My Own Devices

by Dessa

  * * *

  —

  No place wears gravity as beautifully as New Orleans. Spanish moss, tinsel, and strands of colored beads drape over trees, street signs, statues, people—anything and anyone not fast enough to escape ornamentation. Gold ribbons are tied to handlebars, braided into horses’ manes, and woven through the filigree iron balconies that stand like sheets of weaponized lace. The unrelenting abundance doesn’t even feel manmade—decorations pile on themselves like lichen, or like snow.

  I met Free on a tree-lined walkway in City Park. Even for a visitor with a decidedly indoorsy constitution, City Park is a knockout: lagoons, botanical gardens, a sculpture garden. The trees in New Orleans grow into shapes that resemble ball-and-socket joints, ropes of muscle, and parallel bones—radius and ulna with a sunken hollow in between. It’s like they don’t know they’re plants.

  Free sat on a park bench, wearing camo pants and a jeweler’s magnifying headband over his dreadlocks. Reggae played from his truck, parked nearby with the windows down. Beside him he had a tin of green sequins, a Coors tallboy, a soft pack of Camel Filters, and one of those pincushions shaped like a tomato.

  “What are you sewing?”

  Free showed me an oblong strip of satin just longer than his hand. He was affixing tiny gold beads and emerald sequins to the whole thing to make a feather for his chief’s crown. While working, he explained he was a Mardi Gras Indian, Washitaw Nation, born and raised in the 7th Ward. They sewed all year long, making suits—elaborate outfits covered in feathers, beads, and rhinestones. Then on Mardi Gras, they donned their finery to face off with other tribes in the street, “based on who can sing the best and who’s prettiest.” I watched him work the needle. “This is called the popcorn stitch,” he said, “one sequin and three beads. Time-consuming, but it makes the suit so much better.”

  My mom taught me to sew when I was a kid. My blossoming neuroticism immediately fixated on the stitchwork—I’d wanted to “win” quilting with tiny, uniform stitches. My mother would have been impressed by Free’s careful needle.

  He pulled out his phone to show me a video from last year. “My tribe is known for the three-dimensional suit.” Onscreen, gloved black men wore soaring lime green feathered headdresses, making Vegas look like a farm team. Boys strutted with feathered staffs twice their height, wearing sequin work that boiled in the sun. Those were the flagboys, he told me. Each tribe had a hierarchy with many roles—a big chief, a big queen, a witch doctor. Free himself was a wild man. His suit would have horns.

  On Mardi Gras, spy boys scouted ahead of the procession. They’d signal when another tribe was near and the contest could begin. Both chiefs would posture and dance, each staking his claim as the prettiest of all. “It’s friendly competition,” Free said. “Mostly.”

  Later, I would look up the Mardi Gras Indians, whose cultural origins proved difficult to discern. Some accounts suggest that black neighborhoods formed tribes and paraded as Indians to express respect and gratitude for the help that runaway slaves received from Native communities. Some suggested the two communities mixed and some Mardi Gras Indians had Native ancestry.

  Free said the day after Mardi Gras he was going to start his suit for next year. After I’d agreed not to reveal it to anyone, he showed me the color scheme he had planned. I’m at liberty to tell you only that it’s beautiful.

  * * *

  —

  Traffic noses through the French Quarter with a strange, slow calm—the cars move like fish in a restaurant’s aquarium: too tightly stocked to maneuver freely, but too well fed to mind. If you’re heading down Bourbon Street on foot, a dozen songs might hit you, layering atop one another like horseshoes. In dark taverns cover bands play eighties hits; the bright daiquiri joints spin rap and R & B; ragged buskers play whatever songs they know on banged-up guitars.

  Every afternoon GM Scoe set up a folding table on Bourbon with two chessboards and a blitz clock. He played there till after dark. Then, he said, he’d move to Canal Street to play until 6 A.M.

  GM Scoe is from Detroit, but comes through New Orleans on a circuit, playing cash games of chess on the street. “I go where there’s action. Wherever people are having a good time drinking.” He’s best at blitz—games played against the countdown clock. He had a round face shaded by a ball cap, pretty teeth when he showed them. GM stands for “Grand Master”; his given name was Roscoe. Loser pays winner twenty bucks a game.

