Oh New Orleans,

what a town you were...

An article published in this morning's NYT quoted a guy who lives in my neighborhood who had only a foot of water in his house. That suggests I might still have something to salvage and my cat might still be hanging on. But I don't know what time he was interviewed. I've also read that the water is getting deeper, not going down.

Tulane's administration has effectively disappeared. That's my ghetto Wal-Mart getting looted. It's hard to feel too bad about that, but the news of hundreds of stolen guns is pretty scary. I also heard a radio report about a hostage crisis at the Orleans Parish Prison, though I haven't seen that reported elsewhere.

I'm so grateful that I got out.

I'm okay, but...

Thanks to everyone who has been trying to contact me to make sure I'm okay. I spent the last two days in Memphis with an old friend and we actually had a pretty good time, until the news started to get worse. Now that it's apparent that I wont be able to go back for awhile, I'm on my way to St. Louis to stay with my parents. Hank is fine. He's being remarkably well-behaved. Poor Miss P, though, I let myself get talked into leaving her behind.

The news is really scary. I'm sitting in the Barnes & Noble in Cape Girardeau, MO trying not to cry. Yesterday it seemed like the city had dodged the worst of it, but the situation is getting worse. The flooding is getting deeper, my house is almost certainly at least partially underwater, looting is apparently out of control and martial law has been imposed, and I can't get in touch with anyone with a 504 exchange. Most of the people I know got out, but I'm worried about my landlady and the old lady next door. I'm worried about all of us. I've heard that the people sheltered in the Superdome are being evacuated since the roof is collapsing.

I didn't take much with me, and I probably have lost what I left behind. I really loved that house, too. I don't know what's going to happen with school. I'm bereft and adrift. But I'm still breathing air, and that's the most important thing.

A miraculous event occurs

A certain wonderful person is LENDING ME A CAR so that I can evacuate with my dog tonight. Even though she knows Hank and what he smells like.

So, we are leaving for Memphis within the hour.

I hope all the good people in New Orleans get through this intact.

Only in New Orleans

We're about to get drowned by the big one, and here comes a brass band parade down my street. It's the Krewe of OAK parade. I love this town. I hate this town.

I went out to watch it go by and had a talk with my neighbor, who had a slightly calming influence on me. He's a local boy, and he's leaving tomorrow afternoon, but only to go to his folks' house out in Laplace. If the storm turns out to be less severe than expected, he'll come right back. If I'm forced to leave Hank behind, he (my neighbor) will at least know he's there and check up on him when he gets back.

The old lady on the other side is staying. She always stays. Her kids come over and board up her windows for her.

I called J in Memphis and he'd be happy to put me up. I had a potential dog-friendly ride to Memphis but now I can't get in touch with the driver. Miss S decided she's going to South Carolina. Her gig is almost over. AD and the caravan are going to Lafayette. The Hotel Monaco is booked.

Fuck.

I took a nap and woke up, checked the new forecast and had a nervous breakdown. I'm leaving, whether with a friend of AD or with Miss S or whomever, and I'm sorry to say with or without Hank.

I feel horrible, horrible, horrible about this. But I can't stay. They're telling us this is the worst-case scenario.

Oh the irony, what's on my to-do list for next week? Get renter's insurance. Fuck.

I'm a wreck and that's the truth. I'm packing and getting out of here with whoever will take me.

Spooky

WTUL just signed off the air.

Miss S called on the way to her catering gig, feeling panicky.

Her neighor with a bunch of pets is staying. Maybe they can be talked into babysitting Hank and I will flee with Miss S in the morning. But she's thinking maybe she will stay, and it seems probable I will too.

The house is old and has survived Betsy and Camille and all the bad storms of the past. Probably the house will shake in the wind and the power will go off and stay off for a few days and the streets will be underwater, but that will be the worst of it. If I understand correctly, it's not coming from the direction it would have to if if it were to fill the bowl and be the big one that leaves the city under water for six months. I hope not, anyway.

Someone suggested I go check into the Hotel Monaco downtown, which accepts pets. Then I'd be with other people, and up on a higher floor, and hotels have generators that should keep it powered when Entergy gets knocked out. Maybe. We'll see.

I've written a lot about how I'm a loner and an introvert and not cut out for a standard relationship, and that's all true. But I won't lie: right now I wish I had a boyfriend, a capable boyfriend (with a gun and an ax and a pirogue...) who would either get me out of here or stay with me through this thing.

Get me out of here

Law school is hard. Suprise? The first week was relentless. I really like it, I like all my classes and I have great professors. I knew it was going to be a lot of work, it was just a shock to the system--one day I'm in lazy unemployed goofing-off mode and the next day I'm studying 12 hours a day.

Yesterday classes were over by noon. And all the checks I've been waiting on arrived in the last few days. So I blew off studying, and went shopping on Magazine Street for sneakers and bras and jeans. In the evening I took Miss S out for a belated birthday dinner at Ralph's on the Park (yum). Then we went to the Circle Bar to see Egg Yolk Jubilee. I drank a little to much--for me almost anything is too much. I didn't sleep well and woke up too early, cranky and worried about how I was going to focus on all the reading I had to do.

And then the news announcer on the radio told us that this hurricane had us in its crosshairs.

