C. Morgan Babst's Blog, page 3
August 15, 2019
The Mountains Every Time
June/July 2019
The man and I drove all day through the Shenandoah Valley and entered the Blue Ridge by sunset, finding the turnoff only after dark. We serpentined into the mountains until our cell service slipped, until we were singing along to a station tuned to silence. The road to Cashiers ambled through low wet forest, skirted sheer drops that whispered in the darkness of falling water. At the end of it, there was a hedge, a gate, an old fellow in a rocking chair to nod to, then a fireplace roaring on a screened porch, a tumbler full of Scotch. I fell asleep to the sound of tree frogs, woke up in a pool of sun. It wasn’t until I looked out at the view—a cliff reaching, sheer white, above the tallest trees—that I realized I’d been here before.
That before was far away and cut to pieces: a log cabin, a dirt road that just kept rising. Four years old, in corduroy overalls, I trundled up the mountain, a parent in each hand. Above us, Whiteside rose, one of the highest cliffs east of the Mississippi. I’d been promised peanut butter crackers and falcons at the top, but what I really wanted was a piggyback ride. When I discovered one was not forthcoming, I whined, stomped, cried. Did some good old sitting in the dirt. Finally, I just had to lie. “Daddy,” I said, deadpan, “I’m having a heart attack.”
I got my way.
Continue reading at GardenandGun.com
Celebrating 100 Years of Oysters at New Orleans Restaurant Casamento’s
March 29, 2019
In the antique kitchen of his family’s restaurant, C.J. Gerdes slips a handful of corn-floured oysters into one of the six blackened pots on the stove. The fat froths like sea foam. Two minutes later, he pulls them out, their crisp coats crinkled and golden. Sandwiched between thick, buttered slices of “pan bread”—Casamento’s version of Texas toast—the oysters crackle as you bite into them, the crust crumbling down into the creamy centers.
I’ve been eating at Casamento’s, a New Orleans institution that turns 100 this year, since I was a child, but, somehow, I’ve never asked what C.J. fries his seafood in.
“It used to be we couldn’t tell people, or they’d make a face,” Linda Gerdes, C.J.’s wife, says with a laugh. “But then lard came back in style.”
Continue reading at Saveur.com
March 19, 2019
THE HOUSE OF MYTH:
ISSUE 104, SPRING 2019| March 1, 2019
The house my grandparents built was one story, brick. It sat modestly on its suburban lot, a stone’s throw from New Orleans, its front door shaded by a small portico and hidden from the street by a young live oak. Inside, beyond the foyer, a paneled great room was lit by a wall of windows. Through them, every Sunday, we watched my grandfather circle the kidney-shaped pool in his Speedo, fishing for leaves. The house always smelled like cooking. Snapping turtle turned to sherried soup. The ducks my uncle hunted became gumbo. In the spring, there were crawfish boils under the carport’s overhang, Southern spaghetti after baptisms. Wakes were held in the formal rooms blanketed in deep white carpet, the sideboard heavy with lemon squares, rum cake, macaroons. On the parlor upright, my aunt, laughing, interminably played “The Spinning Song.”
But inside this house was another house. Hidden in the private corridor that led from master bedroom to guest, beside the powder room door, was a photograph, in black and white, of Rienzi, the Thibodaux mansion where my grandmother was born. It was a house divided into thirds: dark roof, veranda, floodable ground floor. Eight columns broke the façade into seven bays. From gallery to grass ran two sinuous stairs, one flight for ladies, I was told, one for men. It was the stairs that fascinated me—the idea of belles descending in wide crinolines. The building, otherwise, was unremarkable, flanked by oaks and painted white, as plantation houses invariably are.
I liked that house. I stared at it a lot when I was hiding from my cousins or the old ladies, with their butterscotch and damp hankies. I liked the story I was told about it: that the house was built for Empress Josephine, la reine of Rienzi, on speculation that she would come to French Louisiana upon her exile following the Napoleonic Wars. This story was less than legend, the truth of it so tenuous that my family never bothered to check our facts—we had the wrong queen, wrong etymology, wrong colonial power, wrong timeline. The story’s wrongness, though, was a powerful opiate, the fuel for further fantasies. I imagined my grandmother’s birth in the half-tester bed where a queen had once slept, imagined her brushing her long red hair—one hundred strokes a night. I imagined her walking along a long, dusty road to the schoolhouse where she taught or leaning against the railing of the veranda, looking out over vast, empty fields of cane. The fields, when I imagined them, were always empty. The people who’d worked them did not appear in the story we told, because really it was a myth, built to do what myths do: mask the truth.
