The Raintree Street Bar and Washerteria

THERE WERE FOUR POETS at the bar and the son of a poet tending bar and the Piano Prince of New Orleans playing ragtime in the next room. It was a good day at the Raintree Street Bar and Washerteria. It was a Wednesday afternoon and it was ninety-nine degrees in the shade and (because of that) there was no one in the bar but people other people could trust. All the rich ladies and Tulane students had found air-conditioned places to hang out in and people who needed the Raintree to keep their lives in order could lounge around the bar sipping beer and listening to the Piano Prince play “Such a Night” and “Junko Partner” and “I Walk on Gilded Splinters” while in the back room the washing machines and dryers did their accustomed work. It was June in New Orleans, Louisiana, and it was exactly as hot as it was supposed to be.

“Fuck a bunch of rich women chasing my ass all over town,” the Most Famous Poet in New Orleans was saying to the Jazz Poet. “Fuck them calling me on the telephone. I can’t even take a shit without the goddamn phone ringing off the hook. ‘Finley, is that you? You don’t sound like yourself, honey. Is something wrong?’ Is something wrong, you goddamn bitch, you bet it’s wrong. Leave me alone. Oh, please, for God’s sake, leave me alone.” The Most Famous Poet laid his head down on the bar and the Jazz Poet raised an eyebrow in the direction of the bartender.

“Come on, Finley,” the bartender said. “Come lie down on the sofa in the office. You got to save yourself for the night. Jay-Jay’s coming to sit in with the band and Johnnie Vidocavitch will be here. You don’t want to use it up in the daytime, do you? Come lay down.”

“Lie,” the Most Famous Poet said. “Chickens lay.” His head was almost to the edge of the bar, his right hand shoved his beer farther and farther down the bar. The phone beside the cash register was ringing. “Don’t answer it,” he continued. “I’m not here. Say Finley isn’t here. Finley is in Galway where he wants to be. Finley gone bye-bye. For God’s sake, Charles Joseph, help me.” Now he was all the way down and the Jazz Poet moved behind him and propped him up and held him to the bar.

“Who doesn’t he want to talk to?” the Jazz Poet asked. “Who’s he hiding from now?” The Jazz Poet had only wandered in to wash a load of clothes. He hadn’t meant to get so deep into poetry on a Wednesday afternoon in June.

“The society lady painter. The one that does the cartoons of her friends.”

“Oh, shit,” the Jazz Poet said. “I remember her.”

“She came in here last night all gussied up in black. She’d been to that Andy Warhol thing at the museum. Her mother was with her. Her mother’s as bad as she is. Her mother was chasing ass all over the bar. They parked right out front and left the motor running. She’s been stalking Finley for days. I guess he laid her. He shouldn’t lay them if he doesn’t want them coming after him.”

“Christ,” the Jazz Poet said. “Jesus Christ.”

It was June of 1979. A hard time for poets in New Orleans. Every society woman in town who wasn’t into tennis was into poetry. They were trying to be poets, but they didn’t know how. Some of the ones who were into tennis were also into poetry. They were into poetry but they didn’t know how to do it yet. They didn’t know how to write the poems or what poets to talk about or how to get anyone to publish the poems they wrote in case they wrote them. There wasn’t a big poetry hook-up yet. Of course, over at Tulane a real poet was teaching a poetry class but it met at inconvenient hours for society women just getting into poetry and besides you had to already know how to do poetry to get into it.

Society women are hard to keep out of something once they decide they want to be in, however, and they had discovered the Raintree Street Bar and Washerteria. One of them had even brought her maid over one day pretending their washing machine at home was broken. There she was, sitting at the bar drinking beer and pretending to be a poet and going back every now and then to make sure the maid wasn’t bored.

The society women were being terribly frustrated by the world of poetry in nineteen hundred and seventy-nine and if there is one thing a society woman won’t put up with it is being frustrated or bored.

“Finley started a poetry magazine with her,” the bartender was explaining. “She got drunk one night and gave him a check for five thousand dollars to revive The Quachita Review. Now she’s making him do it.”

