by James Sallis
"In another context, and of another writer, Ellman remarks: 'If we must suffer, it is better to create the world in which we suffer. And this, he says, this is what heroes do spontaneously, artists do consciously, and all men do in their degree.'
"Never has there been, I think, a more determined world-creator than Joyce."
Today we were discussing the Nighttown sequence from Ulysses. In past weeks I had sketched out for them the basic structure of the novel and stood by (I hoped) as they discovered that not only was the book fun to read, it was actually funny: No one ever told us that before, Mr. Griffin. Probably not. Ulysses was offered up to them, to us all, as some kind of intimidating monolith, like those giant gates in King Kong. You had to beat on the drums and chant the right formulas before you'd dare let the beast of Literature loose.
Hosie Straughter had told me about the book years ago. When Hosie died of cancer in '89, body withering down in a matter of months to a dry brown twig, I couldn't think of a more appropriate tribute than to sit that whole weekend rereading Ulysses. Literature was only one of the things Hosie had given me. 1 had my own beasts. Hosie showed me how to contain them.
"The sequence is phantasmagoric, equal parts dream or nightmare and drunken carousing, Freud, E. T. A. Hoffman and vaudeville all whipped up together in the blender. Here, more than anything else, it resembles Beckett's work. Like Beckett's, it's about nothing-and at the same time about everything.
"All the novel's characters and relationships, all the novel's figures, one might even say the whole of civilization-"
"Prefiguring Finnegans Wake." Mrs. Mara. In the front row and a denim miniskirt today.
"Exactly. In the Nighttown sequence all these characters and relationships-real, mythic, imaginary-reappear, maybe resurface is the best way to put it, in various transfigurations."
"Even historical figures like Edward the Seventh," Kyle Skillman said. Limp blond hair, face forever red as though recently scrubbed. A yoke of dandruff when he wore dark clothes.
"Or Reuben J Antichrist the wandering jew." What was this one's name? Taylor, Tyler, something like that. Couldn't remember his ever speaking up in class before.
"But why?" Skillman finished. His aching for a world where everything could break your heart. I found myself wondering, not for the first time, if he might be in some kind of emotional trouble.
"Anyone want to answer Mr. Skillman's question?" I looked around the room. Eyes sank to the floor as though on counterweights. "Mrs. Mara?"
"Obviously dreams are a kind of art, our most personal expression. One of the ways we make sense of our world."
"Or, in a sense at least, re-create it: yes."
Mrs. Mara swung her leg at all of us in approval.
I, for one, beamed at our collective brilliance. But Skillman still looked worried. Loose pieces everywhere.
"Let's look, then, at this most telling of resurfacings from the Night-town sequence: the sudden appearance of Bloom's dead son, which ends it.
" 'Against the dark wall a figure appears slowly, a fairy boy of eleven, a changeling, kidnapped, dressed in an Eton suit with glass shoes and a little bronze helmet, holding a book in his hand. He reads fromrightto left inaudibly, smiling, kissing the page.' "
And so our discussion continued for most of the hour, rain slamming down outside, pools of water from umbrellas flowing into one another, Sally Mara helping urge reluctant students from point to point like some fine intellectual sheepdog.
Near the end, Kyle Skillman put down a well-mashed, half-eaten tuna sandwich to raise his hand.
"Sir, you haven't told us when the firsttest will be."
"I wouldn't worry about that just now, Mr. Skillman. There will be a final, at least; perhaps a midterm. Let's just wait and see how things shape up. I'm sure you'll all do fine, whatever.
"Next week, we'll look briefly at Joyce's Wake — no, you're not expected to read it-and segue towards Beckett's Molloy — which you are.
"If there are no further questions, I'll see you all on Wednesday."
I replaced my notes in the satchel. Their own went into briefcases, book bags, folders and accordion files, backpacks.
One by one, umbrellas left their posts at the back wall.
"Mr. Griffin?" someone said as I stepped into the hall. "You have a minute?"
Older than most of them, hair cut close, black suit giving him a vaguely Muslim look. Collarless white shirt buttoned to his neck. Left hand curved around a history text. He held out the right one.
