It wasn’t long until Dexter started to feel pretty good, though still antsy. His Civil War history no longer had any appeal to him, and it was feeling like too nice a night to sit at home and rot his brain with television. Normally he eschewed Bourbon Street, especially at night, as it was nothing but a home for drunken tourists, but in his current mood a crowd of drunken tourists sounded like they might be amusing.
He left the kitchen window open to help the remains of the smell dissipate, threw on his cloak and headed out the door. When he had first gotten the job as a costumed tour guide, he had been slightly uncomfortable in the Victorian garb, but it hadn’t taken long for him to come to the conclusion that it was a good look for him. Though he rarely went out in full work regalia, he often wore elements, sometimes a frilly shirt and waistcoat, sometimes the cloak.
It was a warm evening, and the cloak might have been a bit much, but thrown back it wasn’t bad and it did give a dramatic flair. Dexter was used to walking, and didn’t think anything of the hike to the French Quarter. Before long he was wandering through the Friday night throngs of Bourbon Street.
There were beautiful girls everywhere, made even more beautiful by the cannabinoids dancing in his blood. The cliché trades of beads for glimpses of body parts were happening every few minutes. Most days he would find such displays tacky, possibly degrading, but tonight, with love in his heart, he found them to be a celebration of youth.
He watched one trio of girls for a while, a petite blonde and two brunettes, obviously drunk, the blonde flashing and relishing the attention, while her friends seemed to be somewhere between mortified and amused. This was the fun part of flashing, he thought: not getting to see a woman’s breasts, but a chance to see the story unfold. He watched for a while, wondering if the other girls would end up seeking some attention for themselves or if they would get the flasher, a not unattractive blonde, calmed down.
His attention wandered before the drama of the flashing girl was resolved, but that was all right with him. At that moment, pretty much everything in the universe was fine with him.
Dexter decided a beer at Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop would do him well. Lafitte’s was probably the only bar on Bourbon he would actually patronize. Even though its clientele was largely tourists, it was further down Bourbon Street than most of the rowdy throngs, and possessed some actual character, as well as quite a bit of history.
He hadn’t made it as far as the intersection with St. Ann when someone slammed into him from behind, knocking them both to the pavement. Picking himself up, Dexter barely recognized Charles. His attention was drawn to the bottle Charles had been holding. It was broken on the ground between his hands, and Dexter was puzzled by the heart drawn next to Admiral Jack on the label. The heart seemed significant to him, though he had no idea why, as did the flecks of red around the heart. As he studied the bottle he realized that the flecks were from a larger pool of red, which was growing under the bottle.
He lifted his hand from the pool, saw the large slice across his palm, and promptly passed out.
The police in New Orleans are remarkably efficient, and by the time Dexter came to, his wounds were already being bandaged and hospital transportation was already on its way.
It was well after two when Dexter finally got home. His wound was nasty, but not urgent enough for really fast treatment in the emergency room. He was now the not-so-proud owner of ten stitches across his palm (the doctor had joked that he had added himself a life line), and three stitches each on three of his fingers.
Friday February 14th
6:30 p.m.
After setting up for the show, Kelly and Jeremy popped over to the restaurant side of the House of Blues to have a couple of burgers. The nice part of not being famous yet was that they didn’t have to hide, and were happy if anybody noticed them. The ceiling of the restaurant was covered with bas-relief portraits of music greats, clearly designed to give the feeling of being a cathedral of music.
While they ate, Jeremy handed Kelly one of his new business cards. “So I figured out how to make a living.”
She looked at the card, looked at his face, looked at the card. “What, pray tell, is a Whisper Garden?”
He tried to look studious. “The Whisper Garden is an environment conducive to self-directed psychic experiences.”
She cocked her head. “I thought you didn’t believe in psychic experiences.”
“I don’t, but what does that have to do with it?” he shrugged.
“So, you have decided to be a charlatan?”
He shook his head, and earnestly said, “No, I have decided to give people a way to get in touch with their own inner voices. If they choose to believe they come from elsewhere, they have a right to that opinion.”
“You expect to make a living at this?”
“I brought in two hundred fifty bucks earlier today. If I can do that five days a week, yes, I think I can make a living doing it.”
Kelly did the math in her head … “Yes, I would say that you could make a living that way. At least until somebody copies your idea for a cheaper price.”
Jeremy shrugged. “I’ll worry about that when it happens. In the meantime, I can pay my bills.”
“So how did you stumble across this idea?”
“The other day, after talking to you about the electro voice phenomenon, my tabletop fountain started talking to me.”
She raised an eyebrow. “What did it say?
“At first it was just some bad old movie dialogue.”
“So I convinced you?”
“Sort of. I now believe the phenomenon exists. I may have a different explanation for it than you do, but I know that there are voices in white noise.”
“Oh? And what is your explanation?”
“I think that the human mind is really good at finding patterns. Even where there aren’t patterns. If we expect to hear something, then we hear it.”
Kelly sighed. “How can someone who has as big a romantic streak as you do get so caught up in mundane explanations for things?”