  “Can you tell the good players right away, even before they sit down?”

  No, but within five or ten moves he’d know. “Lotta guys been in prison are good players.” They’d had time to practice. But, he added, “the players above my level are usually tournament players, not street players.”

  Real grand masters don’t usually hustle, he said. But he thought he’d played one once, a guy from the Philippines. The guy beat Scoe, but then seemed guilty about it. He came back for a rematch and said Scoe wouldn’t have to pay, no matter the outcome. It was a fierce game. Scoe suspected the guy let him win.

  Did he play women? I asked. Sometimes, he said. If Scoe was going to try to hustle me, that would have been his moment. He let it pass.

  Scoe’s soft sell seemed out of place on Bourbon, where bar staff hawked 3-for-1s from doorways, the evangelists carried crosses with LED displays, and even the living statues, spray-painted silver and gold, seemed to be talking half the time.

  I hadn’t played chess in years—I tried to make a quick appraisal of my current skill level. Did I remember how all the pieces moved? I did. Unbidden, the term castle rose to mind, which irritated me because castling is an exotic move that’s rarely necessary but is a favorite of know-it-alls who parade the term about to demonstrate their savvy. If I were to sit down at Scoe’s table, could I put up any sort of strategy? I doubted it. My dad taught me to play when I was a girl; he had a tiny electronic board that allowed him to face off against the machine, frowning down at the petite grid. Each piece was the size of a tooth and had to be pressed until a beep indicated the computer knew what you’d done. In retrospect, it seems strange to think that he bought a beeping toy to play a social game alone.

  I knew that I was probably bad for business. Occupied in conversation with me, Scoe couldn’t properly hail paying customers. I left him to his work on Bourbon, hoping some drunk out-of-towner would stumble up with money to lose.

  * * *

  —

  In New Orleans, the Mississippi winds like a cursive word that’s just been pulled too straight to decipher. My last morning in town, I set my alarm for 6:20 to watch the sunrise over the water—I hadn’t seen a sunrise in any city in a long time. I sat on the steps of a riverbank pavilion. A crescent moon was still in the sky. A crew of men worked a high crane, as if they’d just hung it there.

  The sun came up faster than I expected, jogging through a metal spectrum—bronze, copper, rose gold—before dialing into daylight.

  I left the riverbank to head back into the French Quarter. With the sun still low behind me, my shadow was the tallest I could remember seeing it. Sixty-five feet—I estimated by counting the steps it took to walk the length of her.

  Touring with my rap crew, I’m usually in the company of six or seven men. And between those tours, I often travel overseas alone. Maneuvering as a single foreigner is a task that occupies my whole brain, leaving it no time to generate the usual din of anxious chatter. The signage with strange letters, the thousand ways that dark-haired women fix their scarves, the coinage with unfamiliar heroes—it all rinses out my head and fills it up instead with awe and fear and wonder, the way a bartender will wash a glass in absinthe to mix a Sazerac.

  New Orleans was clearly a vacation destination for couples—scores of them stood in the French Quarter looking at fountains and at their paper maps and at the photo they just took of each other. I know people normally take big trips with romantic partners, but I’ve rar
ely done it—and I’ve wondered if it might be too late to learn how. I’m too accustomed to maneuvering through crowded streets solo, looking for the openings just wide enough to accommodate my one set of shoulders. It’s like when my dad, who is an accordion player, tries to play something on my Casio keyboard. He has to set it on the carpet and lay his head down beside it to simulate his vantage point of looking down the accordion’s keys. He just doesn’t have any practice the regular way.

  At midmorning, I set out for a silver shop on Chartres Street. I’ve made a little pilgrimage to this shop to admire a particular necklace every time I’ve performed nearby. It’s made out of tiny interlocking chains, so fine that the whole thing drapes like heavy fabric around the display neck—not native behavior for metal. The shop was usually bolted down for the night by the time I arrived. But I could still look in through the glass.