I logged into my email and read that classes have been cancelled till Thursday. The school usually dicks around a bit before making up their minds about shutting down, so that seems a sign that this is serious.

If I had a car, I would have packed it up and left this morning. But I don't have a car, and I do have Hank.

AD is organizing a caravan of cars to (probably) Lafayette that I could get a space in. But they may or may not be able to take Hank. Also, they're not leaving till tonight because they're waiting for P to fly in from Portland! If I were in Portland I would stay there. Or I could leave with Miss S, but I can't take Hank with her because her cat would have a stroke. Also, she can't leave till tomorrow morning because she has to work tonight catering a party! What the fuck are these people thinking by not cancelling? I have another possible dog-friendly ride to Memphis but I don't know the parties very well at all and they're also not leaving till the morning.

The contraflow has already started. The highways are already full. I'm afraid that if you leave tomorrow traffic will be so slow that you'll be sitting on the highway when the storm hits. If I'm going to be here for it, I'd rather be in my house.

I went to Langenstein's this morning and got some groceries. It's hard to know what to get. If I'm staying, I should go back and get more groceries and some dogfood and a flashlight since I lost mine in the move.

If anyone reading this is in New Orleans and you're evacuating tonight and you can take a girl and a dog and cat, please get in touch. I've got money and I can leave on short notice. I gave the dog a bath this afternoon so he won't stink up your car too bad, though he will deposit some hair and slobber. But I'll buy you an industrial size jug of Febreeze.

This sucks.

Never the same

I'm typing up my notes and listening to (adorable old fart) Billy Delle's Records from the Crypt show. He gave a little soliloquy about the strippers on Bourbon Street in the 1960s, with their "ambidextrous" breasts, etc. "Bourbon Street will never be the same," he said in conclusion. "Nor will I."

Am I wrecking my life or saving it?

My block as a writer doesn't have anything to do with a lack of skill with words, or an appetite for them, but rather with a chronic vagueness or uncertainty about what to do with them.

I think my deepest, although perhaps most foolish, motivation for going to law school is that I feel it will force me into exactitude and rigor and certainty--maybe not certainty about the answers, but certainty about what the questions are.

I'm prepared for tomorrow's classes and halfway prepared for the next day's. I think I'm going to like my criminal law class with the professor I mentioned earlier. He assigned us the standard textbook, but also required a packet he'd put together of alternative cases and articles about the insanely high incarceration rate in the United States and other such rabble-rousing material. My impression is he's a tough-minded old-school lefty of the rumbling proletariat school (with further training at Harvard and Georgetown.)

I need to be around professors like that to help keep me from losing focus and wandering astray, to serve as a constant example and reminder that there are viable alternative career paths open to me.

Life passes so quickly and I can't help but question my decision to invest so much of what I have so little of in reading and analyzing legal cases. It could be worthwhile--I wouldn't be doing it if I didn't think so--but it could also be a trap.

Oh, I've been worrying on this one for awhile. But now it's informed by the beginning of the experience of the reality of the thing. Law school.

There are ways it could kill your creativity, all that cutting away of all but the legally relevant facts. Not to mention the dull conformity of so many of the people around me.

But then there's also the impulse to imagine the flesh of the skeletons of stories that are in the cases. Was Morales in a gang after all? Ray v. the Eurice Bros. has the raw material for great theater, anal Mr. Ray hiring some rather lazy, though perhaps adequately competent, good-old-boys to build his house and driving them nuts with his demands for perfection. One wonders about the Ray's marriage. How did Mrs. Ray cope with a man like that?

And the austere exactitude is exciting at moments, too, almost invigorating. Like getting off the couch, intellectually speaking, lacing up some new sneakers and taking my first wheezing run around the block--and feeling like I'm going to die. And longing to be back on the couch, vaguely daydreaming.

Copacetic

I was at the Carrollton Rue reading my first case for my criminal law class. Then I closed my book, walked outside, and there was my professor riding down Oak Street on his bicycle.

I'm going to be fine in law school. It's going to be a good thing. There's a certain kind of lawyer-zombie that I don't want to become, but I won't. I think I will still find time for more creative writing, too. Not everyday, maybe not every week--not during exams or other crunch times.

Even though I still like to go out, I don't have the need for the intense drinking and socializing that my 25-year-old colleagues have. They can spend their spare time and energy on that stuff, and I can spend a comparable amount on writing and maintaining some of my old life and still keep up with them in school. Plus I've noticed that I read faster than anyone who hasn't learned speed-reading and I'm a fast writer, too.

I'm still working on the essay I started on the 8th. Almost done with a draft, and then I will take it apart. I also want to write an essay about Big Star and my ex-husband and spinning my wheels in Memphis. Copacetic was one of my ex's words. Everything was copacetic, but not really.

A little light reading

Total cost of my textbooks: $676.67

I look like hell in my ID picture.

I was happy that I only have 8:30 a.m. classes three days a week, till I talked to a girl who has none.

However, on Mondays I don't have class till 10 a.m.

And I have some good professors. One of the best at the school, by reputation, and the head of the environmental law program, is teaching my criminal law class. Which is sort of odd, but I'll take it. And a very attractive and charming (and married, alas) professor who I already have a bit of a crushlet on will teach my torts class. I don't plan to do anything but look, but it will help make the subject more entertaining.

