I drove on to New Orleans in good spirits.  When I arrived, I got a job as a janitor        for $5 an hour at Mardi Gras World, situated against the levy in Algiers.  I lived out        of the back of the Cruiser in the parking lot.  Most nights around midnight I saw a          bum with short white hair.  He sat on the short peripheral mound that separated the        parking lot from the levy, writing on a little spiral notepad.  One night I introduced          myself, “I’m Tom.”

 He looked up at me with clear, ice blue eyes, “I’m Pete.” We shook hands.  His            little notebook looked like it was filled with poems.

 “Nice to meet you.”

 “Nice to meet you too.”

 That was the only time we talked, but he was around most midnights.  It seemed            like one day he looked around and didn’t like where he was, picked up and                  walked himself down to the levy.  He didn’t care that I was there, and we didn’t share a sense of camaraderie, but his presence was soothing like another glowing campfire in the wilderness.

   A half-mile down the levy was the ferry dock where I caught rides over the Mississippi into downtown New Orleans.  Right next to it was a little diner where I could only afford French fries.  But that was fine because the French fries were not ordinary.  It was one of those scenarios where the sweaty waitress and enormous chef are not who they appear, but wizards or saints or curators of secret ancient wisdom.  This was clear when I placed one of their French fries in my mouth—salt, salt, salt, oil, oil, oil, hot, hot, hot, a tiny crunch as the crispy outside broke in my teeth, and then the scalding, tasty oil, once trapped, trickled over teeth and tongue and the steam of fluffy white potato jetted out.  But perfection was not enough.  With a dousing of hot sauce in a nondescript bottle, the next fry became something else all together.  It was as if love had become a food and I found spiritual respite, if briefly, in a French fry.  The waitress and chef looked at me with knowing, smirking eyes.  I left that hole-in-the-wall peacefully once or twice a week, the screen door slamming behind me, my hands stained red with hot sauce.

   That week, we had to work ten hours a day to get July 4^th off on Friday.  I was walking around the area and found one of the older guys who worked at Marti Gras World and he invited me to hang out with him and his wife and their friend, which I thought was very kind of him, indeed.  His name was Hal.  We ambled around, waiting for it to get dark and for the fireworks to begin, he getting drunker by the half-hour.  Hal said, “You see that pier there?”

   I looked through some trees and shrubs and saw an old decrepit pier in the water, “Yeah.”

   “Around 1900, a hundred-and-twenty people gathered out on that pier to watch the fireworks on the 4^th of July.  As the fireworks were going, the pier collapsed and ninety people drowned.”

   “Jesus!” 

   “Yup-whole families drowned right there.”  I looked at the truncated pier.

   “Why couldn’t they swim to shore?”

   “In a situation like that people get crazy and don’t know what to do—probably pulled each other down.”

   I heard the creaking and snapping of the wooden planks and pillars mingled with increasingly frantic screams.  I saw the people grabbing and drowning each other in their mad and vain attempts to stay alive, pulling each other down into the darkness.  

Nina,

      Lying in the grass covered

            Rain

            Lying in your birth

            And rebirth

            Living in all momentary stillness

            Movement is movement

            And I died with my lips touching yours

            And something about life…

            I live and you live

                   forever

            Lying in the raindropsgrasssun

            Riding the storm storm storm

            Rain taste tongue

            Rain 

   In the following weeks I played my sax, got kicked off Bourbon Street, wrote motifs for the symphony I was working on for my music degree, played classical guitar, stared at ceiling fans, met artists on acid, beautiful women in posh hotel rooms, Blue Eyes—a black man with clear blue eyes, Willie the Blues Man and jazz artists, watched young mothers beat their children at the laundromat, gave their kids quarters for the gumball machines, mailed letters in the ghetto, walked across a forbidden bridge, rode the ferry back and forth across the river and worked at Marti Gras World changing light bulbs, polishing floors and painting signs.  I was also lent a vacant apartment by my employers, the Kerns, so I was doing all right.  I just sailed along in a state of relative normalcy.  I didn’t suffer too much from the circling dreams and memories and madness.

   In the midst of this, I received a call from my brother, Jake, one morning.  From Reno, he arrived in Algiers that same afternoon and we set out along the levy toward the magic French fry diner when the sky darkened.  I found out for the first time that Jake was petrified of lightning.  He explained in detail how lightening was always at the hull of a storm cloud.  Thunder rumbled.  Warm, thick raindrops landed on our heads and clothes.  Fat lightening came down, and we saw it hit a church antenna a mile away.  Then,

   POW!