“They asked me for some stuff,” the Jazz Poet answered. “They said they’d pay five dollars a line. I gave them a poem. First American Non-exclusive Serial Rights only, of course. Well, it looks like he’s out, Charles Joseph. You want to leave him here on the bar?”

“Move his beer. No point in having to clean that up.”

Sandy George Wade made his way down Raintree Street from the streetcar stop on Carrollton Avenue, walking as fast as ninety-nine degrees in the shade would allow him to walk, admiring the windows of the little old-fashioned shops, pawn shops, and shoe repair shops and an antique store and a bakery. He had the address of the Raintree in his pocket. A poet named Francis Alter who came to teach at his reform school had given it to him a few months before. “Go by there,” the poet had said. “There are good people there. People who will help you.”

“Can I say I’m a friend of yours?”

“Sure. There are people there who know me. They know my work.”

“Are you famous?”

“They’ll know my work. Poets know other poets by their work. Go there if you get lonely in New Orleans. Keep this address. You might need it someday.” The poet had folded up the piece of paper with the address of the Raintree on it and watched while Sandy put it in his pocket.

Sandy arrived at the door of the Raintree and looked inside and saw the Jazz Poet holding up the Most Famous Poet at the bar and heard the Piano Prince playing “High Blood Pressure.” I get highhhh blood pressure when I hear your name. It looked like a good place to stop. It looked like a place where a man could begin to straighten something out. The Jazz Poet was wearing a clean white T-shirt and a panama hat. He looked like a poet should look and Sandy walked on down the bar and took a seat beside him and ordered a beer.

“Did any of you ever know Francis Alter?” he asked. “He told me I could find friends here if I used his name.”

“Francis,” the Jazz Poet said. “You know Francis?”

“I knew him down in Texas. I was in his class.”

“He’s the best. The absolute nonpareil. The very best. Look, we’ve got to get this guy to the office. You want to help?”

“Sure. I’ll be glad to help. Who is he?”

“He’s a great poet. The best in New Orleans.”

Sandy and the Jazz Poet eased Finley off the stool and moved him toward the office, with the bartender leading the way. “Don’t answer it,” Finley kept calling out. “Tell her I’m not here.”

“He’s not here,” the bartender said. “That’s for sure.”

“Finley in spirit land,” the Jazz Poet added. “Hey, I could make a poem of that. Finley gone to spirit land where no rich lady bother him. Not make him read her dreadful poems. Not make him listen to her whine. No ladies call him on the phone. No magazines send him rejection slips. No blues in spirit land. Goddamn, Charles Joseph. Listen to this. Ain’t No Blues in Spirit Land. What a riff.”

“That’s good,” the bartender agreed. “That’s really good, Dickie. Especially the last line.”

“Where are we going?” Sandy asked. He was now the sole support of Finley. The other two were leaning against the walls talking. The four of them were wedged into a small hall between the bar and the washerteria. The air was thick with the exhaust from the dryers. The smell of panties cooking, Sandy decided. Little flowered panties getting cooked.

“Turn in that door,” the bartender said. He took back his part of the burden, hooked his shoulder under Finley’s arm, and began to drag him to the door. “Right in there, that’s the office.” Sandy pushed open the door and they entered a small neat room with a large sofa in one corner.

“Right there,” the bartender directed. “Ease him down. That’s it. He’ll be okay as soon as he gets some sleep.”

“What’s wrong with him?” Sandy said. “Who doesn’t he want to call him?”

“He’s in deep trouble,” the bartender answered. “They put an article about him in the paper and now all the society women are after his ass. It happens. I told him not to let them interview him. My old man’s a poet. I slept in a bed once with W. H. Auden. I know about this stuff.”

“You slept with Auden?” the Jazz Poet said. “You never told me that.”

“He was passed out in my bed, in Starkville, when he came to read, the last year before he died. He slept in his clothes. God, he was a lovely man.”

“I envy you so much,” the Jazz Poet said. “I would give anything to have had your childhood.”

“It was nice,” the bartender agreed. “I wouldn’t trade it.”

