by Paula Guran
“I knew it,” she said. “Just looking at you. I had you figured for a professor. Or a dentist, maybe.”
She smiled at me one more time. I thought about stopping forever in that little town, eating in that diner every morning and every night. Drinking their bitter coffee and having her smile at me until I ran out of coffee and money and days.
Then I left her a good tip, and went south and west.
2
“Tongue Brought Me Here”
There were no hotel rooms in New Orleans, or anywhere in the New Orleans sprawl. A jazz festival had eaten them, everyone. It was too hot to sleep in my car, and even if I’d cranked a window and been prepared to suffer the heat, I felt unsafe. New Orleans is a real place, which is more than I can say about most of the cities I’ve lived in, but it’s not a safe place, not a friendly one.
I stank, and itched. I wanted to bathe, and to sleep, and for the world to stop moving past me.
I drove from fleabag motel to fleabag motel, and then, at the last, as I had always known I would, I drove into the parking lot of the downtown Marriott on Canal Street. At least I knew they had one free room. I had a voucher for it in the manila folder.
“I need a room,” I said to one of the women behind the counter.
She barely looked at me. “All rooms are taken,” she said. “We won’t have anything until Tuesday”
I needed to shave, and to shower, and to rest. What’s the worst she can say? I thought. I’m sorry, you’ve already checked in?
“I have a room, prepaid by my university. The name’s Anderton.”
She nodded, tapped a keyboard, said “Jackson?” then gave me a key to my room, and I initialed the room rate. She pointed me to the elevators.
A short man with a ponytail, and a dark, hawkish face dusted with stubble, cleared his throat as we stood beside the elevators. “You’re the Anderton from Hopewell,” he said. “We were neighbors in the Journal of Anthropological Heresies.” He wore a white T-shirt that said “Anthropologists Do It While Being Lied To.”
“We were?”
“We were. I’m Campbell Lakh. University of Norwood and Streatham. Formerly North Croydon Polytechnic. England. I wrote the paper about Icelandic spirit walkers and fetches.”
“Good to meet you,” I said, and shook his hand. “You don’t have a London accent.”
“I’m a Brummie,” he said. “From Birmingham,” he added. “Never seen you at one of these things before.”
“It’s my first conference,” I told him.
“Then you stick with me,” he said. “I’ll see you’re all right. I remember my first one of these conferences, I was scared shitless I’d do something stupid the entire time. We’ll stop on the mezzanine, get our stuff, then get cleaned up. There must have been a hundred babies on my plane over, IsweartoGod. They took it in shifts to scream, shit, and puke, though. Never fewer than ten of them screaming at a time.”
We stopped on the mezzanine, collected our badges and programs. “Don’t forget to sign up for the ghost walk,” said the smiling woman behind the table. “Ghost walks of Old New Orleans each night, limited to fifteen people in each party, so sign up fast.”
I bathed, and washed my clothes out in the basin, then hung them up in the bathroom to dry.
I sat naked on the bed, and examined the papers that had been in Anderton’s briefcase. I skimmed through the paper he had intended to present, without taking in the content.
On the clean back of page five he had written, in a tight, mostly legible scrawl, In a perfect perfect world you could fuck people without giving them a piece of your heart. And every glittering kiss and every touch of flesh is another shard of heart you’ll never see again. Until walking (waking? calling?) on your own is unsupportable.
When my clothes were pretty much dry I put them back on and went down to the lobby bar. Campbell was already there. He was drinking a gin and tonic with a gin and tonic on the side.
He had out a copy of the conference program, and had circled each of the talks and papers he wanted to see. (“Rule one, if it’s before midday, fuck it unless you’re the one doing it,” he explained.) He showed me my talk, circled in pencil.
“I’ve never done this before,” I told him. “Presented a paper at a conference.”
“It’s a piece of piss, Jackson,” he said. “Piece of piss. You know what I do?”
“No,” I said.
“I just get up and read the paper. Then people ask questions, and I just bullshit,” he said. “Actively bullshit, as opposed to passively. That’s the best bit. Just bullshitting. Piece of utter piss.”
