TWELFTH NIGHT 2004
BOURBON STREET
When I got back outside, I had to close my eyes for a second against all the neon. Too many lights, too much noise, too many bad songs blaring on top of each other, a sonic assault, and under it all, an overwhelming smell of piss from the alley next door. I was trying to get my bearings and whatever resolve I was going to muster for my next move, when a voice startled me.
“Jesus Christ on a cracker, what took you so long?” I opened my eyes and saw Christopher rising from a squat just beyond the door. A pair of mannequin legs dangled from the window above him. I had seen them a million times before, but as I watched the disembodied feet swing back and forth, in and out, advertising the swing that Taylor was riding inside, I thought of her and I envied her, weightless, high above it all.
“What are you still doing here?” I asked, realizing I wasn’t actually surprised to see him.
“I figured you’d come out eventually. Although I thought you might be with that scumbag. For the record, any guy you have to go find in a strip club is probably not worth your time.” He looked around behind me. “So, where is he?”
“Why?”
“I’m going to fight him for you,” he said. “Or try to. I just figured I owed you. One good punch deserves another. It looks like I don’t have to. You already figured it out. That dude, he’s just not worth it.”
I couldn’t really argue with that. “Well, that friend of yours probably isn’t worth all this trouble either.”
He didn’t seem to like that and frowned. “It’s complicated.”
“It always is,” I sighed. “Well. Since you’re here, do you want to get blind, pissing drunk with me? I’m on my way for a fifth of something clear and deadly.”
“Fuck if I do. You might as well ask a sailor if he likes the sea.”
“Uh, okay.” I started to walk away from Big Papa’s. He followed. “That’s poetic, I guess, but I’m sure plenty of sailors don’t like their job,” I said.
“It’s possible I don’t like drinking if I wake up in a pool of my own vomit, but like the sea, it’s a vocation.”
I snorted a little, but the laugh made me feel better. I really did kind of like this guy. We turned off of Bourbon Street and both visibly relaxed. I got distracted by a window display full of fancy watches at an antiques store and stopped to look. He waited. “So, now that you’re free, how about coming to this party with me?”
“What?” The watches were all motionless in their little velvet boxes. I guess they needed to be wound or something. They were all stopped at ten to two.
“If you’re looking to get shit-faced, why not do it for free? And also, like I said, I’ve heard it’s a pretty good party. Like theater people and artists and stuff. I think they really do it up.”
I hesitated. Maybe this part of my night was over. Maybe it was time to stop running. I was tired. It was late. My disappointment was hanging on me like weights and maybe I needed to finally accept that I was alone in every way that mattered and just move on with it and go deal with my life.
But when I looked over at Christopher, he looked so damn eager. While I knew he had been waiting for me that whole time because he didn’t have anything better to do, it was still kind of touching. He clearly wanted to go to this party. He was also clearly heartbroken about this buddy of his. Would it kill me to put off going home for one more hour or two? I could be his date. Have a few drinks and a slice of king cake to fortify myself for my ordeal. I deserved that much. “How far is it?”
“It’s like literally three blocks away, at Bonaparte’s Retreat. I’ve been trying to tell you. We’re practically there already.”
“Okay, okay.” I hitched my bag farther up on my shoulder. “Sure. Why not? I’ll come. Just for a second.”
“Yes.” He punched the air, a quick stab, unembarrassed.
“But I’ve got to change first.” He looked at me, confused. “You said it’s a costume party, right?” He nodded, and I patted my duffel bag. “I’ve got something I can wear right here. I’ve been carrying this dumb thing around for hours now. At least it will come in handy.”
“Really? What’s in the bag?” He was following me toward the dark bulk of the Wildlife and Fisheries building. “What an amazing coincidence. I can’t believe you even considered saying no. If that’s not fate, then I don’t know what is.”
“Is it?” I asked. “Don’t get too excited. It’s just because I had a burlesque show tonight. Do you think this is what I usually look like?” I indicated my face.
“I didn’t notice. Burlesque, huh? So how long have you been into that?” We climbed the wide stone steps to where magnolia trees shaded the entrance of the building. The big old light fixtures, white globes on bronze arms that made it look like Atticus Finch was about to walk out onto those marble steps, hadn’t worked for years. I set my bag down in this cover of darkness. A police car blipped, turning the corner to the precinct. That ridiculous baby pink precinct building across the street with balconies and palm trees, looking like some kind of banana republic town hall. Which maybe it was.
“For a couple of years. I got kicked out of college and just kind of fell into it.”
“Isn’t it weird having all those dudes staring at you like that?”
I rummaged around in my bag. I considered trying to explain to him that performing was the only time I actually felt safe from dudes staring at me. Onstage was the only time that I got to set the rules on their desire, that objectifying myself put me in control of a dynamic that otherwise dictated every moment of my life, on the sidewalk, in someone’s bed. I didn’t think he would understand. “No.”
