by Greg Herren
She slowed as we descended the off-ramp at St. Charles. “You better?”
“Yeah. For now.” I felt calm. But I could sense the hysteria, trying to get enough momentum to force its way out again, Paul was going to be fine. He was young and strong and God knows, he was healthy. All that eating right and exercise had to have been for something, right?
We parked in the hospital garage and walked over to the main hospital. We held hands. Paige’s was hot and dry, and I kept squeezing it. I could tell she was still trembling a little. The nurse at the front desk sent us up to a waiting room on one of the upper floors. The antiseptic smell, the harsh lighting, the people talking in whispers, the colored directional lines painted on the floor. Fee and Ian were already there, drinking coffee that looked like it could peel paint out of Styrofoam cups.
“They haven’t told us anything but he’s in surgery now.” Fee said after hugging us both. We all sat down on the uncomfortable furniture. Her face was resolute. “But I know he’ll be fine. He’s strong, that one is.”
Her accent was comforting somehow.
“We’ve called the other kids.” Ian said. “They’ll be here in the morning. They wanted us to give you their prayers.”
“How—how nice.” I didn’t know what else to say. I probably should have just said nothing.
Fee gave me a faint smile. “You’re part of the family, Chanse.”
This time I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t. I just somehow got to my feet and walked out of the room and down into the bathroom. I stood in front of the sink, and sobbed. I went down into the dark place of pain and sorrow I always avoided and gave vent to everything. What if Paul dies? What if I never get the chance to tell him how much I love him? What will I do? How will I face life without him? Why was this happening to him? Why not to me?
And then, it was gone as quickly as it had come. Deep breaths, slow and easy. I threw cold water in my face, and rubbed it dry a paper towel that felt like sandpaper. I took one final, deep breath, and walked back into the waiting room.
I don’t know how long we sat there. Time was of no relevance. Paige kept getting up and buying sodas and chips out of the vending machine. She’d taken her shoes off and curled up in a chair, paging through three year old issues of Good Housekeeping. Fee had a book of crossword puzzles in her purse; and she and Ian sat together and figured out the answers. I watched the television but not comprehending any of the programs, and not hearing the sound, or laughing at the jokes. Nothing was felt or thought about except the passing of time. I was afraid to ask anyone what time it was; because I was afraid I would start asking every five minutes and get on everyone’s nerves.
I’d just gotten back from getting rid of about a gallon of Dr. Pepper when the doctor came in and asked for Fee and Ian. I walked over and put my arm around Paige.
“He survived the surgery.” The doctor was saying. “But the head injury was pretty severe. It drove bone fragments from his skull into his brain, and we had to remove those fragments.”
“But you were able to?” Ian asked. He was clutching Fee’s hand.
“Yes, we were able to get all of them out.” He took a deep breath. “But the bad news is there’s no brain activity.”
I sat down on the arm of a chair, hard.
“There wasn’t any when he was brought in.” He went on. “But those fragments—they had to come out. He would have died had we left them in.”
“But his brain is dead, isn’t that what you’re telling us?” Fee’s chin went up.
“I’m afraid so, yes.”
“Is he breathing on his own?” Paige’s voice broke.
The doctor shook his head. “I’m afraid not. But that could change, of course, once he recovers his strength from the surgery—“
“But people who are brain dead—“ Paige gulped, choking off a sob.
“What are the odds of his waking up?” Fee asked.
The doctor just shook his head. “We can just wait, and pray.”
“When can we see him?” This from Ian.
“In the morning, when he’s rested some.” He looked sad. “I’m sorry, folks, all I can tell you to do is pray.”
“We’ll do that.”
The door shut behind him. Fee sat down. “You kids might as well go home and get some sleep. There’s nothing you can do for him now.”
“Are you sure you don’t mind?” Paige stood. “I can come back in the morning and bring breakfast.”
“That’d be nice.” Fee smiled at her. “Now, Chanse, you run along with her. You get some rest. Ian and I will be fine. It won’t be the first time we’ve stayed in a hospital overnight with one of our kids.”
