by James Sallis
Here again, walking up Esplanade in thrall to gentrification. Security gates, doormen and keypads everywhere in evidence now, where brief years ago columns on swayback porches had burst with onion plants and whole floors been chopped indiscriminately (bathtubs in kitchens, walls of sagging plywood) into low-rent rooms.
On into the Faubourg Marigny. After several decades' disuse and crumble, shotgun houses down here again are inhabited, bikes, motorcycles and hibachis out front bespeaking occupation, clothes and hammocks hung from lines and fences out back confirming it, new paint, new cement steps. No trees or greenery. Houses like books on a shelf. This part of the city resoundingly gay. Strips of alternative bookstores, vintage clothing shops, specialty restaurants, bars and galleries, a fine storefront theater, perhaps most of all the headquarters for NO Aids, make a true neighborhood of it—one in which Richaid Garces felt at home. Making me wonder what neighborhood, what community, I might ever feel at home in.
None, maybe. God knows I'd tried enough of them.
Years ago I'd bitten off a part of the great American dream I could never swallow. I was still chewing on it.
"Tween what we see, what be," John Berryman wrote in The Dream Songs, "is blinds. Them blinds' on fire."
Convenience kills, I'd seen spray-painted on the side of a K&B.
And I, powerless, unhappy, could find nothing to put out the fire. Ask the first dog you meet in the street.
That second night I slept in the Faubourg's block of a park, wakened just past dawn by the rattle of chains being unwound from steel gates. Someone stood over me looking down. I heard his breath coming and going, smelled the cup of coffee he'd just drunk, traces of musk from early-morning sex. Should he speak or keep his peace?
(Why do you cry? Are we not happy? Nietzsche asks, momentarily catching the eye of the sister who cares for him.
No, Friedrich, we're not. Nor will we ever be. Children afraid of the night who have never been happy or good.)
I listened to the park guardian's footsteps pass away, noting how he kept to grass, avoiding cement walks. In one of the apartments overlooking the park a fresh cup of coffee, a baguette or pretzel put into the oven to warm, a lover or companion, awaited him.
I started back up Frenchmen towards the Quarter.
Forlorn horn from the river just blocks away. Some outbound ship awaiting bodies.
Tell me at what time I must be earned aboard.
32
THAT WHOLE DAY I strayed through the city, seeing it as though for the first time. Fresh off one of the ships, without even language to contain this experience, codify it. A painter onceremarked that seeing consists of forgetting you know the name of the thing that's seen.
I remembered the voiceover beginning Tavernier's Deathwatch and circling back at the end. Harvey Keitel's eyes have been replaced with cameras. Eveiything towards which he turns his head now is captured, caught: he's become the ultimate artist. "He told me he spent that whole day walking . . ." Keitel like Oedipus by movie's end, blind yet—because from some immeasurable mix of guilt and love he chose that blindness—humanized.
Soon too, like Keitel's character, I found myself in a mission, upper bunk near the back of the dorm, after a dinner of vegetable soup heavy on cabbage and white beans, two slices of white bread piled atop, mug of coffee, the whole of it consumed in the shade of your basic Fundamentalist ranting. Recalling all those youthful Sundays back home, packed into my suit (pajamas worn under, suit scratchy wool like Mom's army-surplus blankets) and clip-on tie, pantseat polishing hardwood pews under stained-glass windows illustrating the parable of the talents, Jesus bringing in sheaves, the prodigal son, stone rolledback from the tomb.
I'd been here before. Last Thursday, following up on the list Richard Garces gave me. The guy who finallyadmitted well, yes, he did kind of look after things (nowhere in evidence now, I noticed) had shown me around, guided me to boxes of books stacked in the hall by his own cramped room.
It all looked substantially different now, of course. Perspective is everything.
Lights-out was at ten. Then you lie listening to bodies turn on the spit of their memories, volleys of farts from newly challenged digestive systems, the occasional scream or convulsion, conversations so private that only one person's involved. You feel the rasp of coarse blankets, monitor the thunderlike rumbling of your own bowels. You're asleep, then awake, then asleep again but aware you're dreaming: another border given way.
