At that point I gave up and turned around.
The day’s heat was starting to accumulate as I wandered slowly back down Lizardi to where my car was parked. In retrospect I was much too close to the trash cart. I looked directly across the road at the ruins of a large structure. The faded lettering on the wall proclaimed the burned out remains of one Lost Tribe of Zion Full Apostolic Gospel Church. The tribe had been housed inside a big brown barn of a building. I couldn’t help but notice that most of the weathered detritus in the cart on the other side of the street was the same shit-brown stained wood as the last remaining sticks of the ruins.
I wondered how long the church had been gone, and how long it would take to rebuild, and I suspected the answer to the first question was a good while, and the second to be pretty much anyone’s guess.
But I did hope for the rapid resurrection of the Lost Tribe. And perhaps the spirit of stubborn resilience on display was an influence. After all, back at the café on Magazine where I’d had breakfast that morning, I’d witnessed a bus full of pasty church youth from a suburb of Milwaukee as they laid siege to a property. They scraped and primed and painted about as efficiently as I did, but what they lacked in skill they more than made up with daunting displays of turbocharged teenage zeal. As I ate my sweet potato pancakes and drank iced coffee in the brevity of the early morning shade, I watched them turn the shabby building into a vision of pastel pristineness.
* * *
The events of the day had distracted me. I changed my mind and headed back toward the levee, turning right to cut diagonally across the grass to the path on the top of the embankment. On the higher ground, where the river and the canal met, the air was agreeably cooler, and the film crowd had thankfully thinned out.
The bridge across the canal at St. Claude was being raised when I got there, and I was forced to wait as three small boats meandered through the narrow lock. When the bridge finally descended, two impatient teenage girls on bicycles rode partway across before the coiled gears of the mechanism were fully locked in place, and a series of honking horns only elicited a cascade of giggles as the bold twosome pedaled away.
Once on the other side of the canal, I turned left and climbed over a fence that followed the levee path for few feet before scaling a series of huge crumbling pipe and cement constructions, which I had to assume were no longer operational.
In a few feet I stopped. This was the place. It had to be. It looked exactly like the photographs taken by his fans, the ones who had made the pilgrimage to the place where he had died.
There was a barge far out on the river. It rested, still and low in the water, half filled with what looked like cubed and compacted old automobiles, incongruously glittering in the early morning sunshine. Part of the city skyline shone in the distance far behind it, curving bridges and tall anonymous buildings peeking out of a haze. As always, the city’s topography defeated me, and I wasn’t sure which direction I was actually facing. The New Orleans skyline is a remarkably generic one from a distance. But up close, the place becomes at once singularly unique.
Inside the blue house I had been obliged to wait. A place should be required to volunteer all of its dark history, to present an imaging of the events that had taken place there. But there had been nothing.
Now I stood here, at the side of the canal, and I waited once again.
It occurred to me that I could always jerry-rig the whole event; perhaps take the paper and the bracelet from my pocket and solemnly toss them in an elegiac act into the water, as I muttered a poignant phrase or two, before lapsing into an anticipatory silence.
And no doubt this would be a fittingly grandiloquent gesture of utter worthlessness. But I didn’t elect to do that.
I lingered for a moment very close to the place where he had drowned.
There was the graffiti I had first seen in photographs on the website. Nothing more had been added since. The vase was dirty and empty and overturned on the grass under the painted letters. I stood it upright, although I’d brought no flowers to place inside it.
He had died in this water a short time after the storm had compromised the canal walls. An estimated eighteen hundred people died in the storm, and forty percent of the deaths were thought to be drownings.
The canal had a lot to answer for.
So I waited for the water to cough up its historical dead, and all their attendant secrets. Like the empty attic room in the house on Lizardi, it should be forced to proclaim its history as including so much pointless death. This one death had managed to somehow insinuate its way a decade forward, and then it all but demanded another senseless sacrifice, the one that had got me started on this journey.
So I waited once again, for the haunted past to be rendered. And once again, I waited in vain, as first the room, and then the waters, relinquished nothing.
There was one final place to visit before I would leave town.
The levee path followed Rampart as it ran close to the canal. At some point I turned right, climbed down over a pile of weeds, broken steps, and exposed metal and found a negotiable gap in a rusty fence. I soon reached the point where Dauphine dead-ends at two lines of abandoned train track. Two short legs were just visible under the front of a silver rusted-out Buick Regal. A brown dog was unleashed and barking and clearly impatient for the makeshift repair to be completed. I kept on walking for two more blocks before making a left onto Poland.
Boldly painted shotgun houses crowded the street. Each had almost no front yard. To compensate, owners placed berserk flower arrangements in window boxes that all but overwhelmed their narrow painted balconies.
On the corner of Chartres and Poland a wine bar stood well concealed. In the back of what had once been an old Creole mercantile building was a patio garden with black wrought iron tables and a handful of early lunchtime customers with wine and cheese plates and good beers in big bomber bottles. There were unlit strands of festival lights in the sunshine and the garden was warm. Almost all the outdoor space was masked in shade as the sun was still behind the shadow of the building.