"Sam Delany."
"You're not one of my students."
"No, sir. Though I would be, if my schedule weren't so tight."
"Walk with me? I'm heading for my office. Russian history, huh?"
"I needed another history elective. It fit between Theories of Modern Economy and Dynamics of the Body Social IV. I'm pre-law."
We went down the stairs and into a storage room the school insisted upon calling my office. I shared it with another part-timer who fortunately never used it You got both of us lodged in there, and a student by the door, I don't know how any of us would ever have gotten out "So what can I do for you, Mr. Delany?" I waved him into the chair across from the desk. He was thin enough that he almost fit there. Idly clicked on the computer to see if it might be working today. Nope.
"I've heard a lot about you, Mr. Griffin. You're kind of a hero to some of the students, you know. They look up to you."
I had no idea what to say to that, so I kept quiet.
"I was born across from the Desire projects. First sixteen years of my life, I looked out the window, that's all I saw. Never guessed the world could be any different. Hard to relate to professors with their tenure and Volvos and their nice, safe homes out in Metairie. But you're not like them. You're still out there. Always have been."
"Not for a long time."
He shook his head. "I read your books. Some of them are hard to find."
"Some of them probably ought to be a lot harder."
"They tell the truth, Mr. Griffin. That's important."
"Yeah… I used to think so too."
"That they tell the truth, or that it's important?"
"Both." I looked out my so-called (soi-disant) window, a sliver of glass set sideways just inches below the seven-foot ceiling. Rain had slowed to a drizzle; there was even a hint of sunlight "You want to get some coffee?"
"I'm from New Orleans, Mr. Griffin. I'm always ready for coffee."
"Able to find a chink in your tight schedule, then?"
"Well, I tell you. Right now you are my schedule."
We crossed from the campus to a corner grocer that had four-seater picnic benches set up in the back half of the store and from ten till they ran out served some of the best roast beef po-boys, jambalaya and gumbo in town. Most of the kids stuck to burgers and fries. A student once told me that she'd lived off burgers since she was fourteen, never ate anything else.
As always, Marcel's was a thicket of noise: formulaic greetings (How it is, 'S up, All right!) as people came and went, the singsong of conversations at tables, orders taken on the bounce and passed off to the cooks in verbal shorthand, music from portable radios the size of cigarette packs or toolboxes, the occasional shrill, monotonous Morse of a beeper.
We got coffee in thick-walled mugs and snagged a table just as two business types, coatless but wearing short-sleeve blue dress shirts and ties, were getting up. Delany wiped off the table with a napkin, piled everything on the tray they'd left behind and took it to a hand-through window near the back. Both the window's broad lip and a steel cart alongside were ajumble with bowls, trays and cups.
"So just what is it I can do for you?" I said as Delany sat across from me. Over his shoulder I read the wall-mounted menu, one of those black boxes with white plastic letters you snap in, like setting type. Halfway down, they'd inn out of O's and substituted zeros. Sandwiches were offered on Bun or French bred. Elsewhere there were curious gaps and run-ons.
"Yo
ufind people."
Sometimes, yes. But as I'd told him earlier, not for a long time now. I'd let teaching become my life, drifted into it because the currents were flowing that way. I wondered again how much of our life we really choose, how much is just following chance road signs.
"I take care of my family," Delany said. "Financially, I mean. My father disappeared when I was four. The other kids' fathers-I have one half brother, fifteen, two sisters, eleven and eight-they disappeared a lot faster. I look out for them all."
A familiar story, though never one the conservative axis with its one-size-fits-all "family values" wanted to hear. The poor, the fucked up, disadvantaged and discarded, are an awful lot of trouble. If only they'd behave.
"And your mother?"
"She's still with us. Alive, I mean. It's been hard for her, she's…"
"Used up."
"Yeah. I guess that says it, all right."
"She the one you wanted to see me about?"
He shook his head. Looked over to the line by the counter. "More coffee?"
