JKINATL2 – Jonathan’s Place

Watching television, at the devastation following Hurricane Katrina, I think about my beloved New Orleans. And how long it might be before I am able to visit it again as a tourist.

Last time I was there, my intention was to kill myself.

For the last ten years, I have made New Orleans my Halloween destination. First with my then-boyfriend, then, two years ago, by myself. I have always been a huge history buff, as well as having a borderline unhealthy interest in the macabre. New Orleans manages to accommodate both, and adds cheap booze, great food, and a thriving/kinky/open all night gay scene on top of all that.

Yay.

Going to New Orleans by myself has been a really tough thing to accomplish. It meant squirreling away money all year. Not spending Christmas or Birthday money, not eating out, not dating (no big loss there) and concentrating on a single effort. Getting to the place I really loved, for absolutely as long as I could afford.

The first year, Mom took pity on me and helped me out. The second year, I managed to snag a hugely discounted airfare coupon. Score on both points.

If you have never vacationed by yourself, I recommend it highly. At least once or twice. Usually, we vacation with families when we are kids, friends and boy/girlfriends when we are older, and then with our mates, and possibly kids of our own. I went in 2003 for the first time, recovering just slightly from the death of my father, using the money I had saved through two years of agoraphobia to fund the trip.

I remember circling the city on the plane, in awe of it’s beauty and fragility. Surrounded by lake Pontchartrain, and the Mississippi River, it looked like a bowl of humanity bravely facing the inevitability of nature.

Insert AIDS analogy there. Or cancer. Or anything that can kill you.

We land, and I take the airport transportation to my hotel. It is beautiful, driving past the natural wonders that made up the landscape. It is gaudy, with huge ugly billboards marring the roadways.

It’s impressive, with bridges that spanned distances I thought no manmade structure would think to design. And it is sobering, even heartbreaking, to see the abject poverty. Tract houses, low-income apartment houses, crumbling businesses, and other indications of generational poverty were impossible for the gaudy billboards to hide — though part of me wonders if that was the true goal of the things.

There’s a closet cynic in me.

I reach my hotel, Le Richeleu, around noonish. It sits on the edge of the French Quarter, in a part of the city known for its eclectic and funky population. It is also several hundred years old, was once the property of a Spanish Aristocrat, and it’s courtyard was the scene of a massacre (of the aforementioned aristocrat, his family and staff) in the 1800′s.

A place full of ghosts and history, where the doors are made of heavy wood, where stairs creaked, and where the electrical system seems, at best, fragile. Best not to plug in my Swinging Santa.

I put my bags down, and take a nap. When I awake, the sun is setting, and there was the distant sound of music. I am several blocks from the real activity at the heart of the Quarter, but the sounds wafts through the windows.

I shower, tasting the uniquely sulphuric New Orleans water, and wake myself up. Dressing in my usual jeans and tee shirt, I get ready to go out. Wallet hidden in my bags, money and identification in my front pocket for security.

I reach for my trusty iPod, the device that lets me venture out of the apartment those months when agoraphobia makes every trip to the store a panic attack. I reach for it, but do not take it. This is not an experience I wanted to shield myself from. This is something immersive, something formative. I put the iPod under the mattress, and lock the door behind me.

The walk to Bourbon Street leads me past the old Ursaline convent, a historical place where young women escaped the groping hands of drunken settlers and sailors, and placed themselves into the questionable security of the Catholic Church. I take a minute to stare through the wrought-iron gates, and marvel at the black holes that were the windows.

The sense of history, of pain and longing and grim determination was almost a taste in the air, like seawater. I drink it, commiserating, and continued.

Bourbon Street is beautiful. It is all things human, distilled into a single avenue. It is fine food, pulled from the brackish waters of the Mississippi River, mixed with music that can only be culled from unrequited love, unrequited dreams, and the bold attempt to circumvent both with whisky, rum, and opium.

There is jazz, there is techno, there was blues and gospel. Each sung or played with equal intensity, competing yet combining into a cacophony that makes it’s own distinctive aural imprint.

