`FOUR DAYS IN NEW ORLEANS (The Rattling Wall, 2015)
It is not to be romanticized, Tom says about New Orleans. I walk down Piety. I walk down Desire. I walk down Burgundy and Dauphine. I walk down Frenchman and the Esplanade through the garden district. The local pie factory burns down in the middle of the night. On Friday, Walter, our middle-aged cemetery tour guide, tells Astrid and me to go to Frenchman Street for real local nighttime flavor. “Gets rowdy,” he says. “Gets loud.” As he says this, he dabs the blood dripping from the bandage under his knee and down his thin, black left leg with a pink hand towel. “Bicycling accident,” he says, limping down the narrow path between the raised tombs on this humid overcast afternoon. “No insurance.” His Nike high tops are sewn in the pattern of the American flag, and his left white sock is stained with blood. Before we walked here from the Bywater, Tom told Astrid and me a rumor that Nicolas Cage had a tomb built for himself in this 18th century cemetery in the center of New Orleans. We find a weighty white structure in the shape of a pyramid twice as tall as both of us and agree that this must be it; it is appropriately weird. We are only sort of correct, because according to Walter, it is Disney that has erected this tomb as a prop for the forthcoming movie National Treasure 3. Walter says that one night after dark he was walking through this cemetery and ran into Nicolas Cage himself. “Musta climbed right over the damn wall in the middle of the night,” he says with a laugh. Walter says it was Nicolas Cage who said that the white marble pyramid tomb is in fact a prop for the forthcoming big budget action adventure movie. New Orleans is not to be romanticized, says Tom. The entire city is sinking into the sea. It is August and so muggy hot by 9am that the sweat runs down my back and thighs as I walk to the coffee shop down the street from Tom’s second floor apartment with high ceilings and plaster crumbling off the walls and the calico cat Gus inherited from the previous tenant. The patrons inside the air-conditioned cafe on Dauphine cheer when the power goes out after a particularly ferocious crack of lightning. The bucket next to the table I’m sitting at catches the rain leaking in through the roof. Drop. Drop. Drop. The rain here is acid Walter will tell us tomorrow, because of the chemical and pharmaceutical companies on the Delta. This rain eats away at the marble nameplates on the tombs in the cemetery. They’re two centuries old, some of these tombs, and they house the bones of dignitaries and creoles and voodoo kings and queens and dozens and dozens of infants who died in the smallpox epidemic of 1775. Except for Nicolas Cage’s perfect white pyramid, the tombs are all streaked with black mold and in so many states of disrepair. My tourist assumption was that these dilapidated visages were the products of time and The Storm, of course, but no, it’s the acid rain. The cemetery smells of rot. It rains here every day between 11am and 2pm. “I’m interested in women and men,” says the balding, vaguely effeminate man I find myself deep in conversation with at the coffee shop during the mid-morning rain. I am here soothing my hangover with a fried egg and avocado on croissant sandwich. He must be something like 35 years old. “I’m not particularly attractive I know, but I used to get laid a lot when I went to electronic dance music shows. People are just attracted to someone dancing confidently. I’m a lawyer now, but I used to sell acid and ecstasy and follow the Disco Biscuits all over the country.” He tells me to read Gravity’s Rainbow. “You must.” He tells me to read Brief Interviews With Hideous Men. He hands me his copy of If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler and instructs me to read the first page. (Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade.) He speaks of LCD Soundsystem with religious conviction and tells me that moon rocks are pure MDMA and the best high he’s ever experienced. “If someone ever offers you any, just take them, no questions asked.” He tells me he worked for BP after the Deepwater Horizon spill, helping write an intentionally uninterpretable corporate language that somehow made the company’s case airtight. It is this language that made the whole disaster defensible. “I sold my soul for a lot of money,” he says with a laugh, looking me straight in the eyes. I maintain the stare, wondering whether or not to hate this person. I think of living on the commune in Big Sur during the oil spill and my anxiety rising at the headlines on the newspaper that came once a week. “The only thing we can do to help right now is meditate on goodness and send love to the people who are doing their best in the Gulf,” said Jane, the gentle middle-aged hippie who worked in the laundry department with me. She smelled like jasmine and seemed like a woman who experienced a phase of life in which she had been hit a lot. “Just send them love,” Jane said. “It’s what you can do as one person. It’s the only thing you can do.” “A lot of money,” the dancing lawyer says. “The Exxon Valdez case took 18 years to settle and this will take longer,” he tells me as I drink iced coffee and sweat through my cotton dress. “They’ll drag the case out for as long as they can, until people don’t even remember