Mendacity

Remember Our Town? The stage manager could see everything.

That gig was a walk in the park. My city is New Orleans. MENDACITY

LOCATION LOCATION LOCATION

Suspend disbelief. We are being engineered. There are no accidents.

Not here. Not there. NOWHERE. Location is everything.

They founded the city on the crescent of the river.

They knew where they were. They knew what they were doing.

The water was everywhere. Walking on water. Breathing water. 98% saturated. You are swimming in it in the fertile crescent. Nothing dies here.

Come here and you never leave. You are nourishment for the organism and at once a part of it.

She thought about this all of the time, and talked about it too much. The organism alive amidst and among us. A fun gus, she called it. A fun gus among us. She couldn’t stop thinking about the organism since she saw it up close and personal with the help of an unknown ingested on a moonlit night in the 80s. The 1980s. She was never the same. She saw it everywhere, flowing among all that lives. She heard it too. Loud and clear. She drank. All the time. Drowned it out. To tune it out. To turn it off. So she could sleep, she said.

Once she saw the organism, she saw it all differently. The body fluids, The body fluids. She couldn’t stop thinking about the fluids. Her mother had done this, she said. Always worrying about TB on the sidewalk. They SPIT on the sidewalk, she'd say. Washing her hands all the time. Don’t pick your nose. WORMS. You will get worms, she’d say. Don’t bite your nails. Don’t put that in your mouth!

You don’t know where it’s been.

YOU AIN’T JUST WHISTLING DIXIE You don’t know where it’s been.

Location is EVERYTHING. OH YOU WANT to see it all?

Be careful what you ask for..

The Smell is the Thing

Ultimately, the smell was the thing that kept her from leaving the apartment. Piss and mildew and blood and beer and bits and pieces and parts of each and every one that stepped off the boat, or drove in for a weekend, or lived and died here. They were all still here, and she could smell them. Once she smelled them, she could taste them. Indigestion. Indigestation.

Scenes. Moments. Mundane and surreal. She could see the what and she knew the where but the who, why and when were always the variables. Images came and went. If she left the house, the streets and the buildings told her stories, and she didn’t always want to hear them. It was enough coping with the living beings in her life. Overwhelmed.

One time too many? She couldn’t stop thinking she had done something that couldn’t be undone. She knew, intrinsically, that she was always changing and regenerating and that her mind was always processing information for her, that IT worried about.

But now IT seemed to be bringing her in on the process. All of the imagery was available, and some of it was intrusive. Like a movie she didn’t want to see. Like a song she didn’t want to hear. Scotch squelched. She didn’t get out much.

The building was a non stop sound, too, but it was different on Toulouse. In the quarter. On the square. Seduction was in the air. And mystery. Roles. You could feel a certain drama when you walked up the winding staircase. Something was going to happen, and a drapery would be drawn closed, dust motes floating on beams of light streaming through panes of leaded glass.. And of course there were spider webs.

Enter Madame X. John Y. Secrets and lies. Pretty lies and ugly truths. Drama. Opera. A big production.

Toulouse Street

I lived in this building in the eighties. The 1980s, that is. The building spoke to me the moment I walked through the gate into the carriage way. It wasn’t all good, but I couldn’t stop listening. I was a fixture on the vinyl sofa. Sloth personified. With cigarettes. If I had a burst of energy I might sit up in the chair by the stereo and listen to music and read liner notes on record sleeves.

What few excursions I made out of the house were in the company of one I called Weird Frank. Frank was what I have come to call an other. Not from the here now. I knew it when I met him, as I had been stripped of all misperception earlier that year. They said the LSD was government made. The question was - WHOSE government made it and WHAT were they trying to accomplish? After three days we realized we weren’t coming back but it was all right. We could handle it. We had it all figured out. We were on the road to nowhere and getting there was half the fun. The other half, we weren’t so sure about.

Weird Frank was a French Quarter fixture who was known to couch surf and panhandle. Some say he was the first gutter punk, though he would have rejected the label. Frank lived fully in the moment and would frequently hop in cars with women he’d just met and take off for another town. Key West, L.A. Brooklyn, Austin, San Francisco. He didn’t really LIVE anywhere, and he seemed to be from somewhere else. He’d been on his own “forwever” he’d say and in New Orleans he liked to run into me on purpose.

He liked me, but he really loved my dog. Astro was his partner in crime. Frank liked to take him for a walk in the morning. In about an hour he’d be back, he and the dog all smiles, with money, food, beer, weed and sometimes another other. He would take Astro to the A&P on Royal and talk to the street musicians, asking friendly looking people if he could get some money so “me and my dog can eat.” The dog fed everyone and kept Frank on his dark beer diet. Making the dog pay, he called it. In a year he collected about 20,000 dollars, all of which was spent to maintain our lifestyle.

On an average day life came to me. I was too anxious to leave the house most of the time. Frank brought the quarter home. He had impeccable taste in people and rarely did he come empty handed. Some of the guests he brought stayed for days, others I never saw again. Frank was good at making himself scarce, too. I can’t remember ever thinking... when will he leave? He was a good friend and a perfect stranger, as well. It was my terms, my space. WELL, not really MY space but HE worked for a living, or so he said. He was never home.