And the smell.

It is booze, magnificent food, spicy peppers and grilled shrimp. It is urine and vomit and freshly shucked raw oysters, mingling with boozy exhalations and semen. No other place I have ever gone has smelled like that. It is at the same time revolting, tantalizing, appetizing.

It is everything human, rolled into nature’s briny husk. It is the smell of evolution, the smell of food, sex, loss, pain, despair and hope. I take it in with both lungs, and taste it.

For the first time in as long as I could remember, I am really a part of the world again. Alive in a way I never was in the sterility of my apartment or the antisepticity of the hospital, or even the musky singularity of sex. There is an unfathomable connection there, and I grab it with all my senses.

I am entranced by the Court of Two Sisters, which offers All You Can Eat Boiled Shrimp after ten at night. I attack crusty French bread, smeared with near-frozen butter.

Mopping the sweat off my forehead while eating spicy gumbo and jambalaya, I down dozen after dozen raw oysters, lubricated only slightly with tangy cocktail sauce. I had done my research, and knew what places had cheap eats for happy hour. I avail myself to those places.

No budget for Brennan’s, but I also know that seven dollars would give me red beans and rice with a generous log of andouille sausage, and a hunk of crusty, often stale French bread as long as my arm. And sitting at the window, I can hear a local band, playing “classics” from the works of Ray Charles and Chuck Berry and Louis Armstrong, and watch all of humanity walk by.

People who, in normal life, would never even see one another up close, now jostle arms as they saunter, dance and stagger down the street. Bikers walked with sorority girls, who walk with elderly couples, who walk with gay men and women.

No one minds holding hands with their beloved. No one makes any sign of protest. It is as if some Ridley Scott Future has come to pass, and I am living in it. A universe where such trifling things as sexual orientation, ageism, sexism, are secondary (or non-existent) compared to the spectacle in which they are all immersed.

I wander out, after dinner, buy the first of my Hurricanes from Pat O’Brians, and make my uneven way down the street, watching people, throwing myself into the mix.

There is no real destination. just the walking and watching.

Hotel balconies provide traffic congestion as second-floor girls tease and flash the men (and women) below — the promise of beads, of course, being the currency for self-exploitation. Sure, I know the history of the Mardis Gras, and I know the inaccuracy of the behaviour and the gestures outside that small Catholic window. I don’t care. No one does.

Just past the main area, right past Marie Laveau’s Voodoo Shop, the Gay Area starts. Well, starts and ends. There were several gay bars scattered around the quarter, but only two on Bourbon Street Proper.

Parade, on one side of the street, and Oz on the other. Both owned by the same folks, serving similar, but different clientele. Circuit boys, drag queens, leather guys, bears and cubs and otters and wolves (and probably some other animals I don’t know about) walk freely among one another, plastic cups in hand.

It is a celebration of hedonism, yet also familial and welcoming. There is not as much of the hierarchy like you’d see in other places. Stomachs could hang low below the beltline, and swing freely without the restrictive constraint of a shirt.

Washboard abs, thanks to hours of gym dedication or months of crystal meth, undulate next to them. Older gay men and women mingle with their barely legal successors, and there is not so much a sexuality as there was a celebration of it. Go home with somebody? And miss the party? It would have to be a remarkable somebody, that’s for sure.

All juxtaposed against a backdrop of antiquity. All taking place in reconditioned buildings hundreds of years old. Colonized by Spanish settlers, housing Europeans and slaves and brothels. That’s what I love about it.

It’s not history behind a glass, or a recreation of history for the sensitive palates of our times. It is real history. Indistinguishable and indistinguished from the present. We tread in the footsteps, and perhaps in the very shades, of the ghosts. We drink from their glasses and lean on their walls.

As an American, I know I am in a place as old as I was likely to find. Preserved lovingly, yet always changing. I lean my chair back in the darkest corner of Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shoppe, drinking a frozen Black Daquiri, thinking — thinking about the horses stabled here hundreds of years ago.

