Wanderlust

Last weekend I went to a Welcome Home party for one of my organization's clients.  She lives far east of new Orleans proper in a small town called Poydras.  To get there you have to follow the River downstream through the city, past all fixtures of urbanity to a long stretch of road beneath a canopy of ancient oaks covered in Spanish moss.

I have not yet seen the River, just evidence.  Every day I drive over the Industrial Canal to get to work.  On the way to the Welcome Home party I couldn't see over the levees, but I could see freighters sitting like titans in what looked like the middle of a tree spotted field.

At the party I talked with the homeowner's niece.  She studies the effects of the oil spill on the local fishing and shrimping industry for a nearby university.  Fishing and shrimping are the only industries worth the name in Poydras and the surrounding communities.  It's been that way for generations.  The homeowner’s niece said that her father and grandfather had been shrimpers.

"Do you live in Poydras?" I asked.

"Not far.  One of my cousins lives in the next town over in Violet -- he'll be here in about an hour.  My other cousin lives in Chalmette and our mother lives up the street."

She enumerated a few more family members within walking distance.  One of my coworkers, a New Orleanian, said that she'd been born a few streets away.

My parents' siblings are scattered across the country and their children across the world.  Most of us live in the Midwest, but no one lives down the street from a blood relation.  It occurred to me that this was an expectation, or at least not an unusual occurrence, to leave home and find a new one Somewhere Else.

I told this to the homeowner's niece.  She nodded.  "It's a big deal when someone moves away.  It's just not something you do.  Not something I'd ever do."

"People came to the Midwest to get away from people.  For one reason or another," I said.  "Maybe wanderlust has just been passed down through the blood."

"Maybe," she said.

"That's why I'm here, at least."

Last night I went to a friend's place and didn't leave until late at night.  Biking back I became disconcerted, unsure if I was heading in the right direction.  People say that the only way to find your way in New Orleans is figure out where you are in relation to the River.  The River is always east in Iowa.  Beyond that, I couldn't figure out any possible way that the River could be useful.

I decided to leave it to trust.  Between muscle memory and landmarks I found my way home following neither the directions I was given nor my typical route.  The city is starting to take shape in my head.

Grandfatherness

During the AmeriCorps orientation our employer told us about the landlord for our business office.  It's part of the Spiel.  Anyone on the development team must be able to tell volunteers about how Mr. F was a fireman for 20 years, then a fisherman for another 20, retired and opened up an appliance repair shop so that he could spend his old age tinkering with things.  He lived within five minutes of all his grandkids.

Katrina hit and his home - now our business office - flooded to the second floor.  He was picked up by another local with a boat and taken to the roof of a bank where he and two hundred others awaited Rescue.  It took five days for help to arrive in the form of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.  It's as much a depressing story about America as it is a sad story about one person's trial.

Meeting Mr. F was surprising.  He's a heavy, crass, old man who loves to wander around the office, hassle us, hit on the women, and give us all nicknames (I'm Uncle Sam, or Mark, or Simon, I'm not sure which).  He speaks with a thick New Orleanian accent that sounds more Bostonian than Southern.  Backwards, a little racist, perpetually telling strange stories, and somehow amazingly endearing he reminds everyone of his or her grandfather.  The man embodies some sort of platonic form of Grandfatherness.  He reminds me of my grandfather and there is absolutely no resemblance.  For one of the other AmeriCorops members, Leisl, the resemblance to her deceased grandfather is so strong that she told me when she first met Mr. F she nearly started crying.

Leisl told me recently how she spoke to another New Orleanian, M, about the future of the city.  M told her, "New Orleans is dead," and that sooner or later another storm will come through, destroy the city again and no one will have the energy to come back.  This is, evidently a common feeling among the natives.

But, Leisl asked, then why bother rebuilding?  Why come back in the first place if it's just a lost cause?

"Because," M said. People have lived here for generations and generations.  New Orleans has been a music and culture center for America for three hundred years.  People have lived, loved, worked, and died on this land for centuries.  There are so many bones and stories here.  That's worth the effort.  And it struck me, as Leisl told me this, that the people who come down here to rebuild, and those that came back, too, all talk about New Orleans like a Grandfather.

