after the floods

Just read a really cool piece by Charles Stross on the quality of mercy, coincidentally just after i was working on some revisions of this chapter. Enjoy.

AFTER THE FLOODS

The floods came and went.

And then they came back again. And again.

The water and the winds returned. But even the tardy, begrudging mercy the country showed New Orleans after the first flood did not. Mercy was already in short supply in those days.

It’s even rarer now.

Mercy does not age well. It must be consumed on the spot or it immediately begins to decay. Like when a stranger offers to buy you a shot: drink it down, lad, drink it down. The offer may not come back around. There are no rain checks on mercy.

Even just after Katrina, some found it a tricky tight-wire act, feeling compassion for the residents of New Orleans. Within days of the first flood, even while the bodies of grandmothers still floated in the brackish water, people began to mutter things like, ‘Well, it’s kind of their fault, for living in a bowl ten feet below sea level. Why should our tax dollars go toward reconstructing the city if it’s doomed anyway?’

Which was true, in a way.

But another truth: cruelly short-sighted sentiment like that was a poor disguise for an unspoken sense of moral superiority, a self-righteous schadenfreude. In parts of the country, certainly in the fish-belly white, Bible-thumping beer-gut of the nation, there was a tacit feeling that New Orleans had gotten what she deserved. The floods and the destruction and the misery and the deaths--these could be viewed as Old Testament-style retribution for her sinful ways. There was a secretive smacking of lips at the thought of all those hedonists getting flooded out of their debauched homes, their porn collections and drug stashes ruined. The nation’s diffident response to the catastrophe reflected that hidden acrimony.

But politicians can’t resist a disaster. They’re drawn to human misery like flies to shit.

Some say it’s difficult to tell which is which.

The politicians came ready with bluster and promises and teary-eyed sentimentalism, sleeves rolled up as if they might actually do some actual work.

Actually, they didn’t. In the days following the first calamity--which, granted, was not entirely man-made--after the cameras had recorded the sound bites, after poll-tested doses of garment-rending had been doled out for the masses, the politicians quickly dried their eyes.

Then they reapplied their make-up, and they rolled their sleeves back down, and fled in their air-conditioned limousines.

Some of them stopped for dinner in Baton Rouge before flying back to Washington. By and large, what they left behind in the restaurants’ toilets afterward would be their final contribution of any tangible kind to the residents of Louisiana.

Most of the politicians were gone before the water even began to recede.

The press stayed a little longer, but they too trickled away soon enough. Their blow-dryers and wardrobe racks were soon packed up and shipped to more arid climes.
After all, there was always some 16-year-old girl--preferably wealthy and white--who had gone missing, one with model good looks and a skeevy 24-year-old boyfriend. And when the media turned away from New Orleans, so did the fickle attention of America.

Among American cities, New Orleans had long been the outcast cousin. She was the slightly seedy one who smelled of trouble--and liquor--but who always got away without having anything serious pinned on her. She was the exotic one, the pariah of the American family who showed up every other Christmas. Or she might randomly call to see if she could crash on your couch--a call that invariably came in the middle of the night. When you were kids, New Orleans was the older cousin who secretly smoked out back at family reunions, the cousin who bought you booze when you were underage, and who always had rolling papers for some reason.

She had a great laugh and endless stories to tell, all of them bawdy and hilarious, and which got her uninvited to most formal events. You wouldn’t want her to meet your new bride’s parents.

So, we tolerated her, barely, back when she was a free-spirited party girl. But as soon as she was struck down by the hurricanes and the floods, as soon as she was helpless, all that changed.

America was not used to seeing her cry. That wasn’t the New Orleans we knew, and we turned our backs on her. She died just as gracefully, just as charmingly as she had lived, quietly succumbing to the water, the relentless water.

The water is patient. The water is a leisurely rapist that has all the time in the world.

She died alone. As much as she loved us, and as much as we loved her, we abandoned her when it came time for her to succumb.

We are all guilty.

But, hell. On the other hand, New Orleans has always been dying. Even from her earliest days when there was little more than a string of shacks where travelers could buy liquor and sex, connected by planks set across the mud, there was a sense of resignation embedded deep within her spirit, a Gallic shrug of the soul.
Of course the sea would come, she said, lifting the bottle to her lips then passing it on.

How could it not?

They rebuilt, eventually. But they didn’t bother much with the levees or the ancient, low-lying structures, the water-logged history rotting beneath.

Instead they built high. They ignored the squalid mess below and looked skyward.

They built New New Orleans.

***

jonah's dreams

Here's a little chunk of the chapter i'm working on today. Me likee. :)

This is the first introduction to Jonah, but for other pieces, search for tag 'crescent city blues.'

ADDENDUM: these are all very very rough-drafty style, just FYI.

Thanks for reading!
--kjb




The dreams were happier, Jonah had to admit, than his waking life. How strange, he thought, to be happier in my sleep than I am when I’m conscious.

There is a 4:00 a.m. sense of worthlessness and insecurity and lack of hope that all but the most dull-witted and emotionally insensate humans come across at some point in their lives. It’s a sudden wakefulness, a sweat-drenched wondering where the hell your life has gone, often followed by an overwhelming, debilitating sense that you have no business doing whatever it is you do, that you are a pretender, a faker, and a sham, and that everyone can see right through you.

What Jonah was experiencing was different, in that it was much, much worse.

It was a crashing, crushing sadness that overcame him upon awaking, true enough. But the engine that drove it was a strange, non-specific sense of loss, a sense of some forgotten magic, of a paradise hidden from sight--a devastating, creeping notion that somewhere along the line, he had misplaced...himself, for lack of a better word.

What made it harder still to deal with was that there was no real reason for him to feel this way. There was nothing in his real-world life that reflected such a change.

It was most poignant just as he reached consciousness, a sense of loneliness and despair so deep that it could occasionally bring tears to his eyes just as they cracked open to see the first light of day. It was as if he were living someone else’s life when he was awake, and that he could only catch fragmentary glimpses of his true self when he slept.

It was a sensation that he was never fully able to shake--that he didn’t belong here in this world, that he had simply mislaid his real one.

He managed to put it to one side, to carry on in the mundane tasks of his work during the day. But every moment of consciousness was plagued by a quiet, nagging sense that his existence was somehow wrong, a mistake, a dead-end that had been reached after a missed turn. He constantly longed for sleep, for a return to that world where he felt comfortable, where he felt right.

Where he felt he belonged.

And so he slept, as often as he could, as much as he could. His machines hummed around him and he slept.

