Colorblind

by Peter Robertson

  I still wasn’t sure why I was doing this.

  It was remarkable, given the limitations of my talent, how willing I was to be this exposed. Perhaps it was the spirit of the city. What else could it be? I reviewed my previous history of public performance: third wise man in a Sunday school Christmas nativity program with a solitary line of dialogue (“We seek the Christ child”), and that was all she wrote.

  What made more sense was the degree to which I felt drawn to Logan Kind and to his music.

  I had looked again at the attempted tablatures of his recordings. The more rudimentary versions were within my abilities. I’d persevered, hoping to be able to play at least one song from Crofter and do it justice. The problem was that the simple notations still sounded nowhere close, while the more advanced versions were light years above my skill to duplicate.

  So I stuck to playing covers and, for reasons I couldn’t explain, was tending to play older songs. Personal taste was not the determining factor; I’m no chronic nostalgic, and plenty of new songs that I loved were transposed and posted and eminently playable.

  It wasn’t that.

  On my commandeered corner in the Quarter, I was playing nothing but vintage songs, or newer songs by people who were themselves vintage. I played Richard Thompson and Lucinda Williams, the more strummy acoustic Beatles and Stones stuff, even early Sir Elton for God’s sake.

  And the question had to be why?

  My simple answer was Logan. It was true I couldn’t play him or play like him. But I could play his era. The songs he might have listened to and liked. The Croftertales postings had listed the covers he had played, and I had shamelessly co-opted as many as I could, all the while assuming he must have had his own good reasons for picking them.

  And I was aware that as I played I was trying to simultaneously sound like both Logan and the original singer, a vocal hybrid, of Logan and Mick, of Logan and Lou, of Logan and John or Paul or even George, when I was capoed up impossibly high for “Here Comes the Sun.”

  When I listened to Logan, I heard his guitar-playing first and foremost. His voice was a young and reedy tenor that had grown on me as I played the songs over and over. His college-sieved North of England diction was stark and unmistakable on every track.

  “Here Comes the Sun” had been the first song of the afternoon. I thought it went splendidly. It produced my first genuine request, other than the usual ones to stop fucking sucking.

  “Can you play any other Beatles songs?”

  “I can play ‘Let It Be’.”

  “Anything else?”

  “In My Life.”

  “Can you play that for us?”

  “It would be my pleasure.”

  And these memories lose their meaning,

  When I think of love as something new.

  Two ladies, perhaps a decade senior to me, danced with each other as I played. It was an old-fashioned affair, with elaborate twirls and hand-holding, with not-quite-ironic curtsying to each other at the end of the song, and a smattering of girlish giggling both before and after.

  They’d dropped a crisp ten-dollar bill in the guitar case, and since I hadn’t lost my seat yet, I was now ahead, at least so far.

  Later in the afternoon I played “Let It Be” and two more ladies showed up. They offered to sing along with me. I had a printout of the words and the chords. I stood in the middle and painstakingly flatpicked. They stood on either side. One held the lyrics high while the other constantly took selfies. They barely looked at the words. They sang very well. When we were finished, I willingly surrendered my cell phone number and the pictures were texted. I looked happy. My neck was indeed seared red from the rigors of yesterday, and I thought it might be time to retire my CU hat, or at least wash it.

  Another ten-spot came my way.

  And still no furniture malfunctions.

  * * *

  “Perhaps you would honor me with a song of your own, young man.”

  His jacket was a light cream color and his ample trousers a thick brown nubby fabric that would surely endure forever. He wore brown polished walking brogans and carried a walking stick with an elaborate yellowed bone handle and a bright metal tip. He carried the stick under his arm. The outfit seemed too warm for the locale, the style more landed English gentry than something appropriate for the stagnant heat of below-sea-level Louisiana. He had simply appeared, materializing crisp and unfazed by the heat in front of me. I assumed the cane to be mostly an affectation, as his arrival had been soundless, unaccompanied by punctuated taps of steel.

  He was smiling at me.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t have any.”

  His tone grew a shade darker. “Then do you not compose, yourself?”

  “I can barely play, let alone compose.”

  “You’re not a native of these parts.”

  “A foolish tourist.”

  “That’s very curious. Are you a traveling musician?”

  “I’m actually a semi-retired businessman here on holiday and clearly pushing my luck.”

  “I hear in your voice that you hail from a faraway land. I have sadly never once left this state. We do have the evanescent nature of occupation in common. I, too, am barely required to work. You have come a long way to be here in this wonderful city of ours.”

  “Not so very far. I live most of the time in Colorado.”

  “And how long have you played?”

  “I played a little as a boy.”

  “And now you find yourself playing as a man.”

  “I’m trying to begin again. There was a long gap.”

  He nodded. “I have some understanding of what it means to begin again. I would imagine it’s less than easy after such an extended break.”

  “I like to think I’m doing much better than I first hoped.”

  “Then allow me to compliment you on your progress.”

  “Thank you.”

  He took a few steps backwards and then stood. He was clearly waiting.

  Feeling unaccountably nervous in his presence I began to play.