Premise

It's only fair to admit that everyone warned me it was a bad idea to spend the week alone at the Body House.  But I have a deadline, I told them.  You're spending the week at a secluded, New England mansion where a family was murdered, among other things, and it's rumored to be haunted, they said.  They said, This is not the best way to meet a deadline.  You've never met my editor, I told them.

At first I was able to get a lot of work done and the house was quiet and peaceful.  It is my understanding that this is the way of things.  On the second day, though, on my walk through the woods I saw an apparition of a hanged man, eyes bulging, tongue lolling, swinging in the trail in front of me.  That was inconvenient.  I shrugged and decided that I'd have to skip the morning walks from now on.  It was more time to write, anyway.

The problem was I was out of ideas.  The story wasn't going anywhere.  For five months solid I'd been hammering out chapters about the Smith family tragedy.  They were losing the family farm, John was an alcoholic, Shawna was seized by wanderlust, Lydia was estranged, and Simon sat at the window all day drinking chamomile tea speaking to no one.  It's boring, they told me.  But I knew better.  Even so, the sixth month of the endeavor came and I hit a wall when Shawna asked for a divorce and John sat at the kitchen table speechless.  That's what I couldn't get past.  That was the trouble, the divorce.

That and the blood curdling screams from the basement that started at 10:37 exactly every night and lasted until dawn.  On the fourth day I improvised ear plugs from Q-tips, but that only helped so much.  I've never been a sound sleeper.

On the third day, no progress made, I started reading some old journals that the last occupant had left behind.  It all started out very normal, all about the life of a secluded heiress in New England.  The longer I read, though, the more intelligible the writing became and it was frequently interrupted by archaic symbols and abstract drawings of death and destruction.  Some of it was written in blood.  The diarist wrote of nightmares that haunted her through the day, of a Dark one that feeds on pain and anguish that would consume the world.  I wasn't impressed.  Clearly a wanna-be hack or cartoonist.  No Anne Frank's diary to be found in that house.

I made good progress on the fourth day.  John spoke up and told Shawna to leave and then went on a binge.  Lydia, the prodigal, finally revealed that while she was away in Europe she became romantically involved with a woman, had a breakdown due to her Christian upbringing, and returned home out of an act of desperation.  Simon was still sitting at the window with his tea, but you couldn't have everything.

I was feeling pretty good about myself and felt the urge to masturbate.  Just then, though, the door to the study creaked open and in the gloom of the cellar I saw two blood red eyes staring at me.  There were things watching me all over the house, I realized.  I've never been an exhibitionist and masturbation is really a private act so I just decided to call it an early night.

On the fifth night the screaming stopped.  This was a welcome relief for all of five minutes until I heard someone tramping, ostentatiously up the stairs.  A moment later a slender woman as pale as death flung open my door.  She then proceeded, in a shrill, scratchy voice to tell me how her twin brother had raped her and then locked her in the basement, telling everyone that she was mad and then, after years of seclusion and psychological torture, he killed her.

I listened as best I could.  After you get published, people do this to you all the time.  They tell you sob stories hoping you'll write about it so they can brag to their friends that such and scuh book was based on them.  Ridiculous.  Anyway, the pale girls' story wasn't worth the lost sleep.  No one believes stories like that because that's not life.

On the sixth and last day I was able to finish the draft despite untenable circumstances.  Just after I started working, blood began to drip from the walls.  It started as a trickle and then a steady stream.  It wasn't long before the house was flooded and I had to use the desk as a work space and ad hoc life boat.  I kept telling myself I didn't deserve this and powered through.

The family had called an emotional armistice in order to get through the business of selling the farm.  In cleaning out all the family possessions they slowly began to remember good times, but it wasn't enough to heal old wounds.  In the final chapter, the family is staying in the empty house one last night when an electrical fire starts.  They all get out safely, and the story ends with all the family watching their home and financial security burn to cinders.

It was a day early, but I decided that staying another night at the Body House would just mean another night of lost sleep so I drove back to Iowa.  My editor, when she got the novel, sent me a dubious email.  When I asked her for clarification she said it was boring and I told her she could fuck herself.