In his dreams he was a part of a large family or clan. There was usually a house, more like a lodge or a commune, a shared compound. It was a raw, sprawling place, a sea of chaos where friends came and went, where children ran underfoot and there was always lively conversation. Smells of cooking emanated from the huge and ever-populous kitchen, and a holiday atmosphere was ever-present. People laughed unselfconsciously and told stories or played games. They sat and drew charcoal sketches or read aloud to one another. In a corner a woman with a thick, braided rope of iron-gray hair hanging down her back smiled as she painted, her easel tilted to allow her to take in the light outside the broad picture window.

Jonah smiled too as he turned to gaze outside. There he saw packs of wild, whooping children playing on the lawn, black and brown and blond and shimmering with sweat in the hazy sunlight, wearing only as much clothing as was absolutely required. Racing after one another, shrieking and laughing, they were a flock of bipedal starlings coalescing, then exploding apart in a series of childish algorithms no adult could ever understand.

Many times in his dreams there was a waterfront, a dock that lay at the foot of the lush, green lawn below the house, where boats were tied up. Groups of men took small craft out onto the water and returned with a bounty of snapper, crawfish, and oysters, pretending to toss the fish at squealing children who ran down to greet them. The men unloaded other sacks as well, ones they didn’t flaunt and which were quickly spirited away.

Even as Jonah sat a hundred floors up behind titanium-bolted doors, plugged into his workstation, monitoring a hundred forms of data streaming past in a thousand different permutations, as plugged in to the modern world of ones and zeroes as anyone ever had been or ever could be, even feeling the steady flow of re-circulated air kept at exactly 65 degrees, even then he could see the pastoral vision from his dreams. And although he had never been there, he felt in some way, as if it had been created for him.

Simultaneously he felt as if he had created it for them, the people who were his dream-family.

He shook his head and made a conscious effort to set aside the lush, green, liveliness of his dream-world.

The real world was strange enough.

###

officer nate

Here's another piece of the novel i've been working on. Look up tag 'crescent city blues' for earlier ones.

enjoy!

NATE DUCHAMPS

The sun was not even out yet, though the sky was growing lighter in the east, beginning the shameful undressing of secrets the night tried to keep but never could. The streets of Downstairs were shiny with dew and God knows what else, dotted with empty cups and the occasional lumpy pancake of vomit. Despite the early hour, a small crowd had already gathered around the mouth of the carriageway, straining to see what the fuss was about.

It wasn’t always easy to tell which denizens of Downstairs--or Upstairs for that matter--were the early risers, and which ones had been up all night. A certain wobbliness was to be expected from most people who visited the city, and for many, the night’s adventures in seeking out the bottom of a glass blended right into the next day’s.



As Officer Nate DuChamps stood just inside the yellow crime scene tape, he tried in vain to peek at what the crime scene investigators were doing at the other end of the tunnel without looking like he was doing so. Simultaneously he was trying to keep an eye on the growing crowd of rubberneckers that was gathering outside the tape.

“What’s going on down there, boss?” said a female voice that materialized next to him.

Nate winced as he glanced down through the near-palpable cloud the small woman exhaled, a fetid stew of cheap cigarettes and many, many hours of cheap beer.

“You just never mind about that, Mo,” said Nate. “They got them a crime scene to investigate, and they don’t need you getting in the way.”

“Nathaniel DuChamps! How I’m getting in the way? I just asked you a question,” she replied, feigning affront as she peered up at him owlishly through her huge glasses.

Maureen was one of those French Quarter fixtures from way back, a product of the Irish Channel--like Nate’s own family--and a survivor of the floods who had probably never even considered leaving, even when things were at their worst. She was a tiny, dried-up woman, like a rip of beef jerky sporting thick glasses that might have been fashionable at some far-off time in the last century. Today they bore as many scratches as they did clear glass. It might even have been the same pair Nate remembered her wearing when she used to keep an eye on the neighborhood kids. They said she had been a nun in some far-off past, although these days she seemed to prefer being married to beer than to Jesus.

She still had a trace of steel in her voice when she wanted, though, a tone that could only come from someone who had once been charged with keeping many unruly kids in line.

“Just...you know, sorry, Miz Maureen, but you gotta stay back and let us do our jobs here,” Nate said.

Maureen snorted. “Looks to me like you doing the same job I am--watching. Come on, Nate, you know me. Just tell me what’s going on. Is they dead people down there?”

“Yeah, they’s people down there,” he said, warming up to the idea of being the one with inside information. “And they dead, all right. I found ‘em. Three kids. Well, I thought it was three when I first went down there...the light ain’t so good, so I musta been wrong... They’s two of ‘em. A boy and girl.”

“Aw, that’s so sad,” Maureen said, taking a sip from her plastic cup of beer. “Was they robbed, you think?”

“I don’t know, Mo,” he said. “I can’t really talk about it...”
Maureen just looked off in the distance and waited, patiently sipping from her cup.

It took about fifteen seconds before Nate broke down. It was just too big a discovery, the biggest crime scene he had ever personally come across; he was bursting to share it with someone besides other cops, who always acted unimpressed with everything.

“So, yeah, I’m on early morning Downstairs patrols now, I have been for a while, since...well, for a while,” he said, lowering his voice conspiratorially, but still speaking loud enough for nearby onlookers to hear. “And I walk past--”

“Aw, sweetie, they got you walking around down here? In the dark? That ain’t right,” Maureen said.

“Naw, it’s okay,” he said. “We got training and stuff. So I’m walking past this carriageway--”

“How long they keeping you down here, babe?”

“It’s all right, I’m telling you, I don’t mind,” he said. “So I’m walking past and--”

“Does your momma know they doin’ that to you?”

“Mizz Mo, do you wanna hear this or not?” Nate said with rising exasperation. “So I walk past and I see something down the tunnel there, looks like a pile of laundry or something. I figured it was prolly someone sleeping one off, but I go down there to investigate, right, and lo and behold--”

“You got the crowd-control situation in hand, there, DuChamps?” boomed out a voice right behind Nate. He tried his best not to jump, but his partner Pete’s voice was like fingernails on a chalkboard.

“Yeah, Pete,” Nate said quickly. “I was just...seeing if there were any witnesses...”

“Yeah? You ask them if they seen any ghosts too?” Pete sneered. He was a beefy man, a classic cop in many ways, all bluster and boast, and a guy who truly enjoyed having power over other people. Currently he was one of Nate’s primary tormenters at the precinct.

