin?"
"Yeah. No anonymity in the electronic age, huh."
"How hard could it be? You're the only friend he has."
"DeSalle?"
"You bet."
"What the hell'd you do, they've got you answering phones?"
"You think they tell us anything down here? Mushrooms, right? City's cutting back. Casinos didn't hump it quite the way council members thought, didn't bail the city out. Some goddamn surprise. So now we've got a few million in new debts and an abandoned shell up there on Basin that'll be around well past the millennium. I hang up, for all I know my next assignment's cleaning bathrooms. Talk about your sense of history.
"Hang on, Lew," he told me. Then, raising his voice: "Hey, Walsh. You taking calls today or what?"
A brief reply I couldn't make out.
"You wish."
This time a longer reply.
"Yeah, but she wasn't that good." Back to me: "He's here. He's live." Turning away again: "Yo. Walsh. Hello?" To me: "Hold on. May have got his attention." Then: "It's Griffin. You want to talk to him or not? No one else will."
"Lew."
"Enjoying your time off, I see."
"Hey. Officially I'm not even here. Just figured since you were gonna be out of frame for a while, I might as well use the time to catch up on paperwork. What else am I gonna do? Lay sod in the backyard?"
I didn't say anything.
"You start whistling that "Don't Worry, Be Happy' thing, I'll have to come over there and kick butt."
We sat listening to the hum in the wires.
"Lew?"
"Yeah."
"What's going on?"
After a moment I said, "I'm not sure."
"Have to tell you I don't much like the sound of that."
"Wouldn't expect you to. Not too crazy about it myself, all things considered." Leaves had gone dead still outside my window. "I may be away for a while, Don."
"I see. We talking a long while or a short one here?"
"I don't know that either."
"Okay."
Wind started up again. Had waited, coiled in the trees, till now. Windows chattered in their panes. Strands of Spanish moss blew sideways. A few let go. The sky grew dark.
"You know where I am."
Yes.
"Call me."
I said I would. A stutter of rain started down outside.
"Take care, Lew."
Deborah would be at work, of course. I left a message on her home machine, asking if she'd take care of Bat, telling her I'd leave a key with Norm Marcus down the street, just in case Zeke wasn't around when she came by. I waited, wanting to say something else, getting ready to, but before I could, the machine cut off.
I went into the kitchen to put a message on therefrigerator door for Zeke and stood there looking out the window above the sink. Rain fell without sound through the trees.
So much of my life bound up with this house. So many mornings and evenings and nights I'd stood here just like this, or sat at the table for long hours with LaVeme, Don, Alouette. Quiet moments as the world outside whirled past, over and around.
Just as it did now.
For by this time the storm had arrived in earnest and incontrovertibly. Rain streamed off roofs edge, a solid curtain, shutting off that world, leaving me marooned here on this mutable island.
Such comfort, such misgiving, in it.
29
Sometimes the future dwells in us without our knowing it and when we think we are lying our words foretell an imminent reality.
PROUST, OF COURSE.
30
SO IT IS that my own Nighttown sequence begins.
Waiting only for the storm to subside, wearing old green jeans I usually reserved for yard work, a pair of blue-and-silver swayback knockoff Nikes, bruise-purple flannel shirt over a denim shirt faded almost to white and a well-worn, well-torn red T-shirt, green bandanna tied at my neck, I left the house within hours of speaking to Don and leaving the message for Deborah. Instinctively I headed for theriver. I looked like Doo-Wop at a fashion show.
If indeed there's something at our centers, how do we find our way to it? The doors that should lead there open into closets and storage places, onto dead corridors, back to the outside.
All our lives, every day, we constantly remake ourselves, reinvent ourselves, layer after layer, mask after mask. Maybe when finally we peel off all the masks there's nothing left. Maybe Doo-Wop in his own timeless way is right: we're nothing but the stories we tell ourselves and others.
I remembered, years ago, walking just like this by the levee downtown, smelling automobile exhausts, stagnant water and all the things that grow in it, hops and yeast from the old Jax brewery. I'd just been sprung from a long, court-enforced hospital stay, locked doors, locked razors. No home, no work or career left, just trunks full of loose connections. That day the terms tabula rasa and palimpsest had drifted into my mind.
I also remembered, further back, waking up at the base of that same levee after a night's hard drinking with bluesman Buster Robinson. My legs were in the water. I raised my head and watched them bob about down there in the wake from ferries and tugs, in the slurry of candy wrappers, paper cups and other flotsam that had collected around them.
Stories, then.
The ones I moved through thosefirst days on the street, as I lowered myself into the depths, heading downtown.
