Things that I took for granted the ten years I tried to live in New Orleans but which now annoy me include waiters who expect huge tips and keep on being haughty even after you turn over the tribute, salaried men at the airport who literally won’t touch your luggage until you hand them five- or ten-dollar bills. I like tipping people but I don’t like to feel as though my luggage will be stolen if I don’t hand over a twenty-dollar bill. You aren’t supposed to have to tip salaried employees of airlines to check in your luggage at the curb. I have flown all over the world and New Orleans is the pirate city of airline employees.
What else annoys me about New Orleans? Taxi drivers from hell, many of whom don’t speak English, won’t turn off the radio or turn on the air conditioning, and expect even bigger tips than their buddies at the airport.
I hate parallel parking on narrow crowded streets with potholes and the fact that parking tickets are one of the major sources of funding for the city. When I was there in the spring semester of 2005, to have a wonderful time and be feted at Tulane University and hold a chair in the humanities and another at the Women’s Center of Newcomb College, it seemed to me that a third of the police force was engaged in parking scams. I was fined fifty dollars for parking in the wrong direction in front of my rented house. No warning. The first night I slept in the house I parked my car in front of it and when I got up at seven the next morning there was a ticket. This after having spent an entire afternoon the day before driving out to City Park to pay seventy-five dollars for a permit and sticker to park in front of my house. Tulane sent one of their office staff with me to make sure I had a personal check. The office where the permits are granted does not accept cash or credit cards. It is manned by three obese women who file their nails and talk on cellular telephones while the roomful of applicants sit politely on hard chairs holding little numbers they are given as they enter. Outside the office a morbidly obese police officer stands guard. This man is so fat it is unbelievable. How they made a policeman’s uniform to fit him is another amazing question. Around the corner two more obese but still basically human-looking policemen sit on a bench earning their paychecks by some mysterious thinking process. I was told by the Tulane employee that all of these people were political appointees, part of the bottomless corruption of the city government. My uncle was the editor of the Times-Picayune, the main newspaper of New Orleans. In his time the city was run by the southern Mafia and the office of mayor was handed down, as it is now, by a family of politically astute pirates.
Before the hurricane and after the hurricane the same hierarchy holds sway. The corruption and lack of real jobs never change. There are jobs on the port, jobs in the tourist industry, jobs selling dope, lawyers and physicians and medical personnel, three universities, yard work, interior decorators and antique dealers and small shops where wealthy people buy expensive clothes for themselves and their dogs and their children, coffee shops and that’s about it, except temporary government jobs teaching the arts to African American students. Plus the Saints games and the struggling symphony orchestra.
The government pours money into New Orleans. It has poured money into New Orleans for a hundred years but nothing much ever changes.
There are wonderful people in the city, rich and poor, white and cocoa colored and black and light brown and dark brown, Caucasian, African American, Vietnamese, and a constantly changing mix of Mexicans and Central and South Americans and French and Belgians and Englishmen and -women who specialize in haughtily looking down their English noses at everyone’s accents.
It’s a constantly changing mix of nations and creeds and costumes and sights. Fifty-year-old white women running in and out of Langenstein’s in their tennis dresses, every man and woman a law unto themselves where fashion and manners is concerned. You can be knocked off the sidewalk by an African bicycle rider and helped into the car by a stranger in the same block.
I hope the federal government keeps on pouring money into this poor but attractive relative of a city. I hope the music never stops and the movie stars keep coming in and buying up all the good houses in the lower garden district.
I wish we could find a way to rebuild the city that did not depend on handouts and people coming there to get drunk and throw trash down on the streets. I really dislike Mardi Gras. It used to be a beautiful, funny, local celebration with grown men being silly enough to pretend they were kings and people seeing through the absurdity and buying into it at the same time.
Now it is a big, overgrown, two-week-long, drunken bacchanal with people coming in from all over the world to get drunk and throw things down on the streets and the next morning big trucks full of poor people coming along behind them to pick up the mess. The trucks burn lots of petrol we buy from the Middle East where the best sons of the poor people go to fight (and sometimes die) because they can’t find a decent job doing anything else.
And so on.
There are times in the early mornings when I go out to run in Audubon Park and the beauty and soft, moisture-laden air and the huge old oak trees are so wonderful I can’t help but love New Orleans.
I hear the bells from Loyola University and see the tall handsome buildings of Tulane University and I think of my physician uncles and great-uncles who were educated there and my doctor grandson and artist granddaughters who recently graduated there. I think of the writing class I once took from a poet at Tulane and the fun of hearing poetry readings in the lovely chapel. I remember the honors they gave me only five years ago and the dinner parties and seventieth birthday party they had for me with three wonderful cakes. I remember when we plastered the campus with signs and gave away buttons saying A SOUND MIND IN A SOUND BODY, both in English and in Latin.