My contracts professor is apparently younger than me. I'm not sure how I feel about that.

Two stories tangentially related to Little Milton

I was somewhere in my mid-to-late-twenties and getting by on a mix of freelance writing, temping, catering and tending bar at the Center for Southern Folklore. Yes, the Center for Southern Folklore, a non-thriving non-profit run by an inept incompetent. For a time, it was fortunate enough to have a lease on a club space on Beale Street and had a license to serve beer. They had occasional shows--Luther and Cody Dickinson used to play there.

I'd done an internship there in college, now I worked the front desk sometimes, until my paychecks started bouncing. But working the bar, I could make decent tips--sometimes. Rufus Thomas used to come in and ask me to make him a strawberry milkshake--which I did, which he would not pay for or tip for. But hell, it was Rufus Thomas.

Sometimes we had a doorman/bouncer on the weekends. Sometimes, the bouncer in question was Scrap Iron. I can't remember his real name--Robert, maybe? Very big, dark, fiftyish. He was the illegitimate son of Dwight "Gatemouth" Moore, who was a preacher and singer on Beale Street back in the day.

Scrap Iron was Little Milton's road manager and worked on Beale Street when Milton was off the road. He drove a late-70s gold LTD. He was always on the make and he had lots of women. He hit on me and I blew him off, but that made him want me more. Before long, he was telling me about how I was special to him and how the other women didn't mean anything to him. He was always after me to go out with him.

And one night I gave in. It just seemed wimpy to pass up the chance to go out on the town in Memphis with Scrap Iron, Gatemouth Moore's son and Little Milton's road manager. It seemed a way to establish my authentic blues bonafides, I guess.

We went to Raiford's Hollywood Disco, just a few blocks south of Beale Street. There was one night a week, I think it was Friday, when white hipsters would go to Raiford's. Honky night. There was a message painted on the side of the building: "Absolutely No Discrimination."

(I just discovered that Raiford's now has a webpage in this terrible new world: www.raiforddisco.com--tried to make a link but it didn't seem to work. The webpage seems to verify what I'd heard, that it has been taken over by white college kids, as often happens. And apparently it's really Hollywood Raiford's Disco, but that's not what we called it.)

Anyway, it wasn't Honky Night that night. I think it was a Sunday. The decor at Raiford's was out of a extra-low-budget blaxploitation movie, and (I regret to say) that night the crowd was, too. The only two other white girls there were obvious prostitutes. A young man came to the table offering to sell us whatever we might want to smoke or snort. We just ordered setups for the Crown Royal that Scrap Iron had brought.

I can't remember what we talked about, or if I could even hear or understand anything that was said. I remember that everyone treated Scrap Iron like he was a king, an old-school big-baller. And I was nervous, because he seemed like way too much for me and I wasn't prepared to see the evening to the conclusion he expected. I think the point of going out that night was to prove I wasn't a scared white girl, except I was such a scared white girl.

We left, got in his car and he told me to slide down and sit closer to him. Oh shit. Then he put the key in the ignition and turned it and... the started made some noise but the engine didn't turn over. He tried again. Again. He got out and popped the hood, fiddled around underneath, tried again, no luck, fiddled some more, I said I could just take a cab home, and he finally got it to turn over. But now he was worrying about his car and his mind wasn't on me. He drove me to my house and said he couldn't come in because he didn't want to shut the car off. So I got out and waved goodbye from the porch and felt exceedingly relieved.

And that was the end of our romance.

But a year or so later, I was living in the Mississippi Delta, working for a small newspaper. My social life was a little bit better than I expected it would be there. I'd just started dating DS, who later helped me move to New Orleans, but got payback by breaking my heart and dating my narcissitic neurotic coworker at the pubs office. But that's another story.

I was also friends with a young girl named Betsy, who was only 19 or 20, bright but lost and stuck in this crappy small town, who helped out at the paper. The editor had taken a liking to her and had her write small stories and take pictures. She was a cute, bubbly blonde, as befitting her name.

Little Milton was scheduled to appear at the now-defunct Flowing Fountain in Greenville. DS couldn't make it, so I got Betsy to go with me. It was her first introduction to nightlife.

It took an hour to get there, but one of the features of living in the Delta is driving forever to get anywhere. People thinking nothing of driving a hundred miles to go to a weekend party.

Scrap Iron was at the door when we got there, and he just about fell out over Betsy, her young blonde self. She was the star of that night. Everyone wanted to dance with her and buy her drinks. Scap Iron was almost gentlemanly, keeping the more predatory elements at bay. We danced and drank and had a good time. Milton dedicated a song to her.

On the way home, Betsy gushed about how that was the most fun she'd had in her whole life. I was happy. I thought she needed to break out and experience more of life. However, when the editor got a job at a paper in a small town in Nevada, he talked Betsy into going with him. Once there, she got knocked up by a convenience store clerk and decided to marry him and keep the baby. I felt bad about it. Maybe she needed to stay a little more sheltered a little longer, and I felt guilty about encouraging her to go out and try new things.

Let's go

The last two weeks of free time have been a luxury, but the last few days have been a bit torpid. It would have been better if I hadn't been deeply broke. But I'm ready for something to happen. I don't want to go back to the pubs office, so bring on this law school nonsense. If it's a mistake, let's find out.

