St. Roch Blues: A storm rages in New Orleans

Chapter VIII

[Names have been changed]

“I love you,” I whispered. Perched on my chest, Ava repeated the words back to me.

A little over a week later, she broke us up to be with someone else.

This story is, as all of them are, more complex, but in the next weeks, as I obsessively replayed the movie in my mind, these were the only two plot points that mattered.

We met in Chicago when we were both in long-term relationships. Like my own relationship at the time, Ava’s was perpetually rocky, and so we confided in one another about the circumstances of our dissatisfaction, as friends.

Then she visited me two summers later. Newly single, she and another friend, Nadie, came to explore Seattle, beauties sans commitments. On the first night of their visit, having given them my bedroom for their stay, I was preparing to sleep on the couch when Ava came into the living room, bent over, and kissed me on the lips.

I’d never had a woman make the first move before and it caught me quite by surprise. The following day was spent exchanging furtive looks until that night, with Nadie gone to bed, Ava once again came to me. A couple days later, the two of them returned to Chicago and that was to be the end of it.

Do Not

The Air

New Orleans is far and away the most idiosyncratic city of all I’ve lived in, a village from the past thrust haphazardly into the future, with a personality so distinct that, at times, it could feel like a foreign country. It was exhilarating, but also wearying.

I avoided Hurricane Isaac by three days, but not the damage. Almost all of New Orleans outside the economic hub of the French Quarter was without power. With temperatures in the 90s and humidity thick as taffy, I sweated through my first weekend, unable to sleep, crushed by the atmosphere.

Like many of the inhabitants of New Orleans, my new roommate, Donatella, was not locally grown but had nonetheless embraced the city as her one true home. She did her best to give me a proper welcome, greeting me with a shot of vodka the moment I stepped out of the taxi before bar hopping me to the French Quarter. Insistent air conditioners whirled in the Quarter, but there was no escaping the  oppressive heat.

Southern DecadenceI wasn’t suffering alone. The entire city was on edge, even with Southern Decadence providing a festive aura of greased up, naked men dancing in the streets. My first night, I tagged along with Donatella who was tending bar at the AllWays Lounge, a home and performance space for the proud mutants and outsiders of New Orleans. Nudity and liquor were flowing, but the move and the heat had melted my energy.

“One second,” Donatella commanded after I told her I was calling it a night. Reaching under the counter and into her bag, she came back up wearing her radiant, incorruptible smile and holding out a box cutter. “Take this. Just in case.” The darkened St. Roch neighborhood was no place to walk without protection, especially on a roiling September night.

The Clouds

As had been the case with some of my previous moves, a budding romance distracted me from the difficulties of adjusting to a new locale. This year, it was Ava.

Ever since Seattle, we’d been exchanging daily texts and emails, with plans for her to visit in October. Built upon a three-year friendship, our relationship blossomed quickly. In discussing the future, it was suggested that she move to New York City where she could further her fashion career. It meant more time apart, but after seven years of travel, two didn’t seem so long. To have a beautiful woman waiting at the finish line felt like a perfect, Hollywood ending.

Meanwhile, even though my savings went a long way in New Orleans’ cheap economy, I wasn’t taking any chances. I accepted the first job offer I received, working at one of New Orleans’ most mismanaged 4-Star restaurants. The nightmare conditions were due almost entirely to the GM, a ladder climbing egotist who ruled disinterestedly as the restaurant’s sommelier, yet rarely made appearances in the presence of a customer.

That job taught me that New Orleans rewarded free-spiritedness and penalized a work ethic. As the year progressed, I naively believed I’d be rewarded for dependability, but instead, my coworkers enjoyed their holidays off while I served an empty dining room. I should’ve heeded Donatella’s warnings. She encouraged me to look for less regimented employment in the essentially citywide, gig economy. Alas.

The Wind

I suffered through the heat until it broke in October. The city came alive again as it prepared for its second favorite holiday, Halloween, AKA warm-up for Mardi Gras. I explored the city with my roommate, but the party generally came to my door. Donatella’s irresistible personality drew in everyone, and so our apartment was a hive of varied and interesting strangers blowing through. Almost literally.