What time of night is it? No way to know. Have you slept an hour? Four hours? Ten minutes?
A single bare bulb hung at the back of the hall, eclipsed as pilgrims shuttled back and forth to the bathroom. Then they'd settle back into beds hawking, hegiras having stirred up various sediments in chest and head.
Never more alone than at 3 A.M. Wake without reason, night's face staring you clown. ERs fill with patients. Men my age suddenly alert, certain that the pain in their aim's a heart attack.
Dim residual light from outside, lash of car headlights. Someone moving below me. A voice.
"You okay up there, man?"
"What?"
"Been slam-dunkin' yourself for the better part of an hour now."
"Sony."
"Hey. No problem. God knows I'm used to it."
"Come here often, do you?"
"Regular Soup Kitchen Sam, yeah."
"Don't guess you know what time it is."
If I'd had a brother, this was the way it might have felt. Parents elsewhere in the house. Two of us up here in the crow's nest holding out against the world.
"Three-eighteen."
Okay. So that morning light in the window's only imagination. Too much night left.
"Name's Griffin, right?"
A beat went by. Two beats.
"Word is, you're a good man. What everyone says. What they don't know is why you'd be down here now, way you are."
I give up. Don't know, myself.
"My grandmother used to tell me how this collector'd come 'round. Tell her records show she owed some arrears. He'd stay to drink a cup of coffee, then after he was gone she'd lift up the napkin, find a five-dollar bill there."
"Heard the same story about Pretty Boy Floyd."
"Right. People be callin' you Pretty Boy Griffin soon." He laughed. It sounded like someone choking. "You ain't though."
"Pretty boy?"
Same laugh. Neither of us said anything for a while. Lay listening to the bodies around us.
"Grandmother raised me. Neither one of us ever knew where my mother might've got off to. Never developed much feeling for people—maybe because of that, who knows? Mostly dog meat, from my experience. Scrape out the bowl. But I purely loved that woman."
One of our shipmates lunged past, bouncing from bed to bed, and fetched up against the wall, where he began sonorously throwing up. Raw-meat smell of blood.
"Gran's life was hard. Wasn't much ever came along to ease it."
We fell asleep again.
Then, five or so, some fool decided his destiny was to liberate whatever I'd squirreled away in my bunk and came rooting. I heard him four steps off. I'd just clamped a fist around his balls when a hand snaked down from the bunk above, wrapped hair about itself and lifted. The would-be hijacker's eyes went round. Feet half a foot off the floor.
"Your call," my bunkmate said. "What'U we do with this piece a shit?"
"What the hell. Turn him loose, I guess."
"You sure?"
"Yeah."
"Not much fun in that, is there?" But he set him down.
The hijacker scuttled away.
Light had begun breaking outside. Real this time, not imagined. We lay there wide awake.
"Berouting us for breakfast soon enough," my bunkmate said. "You up for slimy grits, soggy toast and half-done eggs?"
"I've handled worse."
"Bet you have."
Roused by light and smells from the kitchen, without realpurpose, direction or goal, bodies had begun staggering about, a
kind of Brownian motion.
"Don't mean to impose. Your life and your business. But why are you down here?"
"Trying tofindmyself."
"Bad thing to lose."
"Have to admit it takes some doing." Or maybe not, come to think of it.
Meanwhile, things had picked up in the kitchen.
"Smell that coffee. No better smell in the world." Spoken like a true New Orleanian.
"One tip for you, though."
"Okay."
"Don't touch the casseroles or macaroni. Pasta here'H kill you. It's documented."