If you’re an American, you know this house, too: Scarlett runs in white ruffles from the awkward bulk of Tara. Django rides postilion up the red road toward Evergreen. As a teenager, maybe you got off a bus with your gaggle of classmates, tried to keep it together as a hoop-skirted guide led you on the rounds: dovecote, widow’s walk, cone of sugar. Maybe, as a young man, you drank bourbon beneath Edison-lit oaks, cringed at the cotton in the bride’s bouquet. Maybe this house appears in the bottom drawer of your bathroom vanity, printed on the handfuls of soaps that you stuffed at some point in a suitcase. Or maybe you’ve avoided this house, country-driving, hunting boudin. Maybe, slowed behind a bridal limousine, you averted your gaze as the white pickets flashed, grumbled something about how no one would host a wedding at Auschwitz.
For a long time, a book by surrealist photographer Clarence John Laughlin lay on my mother’s coffee table. Full of images of plantation houses—Rienzi among them—this book, Ghosts Along the Mississippi, seemed seductive to me, occult. Like William Mumler, the charlatan photographer who used double exposure to produce pictures of “spirits”—ostensibly the ghosts of loved ones his clients had lost during the Civil War—Laughlin exposed house upon house, collaged colonnade within colonnade. Trying to create an “elegy” for plantation culture, Laughlin shot the houses from low, close vantage, so that their columns stand against clouds that rise “like the smoke of destruction.” Looking at these buildings through the lens of the “mythos of plantation culture,” he wrote, characteristically maudlin,
we often sense . . . the swish of a silken invisible dress on stairs once dustless, the fragrance of an unseen blossom of other years, the wraith momentarily given form in a begrimed mirror. These wordless perceptions can be due only, it seems, to something still retained in these walls; something crystallized from the energy of human emotion and the activities of human nerves. And, perhaps, it is because of this nameless life of memory and desire and, correlatively, because of a superior power of suggestion, that for those who are sensitive, the ruined houses have a fascination far exceeding that of the intact, and inhabited structures.
Indeed, looking at these pictures as a child, I thought I was looking at something ancient, something over. Gutted by fire, eroded by rain, reduced to a colonnade choked by vines (Laughlin called this one “Enigma”), these places seemed safe to romanticize, like the ruins of ancient Rome. Slavery was over, I thought—white supremacy was over—and these houses were beautiful in their destruction, emblems of decontextualized despair.
What it took me a long time to grasp is that beauty is often a con—a lure, an advertisement, and a blind. Think of Stalin’s symmetrical Seven Sisters, the Cathedral of Light shining above the Zeppelin Tribune during Nazi rallies. Think of Vivien Leigh’s face, that dress made of drapes.
READ MORE AT OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG
January 31, 2019
SALVIFICI DOLORIS
For a long time, we didn’t believe, or if we did, it was only
in moments of veiled anguish: the flickering shapes of fictional children
lashed to fictional posts, my yoga teacher’s Sanskrit invocation for the
happiness of all beings everywhere. Sometimes we caught something glittering
out of the corners of our eyes, but it vanished the second we looked at it,
blinked out like a prism-thrown rainbow the moment we held out our hands.
We read
about the man who wandered through Moscow in his underwear with an icon pinned
to his chest. We saw Juliet Binoche give an interview in which she talked about
meeting angels. We thought they were crazy. We thought we might like that, if
that happened to us. The fact was nothing happened to us. What had been going
to happen—the flood that destroyed our house, brought our city to its knees—had
already happened, and our personal Act of God had barely transcended the
actuarial. Now that we were back on our feet, thanks to the insurance money and
our own hard work and nothing else, we looked out at the rest of our lives, and
it was like looking down a long, low-ceilinged room, the ballroom of a one-star hotel or a school
auditorium, maybe. Everything was calmly, artificially lit, and we had plenty
of room to run, jump, whoop across the smooth, waxed floors, and so what was
there to complain about? We were lucky. Look at us, with our lives and limbs,
our jobs, cars, children, bags of groceries, party invitations. We were
“happy,” except sometimes when we caught these chinks—flashes of a hard yellow
light—and we remembered the sky.