“I didn’t see no ghosts, MacIntyre,” Nate sighed. “The light down there--it’s really dim, you know? I thought--”

“Yeah, well, you called in three bodies, and by the time I got down here they was only two. So you musta seen a ghost, I figure. I figure you got scared shitless,” Pete said, laughing.

Maureen looked up sharply at the big man when she heard him curse so casually, but Pete didn’t notice her.

“Anyways, them crime scene guys wanta ask you a couple more questions,” Pete continued. “I don’t know why they’d wanta talk to you, seeing as how you got the heebie-jeebies so bad. I’ll handle the perimeter. Let’s move on back people--”

“Sure Pete, I’ll go see what they want,” Nate said. “See ya later, Mizz Maureen.”

As Nate looked back over his shoulder, he saw the tiny woman staring straight up at Pete, unmoving on the other side of the crime scene tape. Pete towered above her by at least a foot, but she was unfazed.

“Ain’t you little Petey MacIntyre?” she asked, too loudly.

“Well, it’s Officer MacIntyre now...”

“Sure, yeah, I know you. You that boy used to try to get the all the little girls to show you they panties, ain’t that right?” Maureen said.

“N--no,” the giant man said, suddenly reduced from an intimidating 6’4 cop to a naughty six-year-old shuffling his feet.

“Sure you are! Your daddy had that little samwich shop down by Napoleon Street--”

As Nate trotted down the corridor, he couldn’t help smiling to himself: if Pete had been out on patrol with him like he was supposed to, instead of cribbing at his girlfriend’s, he could answer the crime scene guys himself instead of dealing with Mo’s too-personal queries.

Mac was a bully. It was a game that cops liked to play with their own if there weren’t any criminals nearby to push around, a game that almost came to them subconsciously. If you asked virtually anyone who joined the force, they would tell you they wanted to protect and serve, that they wanted to keep the streets safe. Perhaps, if they were feeling a tad self-righteous, they would even say they had a highly attuned sense of justice.

But despite all the high-minded rhetoric, Nate knew in his heart of hearts that many--not all, but many--of his co-workers had joined up simply because they were bullies. They liked the strength that the uniform and the badge conferred onto them, they liked the power they felt from carrying a gun--and more importantly, they liked pushing people around.

Bullies have an unerring radar that allows them to pick out the weakest person around. They are drawn to the weak like wolves sensing a baby caribou with a pronounced limp. That was the atmosphere at the precinct where Nate worked, and Pete tried hard to be the alpha wolf.

Nate was thoughtful--he knew he wasn’t terribly bright, but he was thoughtful. And he was more sensitive than the typical cop, especially since his fiancée had jumped off the train on their way to Orlando three years back. The others took his sensitivity for weakness.

Plus he looked soft. He had no chin to speak of, and an accompanying overbite that pushed his already prognathous lips out even further. But that wasn’t the worst of it.

He was just an oddly-shaped man, and it was most apparent when he was working. They simply could not find a uniform to correctly fit his peculiar, pear-shaped body. It wasn’t that he was fat, exactly. The uniform-makers knew what to do with that. There were plenty of fat cops around--especially in New Orleans. But Nate wasn’t fat, or at least he wasn’t fat everywhere. On some regions of his abundant carcass, the scratchy material clung to him like so much blue vinyl; in other places, it clumped and sagged and drooped oddly.

More than anything, Nate looked like a water balloon that had been squeezed around the top and bottom, sending all the fluid to his squishy waist. His uniform shirt was billowy and loose around his pigeon chest; his thin upper arms flapped like near-meatless chicken wings inside his shirt. Above his narrow shoulders, the too-wide collar threatened to swallow his tiny head. But the very same uniform shirt that fluttered and sagged droopily above adhered around his middle section tightly, stretching the fabric open between the overstrained buttons. Around the middle he was wrapped snug and taut as a blue sausage casing crossed with a black belt, riding ridiculously high around his upper abdomen.

To further add to the indignity of his appearance, Nate also had long, skinny legs for someone of his height. The result was that, as he trotted down the carriageway clutching his night stick and pistol to his sides, Nate looked rather like a waddling double-hamburger that had been stuck on a spindle and dipped in blue paint. He was Mayor McCheese, only with his burger-head at his waist rather than on top.

His saving grace, appearance-wise, was that he had tremendous hair.

Stunning hair.

Remarkable hair.

Hair that was astonishing, breathtaking and mind-numbing in its dark, shining, lustrous beauty. When Nate passed by in the street, balding businessmen ceased yammering inanities into their cell phones, the stunted idiot-language of buy and sell grown thankfully dim as they stared at his scalp in open jealousy and follicle lust. Drag queens screeched and clawed one another for a chance to flirt with Nate and run their greedy fingers through his coiffure. Packs of genuine women huddled together and assessed him covertly, as though he were a lunch combo, debating in fierce whispered tones whether the hair might be a valuable enough selling point so as to make purchasing the rest of the package worthwhile.

The answer was inevitably ‘no,’ but it always took a summit of the highest echelons of femaleness to reach that conclusion: Yes, it’s true, you get the eggroll and soup with that, but for your entree you only got to choose from the moo goo gai pan and that weird-looking orange chicken stuff. And both of those looked like they’d been under the heat lamp for quite some time.

All of this went on around Nate, but he was mostly oblivious to it. He knew he had nice hair, of course; he often peeked at himself in shop windows as he passed, at the rich swirls of dark brown waves that sat piled atop his tiny head like a shiny cloud. The luxuriant curls that rested upon his skull would have been the stuff of legend had they sprouted from some more fortunate soul, appearance-wise.

At least his hair drew attention away from the rest of him.

“Nature got a way of evening things out, babe,” his mother had often crooned to him when he was small, running her fingers through his locks as he lay his head in her lap. “You’ll find you some woman who loves your hair as much as I do, my baby boy. You’ll see.”

He was about 10 before he finally realized that she hadn’t said, ‘…some woman who loves you,’ but rather, ‘…some woman who loves your hair…’

crescent city blues

hey all. here's another installment (in no particular order, sorta like my mind, and my writing style, lol) from my current work-in-progress, tentatively titled 'crescent city blues.' (earlier pieces here, here... shit, just search for the tag crescent city blues.)
tell me what you think!

peace,
k

CRESCENT CITY BLUES
By Kurt Brighton

Outside the bar, Elmo passed three Jesus Christs in the grubby corridor. They were drinking from green wax Pat O’Brien’s to-go cups and laughing roughly. They had Kool-Aid red stains bleeding down the front of their white tunics, neon bibs of spilled Hurricane and what looked like vomit in one case. The tableau was like a bizarre Christmas hallucination, a nightmare vision from the alcohol-ravaged mind of a former shopping mall Santa.