“Who’s Auden?” Sandy asked. “Is he some friend of yours?”

“Let’s go back to the bar,” the Jazz Poet answered. “I want to hear about Francis. All my life I wanted to meet that man.” He put his arm around Sandy’s shoulder, and, with the bartender leading the way, they went back down the hall and out into the lofty beer-and cigarette-laden air of the Raintree bar. The sky had darkened. It was going to rain. The Piano Prince had just returned to the piano after taking a break to get a fix in the men’s room. He smiled upon the world. He lifted his genius-laden fingers and dropped them down on the piano and began to play his famous rendition of “Oh, Those Lonely, Lonely Nights.”

“This poetry seems like a good deal,” Sandy began. “I like the feel of it. I’d like to get in on some of it.”

“It’s about death, baby,” the Jazz Poet answered. “But it’s to keep the skull at bay. I wrote a poem about waiting in the welfare line that got me so much pussy I had to change my phone number. I just wrote down what everybody said while we waited to get our checks. That line used to stretch all the way down Camp Street from the old Times-Picayune Building past Lafayette Square to the Blood Bank. I met some characters in that line who were unforgettable and I made the longest poem in the world out of it and used to put it on down at this theater we had on Valencia Street. I had to beat them off with a stick when I’d do my welfare line poem. I’ll do it for you someday.”

“It’s great,” the bartender put in. “It’s a great poem.”

“But enough about me,” the Jazz Poet added. He pushed his panama hat back from his brow and wiped his face with a pale orange and white bandanna, then tied the bandanna around his neck. He could see their reflection in the bar mirror. Charles Joseph’s back in his ironed white shirt and the good-looking new kid and his own hat and bandanna and strong hawkish profile. “Tell me about Francis,” he went on. “I’d give anything to know him. He’s the best there is, the absolute best.”

“I thought you said that guy was.”

“He’s the best there is down here. Francis is the best in the United States. He’s a god.”

“I’m going to go see him,” Sandy said. “He said I could go up there to Arkansas and help him run some lines.”

“I’ll go with you. God, I’d love to go up there. Do you think he’d mind if I came along?”

Oh, those lonely, lonely nights. Oh, those lonely, lonely nights. In the adjoining room the Piano Prince was playing his heart out. He was in heaven, back in the arms of his honey juice and as soon as he finished here he’d be back in his bed with his monkey in his arms. Monkey, monkey, monkey, the Piano Prince sang to himself and laid down his heart into his hands. Oh, those lonely, lonely nights. Oh, those lonely, lonely nights.

“That guy is really good,” Sandy said. “That guy is something else.”

“Yeah, that’s the Piano Prince. He’s an addict. He plays to get his fix. He’s the best. He’s so popular now he doesn’t come here often anymore. Oh, shit, look out there.” He pointed out the window to where a big green Mercedes Benz was pulling up beside the curb. “That’s the Lady Jane coming after Finley. Oh, yes, it’s her and who the hell is that she’s got with her?” A short busy-looking woman in a white tennis dress got out of the car and came in the door with a determined look on her face. Right behind her, in her wake as it were, was a taller, thinner woman with long red hair. They moved like an armada into the bar and took up a determined position near the cash register. “Is Finley here?” the woman asked the bartender. “Tell me the truth, Charles Joseph. Have you seen him?”

“He was here a while ago,” the bartender answered, “but now he’s out.”

“Well, I have to find him. Where did he go?”

“What do you need Finley for?” the Jazz Poet put in. “It’s nice to see you, Janey. Who’s this with you?”

“Allison Carter, the painter. You know her work. I had that show for her, remember? Allison, this is Dickey Madison. Hayes Madison, Junior. His daddy’s the district attorney. He’s our Jazz Poet. You ought to hear him sometime. Have you seen Finley, Hayes? We really need to find him. It’s about The Ouachita.

“He was in here a while ago. What’s the problem?”

“We have to see the printer. The printer won’t fix the typos. It’s a mess. We took it to that place on Marengo and they promised they’d have it by last week and now it isn’t finished and they won’t fix the typos. Your poem looks great.”