I remember the Thursday afternoon class I taught and how, almost to a man and woman, the students wrote about the dangers and problems getting drunk had caused them or their friends. One story ended in a death, as drunken stories often do.
These were beautiful, upper-middle-class children, some the children of professors and teachers, who had been sent to Tulane to learn to have sound minds in sound bodies, but they had been taught to get drunk at the same time. On the one hand, geology and history and philosophy and literature and biology and geometry and higher math and chemistry and biochemistry and astrophysics and plain physics and architecture and music and art. On the other hand getting drunk at parties and in the French Quarter and at the lake and in automobiles and in bars, bars, bars.
It made me cry to read their stories. I read the same stories at the University of Arkansas but they aren’t this sad and every student doesn’t write them. This was a hand-picked class of the best students at the university. The homecoming queen wrote about her sadness that the beautiful young man she loved was ruining his life with alcohol and she was helpless to save him.
Another student was spending his spare time trying to get his roommate to stop driving when he was drunk and stoned.
I hope the beautiful and good parts of the city can be rebuilt and that industries will come that will give the citizens of New Orleans something to do that adds to the store of goodness in the world.
I want drunkenness and drugs and prostitution and pornography and bad art to be left in the past, drowned beneath the flood. The pitiful artists who sell their ugly paintings to the tourists. The smelly bars with their Tennessee Williams imitators and all of that. You can have it. I quit drinking thirty-five years ago. I don’t like it anymore. I see no reason to tolerate it and let it ruin our lives and the lives of our children.
January 1, 2010
WONDERFUL DAY YESTERDAY IN A SUNNY WARM NEW ORLEANS. I spent an hour with Gunther Perdigao. Gunther. What an amazing thing the human mind really is. Those deep memories of all the hours I spent with him when I was a confused, unfulfilled thirty-four- and thirty-five- and thirty-six- and thirty-seven-year-old. The behaviorist Chet Scrignar had taught me to stop drinking, a Gargantuan task and worthy of his brilliant, powerful mind and personality. Then Gunther s
pent four afternoons a week listening to me weep years of frustration and confusion on his couch. All this time I was writing poetry, writing it fiercely, praising the beautiful world in which I was confused and suffering, praising all creation while trying desperately to figure out how to become a person I could bear to be.
Just remember that you’re standing on a planet that’s evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,
That’s orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it’s reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,
Of the galaxy we call the ‘Milky Way’.
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars.
It’s a hundred thousand light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick,
But out by us, it’s just three thousand light years wide.
We’re thirty thousand light years from galactic central point.
We go ’round every two hundred million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.
The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute, and that’s the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you’re feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere up in space,
’Cause there’s bugger all down here on Earth.
Gunther and I talked about my youngest son, Pierre, for an hour that seemed like two minutes.
December 29, 2009, Ocean Springs, Mississippi The Mystery of Psychotherapy The Mystery of Transference The Hardwired Banks of the River Memory
ONE OF THE SADDEST THINGS ABOUT DEATH IS THAT IT ERASES the rivers of memory, the vast store of faces, places, events, time, weather, excitement, games, imagination, ideas, love.
I am on the Mississippi coast for five weeks over the Christmas holidays. Which means I take off the rational hats I wear as writer and teacher in the college town of Fayetteville, Arkansas, and put on the kinder, sillier face more suited to a grandmother and great-grandmother.
I have three sons and my sometimes troubled attempts to tell them what to do continue, no matter how hard I try to remember that it is an impossible task, not to mention unworthy of a seventy-five-year-old woman who should be satisfied with unconditional love.
“For they live in the house of the future, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.”
Here they are, visiting India, having many wonderful children, surveying swamps and catching viral diseases like malaria and dengue fever. Getting well in record time. Sailing two-hundred-foot-long boats from Louisiana to Brazil, fighting custody battles with an exwife and her terrible mother, loving their wives, loving their children, laughing, fishing, hunting, driving pickup trucks, patting me on the head.
I am constantly afraid something bad will happen to them if they don’t live as carefully as I do. I should have a sign in my house that says, “No smoking, no drinking, no wild ideas, no motorcycles or fast cars or flying airplanes or piloting large boats across the equator and around the Cape of Good Horn, no being like my brothers or your forefathers.
“All I’m really saying is, keep breathing. I love you, your lives dazzle me. I need everyone to stay alive until I can learn to do this unconditional love thing. Love, your mother.”
I might as well have a sign. I’ve been so judgmental for so many years they all know never to smoke or drink in front of me. They like to bring the children to see me. I adore little children. At least they pretend to listen to me even if the ones with big brains give me that look when I start telling them not to climb high things at the park. They keep on climbing. “I won’t fall,” even the four-year-old tells me. And keeps on climbing.
Because I am sometimes bored when I stay at my little house on the coast waiting for them to bring the children to see me, I thought up calling my old psychotherapist and asking him if I could have a few appointments to talk about mothering grown children.
