It was interesting to watch the recently bereaved Professor Lewis McAllister as he strutted his way down the street with a variety of dance partners. He seemed cheerful enough. He was certainly laughing loud and hard. But if you watched closely, he hesitated between each song, as if he was looking for someone else to dance with, someone much smaller.
He missed her.
He had loved her.
Is it possible to feel both sorry for and jealous of someone at the same time?
In a number of staider locales, the visible display of frivolity would have felt a shade premature and been viewed as more than a touch unseemly, but in New Orleans you can only lament for so long.
Twelve
The sudden inexplicable onset of guilt will make you do things.
I had called Faith Community in Boulder when I first arrived in New Orleans. This was the church where once a month I worked in the basement where the homeless were housed on the coldest nights. I helped set up beds, take down beds, handed out donated socks, and drank shockingly bad coffee for the last quiet hour of my Sunday night shift.
I had started working there two years ago because I wanted to find a man who also worked there, serving the lost, listening to their fears, making them feel better about themselves, and then killing them.
I kept on working there after I helped find that man because the place still needed volunteers, and also because the shitstorm of publicity Faith was buried in after the killer was discovered made me feel uneasy.
I had called because I would miss my night to volunteer. My intention was to reschedule. But the lady who answered the phone had offered another option.
“Would you like to do some volunteer work while you’re in New Orleans, Tom?”
The lady who answered the phone at the church was always polite. I seldom called her. I knew my day to be there, and I almost always showed up. Occasionally she would call to ask me to switch with another volunteer. I usually said yes.
She was notoriously difficult to refuse, so when she posed her question, I mumbled in the affirmative and tried not to sigh as I did so.
She had called me back in a half hour with a day, an address in the Lower Ninth on Tennessee Avenue, and a time early in the morning for me to be there. It was now that day and that time. And I was there.
We were required to cut the grass on long-abandoned properties. We were issued the first of many generic bottled waters, a scythe, work gloves, insect repellent and industrial-strength sunscreen that was so thick it barely squeezed out of the tube. The older kids were given lawn mowers and told to wait. The younger ones were sent ahead to scout for rocks. The handful of adults who showed up were told to spread far out, watch out for rocks and children, and commence swinging.
It was backbreaking, brain-numbing, and easy.
Tobias Watson who worked alongside me was was a strikingly black man maybe close to my age. He told me he lived a few blocks away on Flood Street. A sharp glance dared me to offer any conceivable response to the name.
We swung together in unison as he began to talk.
“Twenty feet of dirty canal water heading down my street. One church left with nothing but the steeple still standing right up after. When the waters fall there was these two rowboats still tied up. Church top was the safest place to wait out the highest of the water.”
“Twenty feet?”
He nodded solemnly. “Like a flood. One house got swept into another church and beat it down flat.”
I looked up and down Tennessee. The levee was nearby, visible through the gaps on either side of the road where other houses had once stood. Maybe one in six structures had been rebuilt. There were a few traditional structures next to a series of bright new homes constructed at the urging of a movie star. He owned a house in the city where he lived with his movie-star wife and their bunch of kids.
Tobias supported his efforts.
“Man did what was right. The houses look nothing like what they replaced, but all that sorry shit fell down. They painted them some pretty wild colors. I heard one of these new houses is built so as to float if we ever get washed away again. The man came here. He talked some to us. Real polite. He listened. Called me sir.”
Tobias swung and toiled beneath an elaborate hat and netting ensemble that looked about right for chopping his way through the Amazon. He pointed towards the levee.
“Water came from over there like it was a wall and washed the street away. Army Corps knew the canal levee was weak.”
Tobias pointed further down Tennessee. “Man over there, he rebuilt. Stone outside the front door in the grass all that was left of his place. Carved the name of his baby daughter and his mother on it. Both of them upstairs when his house done wash away.
Church over on Flood never got to be rebuilt. Pastor has his church in his new house down this road. Used to be a bigger church. Lost his flock to places like Houston. His new house had to be built twice; bad drywall rotted out the copper piping the first time. Volunteers did their best but used them some cheap drywall from a foreign place.”
“Why are we cutting this grass?”
“Keep the city from taking away the property.”
“Will these people come back?”
“Don’t matter to me if they do or don’t. This their places. Some can’t prove it. Some don’t much want it. Don’t matter. It’s theirs to do with what they see fit. Ain’t the city’s business.”
He looked closely at me. “You got you enough sunscreen?”
I assured him that I had.
Tobias revealed his plan for the rest of our day.
“We cuttin’ till lunch. We can stay and keep on cuttin’. Get a ham and cheese sandwich and a bag of chips for our trouble. Cut more grass all the afternoon. Or we go to Gentilly.”
“What’s in Gentilly?”
“Afternoon work. Paint a little house. Two sisters live there. Older ladies. Real nice. They both live on the same street. Both flooded. Both got the inside of their house fixed pretty with insurance money. But the money didn’t cover all the outside work. We paint the one last week. Look fine when we get done. She real happy with the work. Made some crawfish etouffee and cornbread for all us painters. Her sister’s house got to be painted this afternoon.”