“I’m not really good at, um, bullshitting,” I said. “Too honest.”
“Then nod, and tell them that that’s a really perceptive question, and that it’s addressed at length in the longer version of the paper, of which the one you are reading is an edited abstract. If you get some nut job giving you a really difficult time about something you got wrong, just get huffy and say that it’s not about what’s fashionable to believe, it’s about the truth.”
“Does that work?”
“Christ yes. I gave a paper a few years back about the origins of the Thuggee sects in Persian military troops. It’s why you could get Hindus and Muslims equally becoming Thuggee, you see—the Kali worship was tacked on later. It would have begun as some sort of Manichaean secret society—”
“Still spouting that nonsense?” She was a tall, pale woman with a shock of white hair, wearing clothes that looked both aggressively, studiedly Bohemian and far too warm for the climate. I could imagine her riding a bicycle, the kind with a wicker basket in the front.
“Spouting it? I’m writing a fucking book about it,” said the Englishman. “So, what I want to know is, who’s coming with me to the French Quarter to taste all that New Orleans can offer?”
“I’ll pass,” said the woman, unsmiling. “Who’s your friend?”
“This is Jackson Anderton, from Hopewell College.”
“The Zombie Coffee Girls paper?” She smiled. “I saw it in the program. Quite fascinating. Yet another thing we owe Zora, eh?”
“Along with The Great Gatsby,” I said.
“Hurston knew F. Scott Fitzgerald?” said the bicycle woman. “I did not know that. We forget how small the New York literary world was back then, and how the color bar was often lifted for a genius.”
The Englishman snorted. “Lifted? Only under sufferance. The woman died in penury as a cleaner in Florida. Nobody knew she’d written any of the stuff she wrote, let alone that she’d worked with Fitzgerald on The Great Gatsby. It’s pathetic, Margaret.”
“Posterity has a way of taking these things into account,” said the tall woman. She walked away.
Campbell stared after her. “When I grow up,” he said, “I want to be her.”
“Why?”
He looked at me. “Yeah, that’s the attitude. You’re right. Some of us write the bestsellers; some of us read them. Some of us get the prizes; some of us don’t. What’s important is being human, isn’t it? It’s how good a person you are. Being alive.”
He patted me on the arm.
“Come on. Interesting anthropological phenomenon I’ve read about on the Internet I shall point out to you tonight, of the kind you probably don’t see back in Dead Rat, Kentucky. Id est, women who would, under normal circumstances, not show their tits for a hundred quid, who will be only too pleased to get ’em out for the crowd for some cheap plastic beads.”
“Universal trading medium,” I said. “Beads.”
“Fuck,” he said. “There’s a paper in that. Come on. You ever had a Jell-O shot, Jackson?”
“No.”
“Me neither. Bet they’ll be disgusting. Let’s go and see.”
We paid for our drinks. I had to remind him to tip.
“By the way,” I said. “F. Scott Fitzgerald. What was his wife’s name?”
“Zelda? What about her?”
“Nothing,” I said.
Zelda. Zora. Whatever. We went out.
3
“Nothing Like Something Happens Anywhere”
Midnight, give or take. We were in a bar on Bourbon Street, me and the English anthropology prof, and he started buying drinks—real drinks, this place didn’t do Jell-O shots—for a couple of dark-haired women at the bar. They looked so similar they might have been sisters. One wore a red ribbon in her hair; the other wore a white ribbon. Gauguin might have painted them, only he would have painted them bare-breasted, and without the silver mouse-skull earrings. They laughed a lot.
We had seen a small party of academics walk past the bar at one point, being led by a guide with a black umbrella. I pointed them out to Campbell.
The woman with the red ribbon raised an eyebrow. “They go on the Haunted History tours, looking for ghosts. You want to say, ‘Dude, this is where the ghosts come; this is where the dead stay.’ Easier to go looking for the living.”
“You saying the tourists are alive?” said the other, mock concern on her face.
“When they get here,” said the first, and they both laughed at that.