“I—I wouldn’t feel right.”
“Go on, son.” Ian put a hand on my shoulder. “We’ll call you if there’s news.”
And we left. Paige took me back to where my rental car was parked in the Quarter. I had two tickets. Whatever. I threw them in the car and drove home. Once inside, I thought about rolling a joint, but decided against it. It might also heighten my anxiety rather than helping me relax. Instead. I just went to bed.
And somehow, I slept.
I woke in the morning and drove over to Touro around eleven. I’d forgotten to set the alarm, and I’d slept deep and long. Exhaustion from the overdose of adrenalin, maybe, I don’t know for sure. When I got there, the waiting room was full of Maxwells. Paul’s three brothers had all arrived. It was spooky how much they all looked like Paul. None of them were as handsome or as well built, but the resemblance was there in the frame, the body language and the way they all walked. His sister Siobhan was also there; and she looked like her mother must have at her age. I got hugged and kissed by all of them. Paige was there with several boxes of donuts. “Why don’t you go in and see him?” Fee said, sensing I was a bit overwhelmed. She took my by the hand and lead me back to the Intensive Care Unit and introduced me to the nurse as her other son, Chanse, so they could give me a badge to get me in. She led me to where Paul lay, inside a curtain, and then kissed me on the cheek and slipped away.
He looked better than he had chained to that bed, but he still—I swallowed. His skin was bluish white, and his stubble was growing in. The machines around the bed he was hooked up to wheezed and hummed and beeped. His eyes were closed, and weren’t moving beneath the lids.
I sat down on the chair next to the bed and reached up to take his dry, cold hand.
“Paul, it’s me Chanse. Can you hear me?”
Nothing.
I started talking. But I didn’t say anything of the things I thought I would. I started talking about things we’d done, like the time we went to the Aquarium and the IMAX theater, and how bad the IMAX movie had been. I remembered how much we liked the fish, and how zen-like a fish’s life must be. Afterwards, we got bottles of water and walked along the Moonwalk and along the top of the levee. Finally, we just stopped and leaned on a railing, to watch the barges go by, and the currents in the muddy water swirling and rushing. We didn’t talk because we didn’t need to. Just being together, knowing that the other was right there, was more than enough. Sometimes what I liked the most was the silent times, when we were both in bed at night reading books with our nightlights on, or just lying in bed on a Sunday morning, half-asleep with our bodies wrapped around each other. I talked about how much I liked making him pancakes in the morning, how much pleasure it gave me to make him so happy and how he made me happy just by being there. Sure, he got on my nerves from time to time, just like I got on his, but that was o. The other times made up for it.
No response from him at all.
I walked back out to the waiting room. Every few hours I’d go back in and talk to him some more, but nothing. There was no response to anything.
The Maxwells made the waiting room not quite so intense and gruesome. I liked them all. They told stories about Paul, stories that made them laugh until they cried, stories that showed how much they loved him. And I loved them for loving him, and for sh
aring the stories with me.
And every night I’d go back home, and Fee and Ian would stay the night. They’d go back to their hotel room and sleep during the day when the rest of us were there. They’d always take the overnight shift, wouldn’t hear of anything else.
The fourth night I was leaving, when I thought, so this is what ‘family’ feels like.
Paige came as often as work would let her. She was the one who told us Chris Fowler had been found in his garage— after we left. He’d hung himself. I didn’t feel anything but pity for him when she told us. The poor lonely warped man had fallen in love with Paul. There’s such a fine line between love and obsession. Who knows how I would have reacted if Paul had ever stopped loving me—or had never wanted me in the first place.
I was less aware of the hysterics with each passing hour, each time I went in to sit with Paul, hold his hand and talk to him about silly things that didn’t matter, like movies and TV shows and the gym, the kinds of things we always used to talk about together. I wanted to say the other things, but still couldn’t. And when I thought about the situation, I just thought, Paul’s alive, he’s going to wake up and everything is going to go back the way it was.
Until the fifth day.
