by James Sallis
Twenty minutes into the play (as I resisted impulses to pull out my notebook, start making lists, try to keep track of all this) one of the male actors left the stage and, stripping off everything but his mask, stepping into high heels and strapping on a tray like those cigarette vendors once wore, strode through the audience passing out still more masks. These were blank, but came with boxed crayons.
We were supposed to participate.
And some did, wonderfully.
The whole thing shimmered, changing again and again before our eyes-at once brilliant, prosaic, unheralded, obscene, chaotic, challenging, comforting, silly, obvious, disturbing.
A man in a three-piece gray suit and red smiley-face mask stood at the back of the hall and, claiming to be the play's author, confirming the disappointment he'd anticipated even from its inception, demanded that the production immediately be shut down.
Another, an emissary (he said) from the Arts Council in Washington, mask remaining blank, a form, praised free expression in America in drumlike manner.
One rose and, having brought a hush to the house with an imploring wave of his hand, wearing no mask at all, simply stood weeping.
Finally the cigarette vendor threw a kimono over substantial shoulders. Stepping back onstage, he said, "The rest is silence. Unless…"
He paused.
"… I have a higher bid?"
And the curtain fell.
To resounding applause.
My own not the least, once I'd shaken myself loose from the spell. Even to move, I felt, somehow would violate what I'd just experienced, bring mundane life crashing back in.
"Too pretentious, isn't it?" Deborah said beside me. "I knew it. I don't know why I let them-"
When I told her it was among the most powerful moments of theater I'd seen, she shut up and sat staring at me. All around us people stood, easing back into ordinary lives.
"You're desperate, Lewis."
Of course. But that was hardly new.
Still in his kimono, heels exchanged for platform slippers, the cigarette vendor came out with a dozen red roses for Deborah. She ducked her face into them.
"How embarrassing."
But couldn't escape standing to acknowledge the applause when it didn't stop.
When she did stand, swaying, I thought again, as I'd thought when I firstsaw her, of willows.
Afterwards, then, we repaired to Rue de la Course, there over French roast, Earl Grey and biscotti to speak of grand ideas, ambition, disappointment, highrent and sleeping alone, ghosts, phantoms, demands of the past.
This part of town had just begun to crawl out from under years of abandon and disrepair as firstyoung people, then investors, bought up the old Humpty-Dumpty houses and started putting them back together again. Even now, this late at night, a crew was at work across the street on a swayback Colonial double, portions of which had been painted dull silver, like aircraft models. Three men on ladders, spotlights directed up towards them as they scraped, sandpapered, sprayed, and hammered.
Deborah sat watching them. "You sure it wasn't too pretentious?"
No. Want another tea?
Why not.
I went inside. When I came out balancing full mugs, the workers across the street had stopped and begun packing everything-wire brushes, sanders, paint, ladders, toolboxes, toolbelts, lights-into trucks and hatchbacks.
"Thanks," Deborah said. She drank. "What part did you like best?"
"Intellectually?"
"Whatever."
"Okay. I have to tell you: I found the guy wandering around nude in the audience a realturn-on."
"Yeah. Me too. Youreadyto go, Lewis?"
O yes.
17
Years ago a New Orleans friend named Chris Smither wrote a song called "Love You Like a Man," a fierce, intensely physical encomium detailing what his woman needs, what she's not going to find elsewhere and what he can do if she'd only give him the chance; these days, Chris says up in Boston where he lives now, he performs it chiefly as a nostalgia piece.
However we might laugh it off, over time our lives' landmark days become more commemorative than celebratory. Passing yearsfind us able to care passionately about less and less. Less becomes what we're capable of as well, physically, emotionally-andfinally what we hope for, what we believe still possible.
No: not the precis of another heady discussion with Deborah O'Neil, though it might have been. And though Deborah was directly responsible. For as I came to spend more and more time with her, within myself I sensed all manner of rumblings and unsettlings, felt systems I'd thought shut down for good start kicking over again.
Lights flare, dim, dim further still-and finally catch. The survivors let out a long breath.
The long-disused engine turns over once, again, stalls with power surging audibly towards it before stuttering into full bloom. The castaways will be able to escape after all.
