“You’re making me dizzy.”
Carmen put her arm around him to steady his balance. “Come with me. You’re dizzy because you banged your head. We’ll get some ice on you and clean up that cut. It doesn’t look too deep.”
As Jesse followed her through the graveyard, he was no longer afraid. His encounter with the voice had chased the evil out of his mind, at least for the time being.
He was filled with questions. “What can we do with the Voodoo?”
“We can break out of our self-centered prisons. It sounds to me like you did it tonight, for a short time anyway. And then something got in your way to keep you here. Something you can’t let go, something that holds you in your jail cell.”
Jesse shook his head from side to side. “I was ready to let go and be one with the Voodoo voice.”
“Apparently not,” Carmen said. “But you made big progress tonight. Do you at least believe the voice is on your side?”
“Yes, that much is clear. I’ve known that since the fire at the Safari Club. But I still don’t see what the voice has to do with music. You said the voice would teach me what to do with my music.”
“First of all,” Carmen said. “It is not your music. You do not own it. Nor does it own you. Music is not something you can hold in your hand. Music is the escape route.” “It is one of the best ways out of self. Music connects us all. It sets us free.”
“So what’s keeping me from being one with the voice?”
“This is something you will have to learn on your own. I can only tell you this. You are missing the whole point of making music.”
“What is the point?”
“The point is to give it away, not sell it for profit. We only keep what we have by giving it away.”
“How can I keep something if I give it away?”
“Remember,” Carmen said. “Music is not a thing. It is not something you can hold in your hand. Music is a force of nature. It has much in common with Voodoo. In fact, music and Voodoo are the same thing. They join the spiritual and material worlds together.”
Jesse nodded. “I know what you mean. I’ve felt it before. I’ve lost myself in the music.”
“Yes, and in this regard, music and love have much in common. They are part of the same river, the river that flows through all of us. Most people dam up the river with their selfishness, trying to keep all they can get. What we need to do with music and love and Voodoo is give it away and let the river run through us so we can all be part of the flow.”
“I think I know what you’re saying,” Jesse said as he followed her closely. He had never thought of music and love as being part of the same thing. And he had never thought of Voodoo as anything but dark and mysterious and evil. “But I still don’t get how you can only keep something by giving it away.”
“Think about music. Playing music is giving it away. Once you perform a song, it’s gone. Maybe it lives on in the heart of the listener. For the musician, every note played is given away. For the lover, being loved is not nearly as important as giving her love away.”
Jesse thought long and hard as he and Carmen walked through the burial vaults and crypts.
Carmen led him out the main entrance of the graveyard. “Think of it this way. Music is the laughter of the universe.”
“What is it laughing at?”
“You,” Carmen said with a beaming smile. “It is laughing at you … and at me … at anyone who thinks she is the center of the world.”
CHAPTER NINE
THE PRISON OF SELF
Jesse held both hands on the bars of the holding cell in the New Orleans city jail. At least the handcuffs had been removed. His wrists were sore. He was thirsty. It had been less than a week since he and Carmen had talked about the prison of self at Marie Laveau’s tomb. Now, he was in a jail cell for real. Looking through the bars, he could see police and prisoners going through their motions in front of several officers who sat behind a tall desk. No one was there on his behalf. No one cared that he was feeling highly claustrophobic, being caged like an animal.
He sat down and then reclined on a splintered, wooden bench. No point getting in a hurry. Casey knew enough about the law to get him out eventually.
Jesse had been locked up for four hours. It felt like four weeks. The lyrics to Johnny Cash songs were starting to make sense. He might as well have been stuck in Folsum Prison.
He kept thinking about the line from the Jerry Jeff Walker song, “Mr. Bojangles,” “Met him in a cell in New Orleans I was, down and out.”
Humming the songs actually helped him ease the pain of his predicament. Carmen was right. Music is one of the escape routes out of the prison of self. Then again, once the song was over, he was still stuck in the same, stinking rat hole of a holding cell. After the first few hours of staring at the walls, he was losing his battle to escape either his prison of self or the prison itself. He felt like a fool. It was Amy’s birthday and he’d gotten himself thrown in jail. Now, she was out there, hopefully with Casey, getting the cash to buy his freedom.
It was almost impossible to believe that the entire episode was over nothing more than a traffic accident. Jesse had been driving Harley at a reasonable speed down a narrow street in the Irish Channel neighborhood of New Orleans when a middle-aged woman with a carload of kids crashed into him. No one seemed to be hurt but the woman got out of her car and began screaming at him like he’d done something horribly wrong. She yelled at him as she ran toward him shaking her fist in the air. “What you doing, going the wrong way down a one way street?”
“You’re the one who blew the stop sign,” Jesse said.
“I don’t have no stop sign.”
Jesse looked around the intersection. “I don’t see a stop sign facing me.”
“That’s because you’re going the wrong way,” she said, holding her arms out wide in disbelief. “The stop sign is on the other side of the street, facing drivers who are driving the right way. And look at that sign right there.”
Jesse turned and saw the one-way sign, clearly indicating he had been going the wrong way. The accident had been completely his fault.
