All our lives, every day, we constantly remake ourselves, reinvent ourselves, layer after layer, mask after mask. Maybe when finally we peel off all the masks there's nothing left. Maybe Doo-Wop in his own timeless way is right: we're nothing but the stories we tell ourselves and others.
I remembered, years ago, walking just like this by the levee downtown, smelling automobile exhausts, stagnant water and all the things that grow in it, hops and yeast from the old Jax brewery. I'd just been sprung from a long, court-enforced hospital stay, locked doors, locked razors. No home, no work or career left, just trunks full of loose connections. That day the terms tabula rasa and palimpsest had drifted into my mind.
I also remembered, further back, waking up at the base of that same levee after a night's hard drinking with bluesman Buster Robinson. My legs were in the water. I raised my head and watched them bob about down there in the wake from ferries and tugs, in the slurry of candy wrappers, paper cups and other flotsam that had collected around them.
Stories, then.
The ones I moved through thosefirst days on the street, as I lowered myself into the depths, heading downtown.
Just off Tchoupitoulas above Napoleon, where train tracks shrug shoulders into the river's curve, I came across a group of elderly black men sitting on the bank around a galvanized tub of iced beer and a bowl of cold fried chicken. Most had homemadefishingpoles and mostly they wore polyester pants with ribbed white underwear shirts or old dress shirts with wayward collars, thin nylon socks, black shoes. Plastic milk crates and cheap folding lawn chairs provided seats. They invited me to join them.
"Have some chicken."
"Hep yourself to a beer."
A kind of gentlemen's club, I learned, they met here each day.
Sam had been a barber down by Jackson Avenue nigh on fiftyyears. Rarely saw a white face down there.
Ulysses had sous-chefed all his adult life at uptown restaurants where the menus were a kind of found poetry and wine bottles proliferated like brooms in The Sorcerer's Apprentice.
William did whatever he could find, always had and still did, jani-toring, yard work, roadwork. Lot less of all that now, though. Too many people driving by, knocking on doors, scavenging after what subsistence they could. He understood how that was. Wasn't about to begrudge them.
Thing was, from the time he was twelve and already on his own, William'd always given top value for your dollar. Pay for ten hours' work, you were just as likely to get twelve or fifteen or twenty out of him, whatever the job demanded. He wouldn't walk away till it was done. And there were some who remembered, some who took notice.
So William-some called him Sweet William, others Big Bad Bill, and when they did, they laughed-still got work three, four days a week. And when he didn't work, generally he showed up here with beer for the rest, most of whom had been without work now for years.
We sat swapping stories around the beer tub, as people once gathered around campfires.
"You do remember that Reagan fellow?" James Lee said when his turn came. He'd taught for years at Xavier, history and economics; everyone called him Professor. "One of the true heroes of our cause. 'Long with Jesse Helms, of course."
America's memoiy is short. Abjuring any sense of history, the nation eternally improvises itself. Highwaymen such as Richard Nixon disappear only to emerge years later as "elder statesmen." A presidential candidate recently refened to Ronald Reagan as the best president this country ever had. All over America, jaws dropped. But (and this is the amazing part) just as many didn't.
"Yassuh, we be retired, the mosta us," one of the company said. Fishing a beer from the tub, he opened it. It spewed, provoking general laughter.
"What we are all right."
"Retired."
"Tired and tired again."
"Like that beer. Make some rude noise, then go back to what we can't help being."
"American-dream word, ain't it, retired?"
All those big words that make us so unhappy. Stephen Daedalus was right to fear them.
"Some day these fish ain' bitin'-"
"Thass most days, Sheldon."
"You right, ole man."
"-we goan hafta study collectin all them words. Make us up a list. Regular devil's dictionaiy.?"-quality. Z)e-mock-racy. Damn. Just roll right the tongue, don't they?"
"They do for sure."
More than one voice: "Yeah!"
We'd cut right to call and response, echoes of talking drums in Congo Square and church amens, the slapshot syllogism at the heart of the blues.
"You want this last piece a chicken, Lewis?" Sam the barber said.
"Think we all 'bout had our fill."
One last volley, then: "Life, liberty-"
"And the pursuit of happiness."
"You mean haplessness, don't you, Eugene?" The Professor's eyes met mine. We were both in hiding-in plain sight, like Poe's purloined letter.
By this time chickens were nibbled down to dry bone, beer had become a couple dozen empty cansfloatingin tepid water and fish (if indeed they'd ever entertained such a notion) had given up biting. The day itself, ebbing away in pink-and-gray dribbles on the horizon, abandoned all illusion, all pretense: knew once again it wouldn't survive. The group began dispersing. I bade them good-bye.
Then, following river's bend into what used to be called the Irish Channel, I wound up (like Jesus) among thieves.
Back doors of nondescript vans open in an abandoned school parking lot, these maverick capitalists gathered over their latest takes: trading, bartering, buying and selling, avidly redistributing wealth. From time to time kids pedaled up on bicycles with baskets full of goods and pedaled away again with baskets empty.
TVs were a major commodity, as were portable stereos, VCRs, CD players and boom boxes.
Lots of laptop computers these days, I noticed. Larger systems, proving difficult both to transport and to fence, generally stood untouched, but the little ones were fair game, negotiable. New technology, new crimes.
I thought how Newt Gingrich some years back told us flat out that all our country's problems would be solved once information became freely accessible on the Internet. Such sweetness to what he said, in a way: this blind, ever-renewable innocence at America's heart. The man simply could not imagine that other lives might be different from his own. One journalist looked over at the housing project across the street, wondering aloud how many of the residents had their computers turned on just then.
I slept that firstnight under a bench in a pie-slice park on Magazine, my bench and two others, a border of hedge and an anonymous statue pretty much comprising it. Directly across Magazine, used furniture stores stood shoulder to shoulder, tanklike steel desks and Formica dinette sets showing dimly through windows cataracted with grime. A bar took up the V's other leg, HALF MOON painted freehand on its blacked-out window, sign above the doorreading THE PLACE. Chains were wound through the square bars of a security gate whose lock no longer worked. Drifts of refuse and leaves at the gate's base bore witness to long disuse.
Early morning-I'd stepped out of time's circle, gone to Hopi Mean Time like Doo-Wop, give-and-take of light and body's promptings my only calendar or clock-I woke to the sound of a car idling nearby and a voice above me.
Policeman squatting there, face through the bench's slats looking all of sixteen years old. Telling me I'd best move along. Partner in the car watching, hands wrapped around a plastic cup of Circle K coffee.
"You okay, sir?"
Sir? I guess some things do change.
I nodded.
"You heaixl me, right?"
I began climbing out from under the bench, stiff and sore from the day's walking as much as from the night's cramped position.
"You need help? You walk okay?"
No. Yes.
"Better hit it, then. Store owners'll start showing up soon, don't much like campers. Be on the phone in three minutes and we'd be rightback down here."