Thinking that the walls against which I lean were standing proudly before my family thought of coming to America, and would still be here long after my brittle bones were dust. History is a long, long road, and I am just passing through.

(continued next post)

I sleep on top of the crisp cream-colored sheets. A ceiling fan made an irregular metronome above my head. At odd intervals, someone stumbles up the heavy wooden staircase outside my room, talking, laughing, crying, fumbling for keys, slamming their door.

After the first startling moments, They become easy to ignore. The drunks were like French Quarter Cicadas, quickly background noise.

Waking up far earlier in the day than I anticipated, I slowly go through the motions of waking up. There is a coffeemaker in the room, with a proprietary blend of coffee and chicory (a bitter root used by early settlers when coffee was scarce).

It is an acquired taste, but I love it, so long as there was plenty of cream and sugar. Coffee isn’t breakfast, though, and hunger eventually motivates me to dress and wander out, unshaven, into the bright midmorning.

That’s the thing about New Orleans I love so much. You can get breakfast for breakfast. But it’s easier, and cheaper, to get lunch. So my first meal of the day is half an oyster po-boy sandwich, eaten out of a paper sack on the banks of the Mississippi.

It is a beautiful, dirty river, already filling with boats. The riverwalk sported occasional joggers, elderly couples walking, and homeless men and women, still drunk. Or maybe always drunk. There is always, always this subtle undercurrent of despair lurking underneath the surface. Like the sharp-beaked turtles that trolled under the opaque Mississippi, snatching silvery fish and careless birds. I am relaxed, sitting on the banks of the river, but always just a little wary. I don’t want to be one of those birds.

My po-boy comes from a local hangout called Fiona’s, less than a block from the French Market, and the river. While sitting at the bar, waiting for my sandwich, I befriend the bartender. Mostly by rolling eyes with him when a drunk or uncouth tourist walks in and asks if this was Pat O-Brian’s.

Oddly, the English, the French, the Australians were always rather polite and congenial. It was the Americans you have to wonder about. When I get my sandwich, the bartender asks if I want a beer. No thanks, I demur.

He reaches under the bar and pulls out a huge plastic mug, filled with domestic yellow beer. Some guy from New York ordered this about ten minutes ago, changed his mind, the bartender says, On the house. It’s warm, and like most free beer, delicious.

I tip him the price of the beer.

Later, sitting on the riverbank, sipping my warm beer and watching the people, I wonder again about my agenda, my other reason for coming here. God/dess knows I have enough reasons. I have the fortune tellers, the festivities on Bourbon Street, the gay scene, the voodoo scene, the Halloween spectacle, the amazing food and drink.

But like the river, despair still lurked underneath my surface, and its beak was very sharp. The warm beer dulls my senses somewhat, taking the edge off the thick coffee that had jump-started my morning. Makes me nostalgic, made me remember.

A little over a year before, August 5, at 5:00 PM, I had watched my father die. And sitting there, in his hot bedroom, with children playing and dogs barking outside the window, in between one sharp clack of the bedroom clock and the next, my world had changed. Ended, as I understood it. My responsibility to him, played out in horror over the previous weeks, was over. And in a way, my reason to loiter on the planet seemed over.

*************************

I walk into the bedroom, after getting the dreaded call to drive from Atlanta to Greensboro, and see my father sitting there, propped in his bed with embroidered pillows. I go on my knees beside him. He bursts into tears, reaches over, holding me as tightly as his withered arms allow, telling me how glad he is that I am there.

His voice is nothing like it was. It is weak, a whisper and a croak. And yet, there is an anger in his voice as well. He knows I am there because I have received That Call, and my presence in the room means that he was dying. I am his son, and his harbinger. I am a dove and a raven, and he loves me, loathes me in that instant.

**********************

I pick the last of the oysters from the crusty bread, and feed the rest to the ducks that gathered just out of my arm’s reach. They squabble over the remains, and I get to my feet, pour the dregs of my tepid beer into the river, and walk its shore.

In front of St. Charles Cathedral, I stop and sit on the steps. I watch the jazz band for an hour or so, scooting with the shade as the sun crept over the city.