Hank is sleeping and twitching. He's very cute.

My mother called to wish me luck, but managed to annoy me. She said she hopes the next three years will go by quickly and then I can get out of New Orleans. Also, she declines to send me a check to help me through this dry spell. I've got a dollar in cash and a negative bank balance.

My mom is a lovely person, but she can be cold and controlling. I suppose this is the sort of thing that looks like nothing to an outside observer, but she really got under my skin, as only mothers can do. She can't stand me living in New Orleans, but she hasn't liked me living anywhere I've lived. Sometimes I hate New Orleans, but I can't really think of anywhere else I would rather live, not in this country, anyway, and if I do move for I can promise her and everyone else that it won't be anywhere near the god-afflicted midwest.

As for her well-established tighwad-ness (actually a real anxiety about money, almost equal to her anxiety about sex) one of the goals of the great law school adventure is to be able to better take care of myself so as not to have to lean on parents or boyfriends or whomever.

It's ironic and appropriate that my law school career starts with a career services orientation tomorrow (at 8 a.m.)--and that I'll be going to it with a dollar in my pocket.

I'm still working on the essay I started on Aug. 8. It needs scenes, or at least pictures, I think.

Miss S and I went to see Skeleton Key on Friday. It was okay, not as cheesy as a movie about the hoodoo set in and around New Orleans could be. It was a good-looking film. The neighborhood where the main character lives in the beginning of the movie is my old neighborhood. I remember when they were shooting in that triangle-shaped building at the corner of Magazine & Sophie Wright. The second scene takes place in the Half Moon, where my last two romantic misadventures played out. It's all about two blocks from the Grouchy Norwegian's Ghetto Laundromat. I thought it was amusing that the hoodoo shop in the movie was in the back of a laundromat, which are notorious dens of bad-doings.

Did I say Oh Fuck?

Four days till the law school preliminary festivities begin. Yes, it has occured to me that this might be a mistake. I might ruin my peace of mind, never have free time again, destroy all my creative abilities, and be forced to take a job I hate in order to pay off my student loans. I'll almost certainly have to choose between the work I want and staying in New Orleans. But I have a backup plan--I'll change my identity and flee to Buenos Aires. Don't tell anyone.

Still no check. Still broke.

I said I wondered what MD looks like and now I know. I have no further comment.

Flashback to Memphis

Little Milton died last week. Watch this space for my Little Milton story. On the other side of the Memphis music spectrum, internet rumor has it that Big Star is recording another studio album (?)

House tour

Now that I'm mostly settled in, let me take you on a brief tour of my adorable house. The living room has built-in bookcases and a fireplace.




Kitchen, bath, bedroom and closet:







(I need new bedding for my new bed.)



But here's its most exciting feature:



I love my house!

On the almost-empty streetcar at 2:30 a.m.

My, but I have a big nose.

I should be outgrowing it, but I still like going out at night. I like it more than ever. I don't like to drink a lot, I don't have much interest in any drug other than some occasional weed, and I'm now content to keep my lust for bad-boy musicians as completely theoretical as my desire for Johnny Depp.

But I like what happens, or at least some of what happens, when the rules of social engagement ease up after dark, when you can't see so much and the other senses become stronger. Also, during the summer in New Orleans, the late night is really the only time its bearable to go outside. It makes sense to doze the day away, shuttered up in the house, and go out into the world at night.

I like to go out alone, though I get bummed out if people don't talk to me when I'm out. Sometimes going out in Memphis, I was the only white person in the room. Now I have to get used to sometimes being the oldest person in the room.

I found the new club King Bolden. It's a half a block past Donna's (coming from uptown) on Rampart. Ryan Scully, one of the singers from Morning 40, was playing with a piano player. He was really good, though he joked he was not usually so. He's got that great wreck of a voice and a just-so sense of timing. He's cute, too, though please note my previous comment about the abstract nature of my admiration of musicians as sex objects. He put out a record on his own, which I will have to find.

Most of the rest of Morning 40 were there and about a half dozen other people. Slow night, small place. This big bald suburbo-tough guy stumbled in, really fucked up, sat next to me and asked the bartender to call him a cab. He sat there and made faces and seemed about to cry. He took out his credit card and put in on the bar. He tried to make eye contact with me but he seemed like a bad scene in progress, one I didn't want to partake of. The cab pulled up but he didn't see it. He gave the bartender the credit card and insisted that he wanted to pay his tab. The bartender explained that he hadn't ordered anything to pay for. He didn't understand, thought the bartender was messing with him, caught me smirking at him, and went off about how funny it was that he got pepper-sprayed and how the band sucked. But somehow he found his way out the door during this tirade.

After Scully finished his set, I went by Lounge Lizards to find the Stumpknockers still playing. AD says they are cheesy but I like them. I ordered a gin & tonic and the young man sitting next to me explained that I should specify a brand or the bartender would give me a well drink (gasp!). I explained that I like cheap gin.

Michael Dominici sent me an email thanking me for covering his shows while he was gone. He said I am his favorite substitute host. I wonder what he looks like--I have a crush on his record collection.

The beginning of an essay

This morning I woke up with the beginning of an essay in my head, just like the old days. I'm writing it here for your amusement and because I don't yet have a proper word processor on my new computer--I'm waiting till I'm a student and can get a deep discount on software. But please note the copyright notice and the fact that I consider this work and not just internet doodling.