A week passed and the bills came.  My bag was empty and after some desperate pleading I got my editor to talk to me again.  How do you feel about horror? I asked her.  She said that I should stay out of her personal life.  I told her I was bored and angry and frustrated and haunted.  I told her how a tornado took my house when I was sixteen, every woman I've ever dated was named Sarah, I lived as a woman for a year, I declared bankruptcy once, I am a rock-paper-scissors international champion, and how could life be so unbelievable?

She asked, Have you ever considered writing nonficiton?

To Be Called By Noon Is to Be Called Too Soon

Life in no particular order:

Finally, partially moved into the new House.  Everyone who visit's first comment is, "You've got to be shitting me."  I never expected to live in a house like this until I earned $100k.  The front porch is the kind from which one can look down on mere mortals and judge them or perhaps rule an estate like a feudal lord.

The landlord is too good to us.  He left furniture, books, glassware, and a significant liquor collection.  Such wealth unsettles me.

#

The deluge hit New Orleans.  It hasn't stopped raining since yesterday morning.  My sloth is now justified.

This all reminds me of A.  She would probably be running around in this storm and dragging me along with.  The streets are rivers and the air is pleasantly cool for the first time since I arrived.

#

Last night at a party, one commented about my compulsive scribbling.  "What are you writing in there?  Are there things about me in there?  That's creepy.  I'm going to call the police on you."  I don't think I've ever met anyone so openly hostile towards me personally.  It's disconcerting to be loathed.

Reminded me of Berlin.  Out drinking with my history teacher.  He looked at my notebook and told me to stop.  "Why?" I wanted to know.  "Sam," he said, "I just gave you a lesson about the Stasi.  These things make a German nervous."

And another friend on another rainy day who told me about his family.  "Never, ever write this down," he told me.  Never did.

#

Crashing on a friend and colleague's hardwood floor.  My job gives me a reputation.  When another one in the room tried to interrupt me, Friend-Colleague shouted, "Shut up!  The money-man is talking."

#

On Wednesday I asked the Baptists for $350k.  My life is dictated by much larger numbers now.

#

Last night I decided that dance clubs do not suit me.  Life is a series of things to be endured.  A fantastically loud band at Tipitina's insisted that they loved New Orleans.  A shouted reply right into your ear was a fairly intimate gesture requiring coordination and effort.  Tried to navigate the crowd and for my efforts got a Wild Turkey-soaked hand.

#

My exercise aspirations are shot.  Biked 20 minutes through New Orleans and was not winded.  This city is so flat it feels like everywhere is down hill.

#

I'm half-convinced that my work-superiors do not sleep.

#

This morning I woke up outrageously hung over.  There were still conversations unfinished in my head.  A ride home with C, muttering "Thank you," and her laughing, "You've said that three times already."  "And I'll probably say it three more."

Sitting around a table alternating between conversations about Steinbeck and bad habits.  A fantastically uncomfortable couch on the smoking porch and an audible assault of people shouting, "I love you!"  No one there wasn't AmeriCorps or former AmeriCorps.  This town is sick with us.  And the Friend-Colleague saying, "I can't remember your name... fuck... I'm drunk... fucking... Don't you understand my fucking point? I.. fuck."  I still want to know what he was trying to say.

In the kitchen, a Portlander asked me what I thought of New Orleans.  "Haven't decided yet," I said.  He nodded.  "I've been here three years and I'm the same.  That's what this place does to outsiders."

#

My life feels uncomfortable and strange.  Like wet cotton.  Or Joan Didion's The White Album.

#

Today shall be a lazy day.  I will sit here, listen to the Band, watch movies, and then maybe check out the Decadence.  But I could probably sleep forever.

Exile

A few days after I moved into my temporary apartment in New Orleans, Gilligan moved into the apartment next door.  The unit was also owned by my landlord, Scott.  Monday night I walked out the door into the after-dark heat and saw Gilligan, a skinny, white hipster in a wife beater and straw hat, talking to Scott.  Gilligan had recruited two local kids to move his things from the U-Haul truck into his apartment.  I went to get food.

When I came back, the same kids were moving his things to another unit owned by Scott.  Scott explained that Gilligan wanted more space.  Scott would accommodate as long as M cleaned up the new unit which wasn't ready for occupancy.  Before I get in the door, Gilligan stopped me.