Elsewhere, it was a time of maniacs. Planes flown into buildings, mountaintops. Women with bombs strapped under their clothes. Boys killing their classmates, killing little children and teachers. Mass murder in African malls, on Norwegian Islands, in theaters while Batman glared down from the screen. Men dressed in robes and veils stabbed pedestrians in a Chinese square, beheaded journalists . Snipers on roofs picked off protestors as they stood under banners in the streets. Uncles went around shooting their nieces in the head because they had been seen holding hands with boys. Policemen with real guns went around shooting boys with toy guns. We couldn’t understand it. Of course not. Who would do such a thing, you’d have to be deranged. But our un-understanding was less comfortable than that: Such passion. Such conviction. Contemplating it, we thought we knew what it would be like to be hit on your head and not remember your name.
*
* *
Mardi Gras that year was rainy and cold. In front of the
house on Napoleon, the neutral ground had been dug up and then covered over
again by the huge machines that for years had been crawling towards the river
with their thumping and dust and seismographs, laying drain-pipes big enough to
drive two busses through, side by side. Still, we went out in the middle of the
morning in time to see Rex roll by, a portly man in rhinestone-encrusted satin
and white tights, waving from high on his moving throne. We watched the cold
rain trickle down his bald forehead, out from under the crown perched on his
skull. He waved his scepter over us, and the rainwater pattered heavy on our umbrellas
like holy water. We huddled together, the kids yelling for beads, which, when
they came, pelted our hands and teeth as if we were being stoned.
“Let he who
is without sin…” you said, pulling the flask out from the inner pocket of
your fishing slicker.
I just
sipped from the thermos of hot milk punch, my eyes focusing on the rain, so
fine as to be almost a fog in the nearest plane of my vision. On the street,
the dukes were clipping past on their borrowed horses, the smell of manure
rising out of damp, un-brushed coats. One of the dukes—purple satin
handkerchief over his face, plastic poncho over his sequined robes—handed
riding crops to the girls. The horses tossed their heads. When the queen came
gliding by in her scallop shell, you lifted your flask, saluted her, drank.
Your eyes, as usual, were glazed when you turned to me, said, “Sorry,” and then
ran across the second lane of the avenue. An oncoming car braked, jinked
towards the curb. I pulled our son into myself, holding his face to my belly so
that he wouldn’t have to watch you be killed (a thump, your bloodied body
rolling heavily down the dented hood) but you weren’t killed, you swerved in
your sprint through the florescent net barriers around the oak trees and up the
stairs to the house.
Back when I
was still working intake, we used to make fun of the indifferent everyday
suicides we saw on the streets, the bicyclists in black clothes at night, the
cab drivers ripping through traffic at ninety-five miles an hour. You had a
theory about them, that they were actually more afraid of death than we were,
that they taunted it, got up in its face the way a little dog will snarl at a
Mastiff safely leashed to its owner, as if to say Don’t fuck with me. Please? Please, don’t fuck with me. I know now,
though, that they just understand it better than we do, not because they have
more to be afraid of but because they see it better, engage it more completely,
have their noses rubbed in it daily, out there in those weed-covered yards,
under the boiling sky.
Anyway, after you went inside, I kept standing there, watching. Float 3: the Boeuf Gras, decked in garlands, headed for the slaughter. Float 4: the Butterfly King. The naval brigade in their whites twirling bayonets. Men in loose T-shirts with extinguished flambeaux. Damp kids with tubas. Rain dripped from the brims of the tractor-drivers’ baseball caps; rain tapped against the papier-mâché flowers. The kids’ necks were bowed under fistfuls of pearls in every color. The mountain of mud got wetter, sloppier. I sipped on the thermos of brandy and milk, and the rain pooled in the bottoms of my duck boots. It was cold, but that seemed not to matter. The street sweepers ground by, and I looked around for the children, but they were gone.