He replied, “How can someone as reasonable as you keep looking past the obvious answers for more obscure ones?”
She pondered for a moment. “I’d say that what is obvious to you is not necessarily obvious to me. I believe what feels right to me. All logic, all science is based on a series of assumptions. If you start with different assumptions, you wind up with different conclusions.”
He shook his head. “But with that as an assumption you could justify believing anything.”
She nodded. “In case you haven’t noticed, people do believe just about anything.”
“But so much of what people believe is just plain loopy.”
“True,” Kelly conceded, “But remember, at one point the notion that the world was round was considered a loopy idea. So was the notion that disease was caused by little creatures too small for us to see. A lot of what seems obvious now was pretty far-fetched when people first started talking about it.”
He leaned back in his chair. He had just given up on trying to convince Kelly that the voices in the white noise weren’t coming from outside the listener’s head. On the other hand, he was growing interested in the conversation on an abstract level. “So what really counts as a loopy idea?”
“When something has been proven wrong, but people still believe it, then that is a loopy belief.”
Jeremy tried to think of an idea that would sound loopy. “So it is loopy to believe the world is flat, but not loopy to believe that there is a hundred dollar bill taped to the bottom of my plate?”
His question did catch her off guard. “Huh?” was the wittiest response she could muster.
“We haven’t proven that there isn’t a bill there, so by what you are saying it wouldn’t be loopy for me to believe that there was a bill there.”
“Well, there could be
a bill there. Experience suggests that it is unlikely, I have never been served a plate with a bill taped to the bottom of it, but it is possible. So we can’t prove (other than by looking) that there isn’t a bill there. Sort of like playing the lottery … it is not loopy to believe that you could win, but it probably is loopy to believe that you will win.”
Jeremy grinned. “I just had a realization. I can’t prove it, but I am pretty sure that this whole conversation has become loopy.”
Friday February 14th
8:00 p.m.
By eight o’clock Samantha, Jessica, and Amber were hammered. They were on Bourbon Street, they were at FUCKING MARDI GRAS and they were having a GOOD TIME! They were staggering, whooping, hollering, and holding on to each other for support.
Samantha was the first to make the connection between partial nudity and getting beads. It wasn’t long before lifting the beads was harder than lifting her shirt. Amber and Jessica were somewhere between amused and disgusted by their friend. If Sam hadn’t started flashing, one of them probably would have taken it up – but since she had, they certainly weren’t going to.
Any time someone starts reliably flashing on Bourbon Street a crowd forms fairly quickly, mostly comprised of drunk guys with a camcorder in one hand and beads and a beer in the other. Most of the time the guys are pretty well-behaved, but sometimes one of them will get the bright idea that if a girl is flashing, she wants to be groped as well. Most of the time the crowd will respond reasonably well when the girl sets limits, but it only takes one guy who doesn’t care about the word no to turn the whole scene ugly pretty quickly.
Tonight, the guy who didn’t care about the word no was Charles, who was far drunker than he felt like he should have been from a pint of Admiral Jack rum. The voodoo queen’s tomb had been being good to him lately. He didn’t know why and he didn’t care. All that mattered to him was the sexy blonde with her shirt around her neck. Charles reached out and got a handful of breast. The crowd cheered his boldness even as she slapped his hand away and pulled her top down.
“Aww, c’mon,” Charles said as he grabbed her again through the top. One of the camcorder guys grabbed her butt. Samantha cried, “No!” It was half a command, half a plea. Charles did nothing but change his grip. Other hands were tentatively reaching out for whatever part of Samantha’s body was closest when a man stepped in front of her and said, “That’s enough.”
Charles backed off a little. The guy said “Look, guys … this is New Orleans. If you want to touch a pretty girl, ask nice and she might let you. Now get out of here and go play nice.”
Charles said, “Somebody is always trying to ruin my fun,” and drew his right fist back, up next to his head. The mood of the crowd had changed, someone caught Charles’ elbow before he could throw the punch. They tugged a little on his elbow and Charles, who was already off balance, staggered back.
Charles took a step away from the crowd, then started to pirouette back into it, when the thought hit him that he didn’t want the fight. Charles was suddenly ashamed of himself. He might be a homeless drunk, but he thought of himself as a pretty nice guy. He didn’t think of himself as the kind of guy who would hassle a pretty girl. He was confused – why was he acting this way? Suddenly he had the impulse that he should be somewhere else. He turned and ran off down Bourbon Street.
The crowd around Samantha lost its focus and dissolved back into the general throngs on Bourbon. The man turned to Samantha and said, “So, you like beads?”
She said, “I thought I did.”
He smiled and said, “I tell you what, I’ll give you one last set, if you’ll tell me your name.”
Amber and Jessica were relieved; their friend’s show seemed to be over for the evening.