"Hey, Scott tells me you're a grant writer."

"He did," I said.

"Yeah, man.  Hey, I'm from Mississippi, but I'm coming here from New York.  I'm a musician, but that's not what I'm down here for," he lit a cigarette and squatted on the broken pavement.  While he spoke, the next door kids moved his things, one weird shaped box by one strange instrument at a time to the new unit.  "I've been traveling around from one city to the next.  I'm working on making this non-profit website where people can post videos talking about how much they love the United States, how much they love their city.  Because it's all about love, man."

I looked over my shoulder at his truck.  "Love" was written on the windshield in spray paint.  It took another ten minutes to escape his monologue.

The next day, Scott was amused and horrified.  "Last night Gilligan brought a woman home and I told him he couldn't have house guests without prior notice.  A few minutes later I heard this ding-ding-ding sound and I went outside and found them in the U-Haul.  The guy is serious about this love thing."  I hadn't heard anything, but for some reason this seemed reasonable.

A few days later, Scott was fuming on the porch.  "Do you know what he did?" Scott demanded.  "He hasn't paid rent.  I've driven him all over town to get health insurance, to get registered, to meet people in the music scene and he hasn't paid rent.  Today I told he needed to pay and he wrote me a fucking poem!  He even folded it up into a little airplane and threw it at me.  It's all about love and talking about how I'm the man.  Man, suck my dick."

The next day I could sense that fox holes had been dug between the two units.  Scott was in the kitchen, pacing.  "He hasn't cleaned up the place.  He keeps says that was never our agreement, but it was.  Now he's pissed off because the unit doesn't have air conditioning when I told him it didn't and if he wanted air conditioning he could live in one of the other units.  This is ridiculous."

Over the next week, Gilligan-updates became a regular and entertaining feature of my day.  I never witnessed any of this, but I could sense a tense, wrathful paranoia settle around my apartment and the two immediately adjacent.  It reminded me a little of 2008, when all anyone could talk about was how the word was Ending, but I still went to work every day.

After I got home one day, Scott carried in a bag full of locks and knobs.  "I removed all the locks from his apartment," he declared.  "He tried to change the locks.  Last night he broke into Naomi’s apartments and tried to steal one of the air conditioning units.  I'm done with this."

On Wednesday I had to stay late at the office working on a grant.  Grant writing is a strange process.  You're responsible for the financial health of an entity in which you have no time or ability to invest yourself outside of the facts and numbers.  It's a delightfully absurd and alienating endeavor.

When I walked into my apartment, Scott, two very large friends of his, and one of the other tenants - a young woman, bartender from New York named Naomi - were sitting in the living room celebrating.  Gilligan was gone. He had, once again, broken into Naomi's apartment and sat there until Scott and his friends came and forcefully evicted him.

"I think there's something wrong with that guy," Naomi said.  "He started hanging around the bar where I work.  My coworkers said that he made them nervous.  He slept with one girl and ever since all three of them don't want him around.  My manager banned him from the bar for life."

"He got banned from a New Orleans jazz club?"  Scott looked at her with shock and revulsion.  "There's no greater low."

Yesterday I came home to discover my apartment locked.  Due to a complicated series of poor decisions, I didn't have a key and so I called my Scott, my housemate, and anyone I could think of who might reasonably know how to get in.  My housemate, Lee, eventually called me back.  "Dude, didn't you here?" Lee asked.  "Gilligan came back and started something in the street.  He and Scott were both arrested."

"Oh," I said.

It was a hot night and the street lamps were shining.  Across the street a high school party of Hollywood proportions was in full, angry swing.  There were kids on the street screaming into their cell phones, beer in hand.  About a tenth of the houses on the street are blighted, but two streets over all the houses are newly renovated and the pavement is fresh and flat.

And that's mostly how things stand.  There really is no conclusion to this story.  No revelation.  I asked a friend to move me out that night and now I'm crashing at another Americorps member's house.  It just seems odd to me the way stories relayed and related suddenly turned my one-time home into a locked apartment.

So, You're the Grant Writer

My landlord introduces me to everyone saying, "This is Sam, my housemate.  The grant writer."  At first, I found this flattering, but lately it's becoming a little unnerving.  My identity, it seems, is inseparable from my duty as an Americorps member.