Just off Tchoupitoulas above Napoleon, where train tracks shrug shoulders into the river's curve, I came across a group of elderly black men sitting on the bank around a galvanized tub of iced beer and a bowl of cold fried chicken. Most had homemadefishingpoles and mostly they wore polyester pants with ribbed white underwear shirts or old dress shirts with wayward collars, thin nylon socks, black shoes. Plastic milk crates and cheap folding lawn chairs provided seats. They invited me to join them.
"Have some chicken."
"Hep yourself to a beer."
A kind of gentlemen's club, I learned, they met here each day.
Sam had been a barber down by Jackson Avenue nigh on fiftyyears. Rarely saw a white face down there.
Ulysses had sous-chefed all his adult life at uptown restaurants where the menus were a kind of found poetry and wine bottles proliferated like brooms in The Sorcerer's Apprentice.
William did whatever he could find, always had and still did, jani-toring, ya
rd work, roadwork. Lot less of all that now, though. Too many people driving by, knocking on doors, scavenging after what subsistence they could. He understood how that was. Wasn't about to begrudge them.
Thing was, from the time he was twelve and already on his own, William'd always given top value for your dollar. Pay for ten hours' work, you were just as likely to get twelve or fifteen or twenty out of him, whatever the job demanded. He wouldn't walk away till it was done. And there were some who remembered, some who took notice.
So William—some called him Sweet William, others Big Bad Bill, and when they did, they laughed—still got work three, four days a week. And when he didn't work, generally he showed up here with beer for the rest, most of whom had been without work now for years.
We sat swapping stories around the beer tub, as people once gathered around campfires.
"You do remember that Reagan fellow?" James Lee said when his turn came. He'd taught for years at Xavier, history and economics; everyone called him Professor. "One of the true heroes of our cause. 'Long with Jesse Helms, of course."
America's memoiy is short. Abjuring any sense of history, the nation eternally improvises itself. Highwaymen such as Richard Nixon disappear only to emerge years later as "elder statesmen." A presidential candidate recently refened to Ronald Reagan as the best president this country ever had. All over America, jaws dropped. But (and this is the amazing part) just as many didn't.
"Yassuh, we be retired, the mosta us," one of the company said. Fishing a beer from the tub, he opened it. It spewed, provoking general laughter.
"What we are all right."
"Retired."
"Tired and tired again."
"Like that beer. Make some rude noise, then go back to what we can't help being."
"American-dream word, ain't it, retired?"
All those big words that make us so unhappy. Stephen Daedalus was right to fear them.
"Some day these fish ain' bitin'—"
"Thass most days, Sheldon."
"You right, ole man."
"—we goan hafta study collectin all them words. Make us up a list. Regular devil's dictionaiy. £"-quality. Z)e-mock-racy. Damn. Just roll right the tongue, don't they?"
"They do for sure."
More than one voice: "Yeah!"
We'd cut right to call and response, echoes of talking drums in Congo Square and church amens, the slapshot syllogism at the heart of the blues.
"You want this last piece a chicken, Lewis?" Sam the barber said.
"Think we all 'bout had our fill."
One last volley, then: "Life, liberty—"
"And the pursuit of happiness."
"You mean haplessness, don't you, Eugene?" The Professor's eyes met mine. We were both in hiding—in plain sight, like Poe's purloined letter.
By this time chickens were nibbled down to dry bone, beer had become a couple dozen empty cansfloatingin tepid water and fish (if indeed they'd ever entertained such a notion) had given up biting. The day itself, ebbing away in pink-and-gray dribbles on the horizon, abandoned all illusion, all pretense: knew once again it wouldn't survive. The group began dispersing. I bade them good-bye.
Then, following river's bend into what used to be called the Irish Channel, I wound up (like Jesus) among thieves.
Back doors of nondescript vans open in an abandoned school parking lot, these maverick capitalists gathered over their latest takes: trading, bartering, buying and selling, avidly redistributing wealth. From time to time kids pedaled up on bicycles with baskets full of goods and pedaled away again with baskets empty.
TVs were a major commodity, as were portable stereos, VCRs, CD players and boom boxes.
Lots of laptop computers these days, I noticed. Larger systems, proving difficult both to transport and to fence, generally stood untouched, but the little ones were fair game, negotiable. New technology, new crimes.
I thought how Newt Gingrich some years back told us flat out that all our country's problems would be solved once information became freely accessible on the Internet. Such sweetness to what he said, in a way: this blind, ever-renewable innocence at America's heart. The man simply could not imagine that other lives might be different from his own. One journalist looked over at the housing project across the street, wondering aloud how many of the residents had their computers turned on just then.
I slept that firstnight under a bench in a pie-slice park on Magazine, my bench and two others, a border of hedge and an anonymous statue pretty much comprising it. Directly across Magazine, used furniture stores stood shoulder to shoulder, tanklike steel desks and Formica dinette sets showing dimly through windows cataracted with grime. A bar took up the V's other leg, HALF MOON painted freehand on its blacked-out window, sign above the doorreading THE PLACE. Chains were wound through the square bars of a security gate whose lock no longer worked. Drifts of refuse and leaves at the gate's base bore witness to long disuse.