St Roch AvDonatella had sold me on the “shotgun”-style house, a floor plan that abandons hallways and fourth walls for an unbroken passage from front door to back. In my roommate’s perspective, this nurtured a free-flowing, open, and creative living environment. Fine in theory, but in practice it meant no privacy.

My room was the only route to the kitchen from Donatella’s room. I erected a partition out of thick sheets, but even with flimsy doors between our separate spaces, all barriers were essentially ornamental. Sound carried indiscriminately. With Donatella being a fully realized, independent, and carnal woman, I went to sleep many nights with headphones affixed to my ears.

Work drained my spirit and home didn’t provide the rejuvenating solitude I needed after spending the day with people. New Orleans was exhausting me, and not in the fun way.

For this reason, Ava’s daily messages and looming visit were my sole source of restoration in those early months. When she finally did arrive at the end of October, we had the kind of sublime reunion so rarely enjoyed by long-distance lovers. Seeing New Orleans – its towering churches, the Museum of Art, the street performers – with Ava’s fresh eyes made the city beautiful. There was no awkward acclimation period, no time wasted on rediscovering our groove. Laying together after reacquainting our bodies, we spoke of our love.

But she couldn’t stay. On my own again, real life nullified the highs of our romantic weekend,  each day proving anew that the Big Easy cared nothing for my worsening mental state. My daily notes to Ava grew increasingly despondent, and so, when in early November she told me she couldn’t keep the relationship going, a part of me expected it.

The Trinity (Cropped)

The Storm

I couldn’t even reel in private. Donatella walked into my “room” just as I hung up with Ava. She was kind enough to offer a comforting hug and invite me out to drown my sorrows in booze. Strangely, that night I turned down her invitation.

Depression was overwhelming my entire being. I knew it was too much to count on Ava to shoulder my burden, so while the breakup devastated me, I understood. Until, that is, the inevitable Facebook post of Ava with her new boyfriend some weeks later. Now there was an acute sense of rejection to go with my loss.

For a time, Donatella was an unbelievably gracious source of comfort. When I had to work from 9 am to 11 pm on Thanksgiving – the one holiday I celebrate – she greeted me upon my return with a bear hug and a plate of leftovers. She then escorted me out for drinks and lively karaoke performances (her, not me).

After tiring of Kajun’s Pub, she used her key to let us into the closed Allways Lounge. Under a soft, orange glow, we sat together at the empty bar’s piano, shoulder to shoulder, neither one of us knowing what we were doing, and riffed for hours. From our staccato notes emerged restorative, shattered music. I felt weightless for the first time in months.

We walked home with the rising sun, raw with emotions. That night I’d seen the darkness in Donatella that she mostly covered by emitting light like a strobe. She opened up about a history of abuse, a wound still tender, both from the pain she had endured and the guilt she felt for another victim left behind. Her heavy and intimate confession underlined a growing platonic affection between us more substantial than anything I’d had with Ava.

Naturally, it didn’t last.

The Wasteland

The Devastation

Years of itinerancy had taken their toll. I was unable to make the simplest human connections knowing that in a short time I’d be gone, a barely remembered name popping up in a newsfeed. People were temporary and I was a ghost. Ava’s disappearance had been particularly crushing; for a brief time, I’d fooled myself into believing in her permanence.

Amplifying this instability were the unending guests passing through our doors. Donatella signed us up to host  couch surfers. I’d wake up to unknown out-of-towners on the couch; sometimes they were bar patrons she’d met the night before who’d taken her up on an offer of a place to crash. If I had had a door on my room, I might have found the rotating cast of strangers vaguely endearing.

The depression would not relent. Under a confluence of factors, no one cause, my mind had become a tempest, volatile, erratic, boiling over one moment in manic rage, then leaving me hollow and weeping on my floor. I couldn’t even feel in possession of my own emotions.

It’s easier, now, to accept why Donatella lost patience, but at the time it was just one more battlefront, our once close friendship degenerated into screaming matches. It was a cruel irony that a woman who welcomed everyone and readily accepted any sexual, gender, or racial identity, found my illness so intolerable. Perhaps it just hit too close to home.

And yet, no one hates a person with depression more than the person themselves.

In December, distraught over everything – my job, my home, my broken heart, myself – I resolved to end it. Suicide had always hovered in the back of my mind, a personal nuclear option, but now, I woke up and went to sleep contemplating it. I made a plan: At month’s end, I’d throw myself off of the Crescent City Connection into the Mississippi River. The thought of sinking brought me rare moments of peace.