The past week has been a Harrowing trial of orientation and job training.  My colleagues are all, predictably, very well educated, adventurous individuals with some pretty impressive stories.  Whenever we have to introduce ourselves, we do so going around the room, rattling off some personal details and stories and then fading in with the rest of the exceptional lot.  This has not been the case for me.  It seems every time I say my name, one of my superiors looks at me with an intrigued, hungry look and says, "So, you're the grant writer."

When I worked for the Iowa State Seed Lab a few winters ago I remember being introduced to all the researchers and staff.  All of them were middle aged professionals in white coats.  The HR woman then pointed into a corner office where a young woman in a blue bandana and grungy clothes sat slouched over her computer wearing gigantic headphones.  "And that's our grant writer," said the HR woman.  The grant writer waved without looking up.

That's what I feel like I'm supposed to be.  Some harried goblin, squirreled away in the corner who has worked out an understanding, a pact with the world around him.  Leave me the fuck alone and I will bring you Money.

My week has felt much like I imagine life must be for a priest at Notre Dame.  Called to a position of peace and contemplation and surprised to find Americans at every turn.  Unable to find Solace anywhere else, I've mostly locked myself in my room with A Dance With Dragons, my notebook and trying to avoid listening to Simon and Garfunkle's "I Am a Rock."

But, I have a Desk.  And I've found coffee shops, bananas, bars, and Bourbon Street.  Mostly I'm very happy to have a desk for the first time in my life, one where I shall conduct Work and Business.  Furthermore, it is not as hot here as I thought it would be.  I mentioned this to one of my colleagues, the PR woman.

"Yeah, it's a cultural thing, really.   Everyone loves to complain about the heat even though it's the same heat every year," she said.

These are my very muddled thoughts right now.  I have sequestered myself in the Who Dat Cafe and have spent the afternoon writing and reading.  A good day by any measure.  Still, this is a poor excuse for a post.  Please forgive me.

I have faith that in a few weeks I will get my barring and suddenly everything will become clear.  But last night my landlord told me, laughing, "You're in New Orleans now!" as if to negate all further discussion on subject of clarity.  He added, "One thing I will say about this city is that it's a great place to grow.  To find yourself.  It's a free place.  As far as the nightlife goes, alternative lifestyles, music, sex, drinks, all that stuff."  Now I have a mental association between being young in New Orleans and an erection.

A few minutes later, the musician who moved in next door, also my landlord's tenant, texted him.  The guy hasn't been paying rent.  The landlord is prepared to change the locks.  My landlord stared at the phone, baffled and angry, and then looked at me saying, "Do you know what he did today?  When I asked him for rent, he gave me a poem!"

This evening I shall go out and sing karaoke.  I only hope they have the Gin Blossoms, Oasis, and Counting Crows.

Lay of the Land

Leaving Iowa I was surprised by how gigantic the country is and how much of it looks the same to me.  That was how I felt driving from Freiburg to Paris.  I was carpooling with a guy delivering German language Vogue magazines for weekend sale in the city. To get to Paris we drove through Verdun.  It was hard to imagine that on those peaceful hills that looked so much like the Midwest one of the bloodiest battles in history was fought.

About a hundred miles outside of New Orleans I-55 abruptly emerged from cedar forests into wetlands.  The interstate stands twenty feat above swamp and mossy forest and up there you're fully exposed to the sun and the sky.  It was wholly different from any place I've ever been before.

I'm living in the 7th Ward in a very poor neighborhood and, as far as I can tell, I'm the only white guy here.  I have not been in the city yet 24 hours and so I'm still overwhelmed.  My landlord, saint that he is, took me out to dinner and introduced me to the neighbors.  The neighborhood spirit does feel familiar, even if the houses do not and the only shade doesn't come from trees but power lines.

I've got a map.  My roommate knows where all the local branches of the library are.  People are beginning to know my name.  It seems that several have heard about me already and know me as "the grant writer."  My first meal in New Orleans was catfish and I was shocked that someone had figured out a way of making it taste good.

The heat, though infamous, is not that bad.  It could get worse, but I'll enjoy this oven while it lasts.

End of thought, for the time being.