anymore.” He says he saw dozens of terabytes of oil spill-related legal documents, all written in the impenetrable corporate tongue by 100 lawyers working around the clock in an office building in Delaware. I get up to go to the bathroom and when I come out, he’s standing there at the door. We lock eyes again and he comes inside, locks the door and presses me up against it, kissing me hard. My skin breaks out in goosebumps from the air conditioning in this dim little room. He tastes like cigarettes and I like it. Back at the table I give the lawyer my phone number when he asks for it and he texts me later that day asking if I want to smoke pot and walk around the city. Maybe he thinks I’ll have sex with him if we end up in a spot where he can dance confidently. Pot makes me anxious now so I don’t smoke it anymore. I don’t text him back. I think I see him the next day when I’m walking down Desire with Astrid, but I don’t look back to be sure. On Friday night Tom and Astrid and I go to a new hipster restaurant on Burgundy and Louisa and wait an hour and a half for a table. I’d have waited longer, all night; all I want to do is sit on this bar stool in this short red dress and talk endlessly about everything with these dear friends. While we wait we drink slightly fussy bourbon cocktails so expertly mixed that they don’t drink like booze at all so I can drink a lot of them quickly without noticing how drunk I’m getting. I’m paranoid about getting too drunk and talking too much about my personal life. We talk about city planning instead, and my job in Los Angeles and Astrid’s upcoming wedding and about how cute Tom thinks the waitress with the feathers tied up in her hair is. We get a table and sit there for hours, eating bougie pork loin and potatoes and beet salad, going over most everything that has happened in the two years since we last saw each other, although I leave out the part about making out with the possibly nefarious corporate lawyer yesterday morning in the coffee shop bathroom, and other events similar to this story. “The Bywater is gentrifying quickly,” says the New Orleans guidebook Tom left for Astrid and me when he went to work this morning. I read this line like an accusation. “Your type has arrived,” it says to me, “and they are killing the authenticity of our once genuine neighborhood.” “People like us,” says Astrid, “we kill the authentic with our love for it.” I wonder if even as tourists, we too are guilty for loving the fussy mixologist cocktails at the hipster restaurant and for Instagramming the tiled street signs laid into the cement sidewalks. #Desire #Piety #Royal. I wonder if we too are responsible for the slow death of New Orleans. Astrid and I skim the guidebook and start walking in the general direction of the French Quarter. She has taken a long weekend from her job as a publicist for a craft brewery in Minneapolis to join this NOLA friend summit. Next October I’ll be a bridesmaid in her wedding. On the way towards the Quarter, we get caught in an afternoon thunderstorm, the river of water flowing down Derbigny up to our ankles. I take Astrid’s picture and she looks so happy under her umbrella. Here I tip extra everywhere I go. My donation to the local economy. What I can do as one person. Most places in New Orleans only take cash, which somehow makes the place feel even more lawless and chaotic and wild, existing on the fringes of the system as a function of being a victim of the system. I keep lots of cash in my wallet here like I don’t in L.A. Plenty of dollar bills until I run out because I have spent them all on beer and shots of whiskey at the blues bar on Frenchman on Friday night while the brass band rips onstage and Tom and Astrid and me dance until we’re even sweatier than we were when we first walked in. There is no sexual chemistry between the three of us, although I vaguely recall a story Astrid told me when she and Tom drunkenly kissed one Halloween back when they lived down the block from each other in San Francisco. I always find it easier to dance with men I don’t want to sleep with. I walk down Piety. I walk down Desire. I walk down Burgundy and Dauphine. I walk down Frenchman and the Esplanade through the garden district. My train arrives in New Orleans from Atlanta on a Wednesday night. I get into a cab at the Amtrak station and the driver, a woman who seems middle-aged but looks older, drives me through the detours set up because of Obama’s visit to New Orleans today. “Said he was going to fix some things for us but all he did was hold a thousand dollar a plate dinner and shut down the damn roads.” She brings me to the Bywater at dusk and I am already enchanted with the charming decadence of the place. “What’s his name? Do you trust him? I ain’t leaving you nowhere where you ain’t supposed to be,” the driver declares as she pulls up to the bar Tom has instructed me to meet him at. She doesn’t take credit cards, and when I run inside the bar to get cash the ATM gives me an extra forty bucks, which is some sort of good omen. I give the driver one of the crisp twenties because she seems genuinely concerned about my safety and looks like a rumpled version of my grandmother. Inside the bar I order a beer and eventually feel a tap on my back. Tom and I hug long and hard and then share a ham sandwich while I recap my 