It's alive! spectators cry out in horror films.
Holy words.
Somehow we go on being given new chances.
— What I was thinking Sunday night (or Monday morning, whichever shore you watched from), having left Deborah's a little after one. Lying with body exhausted, mind chugging away, in a bamboolike shaft of moonlight.
Late that afternoon I'd come home and, on my hurried way towards a shower and new clothes, gone into the kitchen for a bottle of water only tofindrefrigerator, pantry and shelves stocked for the firsttime in years. With no one to cook for, I'd long ago given it up. I ate out or nibbled at plates of cheese, crackers, sausage, raw vegetables.
A note scrawled in huge printed letters across three sheets of 8 V amp; X 11 paper, taped to the refrigerator door like a child's school drawings put up on display, read:
I FRIED YOUR LAST EGG FOR BREAKFAST.
IT WAS RIPE. THEN AS YOU MAY HAVE NOTICED I WENT SHOPPING. SOMEONE HAS TO. FIGURE SINCE I DON'T HAVE A JOB I'LL TAKE UP A HOBBY AT LEAST AND GET DOWN TO SOME 60URMET COOKING. ALWAYS MEANT TO. NOTICED HOW THE GUTTERS ARE ALL CHOCKFULL BY THE WAY. THEY AND MOST OF THE SHUTTERS DONE PULLED WAY FROM THE WALL. FIGURE I CAN FIX THAT THE NEXT DAY OR TWO IF IT'S OKAY WITH YOU. THERE'S SOME OTHER STUFF TOO. WE CAN TALK ABOUT IT. PROBABLY NEVER TOLD YOU, BUT MY OLD MAN WAS A CARPENTER, HANDYMAN, UP ROUND TUPELO. I WAS ALWAYS KIND OF ASHAMED OF HIM WHEN I WAS A KID. I'LL BE OUT LOOKING FOR WORK WHILE YOU'RE OUT WORKING. LET ME KNOW WHEN YOU'LL BE HOME AND THERE'LL BE A HOT MEAL WAITING. THANKS, ZEKE P.S. I STARTED THE NOVEL THIS AFTERNOON, I'D JUST WATCHED ZEBRAHEAD ON TV. AMAZING, ALL THIS CABLE CHANNEL STUFF. CALLING THE GUY IN MY BOOK LEW GRIFFIN FOR NOW. THAT OKAY?
Of the six messages on my answering machine, the most important was from Tulane, basically Hello? hello? is anyone there? Like a message launched blindly into space.
I would have called back right then, but nobody'd be around on Sunday afternoon. I'd missed, what, one class? It seemed like more. This week had been all over the damn place. Felt as though I needed a map and one of those time-lines-of-history charts.
"So many things happen to us," Deborah said, arm passing into light from the window as she gathered the pink cotton blanket loosely about her. She sat, knees drawn up, against the headboard. "How are we ever supposed to know which are the important ones, which ones matter?"
"We're not. Maybe the ones that matter are the ones we decide matter."
"I'd love to believe we have that much control over it." She sipped white wine from a tulip-shaped glass. "You never drink, do you?"
"Only because for a long time that was mostly what I did. A lot of those things you say you don't know about, things that are important and matter, things that don't, got lost forever because of it. Like people sinking into quicksand in old movies. You watch them go down. In your own disabled way you try to hold on to them. Then you're there at the edge of the frame alone again."
"My father was a drinker."
I made no reply. Became a receptacle.
"He'd been a tyrant a long time, I guess. Told my mother what to fix
for dinner eveiy night, how much she could spend on the household that week, when she could buy shoes for herself or the older kids. And he'd fly into these smashing, screaming fits of rage when things went wrong. But by the time I came along-I was a late child, a surprise, my mother turned forty the year after-he'd become an invalid, someone my mother had to care for totally. Wet brain, she called it Mostly what I remember is the first time I brought a friend home from school. Had to be nine, ten years old, I guess. Mom would prop him up in a chair in front of the TV. She'd tie a sheet around him to keep him from getting up and wandering off, and she made these diapers out of old towels.