I pushed the cup towards him and he brought it back full, with just the right amount of milk. He'd watched me closely earlier, but I hadn't thought much of it at the time. This peculiar intensity hovered about him anyway, as though details were a lair where the world lived, coiled like a dragon; as though everything might depend on our noticing, on our taking note.
"My brother," he said. "Half brother, really. Shon: like John with a sh. Older girl's Tamysha, with a Y. One of the nurses named her that when she was born. Little one's Critty-god knows where that came from. Anyway."
He took a mouthful of coffee, held it a moment, swallowed.
"One day last week, Thursday, Shon leaves for school same as every morning, scooting out of the house half-dressed and already half an hour late. After school he's scheduled for the four-to-eight, so no one's looking for him till late-"
"Where does he work?"
"Donut shop up by the hospital."
"Touro?"
"Yeah. And sometimes one of his friends would drop by the store about the time he got off and they'd hang out awhile, so it might be ten, eleven before he showed up home. But that night, ten comes and goes. Mama's home by then-I stay with the girls while she's at work-but we still justfigure Shon'U be along any minute. Next morning, couldn't of been later than six, not even light outside yet, Mama's at my door with the girls."
"Shon was a no-show."
"Right. Mama fixesus all breakfast, and when Shon's school opens up at eight-I tried to call earlier, and got no answer-I go down there. Not only wasn't Shon in class the day before, I find out, but he hadn't been there for two, three months. And you didn't notify anyone? I say. We justfigured he dropped out, the teacher told me. He's fifteen, I tell her. Yeah I know, she says, lots of 'em don't last near that long."
"That was it?"
He nodded. "Not a ripple since."
"Have you talked to his friends?"
"I tried. Turns out the ones I knew, kids I remembered being his friends, he hadn't had much to do with them, or they with him, for a long time. He must have others, but I haven't found them."
"Not a good sign. People change habits and friends like that, usually it means a lot more's changing."
"Yes, sir. I know."
"I'll need the name of his school, kids you already talked to, his teachers, anybody you know who works with him, usual hangouts, particular interests."
He took a manila envelope out of the book and passed it across to me. The photo inside showed a light-skinned, smallish, compactly built young man with prominent features and hair clipped almost to his scalp. He could easily be in his twenties. The rest was details. Names, lists. Nouns with no verbs. Like the photograph: bits of information, points of light, outlining a presence, a shape, no longer there.
Sudden as pain, memory struck: a twilight long ago. I was twenty, new to New Orleans. Carl Joseph had gone off one of the roofs he'd used to shoot people from, and his mother had come to me to try to make some kind of sense of it all. Having told me about her son, about his life, she walked up the path around the big house into darkness, and I thought: Another person leaving, falling away.
Then another memoiy, another blow. Years later. I'd just told the Claytons their daughter was dead and watched them turn to stone. A friend of Verne's named Sanders had killed himself, filming the whole thing. Verne and I were sitting together on her couch, looking out the window and drinking.
I used to ride trains a lot, Verne said. Mama'd put us on one and give the conductorfiftycents to look after us. And I'd sit in the end car and watch everything pass by, all those places and people I'd never get to know, gone for good-and so quickly.
I'm still on that train, Verne told me. I've always been. Watching people I've loved go away from me, for good.
I slid everything back into the envelope. Phone numbers were on the outside. His ownrented room, his mother's apartment, the university library where he worked most evenings.
"I'll do what I can," I said.
"I appreciate this, Mr. Griffin."
"Don't expect too much. And what there is, is likely to be bad."
That afternoon I visited his half brother's school, his mother at work, and the donut shop at Prytania and Louisiana.
One of the shop's glass doors had been covered with plywood, permanently from the look of it, and wired shut. A cardboard placard on the wall warned, NO Alcoholic Beverages on Premises. Notices on the remaining door and on the marquee beneath the TAST-T DONUT sign outside read Open 24 Hrs. Come in here at two A.M., you'd find people in layers of old clothes sitting half the night over a cup of coffee.
The kid behind the counter with a shock of hair like carrot tops shooting off his head and wearing a dough-smeared assistant manager tag confirmed that Shon Delany had failed to show up for work last Thursday. He'd also missed his shift on Friday, and again on Sunday. Nor had he called in, any of those times.