They laughed a lot.
The one with the white ribbon laughed at everything Campbell said. She would tell him, “Say ‘fuck’ again,” and he would say it, and she would say “Fook! Fook!” trying to copy him. And he’d say, “It’s not fook, it’s fuck,” and she couldn’t hear the difference, and would laugh some more.
After two drinks, maybe three, he took her by the hand and walked her into the back of the bar, where music was playing, and it was dark, and there were a couple of people already, if not dancing, then moving against each other.
I stayed where I was, beside the woman with the red ribbon in her hair.
She said, “So you’re in the record company, too?”
I nodded. It was what Campbell had told them we did. “I hate telling people I’m a fucking academic,” he had said reasonably, when they were in the ladies’ room. Instead he had told them that he had discovered Oasis.
“How about you? What do you do in the world?”
She said, “I’m a priestess of Santeria. Me, I got it all in my blood; my papa was Brazilian, my momma was Irish-Cherokee. In Brazil, everybody makes love with everybody and they have the best little brown babies. Everybody got black slave blood; everybody got Indian blood; my papa even got some Japanese blood. His brother, my uncle, he looks Japanese. My papa, he just a good-looking man. People think it was my papa I got the Santeria from, but no, it was my grandmomma—said she was Cherokee, but I had her figgered for mostly high yaller when I saw the old photographs. When I was three I was talking to dead folks. When I was five I watched a huge black dog, size of a Harley-Davidson, walking behind a man in the street; no one could see it but me. When I told my mom, she told my grandmomma, they said, ‘She’s got to know; she’s got to learn.’ There was people to teach me, even as a little girl.
“I was never afraid of dead folk. You know that? They never hurt you. So many things in this town can hurt you, but the dead don’t hurt you. Living people hurt you. They hurt you so bad.”
I shrugged.
“This is a town where people sleep with each other, you know. We make love to each other. It’s something we do to show we’re still alive.”
I wondered if this was a come-on. It did not seem to be.
She said, “You hungry?”
“A little,” I said.
She said, “I know a place near here they got the best bowl of gumbo in New Orleans. Come on.”
I said, “I hear it’s a town where you’re best off not walking on your own at night.”
“That’s right,” she said. “But you’ll have me with you. You’re safe, with me with you.”
Out on the street, college girls were flashing their breasts to the crowds on the balconies. For every glimpse of nipple the onlookers would cheer and throw plastic beads. I had known the red-ribbon woman’s name earlier in the evening, but now it had evaporated.
“Used to be they only did this shit at Mardi Gras,” she said. “Now the tourists expect it, so it’s just tourists doing it for the tourists. The locals don’t care. When you need to piss,” she added, “you tell me.”
“Okay. Why?”
“Because most tourists who get rolled, get rolled when they go into the alleys to relieve themselves. Wake up an hour later in Pirates’ Alley with a sore head and an empty wallet.”
“I’ll bear that in mind.”
She pointed to an alley as we passed it, foggy and deserted. “Don’t go there,” she said.
The place we wound up in was a bar with tables. A TV on above the bar showed The Tonight Show with the sound off and subtitles on, although the subtitles kept scrambling into numbers and fractions. We ordered the gumbo; a bowl each.
I was expecting more from the best gumbo in New Orleans. It was almost tasteless. Still, I spooned it down, knowing that I needed food, that I had nothing to eat that day.
Three men came into the bar. One sidled; one strutted; one shambled. The sidler was dressed like a Victorian undertaker, high top hat and all. His skin was fish-belly pale; his hair was long and stringy; his beard was long and threaded with silver beads. The strutter was dressed in a long black leather coat, dark clothes underneath. His skin was very black. The last one, the shambler, hung back, waiting by the door. I could not see much of his face, nor decode his race: what I could see of his skin was a dirty gray. His lank hair hung over his face. He made my skin crawl.
The first two men made straight to our table, and I was, momentarily, scared for my skin, but they paid no attention to me. They looked at the woman with the red ribbon, and both of the men kissed her on the cheek. They asked about friends they had not seen, about who did what to whom in which bar and why. They reminded me of the fox and the cat from Pinocchio.
