I stood, one hand on the back of the bench. Not too steady at all. Legs simultaneously numb and knotted with cramps. Absurdly thinking of Reagan in some old movie: My legs, what happened to my legs?
"Hey, you sure you're okay? When's the last time you ate? Don't know how you guys pull it off. Here." He handed me a five."But it's for food, right? Nothing else."
I thanked him.
"No problem. Listen, you take care, okay?"
He got back in the car. The radio crackled. They had the air cranked up high. He and partner sat watching as I moved away down Magazine. The street turned one-way and empty here. No one coming uptown this time of day. The whole city might be deserted. Lifeless husks of cars, shells of buildings. I was the only one left alive.
31
LATER THAT MORNING as I walked by an empty lot on lower Prytania where an impromptu flea market had sprung up, cars, wooden pushcarts and shopping carts spilling out lines of tools, cardboard boxes of record albums, ground cloths or improvised tables laid with waffle irons, hot dog cookers and coconuts turned into heads with shells for eyes, I thought how much of my life these past forty-plus years, since I came to New Orleans, had been passed simply moving through the city, watching it close and reopen like some huge wood-and-stone flower around me, forever new, forever the same; and how much, on the other hand, passed as I sat afloat, apart and alone, a distracted Archimedes, in my room.
All these years I'd believed I understood the city's real life-conceit of the worst sort. Whole generations of change had passed outside, fogging the glass with their breath as they peered in, some of them knocking at the pane, as I sat writing my own books and reading others, sunk in the dailiness of my life. Pascal claimed that all man's unhappiness arises from the single fact that he is unable to remain quietly in his own chamber. Hedging the bet again.
Appropriately enough, I thought of Hamsun's Hunger, how on a gloomy, wet morning the novel's protagonist departs with his few yet-unpawned possessions rolled into a blanket, promising in a note left behind to his landlady that soon enough, away from these distractions and with time to scribble out a scatter of feuilletons for the local paper, he'll remit not only her due but a handsome interest as well.
I thought, too, of the immense sadness of Rimbaud's last letter, dictated to his sister the day before his death. I imagine her at bedside, taking this down, then, as Arthur falls back into pure delirium (I smell her soap-washed body, the stench of his decomposing leg and sour, acid sweat, unguents and incense set out to cover these), stepping to the door where Mother waits, saying, Perhaps he will rest now. I wish to change today from this steamship service, which I do not even know the name of, but in any case let it be the Aphinar line. All those lines are everywhere here; and I, powerless, unhappy, can find nothing; the first dog you meet in the street will be able to tell you. So send me the list of fares from Aphinar to Suez. I am completely paralysed: therefore I wish to be embarked early. Tell me at what time I must be carried on board.
Crossing Canal, prow of my own bateau ivre breaking through floes of tourists in fanny packs and sensible shoes consulting city maps and Greyline schedules, I moved downstream towards the river's thirsty mouth. Where paddle-wheelers kept slow count of bodies walking planks into them and ferries struck out every half hour, swimming frantically overhand, for far Algiers. Slaves fresh from Africa were held there before being brought over to the Quarter for sale. Everything they knew and understood was gone. Stacked belowdeck like logs, awash in their own refuse, they'd emerge blinking, caked with grime and reeking. So much for the joys of a sea cruise.
Amazing Floridas! Hideous wrecks at the bottom of brown gulfs! Eveiy dawn-every last one of them-heartbreaking.
Here I am now on Decatur, walking narrow sidewalks beneath balconies off the apartments above, past bars with front doors propped open and cats aperch on rear half-doors into kitchens through which can be ordered shrimp, special luncheon plates, fried onions, peppers and potatoes, muffalettas heaped with olive salad, thick po-boys, daiquiris, beer.
Here again, walking up Esplanade in thrall to gentrification. Security gates, doormen and keypads everywhere in evidence now, where brief years ago columns on swayback porches had burst with onion plants and whole floors been chopped indiscriminately (bathtubs in kitchens, walls of sagging plywood) into low-rent rooms.
On into the Faubourg Marigny. After several decades' disuse and crumble, shotgun houses down here again are inhabited, bikes, motorcycles and hibachis out front bespeaking occupation, clothes and hammocks hung from lines and fences out back confirming it, new paint, new cement steps. No trees or greenery. Houses like books on a shelf. This part of the city resoundingly gay. Strips of alternative bookstores, vintage clothing shops, specialty restaurants, bars and galleries, a fine storefront theater, perhaps most of all the headquarters for NO Aids, make a true neighborhood of it-one in which Richaid Garces felt at home. Making me wonder what neighborhood, what community, I might ever feel at home in.
None, maybe. God knows I'd tried enough of them.
Years ago I'd bitten off a part of the great American dream I could never swallow. I was still chewing on it.
"Tween what we see, what be," John Berryman wrote in The Dream Songs, "is blinds. Them blinds' on fire."
Convenience kills, I'd seen spray-painted on the side of a K amp;B.
And I, powerless, unhappy, could find nothing to put out the fire. Ask the first dog you meet in the street.
That second night I slept in the Faubourg's block of a park, wakened just past dawn by the rattle of chains being unwound from steel gates. Someone stood over me looking down. I heard his breath coming and going, smelled the cup of coffee he'd just drunk, traces of musk from early-morning sex. Should he speak or keep his peace?
(Why do you cry? Are we not happy? Nietzsche asks, momentarily catching the eye of the sister who cares for him.
No, Friedrich, we're not. Nor will we ever be. Children afraid of the night who have never been happy or good.)
I listened to the park guardian's footsteps pass away, noting how he kept to grass, avoiding cement walks. In one of the apartments overlooking the park a fresh cup of coffee, a baguette or pretzel put into the oven to warm, a lover or companion, awaited him.
I started back up Frenchmen towards the Quarter.
Forlorn horn from the river just blocks away. Some outbound ship awaiting bodies.
Tell me at what time I must be earned aboard.
32
THAT WHOLE DAY I strayed through the city, seeing it as though for the first time. Fresh off one of the ships, without even language to contain this experience, codify it. A painter onceremarked that seeing consists of forgetting you know the name of the thing that's seen.
I remembered the voiceover beginning Tavernier's Deathwatch and circling back at the end. Harvey Keitel's eyes have been replaced with cameras. Eveiything towards which he turns his head now is captured, caught: he's become the ultimate artist. "He told me he spent that whole day walking…" Keitel like Oedipus by movie's end, blind yet-because from some immeasurable mix of guilt and love he chose that blindness-humanized.
Soon too, like Keitel's character, I found myself in a mission, upper bunk near the back of the dorm, after a dinner of vegetable soup heavy on cabbage and white beans, two slices of white bread piled atop, mug of coffee, the whole of it consumed in the shade of your basic Fundamentalist ranting. Recalling all those youthful Sundays back home, packed into my suit (pajamas worn under, suit scratchy wool like Mom's army-surplus blankets) and clip-on tie, pantseat polishing hardwood pews under stained-glass windows illustrating the parable of the talents, Jesus bringing in sheaves, the prodigal son, stone rolledback from the tomb.