“How was the etouffee?”
Tobias smiled. “Lady an outstanding cook.”
I swung that machete harder.
We had a plan for the afternoon.
I offered Tobias a ride to Gentilly. The volunteer coordinator was a full-grown woman trapped inside the body of a ten-year-old boy. She thanked us for our morning labors and handed us two sandwiches, two bottles of water, two huge apples, and two individual bags of Nacho Cheese Doritos. We thanked her and placed our lunches on the back seat of my car hoping we wouldn’t need them.
Tobias Watson gave me his Katrina story as I drove west on Claiborne Avenue.
He had fled Katrina at the mayor’s first urging, heading north to his sister’s place in Jackson, where he waited it out for a few weeks. Tobias’ sister was married to a white man, a cop in Jackson. When Tobias was set to come back home, his brother-in-law made a series of phone calls. Tobias got his FEMA trailer quickly. He had his building permits in place faster than most, and his single shotgun on the unfortunately named Flood was habitable within six months and pretty as a picture within the year, which surely stood as some kind of city record. The interior of his single-story home was a sorry mess when he first returned, but the brick façade had stood firm. Tobias was handy and did a lot of the work himself, plastering and painting every day, and sleeping in his trailer at night.
“Did you ever consider not coming back?” I asked him, as I turned to head north on Franklin.
“I surely did,” he replied. “But this my home.”
We arrived at a two-story house on Cameron. There were ladders leaning
against walls and teenagers everywhere, all wearing bright orange T-shirts that proclaimed their allegiance to Jesus and to a Presbyterian church youth group in southern Illinois.
On our arrival, a volunteer coordinator interrogated us on our level of handiness. Tobias passed, and was assigned to the repair of several rotted-out window frames. I joined most of the youth in the unskilled painting crew.
Tobias and I looked around hopefully. Lunch was either long over or else not happening. We picked at our sandwiches in somber silence.
We were offered top-ups of repellent and sun-blocking cement before we got down to work. I held the ladder while a girl in very tight jean shorts rained paint down on me from above. We labored in this fashion for about ten minutes. Then we switched roles for the rest of the afternoon. Her name was Tracy. I was a much better painter than she was because I was older and able to concentrate better; in other words, I wasn’t distracted by having to flirt with the good-looking young man on the adjacent ladder. I was also much happier to be above Tracy than under her. Trying hard not to stare up at the rear end of a girl surely no more than sixteen was wearying.
The new arrangement worked for Tracy, too, as the boy on the next ladder also switched places, securing his place in the lower-level stabilizing gig. The smitten twosome was now free to chat while offering cursory support to their airborne work partners.
I painted carefully. My Buffs cap was soon sweat-sodden. My neck ached. I broke for water and more paint. The house would soon be a creamy yellow color. The orange-clad crusaders were singing some hideous power ballad about being in love with Jesus, which I just knew would be wedged in my brain for the rest of the night.
But I didn’t care. The work was thoughtless and distracting and the time went surprisingly fast.
We worked until around seven. It was still warm and light and the house was finished. Tobias had worked on retrofitting busted-out window frames and then switched to rebuilding the back deck that now looked brand new.
We were working on Chantelle’s house. Her sister Chevelle lived two doors down on the same street. They were both loud and large and mysteriously happy. At seven, ten folding tables appeared on the front porch as we washed brushes in the yard and cleaned up. Iced tea was served in huge pitchers. Dinner was brought out from the kitchen. Both sisters served us crawfish etouffee over white rice and warm cornbread.
I sat beside Tobias and tried not to match the shit-eating grin plastered across his dark sweaty face. I failed. We clinked our mismatched McDonald’s glasses together and got stuck in.
It was getting dark as I drove Tobias back home. We were both exhausted and we said nothing for most of the way. At his house he offered me a beer and I took him up on it. We sat on his front porch and we drank. The spaces between the new and the surviving buildings were large so that, even though it was relentlessly level, you could see a long distance across several blocks to the deceitful levee, appearing as a long dark line drawn up against the night sky. A stray dog walked past Tobias’ place looking furtive, clearly up to no good. Cars drove by slowly to circumvent the canyon-like potholes that booby-trapped his street. A ship’s horn sounded far away. We sipped at our cold Heinekens.
“This place used to be full,” Tobias told me. “Now it’s just nothing but empty.”
* * *
I got safely back to Elysian Fields without falling asleep at the wheel. I popped open a tall NOLA to cleanse the skunky beer taste and sat down in the courtyard.
I woke up a good while later. The night was still warm, as was my mostly untouched beverage. The fountain was turned off. I remembered it had been gurgling when I first sat down. My painting arm hurt, but my stomach was full of rich food, and despite the layers of SPF 5000 spackle, my neck felt charred, yet I crawled off to bed smiling.
* * *
My painting arm still ached the next morning, as did every other muscle. I made some coffee in the house and sat outside in the last clean T-shirt I had. The washer and dryer, small modern and double stacked machines, were behind a hidden door in the back of the bathroom. I hadn’t bought detergent but there was enough left behind by a previous tenant.