“She has a poetry magazine,” the Jazz Poet explained to Sandy. “She revived an old one called The Ouachita. He knows Francis Alter, Jane. He’s going up there to visit him.”

“You know Francis Alter?” The woman turned her attention to Sandy. “Where did you know him?”

“He taught at a school I went to. He told me I could come and see him anytime I wanted to.”

“What school?”

“Down in Texas. You wouldn’t of heard of it. It’s really small.”

“Oh, okay. Well, if you see him tell him we’d really like to publish some of his stuff. What did you say your name was?”

“Sandy. Sandy Wade.”

“This is Allison Carter, Sandy. She’s a painter. She’s great. She’s going to do our cover. So, do you think Finley’s coming back?”

“He might be back tonight,” the bartender said. “He said he wanted to come hear the band. Johnnie Vidocavitch is going to sit in, and…”

“Tell him to call me,” Jane said. “Tell him I’m looking for him. Look, could we have a Diet Coke? I really need something to drink.” The bartender got two not particularly clean glasses down from a shelf and put some less clean ice in them with his not very clean hands and filled them from a hose that led God knows where, to some subterranean Diet Coke well. Lady Jane shuddered and reached in her purse and took out five dollars and laid it on the counter. She held the dirty germ-filled Diet Coke at a distance from her tennis dress.

“So,” she said. “You know Francis Alter? That’s amazing. I’ve been trying to meet him for years. I’d give anything to be in his class.”

“Are you a poet too?” Sandy asked.

“Well, sort of. I mean, I haven’t published anything yet but I’m learning. I’ve been so busy getting this magazine published I don’t have time to write. Well, come on, Allison. Let’s get out of here. Jesus, it’s so hot in here. It’s so hot everywhere. You really need some air conditioning in this place.” She put the untouched drink down on the counter and left the change beside it and took her friend’s arm and left the way that she had come, in a hurry, and went out and into the car, which she had left running with the air conditioner on.

“Who was that?” Sandy asked.

“That’s why Finley can’t answer the telephone.”

At nine o’clock that night they were all back at the bar. The band was filing in, beginning to warm up. The regular drummer was at the bar, drinking water and talking to the new bass player. Sandy had been home and showered and changed and put on his best white Mexican wedding shirt and his earring. The Jazz Poet had gone home and collected his lady, the ex-lesbian minimalist poet, Kathleen Danelle. Finley had sobered up and washed his face and hands and put on his painted Mirò tie. The Piano Prince had had another fix. The sun was all the way down behind the levee and now it was only ninety-two degrees in New Orleans, Louisiana, and the big fan that blew the air around the Raintree Street Bar and Washerteria could make some headway in its work to make the poets and other patrons more comfortable in their progress through the month of June, nineteen hundred and seventy-nine. The pinnacle year of poets in New Orleans. The year the ladies loved the poets. The year the poets got all the pussy and the preachers got none. Those were the days, the people from the Raintree would say later. Those were the years.

This night, the sixth of June, nineteen hundred and seventy-nine, was the beginning of the end for the poets of New Orleans, but they didn’t know it yet. So far only six people in New Orleans knew that Francis Alter was dead. A married lady named Crystal Weiss knew it and her husband, Manny, and their two children and their two best friends. They had known it since seven o’clock. They had all been out to eat to celebrate the remission of a terrible leukemia inside a child of their two best friends. A gala celebration at a famous steak house. They had feasted on steak and fried potatoes and buttered mushrooms and salad smothered in Roquefort dressing and several bottles of fine red wine. A nineteen fifty-nine Mouton Rothschild from Manny Weiss’s legendary cellar. The Weisses had even let the children have a glass of wine. Drink up, they said to their children. Cancer is on the run. Man has triumphed once again.

After they had finished all the food and wine, they had gone to the Weisses’ house to sit around the pool and celebrate some more. Then the phone rang. A chill of premonition went around the people at the pool. Something’s wrong, everybody said. Something’s happened.

