A petulant text to Nye had resulted in an address in New Orleans, on Elysian Fields, and a place for me to stay in the city for the next few days. Naturally Nye had this good friend, and this good friend naturally had this place, and this good friend was happy to have me as his tenant. My timing was perfect—there was a blank space on the calendar a safe distance from Mardi Gras and snuggled comfortably between the town’s exhaustive pantheon of heritage festivals.
The key was to be found in the mailbox. Living room led into kitchen-dining room, into bedroom, into en suite bathroom, each one equally small, each identically square, each plaster-walled, most ceiling-fanned. Each room shot-gunned one behind the other. No air conditioning was offered. A fenced and deep-shaded courtyard in the back had a water fountain and a resident ginger cat claimed the sweet spots on the rotting wood furniture. The caretaker lived in a split-level frame house behind the shotgun, and the garden was shared.
The cat was hers alone, but paying guests in the front house were extended petting privileges.
I had followed the signs to Slidell, exited on Elysian Fields, and found the boulevard and the yellow stucco single-story dwelling. There was a place to park a block and a half away, outside a bike rental shop. This was a good sign.
I walked with my shoulder bag and my guitar case past a square city block-enclosed park with chained gates on all sides. Inside, dog owners and dogs and sprawling transients mysteriously coexisted, the mystery being their seemingly common purpose, and their collective method of ingress.
On one diagonal corner of the park stood Frenchmen Street and the restaurant Nye had told me to go to. Nye said to get there early. Nye said it would fill up fast. Nye said they would only take cash. Nye recommended the pork chop, but only if I was very hungry. Nye said there was an ATM upstairs. Nye warned me that the transaction fee would be large. Nye informed me that I had been warned. Nye asked me if I was okay.
I told him I was okay.
He was worried about me.
He had a lot of opinions.
I do have a biological parent living in a resort town in Spain with her new husband. Together their aging process seems largely stalled. Then there’s Nigel Prior, a much more substantial parental figure who is younger than me in real years, an unequal partner in our two businesses, who does all the work I don’t do so that I can succumb to myriad distractions.
Nye believes I’m alone far too much.
I’ve told him I’m okay with that, yet he’s convinced that I’m lying.
I knew that everything Nye told me was true. I wasn’t so certain if what I told Nye was true.
My solitary lifestyle masqueraded as a matter of personal choie.
* * *
At the intersection of Elysian Fields and St. Claude I braked rapidly to avoid a wobbling cyclist crossing the street. She wore a pastel vintage dress that fell away from her shoulders under a gossamer lace wrap. Beneath a dirty blonde wig fashioned in a vague shoulder-length bob, the features were fleshy and raw and weather-scrubbed under pale makeup that left her features starkly exposed like cracked alabaster.
In high-heeled sandals, she rode her old red bike, a milk crate swollen with junk fastened awkwardly to the front. She stopped just as I did, glaring at me for something that clearly wasn’t my fault. Then she lost her balance and tipped over. For an awful moment she was invisible to me, hidden underneath the front of my car. I waited anxiously for extended seconds. Then she slowly reappeared, scowling at me again, her mysterious crate of treasures now littering the side of the street.
She got down on her knees and began to pick up all her scattered shit as I sat and waited.
Should I get out and help her? Should I try to park? Should I just keep on waiting?
She was out of my sight once again. A horn sounded behind. Had she moved to safety? I could inch forward. Was she finished? Had she moved out of the way? Another horn bleated and I advanced. There was a crunching sound under the front of the car. I pulled over, got out, and looked tentatively down. What I had driven over was now just so much fine powder.
“I’m so sorry,” I found myself mumbling to the still-kneeling figure.
“Just leave me alone, Mister Tourist.” Her voice was low. I couldn’t see her face, but I could hear her tears.
“Let me . . . ” I trailed off and reached for my wallet. Inside were four twenties and seven tens. How much? I placed fifty dollars inside the empty crate.
“ . . . For your broken things.” My words came to a halt.
“For God’s sake will you please just go away!” She cried this aloud as I backed away from her. Traffic was driving slowly around us. Someone in a passing car took the time to laugh.
I did exactly as I was told.