"So Sue Ann Goerner and I came in after school-my oldest sister, who stayed with him most days, had just left, Mom was due home from work at the diner up the street within the hour-and he's sitting there a few steps inside the front door. One of those classic shotguns: you look straight through the house, four or five rooms, and see banana trees in the backyard. Remember stereopticons? Hazel was on TV. He'd pawed at the diaper till he'd got it pushed down enough that he was able to reach in and get his penis. When Sue Ann and I walk in, he's sitting there playing with it, pumping away at this thing for all he's worth with his eyes never leaving Shirley Booth, though God knows nothing was ever going to come of it.
"What's he doing? Sue Ann asked, and I told her, finessing details I wasn't a hundred percent sure about now that I'd unexpectedly become the voice of authority. Went on for some time. You have anything to eat? she said when I was through.
"I remember thinking how my father's thing looked like one of the slugs that came out at night and ate leftover cat food out back."
She finished her wine and set the glass on the floor.
"That became pretty much his life, such as it was. Sitting propped up in front of Dallas, I Dream of Jeannie, or The Rockford Files in improvised diapers, trying to whack off. He died when I was twelve. It's mostly the tenderness I remember, this incredible tenderness my mother showed for this man who'd so terribly abused her."
I moved up beside her and she leaned into me.
"I could end that way too, Lew." I felt the heat of her tears on my skin.
"We all can. All too easily."
Her finger traced the crater of a gunshot wound on my shoulder, a knife scar low in my ribs. The firstlooked like a smallpox vaccination, the second like a zipper, or the backbone of some tiny animal.
"You're one of the important things, Lew. This matters."
I didn't respond, just pulled her closer to me.
"Okay. So it's romantic abandon you want, huh?"
"You have some?"
"Sure. I lang on, let me open a can. To tell the truth, there's a surplus. Lots of supply, no demand. How's your slug, by the way?"
My slug was fine.
And now both slug and I had crawled home. One of us, at least, to sleep.
All day Sunday, I'd been out there beating bushes.
Hauled myself out of bed at seven, sliding from under Bat, asleep on my chest, to face a workingman's breakfast of scrambled eggs, grits with jalapenos and cheese, toast, melon. Might as well use all this food, since it was here. Bat felt the same way, circling back to his bowl again and again, mewing shrilly, as I ate. Drank a pot of coffee with breakfast and another afterwards while cleaning up the kitchen.
Nerves honed to a fine point.
Whereupon I hit the streets.
There are several groups of people who make it their business to know who's in town, to notice new arrivals, take note of weaknesses and dependencies. Some are (as they like to say) "with the government." Some work for even older and still more centralized, if far-flung, organizations. A few are independents.
None more independent than Doo-Wop.
Actually, it's difficult to think of Doo-Wop ever being sufficiently integrated into the common society as even to be considered independent of, apart, or exempt from it.
John Donne, obviously, never went drinking with him.
On the other hand, there weren't a lot of others who hadn't. And if so, he knew their stories. Had them fixedforever, flies in amber, in his memoiy.
That time of day, it was relatively easy to find him. He'd be near one end or the other of his regular route. Some days he started uptown and worked his way into the Quarter, others he did it in reverse. I took a guess. It was a little before nine when I got to Lafitte's and the bartender, pushing a mop around the floor, avoiding things like tables and chair legs and walls as though magnetically repelled, told me I'd just missed Doo-Wop. The bartender wore a stained, unironed white poet's shirt so oversize that it resembled a dress. He was completely bald on top, hair at the side of his head long and twisted into little pigtails. Looked like Pippi Longstocking after a sex change.
"He did boost one drink from the guy that was here. A beer, if you can believe it. Just sat there looking at it, shaking his head. Pure crow's pickings around here 'less it's a weekend or there's a convention or some kind of a ball game in town. Guy comes in here this early, he's gonna be lucky to have enough to buy his own drink. And he ain't likely to care much of a hoot 'bout other people's stories or his own, know what I mean?"
That's what Doo-Wop did: roamed the city, trading stories for drinks. Like Homer, the Middle Ages' wandering minstrels, Celtic harpists such as O'Carolan, China's ancient poets.