All three were sweating profusely--on the lower levels of Upstairs, the air-conditioning was generally either broken, under repairs, or else it wasn’t working. The three young men chattered nonsensically amongst themselves, intermittently haranguing passersby, especially those of the female persuasion. The nano programs they were running gave them the standard Jesus look: long wavy hair, soft brown eyes, faces that seemed to glow a preternatural white, as if lit from within. Elmo glimpsed stylized stigmata on their hands--puckered, bleeding wounds that never seemed to close, the lines of them as intricate and detailed as any tattoo.

One stout son of God stood out slightly from the rest. Not only had he opted for a decidedly devilish goatee rather than the usual full beard, he also had his room number etched cleverly on his forehead, written in the blood that ran from his crown of thorns. It read, in red:

Sonesta - 2317 - Ladies Only!

It might have been a really stunning effect, this unholy trinity, if only they kept their mouths shut. But they were all quite drunk, and not shy about it either:
“Show us your tits! As the Son of God, I command you to show us your tits!”

The whooping Christs grew slightly more sedate as a tight pack of riot gear-clad Party Security troops clattered past. Encased in their black armor carapaces, they looked like shiny cockroaches that had somehow discovered bipedality. Elmo quickly stepped aside and found himself next to the Jesuses--or maybe that would be ‘Jesii,’ he thought. The ParSec troops rattled by, their faces obscured by filtered plastic faceguards and goggles, but they hardly even glanced over. The Jesii were paying tourists after all; the cops, and especially ParSec were looking for terrorists intent on disrupting the convention, not run-of-the-mill loaders.

“Principalities and powers, my son,” murmured one of the Christs as he and Elmo watched the troops trot down the corridor.

“What?”

“We struggle against principalities and powers, ‘the rulers of darkness of this wicked world and all their followers,’” the man continued, gazing thoughtfully after the troops.

“Yeah...uh, right,” Elmo replied.

“These are grim times. A good man must work hard to retain his soul.”

“Not a whole lot of good men left around here, O Lord,” Elmo said. He eyed the suddenly philosophical loader, noting the tell-tale signs of someone running a nano program with standard Cloud-9 enhancers: enlarged pupils, dreamy smile, relaxed breathing.

“That’s where you’re wrong,” the loader said, grinning beatifically. “We have some fight left in us yet.”

“Right. Well, good luck with that,” Elmo said as he made his way into the dark, cool depths of Perdition.

“Bless you my son!” the Jesus called out.

The bar was crowded for a weekday afternoon. It was especially crowded for a dingy bar with all the ambience of a concrete bunker. Perdition was in a relatively obscure corridor, just off the lowest level of the Sonesta wing--the ass-end of Upstairs, the oldest and dingiest section. For neighbors the bar had a couple of rip-off electronics retailers owned by a revolving-door cast of sketchy Eastern European immigrants, rickety beer booths, several spray-painted doors, and a sorry, dilapidated strip joint. It was a grimy, local bar, and generally that’s who hung out there: grimy locals.

But not today.

It was nearly convention time again. In a couple of days it would begin in earnest, but the early birds from The Party had already descended on the Quarter en masse, even infiltrating this obscure bar in the lower reaches of Upstairs. There was also a smattering of locals, along with a few loaders. Year-round, there was an endless stream of visitors infected by the past, by the long-expired romance of the Crescent City. The mythos lived on, but only in caricature form. As they prowled the endless concrete corridors, what the tourists saw was a version of New Orleans as imagined by a Tennessee Williams-smitten matron who lived and breathed the trashiest sort of romance novels, but who never left her house.

What they saw, in short, was New New Orleans, aka Upstairs.

###

elmo awakes, part tres

Hey y'all. Many thanks to you for continuing to check in with me here, despite my slackerdom this past week or two. The show opens tonight (!!!) so between driving to denver and rehearsing and tech week and all, i've been working pretty hard on that, and thus distracted from penning my pithy, invaluable contributions to civilization and the furtherance of humankind. :) By next week all should return to normal(ish) -- well, what passes for normal for me anyway.

In the meantime, here's the next (big) section from 'Crescent City Blues' for you, from the 'Elmo Awakes' chapter. (previous here and here.)

Thanks again for reading, and enjoy! Comments and thoughts and critiques are always welcome.

***

It’s not like Elmo went out of his way to fuck things up; fuck-ups just sort of seemed to... happen around him. They gravitated to him as if he were the King of Fuck-Ups and they his loyal minions. Fuck-ups just wanted to be near their Lord, and bask in His glory. Elmo, being a beneficent sovereign, granted them their wishes as often as possible.

He pulled on a shirt that had been dangling on the back of a chair and so deemed to be less than filthy. Then he shook out a pair of jeans he pulled from the pile on the floor, just to be sure, before putting them on. In New Orleans, the cockroach was the true Kingfish, the first citizen of New Orleans. The stubborn little beasts had been there for millions of years before humans had settled in the muddy swamp, and they would be there long after we had finally gone away. There was no way to completely eradicate them, especially in a building as ancient and well-used as Mrs. Chambers’ rooming house.

Elmo grabbed his smokes, his empty wallet, and his ring of key cards off the dresser and banged out the door and down the steps two at a time, trying to ignore the throbbing in his head. As he burst through the reinforced-steel front door and hit the sidewalk, he winced at the sharp sun threatening to burn the eyeballs out of his skull, as if a cruel child with a magnifying glass lived far above. Before Elmo had gone three steps he heard a reedy voice call out to him from an upstairs window.

“Elmo? Is that you?” A wobbly, cotton-topped head leaned out of the second-floor window.

“Yes, Mizz Chambers, it’s me.”

“You tell Tre I need some eggs,” she said. “And I’m almost out of milk, too. Where’d that boy run off too?”

“I don’t know, Mizz Chambers, but I’ll tell him,” Elmo said. “You get yourself back to bed now.”

“Oh, and Elmo! The man on the TV said they already beefing up patrols ‘cause of the convention, so you be careful, you hear?” she said. “Don’t you be running your mouth at any of them ParSec goons. They bad news!”

“Aw, come on now, Mizz Chambers!” he said, trying his best to be charming despite the diesel thrum of the hangover pounding his brain to a pulp. “I would never do anything like that! You know me...”

“Yeah, I do, Elmo,” she replied sharply. “That’s why I said. You just keep your mouth shut!”

“You should try that sometime yourself, you old bat,” Elmo said under his breath, still grinning widely.

“What’s that?”

