I couldn’t figure who Us was. I listened. Us, it would seem, was every bedraggled fool between California and Italy who’d got a real nose for the real thing in counterculture. This was a prototype failed orphanage, sort of, or summer camp, sort of, built by Huey Long for the children of workers and never inaugurated or celebrated or even decorated. And it sat in the vast Atchafalaya Basin without the highway and the bridge that would have connected it to the capitalist world from which it was to have offered socialist children refuge. It was all Rastas and nutria now. It was appalling and delightful.
Suddenly the Secretary of State was putting himself between me and a new arrival, a man yelling at me. Taurus took the moment to get another beer from the chest freezer on which we’d been leaning. The yeller was saying, “That’s exactly our problem! That fucker is the problem!”
I sized him up. Not too big but crazed, and not crazed enough to be ineffective. The Secretary of State turned him and ushered him out of the room, a big sunroom facing the bayou we’d come in on.
“I apologize. Sometimes …”
“I’m sure,” I said. And I was. I was sure that this kind of sumping was the left-wing equivalent of a Klan rally or a dogfight. It was a teeming boil of maladjusts who were, failing everything else, going to be heroes to the people. They hadn’t a goddamned clue as to who “the people” was, beyond their deprived, righteous selves. I was not unsympathetic to them, at least not given the predictable responses of my father and his cronies to a scene like this, but personally and privately and without fanfare I would have enjoyed biting the yeller’s nose off. Taurus handed me a beer and steered me out of there and told the Secretary of State he would regard all hogs in the area as feral, huntable.
At first I thought he was referring somehow to their women, that he was mad, too. Then I saw he wasn’t.
“These hippies eat meat?” I asked.
“They do.”
“They grow rice?”
“They grow pot. Got pot plants in here bigger than Christmas trees.”
We rode out, suddenly in sun. There were red-eared sliders on logs and bright green astroturfy bogs of duckweed, and sacalait were snapping bugs under the duckweed like.22 shorts. I could have fished. I could have fished and looked each crappie in his red-rimmed eye and been thankful I was, whatever I was, not a hippie in Huey Long’s orphanage. I thought of frying up a mess of fish out in this gone place and eating them, and then thought of the Ameses coming over to eat with us. I could do without that. I was not disappointed to see that Taurus was taking me to my car.
We got there and tied up, and it was apparent that, not unlike during his earlier tutelage of me, he had most deliberately and most subtly shown me precisely something he wanted me to see. Was it what lies at the absolute end of the road of dalliance? A Land’s End of softheadedness? Was it the monsters of sexuality that await you if you can’t recognize a good thing and glom onto it? There were those good women of mine, and at least that good-legged mother o’ mine of his … I would never figure the fellow out, and that itself was part of the lesson he still provided. There is enigma. There is enigma.
I thanked him and he was on his way. I knew as much as I am to know about my mother’s ex-lover game warden bayou stud to nurses and protector of hippies felling pot plants the size of Christmas trees. I could imagine them out there sawing at the trees with butter knives they found in the orphanage. I went to New Orleans.
22
IN NEW ORLEANS I stayed at the Flamingo Bar & Grill & Hotel — a place I began to gather was famous. It was removed from the Quarter just a bit in space, but in spirit it was miles away: it was the final resting place for boozists, remove all pretense to Catholic this, voodoo that, and Creole this and that. It was three stories that wound away from the street, not one floor level, with a grill & bar in which you could eat and drink twenty-four hours a day. Beside the pay phone a hand-lettered sign read, “Imaginary conversations prohibited.” I spent some time in this grill, which was Norman Rockwell meets William Burroughs, if Burroughs was, as we say, the dominant partner in such a twain. It was so creepy it was most agreeable. You mostly wanted to drink your beer, which they did not begrudge you at any hour, without anyone talking to you lest you might have to smell him. I spent time there in lieu of forced march to the known touring nodes, and looked at my gently bubbling yellow beer in a good heavy water glass that had fine scars on it from years of use, and thought of my mother, mostly. It has come to this, I thought. I was drinking, but not drunk — I was in Hotel Step 13 and looking like a long-term registered guest (one day I got my shoes on the wrong feet and discovered the unlevel floors more manageable that way).
I found in my coat pocket — I have noted that the true secrets of the universe are discovered in sport- and suit-coat pockets either during or after drunkenness — a note from Patricia Hod. We were in the habit of giving each other love letters, I guess you’d call them, little scraps of mostly excess sentiment we’d have been too embarrassed to say aloud, things we could at once safely laugh at and believe. She had given it to me a day or two before the walkout, and I had looked at it, glanced at it, during the emergency soup-tureen foster-homing and rearguard retreat and tangled minutiae of fleeing women you don’t want to know you are fleeing — so I had only glanced at it. It was written before she knew there was anything wrong — I thought. But in New Orleans’s Hotel Step 13 beneath a sign prohibiting imaginary conversations, with my shoes on the opposite feet, and getting profoundly homesick for something nice—I kept thinking about Southern Living modern-bathroom ads with toilet bibs matching the bathmats — this note leapt out of my pocket and uncreased itself stiffly and resonated plainly in the hand like a lost biblical tract. “I see,” Patricia Hod had written me two days before I unfairly left her (wanting her, too), “your mother’s face in yours sometimes. Not always. But sometimes. It’s disturbing when you see that in a man’s face.”
That it was. It disturbed me there and then. That she saw that, that she said that, that she had seen it in other men, that it disturbed her in the cases of these other men, that it disturbed her in my case, that my case was not different from that of other men, or was it? (It would be if she saw the face she should have seen in mine: her mother’s, sister to my father.) Was this disturbing mom’s face in one’s man merely the latest case, or was it disturbing for reasons other, maybe better and real reasons: maybe Patricia Hod loved me. This idea winged too near me like a bat in the dark in the fluorescent glare of the Flamingo Bar & Grill. Maybe she was not crazy — I was crazy. This is a notion we all articulate on a daily basis, inspired by a thousand daily things, and I was leery of it, half-drunk on skid row in a town I did not and did not want to understand.
Patricia Hod. Would Patricia Hod have me back? She shouldn’t, that we knew. She possibly couldn’t — gone, etc. But she was crazy! There was hope. I got a beer and eyed the pay phone and deigned not: the prospect of such a call — and to where? Her mother’s house, where her mother drank so much her father shipped her out to sleep with her cousin? To my own house, where I’d left her and where my own mother drank so much she put her up, for me? — the prospect of such a call was too imaginary. Under the circumstances I thought the sign prohibiting imaginary conversations had been conceived just for me. Beer. Beer was going to have to go, and I was going to have to put my shoes on the right feet, shortly. I got another beer and stretched out my splayed feet and thought about that. Norman Rockwell was going to get up and say, Mr. Burroughs, I’m not taking it anymore. I find finally untenable your acquiescence to the disgusting in human endeavor. Put your pants on, Mr. Burroughs, I am through with you. This was amusing, and a bit sad, but I’d reached the point where I had to concede Mr. Rockwell right.