He agreed and the next morning I drove the ninety miles from Ocean Springs to New Orleans and spent an hour talking nonstop about the huge cast of characters I have acquired since this dear man helped me find myself. It was in his office that I cried my tears and found the courage to become a writer and left my sweet, wealthy husband and went to Fayetteville, Arkansas, to live the life I had always meant to live. I didn’t abandon my children. They had already abandoned me by taking drugs and not giving a damn about a thing but the madness of the nineteen seventies.
“If they won’t use the genes, then I’ll use them,” I had told this psychotherapist, whose name is Gunther and whom I had been seeing four days a week for several years.
I became a writer. I fulfilled my dreams. I made my way in the world alone. I made a good living and used most of the money to help my now somewhat repentant sons get educations and become useful members of society.
All of that was so long ago, so many long years ago, so many wives and girlfriends and children ago, so many books that I wrote and published, so many lectures around the United States and in Europe, so many fine adventures I was given and so many fans I acquired and honors I received.
But at the core of my being are these three sons and their progeny, these gene-bearers, these wonderful little boys and girls.
So mysterious, all of this. None of it more mysterious than the three afternoons I just spent sitting in the office of my old psychotherapist and delving deep into all this history and all the old fears and guilt. I bury fear. I John Wayne fear. “That will be the day,” I think, if I dream of dying or of losing any battle other than the endless one I wage to control my uncontrollable sons.
Always, since the very first day I was alone in a room with H. Gunther Perdigao, M.D., I have been able to let the fears and rage show their ugly faces, and, in his presence, with him listening, I beat them down, I right hook and left hook and kill shot them. I refuse to be fearful of anything human, except, of course, disease and disability. So let me put it this way, I refuse to fear anything, only excepting mortality and its causes.
It’s a battle and I’m waging it as hard as I can. Exercise, careful diet, constant vigilance, flu shots, pneumonia shots, detox diets, Dr. Andrew Weil’s vitamins and anti-aging Juvenon, and so much else. I’m armed and dangerous when it comes to aging. I’m ready to go the distance with preventing disease.
All of these ideas and musings, these memories and questionings, these vibrantly alive doings and dreams, this wild, vibrant life I’ve led, all came rushing out as I talked to Gunther again after all these years. I talked without ceasing for almost an hour each time I saw him and, when he told me it was time to stop, I kept on talking as I said goodbye and left the room and went out the door onto the street. I could not stop at his command. I had to put a coda on what I had been saying, to reassure him, although he had not asked to be reassured, that my leaving was all right, that I knew psychotherapy is long, its goals are unformed and unknown until the unconscious mind forces an end, or answers a question, and you seem to know what it was you were doing, and that there is an answer, of sorts, and a way is prepared before you to proceed with your life in a better, clearer way.
It is so difficult to tell anyone who wasn’t in the room what it was that happened there or why it seems to be important.
When I was in psychotherapy with Gunther I found out what my strengths were, I remembered my great talent as a writer, I wrote my heart out and talked my heart out and then I left a very nice, very wealthy man. Although I loved and honored him, I could not
fulfill my work as a writer until I was alone, with no one looking over my shoulder or being afraid of what I was writing.
“He is called a poet, not he who writeth in measure only, but he who formeth and fayneth a fable and writes things like the truth.”
On the third afternoon I spent with Gunther something happened that must be noted. There were physical reasons for what happened. I had driven three hours that morning in a rickety little Honda I bought to keep on the coast. It was freezing cold. I had not eaten much and probably hadn’t drunk enough water.
But that is not the reason that when I stood up from Gunther’s chair I was dizzy. I overcame it and told him goodbye, imagining that it was temporary or a low blood sugar problem from not eating. When I began to drive down the crooked, crowded streets of uptown New Orleans I was still dizzy but in control. I went to the Whole Foods Market on Magazine Street and bought food and ate it. Then, because they didn’t have aspirin for sale, I went to Langenstein’s Grocery Store and bought a bottle of water and a bottle of aspirins and took one in case I was having a stroke. I didn’t think I was having a stroke. I was just covering my bases.
It was cold and grey outside, deep cloud cover all the way to Canada, freezing cold for New Orleans. I could have called my grandson, who is a fourth-year medical student at Tulane. I could have called my son Pierre, or his wife, or my ex-daughter-in-law, or my granddaughters or my cousins. I could have gone to the emergency room at Touro Infirmary, but I’d had enough doctors for one day.
I drove home to Ocean Springs, very, very carefully, watching closely to see if I became more dizzy or in any way unable to drive.
I stopped three times on the way home. When I would get out of the car and stand up the dizziness would return but I could walk in a straight line.
At the Mississippi State Rest Area near the state line I took a second aspirin after talking to some strangers about whether it was safe to take two full-strength aspirins.
Things like the Truth Page 4