   The lightening bolt struck the mast of a boat about fifty feet away from us.  Electricity crackled and ululated about the pole tzzzt!zzzz!tictzzzt! in braided blue threads and we squinted at it with our shoulders hunched.  Jake kept it together long enough to get to the diner.

   We continued across the river for Bourbon Street.  We bounced around here and there for a few hours and ended up in seedy strip club.  Sitting there I overheard a conversation between two of the dancers. One of them was going to dance that night for her first time.  She wanted to back out.

   “I don’t think I can do it.”

   “Yes you can Charlene…”

   “No, I don’t want to…”

   “Just do it the first time and then it gets easier-you can do it, it’s easy.”

   “No…”

   I looked at her pretty face and her long dark hair and then at her costumed body.  Her shoulders were slightly wrapped around her, and her arms crossed over her breasts, keeping her safe from the probing eyes of the sad male constituents, mostly middle-management types with nice suites, some who looked like they were on a mass collective business trip from Hong Kong or Tokyo.  The girl’s face was sad, reluctant and translucent.  In it I could see memories of the last year up to this point in an ongoing loop.  They scintillated from her eyes onto the room like a movie projector.  The images moved on the walls and drinks and customers’ faces and clothes and on floors, stages and dancers.  They were rendered blobs of light and shadow without definition.  I think I was the only one who saw the tiny pictures clicking by on her eyes like the little windows the projectors shine through at the theater.

   The rest of the night was very blurry but we ended up in a decent hotel room that Jake paid for.  We looked for stuff to do and walked to the aquarium on the boardwalk.  We watched young manta rays swim endlessly in circles with tragic intelligence and grief. 

   “They know they’re in there,” I said.

   “I know.  You can tell.  It’s sad.”

   My brother’s Catholic, so we walked from the aquarium to mass at a grand cathedral. I always imagined Paul Simon’s Richard Cory putting the bullet in his head on the sidewalk across the street.  The mass was boring.  A couple hours later, Jake flew home and I was alone again.

   I returned to work the next day.  That morning I said hi to the beautiful Asian artist I wished would invite me to do something.  “They just found a guy who hung himself,” she said.

   “Where?”

   “Right out back.”

   “Jesus. Have you seen him, yet?”

   “No, I just found out.  Some people found him up there about 10 minutes ago.  Do you want to go look at him with me?”

   I hesitated.  “Yeah, let’s go.”

   We walked through the long grass up the hill behind the art studio.  He was hanging from a rope tied to the top of tube-shaped ladder.  He was wearing a backpack bulging with books to make sure he died.  His broken neck bulged under his skin like his backpack.  His ears and the side of his head were purple.  He didn’t move.  You could tell he wasn’t more than fifteen or sixteen years old.

   “Did someone call the paramedics?”

   “They’re on their way.”

   There were murmurs of conversation behind me.

   “When’dja find ‘im?”

   “About 15 or 20 minutes ago.  They heard it happen,” Warren, my boss and head fixit man, nodded to a group of burned out looking hippies sitting on dirty blanket.

   “Do you know him?”

   “Naw.”

   “Should we get him down?”

   “I aint touchin’ im,” Warren said. 

   I thought about how the paramedics or police or firemen would have to touch him to pull him up out of the ladder and put him on a gurney, how his cooling body would feel on their squeezing fingers and hands, how he would sag like a bag of dough, and they would see his face purple and his swollen tongue and eyelids.

   “Do you think he’s still alive?” I asked.

   “I donno-” Warren said.  And still I just stood there.  I didn’t even think to get him down.  We stayed for a few minutes and walked back to work.

   Back at work Warren said, “Happens all the time around here.”

   “All the time?”

   “Well, not people hangin themselves, but the bums aint got no food so they go steal somethin from one of these houses, then the niggers kill em and throw em in the river.”

   “That happens all the time?”

   “Eh, few times a year,” he shook the extra water off his hands and dried them.

 During lunch break I walked to the French fry place where I thought how hot it was that day.  It was hot the day before at lunch and I drank a cold Coke in a glass bottle.  I wondered if that kid drank a Coke the same time I did.

[you can purchase a copy of this book from https://www.createspace.com/3348649]