I suppose I gave myself a buffer, in part, because my brain goes through cycles and I knew there was a possibility I could still rise out of stark misery. Instead, each day, I felt worse. I became a practical mute at work and stayed offline, falling further into isolation. When no one seemed to notice, I took that as confirmation of my worthlessness, justification for my choice.

Marianne noticed.

On an evening in mid-December, my D.C. friend from college appeared on the caller ID. Surprised, I almost let it go to voicemail, but succumbed to curiosity.

“Hey,” she said in her hesitant, unassuming way. “Hadn’t seen you post lately, thought I’d check how things were going with you.” Without hyperbole: Marianne saved my life that night.

I didn’t admit to her what I planned to do, probably attempted to sound lighthearted and casual, but after we talked briefly, I hung up and bawled. For once, the tears brought relief. Such a simple act; Gomorrah spared for the benevolence of one friend.

Life on the Bayou

Clear Skies, Again

Life didn’t immediately improve. Climbing out of the depths is a process.

My rift with Donatella grew apace and after five months, I relocated to a new apartment in Mid-City with co-workers. The job remained a drudge, but an incredibly lucrative one. I earned more money serving the well-heeled of New Orleans than I’ve ever made at any other job. I could pay to see a show or buy a necessity without checking my bank account. I reached my savings goal so easily that I gleefully quit my job a month and a half early.

Despite my mental state, NOLA gave me extraordinary, one-of-a-kind experiences: waking up early on Fat Tuesday to drink Irish coffee in a crowd of colorful costumes on Frenchmen Street; sinking into mud while watching Fleetwood Mac at Jazz Fest; dancing upstairs at Blue Nile and being kissed by a stranger; feeling the city’s incomparable rhythms pulsing from every street corner. Hell, even the graphic gay porn playing on the TVs upstairs at Phoenix Bar was delightful in its own way.

Cracked by Mother Nature and enshrined by ineffectual governance, the city’s splintered infrastructure can’t hide that underneath it all, NOLA and her people are big-hearted and dynamic. Still, like that friend who always knows where the party’s at, sometimes you’re just not in the mood to answer her call.

Which is to say, I’d take any opportunity to visit New Orleans; I’ll just never live there again.

In the summer, New Orleans’s suffocating heat and humidity returned, but planning for Boston invigorated me. After only one more year, I would finally arrive in the Promised Land.

 

 

Keep Reading: Chapter IX – Boston

Making it through: Surviving the Great Recession on opioids and vodka

Chapter IV

[Note: The names, they are a-changin’.]

The most scenic route to San Francisco from Orange County is the 101: long stretches of coastal views and cool, dry air whipping through your windows. For our cross state move, Selene and I drove the 5 through the desert.

The trip started with a fight over a flimsy IKEA mattress that refused to stay strapped to the roof of her Jeep. Selene argued for dumping the thing, but I was determined to get that slab of hay to our new home even if I had to ride on top of it. Ultimately, we dumped it by a gas station dumpster just outside L.A.

So began Year 4.

This would be Selene’s first time living away from her parents.

Relocating every year bred routine: rent an apartment, explore the neighborhood, find a job. For Selene, though – joining me despite the vehement objections of her father (strangely immune to my charms) – this relocation upended her entire existence. In addition to her family, she was leaving behind a job, college, and her college boyfriend – her entire life up until that point – to be with me as I pursued my dream; a dream, mind you, without a raison d’être.

We’d gone in with two other couples for a lease in the unfashionable Portola neighborhood of southeast San Francisco. Though the predominantly Asian neighborhood is at a remove from the more celebrated and urban areas (or, at least, was back then), wherever you find yourself in the city’s 49 square miles, you’re never far from some activity.

We arrived under the red glow of the gloaming. Greeting us at the Jeep were Ann and Don, he an aspiring stand-up from Australia, and she the manager of a clothing boutique. Inside were Samantha and Glen, an earthy, vegan couple who, like Selene and myself, were brand new transplants to San Francisco. After first impressions, I expected to have more in common with Ann and Don, but they’d soon demolish that assumption.

