Saints

First thing I ever did when I arrived in New Orleans was buy a bottle of cheap bourbon from the ABC to go with the cheap room in the cheap transients’ house on Josephine Street just at the edge of the Garden District. I set the bottle on the filthy table by the window and poured the golden juice into a small, dirty tumbler which I had packed in the duffel bag, and listened to Mahler’s 5th on my small radio. I watched dozens of streetcars going down St. Charles with happy tourists ready to pop hundreds on drinks and po’ boys and shirts and voodoo dolls and…something. Always something for sale in this goddamn town. Snake oil for the aching joints. Beads to throw in return for a peek at bare tits. People are so goddamn thick. Always, always something. Every bloody town. For sale.

When the booze ran out I crossed the street and sat down at the bar in Igor’s and ordered a seven and seven. Hard on the Seagram’s and easy on the seven. I put down a tenner. I had money from a tax return that previous year. I had worked. And I had also won three hundred dollars at the roulette in Vegas the previous week. Red fourteen. My only win, aside from the time I hit the trifecta at Pimlico in Laurel my last year in high school. That brought in a bit over two hundred. Igor’s was a great place, right on St. Charles in uptown. It had a big neon sign on the front: “A half pound burger is always waiting for you!” Inside there was the bar and then some: laundry facilities, so you could drink while you washed and dried your loads of stained, infested junk. The chippie barkeep wore short jean shorts and was all legs. And she knew it. She made sure to exaggerate her squats whenever she’d pick up a bottle from below the counters, and gave a good show to all the barflys smoking the day away. She made a good double-seven, and that’s really all that mattered.

There were video poker machines just behind me, and the most decrepit, down-n-outers were pumping coins into the bastards at an alarming rate. Somehow they had money. I drank. A storm or hurricane or something rolled in. The barkeep shift changed and the chippie disappeared into the laundry facilities. Some woman next to me snorted and said she was probably turning tricks upstairs, the whore. That’s what she called her. There was a room above the bar you could rent by the hour or day, she said. I just drank. The rain came hard outside and we couldn’t hear the jukebox with the door open like that. It sounded like some giant waterfall in Argentina.
–About time, the new barkeep said. He was an old dog with boils on his nose and cheeks and when he poured, his hand shook and spilled booze all around the shot glass. He cleaned it up with a yellowing rag. He also blew his nose with it. Right in front of everyone.
–About time, he said again first looking at me and then quickly swinging his head toward the window. Gusts were spraying water into the bar but no one got up to close the door.
–Yeh heh?
–I like it. Rain comes in and washes all the scum away. All the shit and piss on these cursed streets. The saints and ghosts and pimps…
I tuned him out and cross faded him with Travis Bickle: “All the animals come out at night – whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick, venal. Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.”

Nothing changes. Not even the weather. I left after half an hour of being bothered by a soliloquizing former pirate who had lost everything in a divorce and was looking for work as a carpenter, only he wasn’t really looking. None of us are. All he did was talk and smoke my cigarettes. And so I left.

Later I walked by Fritzel’s in the French Quarter and heard Terrence Blanchard inside. I couldn’t afford the ticket. But he was brilliant for those fifteen seconds I hung around before the big goons came out to sweep the sidewalk clean of transients. And so it goes. Chickory coffee and two beignets at Café Du Monde for buck-ninety and some lonely soul at midnight telling me how beignets ought to be made with cottonseed oil and how chicory was developed by the French during their civil war because coffee was scarce during those times, and they found that chicory added body and flavor to the brew.
–The Acadians from Nova Scotia brought this taste and many other French customs to Louisiana…
I cross faded him with…I couldn’t. He was adamant.
–Chickory is the root of the endive plant…
I couldn’t make him stop. He wanted fifty cents for his history lesson.
–Don’t have fifty cents.
–How ’bout a dollar?
And that got him to walk away and start in all over again at a table of well-fed, nocturnal warrior-tourists. Always something for sale in every bloody town. Always. Cute little black kids tap dancing on the corner: 75 cents. Man blowing into a rusty sax needs a new reed: dollar. Man with box of shoe polish and brushes:
–Skew me. Skew me, sir, you dropped somethin’
–What?
–You dropped your shine!
Deluxe job on the go with wax and moisture protection: Five twenty-five.
Shit, son…people got to make a living.