Manny answered the phone. Francis is dead, the caller said. Francis shot himself.

It was unbelievable. Francis had just been in New Orleans visiting all of them, charming them to death with his beauty and poetry, charming their children, charming the sick boy, charming their parents and the people they invited to meet him, charming the maids and yardmen, charming the birds down from the trees. Then he had gone home to his meager poet’s cottage and lain down upon a bed and shot himself through the heart. He had gone into a bedroom and lain down upon a bed and blown his heart to smithereens. He had decided to put an end to all his poetry and pain and the hard work it is to be alive. Besides, he believed that if he killed himself everyone would be sorry and not be able to forget him. He was right about that.

As soon as the phone call came all the people around the Weisses’ pool felt guilty for being alive. The Weisses’ best friends soon went home. The Weisses’ children were sent to their bedrooms to watch their television sets. The Weisses started getting very drunk. Then Crystal Weiss decided it was time to drive down to the Raintree and tell the poets. “The poets should know,” she told her husband. “You stay here with the kids. I’m going to tell the poets.”

“You shouldn’t drive,” he said, halfheartedly.

“It doesn’t matter. I’m not drunk.”

“Okay,” he said and let her go. As soon as she left for the Raintree he went downstairs to his darkroom and began to print a roll of film he had taken when Francis was visiting them. It was a film of a Martin Luther King parade they had gone to with the poets. It began with a series of photographs of Francis eating breakfast in their dining room, smiling and charming everyone in sight. Manny cut off a negative of Francis sitting at the breakfast table and began to make a print. It was pitch-black dark in the darkroom and the face of the dead poet floated up in the developer, eyes first, then nose, then chin. “My God,” Manny cried out loud and fled from the room. “This is nuts. What am I doing mixed up with these crazy people?” He left the print in the developer and ran up the stairs and into his little four-year-old girl’s room. He covered her with a blanket and took off her shoes and turned off her television set and kissed her on the head. Then he went into his fourteen-year-old stepson’s room and sat down beside him on the bed. “What are you watching?” he asked.

“Nothing,” the boy said. “Is Francis really dead? Francis is dead? He said he was going to take me fishing. He said we were going camping on the White River. He said he was coming back.”

Crystal Weiss drove drunkenly in the direction of the Raintree. No one at the Raintree knew yet that Francis had killed himself. No one knew anything except that the night was young and Johnny Vidocavitch was coming to sit in with the band and they had plans for one another. Finley’s plan was to get the married lady to leave him alone. Hopefully, to give him five thousand more dollars for the magazine and still leave him alone. The Jazz Poet had two plans, one, to get Finley and the rich lady to do a special issue of the magazine featuring only his poetry and, two, to get Sandy to take him up to Arkansas to meet Francis Alter.

The bartender, Charles Joseph, had a plan to write a novel about the whole bunch of them, using their real names and then taking them out later so they couldn’t sue him. Maybe also change the name of the street and get his dad to edit it since his dad was a sober man who worked hard and taught school as well as being a poet. His dad was extremely worried about Charles Joseph wasting his youth tending bar. He’d be glad to edit a novel Charles Joseph wrote so he’d have a chance to get rich and make something of himself. If I could get a million dollars for a book I’d be in high cotton, Charles Joseph was thinking. I’d go off to the islands and never come back. I’d drink all day and play cards and get all that island pussy. What a lovely deal. Charles Joseph rubbed his rag across the bar, fixed drinks, opened beers, rang up charges on the cash register, whistling to himself, lost in island dreams, singing along with the music on the juke box. Iko, Iko … Iko, Iko, Ole. Laissez les bons temps roule. Oh, those lonely, lonely nights. Oh, those lonely, lonely nights.

About nine-thirty the rich lady, Jane Monroe, and her girlfriend, Allison, and her mother, Big Jane, who was even richer than her daughter, came breezing in the door. They stopped at the cash register to talk to Charles Joseph. “I don’t know whether to get a table on the dance floor or the other room,” Jane asked. “What do you think?”

“The dance floor,” Charles Joseph said. “Johnny Vidocavitch is sitting in. It might be the last time he ever plays here.”