Early morning—I'd stepped out of time's circle, gone to Hopi Mean Time like Doo-Wop, give-and-take of light and body's promptings my only calendar or clock—I woke to the sound of a car idling nearby and a voice above me.
Policeman squatting there, face through the bench's slats looking all of sixteen years old. Telling me I'd best move along. Partner in the car watching, hands wrapped around a plastic cup of Circle K coffee.
"You okay, sir?"
Sir? I guess some things do change.
I nodded.
"You heaixl me, right?"
I began climbing out from under the bench, stiff and sore from the day's walking as much as from the night's cramped position.
"You need help? You walk okay?"
No. Yes.
"Better hit it, then. Store owners'll start showing up soon, don't much like campers. Be on the phone in three minutes and we'd be rightback down here."
I stood, one hand on the back of the bench. Not too steady at all. Legs simultaneously numb and knotted with cramps. Absurdly thinking of Reagan in some old movie: My legs, what happened to my legs?
"Hey, you sure you're okay? When's the last time you ate? Don't know how you guys pull it off. Here." He handed me a five."But it's for food, right? Nothing else."
I thanked him.
"No problem. Listen, you take care, okay?"
He got back in the car. The radio crackled. They had the air cranked up high. He and partner sat watching as I moved away down Magazine. The street turned one-way and empty here. No one coming uptown this time of day. The whole city might be deserted. Lifeless husks of cars, shells of buildings. I was the only one left alive.
31
LATER THAT MORNING as I walked by an empty lot on lower Prytania where an impromptu flea market had sprung up, cars, wooden pushcarts and shopping carts spilling out lines of tools, cardboard boxes of record albums, ground cloths or improvised tables laid with waffle irons, hot dog cookers and coconuts turned into heads with shells for eyes, I thought how much of my life these past forty-plus years, since I came to New Orleans, had been passed simply moving through the city, watching it close and reopen like some huge wood-and-stone flower around me, forever new, forever the same; and how much, on the other hand, passed as I sat afloat, apart and alone, a distracted Archimedes, in my room.
All these years I'd believed I understood the city's real life—conceit of the worst sort. Whole generations of change had passed outside, fogging the glass with their breath as they peered in, some of them knocking at the pane, as I sat writing my own books and reading others, sunk in the dailiness of my life. Pascal claimed that all man's unhappiness arises from the single fact that he is unable to remain quietly in his own chamber. Hedging the bet again.
Appropriately enough, I thought of Hamsun's Hunger, how on a gloomy, wet morning the novel's protagonist departs with his few yet-unpawned possessions rolled into a blanket, promising in a note left behind to his landlady that soon enough, away from these distractions and with time to scribble out a scatter offeuilletons for the loca
l paper, he'll remit not only her due but a handsome interest as well.
I thought, too, of the immense sadness of Rimbaud's last letter, dictated to his sister the day before his death. I imagine her at bedside, taking this down, then, as Arthur falls back into pure delirium (I smell her soap-washed body, the stench of his decomposing leg and sour, acid sweat, unguents and incense set out to cover these), stepping to the door where Mother waits, saying, Perhaps he will rest now.
I wish to change today from this steamship service, which I do not even know the name of, but in any case let it be the Aphinar line. All those lines are everywhere here; and I, powerless, unhappy, can find nothing; the first dog you meet in the street will be able to tell you.
So send me the list of fares from Aphinar to Suez. I am completely paralysed: therefore I wish to be embarked early. Tell me at what time I must be carried on board.
Crossing Canal, prow of my own bateau ivre breaking through floes of tourists in fanny packs and sensible shoes consulting city maps and Greyline schedules, I moved downstream towards the river's thirsty mouth. Where paddle-wheelers kept slow count of bodies walking planks into them and ferries struck out every half hour, swimming frantically overhand, for far Algiers. Slaves fresh from Africa were held there before being brought over to the Quarter for sale. Everything they knew and understood was gone. Stacked belowdeck like logs, awash in their own refuse, they'd emerge blinking, caked with grime and reeking. So much for the joys of a sea cruise.
Amazing Floridas! Hideous wrecks at the bottom of brown gulfs! Eveiy dawn—every last one of them—heartbreaking.
Here I am now on Decatur, walking narrow sidewalks beneath balconies off the apartments above, past bars with front doors propped open and cats aperch on rear half-doors into kitchens through which can be ordered shrimp, special luncheon plates, fried onions, peppers and potatoes, muffalettas heaped with olive salad, thick po-boys, daiquiris, beer.