Read more in Issue 70 of Bayou Magazine, a literary journal published in New Orleans out of U.N.O.
Salvifici Doloris
Salvifici Doloris
For a long time, we didn’t believe, or if we did, it was only
in moments of veiled anguish: the flickering shapes of fictional children
lashed to fictional posts, my yoga teacher’s Sanskrit invocation for the
happiness of all beings everywhere. Sometimes we caught something glittering
out of the corners of our eyes, but it vanished the second we looked at it,
blinked out like a prism-thrown rainbow the moment we held out our hands.
We read
about the man who wandered through Moscow in his underwear with an icon pinned
to his chest. We saw Juliet Binoche give an interview in which she talked about
meeting angels. We thought they were crazy. We thought we might like that, if
that happened to us. The fact was nothing happened to us. What had been going
to happen—the flood that destroyed our house, brought our city to its knees—had
already happened, and our personal Act of God had barely transcended the
actuarial. Now that we were back on our feet, thanks to the insurance money and
our own hard work and nothing else, we looked out at the rest of our lives, and
it was like looking down a long, low-ceilinged room, the ballroom of a one-star hotel or a school
auditorium, maybe. Everything was calmly, artificially lit, and we had plenty
of room to run, jump, whoop across the smooth, waxed floors, and so what was
there to complain about? We were lucky. Look at us, with our lives and limbs,
our jobs, cars, children, bags of groceries, party invitations. We were
“happy,” except sometimes when we caught these chinks—flashes of a hard yellow
light—and we remembered the sky.
Elsewhere, it was a time of maniacs. Planes flown into buildings, mountaintops. Women with bombs strapped under their clothes. Boys killing their classmates, killing little children and teachers. Mass murder in African malls, on Norwegian Islands, in theaters while Batman glared down from the screen. Men dressed in robes and veils stabbed pedestrians in a Chinese square, beheaded journalists . Snipers on roofs picked off protestors as they stood under banners in the streets. Uncles went around shooting their nieces in the head because they had been seen holding hands with boys. Policemen with real guns went around shooting boys with toy guns. We couldn’t understand it. Of course not. Who would do such a thing, you’d have to be deranged. But our un-understanding was less comfortable than that: Such passion. Such conviction. Contemplating it, we thought we knew what it would be like to be hit on your head and not remember your name.
*
* *
Mardi Gras that year was rainy and cold. In front of the
house on Napoleon, the neutral ground had been dug up and then covered over
again by the huge machines that for years had been crawling towards the river
with their thumping and dust and seismographs, laying drain-pipes big enough to
drive two busses through, side by side. Still, we went out in the middle of the
morning in time to see Rex roll by, a portly man in rhinestone-encrusted satin
and white tights, waving from high on his moving throne. We watched the cold
rain trickle down his bald forehead, out from under the crown perched on his
skull. He waved his scepter over us, and the rainwater pattered heavy on our umbrellas
like holy water. We huddled together, the kids yelling for beads, which, when
they came, pelted our hands and teeth as if we were being stoned.
“Let he who
is without sin…” you said, pulling the flask out from the inner pocket of
your fishing slicker.
I just
sipped from the thermos of hot milk punch, my eyes focusing on the rain, so
fine as to be almost a fog in the nearest plane of my vision. On the street,
the dukes were clipping past on their borrowed horses, the smell of manure
rising out of damp, un-brushed coats. One of the dukes—purple satin
handkerchief over his face, plastic poncho over his sequined robes—handed
riding crops to the girls. The horses tossed their heads. When the queen came
gliding by in her scallop shell, you lifted your flask, saluted her, drank.
Your eyes, as usual, were glazed when you turned to me, said, “Sorry,” and then
ran across the second lane of the avenue. An oncoming car braked, jinked
towards the curb. I pulled our son into myself, holding his face to my belly so
that he wouldn’t have to watch you be killed (a thump, your bloodied body
rolling heavily down the dented hood) but you weren’t killed, you swerved in
your sprint through the florescent net barriers around the oak trees and up the
stairs to the house.