12-hour train ride here from Atlanta. Later, we get drunk on cheap whiskey at the Candlelight Lounge in Treme while we smoke menthols and dance to the brass band set up in the corner of this cinder block building. In the back of the room a thick black woman gives away bowls of red beans and rice. I have two. At bar time, Tom and I drive back to his place slow and bumpy through the paved and repaved roads of the Bywater. “That church is beautiful,” I say as we cruise down the deserted streets with all the windows of his Honda Civic rolled down. “It’s my favorite,” he says. “Have you ever been inside?” “No.” “So let’s go.” We park and walk in a circle around the place, checking for unlocked doors as the crickets chirp their symphony. Near the front of the church, I find an open stained glass window and crawl up and contort my body to fit through the narrow opening. “Tada!” I say, opening the huge wooden front doors for Tom, and we smile at each other as he enters. In moments like this I often gauge my morality by thinking of my grandparents. “What would they say about this?” I ask myself. “What would they think of me breaking into this abandoned Catholic church at three in the morning, drunk and sweaty with a guy, streaks of pink in my long hair and the fading remnants of a black eye I got when someone kicked me in the face in a rooftop pool in Atlanta?” Usually I think they’d cheer my adventures. “Go, they’d say, GO! Live!” It’s easy to get the advice I want from people who are dead. Inside, the church is dark and huge and stripped of its traditional accessories. No pews. No holy water. No hymnals. No Jesus on the altar, although he’s here in the stained glass windows depicting the Stations of the Cross. Jesus is sentenced to death. Jesus falls for the first time. Jesus wipes his face with a towel. I feel better thinking that maybe the place has been deconsecrated. The rule, I seem to remember from all those years of Catholic school, is that this sin is not so serious then. We sit on the tattered couch someone has placed near back of the church where the choir would have been. My grandma sang in the church choir in Wisconsin and when I was a kid she would let me sit on her lap during the service, her long synthetic choir robe brushing against my baby shoulders as she sang the alto part of “In the Garden.” And he walks with me, and he talks with me, and he tells me I am his own. The choir sang that song at her funeral. I close my eyes and see if I can feel any remnants of ceremonial religious residue. I close my eyes and my body spins. The whole world spins. On the other end of the couch, Tom has his eyes closed too. I get up and play the first chords of “Für Elise” on the crumbling grand piano. The ceilings here are thirty feet high and the notes echo up to the rafters of this cavernous American ruin. “Let’s go,” says Tom, getting up and running his hand through his long dark hair, “before we fall asleep here.” I lock the heavy doors behind him, turn towards the altar and with my right hand touch my forehead, my chest, my left shoulder, my right shoulder. I hoist myself up to the window and a shoe slips from my foot and falls to the floor with a slap that echoes. “Do you want to go back in for that?” Tom asks when I emerge back outside with one bare foot. I leave it. I like the idea of a single black flip flop under the stained glass window on the inside of the abandoned church. Some sort of Cinderella was here, that shoe says. When I wake up the next morning, the backs of my tan thighs are bruised from climbing through the window. Go, they’d say, GO! On Monday just after sunset at the Hi-Ho Lounge, a dozen musicians sit in a circle with their guitars and banjos and play “I’ll Fly Away” like a hymn. Like an incantation. “I’ll fly away. I’ll fly away,” they repeat as they pull cans of PBR out of a 24 pack that’s sitting on the floor in the middle of them. “You can come here and play and they’ll give you free rice and beans and let you bring your own beer to drink,” says Troy, a baby-faced curly haired twenty-something musician from Oregon who is playing here at the Hi-Ho for the first time tonight. He lives in the French Quarter. It’s a lot of things, he says with downcast eyes and a touch of apologetic solemnity, of that living situation. I nod, believing I might understand what he means. The musicians here are all ages, men and women. I meet eyes with a pretty banjo player in a peach-colored housedress and we smile at each other. Everyone smiles here. “How y’all doing?” Genuinely nice even if it is perfunctory. Maybe I’ll start saying it back in Los Angeles, How y’all doing? “They say it in New Orleans,” I’ll say, and everyone will hate me. On the television over the bar, the women’s U.S. gymnastics team is competing in the floor routine competition, making the bar intermittently break out in cheers. Tom and I cheer too and our table wobbles, making the Abita in our two plastic cups sway precariously. The Olympics cut to commercial, and we get up and walk past the bar and the circle of moonlighting folk musicians towards the back of the building. We go past the restrooms and the little table of spices and hot sauces in the dark, narrow hallway straight to the kitchen, where we order two bowls of red beans and rice from the cook. He ladles them out of a banged up five gallon metal pot and hands them over in Styrofoam bowls. Tom gives him four dollars total. If you save your bowl, the chef says, the next bowl is half price. Back out front, the bartender has a glow on that is probably mostly sweat. 