I took the streetcar back up St. Charles and jumped off at Josephine. There was a group of frat boys pissing on the side of a building, laughing and screaming something about going backdoor on some girl one of them had met, and how much she’d like it from all of them. Nothing ever changes. People are mostly shit to one another. Even the cockroaches exploit the other cockroaches. I went to my room, sat at the table in the dark and turned on the radio. They were playing The Blue Danube waltz; von Karajan conducting.

Rooming Houses

“Send out for scotch.”
I love that line. It’s from an old song called Peel Me a Grape. You probably won’t remember that one. Before your time. But listen, I’ve been telling you all these stories, all these years, and I think I’ve finally run out of them. And now I’m too old to go looking for new ones. I know, I know…but I’m not good at making up stuff I don’t know first hand. At least a little bit, you know. Oh yea, this one’s good too: “Some Argentines without means do it, people say in Boston even beans do it…” Cole Porter. “Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall In Love.” Before your time; the love part too.

They don’t have too many rooming houses anymore. You can still find a few in the city, but mainly they’re gone. I don’t know, there’s enough people out there who still need them, so I don’t know where they go. Streets, I guess. Or underground. In subway tunnels. I don’t know. There’s still one down on the Bowery called the Sunshine Hotel. It’s at 241 Bowery. I lived in that one for almost two years. I took photographs of all the people, but I ripped them up in winter of sixty-nine. I couldn’t stand looking at them. All those faces. They had no say in me taking their photos. It’s almost as if they were abused by that. And I couldn’t stand it. So I ripped them up and burned them outside in a trashcan. Made a fire you could see from three blocks down. Oh listen, this reminds me… you know what some artist did to the Sunshine Hotel a few years ago? She ran a PVC pipe outfitted with mirrors from street level to the second floor lobby. Passersby and hotel residents were able to have conversations through the tube. She created a conduit for interactions that otherwise would have been unlikely to occur. No one really wants to talk to these people. Just exploit them. That’s why I burned the photographs. People love to make art from others’ suffering. They love to show the faces filled with pain. What I know is, there’s no valor or gallantry in life. Nor death. There’s nothing in those. Nothing.

I had a neighbor when I lived at the Sunshine, he was an Indian. I think you call them Native Americans now. Big guy. Nicknamed Ridge. Drank like a fish. He first told me about Cheyenne Champagne. Years before anyone knew what in hell that was. Rubbing alcohol. That’s what they drank on the reservations, the Indians. They were too poor to get booze. So they drank rubbing alcohol. That’s what Ridge drank. Anyway, he had the best baritone you’d ever heard. We used to make him sing Puccini in the afternoons, before he got too tight. Best goddamned baritone. Got stabbed in the washroom one morning by some Italian guy on the third floor, over a room that had come empty which both were squatting over. They sent him to Bellevue on First Avenue, but he was back the next day with a big band-aid. That’s all they did for him. Believe that? Anyway, I know this is boring. Oh yea, this is a good one too: “And down by the shore an orchestra’s playing, and even the palms seem to be swaying…” It’s Begin the Beguine. Cole Porter, before your time.

Ridge got killed July 1, 1969. I remember that date because it was my thirtieth go ’round. It was no big deal. He slipped and fell in his room. Bashed his forehead and cut his throat on the pane of glass separating the little entryway from where he kept his bed. Some men came to get him out of there and the Italian on the third floor ended up getting Ridge’s room. I moved out the following month and went to live in a cardboard box in Atlanta, in a public park. Figured if I was gonna be a tramp, I might as well be somewhere where it’s warm.

It’s like I said, kid. There’s no valor or gallantry in life. Nor death. There’s nothing in those, no matter what others try to tell you; how they try to make it. There’s nothing in those. It’s just part of natural history. The earth don’t give a shit about any of it.