Equipment: The iPad I bought for a sales job I failed at, Bluetooth keyboard, WiFi connection to my phone as a hotspot, and coffee table littered with ancient useless remotes for the stereo and TV I’m never going to use.
Location: On the floor next to said coffee table, in an apartment in a 170-year-old building on the French Quarter side of Esplanade half a block down from Rampart.
Condition: Headache but not buzzed, melancholy but not depressed, tired but not ready to pack it in. The IPA I found in the fridge is terrible and I won’t be opening a second can (I don’t like IPAs). I’m a little sad from the memories that flood in from previous visits. I’m tired because I didn’t sleep much before the 8-hour travel to get here and one night’s sleep didn’t fix me (BMan experience notwithstanding — I was younger then, not even yet in my 60s).
My brother and his partner acquired this apartment in 1991. They rented it out while they lived in L.A. and then used it when they moved to New Orleans. When they got a second home in the Garden District they kept this one. I stayed in it with my family in 2000 when we brought the kids to Mardi Gras. I stayed in it when my brother’s partner died and there was a memorial celebration. I stayed in it when I brought a ladyfriend to NOLA on several occasions, Those are the occasions I’m still processing.
Get over it, yeah, I hear you (not you, I mean the voices in my head). We broke up almost four years ago. Yeah, well, when she got married last week I found I hadn’t entirely let go. The screaming was a clue. So now I’m here in the room and the city where we made incomparable memories so of course I have to sit with it a bit. Not necessarily write about it. But goddam. I’m here. What else am I going to write about?
This city has a really good WWII museum. I got my mother a wheelchair and pushed her around. It’s a very well-done museum (I’m not here to write a review) but probably the best thing was going through it with someone who remembers WWII. She remembers hearing about the defeat of Poland around her 12th birthday, heard FDR’s famous Dec 7 speech on a radio at school, did her time watching the skies for enemy planes (which were not very numerous over southern Solano County), etc.
My brother has an interesting house. His partner was born into money and became a music professor at UCLA as well as a contemporary classical composer and a scholar of jazz. He passed and I guess his daughters didn’t want much of his stuff. Consequently the house is full of books and recordings and quality furniture, and if you look under the clutter you may find a harpsichord or a concert grand piano or a three-manual organ connected to huge wall speakers. I poked around a bookshelf and found some bound Shakespeare plays that were printed in 1747. There’s also a black cat named Salem. Our mother is staying in the spare bedroom. I’m at the apartment as an alternative to the couch.
Nothing much has been done to the apartment for about twenty years so there are still shelves of VHS tapes and long-expired medications and jazz posters that may actually be worth something by now. Being as for a time this was the home of a gay couple in New Orleans in the 1990s I’m not likely to look at what’s on the unlabeled video tapes. There is a small organ, though, and seven-foot-tall windows under twelve-foot ceilings, and dust, a fair amount of dust.
Tomorrow we meet for lunch with a gay men’s group my brother has joined. It’s given him an actual social life and it was my mother who wanted to come out and meet them. She worries about him (parents never stop) and I think wants to see for herself that he’s okay. Next day, Turkey Day, I think he’s making jambalaya. Day after that we have a Zoom meeting with extended family, all thirteen of us, spread around three western states plus Louisiana. Day after that, return home.
Tomorrow morning I’ll walk from here to the restaurant. It’s on the other side of the Quarter and will be a pleasant stroll. We’ll then do whatever in the afternoon but tomorrow night late I’m thinking to see what goes on in the Vieux Carré the night before Thanksgiving. Like Xmas Eve, it can be one of those nights when the disconnected seek connection, and people who have had to sever family ties decide not to be alone. I only want to get away from the usual and soak up the atmosphere. And take pictures. I always take pictures.
When I was in the deepest part of the pit I thought if I lost everything I might just move to New Orleans, get a job pouring coffee, live in this apartment, and write my stories. It sounds almost exactly like what I wanted to do when I was in high school. However, I was being dramatic and in fact didn’t lose anything important and am now doing fine and am not interested in living here. I’d love to visit for an extended time and do research of various kinds, but since that’s not an option I’m happy to stay where I am and just come down here on occasion.
I’ve been scribbling long enough and I still haven’t choked down that beer but it’s time to stop pretending I have anything to say.
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