"You're not sleeping with him, are you?" my mother asked me. I was 35 years old and almost a decade divorced. The "him" in question was 40 and also divorced. We'd been going out for several months.

"Mom!" I drew the word out in the special tone of annoyed exasperation I never use with anyone but my mother. The sex was the only appealing thing about the relationship--without it, why bother? Though if I look at it that way, she had a point. I later regretted that affair ever made it past the second date. If I had not gotten naked with him, it surely would not have.

My mother seems unable to conceive that a woman might want sex for its own sake, might take genuine pleasure in it, that it might be anything other than the means by which a man annoys, oppresses and takes advantage of a woman. My mother has almost certainly only ever slept with my father, and though it makes me queasy to think it and uncomfortable to write it, the evidence suggests that my dad was never very good at the bedroom arts. Even if he was, I think my mother would have been a lot of work.

She came of age during the Great Pussy Drought of the 1950s (Geoffrey Wolff's phrase). But lots of women her age later got over it, loosened up by exposure to real-life sex and men and marriage.

She was always very religious, a pretty serious Catholic who later was pulled away by evangelicalism and became a born-again Christian. That might partly explain her attitude toward sex, but not all evangelical Christians, even women of her generation, seem to carry the negative tension about the idea and the act that she does.

My mother's only sister, who's about three years younger, was recently in town with her conventioneering husband. I hadn't seen them in a few years and had never been in their company with no other relatives present. We went out to dinner a few times and I spent most of one day with them.

My aunt is heavier and blowsier than my mother, but they look much alike. They sound alike, though my aunt retains more of small-town eastern Ohio in her voice. They have all sorts of subtle mannerisms in common that I would be challenged to catch accurately in description but which mark them as close siblings.

They grew up together in a different world, a different era--it might well have been the Dark Ages, but it was in a tiny coal-mining town just after the war. They were the only daughters of hard-working unhappy Eastern European immigrants who had a half-dozen sons before the girls arrived.

I took my aunt and uncle to Angelo Brocato's, where we ate blueberry and raspberry and blackberry Italian ices and watched the neighborhood families come in and get their sugar fixes and my uncle told me about how he made my aunt cry on their first date. She was an innocent small-town girl and he put the moves on her too fast. She asked him if this was what he did every night, and he jokingly said, "Yeah, pretty much." She was profoundly hurt and offended by his answer, which gives you an idea of just how sheltered she was.

But he told me how he hated to see her cry, and how he knew from the first night that he wanted to marry her. There in Brocato's, he held her hand, and when she excused herself to go the the bathroom, he told me that it was significant to her that she hadn't slept with him until right before their wedding--which was four years after they met.

"The woman had no human urges," my uncle lamented.

I can imagine my mother being similarly over-offended by some guy's flip comment, though I picture her as more angry than tearful. I can picture her stonewalling a guy until the ring was on her finger. But here's what I can't picture: thirty-odd years later, my mom and dad holding hands across a table in a public place. I can't imagine them fondly reminiscing to their niece about their courtship. I can't imagine my dad practically begging my mom to go with him on the next leg of his trip, as my uncle did to my aunt.

My aunt, like my mother, like a lot of women, is the designated disapprover in her relationship. My uncle wants a daquiri but my aunt thinks he's had too many. Not-very-secretly, he's relying on her to keep him from going too far.

Still, she lets him have a few and she'll even have a couple with him. The two of them hung out on Bourbon Street at night. She accidently wandered into the gift shop of the Hustler Club, thinking it was just another t-shirt shop, and she wasn't overly shocked or offended. She's not doing anything wild and crazy, she's just more relaxed about sex and slightly transgressive behavior than my mother ever was or will be. She's probably had more fun than her sister. She might even still be getting laid.

The point is not to idealize my aunt and uncle's marriage--they clearly have their problems--or to chastise my dad for being insufficiently loving and attentive, though I don't think my parents were in love when they got married or ever. But my dad tries in his misdirected way to be a loving husband, and he's the affectionate one in the relationship. He'll sometimes put his arm around her or call her pet names. I've never, ever seen her reciprocate.

Might she have been different if she'd been loved and pursued and cherished like her sister was? Or was there something about her that inoculated her against that kind of devotion?

Maybe it's being the older sister that makes the difference. I was more cautious and rule-abiding than my younger sister, and much more susceptible to the "just say no" propaganda. I barely rebelled until I had moved out of my parent's house, and I don't think I ever caught up with her in sum total of partying, drug-taking and petty crime. As the sensible older sister, I think that's probably a good thing.


This is not only about sex--about how my mom is uptight about sex and I am not so much, thanks to a tangled set of causes explained by nature, nurture and accident. It's about this: My sister and I are both in our mid-thirties. I was married for a few short years in my early twenties; my sister was never married at all. Neither one of us ever had a baby. My dad has four siblings, my mom has six. All of their brothers and sisters are grandparents.

"Sometimes I wonder if my mom feels bad about not being a grandmother," I said to my aunt after she got done listing her five grandchildren.

She rolled her eyes.

"I don't thinks so."