“What happened to your pretty girlfriend?” the woman asked the black man.
He smiled, without humor. “She put a squirrel tail on my family tomb.”
She pursed her lips. “Then you better off without her.”
“That’s what I say.”
I glanced over at the one who gave me the creeps. He was a filthy thing, junkie thin, gray-lipped. His eyes were downcast. He barely moved. I wondered what the three men were doing together: the fox and the cat and the ghost.
Then the white man took the woman’s hand and pressed it to his lips, bowed to her, raised a hand to me in a mock salute, and the three of them were gone.
“Friends of yours?”
“Bad people,” she said. “Macumba. Not friends of anybody”
“What was up with the guy by the door? Is he sick?”
She hesitated; then she shook her head. “Not really. I’ll tell you when you’re ready”
“Tell me now”
On the TV Jay Leno was talking to a thin blond woman, ITS&S NOT UST THE MOVIE, said the caption. SO H.VE SS YOU SEEN THE AC ION F!GURE? He picked up a small toy from his desk, pretended to check under its skirt to make sure it was anatomically correct, [LAUGHTER], said the caption.
She finished her bowl of gumbo, licked the spoon with a red, red tongue, and put it down in the bowl. “A lot of kids they come to New Orleans. Some of them read Anne Rice books and figure they learn about being vampires here. Some of them have abusive parents; some are just bored. Like stray kittens living in drains, they come here. They found a whole new breed of cat living in a drain in New Orleans, you know that?”
[SLAUGHTER S] said the caption, but Jay was still grinning, and The Tonight Show went to a car commercial.
“He was one of the street kids, only he had a place to crash at night. Good kid. Hitchhiked from L.A. to New Orleans. Wanted to be left alone to smoke a little weed, listen to his Doors cassettes, study up on chaos magick and read the complete works of Aleister Crowley. Also get his dick sucked. He wasn’t particular about who did it. Bright eyes and bushy tail.”
“Hey,” I said. “That was Campbell. Going
past. Out there.”
“Campbell?”
“My friend.”
“The record producer?” She smiled as she said it, and I thought, She knows. She knows he was lying. She knows what he is.
I put down a twenty and a ten on the table, and we went out onto the street, to find him, but he was already gone. “I thought he was with your sister,” I told her.
“No sister,” she said. “No sister. Only me. Only me.”
We turned a corner and were engulfed by a crowd of noisy tourists, like a sudden breaker crashing onto the shore. Then, as fast as they had come, they were gone, leaving only a handful of people behind them. A teenaged girl was throwing up in a gutter, a young man nervously standing near her, holding her purse and a plastic cup half-full of booze.
The woman with the red ribbon in her hair was gone. I wished I had made a note of her name, or the name of the bar in which I’d met her.
I had intended to leave that night, to take the interstate west to Houston and from there to Mexico, but I was tired and two-thirds drunk, and instead I went back to my room. When the morning came I was still in the Marriott. Everything I had worn the night before smelled of perfume and rot.
I put on my T-shirt and pants, went down to the hotel gift shop, picked out a couple more T-shirts and a pair of shorts. The tall woman, the one without the bicycle, was in there, buying some Alka-Seltzer.
She said, “They’ve moved your presentation. It’s now in the Audubon Room, in about twenty minutes. You might want to clean your teeth first. Your best friends won’t tell you, but I hardly know you, Mister Anderton, so I don’t mind telling you at all.”
I added a traveling toothbrush and toothpaste to the stuff I was buying. Adding to my possessions, though, troubled me. I felt I should be shedding them. I needed to be transparent, to have nothing.
I went up to the room, cleaned my teeth, put on the jazz festival T-shirt. And then, because I had no choice in the matter; or because I was doomed to confer, consult, and otherwise hobnob; or because I was pretty certain Campbell would be in the audience and I wanted to say goodbye to him before I drove away, I picked up the typescript and went down to the Audubon Room, where fifteen people were waiting. Campbell was not one of them.