Back when I
was still working intake, we used to make fun of the indifferent everyday
suicides we saw on the streets, the bicyclists in black clothes at night, the
cab drivers ripping through traffic at ninety-five miles an hour. You had a
theory about them, that they were actually more afraid of death than we were,
that they taunted it, got up in its face the way a little dog will snarl at a
Mastiff safely leashed to its owner, as if to say Don’t fuck with me. Please? Please, don’t fuck with me. I know now,
though, that they just understand it better than we do, not because they have
more to be afraid of but because they see it better, engage it more completely,
have their noses rubbed in it daily, out there in those weed-covered yards,
under the boiling sky.
Anyway, after you went inside, I kept standing there, watching. Float 3: the Boeuf Gras, decked in garlands, headed for the slaughter. Float 4: the Butterfly King. The naval brigade in their whites twirling bayonets. Men in loose T-shirts with extinguished flambeaux. Damp kids with tubas. Rain dripped from the brims of the tractor-drivers’ baseball caps; rain tapped against the papier-mâché flowers. The kids’ necks were bowed under fistfuls of pearls in every color. The mountain of mud got wetter, sloppier. I sipped on the thermos of brandy and milk, and the rain pooled in the bottoms of my duck boots. It was cold, but that seemed not to matter. The street sweepers ground by, and I looked around for the children, but they were gone.
Read more in Issue 70 of Bayou Magazine, a literary journal published in New Orleans out of U.N.O.
October 9, 2018
Confessions of a Recovering Debutante
Lenny Letter, FEBRUARY 13, 2018
We sat around on folding chairs, pinning ostrich plumes into one another’s hair, sharing college gossip. Near the door that led into the bowels of the Municipal Auditorium, our chaperone was shouting about curtsies — demonstrating, in her tight satin skirt, how we were to bend at the knees without bowing our heads. Our bodies must not betray one trace of submission, she said; we were debutantes, not subjects, after all. Her breath — tuna-laced, necrotic — tossed our feathers. They bobbed as if they were in the bridles of carriage ponies. This felt apt.
My father was offered goats for me once at a dinner party Uptown. The host’s friend, just back from a stint for Shell, had a son as yet unmarried; he thought we’d be a good match. A camel and four goats was the right price, he said, for a basic model like me, but, given what my daddy had paid for my schooling, maybe an Arabian horse should be thrown in too.
He laughed, looking down my dress. I took my mother’s scarf from her chair. My father, bless him, barely chuckled before he started talking. My father has a talent for talking; he can go on for hours about things that interest no one but himself: circuit-court rulings, collegiate a capella, etymologically incorrect usages of common words. That night, huddled under the coral pashmina, I didn’t even try to interrupt so that, by the time dessert arrived, the rest of the table had forgotten about the goats.
My father chuckled again as he took my arm and lead me to the dance floor of the Municipal Auditorium, through a tunnel, into the spotlight. The carriage feather bobbing above my chignon, I felt a little bit like a linebacker, a little bit like I’d died. Patting my hand through two layers of kid gloves, he whispered: Just like a yearling sale.
He meant the subversion to be obvious. Meant the whole thing, I think, as a lesson. Meant for me to see the antique pistons that drive the debauch of Mardi Gras: classism, racism, patriarchy, the commodification of my sex.
I suppose he believed some things are best learned by doing.
***
One thing I learned: The “Greatest Free Party on Earth” is paid for by debs’ daddies. I shared this revelation with my college friends in Connecticut, trying to get them to stop making those faces at me. They were horrified by all this: the white dress, the pageant. They spoke to me in those tones that people use to speak to the brainwashed, lecturing me on the history of something of which they were not a part.
I tried to explain how funny it was. That all this had originated in a joke — Mardi Gras as a reprisal of Roman Saturnalia, a sort of class-based opposite day. I quoted Bakhtin — “All were considered equal during Carnival” — explaining that every socioeconomic stratum had a “krewe” that threw its own parade and ball. I got into the innate symbolism of rhinestones and the hermeneutics of the Zulu parade, whose African-American members wear whiteface under blackface, a send-up of minstrelsy that consternates still today. I told them about the hot-sauce heiress, who’d passed out, drunk, on her way to the throne. I made fun of Rex, the “King of Carnival,” who proclaimed his throwing of lead-tainted plastic pearls to be pro bono publico. It was cringeworthy, sure. But I figured it was my civic duty to be cringeworthy too.