33
SIMPLE SUZIE WAS around fifty now, my age, a little less. She'd been on the street for twenty years at least, and everyone knew her: cops, mail earners, newspaper boys, homeowners and apartment renters on her usual beat just riverside of Claiborne in the triangle formed by Felicity and Melpomene, enclosing Terpsichore, Euterpe, Polymnia. Some of these people gave her food, others asked about her dog Daniel. Daniel had been dead as long as she'd been on the streets, but she still talked about him all the time. For eight, ten years Suzie's husband beat her eveiy other day or so. Then one day he came home from work early (he'd been firedbut failed to tell her that) and because she didn't have dinner ready (at four in the afternoon) grabbed Daniel up by the hind legs and swung him against the wall. Dog barely had time to bark twice. And when Suzie bent over the clog, something like oatmeal with ketchup coming out its ears and broken skull, he started in on her. When neighbors checked a couple of days later she was still lying there in the kitchen. Went to Charity and hadn't been the same since. That's when she became Simple Suzie and a denizen of New Orleans' streets, as famous in her own uptown way as Sam the Preacher or the Duck Lady in the Quarter. Police never found the husband.
As he struggled up the slope towards sixty, Ed opened the door one day to an unexpected visitor: no word for it then, but now we call it Alzheimer's. Within a year things had got bad enough that he couldn't live alone anymore and moved in with his only daughter and her husband. Within two, things were bad enough that he couldn't do much of anything on his own. Dress himself, for instance, or see to personal hygiene. And within three, daughter Cassie had died, leaving husband Al (for Aloysius, but no one God help him knew that) with three kids under ten, Grandpa Ed and a job that paid three-sixty-five an hour. The kids pretty much fended for themselves as Al began coming home later and later from work. Then one day he didn't come home at all. Couple of days after, Ed realizedhe was hungry, no one had been bringing him food. He pried off a simple window lock. Using the lock as a lever, a closet doorknob as a hammer, he worked the pins out of the door hinges. He went downstairs into the family room, where the kids, startled at the appearance of this naked old man smeared in his own excrement (though in fact they looked much the same), began screaming. Ed walked on into the kitchen, found a box of grits and some dodgy cheese, threw it all together in a pan to cook. While it did so, he called the police. Spent a few months over at Mandeville, then was released. The hospital delivered him to a halfway house on Jackson. Smiling and yessiring the whole time, he checked in, went through the door of the room he was to share with three others, and right out the window. Now, still smiling, still yessiring the whole time, he was one of those guys you saw going through the trash you'd put out curbside. These days he had quite a wardrobe he'd retrieved from those trash cans, and showed up on the streets each morning in a new outfit.
After class one day Professor Bill bent down to pick up a book one of his graduate students had dropped and felt something pop in his chest, a spontaneous pneumothorax, as it turned out. Within moments he had difficulty breathing. Paramedics were called, he was taken to nearby Oschner, chest tubes were inserted to relieve pressure, and he wound up on a ventilator in the medical ICU. Hours later, difficult breathing made a curtain call: another pneumo, another chest tube. Further complications ensued. Four months along, chiefly at the urging of his insurance carrier, at last off the ventilator and doing well, Professor Bill was transferred to a long-term facility forrehabilitation. That very night a bullet from a drive-by shooting a block away penetrated the wall of Bill's room and his chest, all but severing his vena cava. Blood and the oxygen it carried drained away from his brain. Only the intervention of an eighteen-year-old orderly, who recognized what was happening and thmst his fingers into the leaking vessel, saved Bill from death. This all happened ten years ago. Now Bill spent his days wandering about downtown, occasionally lecturing passersby on street corners or patrons in Wendy's and Winchell's on early American military history, most often not speaking at all.
As Buster Robinson would have said: Long after midnight when death comes slipping in your room, you gonna need somebody on your bond.
Or Gnostics: If you find a way of getting out what is within you, it can save you; if you don't, it will kill you.
But often enough it won't matter how hard you listen for the universe's voice outside you, for the still, small voice of truth inside.
Often enough, no matter what you do, the wind's footsteps are all you'll hear.
34
THE CITY HAD followed Rimbaud's advice: Je est un autre. "I" is another. Or maybe it was just that I had become another. Which I guess was pretty much young Arthur's point. Everything had changed because I had changed. The shape of the jar defines what is contained. We can say only what language allows us to say. And to say more we must change language itself. It was a quest Rimbaud finally fled, taking his sad, doomed refuge in Abyssinia. But he'd almost done it. He'd bent language almost, almost, into new shapes—before it sprang back.