So I went up the steps one by one.
Kenny's Shamrock on Burgundy, about the size of cinder-block toilets youfind in parks or roadsidestops and smelling not unlike them, Ireland travel posters stapled to the walls.
Donna's on Rampart across from Louis Armstrong Park, good burgers and bar food, great brass-band music nights and weekends.
A bar on St. Ursulines that to the best of my knowledge has never had a name. Same bartender and to all appearances the same patrons have been there for twenty years. I guess they all go home sometime, but it doesn't seem like it.
I caught up with him at Monster's. It had started life as a disco about the time discos were dying out, then briefly managed to transform itself into a concert hall for the likes of Don McLean, Arlo Guthrie, John Lee Hooker. Minor balls still hung over a dance floor crowded with stacked plastic chairs and unlit. Posters curled and cracked on the walls beside signed photographs of musicians no one had ever heard of, some of them in leisure suits, tie-dye, Nehru jackets, Carnaby gear.
"My man," Doo-Wop said to my reflection in the mirror behind the bar. Silver had worn away in patches, erasing portions of the world. "Been a while."
We'd known each other now for over thirty years. This was his standard greeting. Sometimes I'd be My man, other times Captain. Names weren't a big thing with Doo-Wop. Been a while was equally generic, since Doo-Wop had no conception of time. For him everything happened in the present. Hopi Mean Time, a friend once called it.
"Buy you a drink?"
Part of the ritual. New Orleans is a Catholic city, a pagan, voodoo city. It takes ritual to its heart.
Doo-Wop paused, head tiltingfirst right, then left, as though sampling winds. "Bourbon," he decided.
But Monster's has been hanging by its fingernailsfor too many years. Employees figure if they're gonna go down with it, why break a sweat Makes it hard to motivate them. Glaring across the bar didn't work. Dropping a ten onto it did.
Bourbon appeared before Doo-Wop. He poured it straight down. In its former life the shot glass had been someone's souvenir of Florida.
"Something I do keep wondering," Doo-Wop said.
I signaled for another bourbon. Wondering how long my luck and my ten will hold out.
"None of my business, of course." He sniffed this new shot of generic whiskey as though it's been aged in barrels. "You ever find any of these folks you show up asking me about?"
"Some of them, sure."
"They want to get found?"
"Some of them."
He nodded and threw the bourbon back. Waited quietly. I glanced at the bartender. He put down another, but his look let me know I was push
ing it.
Doo-Wop's look, on the other hand, let me know we were ready for business.
"Name's Armantine Rauch," I told him. "Twentyish, black, knows his way around. May be freelancing as enforcement for street bankers. Scamming, definitely-and it could be almost anything. Started off his career stealing money from a relative's purse, soon went on to bigger and better things. Boosted cars, stabbed one of his teachers in the chest with a pair of ocissors."
"Boy's busy."
I nodded.
"From around here?"
"He is now. State's been taking care of him the last few years. Sprung him this past August."
"Taking care of himself again."
I showed him my copy of a photo Don had pulled up from prison files. These shots are shaky at best. Add the fax machine's contribution, it could be anyone from Pancho Villa to Charley Patton.
"Nice photo."
Right.
And for Doo-Wop, downright garrulous.
"Don't look much like him, though."
Ah.
I dropped another ten on the bar just as the air conditioner heaved itself to life, catching up the bill in its sudden draft. The bartender snagged it neatly with one hand as he set down Doo-Wop's shot with the other.
Doo-Wop sat considering.
"Tommy T's Tavern, out on Gentilly."
I knew the place. Any given time, half the guys in there were cons, the other half ex-military. Cons, I could handle. I understood them. Only fools felt safe around the others. You never knew what might set them off, which way they'd go with it, how far or hard.
"Owe you one, Captain." Doo-Wop had a finelydeveloped sense of just compensation. To his mind the drinks I'd bought him exceeded the value of the information he was able to give me, so next time was on him. And he damned sure wouldn't forget.
"One other thing," he said as I stood to leave.
"Okay."
"Take Papa with you? He don't get out near enough. Probably be up at Kinney's about now, you stop by there."
"Doesn't get out, huh."