When I got to the hospital, the Maxwells were all there. Their faces were grim, and as I looked from one to the other, I feared the worst. “He’s dead.” I said.
“Sit down, honey, please.” Fee replied. “He isn’t dead.” And then she started to talk. They’d been talking to the doctors. It didn’t look good for him. The machines were keeping him alive. He’d often talked about it, how he didn’t want to be kept alive that way. Turn the machines off, let me die, and harvest my organs, he’d always said. So they’d decided.
“He never said that to me.” I heard myself saying in a thick voice.
“It’s what he would have wanted, you know that.” One of the brothers, I don’t know which, murmured.
And I knew they were right.
“When?”
Fee finally cracked. “I wanted to wait—until you saw him again.”
I nodded, and walked back to where Paul lay and I stepped inside the curtains.
“Hey, honey.” I reached down and touched his cheek. “They—they tell me—“ my voice broke. My eyes begin to fill. I cleared my throat. “They tell me they’re um, going to turn your machines off.” My nose began to run. “I know, I know they’re right. I know you would have wanted that. It’s just—they just, you know, told me so I wasn’t prepared for it, you know?” I wiped tears off my cheeks. “You deserved better than what I gave you, honey. You deserved someone you could tell things to—someone who loved you no matter what. I do, you know. I’m only sorry it’s taken me this long to understand it, you know? You made me so happy.” I reached down and kissed his cheek, and touched my forehead to his while I cried for a few minutes.
Nothing. No response.
I leaned down and kissed his cheek. “I love you, Paul.”
I walked out of the ICU. I walked down the hall and out to the parking garage. I got into my rental car and drove out. The sun was bright. My eyes watered as I headed home.
But I drove past the turn to go home, and kept heading downtown, to the Quarter. I parked and walked down to Bourbon Street and St. Ann where I stopped at the Attitude gate. The ‘for rent’ sign was gone. I stood there for a minute and looked inside. I saw the front door open and my beautiful, sweet Paul walk out again. My eyes teared, then he faded away again. I walked on down and around the corner.
Sly was behind the bar, like he always was. “Hey, Chanse.” He shook my hand. “Hey man—was really sorry to hear about your boyfriend.”
“Thanks.” New Orleans is really a small town.
Dominique came walking in from around the corner. She looked tired, haggard, like she hadn’t been sleeping well. She slid down onto a barstool next to mine. “I’m sorry, Chanse.”
I nodded. “I’m sorry about Ricky.”
“Yeah.” She motioned to Sly. “Get me a glass of Wild Turkey.” She looked at me. “Want one?”
I looked at my watch. Quarter till noon. Hell, it was five o’clock somewhere. I nodded.
Sly slid the glass down to me. We raised our glasses and clinked them together. “To love.” She said, her voice aching.
“To love.” My own voice broke, but I forced a terrible smile on my face.
And I knew, at some point, the whiskey would bring the numbness back.
Author’s Note
Out of all of my books, Murder in the Rue St. Ann is the one I have the most regrets about.
The book itself had a torturous route to getting published. Before Murder in the Rue Dauphine was released, I signed a contract with a different publisher to write a second New Orleans series, the Scotty Bradley mysteries. As a result, my then-editor at Alyson decided to drop the Chanse series “because they were too similar.”
It was bullshit, of course—as everyone who has read both series can attest, the only thing the two series have in common is that both are set in New Orleans and feature a gay male protagonist. But I believed the Chanse series was dead in the water—and no other publisher was interested in picking it up. I had already written the first draft of Murder in the Rue St. Ann (although the working title was Murder in the Rue Royal), so with a heavy heart I put the manuscript aside and started working on the first Scotty mystery (Bourbon Street Blues).
Flash forward a couple of years. Murder in the Rue Dauphine had been published, had sold relatively well, and was even nominated for a Lambda Literary Award. The reviews were mixed, but even the most negative ones had a lot of positive things to say. Bourbon Street Blues had just been released and was also doing rather well. My former editor had left Alyson, and I was working on an anthology he’d contracted with me, FRATSEX. The new editor-in-chief called me one afternoon about the anthology, and during the course of the conversation she asked me why she didn’t see the next Chanse mystery on the schedule?