… continued at https://www.lennyletter.com/story/confessions-of-a-recovering-debutante
October 3, 2017
a prequel to THE FLOATING WORLD
GUERNICA, OCTOBER 3, 2017
Joe threw the flashlight’s hollow beam over the cabin’s walls. His heart thumped hard against his ribs, and he still felt hungry, though he’d eaten on the road—he felt weak. They had shown him he was weak. He circled the flashlight over the cypress ceiling, the weeks of dust on the mantle, the sweating floor. Through the open window, a lightning bug entered, softly buzzing. Joe’s knees buckled. He slumped down against the wall.
Nothing you can do, man.
The flashlight was heavy in his flaccid hand, and the light tunneled in the thigh of his waders, still outgassing their rubber fumes—not a speck of mud on them. They’d trained their guns on him and they’d won.
Alright. Nothing I can do, nothing I can do.
He’d let them back him down.
All around the lake, through the old circle roads barricaded with fallen trees, he’d picked his way. He saw what the storm had left: a gator flipped on its back, showing its pale belly. A wild boar with a shredded coat, hung by its tusks from a tree. Shards of bridges, whole houses floating on water.
Men with guns were stationed at the entrance to the twelve-mile bridge. A corn-fed black kid from Iowa had wrinkled his brow and nodded, listening, then shaken his head.
Nothing you can do, man.
But my daughter’s in there, Joe said.
You have to have faith—
Faith? He’d laughed, before looking harder: The uniform starched and shiny. The cross tattooed on the side of the soldier’s neck. You tell me what you have faith in. You believe in God? You trust in the goddamned government?
The boy just blinked.
They’d shoot you as soon as look at you, son, Joe said, and that was when the other soldier shouldered his rifle and he realized he had Vin’s 9mm in his belt—all among the Humvees, the click-clack of rifles brought to ready.
Joe clicked off his flashlight. The pain in his belly roared like a wood fire, and he let himself fall to his side on the rag rug. Pain traveled through his back, up into his chest. It licked the spaces between his ribs. The tree frogs singing twilight stopped abruptly. Breeze came through the window with its cargo of water, and he could almost feel his mother’s hands, soothing him to sleep.
A hard-bodied insect landed with a click. He pushed himself up off the floor. He picked up the flashlight, his bag from the counter, picked up the pistol.
September 24, 2017
CHASING THE BLUES, an essay
garden and gun, october/november 2017
I met her on a Monday night, sometime after ten. Just off the plane from New Orleans, I could still smell the city in my clothes. I’d dropped by Casamento’s before heading to the airport, gotten a hug in the kitchen and an oyster loaf for the road. But if I’d thought that smell—buttered bread, grease, and mollusk—would stand me in good stead with the stranger waiting for me in Brooklyn, I was wrong.
As I banged my suitcase into the apartment, bellowing, “Hello, Little One! I’m home!” I caught a flash of kohl-rimmed eye, a flick of tail. Then she vanished under the sofa.
My husband had picked her up from an adoption event at a mansion in the Hamptons earlier that day—a skinny stray trucked in from the mountains somewhere, snuffling around a dog party Gatsby would have liked. She’d slept soundly all the way across Long Island, waiting until they’d reached home to unload her baggage: Dandruff. A garbage-bag phobia. And a terror of umbrellas so strong that when my husband had opened his, the little stranger had nearly hara-kiried herself under a Subaru.
I crouched down, tried a gentler tone. “Hello, Miss Pup. Would you come out now?”
Her smoky eyes glinting in the under-sofa darkness, she only slunk farther back.
A rescue dog is a four-legged mystery. Parentage, place of whelp, method of abandonment, are sucked into the twin black holes of dog brain, dog tongue. All the rescue group would give us was a vaccination record from a vet in West Virginia, an unlikely guesstimate of breeds (“dachshund/ beagle”), and a note, purportedly from the pup herself, that I’d swear she didn’t write:
Hi, I’m Hiro and I would love to become a part of your life. I am a happy, playful pup who loves to snuggle!
You can’t blame an orphan for tarting herself up a little, but snuggles did not seem to be forthcoming. We couldn’t even be sure that Hiro was her name. So we grilled her:
“Someone hit you with an umbrella, honey?”