My mom thinks sex is a bad deal for women. In general I think she's wrong, but there are ways in which she's right. It's women who get knocked up, for obvious starters. Women get hurt when they try to barter sex for love and security. But that's not about sex as much as it is about how we think men and women should relate to each other. But sex? Women need sex less than men, yet have the potential to enjoy it much more. Seems like a good deal to me.

My mom also thinks relationships are a bad deal for women, and that's where I'm inclined to agree with her.

I have to admit that my father is also not very enthusiastic about the idea of his daughters having a love and sex life. It seems a pretty tricky business to be the father of daughters, for good dads who love their daughters, particularly for those who have only daughters as my father did. What seems acceptable for or accepted of women in general--even one's wife--might not seem such a good deal for a well-loved, bright, talented daughter. This is one reason fathers often would prefer their daughters remain sexless and dateless. Still, I've had a boyfriend or two that my dad actually liked. He believes in the concept of nice fellows who are good to women. My mother seems to have less faith in that ideal.

Of course, she'll never say she thinks relationships are overrated. She says I'll find the right one someday.

My mom has her idea of what the right one would be like. I have my own idea. What they have in common is that they don't bear any resemblance to any man currently alive on this planet.

You could accuse me of hating men, but you would be wrong. Of the real men I have known, there are many that I have liked, some that I have loved, and a few that I miss. There are ones I care about, wish well for, would be there for if they needed me. There are those I want to talk to and those I want to go out drinking with. There are some I'd like to see again and a couple I'd like to sleep with again. But there's not a single one I'd like to share living space with. There's not one that I want to buy furniture with, or diamond rings, and there's definitely not any whose babies I want to bear.

My mom and dad are like a late-model Ozzie and Harriet. They're the Oldsmobile of couples--there's still a few like them around, but they don't make them like that anymore. In their early sixties, they're approaching their 40th wedding anniversary and my dad's retirement from his pretty well-paying blue-collar union job--to name another thing they don't make anymore.

They're leaders in their church, with many friends, many of whom probably take them as role models. They serve as makeshift surrogate grandparents to some of the children of the younger couples at their church, which is what makes me feel the occasional twinge about denying them real grandchildren.

I'm not around as much anymore, but I don't think they've had a real fight with raised voices in years. Of course, they used to fight--long before the church and the big circle of friends. There was yelling and my dad's fist hitting the dinnertable making the dishes jump and sometimes talk about divorce. My dad might have cheated, or come close.

I used to think my family was a dysfunctional wreck, but that was before I got a good look at other people and their families. There are couple who have happier long-term marriages than my parents, but they're a rarity. Maybe my aunt and uncle have a better union, but I'm not prepared to say that unequivocably. For most people, what my folks have is just about as good as it gets.

It's terrible and damaging when your mom has a restraining order against your dad, or when he has a new girlfriend who's five years older than you or he doesn't pay the child support or even when they stay together in icy hatred. But when you're the offspring of a wreck of a marriage, at least you can reasonably hope for a better relationship for yourself.

But if what my folks have is likely as good as it gets, is that good enough? Well, it depends. Maybe you don't like to live alone and you don't have outsize expectations of a soulmate. If you want to have kids, then good enough is probably a lot better than going it alone.

But I don't seem to have a single maternal urge. Maybe that has something to do with they way my mom seemed oppressed by motherhood when we were little. I suppose saying so undermines my claim of the good-enoughness of my parents, but this is all knotty. The opposite of everything is also true.

Anyway, you can't really blame my mom for this one. My genes just don't seem be motivated to propogate themselves. Sometimes I think of myself as some unworkable mutation, other times as the bloom at the end of a genetic branch--like my life is totally justified in itself and not just as a means of continuing the species. Of course, the problem with that last analogy is that fertility and reproduction are a flower's reason for blooming.


My mom wants better for me than she had. It's the desire of a million million mothers weighing their daughters down with their desires and good intentions. She wants me to have opportunities she didn't have and she wants me to take them. Whatever she wants for me, I'm bound to resent being cast as a do-over for her. I chafe when she wants things for me that I don't want. When she wants things for me that I also want, I second-guess my own desires. That might be the pith of daughterhood.

I'm busy running up law school debt that will approach six figures, which worries me a bit. But I recently read a statistic that it costs more than that to raise an American child from birth to age 18, and I found that comforting.

"I'm not going to have children, I'm going to have a student loan," I told my mother. She's proud and anxious about me going to law school. She didn't flinch when I casually posited that I'm not going to have children. This was over the phone, but I can hear the flinch through the receiver She would have flinched if I'd said I'd met a guy I liked. She flinches when I suggest I might stay in godforsaken New Orleans for awhile longer.

It's delicate work drawing out what I want for myself because I want it from what I want as a reaction to what she wants for me.

I don't want a marriage like hers. I don't want a marriage like my aunt's either--I would feel stifled by all that need and affection and holding hands.

And some things Lucy wrote to me...

I'd just moved to Mississippi and she'd just moved to the artist's club on Gramercy Park. After writing that I should and could write and sell a book about the Delta...

"In preparation, let me tell you that what any agent or publisher wants to see is a coherent them, something that would 'explain' the book in the amount of space normally accorded jacket copy. This is just a big joke, really, if you ask me--and it's important to maintain a sense of humor in this business so as not to become demoralized by the sheer nihilistic reductive nature of it all--because most people wouldn't recognize a coherent theme if it bit them, leaving the enviable task of proposing said theme up to the writer herself. A little 'Ministry of Truth' like, to be sure, but my goal here is to allay any fears you may have about the whole process. Simply keep writing well, and the rest is cake.

