Errata (6 page)

Day 14

I carried the awkward weight of a schoolboy’s crush on Eve for years, but the summer before my sophomore year when she was but a semester from graduating high school, the crush became an awakening.  There’s no way for delicacy of disclosure other than to say that peculiar honesty is its own virtue.  After I finished a five mile training run one afternoon, Eve called out from her porch, beckoning with the promise of frozen grapes.  There was little time before my band practice, but I wanted to relax for a bit and catch up.  We met in her grassy front yard under a ginkgo tree, and years later I haven’t stopped musing fondly about hearing of Jorge Luis Borges for the first time, as well as why the short stories of Melville and Bruno Schulz mattered, the literary talk coupled with the considerably more banal (but leaving no less of a striking recall) instant headaches from eating the frozen fruit too quickly. 

The sharpest element of this indelicate memory which is more than a memory, sharp enough to hold as much indelible and formative sway as reading the works of Borges eventually would, is that of Eve rising and returning to her house for more grapes.  When she was midway there, she walked into a brilliant sunglare, surrounding her with a saint-like aura for a ferocious instant, the saturation of light causing her black dress to become momentarily sheer.  My eyes dropped and heart widened, seeing her lower curves ever-so-briefly but clearly, my first view of any part of the female form normally covered.  Granted this was no more than a kernel, but undisputedly an unexpected coronation of flesh, a new consciousness literally unveiled.  I became immediately interested in the occasional infatuations provided by chance pleasures of this type or the lurid fevered ruminations of such, organizing a mental space to make my way through these boundless thoughts.  Sex as an uppercase word held little sense previously (I looked askance at the crude bragging tales certain boys told at school) and it would confound for years, but I knew this had something to do with it and this I could handle.  So began my entry into the universal vice, a marvelous craving of the fairer sex unadorned by clothing, craving that would occasionally dissolve my common sense.  This in itself wasn’t unique, but it’s a safe assumption that most of the less-fairer sex (who like me, revisited these thoughts privately and reconciled them with desperate Onanistic reveling in the pleasure realm) weren’t leering while also free-associating
naked, neighbor, native, nascent, natal, napalm.
  My wholesome crush on Eve transformed to an unspoken pleading ache (quizzically noticed by its recipient but unreciprocated), eventually meeting its match in the stories of Borges, which came to provide a welcoming literary cold shower, as reading his philosophical prose, mostly stricken of carnality and laden with erudite concerns, served well to de-escalate my lustiness and sublimate transient concerns toward the contemplative. 

On that summer day of awakening, Eve was only three months away from another heart surgery.  While she was under the knife, I read the Bruno Schulz stories from her lent hardcover to feel connected, though I didn’t understand them then.  I read them to her in the hospital also, unaware that the dust jacket’s cover art was a mere glimpse of the usual obsession portrayed in Schulz’s artwork.  Were Eve to have shown me a monograph of the Schulz-faced inadequate men with their furtive yearnings and servant-like subjugation to unattainable women, I’d likely have been shocked at a telling book of mirrors, by the idea that the bounteous vine of desire led others around by their noses too, and also left them with writhing consternation beyond frozen headaches. 

Although it was expected, around six years later, when her heart gave out too soon at age 22, it wasn’t desire I felt, but a triggered retching, an immense void, and a primal need to flee, to escape from Indiana.  I couldn’t handle attending the funeral and seeing Eve buried, but showed up early to offer private eulogy to her in the casket and also gawk at the new rectangular hole dug in the cemetery down the street, hours before the mourners arrived to grieve and shiver.  Her parents asked me to be a pallbearer, and I’d weakly consented, but at the time she would’ve been lowered into the winter ground, I was racing due West, away.

Day 15

Everyone here has a least one story of a previous life, most people several.  Don’t trust anyone without multiple histories or those who are responsibly certain.  New Orleans is one of a few cities which attracts those with versatile lives, an expected stop along the way for at least a little while.  It’s a place where opposites of one’s nature meet, organically resolve their contradictions, and find a way to coexist, if not bind.  Not for everyone, certainly.  Though many come here for a coveted reconciliation of this type, others do so expressly to avoid it. 