“How did you escape from that Hefty bag beside the road?”
But no matter what or how we asked, the sleek little girl kept mum.
As she would not respond to the alias she’d come with, we decided to rechristen her. We wanted something funny but New Orleanian, something that would mark her as one of ours. That she was not native like us did not matter; a New Orleans name would be fitting. Like me, gone from home since Hurricane Katrina, she was one of the displaced. After rejecting a slew of monikers—Sazerac, Tchoupitoulas, Tipitina—we settled on Professor Shorthair (Shorty, for short), in honor of the late, great singer and pianist from Bogalusa, Henry Roeland Byrd, a.k.a. Professor Longhair, with whom she shares a lolloping singing voice, if not the mane.
FOR THE REST, VISIT garden and gun
March 22, 2017
C.V.
THE FLOATING WORLD, ALGONQUIN BOOKS, OCTOBER 17, 2017
“AT THE TIME WHEN KINGS GO OFF TO WAR,” THE LITERARY REVIEW, “I LIVE HERE,” VOL. 59 ISSUE 04,
“TIC-TAC-TOE,” THE BUTTER/THE TOAST, JULY 2015
“THE WATER,” REVOLUTION JOHN, APRIL 2015
“THE ISLAND THEORY,” JMWW, SPRING 2014
“THE WINTER HORSES,” THE HARVARD REVIEW 41
“OTHER REAL GIRLS,” THE NEW ORLEANS REVIEW, 31.2
ESSAYS:
“PRESERVATION,” THE OXFORD AMERICAN, SPRING 2017
“EVERYTHING IS NOT FINE IF IT’S NOT FINE FOR EVERYONE,” LITERARY HUB, NOVEMBER 22, 2016
“DEATH IS A WAY TO BE,” IN GUERNICA’S SPECIAL ISSUE ON THE BOUNDARIES OF TASTE, SUMMER 2015
Other Real Girls, a short story
The New Orleans Review, 31.2
Cold in New Orleans emptied the air. The buildings stood sharply separated from a sky now diluted, as if the air had moved one state of matter farther from wood and stone. Cold was perhaps the same in other cities, but Allie imagined that it could not feel the same in a place without the walloping contrast. New Orleans’s atmosphere remained humid through all of its seasons, bathed in the swamp’s green halitosis, until that point when the mayor—always a man the color of café au lait, the city’s mélange and its compromise—came on the television to tell everyone to tuck their plants into their beds and bring their animals inside. There would be a cold snap, there was the potential for frost. And the city, defiant, would slip off its dress made of water, leaving it white over the shocked grass, to gallivant, naked, in the cold. The sense of being cast suddenly into a vacuum made Allie want to fill it. She felt light within her skin—depressurized.
She could not sleep, while Marin stayed in bed for two days straight under her comforter, watching Japanese films. Allie got into bed and then she got out again. She left the house into the sleeping evening, the dogwoods budded, the labs next door quiet on their veranda. The Peugeot’s engine turned over as if whispering, and she backed into the empty street and drove the dozen blocks to Oak Street. There were few cars—unusual—but then again she’d only ever been here before for Rebirth, and who knew what the cheese man and his band could do. She parked around the corner in the gravel and ran to the door. No music yet, but the man took her three dollars and stamped a lion in her palm. She bought herself a bourbon and sat with her back to the bar and sipped it, flanked by two skinny men she wanted to call denizens, both of whom looked at her like to talk and then looked away. “Has the show started yet,” she said to no one, and a man passing through to the toilets said no and she looked straight in front of her at the beaded wall and the Christmas lights they had hanging from the pressed tin ceiling and waited.
She felt the cheese man come up to the far end of the bar and lean over to procure beers for his band and himself. Allie buried her nose in her cup and pretended to be waiting for someone. Where is Scottie, she thought to herself in order to heighten the appearance. He should have been here twenty minutes ago. Best not to look stood up, only waiting. Onstage, the band were recuperating the wires from the floor and plugging in guitars, miking the green drums. Jerome walked towards them, his hands splayed among six Mardi Gras cups of Abita.
“Hey, Academy,” he said, walking through.