Once the shame sunk in, all he could do was hang his head and apologize. “Oh, shit. I’m sorry.”
“No shit, Sherlock,” she said. “You could have killed me and my kids.”
Jesse continued to apologize as he and the woman went back to her car to check on the children. Only one of the four kids was crying and even he was already getting over it.
“Here’s the drug-crazed hippie who tried to kill us all,” she said to the kids.
Sorry as he was, Jesse couldn’t let that comment stand. “Come on. I haven’t even had a drink. And I’m not on drugs.”
The woman calmed down as one of her children waved shyly to Jesse. “I’ve got to stay here with the children. You find a phone and call the police.”
“Do we really need to do that?”
“Yes, we really need to do that,” she said. “Look at my car. It’s totaled. I need a police report so my insurance company will pay for this mess. I can tell by looking at you and your sorry little car that you got no insurance.”
The ashamed look on Jesse’s face told the woman she was correct in her assessment. She adjusted her polka-dotted, drawstring dress in self-righteous indignation and motioned him to get about calling the police.
Jesse found a neighbor to let him use the phone. He called Casey first and gave his friend a five-minute head start before he called the police. Even so, the cops arrived on the accident scene a couple minutes before Casey. Jesse avoided them until he could speak to his legal counsel in training.
Casey assessed the scene and saw that Jesse had been in the wrong. “We’ve got a problem. You’ve got an Indiana driver’s license.”
Jesse shrugged his shoulders as he pulled out his driver’s license from his wallet. “So, what? It’s valid.”
“So they take you to jail until the ticket is paid in full if you’ve got a
n out-of-state driver’s license,” Casey said.
“I don’t have any money.”
Casey couldn’t help but laugh at the forlorn look on Jesse’s face. “Like I said. We’ve got a problem.”
“You mean I’ve got a problem.”
A uniformed New Orleans police officer came up to ask Jesse for his license just as Casey was telling him not to say anything to the police. The police officer overheard Casey and took off his reflector sunglasses to squint in disapproval. “What are you? Some kind of second year law student?”
Casey smiled and held up his hands at chest level. “Actually, that’s exactly what I am, officer. My friend, here, is from Indiana. He’s not familiar with the streets of New Orleans.”
The cop wasn’t having any of it. He put his sunglasses back on. “Looks like your Indiana friend here is going to jail if he can’t pay his ticket for driving the wrong way down a one-way street. So, maybe you’d like to go to jail with him for interfering with a police investigation.”
Casey wisely elected to remain silent as the officer told Jesse to put his hands behind his back so he could be cuffed. The awesome power of the police state became suddenly apparent to him. He felt vulnerable and exposed with his arms pinned behind his back. The cuffs were so tight they cut into his wrists. Getting into the back of the squad car was painful, awkward and humiliating. It smelled like wino piss.
“Could you please loosen the cuffs a little?”
The officer looked at Casey and chuckled before returning his attention to Jesse. “We’ll take them off once we get you into a comfy, little jail cell.”
Jesse looked at Casey helplessly through the window as he rolled away in the back of the squad car. “I’ll call Amy,” Casey mouthed as he held his hand up to his ear like he was using a phone.
So now Jesse lay on the bench in jail, wondering again how long it would take Amy to come up with a hundred and fifteen dollars to pay the ticket. He knew she had less than a hundred in her checking account. She’d just finished paying the rent. Amy was never shy about telling him just how broke they were.
This is a perfect opportunity to practice your patience, Jesse told himself over and over. He closed his eyes and tried to imagine being on the beach, listening to the surf, swaying in his hammock. It didn’t work. For one thing, closing his eyes couldn’t block out the clanging noises and rotting smells of the jail. For another, patience wasn’t even a word in his emotional vocabulary. He stood up and began pacing back and forth. Anger began welling up in his mind. How could anyone put me, The Great One, in a cage like an animal? It didn’t help that he immediately recognized such thoughts as laughably delusional. Self-righteous indignation had always been one of his favorite emotions. It always felt good to feel better than the rest of the world. The problem was, he knew it wasn’t true. He stopped pacing and tried to calm himself with deep breathing and meditation. It didn’t come close to working.
Just when Jesse thought things couldn’t get worse, a cop opened the cell door and shoved in a man wearing a devil costume. The man was slurring his words unintelligibly. He sounded like he thought he was making a collect call to his second ex-wife. The only words Jesse could make out were “honey” and “sorry.” Jesse didn’t need to be a crime-solving detective to know the devil himself was going to puke all over the tiny cell.
The man fell to his knees and began sobbing uncontrollably as he realized where he was. It took a good five minutes, but the sobs eventually turned to gagging noises. Jesse sat on the bench and pulled his legs up underneath him. He knew there was little chance he could completely avoid the splatter. The man in the devil costume started choking. It sounded like a cough at first. Then it sounded like he had something stuck in his throat. Jesse was about to begin the Heimlich maneuver when the man lurched to his feet, turned around and lunged to the cell door.
The drunk ripped off his devil mask. His body banged and clanged into the metal door as he blew lunch through the bars in one of the most impressive displays of projectile vomiting Jesse had ever seen. The man collapsed slowly and thumped his chin on each and every horizontal bar on the way to the floor.