As I drove away she picked up a string of red beads and threw them at my car.
She missed by a mile.
Welcome to the Crescent City.
* * *
I bought my groceries later that night at a Whole Foods a mile away from the house. It was the act of an urban coward. I sat in the courtyard on a soggy cushion with a tall can of cold NOLA beer and fresh baked bread and asiago cheese and organic apples and listened to the chuckling of the water fountain and read Nye’s texts again.
Paved stones were concealed under a sliding trap of old fallen leaves, and a tall oak tree had cajoled the fence over to one side of the yard, exposing the neighbor’s back deck, a transitory project. It could have been under protracted construction, or else it was in the throes of demolition, the latter process either manufactured or organically driven.
Eventually the damp soaking through my trousers motivated me and I crawled off to bed. The overhead fan chilled the room and the noise kept me awake for a long time. In retaliation I listened to Crofter, with my phone docked and charging in a relic of a machine that played the downloaded songs through a single speaker mounted on one wall. The window of the house next door stood wide open and opaque a matter of feet from my own window.
I was almost asleep when a light came on next door. A dazzlingly lit kitchen was suddenly revealed and at the window a woman in her underwear and a red apron washed large green vegetables over a sink and stuffed them with chopped onions and celery and garlic. My bedroom glowed with enough refracted light that I was certain she could see in, even though her gaze passed straight through me as she lingered over the food.
She was talking to someone. Or else she was singing. She looked very satisfied, with her audience, or with the song, with the food, or maybe with herself. Her underwear was more utilitarian than playful, expansive cotton undergarments that looked comfortable and fitted.
I should turn away, but I hesitated.
What should have felt creepy and invasive felt inexplicably like witnessing a scene of happy domesticity, missing any kind of erotic charge.
But I told myself that this was still wrong as soft-core voyeurism and an invasion of privacy.
If Nye was worried about me being alone he should see me now. A solitary peeper cavalierly observing food being prepared by a full-figured woman in beige-toned Fruit of the Loom skivvies.
That the vision lacked sexual subtext was demonstrated by the gloomy fact that I soon fell into a guilt-free slumber unthwarted by the mild thrill of observing a woman missing most of her clothes. And then there was a good night’s sleep. I had clearly arrived at the age where sleep trumps clandestine peeking at unexpected displays of female flesh.
* * *
They served a breakfast of homemade boudin and cheese grits under fried eggs at a corner café on Chartres. It would be my first taste of boudin. The place was crowded, with aggravated locals conspiring to keep all the warm seats inside to themselves. But three open tables stood beckoning to the hardier breed of outdoor enthusiast. I seized one.
I had showered and attended to ablutions, troweled on several coats of dense sunscreen, perched a grubby University of Colorado baseball cap on my pale head, and dressed in old shorts, a T-shirt, and gym shoes. I looked suitably nondescript and a good deal less than prosperous. I had liberated a hard wood chair from the courtyard, my guitar was in its case with me, and I had over two dozen songs downloaded from the Internet and printed out, courtesy of the wireless printer that came with the house.
I had woken up in the morning with an idea.
Logan Kind had played on the streets of the French Quarter. The street corner he had chosen and the names of the songs he had performed were all posted online.
My plan was to go there and retrace his steps, play my guitar on the same corner, and duplicate his set list. Some of the songs were beyond me, some I didn’t actually know, but a good few were both familiar and somewhat playable.
This would be an act of recreation and homage. This was my waking idea. It wasn’t entirely sensible and it begged the question: Did you need anything, beyond the basic desire, to sing poorly on the streets of New Orleans?
We would soon find out.
Several scenarios suggested themselves. There could well be some kind of unspoken system that allocated street performers their requisite piece of performing turf. In all likelihood I would be exposed as utterly feeble and devoid of talent. Both these possibilities would require beating a hasty retreat, pursued by either the authorities or a posse of discerning music lovers.
I was well aware that Logan Kind had been a good singer and a wonderful guitarist. I, on the other hand, was on track to be pitiful at both. I’d for sure make next to nothing in tips.