  He spoke again when I had finished.

  “Were you aware that Lead Belly, who was born on a plantation near Mooringsport, Louisiana, recorded that very song in 1944? He called it “In New Orleans.” It was also recorded earlier in 1937 as “The Rising Sun Blues.”

  “Who originally wrote it?” I queried.

  He smiled warmly at me. “Who indeed? It would fall under the wide umbrella of an uncertain provenance.”

  He moved surprisingly fast, placing something inside the guitar case and turned towards me.

  “I wish you all good luck on your new beginning young man.”

  When he walked away, his cane stayed tucked under his arm and never once touched the ground as he headed northwest on Dumaine.

  Inside my case I discovered a new hundred-dollar bill slumming with the two tens.

  I knew what to do with the money as soon as I saw it.

  But first the guitar and the chair had to be safely escorted back to the house. The walk took me down Frenchmen and past Washington Square, where the funeral walk had started and ended yesterday.

  A stooped man in sweat-soaked overalls was singing loudly and tunelessly as he swept a fine dusting of flower petals from the oak-sheltered path onto the grass. I wasn’t altogether sure what purpose the repositioning of the dead flowers served. I could have asked. It would have stopped the singing. But I chose not to.

  The chair was returned with some pride to the courtyard, and the guitar was placed on the bed, with the overhead fan cranked to the second highest setting.

  When I got back to Jackson Square, the place was bursting with all the ingredients of Big Easy hustle.

  Outside the market café a tense standoff was taking place between a tourist on foot and a tourist in a white Toyota
Camry with Indiana plates. The pedestrian was a black woman. The driver was the same color as his car. She had been taking her time crossing the street when he had inched his vehicle too close. She was building to incensed, whereas he was mostly embarrassed. She wasn’t about to step aside any time soon. He also wasn’t going any place, as his car was sandwiched between her and more traffic. Horns were honking behind him. The woman was building a supportive audience. There was scattered cheering as her finger commenced to wag. She smiled at her new fans. This was all going her way.

  The driver had a measure of my sympathy. Someone had once advised me that going crosstown in New Orleans was possible on foot and ill-advised in a car, unless you chose to take Claiborne Avenue.

  I found Mel in predatory Marilyn mode. There were two young men standing close by, faking coy, as she blew them a series of very deliberate kisses. One was the primary target, slickly overripe and disagreeably handsome. The other was pockmarked and petulant. She was soft-whispering a song about Little Rock. It was mostly a breathing exercise.

  I got closer. She saw me and smiled. I held out the hundo. Her face did something weird for a split second before she recovered and took the money.

  I blew her a big kiss of my own and left.

  Still twenty bucks clear profit. I was suddenly hungry. When was the last time I had dined at the corner of Chartres and St. Louis? I had enough for a half muffuletta, a side of jambalaya, and two Abitas. An internal debate lasted less than a second. Done and done.

  This was the very first place I had gone to in New Orleans, on the occasion of my very first visit. On that occasion I had been in the process of falling in love.

  * * *

  The train had headed south from Chicago. I was then thirty-seven and my marriage was breaking up. The journey had been taken on impulse, in a life not thus far noted for impulsiveness.

  It had come at the conclusion of another journey, this one northwards, to Michigan, where a friend had become lost and where the mapping out of his last days had become an obsession built on a solemn conviction that his closing had gone neither well nor naturally.

  I had been too late to book a sleeper car to New Orleans and instead sat through the night with a young woman ten years younger than I was. Her name was Kate. She was to meet up with a female friend in the city. We sat together. Then we fell asleep in the early hours and woke to find ourselves tangled up.

  A handful of memories prove indelible. Mostly they comprise fearful moments, shameful acts of exclusion and intended cruelty. A few are more pleasant, like the wildly inappropriate notion to kiss a sleeping stranger’s forehead as she smiles and begins to stir to an unexpected wakefulness in your arms.

  Yes, it was an indefensible act of intrusion, and I hope I never forget doing it.

  The train had offered breakfast service and we drowsily partook. The eggs were a grim rubbery affair. The coffee was altogether too welcome to justify criticism. She told me her post-grad work was in anthropology. She was looking for a research job in that field. I had just read an Oliver Sacks book about color blindness, and tried to bluff my way through a quasi-scientific conversation that I didn’t want to end.

  I was staying near the Audubon Zoo on Calhoun. Kate had been able to secure herself accommodation in the Tulane residences, on the strength of a student ID that was still valid, and which allowed students to stay cheaply on campuses across the country.

  Later in the day I would take the St. Charles streetcar to my bed and breakfast and be surprised at how many blocks south I had to walk to get to my digs. I was a good deal younger then, but ironically not as healthy as I am today. I had bought a guidebook at the Amtrak station. There were a dozen walking tours laid out in detail and I boldly intended to take each one.

  We took a taxi together to the quarter from the train station. The train had been late arriving after over an hour spent simmering on a rail siding a few miles south of McComb, Mississippi. Every time the announcer apologized for the delay we were reminded how close we were to the birthplace of new teen singing sensation Britney Spears.