“I’m into pretty girls, don’t get me wrong. It’s just all that swing-dancing, flaming-dice stuff seems really dorky.” He had sunk down, resting his elbows against his knees, his back against the building.
“Oh yeah? You want to talk about dorky? Tell me you don’t have a jacket with a Misfits patch on it.” I slipped out of my jeans and noticed a dark smudge running down my thigh. I had forgotten I was bleeding. I quickly wiped it away with my sleeve. I needed to go get a tampon or some toilet paper to stuff in my underpants whenever we got where we were going.
He laughed and turned toward me, then noticing what I was doing, quickly looked away. “Yeah, but the Misfits are awesome.”
I decided against my dress. I had patched up the back with Velcro to make it easy to take off and I wasn’t sure it would hold up to regular life. Instead I went down a layer. My beaded bra had gotten all twisted and I had to stand there unwrapping the straps from around themselves, feeling the cool night air on my nipples. I snapped the wide belt of the panel skirt to where it hung low on my hips. Out of context I looked like some kind of dour I Dream of Jeannie but at least there were lots of rhinestones and fringe. I slid back into my fishnets to hide the blood on my leg and buckled on my heels. Here I was again.
“How do I look?” I felt suddenly shy and needed his reassurance.
He turned around and his expression didn’t disappoint. “I can’t believe you’ve just been carrying that around with you. Who are you?” And then he frowned and stood up. “I’m sorry. This was stupid. You’re too hot for me. I don’t know what I’m doing. I should just go.”
Oh thank God. Ever since I had seen him sitting outside of Big Papa’s, I had been trying to ignore the rush of gratitude that I felt, terrified that he might be able to tell that our dynamic had changed, that our relationship had undergone a subtle shift in power and that now I was a little dependent on him. I hoped he was too young and blind to recognize that I secretly wanted to cling to his dirty suit jacket and beg him to never leave my side. A few more years, a little more confidence, and he would be able to smell out need in a woman like those land mine–sniffing dogs. But for now, this insecurity confirmed I was still safe.
“I am too hot for you, but I’m not changing back and it’s kind of cold out here, so come on. Let’s go to this party.” I fished around for my headpiece and adjusted the feathers in a trembling spray to the side. Just for an hour. I would go just long enough to get suitably drunk. I stuffed my street clothes into my duffel bag. “What about you? Where’s your costume?”
“Oh yeah.” He smiled and buttoned the top button of his dingy white shirt, smoothing down the wrinkled collar and taking a Sharpie out of his pocket. Guys like him always had a Sharpie on them. Sharpies and duct tape, the armature of a generation of punks. Then, biting his lip in concentration, he wrote “LOVE” on the knuckles of one hand and “HATE” on the knuckles of the other. He buttoned his jacket and smoothed his hair back from his forehead and it more or less stayed from the grease.
“Ah.” I laughed. “Right, now I get it. Night of the Hunter. What was his name?”
“I forget,” he admitted. “But it’s hard to come up with a costume cheaper than this. I already had the suit.”
“Clearly. I feel like together we are looking more Halloween than Mardi Gras.”
“In the midst of life, we are in death,” he said in a heavy Southern accent. He offered me his arm and we moved on. I had sewn the same beaded fringe as the rest of my costume to the straps of my heels and they beat against my ankles, heavy and satisfying. I walked differently, my stomach exposed to the breeze, the belt hanging over my hips. I felt alert, the way the air sparked around me, a tension in my relationship to passersby, and even to Christopher, who was now trying to pretend like he didn’t notice the way my bare skin glowed in the streetlamps. The unsteady ground of my terrible night rehardened for a minute, and I was glad because I wasn’t entirely sure I was ready to go back to Bonaparte’s Retreat. We arrived, and the bar was old and grimy, but as magical as I remembered.
Sometimes when I was little, I had to hang around the lobby of Mom’s hotel, waiting for her to get off work on Saturdays, and we would come here after as a reward. Inside, it was dark, candles in nubby red glass lanterns continuously lit. We would sit in a shadowy alcove, under the old framed prints of Napoleon, where people had scrawled their names and phone numbers in the peeling plaster walls, and she would tell me stories, all totally made up, about the French emperor. There would be the first of many Bloody Marys in front of her. She would fish out the pickled okra for me, the narrow delicate point on my tongue, the soft fuzz and the snap when it burst in my mouth, full of peppery alcohol and slime. I ate muffulettas, the thick greasy sandwiches too big for my small mouth, and with every bite, tangy olive salad would squirt onto my hands and I would have to lick it off, the sharp celery bite of it, my favorite part of the sandwich. We would linger together in the strange hour of three o’clock on a Saturday afternoon, when it was quiet, and opera boomed over the stereo. The door to the courtyard slamming behind the busboys, always black, passing through with their arms full of dishes, the waiters, always white, flirting shamelessly with my mom. My root beer came in a big red plastic cup and it was cold and sweet and sharp, and I’d watch people pass outside through the dirty windows while voices screaming about love and murder made me feel like my heart was swelling painfully in my chest.