“I said, ‘Okay! See ya later now!’”

He turned the corner and headed toward the St. Phillip Street elevators, not looking to see if the old lady had pulled her head back inside. Mrs. Chambers lived in her second floor apartment and never left. She spent her days shuffling from bed to chair, trying in vain to keep track of her stories on the tube and the various medicines she took for her various afflictions. She didn’t seem to have much luck making sense of either. But depending on the order and frequency with which she grabbed pills from the forest of prescription bottles that was laid out on her TV tray, she went through surprising moments of clarity, and even wisdom. There were days when she was completely addled, and days when she seemed oddly lucid.

In general though, Elmo was fairly certain that the interactions between the dozen or more drugs she took--provided by half a dozen shady doctors who clearly had no concept of what ‘drug interaction’ even meant--had long since left Mizz Chambers’ mind a hallucinatory wasteland. She sometimes called Tre by her dead son’s name, despite the fact that Tre was a muscular black man, and her son, based on the many pictures she kept in her room, had been neither. In the pictures he looked like a rat-faced, chinless kid with scared eyes and a skinny neck, lost in a too-large uniform, about to ship off to Iran.

That look was one Elmo knew too well. He had seen dozens, if not hundreds of kids with the exact same look come and go during his two tours. According to Mizz Chambers, that’s where the kid had died, outside of Tehran. But who could say for sure, with her mind the way it was? For all she knew, he could be living in Thailand with a model for a wife and 18 kids.

When the television failed to provide adequate entertainment for her loosely-hinged mind, she took her imagination out on Tre and Elmo, her longest-standing tenants. Tre especially looked out for the old lady, helping her with groceries and with repairs around the building, which was almost as decrepit as the old woman herself.

But despite the roughness of the accommodations, it had its advantages. For one thing, Tre and Elmo and whatever other tenants drifted through the building paid Mrs. Chambers in cash. She didn’t even have a chip scanner in her building, so she couldn’t collect rent in more conventional ways even if she was inclined to. The entire place was off the data grid, which suited Elmo just fine.

Also, living there was cheap, dirt cheap. The price of a night’s stay at an average hotel in the Quarter section of Upstairs was equal to a month at the Dauphine Street rooming house. Gods help you if it flooded again, but on the other hand, Elmo was not the type who worried much about the future.

Just now, he strode purposefully if a little gingerly down Dauphine. He was already starting to sweat in the August heat despite the shade of Upstairs looming above him, the raised network of shops, restaurants, bars, casinos and hotels that rose above the street like a concrete hamster habitat. It had to be pushing 100 already, even in the shade, and the legendary humidity of New Orleans was out in full, oppressive force.

Screens embedded in the concrete underbelly of Upstairs scrambled for a moment as they sensed him pass, trying in vain to read his non-existent All-In-One chip. Since they couldn’t tailor their messages to his particular shopping habits based on information on a chip, the screens instead ran generic messages, adding to the cacophony inside his skull.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw two bikini-clad starlets peering down at him from the screens. They had to be in their forties or even fifties by now, but they appeared to be around 20--impossibly thin and smooth-skinned, despite having lived the starlet lifestyle for a couple of decades, not to mention popping out a half-dozen moronic, redneck, miniature billionaires between them. They reclined on lounge chairs by a pool, chatting about their umpteenth comeback tour.

“Wow, Britney, you’re looking great! Ready for our tour?”

“Sure am! All thanks to our sponsor, Novus Skin Solutions.”

“Hey Britney, don’t tell anyone, but I’m one of their best customers!”

“Me too, Jessica! Their nano products make my skin so smooth and young-looking!”

“And with each dose you buy, you have a chance to win a trip to Hawaii! How does that sound...Unidentified Passerby?” said Jessica, her blank, empty cow eyes fixing on Elmo as he passed.

Elmo ignored the entreaties and strode on. He felt slightly ill as the undigested portion of last night’s booze sloshed around in his stomach in time with his footsteps. The smells of life on Garden Level weren’t helping either. Some open doorways belched out cooking smells; others exuded fetid, graveyard odors from the dark spaces within. Disheveled rent-girls and boys leaned out of doorways to scope him as he went by. Hollow-eyed children played in the street, using whatever toys the street provided. Clusters of old women sat in mossy-looking lawn chairs and smoked, staring off in the distance, chatting idly about the old days.

Many, but not all of the buildings had been gutted, stripped of everything from copper pipes to bathroom fixtures to cabinet doors and even tile. Squatters spilled out onto the street, passing the time sipping beers and bullshitting. The more industrious people sewed up old clothing or worked at repairing ancient, abandoned televisions and appliances.



And carved out within some of the less-damaged buildings there were a fair number of bars and informal kitchens. They served no-frills food and drink on mismatched plates and in cracked glasses, all in the shadow of the opulence that hung above them. To a casual observer, these informal establishments might have seemed more to be community hangouts than actual businesses, as it was rare to see money exchange hands. That’s not to say that everything was suddenly free; there was an elaborate barter system unofficially in place, with arcane rules and unspoken signals that a stranger might spend years trying to unravel.

Here was Maria’s, with a hand-written sign hanging out front, advertising “Spagheti and Fine Dinning” with undue optimism. From inside the dark, tiny room, Elmo could just make out Maria waving to him as he passed.

“Hey Elmo! You going to work, dawlin’?”

“Yep, sure am, Maria,” he called out. “We’ll see if I still got a job when I get there.”

“Well, you come on back and get you some spaghetti if you fired, you hear? You looking too thin,” she said. “I fatten you up and get you married off to some woman take care of you!”

“Thanks, Maria,” he said. “We’ll see.”

As he passed a pack of urchins sitting on the curb rolling cigarettes, one of them called out.

“Elmo!” said the boy, as he fell in step alongside Elmo.

Abraham was no more than ten or eleven, a deeply tanned white kid with filthy dreads and piercing ice-blue eyes. He and his dad had carved out a home of sorts in the corner of a former café. They shared the space with three or four other families, forming a commune of sorts, each contributing something to the group’s well-being.

“What’s up, Abraham?”

“Nothing man,” the kid said. “But, say, lend me a dollar, bro. I got a deal cookin’ and I’m a little short. I pay you back.”

“You know there’s no such thing as cash anymore, kid. Government says so.”

The boy snorted and looked up at Elmo with disdain.

“Shee-it. Government say a lot of things, man,” the boy said. “Come on, Elmo, gimme a dollar. If I cut this deal, I can make a lot more than that.”

“No can do, bud,” Elmo said, barely looking up as he continued walking. “I might not even have a job anymore.”