“This is so exciting,” Big Jane said. “This reminds me of the south of France.”

“Get a table, Momma,” Jane said. “I’ve got to talk to Finley.” She had spied him at the end of the bar talking to Sandy.

“What do you guys want to drink?” Charles Joseph asked.

“A martini,” Big Jane answered. “Make it a double.” She smiled a curved smile through her third face-lift, wrinkled what was left of the skin around her eyes. “I love martinis. And load it up with olives.”

“Coming up.” Charles Joseph smiled back, thinking about her tons of money, thinking about the story he had heard about her dancing naked on the bar at Lu and Charlie’s. “Now that would be something to see,” he said out loud.

“What?” Big Jane asked. “I don’t understand.”

“I heard you were a great dancer,” he said. “I heard you could dance like everything.”

“We’ll try it later,” she answered. The smile had straightened back out. She moved in. “Come try me out.” She took the martini he offered her. “You look like your daddy,” she added. “I knew him when he was young.”

“Go to the table, Momma,” Lady Jane said. “I’m going to talk to Finley. Come on, Allison.” She pulled her guest down to the end of the bar where Sandy was telling stories of the great poet.

“He’s the most beautiful man I ever knew,” Sandy was saying. “He makes everything seem important. He read us poems, Yeats, Rilke, Rimbaud.”

“Oh, my God,” Jane said. “I’d give anything to hear him read. He won’t give readings. Tulane offered him two thousand dollars and he wouldn’t come. And here he is, down in Texas, reading to a bunch of kids. Oh, God, that’s just like poetry.”

“He made poetry seem the most wonderful thing in the world. I’m going up there to see him. I’m going to help him run some lines.”

“I’m going too,” the Jazz Poet put in. “He’s going to call and ask if I can come. I worship Francis Alter. I worship at his shrine.”

“He steals from black people,” Finley muttered. “He steals everything he writes from them.”

“Oh, sure,” Jane said. It was her chance to pay him back for all the times he had never called her up. “Oh, sure, you’re not jealous or anything, are you, Finley? You’re so great, of course. Why would you be?”

“What are you doing here, Jane?” he answered. “What do you want with me?”

Crystal Weiss came into the Raintree and stood beside the cash register for a moment watching the dancers in the adjoining room. Big Jane was jitterbugging with a martini glass in her hand. The wife of the owner of a steamship line was dancing with a tall skinny poet who taught at UNO. A fat poet was seated at a table with glasses all around him looking wise and cynical. He was the Fat Cynical Poet. Many people were afraid of him. Johnny Vidocavitch had shown up and was playing the drums like all hell had broken loose. The Piano Prince was playing standing up. I hate to tell them, Crystal thought. I don’t know if I want to be the one to spread this. Of course she was dying to be the one to tell, dying to be known as the first one who knew, dying to be remembered as the great poet’s friend. She arranged her face into a mask of sadness and mystery and despair and walked down the bar to where Finley was sitting between Jane Monroe and Sandy. “Can I talk to you?” she said. “I have to tell you something private.” Jane Monroe flinched. Sandy admired the blonde intruder’s long white dress and long white hair. Finley got up off the stool and walked with Crystal to the hall.

“What’s up?” he asked. “What’s happened?”

“Francis is dead. He shot himself. It’s true. It’s really true. I talked to James and to Sam. They saw it. People were in the house. He did it with people in the house.”

“Oh, God, oh, my God.”

“I know. Oh, Finley. He’s gone. Gone forever.” She let Finley take her into his arms and then she began to cry. Then the terrible news spread around the bar and into the adjoining room and the Fat Cynical Poet stood up and shook his head back and forth and the bartender opened himself a beer and the band began to play “The Saint James Infirmary Blues” as slowly as they could play and all the dancers stopped and stood around and looked each other over. A death had come among them. A poet had died by his own hand, had given the lie to all the gaiety and pussy and beer and poetry and jazz.

“Such a night,” the Piano Prince began to play. Sweet confusion under the moonlight.