But my fledgling technique could certainly benefit from a day spent practicing. It was going to be a pretty enough day when the dark clouds departed. In fact, it was already beginning to warm agreeably. If it got too hot, there was always the option to up and quit.
When Kind had performed he had chosen a spot on the edge of the Quarter, at the corner of Dumaine and Burgundy. The location boasted the welcome shade of a grocery store awning, where a sit down and a po’ boy lunch would be just the ticket.
It would be a blast to play on the street as Kind had done. I saw it as an act of deference and tribute. I could walk briskly there and back and exercise away the questionable nutritional merits of my fine morning repast. I could set my own hours, pause when I was sore or tuckered out. I would get some fresh air.
I could even break for alcohol and stroll a few blocks to Lafitte’s to pound a voodoo daiquiri or two and still not sound any worse.
My whole plan was a masterpiece of unexplained spontaneity and inexplicable bravado.
What could possibly go wrong with such a plan?
I played “Perfect Day” capoed on the first fret to sing it in the same key as Lou Reed had sung it. I played it too slow. The chair was uncomfortable. My guitar case was wedged open expectantly and I placed a handful of dollar bills inside to encourage similar acts of generosity. Two college-age boys took the trouble to stop and tell me that I fucking sucked. A man on a bike threw close to a dollar in change without even slowing down. He was my one and only benefactor.
All this occurred during the first dreary dirge. After that, it rained explosively for almost half an hour as I squatted for shelter beneath the grocery store awning.
When the rain finally ended it was time to rock out.
I riffed on the E chord to open “When the Levee Breaks,” alternating on the bass string between open and third and third and fifth frets. It sounded pretty decent. Then I realized that having the words printed out and in front of me and knowing how to sing them were two different things. So I played the chords and keened softly to myself. I arrived at the bridge of the song and noticed that my cheat sheet omitted that part. I slid to the ninth fret and hit the middle strings then slid down to the fourth and second. Then I did pretty much the same thing three more times. Not too bad. A partial save. At least no one was listening as I sat on the levee and moaned.
When I had finished moaning, someone from the grocery store came out and asked me how long I was going to be there. I had planned on asking to use their washroom at some point soon but instead I kept on playing in rising discomfort. My back was sore. My head sweated inside the baseball cap. The sun had moved upward and the awning was no longer capable of sheltering my pasty hide.
A couple of Scottish tourists came by and listened to me lay waste to an old Badfinger song. They were from Inverness and were far keener on talking about home than having me keep on playing. They were having a great holiday. Did I know there was a British pub over in Algiers that you went through a Tardis to get into? I told them I surely did. They insisted on handing me a ten-dollar bill. Maybe they hoped it would buy my silence. I told them it was too much, that I was doing this for fun, but they just looked sad and mystified and wouldn’t think of taking their money back. So I gave up. Maybe they were right. With a surge of newfound capitalist zeal, I placed the larger bill in the open case to encourage others to up the ante accordingly.
Later on, as I gave the unsuspecting world one more mediocre version of “Hallelujah,” a small boy approached the case, threw in a quarter, grabbed most of the bills, including the ten-spot, naturally, smiled sweetly at me, and ran like fuck.
My slim profit instantly became a net loss.
Undaunted, I played “Soul Love” by Bowie, and did just fine, until the key change. It was suddenly a stretch to sing, and it featured a chord or two beyond my ken.
It began to rain again as I finished my unintentionally elegiac rendition of a Steve Earle song about New Orleans. At that point I decided to continue on a thematic triad for the tourists, and promptly fired off the late Steve Goodman’s biggest hit, then the Animals chestnut, which was the very first song I ever learned to play back on my piece-of-shit pawnshop special when I dodged scripture studies on Thursday afternoons.
Then the rain and my back both got worse.
I put the guitar in the case and carried it inside the grocery store. The restroom was available with any purchase. I chose a cold bottle of water, used the spotless facilities gratefully, and headed back outside to drink my pricey water.
My chair had been taken. The rain had stopped. I was soundly beaten and I knew it. After deducting the cost of the water I was behind by a few dollars and one chair. But my performance would still end on a high note.
“I know where you got them shoes.” The old voice wheezed the words out at me.