“Then you can get in on this with me!” the kid enthused. “A buddy of mine says they need people to sell drinks and shit at the convention. Well, outside it, you know? We just each gotta come up with ten bucks to buy our way in.”

“Your buddy is charging you ten bucks to sell drinks to people at the convention?”

“Well...nooo...not exactly,” the kid said, suddenly finding a spot in the middle distance fascinating beyond belief.

“What, then?”

“Weeelll, this guy I know wants a bunch of us kids to go down there, like we selling drinks and hats and tourist shit. But then we gonna roll a couple of these convention fucks and split the money.”

“Your dad know about this?”

“Nooo...”

Abraham’s dad, a hippie who called himself Ravenwise, peddled various nostrums of an extra-legal nature that were always in high demand by the fast-paced 21st century lifestyle. He was not a fan of the Party or government in general. But he would almost certainly not approve of his son falling in with a gang looking to beat people up who employed not only private security guards, but who also had the added protection of ParSec on full alert for the convention.

“You know those people are all rich Party assholes, right, Abraham?”

“Yeah, exactly! Why shouldn’t we make some money off of them?”

“Sure. Okay. But they’re going to have a shit-ton of security down there,” Elmo said. “Ain’t no way your little friends and one guy are going to win that fight.”

“Naw, man! This dude big, Elmo, I’m telling you--”

“He’s probably planning to sell you and your buddies to some rich perv the second he gets you down there, kid. Don’t be a sucker. The rich have been hustling a lot longer than you and me. For generations. They’re better at it, and they’re meaner, too, especially when it come to their money.”

“Shee-it! I can outsmart those suitentie motherfuckers...I’m fast like lightning!”

Despite Abraham’s bravado, Elmo could see he had put a crack in the kid’s confidence.

“All right, Abraham,” Elmo said. “Tell your dad I said ‘hi,’ you hear?”

“He high, all right,” the boy said. “That motherfucker ALWAYS high!”

“Yeah, hey, speaking of--is he around?” Elmo realized he could use a little chemical assistance if he was going to attempt to salvage his job under the duress of this mighty hangover.

“Nope,” the kid replied. “He took the pirogue down the swamps, to check on his weed and shit. What you want? Some Cloud-9? Weed? Speed? Smack? Crack?”

“Kid, if you had a couple of bennies I would sing your praises to Jah forevermore.”

“Sure, man,” Abraham said, suddenly looking cagey. “Ten bucks.”

“For two? Bullshit! You little pirate!”

“Sorry, man. Pops say I gotta start earning my owns now, so--”

“I’ll see you later, Abraham.”

“All right, wait, wait,” Abraham fished around in his pocket, then held out his fist. “Just give me five, then.”

“That’s more like it.” Elmo dug a grubby fiver out of his jeans pocket and handed it over, holding out his other hand beneath the boy’s closed fist.

“Thanks, man. There you go!” Abraham let drop a single dirty white tablet into Elmo’s hand, as he simultaneously peeled off and ran back the way he had come.

“Hey! This is just one, you little shit!” Elmo called out, taking a half-hearted step to chase the boy.

“Never said how many you’d get for fiiiiiive! Ha hahaha!” the boy cried out as he ran. “See ya later, Ellmoooooo!”

Elmo sighed, shrugged, and popped the grubby pill, hoping that despite the kid’s mercenary ways, he had actually sold him speed--albeit at an outrageous price--and not a laxative or something more nefarious.

Elmo marched on, approaching the gray concrete and glass tube of the Upstairs entrance. It was like an inverted middle finger poked down into the ground. It was an act of war, a passive assertion that whatever remained below was without value, fodder to be crushed beneath the mighty thrust of progress.

###

another 'nuther 'nuther piece...

this is from a chapter without a name, really. the title of the document is 'busy machines,' and so that might end up being what it is called. happy sunday!



The machines were busy today. The candidate smiled, watching them from his window, way up high, high in the hotel. They scrambled around on the plaza outside, on the ground. On the ground, they were, and far away from him. They were mindless creatures, intent on their own busy business, on their hopeless tasks. They were far, far below him. He could barely see them, but he liked watching anyway. He watched as they erected colorful tents and hung banners that flapped proudly in the breeze. Others built tiny rows of benches that rose up one past the other, forming a sort of bowl. These faced yet another group of tiny machines that constructed a platform hung with posters and banners and all manner of flapping paper and cloth festooned with red, white and blue. Some of them hung pictures of a man looking proudly off into the middle distance.

The man in the pictures was the candidate, though in his current condition he wouldn’t have been able to recognize himself, even if he had been closer.

He wasn’t sure what they were doing down there, but the little machines made him smile nonetheless. They were so earnest and sweet and full of energetic comings and goings. He wanted so badly to help them, to raise them up, to make them see. Such busy little machines. Such hopeful, blind creatures. When he remembered the many times he had seen them up close, their smiling moon faces and blank adoration, all blending into one mass of machine-crowd--waving their little festive flags, hooting and howling, calling out to him--it made him feel warm inside, protective. The happy machine-crowds were almost enough to make him forget the other ones, the bad machines. For there were also hateful, cold machines that used to hurt him--and maybe still did sometimes. He suspected, but he couldn’t remember. He started to think other thoughts about those ones, the bad ones. Darker, less forgiving thoughts…

Then…soon, as it always did, a warm, gauzy veil descended between his mind and what he had been thinking about. A comforting peace oozed through him as though he had honey for blood. He was elsewhere. And nowhere at the same time. He idly watched the cruel summer light sparkling off the fat river below. He had no idea how blistering hot the sun was; to him it just looked pretty, hypnotizing. That was out there, and he was in here, where it was cool and comfortable.

And so that was what he knew.

He liked watching the big boats grind their slow way down the shimmering, deep-green water, like plump insects plodding along on legs too tiny to be seen beneath their bulk. They were machines too, the boats, good machines, solid machines that went out and did what they were supposed to do. They were lumbering, optimistic machines, straightforward as a golden retriever. They didn’t doubt or question or scheme, they didn’t say one thing and then do another. They simply trudged along their way, downriver or up, and dropped off their load and picked up another one, before heading off to do the same thing again. They didn’t smile to your face and then turn around and whisper secret orders and false stories behind you. You never had to worry about them stabbing you in the back. Those boats…

And then, that thought also slipped easily, too easily down the sinkhole of the candidate’s mind. He felt a fleeting moment of loss, a sadness at something missed, something stolen, and for a moment he felt a red blossoming, a hot feeling like his head was in a molten vise--but then it too dissipated, and was gone. He smiled and blinked wide-eyed at the spectacle outside his window, at the busy, busy world of machines that trundled past on the tiny river and the sidewalks next to it, far below.