He talked to the three of them for a while and, in the course of conversation, it came out that his name was Ward, and he was a doctor. He took them to a couple of bars and bought them some drinks, and nobody was surprised when he wanted Samantha to go home with him. Amber did not approve, and Jessica had reservations, but Sam insisted she was here to have a good time, and she was going to have as good a time as possible. Jessica offered her a handful of condoms, but Samantha pulled a few of her own from her purse to prove that she might be totally completely drunk, but she wasn’t totally, completely stupid. Amber looked on in horror, because that meant that Jess had been thinking about hooking up with someone too. Later, after a crawl down the bars of Bourbon Street, when Amber met a cute army sergeant, she forgot her horror, revulsion, and embarrassment and asked Jess for some of her rubbers.
It was only a few blocks to Ward’s house, but they stopped several times for some sloppy kissing and fast groping. Nobody seemed to notice. Ward was furious when he found that someone had blocked his BMW in with a midnight blue 1969 GTO, but kept his priorities straight. He kept his anger concealed. He would enjoy the blonde on his arm before he had the asshole’s car towed. If the car was still there in the morning, he decided, he would spray some oven cleaner on its pretty paint before making the call.
They stumbled into the house, and staggered up the stairs and fell into the bed and into each other in a drunken tangle.
Twenty minutes later Samantha was asleep and drooling on the pillow. It was just a little after midnight.
Friday February 14th
8:00 p.m.
After eating, Jeremy and Kelly went to finish getting ready for the set. The rest of the band had finally shown up. Jimmie, the lead guitarist, was busy setting some stuff up for his spotlight part of the show, which mostly involved hanging a few pieces of string from the lighting rig. Not an easy task, the House of Blues stage is a lot taller than it is deep.
Kelly came out in her dress – tight fitting black silk, with frog closures and a high Chinese collar. The dress was slit to her hip bones on both sides and flashing its red lining. She wore knee-high black boots with a platform that was at least three inches high, which made her loom over the rest of the band. Standing at around six feet tall in her stocking feet, Kelly was the tallest band member anyway, but with the platforms she towered.
Everyone except Steve grabbed an instrument and headed backstage to warm up; Steve only brought a pair of sticks. The good part about being a drummer was he could warm up on anything. The bad part was that even his light synth drum rig was a lot less portable than a guitar. On the other hand, since Jeremy was the one that usually schlepped Steve’s rig, he really didn’t need to worry about portability.
True to form, Steve waited until the last five minutes to adjust his drum pads, tapping them with his sticks and watching a display of their volume on the laptop.
They had until nine-thirty to make their point. They were supposed to start at nine o’clock, but they took the stage at ten til. Jeremy wanted people to get more than they paid for, and since they couldn’t do it on the back end, they would do it in the front.
Jeremy swung his guitar neck like a conductor’s baton to set the basic rhythm, and then Steve, the human metronome, took over. Jimmie, the lead guitar player, noodled his way around Steve’s beat, and a couple of measures later Kelly thundered in with her own brand of funk. Jeremy stomped on his wah pedal and added his own little wok wok wok, and then raised his guitar neck high and brought it down hard. The band stopped. They had only been playing for about thirty seconds and it had all been improv; partly it was a warm-up and partly it was just to get the attention of crowd. Actually, the word crowd might be an overstatement. The house was less than half-full, and from the stage it was all too easy to pay attention to the part of the house that was more than half-empty.
But they knew it was early, and that the crowd would come, and they wanted the people who had been here first to tell the people who got there late, “Man, you should’ve been here.”
The set list was planned, as was some of the witty banter between songs. Kelly stepped up to the microphone and Jeremy stepped over to the laptop o
n top of her amp. Kelly said, “Hey Steve, what do you think we should do with this crowd?” Jeremy clicked on the first song on the list, which started a flashing countdown for the first song on both the laptops. When your drummer is deaf, you have to go to great lengths to make the show work right sometimes.
Kelly knew Steve couldn’t hear her, but the audience didn’t. The audience had no need to know that Steve, the human metronome, was deaf. When his laptop flashed green once, Steve said, “Pick ‘em up and shake ‘em.” The next green flash was the downbeat and the band all hit together. The song was tight, as funky as three-day-old sweat socks, and designed to get a crowd bouncing. The audience was not yet big enough to really be called a crowd and not yet drunk enough to bounce, but heads started bopping anyway.
They ripped through another couple of songs before Jeremy managed to spot Sarah. She was dancing in place by a column. She was wearing all white. Once she realized he was looking at her, she flashed a smile that sent a wave of warmth up Jeremy’s spine.
The next song on the list was a slinked up version of The Police’s “Demolition Man.” They swung the rhythm, and Kelly gave it her best torch singer voice. The song was half whispered and half sung. Jimmie put his guitar down and produced a stack of boards from behind his amp. Jimmie had two hobbies in his life, music and Tae Kwon Do. For this song the band let him combine the two.
Jimmie pulled a couple of chairs on stage and positioned them facing each other about a foot apart. He held up one of the boards so the crowd could see it, and then placed it over the gap between the chairs. He stood on the board. This was kind of cheating, because he had lined the board’s grain up so that his weight would not break the board. If the grain was the other way, he would have just stepped through it. (Half-inch pine just isn’t very strong.) Jimmie would argue that he was just being a showman, and demonstrating that the board was real and not pre-broken.
The Whisper Garden Page 9