  On first sight I knew this necklace would never pass the rap test: Doomtree sets are two hours of jumping, sweating, and bodychecking—both accidental and intentional. I’ve had bra clasps fail mid-show, inseams give way, and solid metal bracelets snap, ensnared in another rapper’s mic cord. But I’d resolved that if I found the store open, I’d buy this necklace. And I’d commit to finding an occasion to wear it: a neighboring universe where I enjoyed cocktails in moderation and could walk down stairs in high heels.

  I didn’t want to creep out the sales lady, but couldn’t manage to contain myself: “I’ve been visiting this necklace for seven years.” She was unfazed, said it was one of the few pieces they had more than one of in stock. In my hands, it was heavier than I expected. Maybe gravity in New Orleans pulled harder on beautiful things. After she’d boxed it, I took a picture of the empty display window, feeling strange that on the next pass through town, I wouldn’t be coming back.

  Household Magnets

  —

  Mayo Clinic is a world-famous hospital in Rochester, Minnesota. Foreign leaders go there for discreet, pioneering treatments. Their frenzied press teams, meanwhile, loudly insist that it’s just a checkup—all very routine.

  I was asked to give an eighteen-minute speech at Mayo, as part of a health care conference. My job was to talk about life as an indie musician, hopefully sparking some cross-disciplinary insights. Then I’d sing two songs at a roomful of seated physicians and administrators before their dinner break.

  I practiced my PowerPoint presentation on the plane from New York. It had pictures I’d taken from stage, a Dolly Parton song, and all sorts of clever parallels between doctors and rappers. I was going to slay and I knew it. The flight landed on time in Minneapolis; I’d stay there for the night, then drive an hour and a half south to Rochester in the morning.

  I grew up in Minneapolis and it’s the city in which my X still lives. Although we hadn’t spent any real time together in months, he wrote asking if I’d like to have coffee. Social media, I’d presumed, had alerted him to the fact that I was in town.

  I knew the correct answer was no. I wrote yes. But I suggested we meet at the chaste hour of 10 A.M., before my sound check at Mayo.

  The conference organizers didn’t know it when they invited me, but before making music full-time, I’d worked as a medical technical writer. I’d been into biological science since I was a kid; learning about the fundamental nature of things had always seemed more interesting than the sort of stuff we studied in history classes—tectonic plates just seem truer than nation states. Out of college, when I got the writing gig, my first job was to draft a guide on pacemaker implantation.

  Waitressing is the more traditional part-time gig for young artists, but I wasn’t very good at it. Successful servers have a shelf full of clocks in their head—like the wall at the airport that shows local time in Paris, Tokyo, and New York. They know when Table 1 needs another round; when to drop dessert menus at 7; when to interrupt the efforts of the gentleman at the bar who is creeping out the female patron beside him. But I never got it all synced right. Everyone in my section was always waiting for something; I had to dial the charm to eleven to compensate for the fact that they were all still hungry. I earned decent tips, but my table turn was awful and the constant soft-shoe was exhausting, even for a twenty-one-year-old. I was never gonna make varsity. I needed another job that paid well, but that I could quit on short notice if I was offered a rap tour.

  I interviewed for a medical technical writing position at a diner called the Egg and I. I was nervous. Tony, the man who’d become my boss, sat on the other side of the booth. He had a tailored suit, a buzzing phone, and a leather-bound calendar. He offered me twenty-two dollars an hour. If I’d had a mic, I would have spiked it. I was made.

  Days later a courier arrived at my apartment building. It was late, very dark. He handed me a small stack of CD-ROMs, then got back into his car and drove away. My first assignment.

  I went inside and sat at the little kitchen table that belonged to one of my roommates—the landlord rented the apartment like a boarding house, installing strangers in each of the three bedrooms. I inserted the first CD-ROM. A video file appeared. When I pressed Play, colorless flesh fluttered and contracted on-screen. I was watching a pig’s heart pumping water with a camera threaded into one of the chambers. In another video, a man in a white coat talked about the challenges of cannulating the coronary sinus. There was a 3-D image of the veins in the human heart that rotated around and around. There was no note for me anywhere in the package.