He had played here once.
I pulled a cold bottle of Meadowlark IPA from the cooler in the front of the shop. The clerk was an older gentleman with a monster gut. He wore a tie-dye bandana and antique NOLA jazz heritage T-shirt. Without uttering a single word, he opened the bottle and handed me a tall glass. When I offered him my money, he shook his head.
“Startin’ y’all up a tab,” he muttered under his breath.
There was little point in arguing with him.
In the far corner of a small second-floor room, a young man sat bony and angular. He was hunched over a vintage blonde Telecaster processed through about a dozen effects pedals and a peeling tweed Vibrolux. Beside him a young woman in a thin wheat-yellow summer dress and dark blonde dreadlocks sat very upright in a hardbacked chair. She moaned into a microphone. Her voice was far bigger than she was. The song rhythms were gently induced by varying delay patterns, and the droning melodies came from no more than two or three strings that were detuned, then plucked, then ground, then left alone to reverb gently. The young man spent much more time stabbing at the pedals with his two feet than playing the guitar with his hands. He constantly looked at the floor and frowned often, but still managed to raise his head on occasion and smile softly as the girl’s voice drifted upward.
The twenty souls occupying perhaps a quarter of the room’s seating capacity sat quietly. Some read. Some listened. A few checked their cell phones with the long-suffering air of attending to an odious yet necessary duty. Most were young but not all. They were all locals. Not visibly sweating, moving slowly, decked out in studied attire that tended towards too much, vintage hats tilted at a rakish angle, dashing and sloppily debonair if a little overplayed, especially in a locale so resoundingly, so swimmingly sultry.
I sat at a table near the back of the room in deep shade
and watched as dust spiraled in a prism of sunlight from a bare window facing east. I pulled the paper from my pocket and placed it carefully on the table. I read the lyric again as I held the bracelet in my hands, gently working it between my fingers some more, softening the leather and removing the last remains of the patina of dust at the same time.
I took my phone out and figured my route north and west away from the city. Then I thought about the guitar I had found, and what I should do with it. I considered the guitar shop in Memphis where I had stopped on the way down. They would surely take it and would know what to do with it. I should probably text them.
When I did they texted right back and told me all they could do. Then they told me about a store in Boulder close to my house on 28th Street that could do the very same things.
It all seemed simple enough.
Dusty beer bottles were fastened in groups of four, conjoined at the necks, and fashioned into light fixtures attached to the bare brick walls. They made barely enough light to read from, and all I could think of was the diagonal death signs painted on the outer shells of the Katrina houses.
“Takin’ ourselves a goodwill offering at this time.”
I raised my head in some confusion. The girl held what I was fairly sure was a straw pork pie hat in one hand. It contained about ten dollar bills and was rimmed with antique sweat stains, which I was quite certain didn’t belong to her, as she showed no other visible signs of wilting.
It was the singer. She gazed at me and raised her eyebrows. I noticed that one of her pupils was larger than the other. Just like David Bowie. I was surprised I had remembered this fact.
“How much are you asking?” I finally asked her.
She shrugged sweetly at me.
“Just what y’all think would be fair,” she said.
I put a twenty in the hat and I could see from her expression that it was too much.
“Something you like that we could play for you this very fine morning?” She offered this gently.
Impulsively I evoked his name. I asked her if she knew any of his songs. She made herself look regretful. Then she shook her head. It had been a stupid question. His name clearly meant nothing to her, and she looked long and hard at me, as if I had played a trick on her.
But he had played here once.
“We could sing you some Neil Young.”
It was a wonderful suggestion and I told her just that, all the while wondering what had made me appear like someone who would care for Neil Young. Was it an inspired guess? Or the law of averages, applied to an older gentleman trying to look casual in a room full of people trying even harder to look casual?
She returned to her chair and whispered to her partner who was tuning another electric guitar, this time a vintage Gibson SG, with an elaborate Bigsby tailpiece and a third Seymour Duncan humbucker pickup retrofitted onto a chipped body of cherry-stained wood. He nodded knowingly as she spoke.
After another minute of listless tuning and painstaking pedal selection they began to play the slowest version of “Heart of Gold” I had ever heard. The intro reverbed from an E minor seventh to a D major and then to an E minor, and the guitar chords swelled in a bludgeoning haze of chorus and barely restrained feedback; a sonic methodology I felt certain would have made Shakey quite proud. After four agonizingly lethargic repetitions the young lady seemingly coughed a few times at random into a battered harmonica as the guitarist morphed the chord progression into an E minor, C major, D major, and G major pattern.
I couldn’t help looking down at the notepaper that was still lying on the table, at the letters and symbols above the words, at the chords he had chosen, at perhaps his last song.
“I want to live. I want to give.” She began to howl the words across the room.
I swallowed most of the beer in my glass and closed my eyes. I contemplated today, and the last few days, and then the days ahead, in no conceivable order.