My how-I-got-here tale is fairly simple compared to most, but also more harrowing.  I decided it was time to get away from Indiana and see the country along the way, so I loaded up my few belongings and drove to San Francisco.  A teaching job had been quickly lined up.  My parents weren’t to be counted on, and I wasn’t so free and easy to play at relocating to a new city without certain advance stability.  After bouncing from one flophouse to another, getting more and more fed up with the stumbling racket, I decided to buy a houseboat.  A simple one.  Nothing fancy.  I didn’t consider the problems that might come from living in the marina, particularly an upset stomach, but it was certainly unexpected for the Lady Howard to take on water in the middle of the night three days after I bought her.  I can’t actually swim, more of a flail and kick routine of minor forward motion, but that was enough to bridge the close distance to the dock.  I owned few possessions before, but they immediately limited to only my car and the dripping sweats worn to bed.  The Coast Guard looked into the cause of the sinking vessel and discovered a sizable hole with a temporary patch job that held long enough to sell the houseboat to a dupe willing to pay cash.  No one in law enforcement was interested in pursuing the seller, but in spite of myself I had an obsessed sense of justice that few beyond a young person hold.  It took a couple months of walking and talking, picking up stray tips, and connecting loose ends, before persistence paid off, and I eventually found the guilty party up in Sausalito.  I was a hit of the Bay Area for a few weeks then and didn’t have to pay for my drinks, what with the
Chronicle
doing a serialized spread on the manhunt, complete with my picture included. Since the newspaper mentioned the interview’s location (Specs’ bar in North Beach), a stream of p.i.’s tried to hire me.  It was like a Humphrey Bogart movie, but without the masculine charm and femme fatales.  There were so many rumpled suits shuffling into the bar for me that I toyed with the idea of coasting on the publicity and opening my own detective firm until I remembered my usually-yielding manner.  It was nice to be in the limelight initially, but it soon felt unworthy being known on the streets, fitting in, unable to exist as an anonymous recluse, plus the regulars at Specs were getting fed up with the nonsense, so I declined it all and made arrangements, secured a position almost 2,000 miles away in New Orleans, and left without a word to anyone. 

I know I appear to be good-natured, but it’s only because I’m out in public the limited times that I feel good-natured.  It’s what I do.  People encroach.  I’m unsociable.  I resign their company or that particular existence and return to my natural habitat.  Swept away by the great indoors.  Drunk on the still air in my mouth.  At the moment, juggling my mind and scratching silly trifles in this notebook to save my head.

Day 16

Melville’s
The Confidence Man
is the story of a group of con men aboard a steamboat sailing down the Mississippi River, the sinuous almost-tail of which ribbons alongside New Orleans.  If the seasoned crocodile-smile tricksters would’ve reached the city, they’d have more than met their match, for our grifters are second to none, regardless of color of collar.  William Faulkner, whose presence looms larger and longer than his brief residency in this northernmost Caribbean outpost, wrote one novel of the child-like city by virtue of its residents. 
Mosquitoes
is considered by no one to be one of Faulkner’s better works, but it serves as another fine example of isolate-your-characters-on-water-and-see-what-happens. 

What’s next to be written after this day in December 1984?  A continent or peninsula cracks loose and floats out into the ocean before exiling itself to a land mass, a houseboat’s built on the backs of a trained crocodile team, or a ship never returns to port, only to drift?  These three possibilities in glowing combination feel aptly similar to the isolated voyage of steamy surrealism that is New Orleans life.  In reality, we wouldn’t have very far to float before arriving somewhere near, say Cabrera Infante’s Cuba.  It doesn’t take much hunting to discover that 1) There were New Orleans colonists from Havana, 2) A few decades later one realization of the Saint-Domingue slave revolt was a doubling of New Orleans, in part from Haitian Cubans, and 3) Rumor has it that Cuban rum-runners were in high demand here during Prohibition (which never quite took hold in this city that drinks freely), slipping in via the same eastern swamps that the Spanish boats asserted themselves through a couple centuries past.  It also bears mentioning that the bounce in Jelly Roll Morton’s piano style, what he called the Spanish Tinge, came from the influence of Caribbean musicians, though to barely brush the surface of a fertile topic is criminal. 