  From this material I was to create a step-by-step guide for pacemaker implantation. But what was a coronary sinus? What was I supposed to do? I called my stepmom Linda and cried. She asked if it was too late to get out of it.

  Working under a deadline, and with what seemed like terrifyingly important material, my boss Tony taught me how to tech write. He was always busy, so I learned to save up all my questions to ask them in a single call. He taught me never to pose a question without also presenting an educated guess as to its answer—even if you’re wrong, it demonstrates credibility. I stayed up late, crouching over my screen, frantic to submit to my editor by the morning deadline. I read through the editorial comments, flinching at the errors and scared the doctors would discover I was just some punk kid with a borrowed laptop.

  The hours were relentless, the stress made me cry. The money was great. The science was fascinating. The adrenaline was a drug my brain made for free.

  Soon Tony trusted me enough to let me accompany him to client meetings to take notes. To conceal my age I wore my mother’s old wedding ring and a pager with no batteries. When physicians asked where I’d gone to school, I told them the truth—the University of Minnesota—but then changed the topic as fast as I could, hoping they’d assume I’d earned some sort of graduate degree, instead of a BA in philosophy.

  I learned enough jargon to get a speaking role in the next round of meetings. Sometimes I’d even go in without Tony, talking to sales teams, and scientists, and the occasional cardiologist.

  Pacemakers are implanted when a heart can’t keep time properly. The pacemaker delivers a pulsing charge through a wire called a lead. To get the lead nested in the right bit of tissue, a doctor must thread it through a series of blood vessels, like snaking a pipe. The most difficult passage is called the coronary sinus, a winding vein that twists in three dimensions. After implantation, the pacemaker gets programmed telemetrically, by placing a wand against the patient’s chest. Medical device manufacturers suggest people with pacemakers keep any household item with a magnet at least six inches away from it. It’s not likely, but getting too close to a magnet can reset a pacemaker. For a while there, garage door openers could reset them too.

  At rest, a human heart should beat between 60 and 100 times per minute. If it goes too slowly, it’s called bradycardia. If it goes too fast, it’s called tachycardia (though all the doctors just said tacky). Most hit songs have a tempo of about 120 beats per minute, roughly the heart rate of someone on a stationary
bike, slightly elevated. I used to wonder what the music of other animals would sound like—if terriers would compose in supersonic registers, if hummingbirds, whose hearts beat more than a thousand times a minute, would write only EDM.

  Sometimes I tech wrote at the Doomtree house, where most of my rap crew lived and recorded. One night, one of the producers looked over my shoulder at the electrocardiogram on my screen. He asked, Kickdrum? Yeah, I s’pose so.

  I kept some serving shifts at the beginning. So while working for Tony, I was a tech writer by day, a waitress by night, and a rapper by night-night. I remember smuggling my laptop into the bathroom at Chino Latino, my tables languishing, trying to meet a morning deadline on pharmaceutical benefits. I sweated through my T-shirt and cursed through clenched teeth waiting for the Wi-Fi to send off a message so I could get back up there and run entrées.

  My X (who wasn’t yet ex’d then) was proud of me for having a smart job. All the same, he’d occasionally suggest I quit—he saw the fear and panic and figured no job was worth that kind of distress. My anxiety was a regular topic of discussion between us. Already naturally high-strung, the job was turning me into a hunted rabbit. He wished I’d worry less, enjoy myself. I wished he’d worry a little more, quit smoking, and start saving. It would take us just over ten years to figure out the gap between our dispositions was too wide to bridge. And by then we loved each other too much—we just kept trying to fling ourselves across the divide.

  The morning of my speech at Mayo, we met for coffee. I wore a dress X hadn’t seen before. And boots with heels. I did not, however, permit myself either eyeliner or nylons. I wouldn’t have worn either at a morning meeting with someone else, I figured—and there had to be parameters.

  He arrived before me, on time. He’d gotten better at that. He bought my coffee and we sat down at a metal table outside. I pulled a tin of macaroons, which I’d received as a gift at a recent concert, out of my messenger bag. I’ve developed a hang-up about waste, I explained. Eat a macaroon. He reminded me that he’d known me for more than a decade and this hang-up was not a recent development. He took two.