The candidate stood naked on the burgundy carpet of the hotel room looking out over the edge of the city. He scratched himself absently and squished the carpet between his toes, heedless of his nudity, as unashamed as an infant. It just didn’t matter to him one way or the other. He had been standing there for two hours or more. Soon the machines would come to prepare him, and he would wear clothes. And that would be fine, too. Neither state mattered to him one bit. He smiled the smile of an idiot or madman, but he was neither, not really.

Not really, and not quite.

He was a tall, solid man of fifty-some years, the small paunch at his middle and tracery of salt among the dark pepper of his neat hair the only indications he had reached middle age. His upper arms and thighs showed cords of muscle yet, betraying the football player he had been in college, despite a life since that had been too soft. The skin of his fine-boned face was mostly smooth, punctuated with piercing, bright blue eyes that were for the moment devoid of anything more complicated than a simple delight at the images that danced on the plaza below him. He had an aquiline jaw and cheekbone structure, the sharp chin of WASP genes--just delicate enough to be almost pretty, just hard enough to still be firmly masculine.

It was the kind of face that middle-aged women in dying marriages found irresistible.

Just now, his face was completely free of worry, smooth as a shark’s skin, simple as blood.

another 'nuther piece...

...of my sci-fi story. This chapter I think is called "Elmo Awakes." Read the first part here.

I’ve got to figure out how to change the alarm settings on that damn thing, Elmo thought. But the news feed didn’t matter anymore--the sounds of rough laughter and two pairs of feet banging down the staircase pounded the final nail into the coffin of Elmo’s sleep. He slid upward into the sludgy pain of yet another hangover, as familiar as slipping on a poison mask, one that was molded perfectly to his face. He squeezed his eyes shut, curled up tighter and groaned a little.

Until someone pounded on his door.

“Elmo! Wake up, man! You late again!”

His bloodshot eyes flew open, filled with an instant rage. Fucking Tre.

Elmo leapt naked from the sour, twisted sheets, tripping on his way out of the tangle and banging his knee on the floor. Cursing, he half-crawled, half-limped to the flimsy boarding-house door like some kind of wounded crab-thing and flung it open in time to see Tre’s bouncing dreadlocks disappear past the landing below, a giggling girl in tow.

“You’d better run, motherfucker!” Elmo croaked before sinking into paroxysms of wet coughing. He groped his way to the wobbly banister and held on for dear life as the coughing consumed him. Once he gathered himself he peered over the edge to see Tre and a grinning, disheveled blond girl peering up at him from two floors down.

“Damn, Elmo, you about to be the most unemployed-ed white man ever in the history of New New Orleans if you don’t move yo’ ass,” Tre said. “Don’t forget I got you that job, boy! And put on some damn clothes! What’s wrong with you?”

The girl giggled and looked up at him frankly.

“Ain’t nothing wrong with me! Come on back up here and I’ll show you,” Elmo growled. Then he blinked and noticed that what little sun slanted in through the filthy skylight above was nearly vertical. “Hey, what time is it?”

“It’s 11:35: do you know where yo’ job is?” Tre shouted as he and the girl crashed their way laughing through the front door and out onto the street.

“Shit,” said Elmo, blinking.

He stepped back into his room, grabbed a cigarette from a crumpled pack and gingerly made his way toward the bathroom at the end of the hall. The burst of adrenaline he had exerted in chasing after Tre was not customary at this stage of his usual hangover program, and it wasn’t sitting well. His head felt like a melon, a big rotting melon. It felt like you could punch your fingers through the soft skin of it and poke around at the putrid brain matter inside, if you should find yourself wanting to do that for some reason.

Elmo lit his cigarette as he peed no-handed with a reasonable measure of accuracy. Not that accuracy mattered at all in the disgusting rooming house bathroom. When he was done he soaked his head in cold water in the sink. As he splashed the tepid, discolored water across the stubble on his face it occurred to him that it nearly matched the length of the stubble on his head.

I should probably shave sometime, he thought.

On the other hand, why shave if he was most likely about to be fired yet again? No need to impress his soon-to-be ex-boss, especially when he was already two hours late.

He sighed heavily, exuding used bourbon fumes. Here we go again, he thought.

The grizzled mug that blinked back at him was 33, but today it looked like it was leaning more toward middle age. He didn’t live his life any differently than he used to when he was 23 -- the only difference now was that hangovers felt significantly worse. More than ten years worse.

He ducked his head in the water and then shook it off as if he were a dog, spattering the filthy sink and mirror. Then he inserted his now-wet cigarette back into his face and dragged soggily on the damp filter before he gave up and flung it into the toilet. He sighed again and headed back toward his room to get dressed. He had to at least try to salvage his job at The Prodigal Sun, even if it was hopeless. It was a shithole restaurant on the lowest levels of Upstairs, just another corporate cardboard cutout, but they paid under the table and he needed the money. This would likely be the third job he had gone through in as many months, given that he was an hour late.

That, plus the fact that he had yet to make it to work on time since he’d been employed there.

It’s not like Elmo went out of his way to fuck things up; fuck-ups just sort of seemed to... happen around him. They gravitated to him as if he were the King of Fuck-Ups and they his loyal minions. Fuck-ups just wanted to be near their Lord, and bask in His glory. Elmo, being a beneficent sovereign, granted them their wishes as often as possible.

another piece...

...of the sci-fi story i'm working on right now.
This is from a chapter titled "Elmo Awakes."



Sleep fled. The muzzy warmth that had been cradling Elmo’s brain like a gentle child holding a baby bunny rabbit receded. In its place a new sensation began to emerge: the child had stuffed the bunny into a garbage disposal.

“And in other news, the Kylie Westerberg case still has police baffled.”

Elmo squeezed his eyes shut and willed the voice to be silent.

“The Bradenton, Florida 17-year-old went missing nearly two weeks ago, during a trip to Key West with friends and family. Witnesses say Kylie was arguing earlier that night with her boyfriend, Max Edlund, heir to the Novus fortune. And while police have questioned Edlund repeatedly, they have yet to announce any arrests.”

The insanely chirpy voice tried to attenuate itself down to a more somber affect, but largely failed. Years of training as a morning news anchor had left the woman with the emotional range of a kindergarten teacher on amphetamines.

His eyes glued shut, his skull showing the first signs of a vicious, pounding pain that had yet to fully reveal itself, Elmo silently prayed for death, or barring that, for the news feed to shut itself off.