After a while I meander to the Cabildo, tour the historical location of the Spanish Government. Unlike other museums, this place sports few velvet ropes or plexiglass protection.

You can sit in the benches in front of the table where the Louisiana Purchase was drafted and signed. You can stroke the velvet collars of the uniform worn by a member of the military during the war. You can smell the musty, rich perfume of hundred-year-old sweat. My sneakers squeak across hardwood floors, stopping at places to wonder at the scuffs and bullet holes.

There is an exhibit there from the Yellow Fever epidemic of 1853. I see the myriad of ineffective medial appliances, from huge metal cones to swinging amulets filled with incense, meant to ward off the deadly pathogen.

I read about the intense effort, ultimately useless, as the medical establishment and government struggled with its inadequacy. But the photographs draw me in, most of all.

Apparently there was a tradition, in this world where photographs were a novelty, to capture the images of children when on their sick/or deathbeds. These images, saved and enlarged to room-size, were sepia and yellow, but in sharp focus. The haunted, sunken eyes of children stared at me from photo to photo.

I wonder what the children must have felt, seeing a photographer instead of a physician come into the bedroom to set up a tripod. Some of them surely knew what that meant. This was not about healing, but about preparing for the inevitable. The look on their faces was singular. It was half-hope, half-betrayed resignation. Death was waiting for them behind the lens.

********************

It is past midnight, and I am half asleep in a comfortable chair beside the master bed, the King-sized bed where Mom and Dad had slept for twenty-five of their fifty-one years together. The bed where my father sleeps motionless on his back, breathing in raspy snores.

My iBook is on the floor next to my chair, the mindless, endless game pauses while I rest my eyes. In a bedroom down the hall, my Mom sleeps, or perhaps she lay motionless on her back as well, eyes searching through closed lids.

My twilight half-sleep is startles awake with a crash. I jump up to see my Dad’s bedside lamp crash to the floor. The light in the bathroom is on, and the door was cracked.

Otherwise, we would have plunged into darkness when the bulb flickers and dies. I run around the bed, which suddenly seems impossibly huge to navigate, as my father pulls himself to his feet. The people at Hospice Care had warned me about this. I am still unprepared.

He mumbles about needing to go home, needing to go home. After nearly a week without food, and only sips of water and the pudding laced with powerful painkillers, he bursts into motion.

He is six-feet three inches. I am five feet seven. His hands are as big as my head, and there was never a time when his very presence could not intimidate. I block his path to the bedroom door, aware of the staircase that lay waiting in the dark hallway like the teeth of a saw.

I’ve got to go home, go home, He half-cries, staring at me with pure anguish in his blue eyes. I tell him he is home, he is home, but he just shakes his head and moves to go past me. I clutch him, embracing him to stop him.

His hot acidic urine patters on my legs and feet as he strains to move past me. In the half light of the cracked bathroom door, I am wrestling with a ghost, a monster.

I reach around him, pick him up like a groom on his wedding day, and carry my father, who still struggles feebly, back to the bed. Once he touches the mattress again, it is as if all awareness melts out of him.

He shudders, and goes back to that place that is not sleep as I know it. In the back of my buzzing mind I hear my mother crying. She clutches her fist to her mouth, like I won’t hear it from the other room. But I do .

I feel the bed move as she sits next to her husband and touches his chest. I want to lay next to them. I want to go somewhere away. I want to scream or cry. I walk into the bathroom, and got a towel, and started cleaning the piss off of the floor. No one says anything.

**********************

I stay at the Cabildo until shortly before it closes, lost in the memories of people generations dead. Lost in my own, too. Outside, I can still hear the jazz band. I want something spicy to eat, but first I head back to my place for a nap. At my hotel, I cranked the A/C up a couple of notches, and stretched out again on the sheets.

In the open suitcase next to me are I clothes, electric razor, toothbrush, dental floss, cheap baby shampoo, untouched HIV antivirals, too many bottles of sleeping pills, and an unopened bottle of my dead father‚ and liquid OxyCodone.