With greetings out of the way, Selene and I unloaded our belongings and called it a night. In echoes of my first night in Philadelphia, all we had to sleep on was a pile of blankets.

Exhausted, Selene still couldn’t sleep. The alien surroundings mixed with a motorcycle engine revving belligerently beneath our window had her on edge. I offered to go out and say something to the cyclist, but Selene insisted I stay with her. I was her anchor to the familiar, and would be for some time. I had every intent of staying awake until Selene fell asleep, but eventually I dozed off. She never did.

Our first San Francisco morning, Selene was clearly operating on frayed nerves. I suggested a walk to familiarize her with the neighborhood so the strangeness might dissipate.

She appeared to have calmed some by the time we came across a discarded mattress a few blocks from our apartment. We hauled the find back to our place, and even though we didn’t have the right size bed frame, just having a real mattress to sleep on felt like a victory. Laying sheets down, we crawled into one another’s arms. For a moment, everything felt settled.

The moment was brief.

“Are you okay?” I already knew the answer. I could feel Selene crying into my chest, her body taut as a violin string.

“I can’t do this.”

“What do you mean?”

“I can’t stay here.”

Since our arrival, her anxiety had only grown worse. I attempted to convince her to stay and give San Francisco a chance, to trust that in time she would acclimate. I knew well the unease of unfamiliar territory. My best efforts weren’t enough, though. Even as I begged her to reconsider, she gathered her things and headed to the Jeep.

Out on the street, I tried every last arrow in my quiver to change Selene’s mind. For an instant, I thought I might have succeeded when she slid back out of the driver’s seat. But it was only to give me a tearful, trembling goodbye.

Another woman driving away.

Selene didn’t answer her phone while on the road, so I called Kate, a mutual friend, and filled her in. Kate had worked with us at the bookstore in Costa Mesa and had been privy to every development in our romance from the beginning. Sometimes she seemed as invested in Selene and my relationship as we were.

Kate leapt into action. Throughout the next week, she worked on persuading Selene to give San Francisco another shot. Sometimes, Selene and I would talk by phone, but with 400 miles between us, it was up to Kate to act as our mediator.

Alone again, I had little else to do but wander San Francisco. One afternoon, having stepped into a bookstore, a title caught my eye: Stuff White People Like. Absentmindedly flipping through the pages of the book, one entry stuck out: “Difficult Breakups.” Touché, hipsters, touché. Under the circumstances, the humor was a bit lost on me.

Day by day, Kate chipped away at Selene’s doubts. Finally, Selene called and we discussed what it would take for her to feel comfortable in the city. I vowed to spend all day, every day with her until she felt at home. We would go to shows, take in the sights, have our bohemian, San Francisco romance.

Meanwhile, Selene was remembering why she had gone with me in the first place: her boredom in Orange County, the lack of ambition she felt there, her desire to see more. She was primed to travel. Would she take the risk?

A week after I had helplessly watched her drive away, Selene returned.

It might have been the biggest mistake of her life.

September 2008

It’s hard to express just how disastrously those first months in San Francisco went for us, but consider: We moved to one of the priciest cities in the world at a moment in time that economists have identified as the nadir of the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression. So, not ideal.

Up until that point, it had never taken me more than a month to find work. In San Francisco, I went without employment until January of 2009. Selene had better luck, landing a gig with the San Francisco Symphony, selling tickets on commission. Bafflingly, the middle of a recession is not the best time to try to hawk tickets to the opera.

And then there was Ann and Don, the Platonic ideal of horrendous roommates. Don, the Australian comedian with an allergy to jokes, didn’t have a visa to work and so spent his days lounging on the couch in his underwear. He might have pulled off the charming layabout cliché if he weren’t such an unrepentant piece of shit. Verbally abusive towards Ann, he berated her for her cooking (though she worked all day, she made his dinner every night) and could be heard yelling at her behind their closed door almost daily.

Ann, who could be perplexingly chipper and assertive with the group, confided her grimmer truths to Samantha: she was pregnant and hoped to keep it, but Don was demanding she abort or he’d leave her. Having furthermore admitted a penchant for finding (nay, seeking) abusive relationships, there was little question which decision Ann would ultimately make. One weekend, the couple disappeared without announcement; when they returned, the matter was closed.