And now I was in a kind of Abyssinia myself.
Soon enough I'd lost all sense of time; I might just as easily have been on the streets a week, six or eight weeks, months on end. Not that anything was lost. On the contrary, each moment was scored deeply into my memory. That veiy immediacy mitigated time's flow. Days and time of day had become irrelevant. Only the moment mattered.
I pass from missions doling out watery soup and day-old bread donated by Leidenheimer Bakery to others where we queue for beds (take a number please) till available spaces are filled(shipwreck victims awaiting allocation to lifeboats), to squatters' pads in abandoned, half-demolished buildings reeking of fresh humanrefuse and decomposing foodstuffs, to curiously medieval communities pitched beneath the vaults of passovers and bridges and Villonesque thieves' societies met in the cloisters of canal culverts.
I sleep upon benches and beneath them, in the recess of doorways, at the foot of hedges set out sentrylike alongside public parks, public buildings, apartment complexes, unreclaimed lots.
Days, I walk. Walk uptown on Carrollton to Oak or Freret or Maple, along St. Charles from Broadway to Napoleon to Jackson, downtown following the curve of the river to Esplanade then hopscotching back up through the Quarter, lakeward on Canal past shopfronts topped with boarded-up vacant spaces and across Basin, what used to be Storyville. Walk as though, for the city to keep its existence, not fade away, it must daily, hourly, ceaselessly be traced over, repaced,reaffirmed.
One afternoon I found myself on Prytania. Sitting on the steps of a recently renovated, still-unoccupied double across the street, through the front windows of my old house I watched Zeke step from table to mantel and back again, speaking animatedly with someone out of sight, huge ceramic mug in his hand. An early dinner, perhaps, just now finished. Or tea. A variety of containers, plates and bowls were set out. Zeke picked up a book from the table, opened it and read aloud. A hand and lower arm came into view, narrow wrist, slim fingers entwined about the stem of a wineglass. Then for the second time a police car cruised slowly by and I knew it was time to pick up my bag of belongings and move along.
Another afternoon, could have been the next, or weeks later, or a month (no seasons here in New Orleans to help orient us to passing time, not even that, only the ticking over of day and night), I found myself sitting on the levee with a man whose face I knew. We both had our heels spurred into the grou
nd and sat crouched over, knees in the air. He had a bag of food he'd salvaged from the Dumpster out behind Frank ie's in the riverbend: a melange of fried shrimp, garlic toast, pasta and fish, soggy, forlorn fries, broccoli and carrots, even half a steak. I had a plastic bottle I'd filled with water at an Exxon station and four beers I'd filched from a car whose driver stopped off at Lenny's Newsstand for a paper and left the windows down.
I tore one of the beers free of its plastic webbing and handed it to my companion. Nodding thanks, he worked the can into the dirt beside him, digging out a niche for it. On the back of a pizza carton he carefully set out for me four shrimp, portions of pasta, three pieces of fish, fries, a watery mound of broccoli and carrots and something else, mirliton maybe. Nothing to cut the steak with, so I'd have to wait till he'd had his share, then he'd pass it along.
Down on that shining blade of water a barge the size and shape of an aircraft earner inched upriver. Behind us, at the base of the levee, car after slow car, a train clanked by. A small plane caught and threw sunlight as it coasted through clouds. Everybody, everything going somewhere, it seemed.
We ate. And when my companion held the empty can high over his mouth to drain out the last drop, I handed him another beer. He looked momentarily surprised, hesitated before accepting it.
"Obliged," he said. Among the first words to pass between us.
"You a reader by any chance?" I asked once we'd eaten awhile.
He grunted and took a sip of beer. Pulled a paperback from his back pocket. It was a perfect mold of his buttock. An ancient, off-size Avon edition that originally sold for 35 cents, The Real Cool Killers by Chester Himes.
I took the book and looked through it. It was well paged, sentences roughly underlined, words scribbled in margins. My companion had been doing research, as he had with The Old Man, creating a life for himself.