  Kate found a payphone and called her friend and they arranged to meet in an hour’s time. We stood outside the restaurant. A sign hanging overhead claimed the place had been there since 1797. The crumbling plaster walls and peeling white paint outside made that claim seem entirely plausible.

  We were comically unsure of what to do next. We wanted to walk and to explore. She had a backpack. I had my shoulder bag. We were both travelling light but not quite light enough.

  We weren’t especially hungry.

  I looked in my guidebook. The restaurant was favorably mentioned. She asked me if I planned on making all my decisions after consulting the book. I pantomimed the taking of mild umbrage in grumpy response.

  We each ate small bowls of gumbo and guzzled our late morning hurricanes like the shameless tourists we were. The waiter’s white shirt was far from clean. The flaking stucco walls inside the restaurant’s front room were in as dilapidated a condition as the place’s exterior. There were palm trees in a courtyard. At the back of the building was a larger and much fancier dining room with freshly painted walls and wood trim and clean white tablecloths that didn’t have a sheet of grubby clear plastic placed on top of them. We wordlessly opted for the determined squalor of the front room.

  Kate would have to leave soon. In a hurry I had looked some more in my guidebook. There was a grandly columned hotel on St. Charles Avenue. It boasted a many-roomed bar and a huge deck with fans overhead and white wicker chairs. It offered live jazz at night. It was an old city tradition in a town overloaded with old traditions. The guidebook told me not to miss the mahogany stairwell that led to a stained glass skylight. It warned of the likelihood of having to endure clusters of yappy college kids hitting on each other loudly, but promised that the place was dark and sprawling and there were plenty of carpeted corners to submerge yourself in.

  I asked if we could meet and have a drink there later that night, and Kate said she would like that.

  We arranged a time.

  Our hour was almost up.

  She told me that she had to go.

  She got up and kissed me on the cheek.

  “Now we’re even,” she told me.

  She was right. We had now kissed each other once.

  And she left.

  We never saw each other again.

  * * *

  At 6:45 I was sitting at the hotel bar with my guidebook open. I looked up as instructed. The bar ceiling was mahogany wood imported from Honduras and was positioned fifteen feet above the dark wood floor. The chandeliers were bronze.

  On a more practical note, happy-hour prices were good until seven.

  I was asked if I cared to sample a Sazerac. I saw no reason to appear churlish.

  At precisely seven o’clock the hotel intercom summoned me by name to the front desk where I was handed a note. I had two distinct thoughts as I opened the folded paper.

  It felt like a melodramatic moment in an old film.

  It would unquestionably be bad news.

  Kate had swung by the hotel on the way to the airport to hand deliver it. Her mother had called her at the university residences. Her father had suffered a heart attack. There was a ticket home waiting for her at the airport. She had to leave right away. She was very sorry. Goodbye, Tom.

  If I remember correctly Humphrey Bogart had read his note at the train station. He now has to leave town without his best girl. He reluctantly gets onto the train. His face is all broken. In an angry gesture he throws the letter away. The black piano player is with him, which is of some small comfort. As the train starts to foggily depart, a rush of sickly violins rises up and mocks him.

  I read my note twice. Once at the desk and a second time at the bar where I returned to finish my discounted cocktail. When I had completed the second reading I folded the pape
r and put it inside the back cover of my guidebook for safekeeping. There were more architectural details to read about but I no longer gave much of a fuck one way or another. In truth I didn’t much care about historic Louisiana décor. I had only wanted something to talk to Kate about when she arrived, so that she would think me urbane and sophisticated.

  I knew her last name and where she had been planning on staying. I could have employed the university or the Amtrak people into helping me trace her. I didn’t know where she or her parents lived, but I could certainly have endeavored to find out.

  But I didn’t. I was still married. I was older. I was mostly a miserable excuse for a living soul. And I also entertained the weird notion that what we had experienced, however fleeting, was oddly sweet and perfectly complete just as it was. The rest would undoubtedly have turned out to be so much bitter anticlimax. That was the illusionary concept I initially fashioned at the hotel bar as I nursed my second, now full-priced official cocktail of the city of New Orleans.

  I’ve since googled Kate twice. Both times drunk, and both times not drunk enough to not feel like a complete dolt for doing it. The episodes were ten years apart. The first disclosed a spell of adjunct professorship in one of the thousands of small liberal colleges littering Ohio. The second revealed high school teaching in a suburb of Toronto, a husband, two very small children, and a head full of prematurely grey hair that looked extremely becoming on her.

  She looked quite happy on both occasions. Her life had clearly survived the gut-wrenching trauma of losing me.

  I still have the guidebook and her note in my house in Boulder.

  I did follow every tour in the guidebook when I was there, and I silently dedicated my series of pedestrian pilgrimages to Kate, my newly lost love. On the first junket, my hurricane was served in a jumbo souvenir bucket and hastily downed outside a voodoo shop. Inside the shop we were encouraged to purchase a trinket to offer to a legendry dark enchantress whose slogan-scarred grave was the next stop we were to be frog-marched to on our frenzied itinerary.