“Corner of Burgundy and Dumaine.” I knew that one.
“Shit.” The word positively lingered.
I gave him a ten-spot anyway. The losses continued.
He pointed to my head.
“Go Buffs,” he said.
With that last act of charity, I was now operating at a loss somewhere in the low double figures. A quick calculation: almost twenty in the hole, plus the chair, and let’s not forget the loss of dignity. What price on that?
And, lest we forget, I fucking sucked.
* * *
But outside Lafitte’s a half hour later with my guitar case safely stowed under the table and a Turbodog half consumed, I was absurdly pleased with myself. I’d offered my tribute to Logan Kind on the very spot where he had performed, even playing a couple of songs he’d played. I’d performed a few New Orleans songs, a couple of old personal favorites, and I’d been paid and ripped off, been justly heckled, and had escaped arrest. I needed to replace one of the chairs in the courtyard of the house I was staying in, but, all in all, I was far from discouraged.
It was never intended as a career move.
All my realistic expectations had been met. My far more unrealistic one was the crazed fantasy where a nameless stranger approaches and, vividly recalling Logan Kind playing in the same place more than eight years ago, proceeds to answer every single stupid question I might have.
Of course that didn’t happen.
Of course that was never going to happen.
* * *
“Y’all still attacking innocent people with your big car Mister Tourist?” It was the fallen woman on the bike from the previous night, in the same anachronistic gauzy attire, on the same precarious mode of transport. But wait a minute. Was the crate on the front now just that bit more securely fastened?
“Just you, young lady.” I offered up a riposte and raised my glass. “You threw your beads at my car.” It was a lame response.
“You deserved much more. You do know that deliberate cruelty is unforgivable, don’t you?” She toggled between laughing and pouting. “I’ll be entertaining on the square this afternoon Mister Tourist. Y’all can come by and see me later, if you have a notion to, if you can spare the time.” Her tone held nothing but a tease.
And with that, her bike picked up speed and she was gone.
I finished my beer.
* * *
I returned to Elysian Fields in the early afternoon with my guitar and used the house Wi-Fi to log back onto Croftertales.
There was much more to read on the site.
The biographical information about Kind became more extensive the closer his death loomed. But that made sense. Crofter was a stillborn release initially, and for a good many years after. The Internet wasn’t around to jumpstart his legend until later, after he had left for the states. Even then there was next to nothing about Logan during his time in Oxford. He was believed to have lived alone, for close to a year, in the house that Carly Williamson had coveted and now occupied.
Carly had told me more than the web could offer. Why was that? My guess was that the death of Stephen Park had encouraged her to talk.
There was an extended posting from Margot Kind. When Logan had first arrived in New Orleans he had got in contact with his sister. She had been surprised to hear from him. It had clearly been a while.
Margot had known that Logan had fathered a child. She had known that his ex-wife had died in a hotel room in France of food poisoning or some other natural cause. The former Mrs. Kind had apparently suffered from poor health for a time and her death had been a piece of new information for Logan.
Margot’s post proceeded to touch on several subjects. She was now the executor of Logan’s estate, which, while not exactly a goldmine, was gradually becoming more lucrative. There was talk of a Logan Kind film, independently produced, commensurately budgeted. Margot was planning to write about Logan herself, thanks to a small publishing house and a modest advance. Each passing year brought more sales, and more interest in her late brother. It was easy to identify her pride in Logan and his music. At the conclusion of her post she personally thanked all the good people at Croftertales for keeping her brother and his legacy alive.
The next posts covered Logan’s final months on earth, and in New Orleans. They were immediately post Katrina, and by then Kind no longer lived in an apartment on Esplanade and no longer lived close to the house where the artist Degas had visited for five months in 1872. Logan’s third floor apartment had survived the storm, but he had moved out abruptly, abandoning his few pieces of furniture and his security deposit, and leaving no forwarding address. There was a series of photographs of the outside of the apartment.
But even as he all but disappeared, he was seen twice more on the street, still playing his guitar.
