BY ERICA LETTIE
The grumble of a 1969 Chevy Nova turning over in a graveyard is the appropriate sound. For my old friend, host, and chauffeur for the weekend, 2020 was not an entire loss. Blue with two white stripes up the hood and no shoulder belts. Sauntering through one of Louisiana’s old cemeteries, the military officer and I shop headstones for a proud name for the machine. His being vaccinated, my not being yet, we may be digesting the surrounding death differently. Ultimately, he decides to go with Florence, “Flossy” for short, after his grandmother back in Florida who still drives at eighty-six. As all eighty-six-year-old grandmothers are wont to do in Florida. Mine recently recalled for me the gorgeous voice of a blind woman she’d heard when she was here for the World’s Fair in ‘84. Imagine the world gathering.
It’s my third visit to New Orleans and just in time. I’d claim I was chased out of Colorado by a record blizzard and a mass shooting fifteen minutes from my pre-plague office, but I bought the ticket in February. Tant pis. The maiden voyage was for a Halloween parade in high school, pre-Katrina, the second in college for a music festival, the devastation still fresh. In a way this feels like the first, seeing the city sans makeup, and by the looks of it someone or something’s roughed her up a bit. Again. I’m one to talk, looked like a sideshow escaped from its handler deboarding in my goggles and masks.
Whenever possible I prefer a crippled bartender. Evens up the score. Turned out the Funky Pirate Blues Bar’s been closed since The Beginning. Thanks again, Sundar. So, Friday night I seized a stool at Fritzel’s jazz joint. My caregiver hobbled so severely it looked as though he were dancing down the bar with my vodka diet. The pianist sang from a monkey’s perspective for a childhood classic. “I wanna be like you, I wanna walk like you, talk like you…learn to be human, too.” Most of us will be relearning. Bourbon has of course become a caricature of a fraternity toilet, but you can still sniff out the historical grit with minimal effort. What I’m trying to say is Marie Laveau can eat it.
The next afternoon passed with the help of a goldfish the size of a La-Z-Boy, an apoplectic swan, and hordes of mallard ducks at Audubon Park. They’re going to have to swap the 100-metre dash for birdwatching at the Olympics after All This. Heading back out into the city, I came upon a three-legged Great Dane beneath massive oaks outside a chapel on St. Charles. Its human was hollering, “Lucy! No! No, Lucy,” as he struggled to hold onto her leash. She was yearning with all her handicapable might to play with another dog that was coming around the corner. I wondered which has proven the more essential of the two miscreations. Teach that mutt to mix a Mai Tai and the tie’s broken.
By Friday evening we were heading towards the history museums to check their posted hours when I was stopped in my tracks on the sidewalk. Some standup going down, a bar show, within earshot. I didn’t recognize the actual voice, but the cadence and gist of the bit were wildly familiar. “But hey, small fingers sew small sequins.” I saw Joan Rivers a few months before she died. I can spot a child labor line a slave-driving mile away. “Just remember, small hands set small stones.” My friend, Mr. Joan, a couple of the other comics, and I drank away the remainder of the night at a patio table. I snatched the tab with a mortifying degree of enthusiasm. Society!
The notion of acclimation is grisly propaganda. I lived in Florida for thirty years. I have worked from home for fifteen consecutive months and counting. You can train yourself to occasionally forget that the air you’re gasping for is half liquid; it’s still hotter than Satan’s taint. You can exercise your social skills speaking softly but regularly to the shriveling houseplants; you’re still losing your proverbial marbles. You can multiply enough loaves of bread to rewrite the books of Matt, Mark, and John; you’re still running out of purpose. Reality remains. The starvation of the flesh persists. Darwin declared survival of the most adaptable, but perhaps it’s not the planet’s best move allowing us To Be Continued…
It is natural and right to enjoy steaming hot spicy food in a climate comparable to a Saigon summer. Is the étouffée too salty or is it the sweat of six line cooks? Culinary mysteries! The gator cheesecake at Jacques-Imo’s left no question unanswered at our last supper Saturday night, however. A dish that makes even more sense when you learn that Jacques was allegedly kicked out of the Coast Guard for drinking. Safe to say he had help hanging the ceilingful of framed paintings. A scribbling on a wall in the WC reminded me of a trip to NYC in early 2020, my last expedition B.C. “SAMO.” Jean-Michel Basquiat’s original penname. These common denominators, the splattered synchronicities. They do not have to mean anything for you to hold onto them. My knuckles are chalk white.
Popping off a few rounds at a distance deemed Safe Enough from the sub-swamp gas pipeline, there was no mention of jobs or housing. Nothing regarding grocery stores or massage parlors. America is back to back-to-back. I secretly hoped to nail a lizard. Lake Pontchartrain sat nearby up the flowered trail, unimpressed by our sportsmanship. Nothing more loathsome than the lizard. Slithering shitheads down here got fleur-de-lis pupils. We later attempted a quick dip in the Mississippi by the light of the Worm Moon, as full as our engorged guts, but a menacing cargo ship cut us off at the pass.
One headstone in front of a crumbly tomb reads “George H. Post. Native of Springfield, IL. 1859-1898.” What in cornbread Christ’s name could have lured people here before the turn of the second to last century? The thrill of mobility? For those of us fortunate enough to find ourselves still breathing, forget tasting and smelling, there is just a hobbling of sorts. As trickle-down vaccinations play out, we must muster impetus. “Get up, get on ya feet,” I recall a bouncer demanding back in the Quarter, a spring breaker curled in the gutter. As Flossy schlepps us out the way we came in, I watch a crow perch on a statue of an angel. It’s missing a head.