The holding area filled with angry shouting as police rushed to the scene of the slime. One cop slipped and fell backwards, flat into the puke. He tried to get up in a hurry and only succeeded in falling down a second time.
“Shit, shit, shit,” the soiled officer complained as he finally regained his footing. “This puke’s all over my gun and everything.”
Jesse buried his head in his knees so no one could see him laughing.
Another officer yelled at Jesse as he came in to help drag the puking devil out of the cell. “You think that’s funny, long hair? I’ll show you what’s funny.”
Jesse looked up to see the officer raising his nightstick.
He put his head down and waited for the blow to fall. It never came. The cop must have thought better of beating him in front of so many witnesses. Jesse felt him walking away to help with the cleanup.
The vomit smelled like rum and rotting garbage. Jesse knew from personal experience that the man had been drinking too many rum Hurricanes at Pat Obrien’s Bar in The French Quarter. The vomit created a toxic, nauseous stench when mixed with the pungent smells of cleaning fluids. Maintenance people mopped the floor, wiped down the bars, and then set up a drying fan that mainly blew the entire aftermath back into the cell. It was a stomach turner.
The irony and symbolism of the situation was not lost on Jesse. The devil costume was no surprise. New Orleans was a never-ending Halloween party. Temptation and sin were like trick-or-treat. The putrid smell was also no surprise. It reminded him of Bourbon Street at 3 a.m. What did come as a surprise was the realization that escaping the prison of self and getting one’s self out of prison might be the two sides of the existential coin Madame Desiree loved to flip.
It didn’t matter. Spiritually or materially, Jesse was unable to transcend his circumstance.
He sat back down on the wooden bench to breath through his mouth and to feel sorry for himself. It wasn’t his fault he was from Indiana. It wasn’t his fault he couldn’t afford insurance. It wasn’t his fault the one-way streets in New Orleans made no sense. What was his fault was a rising and increasingly urgent need to urinate. Talk about the prison of self. His own body now had an escape attempt in progress.
At least he had somebody to talk to now. The voice of his own bodily fluids was one talkative companion. It went from, “Let’s just piss in the corner,” to “Let’s bang on the bars and demand a trip to the toilet,” to “You can’t hold me forever. I know my rights.”
In fact, there seemed to be several voices inside his head, each fighting for airtime like squabbling news anchors. His father’s voice was retelling the story of how his one night in jail as a scared kid had made him want to become an attorney. His ninth grade history teacher was talking about how many important leaders had formulated grand plans while in prison. Amy’s voice was scolding him for being an irresponsible driver.
How could he be one with anything when he couldn’t even be one within himself?
The voice he kept listening for, the Voodoo voice, was not to be heard. It would have been louder than all the others combined. Louder and more clearly not manufactured by his thoughts. Where was the guidance when he needed it most? And why, now that he could see the voice in his mind’s eye, could he not make contact with it by his own force of will?
Eventually, the only voice he could hear was nature calling. Jesse stood up and did a little dance to keep from wetting himself. As he did, a confinement officer came to open the cell door and said, “You’re free to go.”
“Free to go to the toilet?”
“Free to go wherever you want. Somebody paid your ticket. She’s down the hall to the right. There’s a public toilet between here and there.”
Jesse took the papers the officer handed him, ran down the hall and ducked into the restroom before Amy saw him. Nothing ever felt so g
ood as that painfully delayed urination. Once he got started, he felt the powerful satisfaction of sweet relief. He washed his face, ran wet fingers through his matted hair to dry his hands and flare up his bushy hair, and went out to greet Amy with open arms.
She let him hug her briefly, but backed off quickly to hold him at arm’s length. “You smell worse than the jail. What did you get into?”
One week later, Jesse was in New Orleans traffic court with Casey, trying to get back the money Amy paid on the ticket. Turned out, the fine she paid was technically a bond. The city was giving him an opportunity to be guilty until proven innocent.
The courtroom was packed. At least fifty cases were scheduled for the morning. Casey gave Jesse advice as he waited for his name to be called. “Get up there and look that judge in the eye. Tell him you’re sorry but you’re from Indiana and the roads are different up there.”
Jesse’s name was called before he had time to get himself emotionally prepared to be his own attorney. He went before the judge, who was sitting high above the rest of the courtroom behind an ornate desk.
The judge looked down and talked to Jesse like he was a horse about to be ridden. “This is a driving the wrong way ticket. What have you got to say for yourself?”
Jesse tried to be polite. “Good morning, your honor. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to be heard.”
The judge smiled slightly. “Go on, then, be heard.”
“I’m from Indiana, sir, and I’m not familiar with the traffic patterns or street signs of New Orleans.”
“Are you saying you were not going the wrong way down a one-way street?”
“No, I’m not saying that. I’m saying …”
“What you’re trying to say is you are guilty as charged. Once you say that, there’s really nothing left to say.”
“Well, excuse me, your honor, but I was hoping to plead guilty with an explanation and, hopefully, have some leniency shown.”
A ripple of chuckles swept through the courtroom. The judge laughed aloud. “Ignorance of the law is no excuse and certainly no reason for leniency.”
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