"I've moved into my new digs, though it feels more like I've piled into my new digs. How long did it take you to unpack? I've been here a week and am only about a third of the way done. I guess, really, that I've only spent the equivalent of a day and a half unpacking in the time, but I feel somewhat inferior because I've been wearing the same clothes for a week now (I did get to wash them once, but the suitcase with the clothes is not yet reachable beneath all the boxes of books.) Where I live is a strange place; before I moved thee I was saying I was moving into a Henry James novel, but now I say, to describe the place: imagine David Lynch made a movie of a Henry James novel. Some mighty peculiar people live there. My favorites are these two gay men (very gay), who are also identical twins (very identical) who live together (I don't want to know) and who do nothing but fight; the first time I saw them they were actually chasing each other down the street...


"H, what semester are you in? Are you supposed to be writing me a critical paper or anything like that? I'm so terrible at keeping track of such things, and have the bad habit of assuming other's will keep track for me, a habit which leads to a lot of bounced checks in my past..."

The next month was my last letter from her. I'm not sure what happened to all the earlier ones.

"It's hard to be mad at a student for not producing volumes of work when a) it alleviates the implicated teacher of a certain amount of work, b) said teacher knows the aforementioned student is actually quite talented anyway and she just moved and took on a new job, and c) said teacher is in a state of panic about her own lack of production.

"I'm more or less fitted into my small apartment, each thing in its exactly fitted place. I'm happy here; it has a good vibe, and I love the whole eccentricity of the building. But with the drama of the move, of unpacking, and of the months of drama with lawyers and landlords that precipitated the move, I'm currently in a state of panic about getting my book in on time. It wasn't that much different with my first book; I'd be having dinner or talking with someone, when an urge and deep fear would come over me in mid-sentence. The rudeness of it would escape me: all I knew was that I very suddenly had to excuse myself from whomever I was with; I'd stand up in the middle of a conversation and wlk out the door, saying as I left, Excuse me, I have to go write a book now. Similar symptoms are appearing now. I forgot to get an innoculation....

"I still want to push you to seriously consider a book proposal about the Delta. The Eggleston piece might just, if you push and pull it in certain directions I'm not entirely sure of just yet, pass as an introduction for this book. And part of the annotation for 'From the Mississippi Delta' could work as the text part of the propososal; especially the ending, where you talk about he possibility of evil: editors and agents love that brazen I-know-exactly-what-this-book-is-about sort of talk. For the record, this is how I envision said book: Contents wise, the book is half historical, half current. Thematically, the books is half social (what the south means to the U.S.) and half personal, which is itself divided: what the south means to you as a white person, and you as a woman, and you as a writer also.

"A good way to approach this proposal thing is to simply fantasize about a book you would have liked to have written, and then simply describe that book. I'll tell you from personal experience that book proposals are, to a large degree, a bit of a trick; it's so very rare that books actually turn out to be the books that were proposed. I'm saying this not to expose the lassitude of the publishing industry, but to try and give you a sense that you can actually do this, tht it is a possibility. I have great faith in you....

"I spent the morning watching the Japanese remake of Godzilla at an electronics chain store. I was buying a new stereo (mine was too banged up in the move) and I happened to look at what was being played on the display VCR, which was the American remake of Godzilla, and I said to the guy serving me, Was this the worst movie you ever saw in your whole life or what? It turned out he was a HUGE Godzilla fan, he hated the American remake too, and then he disappeared into the store room. He came back with a home made tape of the Japanese remake (from the nineties, and not available in the US) and it was fascinating. Very much like the original, which I remember fondly because I had something of a crush on Godzilla when I was about eight. No high tech garbage here: Godzilla was just a big puppet and the electricity that came from his big gob was obviously drawn onto the film, yet I just loved it. Its low tech-ess was part of the appeal; the special effects didn't try and make me believe this was other than a big puppet; it supported the illusion, meaning it kept the idea that this was an illusion in the foreground, feeing the myth to retain the power that belongs to myth. The American version, and like all the high tech films now, attempts to make it "believable," and so completely forgets about the power of illusion as illusion; people now can only value illusion that is actually deception.

"Well, that's my rant for this letter.... I look forward to seeing you in January.

"Lucy"

Oh fuck...

Here are some things Lucy Grealy wrote about me:

"...this is one damn talented woman. This is a Siamese-twin, double-hearted work... Each essay works.... I'd like to see that last essay be the penultimate essay; in an indirect way, I think that would make her point even more stongly. Or maybe I'm just trying to trick H into writing another essay, simply for the pleasure of reading it. I'm won over."

"H is a true writer, and I admire her work greatly. Her essay on the photographer Eggleston, which I saw through several drafts, and which was about so many different things, was beautiful. Overall, I think she needs to be aware of all the complexities in her writing, and force herself to follow some of the many threads in the pieces to their ends, but these are problems of tenaciousness and self-esteem, not talent. H is full of talent; all I want is for her to write more."