One evening Frank came over and asked if we could go up on the roof of the building. It was the highest roof on the block so you could see all the way to the river from the peak. It was a steep slate roof, so you would have to be half crazy to go up there. We were more than half crazy.

Frank seemed to have lived a difficult life. It wasn’t all fun and games. He was adopted, and he had seen it all but he didn’t like to talk about it. That night on the roof I asked him what he thought about generally. Life, meaning, all that. He said he thought as little as possible. I told him I wanted to see it all. To know what is really happening. I was on a mission of sorts and I needed answers. I wanted to see all sides and take no side. To be fit to judge and not judge.

He didn’t say anything for a long time. The sun had set. We were on the roof in the dark. Nothing was said for minutes. Maybe hours. Time stood still. We were moving through it.

Let’s go to Peru, he said. He had the money and nothing but time.

Hell, I couldn’t leave the building. I told him as much. House bound. Up on the roof, I was out of it but still on it. That’s not going out, that’s going up. I didn’t go down. Frank took off that night and I didn’t see him for a while. I don’t know if it was days or months before he dropped in again. I don’t know where he went. I never did. It was strange I had no dependency even though he was my favorite link with the world outside. Frank was just there or he wasn’t. It didn’t concern me if he wasn’t there. I was busy listening to the building, watching strangers from the balcony and drinking scotch. It helped.

I was drunk. It was cold. No one was home.

I was in the parlor with the gas fireplace lit. This was no ordinary apartment. The building is famously fabulous. Carriage way, slave quarters, winding staircases. High ceilings, pocket doors. Our apartment on the second floor was the intended main living area. The first floor had been a shop with french doors that opened on to the sidewalk. To get to our place you entered a carriage way and used a buzzer to have the gate opened. We had security. A buzzer. An intercom. Locked gates. Noisy steps. No one could just “drop by” and that was a good thing. We had little to steal - it was the privacy I valued most of all. But that was only I L L U SION

... an illusion like so many other notions. Where was I ? Oh yeah, I was Home alone. Smoking cigarettes, staring at the floor, listening to music. The buzzer buzzed. Before I got to the intercom I heard the gate slam. Whoever it was was on their way up the steps and at the door before I got there.

It was Frank. He was gone and now he was back.

He didn’t look good. In fact, he looked terrible. I asked him in and offered him food and drink. He said No Thank You and grabbed a cigarette from the pack on the table and took a seat. He had a briefcase with him that appeared to be a doctor’s bag. It was well worn with soft handles. He reached into the bag and pulled out what looked like a parchment. A bundle of paper that had been rolled up and flattened and sealed with sealing wax. Red. Dark. An imprint. Just like in the movies. There was also a lot of cash in the bag, bound by rubber bands.

I couldn’t make out the image on the wax, but it was unbroken and somewhat flexible. It had been racked up a bit in the bag and seemed to have come a long way. Now Frank was a strange guy and a punk and a freak of sorts but he didn’t strike me as one who would carry around ancient parchments and wads of cash. He was likely to have bootleg Dylan and Dead tapes, so this delivery was very out of context. Or so I thought!

Frank’s demeanor disturbed me. He never seemed anxious or nervous and he looked almost tortured that day. He had the document in his hand. He looked at me and said “I have something for you. You said you wanted to see it all?”

He put the bundle in my hands. I looked at it. The wax. The paper. I was touching it and it felt very warm. I rubbed it. Do I get to keep this, or does it belong to someone else?

He said “It’s for you.”

I thanked him and sat down in a chair and broke the seal. Sealing Wax. Jesus Christ. He looked away. He put the cigarette out and walked to the balcony as I opened the papers and began to read. The words appeared to have been handwritten. A tight small dark writing that appeared to have been done with a fountain pen or a nibbed quill but it could have been a machine generated font meant to replicate that look. I wasn't sure but soon it didn’t matter. They started moving. The words grabbed me and they didn’t let go.

Normally I scanned documents, reading entire pages or paragraphs at once, choosing what to actually read. I had been trained in special reading techniques that had served me well, but this was something entirely different. My head was nodding and my heart was pounding and my mind was wide open. It was all so true. Yes. I hadn’t seen it like that!

Resonating. This is true. So right.

I let my guard down and fell into it. Just as I began to hear the voice inside me I didn’t want to look any more. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I had seen enough. It was horrific. No more no more no but I couldn’t pull away and I couldn’t shut it off and I couldn’t stop reading. My hands wouldn’t let me let go. My eyes wouldn’t close. I was compelled. I was terrified. It was hell. An ongoing narrative. Not in the past or in the future or in a faraway cave or another dimension. No. Hell here and now happening in the pages in the words between the lines - an account of the present.

I couldn’t put the cat back in the bag. I couldn’t unsee what I had seen. I hoped I could forget it but still I wonder how it worked though I wanted it not to be. And to not be true. But I knew it was true. Truth too ugly to be imagined. From the corner of my eye I saw Frank standing in the doorway. The words let go. I didn’t know how much time had passed. It was dark when he got there and the sun was up. I was furious.

WHO wrote this? I asked. I don’t know, he said.

WHERE did it come from? I demanded.

I don’t know but it is authentic, he said.

AUTHENTIC WHAT?

Frank shook his head. Just burn it, he said, and he was gone again.