“. . . and I’m getting old.”
That nasty young girl surely threw these cruel words right at me.
Have I mentioned that all this happened somewhere in the middle?
Two
I have driven this far on little more than the slenderest of notions. First, for five hundred miles south, to the northern part of Mississippi, then for another five hundred, down here to New Orleans.
From here I will drive much more: another two thousand five hundred miles, diagonally north and west across the country, to arrive in West Seattle.
When I get there a woman in her mid-thirties will be given a thin leather bracelet because I want to give it to her, and a song, which I convince myself, was intended for her to have. Naturally she will not understand and naturally she will be quite confused at first.
The song is written on the piece of notepaper. It is dedicated to her by name. She will gingerly take it and hold it in front of her, and will begin to read it very carefully, and the start of a smile will take shape on her lips, and I will not fail to notice that her lips are a small part of a face that looks an awful lot like her late father’s.
When she finishes reading she will ask me what the song sounds like, and even though I know in theory how to play all the chords written down, I will tell her that I don’t exactly know. I will try to explain that, to my knowledge, the song was never recorded. There is no known melody line, no published sheet music to help, and her father’s guitar playing is almost impossible to duplicate.
She will look sadly at me as I say this. But could I perhaps try? Could I guess? She asks me these things very nicely. So I close my eyes, summon up the opening chord progression and I give it a shot.
I’ve actually thought about the song a lot as I drove across the country. I’ve imagined her father singing it, and when I do this I have an imaginary melody running through my head that almost sounds like one of her father’s.
So I sing her the song as I have fashioned it, as an unaccompanied homage. She smiles at me when I finish. In truth I’ve sung about as well as I can, but I will still feel slightly foolish.
I look into her face. It isn’t clear if she likes it or not. But she is polite and she insists that she does.
I’m absurdly pleased.
And after I have sung we will talk some more, actually for a long while, and eventually it will begin to get much darker outside.
She will do most of the talking and she will spend a lot of time telling me stories from her past and about how happy she is, but I won’t believe her either then or now because I think she’s mostly lonely, even as I listen to her.
Because happy people don’t spend much time telling you how happy they are.
Before we met I did consider placing the bracelet and the song on one of the low stone walls outside her house for her to discover. It was an admittedly idiotic gesture; equal parts Brief Encounter and French Lieutenant’s Woman (incidentally one film I love and one I truly can’t stand).
As I considered this option it did occur to me that, if she didn’t retrieve them soon, the perpetual damp of the local terrain would quickly destroy the paper, and the leather almost as fast.
There again, I reasoned, I could simply knock on her door, silently hand her the two items, and stride boldly and enigmatically away.
But in the end I had been forced to do neither of these things, because Catriona was leaving her house on foot even as I approached. And that was the last thing I had expected.
* * *
It seemed best to follow her from a distance.
She walked quickly, and something in the purposefulness of her stride made me suspect that she made this journey most days. The bracelet was still in my pocket and I took it out without thinking. I imagined it double-wrapped around her wrist; the leather dark, tightly braided, a little chunky and mannish perhaps. She was a slender, pale creature, and I imagined her wrist similarly.
Perhaps she will hold her hand away when she tries it on for the first time. Perhaps she will look at it, as she turns her arm back and forth playfully, a trifle whimsically.
There’s a real danger of getting carried away with all this whimsy.
I did have enough time to admire her little house as I turned and gave chase. It was constructed of equal parts red-stained cedar wood and mossy weathered brick. Being two blocks above the main shoreline road, her view would surely encompass the car ferry, which runs on the hour and docks leisurely; an ancient outdoor swimming pool of quasi-Victorian construction and questionable practicality; a footpath; a small park; a beach of sorts; and, of course, the wide stretch of water that lies between West Seattle and Vashon Island.
I tried to calculate whether her house would provide the much desired view of the water from any of the small windows. I wasn’t sure, but I strongly suspected that it wouldn’t.
The wet stone wall runs the entire length of her garden, which is small and steep, a haphazard assortment of worn grey rocks bundled up in gnarly knots of brilliant flowers.
She soon arrived at the shore road.
On the far side a footpath dissected a recreational strip of lush lawn, where the grass fell at a sharp incline, fading from an improbable green to ever-damp mud, to dark brown sand strewn with flat round rocks and the strands of worn seaweed that constitute this particular section of West Seattle coastline.
Catriona patiently waited for the two moderately drunk men on road bikes to pass; they argued loudly and heatedly over the absence of professional basketball in their city. She crossed the street hurriedly, even though there was no other traffic in sight. The fish and chip shop was open. She entered.
For a minute or two I pretended to read the signs in the front window for missing purebred cats and desired nonsmoking vegan roommates, before I followed her inside. We sat down at adjoining tables. The place was almost empty, and I could hear an angry seagull trash talking the bleating horn of the Southworth-Fauntleroy ferry outside.
Colorblind Page 2