100 degrees plus humidity today. High summer in the sinking city. The crumbling capital of the American tropics. Arrestingly hot, Tom calls it. The bartender is maybe my age, 28 or something close to that. Her ponytail is tidy and tight and she has a raised scar an inch thick and four inches long on the dark skin between her breasts. Behind her, the crowd in London cheers for the little girls on team U.S.A. The bartender is out of every beer but Abita Amber, and I order two and tip her extra. For what? For living in New Orleans? For bearing the heat? For wearing that scar on her chest? I carry the plastic cups back to our wobbly table and Tom and I eat red beans and rice and talk about all of our old friends getting married and having babies. We ride our bikes back to his place and inside, he calls his girlfriend back in Berkeley while I get in the shower. The ceiling of the bathroom is cracked and crumbling, the missing patches of plaster revealing the wooden beams above. A roach crosses the bottom of the clawfoot tub as the water carries the grime of the day off my body. I don’t scream or recoil, and somehow I feel like this makes me commendable, not a weak chick cowering naked in the shower because of some bug. I wash my hair and think that I’m grateful Tom has never tried to kiss me, how it’s good we’re not attracted to each other, how he’s my only guy friend that I haven’t wanted to sleep with or vice versa. Then I think about what it might be like to kiss him, to just climb into his bed fresh and damp from the shower without saying anything. Back in his bedroom, he is off the phone and already sleeping, his thick book of New Orleans history laid open next to his head. I step out onto the balcony off of his bedroom and smoke. The air is thick, the moon high and bright, a waxing gibbous. There is no breeze. In New Orleans there are cats everywhere roaming the streets. One nuzzles up against my ankle as I walk to Pizza Delicious –“The Bywater’s only LGBT friendly pizza spot. Open Thursdays and Sundays” says the pizza box– on the corner of Desire and Royal. I have nothing to give this thin striped cat. A dollar will not do. “I’m sorry,” I tell the cat. “I’m sorry.” On Friday afternoon the French Quarter is an amusement park for stag parties in polo shirts and khaki shorts who have flown in from the Midwest for the weekend. Maybe they think all these neon-signed tourist bars are authentic and maybe Astrid and I are assholes for thinking we know better. Is it us that is killing the city or is it them? “Where is the Best Western?” a young man in a carful of young men yells at Astrid and me as we walk down the street not far from St. Louis Cemetery No. 1. We don’t know. Why would we know? “Where is Bourbon Street?” they yell. “Take a left,” I yell back. They disappear into the Quarter. I walk down Piety. I walk down Desire. I walk down Burgundy and Dauphine. I walk down Frenchman and the Esplanade through the garden district. Bacchanal is a casual cash only speakeasy style wine bar that is basically a storefront in an old house and a backyard with tiki torches and plastic tables. The woman at the register has a tattoo across her chest that says I DARE YOU in thick black ink. To what, I wonder. Back on the patio, a male duo plays Spanish guitar tinged with the blues. When the band’s tip bucket is passed through the crowd I throw in all the cash left in my wallet. Twinkle lights hang in the trees and our bottle of Vino Verde sweats in its plastic bucket of ice. It’s so hot here that the bare minimum of clothing is always okay. No need to carry a sweater. No need for makeup it will just melt off. A feeling of dread for my impending return to Los Angeles passes through me. A 7am flight on Monday morning. I haven’t been back for a month. “Hi. It’s me. I miss you. Maybe that’s weird.” says the text message on my phone sent from the brown-eyed man I’m sleeping with in Los Angeles. I’m in the bathroom but I don’t really have to go so I just wash my hands and stand in front of the mirror playing with my hair, which is limp because I just washed it and frizzy because it’s humid and partially pink because I got bored late one night in Atlanta. I take too long in the bathroom crafting the perfect response to this text (“Hi! No, not weird…”) and fret that it reads unnatural immediately after pressing send. I was natural with this person when I didn’t care so much about whether he liked me. This is one of those things I want to talk about when I’m drinking with Astrid and Tom but don’t know how to accurately express without sounding moronic. Astrid with her wedding and Tom with his Berkeley internship and the entire city below us sinking into the sea and I just want to talk about a casual relationship with a handsome man I know is not good for me. On Sunday morning, Astrid and I walk back through the French Quarter on the way back to Tom’s place, our legs and feet sticky and dirty and covered with flecks of debris from walking down the old streets in pouring rain. We dip into a designer consignment shop on Conti Street under the premise of looking for