From Piety to Desire, Volume 7 was playing on the boom box I had found and connected to an electrical outlet on the side of the house. I wasn’t close to being hungry. I sipped my coffee and tried to think of something I should know about Logan Kind that the Internet hadn’t already told me.
There wasn’t terribly much. Tracking down his old digs was maybe a place to start. He had rented an apartment on Esplanade before the storm. The building had closed and reopened as condos within the year, but Logan was long gone by then. The previous property company no longer answered their old phone number, and boasted no online presence. Logan Kind appeared to have never possessed a listed phone number in New Orleans, and his place of residence after Katrina was still something I hadn’t uncovered.
So how had Logan lived? There had been music sales that had grown slowly and exponentially before and after his death. His sister Margot administered his estate after his death. There was a publishing company named Kindsongs, which held publishing rights to all the songs recorded on Crofter. Margot Kind was the only named employee on the website. No other performers, and no other songs, were legally represented by the company. It wasn’t clear when Kindsongs was founded. Was it before Logan had died or after? My best guess would be post-demise.
Had Logan worked? Not in Oxford, according to Carly Williamson, although unpaid dog-walking had certainly taken up a good portion of his free time. In New Orleans he had played out on the street on occasion. It was hard to know how often he performed. The registered sightings by Croftertales subscribers were sporadic, but that was hardly a definitive record of employment.
Could you make a living performing on the streets? I had no idea, but if Mel’s theatrical one performer-two-character revue required giving hand jobs to young drunks to stay afloat, then the profitability of Logan’s intermittent busking seemed doubtful.
At that moment, an impossibly pure voice caught my attention. According to the brief liner notes, tracks seven and eight on the Piety compilation were recorded by Iris Cummings. She played a hammered dulcimer and she sang wistfully in both English and Gaelic. The first track was “Meddlesome Malcolm” and was lightly comic in tone. The name of the second song was unpronounceable and was a more ethereal composition. Her voice was quite wonderful on both. The production was simple and perfect. I could have listened to her forever. Alas, the two tracks were all Ms. Cummings delivered before a zydeco-speed-metal hybrid power trio laid waste to my eardrums.
This was, I judged, the perfect moment to move my laundry along.
Once my clothes were safely drying, it was back to work.
It was possible to leave a message on Margot Kind’s website. I contemplated asking her a few questions about her brother, but I couldn’t quite work out what to say. I did want to get in contact with her eventually. But I wanted to be able to tell her something and that clearly wasn’t possible yet.
Logan Kind had rented two places to live. He had existed. He hadn’t had any kind of gainful employment as far as I could tell. But he hadn’t actually starved. I wanted to know if he had made money. He went to clubs on rare occasions. Crofter had never been a million seller, but it had at least sold copies. Had he received royalties? Had anyone famous recorded his songs? Had he written a screenplay? Won the lottery? Sued some rich rapper for sampling his songs and settled out of court for a colossal lump sum?
The Internet could go some way towards answering these questions.
I loaded From Piety to Desire, Volume 10.
By the time my clothes were toasty dry I had plenty of answers. Three bands I had never heard of had recorded three of Logan’s songs. His Amazon rating was a number several decimal points west of Beyoncé’s. I did note that the Amazon ratings of the three aforementioned bands were v
ery close to Logan’s. He hadn’t won the lottery. I had already discovered that Margot Kind had a book in the works, and that an indie film about Logan was in preproduction, but neither of these endeavors would have provided financial assistance to Kind during his lifetime.
The last site I visited was simply one person’s list of sad music deaths, in reverse order, from ten to one. Logan’s was number eight.
Two members of the band Badfinger had hung themselves, years apart, supposedly as a result of widespread public indifference to their well-crafted pop songs. Badfinger had once drawn favorable comparisons to the Beatles, who had signed them to their own record label. One of their songs did become a huge hit twice over, but it was too late by then. Even very recently an acclaimed television show had featured their finest song in the last scene of the series finale. But it was still too late. The website listed Badfinger’s members as rock’s saddest deaths. It was hard to argue.
Guess I got what I deserve
Kept you waiting there too long, my love
The courtyard was now quiet. The music on the compilation discs had proved to be mostly distracting; not because it was especially good or bad, but because there was so little attempt at continuity. It was rap to jazz to rock. At one point what sounded like a couple of ADHD kids beating a handful of large plastic receptacles to death gave way to plainsong: barely whispered spoken word, as an earnest woman emoted on the subject of childbirth, over what sounded like a duet for pregnant whale and theremin.
I had managed to enjoy Iris Cummings, despite the unruly juxtapositions. I was certain that I would have appreciated some of the other artists in a more supportive setting.
Thirteen
The Internet recommended Nashville tuning for “Wild Horses,” but that wasn’t about to happen.
It was two hours later. My body hurt despite four Ibuprofen, and I was back on the streets in the early afternoon, guitar in my lap, another sorry-looking chair from the courtyard securely wedged under my rear end. Once again I had been able to procure shade under the store awning, with my guitar case lying open in an act of incurable optimism. I was fully watered, with all manner of ablutions successfully completed.
Colorblind Page 18