His prayers went unanswered.

“Police spokesmen have told us they are also questioning Josh Renfro, another friend of Kylie’s who was seen with her the night of her disappearance.”

The boyfriend did it, Elmo thought, as he jammed a pillow over his head. The boyfriend always did it. Or else the other guy she was fucking. Or both of them. Mystery solved. Now shut up and let me go back to sleep.

“Police have executed a search warrant on the girl’s hotel room, but have not released their findings from that search.

“‘Ah, at this time we, ah, have no new information to give you. We would just request that if anyone can shed new light on this case that they would come forward. Otherwise, please just let us do our jobs so we can find Kylie and get her home.’”

I’ve got to figure out how to change the alarm settings on that damn thing, Elmo thought.

***

Tell me if you wanna hear more, and thanks as always for reading,
kjb

slacker

So, i've been slacking here lately. I have been driving to Denver to rehearse 'And the Winner Is...' and working on learning lines, for one thing. But when it comes to the writing stuff, i have been delving pretty deeply into a sci-fi project i've been toying with for a long time.

The working title is 'Crescent City Blues,' and it's a story set in New Orleans in the near future. Katrina was just the tip of the iceberg; floods keep coming, rendering much of the ground level of the city nigh-uninhabitable. Once 75 percent of the population has fled, corporations seize on the bright idea of rebuilding the city, only doing it above the actual city. Upstairs. A new enclosed mall of a city, an Applebee's version of New Orleans, sterile and exclusive, looms above the streets.



Meanwhile, normal (read: poor) people eke out a living as best they can on the ground.

Here's a small taste:


PRE-PREFACE 2

In a mad swirl of club music, bodies cavorted in and around The Saloon. Dancers gyrated amid lunatic shafts of purple and green light, which spun like schizophrenic fingers poking through the open shutters into the night. The crowd overspilled the bar’s doorway and into the street, howling up into the night, daring ever more outrageous acts from the people on the balcony above. Screaming the universal language of the too-loud club, men and women yelled into one another’s ears, no doubt imparting tidbits of wisdom that would be remembered forever.

Some wore costumes -- superheroes, politicians and movie stars populated the street -- while others wore as little as possible, and continued the process of removing clothing in the oppressive heat. They clutched their drinks even as they casually parted ways with their shirts, and for some, their pants. Unconcerned, glistening with sweat, they bounced along with the thump of the music.

Just upriver, the towering concrete monolith of the Royal Sonesta Hotel and Casino loomed above the proceedings like a disapproving relative, or a shunned dance partner, its wall of desperate neon advertising winking down at the revelers. But no one noticed. Or cared.

That was Upstairs; this was Downstairs.

The Saloon was one of the last places on street level that still did any kind of steady business, although the place worked hard to maintain the feel of an underground club. Even so, such was the pull of the owners that you might occasionally even see a cop patrolling nearby, a rarity Downstairs these days; a near-impossibility after dark. The crowd was made up of the young and the hip, as well as those who wished they were, a free-for-all mélange of white, black, brown, straight, gay, trans and who-knows-what.

This was not where you would be likely to find middle-aged tourists from Indiana. They would be safely ensconced Upstairs, in places like the Royal Sonesta, behind layer upon layer of Plexiglas and locked doors. There, they could enjoy the air-conditioning and perhaps a late buffet at the casino, with a safe view of the city and the river -- and, oh, Harold, just look at the way the lights glimmer on the water! The bars, restaurants and theaters up there offered their own amusements -- albeit of a slightly more demure variety -- and you never had to leave the air-conditioned safety of your concrete cocoon.

Someone once described the so-called culture of Upstairs as being on board a miles-long cruise ship that never dropped anchor.

To Jess, a senior at Ohio State down for the week with her friends Sara and Taylor, Upstairs was about as much fun as going on spring break with your grandparents.

“Oh, yeah, great,” said Jess, earlier that evening when she was trying to talk the others into venturing Downstairs. “Sounds like a blast. We’ll just hang out in the casino and listen to the Frank Sinatra impersonator and hit the sack around, what, 9:30?”

“Jess, it’s not safe down there,” said Taylor. “You know that. You said so yourself.”

“I never said it wasn’t safe; I said you had to be smart if you went down,” Jess replied.

The three of them had come down from Columbus to volunteer for the convention, but Jess had arranged it so they would have a couple extra days to party before their work started in earnest.

“Look, some of the best music and culture in the country is coming out of Downstairs New Orleans right now,” she said. “Old New Orleans is where it’s at, and here we are, at the heart of it! But we’re not in the heart of it -- we’re sitting in a boring-ass hotel bar 300 feet above it!”

Other patrons at the aforementioned boring-ass bar looked up as Jess’ voice rose in volume as well as pitch. The bartender eyed the trio and thought about checking their IDs again.

“It’s like Austin was twenty years ago,” Jess continued, oblivious to the sudden iciness in the room. “And Seattle before that, and Athens before that. I’m telling you, if we spend our entire time here hiding Upstairs, we are going to regret it. What if you had the chance to see the next Sensus, or Flaggship or Stone Impeachment in some little club, before they got huge? What would you give to be able to tell a story like that?”

Jess was very persuasive. Before long the girls were exiting the last doorway onto the street.

It was only Wednesday night, but with the convention coming up, people were ready for a party, the oppressive August heat be damned. There was a strange alchemy that occurred in New Orleans in the summertime. You could spend the entire day doing your best to avoid the heat, flitting from home to store to movie theatre to restaurant, spending as little time as possible outside, all the while seeking the air-conditioning with the desperation of a fish flopping around on the bank of a stream. When the heat was unavoidable, you would feel dragged down, slowed to a crawl, almost ill with the oppressive weight of it, as if it were a slimy, sweaty, living thing that had attached itself to you.

It was The Beast. It felt as if a stealthy water buffalo had taken up residence on your back when you weren’t paying attention.

But when the liquor started flowing and the music started playing, there was a switch that got thrown, a changeover from oppressiveness to release. The Beast, this creature you lugged around with you all day suddenly turned all helpful and friendly-like. He guided you into the funniest, most interesting conversations, he rendered your lame words fascinating and hilarious, and he made you irresistible to the opposite sex. When the booze was flowing there was suddenly something slippery and wonderful and free about the heat. The Beast dug its claws into your ribs and spurred you on, and you happily complied. The heat and the booze combined into permission, translating sweat into drunkenness into freedom into lust.

Suddenly, it was safe to let the animal out.

###