History is the story of people that dared to be different, Rosemary, she liked to say. You’ve got to go out and make up your destiny. Imagine if Napoleon had wasted his life fishing for sardines on some Italian island. It’s the dreamers that really make things happen. I would drag my finger through puddles of spilled water on the glassy table, unconvinced but loving the dusty, grubby glamor of the room.
“I always get a fascist vibe from this place,” Christopher said.
“Fascist?” I looked around, surprised. “This dump? You’d think they would have things running a little better. I used to come here with my mom when I was little. I’ve always liked it.”
“Maybe it’s that guy,” he said, pointing to an oil painting of a former owner smiling a little sinisterly that hung above the mahogany bar. “Or it’s all the pictures of Napoleon and the opera and stuff, the Mussolini vibe. I don’t know. It creeps me out. My dad comes here all the time too. He brings clients from out of town and they eat this shit up.”
“What does your dad do?” I asked, glad for the excuse to find out a little more what his deal was.
“He’s a real estate developer. Fucking scumbag. He makes his living cheating little old black ladies out of their houses. When he’s not being a pillar of the community, of course, he’s on the tourism board, the chamber of commerce, you name it, and all those dudes love to come here, slumming it, with their steak-fat bellies and get sozzled. Gross.”
“Still, it is a pretty bar,” I argued.
“You want to sit here and drink their famous gin and tonics like some fucking British imperialist while you look out the window at that?” He pointed to the restaurant across the street.
As I read the sign, I realized I had forgotten that the full name of the restaurant on the opposite corner was Marrero’s World Famous Slave Exchange Restaurant. It was one of those things that blended into the background of the bustling, tacky, touristy part of the Quarter that I barely noticed anymore. But yes, now that he was pointing it out, yes, it felt obscene. How could anyone have thought it was a good idea to turn the former site of a slave auction block into a café? And how could I not have noticed all these years? But still, it seemed unfair to condemn this bar just by proximity. “Yeah, but we’re not over there. We’re here and this place is old and beautiful.”
“It’s all the fucking same,” he spat. “Everything old in this town was built by slaves, it’s all the same fucking thing. Nostalgia, a goddamn crime around here.”
Just then, a woman pointed at us. “Oh, look honey,” she yelled in a delighted Texas drawl. “Just look at that. It must be for the Mardi Gras. Take a picture of me with them.”
I could feel Christopher’s desperation to tell her it wasn’t the Mardi Gras yet, but it kind of was, so neither of us contradicted her.
“You don’t see that at home,” her husband agreed, holding up his camera.
Christopher stuck his tongue out between his first two fingers as he took the shot. “Hail Satan,” he said instead of “cheese” as prompted.
The woman just looked at us indulgently, still beaming that she had found the real New Orleans she had traveled to see. “Y’all look fantastic, thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” I couldn’t help but mutter back.
The waiters were looking especially stern tonight in their black bowties. The guy behind the bar shook his head at us and my outfit, banging the brass buttons of the ancient cash register. “Upstairs,” he grunted in the soft accent of Italian New Orleans.
“I didn’t know there was an upstairs,” I said as we passed through the bar and into the courtyard. “I like secret places.”
“Over there.” Christopher pointed.
I had never noticed the curved staircase partially hidden in a dark nook before us. French Quarter bars and courtyards often had these extraneous architectural flourishes in the corners. A staircase leading up into shadows, the balcony of an apartment that seemingly had no entrance, these buildings all ran up against each other, soggy wooden Escher drawings, buckling from the leaks of sputtering air conditioners.
A guy was clearing plates from one of the iron tables nearby and it rattled on the uneven bricks every time he leaned on it. He was wearing the loose white jacket and black bowtie that was the uniform of the old-school service industry in the Quarter.
He looked up at us as we passed, and his expression took me by surprise. It was different from the bored contempt of the waiters in the front, and I felt his anger so suddenly that it made me want to apologize but I didn’t know what for, exactly, and so I looked away. Then a woman at one of the tables waved for his attention and he passed out of our line of view. But I felt funny. And the feeling lingered as we climbed, and the warped steps groaned under our weight. And I thought about Gaby, how rarely I had seen her angry and I wondered how she had managed it, that smooth, soft exterior from which everything seemed to roll off with a laugh and a wave of her hand. Oh girl, you know, and how ambiguous that sounded to my ears hearing it again in my memories now. But I stopped thinking about it. I didn’t want to contemplate the possibility that maybe, even after all these years, I barely knew her at all.