She thought hey and said nothing. She walked back to the patio. The back bar and the pool tables were sheeted, and a tarpaulin ran down from the roof into the far flower beds. It heaved in and out, breathing, with the intermittent wind. Two people sat along the bar—a girl with her cowboy boots up on the gutter and a boy, talking about salmon fishing in Alaska. She sat on a corner of the pool table, over a pocket, and listened. They made no indication of minding. They seemed to know each other and yet not to; the girl challenged him and mentioned his mother twice, while he told her stories—broken bones and a year long trip to Nepal—she looking at him as if it were all new.
Everyone in the city, at least the parts she knew, was related to each other. Marin liked the story of how she had one day tried to pick up a guy during the Endymion parade who had turned out to be her second cousin, and there were black, white and Creole Leperes in every corner, all of whom traced their lineage back to a single plantation owner. But beyond genealogies of blood were the unending networks that ramified from clubs and schools and law firms, the permanent guest lists of annual parties, the memories of houses. Coming home early from skiing once, alone, Allie had taken a cab from the airport, and the driver had asked her if she was one of the Mealings, the family who had sold her parents their house. “My grandmother worked for Mrs. Mealing until she was ninety-seven years old. Or she lived there I guess and peeled potatoes for Christmas when she got late in life. They was always real good to her,” he’d said. “Y’all still have a party on Mardi Gras day?” Allie said they did—it was impossible to stop it, as people came whether or not anyone was even home—and she invited him.
The girl at the bar, who sat on her stool as if she’d been out of town for a while, kept their conversation from sinking too deep, turning an anecdote he began with sleeping arrangements in narrow tents into a discussion of yurts before he’d gotten to his punch-line. When her hand fell in a gesture against his thigh, she pulled it back quickly to her own knee. From the front of the bar, the drums began, a short riff applauding the rest of the band onto the stage. Allie pushed herself off the pool table and followed the pair in. The girl lagged a little, and in the dark doorway, Allie watched her drop her eyes to the boy’s back pockets and then straighten herself with a disconsolate skip.
The room was sparsely populated, almost uncomfortably so, and she hung back along the right wall, in the shadows by the trash barrel. Jerome stood on the left side of the stage, dangling a trumpet from his fingers, his head down, rocking as the band started. Funk which was like everything and nothing she’d ever heard before. Like the parade bands fucking off while they waited for the big floats to make the turn from Napoleon onto St. Charles, inventing music against the pop blasting from speakers behind them for the West Bank girls to dance to and the Longhair falling in sheets from somebody’s balcony. Like a gospel organist on LSD. The guitarist occasionally took his hands off the strings and said something indecipherable into the microphone. The denizens had gotten off of their bar stools and bopped along in the front of the three-deep knot of people by the stage. Jerome stood waiting. Allie moved slowly forward, thinking if she only got close enough she might catch something. People pressed warm around her. The bassist bounced on the low strings, and she let herself be pushed, something starting in her thighs. She began the controlled flail, the only way she knew to dance—to get inside the drums and try to keep from falling off the curb into the oncoming floats. Jerome brought the trumpet to his lips and let out a long howl which pushed her back into the crowd’s raised hands. She felt herself dancing, her hands syncopated, her feet keeping something steady up, her belly singing. She looked to him and found him, behind the brass, watching her. Neither of them blinked. He was playing his trumpet into her mouth and she drank the sound. It colored her muscles and her bones. He stood stock-still suspended from the music and she had become the music. She went on and on. The denizens applauded her through the long bass riffs. Every time Jerome blew, something flared between her pelvic bones. There were hours of it, or minutes. Who knew when the music made the time?
When it was over, it wasn’t over; her ears rang as she walked back to the ladies’ room. The girl in the cowboy boots came out of the stall amid flushing, staring blankly into someplace else as Allie passed her. Allie wondered how she could be tired. There was blood in the toilet, and Allie flushed it again. She squatted over the seat and tried to pee, but her body wouldn’t be calm. Relaxation took the wrong form. She shuddered and braced herself on the toilet paper dispenser. She forced herself to think about moths and puddles on the summer sidewalk after rain. In the mirror, as she washed her hands, she ran with sweat. She tamped the beads that hung down her temples and pulled her hair back tight. Her teeth were white and wet when she smiled.