Shon's homeroom teacher, a Miss Kamil Brown, couldn't be more specific about when Shon had stopped attending school. I'm sorry, she kept saying. Sorry she couldn't help me, sorry she hadn't tried to contact Shon's parents, sorry she didn't have any real reasonto call attendance, sorry she didn't have time to get to know the students any better. I believed her sorrow. She was in her early twenties, couldn't have been at this more than a few years. Already she looked about her as though unable to remember how she got here, or exactly where here was. Her eyes and voice were affectless, like those of young soldiers.
At Rite Way Dry Cleaners on Baronne the boy's mother, Rachel Lee Baldwin, reiteratedwhat Sam Delany had told me, admitted that Shon hadn't been talking to her much these days when she did see him, and said that she had to get back to work. She too, whether from this latest incident or her whole life, had a vague, shell-shocked look about her.
That night after dinner at Dunbar's I walked down Carondelet into town and prowled the Quarter awhile before settling in at the Napoleon House. Joe's closed down years ago, the Seven Seas is long gone, but the Napoleon House is still around, looking pretty much the same as it always has. Still has the same pictures, and as far as I can tell the same coat of paint, it had when Ifirstsaw it.
I sat there watching those around me, those walking by past the French doors that opened one wall of the bar to the sidewalk outside, and thinking about a passage from Ulysses.
The sadness, the dark, in Dublin late at night, Joyce wrote, is swingeing. People who do not want to go home, who will not go home, who have not got a home, lurch and stagger in the gloom, moths without a candle.
About nine an off-duty cop who turned out to be a friend of Walsh's came in. We got to talking about the murder rate and the new mayor, wondering if the city would ever haul itself back upright.
Hours later, though I'd had only coffee and club soda, I lurched and staggered home myself.
3
I remember a December, unseasonably warm-it might have been June. Sometime in the late sixties
. Cataclysms everywhere: social, racial, personal. The whole period's kind of a blur. Not a good time for me, as they say.
I'd been thrown out of yet another apartment, spent the night in a covered bus stop having intermittent, elliptical conversations, and at eight, when it opened, was standing outside the K amp;B at St. Charles and Napoleon waiting to buy a pint of bourbon. Someone else was there before me, a neatly dressed businessman type in his Lincoln with the windows up and radio on. He asked for two pint bottles of vodka, and at the register, for just a moment, our eyes met in silent kinship: two men buying liquor at eight in the morning.
I walked along St. Charles sipping from the bottle, watching cars surge forward a half-block, a block, before they fetched up at a dead stop behind traffic. Hydrogen sulfide burned on the air like a fuse. I turned off to the right, lakeside, into stands of massive old houses painted white, light blue and peach. Palms, hibiscus, yucca trees and rubber plants sat in terra-cotta pots on galleries, balconies, patios. Rooms behind windows were sparsely furnished with antique sofas, paintings in ornate frames, chairs and tables adrift on rafts of tapestrylike carpet, chandeliers clear and bright as springwater. An area where a black man had best keep moving.
By ten-thirty or so, bottle long depleted, I was heading back down town towards Louisiana. A young man stood outside Gladstone's hosing off the parking lot and street. In better days I'd stop at the lounge there for a drink whenever I was in the neighborhood. Louis Armstrong used to meet fans and friends at the Gladstone when he came back to town.
Getting close to noon. Lunchtime. Between St. Charles and Claiborne I walked by at least a dozen corner grocery stores, bars and one-room cafes, all of them giving off the meaty, rich smell of frying shrimp that's so much a part of this city. I had no place to go, and I was hungry. But what I wanted most of all was another drink.
There was a period back then when I lived for over a year on something like $400. Rent for a small apartment, a kitchenette and one room, maybe even a tiny bedroom, was $75. I'd pay a month'srent and move in. Wouldn't be able to make the second month, but they wouldn't throw me out till the third-then I'd move on. At first, each new place was a step down the social scale. Later on they seemed more like steps down the evolutionary scale.