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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.