“Because I was told Alyson didn’t want the next one,” I replied.
She dismissed that with a sniff. “Well, of course we do. Do you have a name for it?”
“Murder in the Rue Royal, and I’ve even got a first draft done.”
“I’ll get the contract in the mail today.”
And that was that—I signed it and pulled out the manuscript and got back to work.
The basic premise of the plot came from an actual experience I’d had in my real life. I'd gone to work for a small gay monthly publication here in New Orleans. It was a great job, actually--my co-workers were great, we did some good work, and it was a lot of fun. The only fly in the ointment was the guy running the business was--well, a criminal. None of us knew he was committing all kinds of fraud, none of us knew that he was actually out on parole for credit card fraud--and had fallen back into his old habits. This job resulted in my being interviewed by the FBI—which was my very first time ever in an office of the FBI. Obviously, it wasn’t a lot of fun to go through this, but even while all this nonsense was going, I couldn’t help but feel like it would be a great set-up for a murder mystery.
It was also during this time that a group of Miami investors had opened a gay bar called Club 735 on the wrong side of St. Ann Street on Bourbon. They were having all kinds of trouble getting permits and licenses; the story we were being told in the office was the a group of bars in the Quarter were trying to keep them from opening. (Given how things turned out, who knows if any of that was true? But again, it was a great premise.) When I first created the character of Chanse and started writing about him, he had a friend named Dominique DuPre, who was a jazz singer and a photographer who owned her own club in the Quarter called Domino's--I thought it would be fun to have a fictional bar in the Quarter where Chanse could hang out and interact with interesting French Quarter characters. Dominique and the Domino Bar were among the many things I jettisoned after moving here and when I started writing Murder in the Rue Dauphine. But now, I
needed a fictitious Quarter bar and bar owner, so I went back to the files, dug out all my stuff about Dominique and her bar, and added that into the story.
As for Chanse’s personal life, I’d always intended for he and his boyfriend, Paul Maxwell, to break up in the second book. Chanse had some serious issues with intimacy and trust that I wanted to explore (and eventually resolve), and giving Paul what Chanse would see as a ‘sordid past’ would provide the impetus for the break-up as well as to make Chanse start re-evaluating some of his long-held opinions about sex and sexuality that he needed to terms with in order to be happy. (I hinted around at Chanse’s prudishness in the first book, with his contempt and distaste for escorts.) The theme I exploring with this book--how well do you really know anyone—could be illustrated perfectly by having something from Paul’s past (a past he hasn’t told Chanse about, of course) surface. And while this ‘past’ might not seem as sordid today (he had been a nude model and had done videos for a gay oriented wrestling video company), it certainly caught Chanse off-guard; and having never truly shaken his incredibly strict Church of Christ upbringing and morality, he was quite appalled about this. While rightfully upset Paul never told him about it, the true core of his problem with it was what Paul had actually done. To force Paul to tell Chanse the truth about this ‘past’ I gave him an obsessed fan who becomes a stalker.
As the story began to come together, I realized that the theme was very much in evidence; very few of the characters in this book were who they said they were, or were keeping secrets. We find out, for example, one of Paige's deep dark secrets that she never shared with Chanse. After the publisher of the small gay publication was murdered--and Paul became a suspect (hence all the secrets started coming out)--I kept finding the true story of what was going on shifting and becoming more and more labyrinthine.
And of all the books I'd written at that point, this one was by far the most difficult on me emotionally. It was incredibly dark, and Chanse was becoming a much darker character than I'd originally conceived. Going into that dark place that was Chanse's mind, and writing about it, was incredibly taxing and very hard for me to come back from. After working on the book, I found myself going out more frequently than I had in years to the bars in the Quarter because I needed to listen to loud music and be around people laughing and having fun. I was also drinking more than usual, and as the book continued to progress, I realized that the original ending of the book was not dark enough. The book was so dark I couldn’t just switch and have a happy ending.