New Orleans is a puzzling canvas.  It’s geographically, culturally, and psychologically ringed off from country.  Havana suits as well as any other proposed spiritual counterpart, so much so that, interestingly enough, New Orleans has the feel of an island which floated loose of its Caribbean constellation and ended up fusing itself to a foreign body, resulting in a misshapen form (like a man with a book for a head or a cat with a single fin upon its back), but more than a backwater curiosity piece to be kindly tolerated or actively despised by its new host.  In actuality New Orleans’ general resistance to prevailing trends and tones places the city in a unique position.  Few have any confidence in New Orleans, neither in its geographical form nor people (we take exasperating comfort in those of blank charm that pensively resent or boldly condemn us), but it’s an oracular city, so far behind the present day that everyone else keeps sailing along, catching, and sizing us up from time to time.  Jelly Roll’s defiant eye is always there, looking for a wandering fortune, faithful to the descent like the rest of us, singular in his accomplishments, though dual in his follies, typifying our scarred principles and alluring cures. Despite being well-defined, for better or worse, New Orleans seems to exist as a blank slate for outsiders to grasp and cast their own aspirations, pretences, and prejudices upon, a few of the outsiders always end up lingering, holding fast, and adding to the city’s layers, despite the fact that New Orleans changes them more than otherwise, ingrains itself in them if for no more than confounding sustenance.

Though not every sentence needs to contain the ocean, we’re going to continue to float along, since clarifying the mention of a certain reptile is overdue. 
Cuba, crocodile, constellations, confidence man.
 
Crocodile tears, crocodile lies, crocodile smiles.  Also, crocodile mystique.
  Our latitude might be directly in line with Cairo, Egypt, but alligators are the usual animals found in this region rather than crocodiles, and there’s no record of Southerners ever deifying this particular lizard.  If one interchanged
croc
for
gator,
as in, They caught another croc in Audubon Park, sunning itself by the fountain, it’d be incorrect and like expressing that New Orleans barbecue shrimp should taste like it was prepared with a tomato or vinegar-based sauce, or saying
trolley
instead of
streetcar
.  It’s pariah talk.  The usual misparlance from drink sloshing stumblers, but a terrible faux pas if spoken by a new local.

At the same time, use of the crocodile as a symbol is far more prevalent and expected, whether metaphorically straightforward as in Felisberto Hernandez’s short story about a pianist whose crying jags spawn a nickname, or more mysteriously so in the works of De Quincey and Bruno Schulz.  The crocodile is also employed as a metaphor of deception, indicating seeming trustworthiness, yet actually containing ulterior motives, cloaked as a man of the people until the opportune moment arrives and the liberator is revealed as false.  This is the case in the 18th century apocalyptic allegory
Le Crocodile
, depicting The Crocodile as representing the low material world vanquished by upright mystics. Before The Crocodile is finally defeated by the adepts, author Louis Claude de Saint-Martin introduces fantastical elements like a plague of books which turns all the tomes of Paris into paste that is eaten by the city’s residents, bringing about mass Babelspeak.  Also, a number of the virtuous are swallowed by The Crocodile, and they travel through the limitless creature as if through purgatory. 

The crocodile is likewise portrayed, though less fantastically, with expatriate Cabrera Infante’s essay
Bites from a Bearded Crocodile
referenced in The Interview, in which the author, a former adherent of the Revolution, scathingly takes Castro to task for bringing about the decline of a literary renaissance as part of turning into an authoritarian regime, with the typical accoutrements like show trials and censorship boards.  The Castro government held particular animus for homosexuals, especially artists.  A police unit under the name Social Scum Squad unleashed the Night of the Three P’s, a round-up of arresting all those considered pimp, prostitute, or pederast, many of whom ended up in concentration camps and worked sugarcane plantations.  Anyone with the means or method fled Cuba.  Others such as poet Heberto Padilla were assisted by U.S. intervention requests on their behalf to allow for a front door exit, so to speak.