And something Sven Birkerts wrote about me:

"The prose is a result of H's arriving at a certain point of writerly readiness. She has, in her own off-beat way, brough herself to the threshold of serious publication. Now come stamps and envelopes and strategies of keeping faith through the long stretches where it seems that nothing will ever happen. It will."

Re-reading this stuff stirs me up in complicated ways. How much did they meant all that? I was on the verge of semi-serious publication once, with near-misses with Harper's and Esquire. And I was in that DaCapo Best Music Writing anthology. But deciding to make a living as a writer, by any means necessary, actually hurt me as a serious writer, I think. Quitting my job is actually an opportunity to go back to writing for the art and the discipline of it. Except of course I'm going to law school, which I'm sure is going to take up such the bulk of my time and attention and energy

Happy in limbo

I'm listening to Ibrahim Ferrer, in honor of his passing.

Maybe I'm lonely and sex-deprived, but today after spending the morning unpacking I went downtown on the streetcar. I went to the used bookstore on Chartres--they were playing WWOZ on the radio and the UD was broadcasting from the Satchmo fest. Then to Louisiana Music Factory on Decatur, then to the matinee of Happy Endings, which was pretty good. And I was happy to do all that stuff alone. I prefer it. After the movie, I discovered that Miss S had left a message on my phone, and I called back and we made plans to meet up later in the evening. Waiting on the streetcar to come home, an assorted group of guys from the Hot 8, New Birth and various 6th/9th ward brass bands were playing on the corner of Canal and Bourbon. They were good, better than the tourists deserve. The lady who sings gospel on the bus was across the street dancing and testifying. I was happy. It was a good day. I love New Orleans again. I was thinking I have close to the right balance of solitude and socialization in my life--it's just sex that is the problem.

The more immediate problem is that, though I did get mail today, I did not get a check. I have one more week of freedom before the law school festivities start. I would like to spend it goofing off, doing a little shopping, and going out at night. Instead I may spend it at home eating ramen noodles.

By tomorrow I should have the house in order. I'm going to dig out my letters from Lucy Grealy. If I'm at home eating ramen noodles, I'll at least write something to prove that I still can.

Moodswing

I love my new house, I love my new neighborhood, and my first day here was a purely happy one.

I had to say that before I start parsing the woes that have befallen me.

I'm feeling lonely and sexless. The last week I was at work, I logged on to the online dating site I used to use to delete my listing. But of course I had to check out the current crop of guys on the site, and I found that T the Underaged had posted a profile. And that twisted me up more than it should have. Last spring we had one of the most fun dates I've had in years, sparks were a'flying, nakedness ensued, and then he disappeared. I thought I had done pretty well, thought I had even passed a karmic test of some kind, by letting it go without too much of a fuss. But this sparked a new round of mooning about what happened and wondering what I did wrong.

But the thing is whatever I do wrong, it comes down to just being who I am. So it's not useful to brood about it. A better way to look at it, and equally true, is that it just wasn't a good match or that he's the one with the problem.

Still, whatever may or may not be wrong with me, I am feeling lonely. I got the new Shannon McNally record, which is pretty good. But I was reading about her and her record release party in the paper, and the story mentioned her husband W who worked at the Louisiana Music Factory. The same W who I had a crushlet on a few years ago, and made a pass at, and who tactfully let me know he was married. God, she's beautiful, too, way out of my league.

In the middle of all this, while I was at my old apartment waiting for the movers who were hours late, I got a package of books I'd ordered weeks ago. One of the books was Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty about her friendship with Lucy Grealy, who also happened to be one of my teachers at Bennington.

RW and I were just discussing this when I was in Maine. He went to Columbia, paid for it with a big student loan, and acquired Jonathan Franzen and Michael Cunningham as mentors. My mentors were lesser literary lights like Lucy and Bob Shacochis and Sven Birkerts--and I don't mean to put them down, they were great and it was a thrill to have teachers who published actual books, even if they weren't at the top of the bestseller lists.

Lucy actually was at the top of the bestseller lists for awhile when she published her memoir Autobiography of a Face. As a child, she'd had a rare and lethal cancer that ate up her jaw. She beat the odds by surviving it, but her face was never right. She looked odd, she had almost no teeth and she couldn't closer her mouth.

But she was a great writer and enormously popular and well-loved. But she never felt loved, and always thought it was because of how she looked. The irony is that she had at least two boyfriends who really loved her. I met one, and he was quite attractive. He might have married her, but she broke up with him. Patchett writes that she'd had so much time alone to build up an unattainable ideal of love. Real love in the real world didn't quite measure up. She never quite understood that it's like that for all of us. She thought it was because of how she looked.

There's a lot here to turn over in my head. Maybe this will be the kernel of my next essay.

One thing that Patchett mentions is that Lucy was thinking about going to medical school before she died (of a heroin overdose). She wanted to keep her writing as art, separate it from commerce.

Now that I've moved and quit my job, the fact that I'm starting law school in a few weeks has finally started to seem real, and I've begun to feel a bit anxious about it.

But my immediate anxiety is that I'm waiting on an overdue check and I've only gotten mail one day this week. I'm supposed to take Miss S out to Ralph's on the Park tonight for her birthday, but if the check doesn't show up in the next few hours, tha'ts gonna be a problem.

There's much more to write, but this will have to do for now.

I'm here in my house. I love it. The blues will pass.