her wedding dress, although I’m the one who tries on the size zero Nicole Miller cream-colored silk column gown with a lace keyhole neckline that perfectly frames my tan shoulder blades. I love how I feel in this dress. Astrid and the woman who works at the shop say that it’s perfect. It’s my dress. It fits me like a tight silk glove. “You know, this might be the thing that sets off the chain of events that leads you to getting married,” says the thin saleslady. “Buying it is a sign to the universe that you’re ready.” “Am I ready?” I think. I can’t even write a text message charming enough to warrant a response. She’s a good saleswoman. She gives me a pair of strappy silver Badgley Mischka heels to try on with the dress and I think I must have this as I stand in front of the full-length mirror in the back of the store. I do not have $500 for a size zero Nicole Miller cream colored silk column gown with a lace keyhole neckline that perfectly frames my tan shoulder blades. I step back into the dressing room and unzip, wondering if and when I’m going to regret not buying it. What is my intuition saying? What would my grandparents say? I put it back on the hanger and hand it to the saleslady, already feeling regretful. I wonder aloud what the man in L.A. would say if I told him I had purchased a wedding gown. “He would probably never text me again.” Laughing together on this thought, Astrid and I depart into the Quarter, our feet dirty in our flip flops. On Sunday after the rain, Tom drives Astrid and me around the city on a Katrina-themed sightseeing tour. “This flooded. This did not flood. This was completely underwater. This was rebuilt. This area has money and was damaged as badly as the poor Wards you heard about, but this place was able to rebuild so you just didn’t hear as much about it. This school/hospital/ twenty-story office building was completely abandoned.” There has to be people in there, I think, shuddering at the thought in this car with no air conditioning. We drive to the lower ninth and see where Brad Pitt has built his row of charity houses. These structures are stylish and beautiful and fresh, up on stilts and settled among flood-worn buildings in various states of decay and disrepair. “Those houses were controversial,” says Tom of Brad Pitt’s humanitarian effort. Tom knows such things because he’s here for the summer doing an internship in city planning with Berkeley. “So much bureaucracy here,” he says as we cruise slowly down along the shore of Lake Pontchartrain. “Nothing moves very fast here except the cockroaches and the cats.” The locals think Tom is a cop. Part of his responsibilities as a Berkeley grad student intern is to go from neighborhood to neighborhood, house to house, taking pictures and making assessments on whether or not each property should be razed. He says it’s sometimes awkward, standing in front of these derelict houses, sweating in his button down and khakis, making these judgment calls. Especially when tenants come out and ask what he’s doing. Especially when a tenant comes out of a house he has just deemed condemned. He says that happens a lot. “The people here have a sort of agency fatigue,” Tom says. “They’ll believe it when they see it, but they pretty much just want to get on with their lives. They don’t believe in these social aid programs anymore.” The problem he says is that there are no jobs. The problem is no industry. The problem is the drugs. The problem is the bad schools. The problem is the segregation. The problem is the lack of infrastructure. The problem is the acid rain every day between 11am and 2pm. The problem is that the whole shebang is sinking into the sea. It is the worst place to build a city says Tom, who knows because next year he will have a master’s degree in city planning. The problem is circuitous. It is not to be romanticized. “This place is wonderful,” I tell my mother over the phone. “It’s loose and beautiful and falling apart and everything smells slightly of mold and flowers.” I am sitting on Tom’s balcony drinking a glass of pinot grigio and smoking while Astrid sits nearby reading a Jennifer Egan novel and intermittently sighing and looking off into the distance. The sunset is orange and purple over the Bywater. “Most people think it was the levees that broke,” Tom says, “but it was the holding walls. They weren’t high enough. They weren’t thick enough.” We drive around until we find a spot where one of these walls broke and let Lake Pontchartrain in over the city. Just to see it. We don’t take pictures. We don’t even get out of the car. On an intersection of St. Charles and Louisiana, a group of five men are fighting –yelling and shoving each other on the street corner in the Sunday afternoon heat. A woman pushing a stroller turns and yells something back at them. The baby in her stroller is sleeping, tiny chin to chest. The problem is the schools. The problem is the drugs. The problem is the segregation. I wonder if Tom has surveyed the house in which that baby lives, and if so, whether or not he has deemed it livable. We drive back to the Bywater to take a nap, the three of us sprawled out in Tom’s high-ceilinged bedroom. A roach crosses the floor and disappears under the windowsill. Not one of us moves. No one says a thing.
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