“Look, Creole, you’re a good customer, and I can’t get blood from a stone. I’ll talk to Lazarus. We’ll work something out. You’ll pay me back and you’ll cater me a party or something and we’ll call it square. Eh?”
He offered his hand and I took it, two whores bequesting their words of honor. He pumped firmly and locked my eyes with his as he added: “And one more thing.”
In my relief I’d felt like the kingfish who dives deep enough to outrun the line on the reel, so relieved that I’d lost track of the knife. Our eyes stayed locked as I felt the blade glide through the oft-burned skin and gristly sinew of my little finger. My mouth widened in a shocked O as I heard the blade crack into bone and wind its way around the knuckle, like a seasoned butcher’s knife carving tender baby back ribs away from tougher, more muscular meat. His free hand dropped the bloody blade and held up my own pinky finger for my examination, his other hand still pumping my remaining four fingers in some perverse gentlemen’s agreement.
“I’ll give this to Lazarus, a token of your sincere intentions, eh? Come see me tomorrow at the Quad. Don’t disappoint.” He stuffed my finger in his shirt pocket and left me a man bleeding from so many different wounds that, had I a needle to do up with, the spike would have simply deflated me, releasing only air from my veins.
There was one other snapshot I saw floating non-sequentially from the heavens while waiting for Chase to make me Isaac to his Abraham. I wasn’t going to tell you about it, but what the hell; ain’t no way out but through and all that shit. It was the fight I had with Faith the night she was packing to leave. I told her that if this is what it came down to, I would quit. Cold turkey, no rehab required, the thought of her taking my little daughter away was all the therapy I needed thank you very much.
“No, Creole, you won’t, not if we stay. That’s just it.”
“Bullshit,” I tried to rage, but by then the only wind in my sails was fueled by reds and opium and three hours sleep. It was hard to sound convincing, even to myself. “You’re all that matters to me.” She stopped packing long enough to cradle my face in her hands just so. It was a melancholy, sympathetic gesture full of the sorrow of what could have been. Should have been. “If I threaten to leave, you’ll quit for a day, maybe even a week. But then when I’m still here, it will be too easy to go back to it. You keep thinking you aren’t hooked because if someone put a gun to your head and said ‘quit’ you could. But that’s never going to happen. Life is the little decisions that you make, the choices that keep you from becoming so divided against yourself that someone has to put a gun to your head. So choose for yourself, not for Emily, not for me. Choose for yourself the same way you’d pick out breakfast cereal. And maybe we can work from there.”
She was right only to the extent that there was a weapon involved, though it was a knife and not a gun. The rest of the scenario she had dead wrong, including, sadly, the path I’d choose.
The Quad was the Student Union courtyard at Loyola where I’d first met Chase and the sympathetic poison he pedaled. By then I’d been designing specials at Macanudo for two months, doing the sous-chef’s job while the sous-chef was doing Geoffery’s wife, burning seventy, sometimes eighty hours a week and serving hickory grilled shrimp Chippewa over jambalaya cakes with crowder peas and artichoke Monte Cristo while everyone else was just doubling up the saffron in their crab bisque and gouging tourists like stuck pigs. Geoffery was so fired up over the reviews he was getting, he kept springing for meth and tear drops and anything that would keep me going. And me with a new baby in the house on St. Philip Street needing a new roof or a new slab every six months, I was willing to sell my soul for way less than thirty pieces of silver.
One of the busboys at the restaurant knew what hopped-up shape I was in and said he knew a guy who had something that was good for what ailed me. Despite spending ninety percent of my waking hours inside Geoffery’s kitchen, I was still enough in touch with the outside world to know that taking a second pill to cancel the first was stupider than forgoing the first one altogether. But by then Geoffery had busted his wife and the sous-chef job was wide open and Emily was graduating from four ounces six times a day to eight ounces sixty times a day. Most men believe that chefs are pussies, complimenting each other’s fairy hats and tasting one another’s sauce, if you know what I mean. But the restaurant business — especially the New Orleans Jackson Square restaurant business — is cut-throat. You put that many cut-throat guys in that small a space around that many knives and that much fire, it gets easy to understand why stimulants are a major food group.
I wish I could believe that my habit was Geoffery’s fault, or Chase’s, or even Faith’s. God knows I told all three that plenty of times. Even more — for whatever this says about me — I wish you would believe it. But I would have found my way there somehow, like it was written in my genes, always coursing through the very veins it would later pollute. I came to drink early — I can remember sharing a flagon of filched communion wine with my brother, hiding behind the Cornstalk Fence on Royal and goofing on the tourists; I think I was eleven — and I smoked my share of grass in high school. Probably smoked several people’s shares. About the time Daddy’s inmates were revoking his sentence I got into psychedelics and became real acquainted with the subconscious that would betray me so miserably just a few days ago. Met Faith at a Michael Doucet and Beausoleil show at Tulane where we shared a sugar cube communion. I guess you can follow the line of progression from there.
But many times in the past few months, ever since Faith lost hope and took Emily with her, I’ve wondered why I was unable to right the ship when I knew I was navigating not by the stars but by the black spaces in between. My wife, never shy to be third on a quaalude, gave it all up. Geoffery pumped me full of speed but never touched the stuff. Even Chase claimed never to sample his wares. My only answer is: sometimes a man quits trusting his strengths and starts trusting his weaknesses. His weaknesses are more apt to be dependable.
I met Chase at the Quad the next day, a heavy rouge gauze wrapped around my right hand. My filleting hand, it occurred to me. I was in a bad way. Weak from blood loss, jonesing to kill all after almost five days (holy shit, five goddamn days and it was getting worse? Who ever beats this shit?) without doing up. Fuck sleepless in Seattle, I was Neurotic Needing Narcotic in New Orleans.
We went for a coffee in this beatnik coffee shop where my hand was the only thing not dressed in black. I tried to feel Chase out by saying: “Hope you’re buying. As you know I’m in poor shape financially.” Which was true to the extent that I had no money (I told Faith to clean out the checking account when she left; never knew so much money could assuage so little guilt; rationalizations are the most expensive commodity on earth) and no income. I did, however, still have my house. A street-level pastel stucco right on St. Philip Street, between Bourbon and Royal. Great sub-tropical hanging garden on the front porch and a friendly courtyard in the back.