One hundred men.
And she set off on her goal with abandon, especially in those first months. National Guardsmen, Louisiana SWAT, Texas Rangers, NOPD, animal rescue workers, paramedics, firemen. The second wave brought in demolition and salvage crews, construction workers, electricians, Latin migrant workers. Her bed was open to musicians, artists, poets, the drunken, the sad, the crazy. Men she would have never slept with before the hurricane. Men who would never have slept with her before the hurricane. By her calculation, she was at ninety-nine. She had been one man short for weeks now, peculiarly relishing the idea that with one more fuck her suffering would be over. So why did she hesitate? She stared deep into her wine glass.
“Gigolette!”
There was Jimmie Lee. The most beautiful boy in town. He waved at her drunkenly from the pool table, wearing a T-shirt with a frog drawing on it. To be anywhere near this creature was to be blessed by the gods. Pretty, pretty Jimmie Lee. Like many youth in New Orleans, he started carousing early. He was everything innocent and pure yet wicked that was the Big Easy. A naughty manchild. Girls giggled and blushed when they passed him, peering back to see if he was looking at them. Men measured him with their eyes. Jimmie Lee flirted with everybody, but he wasn’t a heartbreaker. More like a boyfriend to the world. He was the one good, true thing that seemed untouched by the storm. Everybody looked after Jimmie. He was like something holy.
She took her drink and sauntered over to him. Jimmie Lee leaned against the table aiming his shot with the pool stick, a cigarette butt with a long ash resting precipitously between his lips, ash stains on the green cloth. The balls clacked and, as drunk as he was, he still managed the solid into the hole.
“Who’s winning?” she asked.
“Me!” he chirped.
“Who are you playing?” She glanced around.
“Myself!” The ash fell on the pool table.
Her cruel lover and his skinny brunette were necking at the bar, for her benefit no doubt. That’s what wild animals do.
“Oh fuck it all to hell,” she said under her breath.
Jimmie Lee looked at her, put down the stick, grabbed his beer, and took her by the hand. “I want to show you something.”
He took her to the door and outside. Even at night, the weather was oppressively sauna-like. He took a swig of his beer.
“What, Jimmie Lee?”
He giggled like a little mischievous boy, then pulled her close and kissed her. It was like a third-grade kiss behind the magnolia tree in the school yard.
“Don’t be silly, Jimmie Lee. You’re too good for me.”
She looked into his handsome brown eyes under the luminescent, almost full moon. He wiggled his eyebrows in his comical, precocious way. They both started laughing. The more they laughed the funnier and funnier it seemed. They laughed harder and harder there on the street at the corner of Dauphine and France in the Bywater, where before the storm, teenagers from the projects used to die with regularity from gangland drive-bys — neighbors would wake up and find a dead body on their lawn. Yet they laughed. A few blocks away across the Industrial Canal was the Lower Ninth, where the frail had floated in their attics, unable to breech their roofs during the storm. Laughed and laughed. They hugged long and hard.
“Let’s go to a hotel and use their pool,” he said.
“You got one in mind, Jimmie Lee? It’s 3:00 in the morning.”
“We could go swimming in the river.”
“Are you out of your mind?” The undertow was notoriously fierce. The Mississippi was like a snake that swallowed its prey whole.
He pulled out a joint. “Well, how about we smoke this in my car?”
She could hear the phone all the way up the stairs. She was coming home from waiting tables at Elizabeth’s Diner near the levee. The voice on the phone wouldn’t stop crying. A tugboat captain, the voice sobbed, reported a body caught on a floating tree near Poland Avenue Wharf in the late morning.
Her instinct was to get drunk. She listened to her instinct. She parked her bike at the corner of Lesseps and Burgundy and entered BJ’s, an old neighborhood dive bar, and proceeded to wallow. It was a skill she was good at. Several of the colorful older regulars had disappeared since the storm, but there was always another drunk to spring up and take the vacant barstool. She sat at a table away from the new faces.
A great many drinks later, the welcome feeling of indifference washed over her. Indifference over losing electricity every other day. Indifference over having to ride the bus for miles to find a decent grocery store. Indifference over nobody knowing what they were doing or how they were going to do it. She reckoned New Orleans as the best loverboy in the neighborhood who all the husbands cornered and mutilated while the wives wailed.
“Why are you crying?” He was dripping wet, his sparkly brown eyes mischievous. She jumped up and held him. Hard. He smelled of Old Man River.
“You’ve got a lot of explaining to do. Everybody thinks you’ve drowned.”
The strains of a brass band reached a crescendo. The bar door opened and a second-line entered loudly, marching drums, trumpets, tuba, trombones, good-time people swaying with the good-time music, customers smiling, waving their drinks as they danced.
“See what you’re missing?” she yelled to him over the cacophony.
She looked long and hard in the bathroom mirror and didn’t like what she saw. I wonder if I’ll die tonight, she thought, and sat on the toilet. Now that’s a sign you’re wasted, she mused, when you actually sit on the toilet at the Abbey.
Back in the bar, the jukebox was screaming a Tom Waits song about the end of the world. She spied Wyatt nursing a cocktail in the corner and sauntered over.
“That really sucks about Jimmie Lee,” he said after hugging her.
“Don’t tell anybody,” she whispered in his ear, “but he’s in hiding.”
Wyatt looked at her, incredulous.
“He’s too embarrassed.”
“You mean it’s a hoax?”
“Just like Tom-fucking-Sawyer.”
Wyatt grinned ear to ear. “I’m going to kill him!”
They laughed and drank with renewed vigor. They drank all night long and made out at the bar. She’d already slept with Wyatt. He had been number forty-six or so.
By the time they decided to part company the next morning, it was already humid and scorching. The thought of her air conditioner still on the blink prompted her to order an ice-cold cocktail in a to-go cup. She remembered the pill someone had given her the night before and popped it in her mouth. As she walked down the street, she heard the low purr of a muscle car. It stopped next to her.
“Gigolette!”
She leaned into the open passenger window. “Aren’t you dead? Did you fall off the dock or jump?” She grabbed his cigarette and took a drag.
1
From the song “Boulevard of Broken Dream.” Words by Al Dubin, music by Harry Warren; © 1933 Warner Bros., Inc. All rights administered by WB Music Corp., lyrics reprinted by permission of Alfred Publishing Co., Inc. All rights reserved.