Samantha, Glen, Selene, and I resolved that they had to leave. Best case scenario, Don might be forced to return to Australia and would simply ditch Ann. Since they were persistently behind on the rent and owed Samantha and Glen money, their protestations garnered little sympathy. Still, Ann knew there was only one person responsible for their ousting: me.

Cornering me in the kitchen one afternoon, she unloaded, arguing that she and Don only fought because of my sinister presence. I, it turned out, was the real corrosive element in the household. More stunned than angry, my bemused expression must have rubbed her the wrong way because suddenly she reared back, snatched a spoon from the counter, and flung it at my face. Thankfully, her aim was as poor as her taste in men.

In the midst of that drama, Selene and I had our dwindling finances to worry about. We rarely went out. Instead of drinking cheap whiskey, I settled for cheaper vodka (sacrifices had to be made). We did manage a pleasant New Year’s Eve out when an elderly queer gentleman at the bar took a shining to me and bought us drinks all night in exchange for the occasional ass grab. Worth it.

As our poverty worsened, I grew convinced that my project would become a causality of the recession. The stress dissolved our bound like acid; Selene and I existed in a perpetual cycle of fighting and reconciliation.

In November, Samantha alerted me to a two-week medical study that paid $2,100. I promptly signed up. It was a drug trial. I was administered two different drugs: the first was a potent opioid, while the second was supposed to nullify the narcotic effects of the first in an effort to quell withdrawal symptoms. Either the drug worked or I was on a placebo, because the only effects I felt were constipation.

For the length of the study, I was sequestered on a single floor of the hospital, leaving Selene behind two months after promising to be by her side through everything. She was on her own, and she was fine.

Home sweet home

When I left the hospital – practically rich – Ann and Don were gone.

Shortly afterwards, we received news that Selene’s great-grandfather had passed. Driving down to Orange County to attend the funeral, we had no choice but to stay with her parents where I was not a popular guest. Still, aside for a few pointed remarks about my joblessness, her father was generally civil.

Preparing to leave, I carried our bags to the Jeep. With Selene in the house, her father stood on the driveway, drinking a beer.

“Must feel good to be the man for once,” he called out. We didn’t speak another word to each other.

(At this time, I was also dealing with excruciating pain: my wisdom teeth were coming in, but jobless and without insurance, I had to live with it.)

In December, a charming young woman named Nicki moved in with her kitten, ushering in a quiet, calm breath of fresh air. Our living dynamic was now peaceful. The five housemates spent many nights playing board games or watching movies together.

In January, I interviewed for a management position at the locally owned Books, Inc. I had interviewed for this exact same position when I first arrived in the city, but never received a call back. That was 2008; in the new year, the store manager hired me essentially on the spot. After five months adrift, we found land.

Then Nicki’s breathing problems began. We discovered moist, black mold growing in almost every room of the apartment. At first, we only noticed dark spots in the middle of the walls, but upon investigation, we uncovered thick sheets of growth behind our bookshelves and dressers. Our attempts to wipe it away were futile: the apartment was a lost cause.

Leaving behind our friends – comrades in arms, by this point – Selene and I moved to Outer Richmond, a short walk from the beach. We had been in San Francisco for six months.

After half a year of constant, roiling turmoil, our lives were stabilizing. The new apartment was clean and the new roommates were boring, but in a good way. Selene, adapted to her new life, worked as a bank teller. We could afford the occasional date night, usually Mexican food and margaritas at a corporate chain followed by a film at the indie cinema. We were making it work; we worked.

But there’s no such thing as status quo in my life.

Year 5 was on the horizon.

Keep reading: Chapter V – Chicago

Romance in Paradise

                Boys and girls in time together, like a dance, but
nothing so intimate, just sex
Angry at the world and capable of caustic remarks ever as precise as the piston punches of that fatherly embrace
Nothing so dramatic; White America still believes in the literary anti-hero
A figure in the distance, a romantic; a safe place
Kisses come and go, but bruises are forever
The details are hazy, but a Bible was involved, and swearing, and a loose interpretation of the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the glass and a bottle
Leave it!
Sons want to love their mothers and daughters want so very much to be those mothers, only,
thinner, and not so beaten down
by life
It’s in between gasps that we learn to love

White America still believes in the Gnostic anti-hero, but
the details are hazy

                              And Black America –

Well, I know almost nothing about Black America