The last recorded sighting was from a man named Alex who lived in Portland, Oregon. He had been in New Orleans with a convention of librarians, actually the first brave delegation to visit the city after the storm. He had performed an afternoon’s volunteer work in the Treme and was walking through the deserted quarter in the early evening. Alex loved Crofter. He loved Logan Kind. He almost couldn’t believe it when he spotted Logan playing. He stopped and listened. He didn’t have his camera with him and the battery on his cell phone was dead. He was alone. Logan would be dead in two weeks.
Logan had played as Alex had watched. But he hadn’t played covers that day. And he hadn’t played old songs from Crofter. Alex was convinced these were new, unrecorded songs. He stood stunned and helpless as Logan played one more Alex didn’t recognize. When Logan started to leave, Alex tried to talk to him but Logan put away his guitar and kept on leaving. He asked Logan the names of the songs. He asked Logan where he was staying. He asked Logan how he was keeping.
But he got nothing. Logan left.
It would be fair to say that Alex’s post caused a veritable flood of cyber conversation on Crofterales. There were skeptics who questioned Alex’s story and outright cynics who believed they could spot a Kind hoax when they saw one. And there were the faithful who clamored for more details, actual song titles and descriptions.
After the bombshell from Alex, the rest of the posts were mostly posthumous.
Several were strictly of a historical nature.
The location on the Industrial Canal where Logan had died had become a pilgrimage destination. There were photographs of a raised metal structure resembling a balcony, intersecting a piece of rusted out fence and suspended twenty feet above the ground by a pair of concrete supports easily ten feet square and beginning to crack and crumble. The balcony structure became a steep ramp that dropped down into a shallow bank. On one of the supports the letters KIND RIP were clearly visible in a mélange of black and red graffiti. One photograph showed fresh flowers protruding from a cheap vase located just below the letters.
For as long as I stared at the photographs of the death scene, the nature of the structure remained a complete mystery. Was it some outdated fragment of industrial construction or an abstract waterfront sculpture? I would have willingly believed either explanation.
Other images displayed the nearby St. Claude Avenue Bridge and the loose stone path that ran along the top of the levee and came to an end at the side of the road.
The next posts clearly owed a debt to Wikipedia.
The bridge connected the Bywater district to the Lower Ninth Ward. When Katrina washed over the Lower Ninth, people climbed up into the structure for safety as the levees burst along the canal. After the flood the bridge was the only passable, if restricted, route upriver from the flooded areas to the rest of the city for several months. At one time in its history, the bridge, built in 1919, carried trains as well as cars. It still functioned as both a bridge and canal lock.
I studied the death site images more carefully.
Close to the shore, tall poles stood like cranes. Further out in the water, thirty-foot-tall edifices in asymmetric rectangle configurations extended skyward, with a handful of support beams still extant. Again, whether I saw modern art or chunks of industrial refuse was still open to interpretation.
Out beyond the raised balcony and the ramp and the rectangles stood the two canal jetties, lofty scaffolded wood-lined walls of surviving functionality. These jetties housed the narrow water passage for shipping of assorted size and function. Traffic waited or painstakingly progressed, depending on the status of the bridge.
The pictures taken from Logan’s death scene had been uploaded in the last year or so, and they were some of the very last things that had been posted on the site.
The flowers still looked fresh in the photographs.
Croftertales finally ended with much assorted minutiae. In the last postings were the hopeful and the sentimental and the paranoid and the crazy. Logan was still alive and would show up one day. His death was a stunt. After all, he was a very good swimmer. There was no suicide note found. He was even singing new songs.
Other singers were discussed, specifically ones who sounded like Logan, or ones who had chosen to cover his songs. Comparisons were made, and to a fault Logan’s work was considered to be superior. Logan had been killed for any number of convoluted reasons. Someone actually asked us to consider the Deltatones as possible murder suspects. For at least one person, their act of possible piracy was merely a precursor to far worse villainy.
It all sounded increasingly unlikely.
As I closed my computer it occurred to me that the mysterious “Circumstance” that Stephen Park had mentioned had not been mentioned once by anyone on Croftertales, including Park himself.
I found “The Town Where She Loved Me” on my phone. It was the song Park had cited as another example of plagiarism.
I sat on the bed and listened.
What was it I had been thinking about two nights ago as I fell asleep?