Rod Amis - Unbound

NEW ORLEANS - 26 February, 2004: WHEN YOU LIVE IN THE CITY OF MARDI GRAS, you learn to write-off the weekend before and most of the week after. You realize that this will be difficult to reconcile to people living out in the Real World with whom you have to interact but you also know that they have not walked through streets full of jungle drumming and adults dressed like cartoon characters or the cast of a pirate movie. Walking through the French Quarter and its environs on Mardi Gras is like walking through a mammoth theme park or the back lot of a movie studio -- except many of the people you encounter are friends and co-workers.

Matt and I went to the Zulu parade on Mardi Gras morning. The Zulu is legendary and the hand-made coconuts they proffer are badges of honor for parade-goers and thus difficult to obtain. It helps to know somebody. From Zulu, we wandered to Monaghan's Erin Rose and down Bourbon Street for a bit - a nostalgia jaunt for me because of my working that street my first Mardi Gras - and then home for me and to retrieve his bike for Matt so that he could head back home where Jo was waiting. They planned to go out later in the day (Zulu rolls at 8:30 a.m.) when the revelry would be in full swing.

By the time the Zulu krewe had completely passed, of course, we were already into the afternoon and the damp streets were steamy. People were already out and in their cups and finery. Some people had been out since the night before, it was apparent.

On our way back to my digs, Matt and I crossed paths with our friend, the writer Utahna Faith. She and a companion had been among the 'round-the-clock revelers. She had just come from a party that had begun the night before. The theme of the party was Versions of Love. According to her Foto Web site, where she features pictures, she had attended as Love Gone Bad, complete with rumpled hair, a frowzy dress, bloody-bandaged wrists and the house-slippers of days spent alone in anguish.

In the romantic tradition to which you'd expect me to subscribe, Carnaval is a time of reckoning. You make peace with some and to others you reveal the bloody knife. Before you turn to your god, you have to know the score. I tried to do a little of both.

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27 February, 2004: A week like this races by. I'm closer to finishing the database project, might even bring the thing live by next week, which means it's time to think about finding another job. Meanwhile, I have a deadline on the new Web site I'm building for the housing company out East. Looks like I'll make rent.

Kevin sent the money that's been circling the airport these last four years, thank Goodness! And then I arrived home yesterday evening to find a book and the down payment on my proposed "Glass House" book from my friend Darhl, over in Florida. He enclosed a handmade card (the best kind!) in which he comments that reading the book he sent, Dennis Covington's Redneck Riviera, he kept thinking: "Why doesn't Rod do one of these? He already has more than enough material about the hazards of living in New Orleans?"

This "Glass House" book thing seems to be in the mind of too many of my friends, here and abroad. It would be better if it were more solidly in my own mind.

Instead, I do my best writing lying awake, tossing and turning, at three in the morning. It fits under that rubric "Words that Never See the Light of Day". I finally stop fretting around four or four-thirty, fall back into an exhausted sleep and awaken just before dawn with the finches who share this apartment with me. They rustle around in the exhaust valve for my hot water heater as they prepare to greet the rising sun. Their racket awakens me and I put on hot water to make coffee in my French press. I stumble to the closet and grab my red robe while the water is heating and turn on National Public Radio (NPR) to hear what the Real World was doing while I drifted through the suspended time that emanates from the French Quarter of New Orleans and hold s us all in its centripetal force.

Over the coffee, news and a cigarette, I attempt to plan my day. It seems a day is about all I can plan any longer, my love. I am attempting to work my way up to envisioning an entire week but cannot depend on my limited mental capacity to accomplish such a feat.

And then there is the uncertainty factor: Destiny and The New Orleans Way can be depended upon to scuttle any attempts of living other than like one in the bush of ghosts.

When I considered re-beginning the proposed book today, I imagined beginning it thusly:

You never know what other people think about you. When I made a comment to my late friend, Steven Bland, about my brother Nick, who was then in the U.S. Army in Germany, the former exclaimed: "What? You have a family? I've known you for four years and you've never mentioned them before today. I had honestly begun to believe that you simply crawled from under a cabbage leaf one morning."

It might have been better if I had. I would have saved myself a lot of emotional baggage and a shitload of suffering ...

Then I went: "Na-aw!" It works, in that it reveals how secretive I am, even with people who consider me one of their closest friends. It doesn't work because it leaves me limited places to go in order to engage a reader in staying the length of a book.

OR maybe I've been editing other's peoples' writing for so long that I can't look at my own objectively any longer.

I can do what I want in the confines of this magazine because I control it. Writing for actual public consumption in the commercial arena is the horse of a different color that I'm not ready to hitch my wagon onto just yet. I can't see it - or, more to the point of my own internal metaphor - I can't hear that book rumbling around in my brainpan just yet.

Attaboy, Tom Hart

AS BOB POWERS NOTED in a recent letter to our "Vox Populi" page, one of the writers who doesn't get respect in his own country (meaning this magazine) is Thomas "Tabloid" Hart. That might, partially, be my fault. I usually tout the "serious" writers here who send us straight-up editorial or reportage.

This week, after the dust had settled and I was planning the edition you're reading now, I went back and read Tom's latest column. I laughed out loud! I laughed and nodded at some of his references and appreciated why he's been around these precincts so long, though I don't say that enough. So I am now: "Attaboy, Tom!"

When Mr. Hart first appeared on these pages, I was made to recall, he received an award from the folks over at the WELL (now affiliated with Salon) for being among the best satirists on the Web for his piece about the television show "Saturday Night Live". We gave him props for that here, but then treated him like most publications treat their gossip columnists. (Read: poorly.)

The fact is, in a "serious" (and often dour) publication, Thomas Hart has provided a breath of fresh air over the years that has too seldom been acknowledged. Just so you know. I'd avoid his column less if I were you.

The New Orleans Way

The amazing (to me) and singular thing about New Orleans is that it is the kind of city where people talk about going home at dawn as though that is not an unusual occurrence. In the rest of the United States, and lots of other places in the world, the notion that one would be out and around at sunrise would indicate some degree of profligacy. But New Orleans, like New York, never sleeps. The bars are open 24 and 7 and so are diners where you can eat when you're about done with the drinking. If you live in the French Quarter or the Marigny, Verti Mart delivers hot food and groceries, beer and booze, 24 and 7 as well. 'Round here we say "Thank God, for dirty Verti."

If you live in or around the Quarter, most of your friends work in the service industry. I have been unusual, in that regard, because I've worked construction and computer gigs for the most part with the exception of my nine-month stint bartending. The service industry crowd, if they are going to make a decent living, normally end their days between eleven at night and five in the morning and need some place to go to blow off steam like the rest of us. The difference between them and us is that Happy Hour is not between four and seven p.m. It's more like midnight or four in the morning. New Orleans accommodates that kind of schedule and lets the rest of the people in town go along for the ride.

That's why it's not unusual here to have a stripper or a bartender or waitperson here among your coterie of friends, if you live in or near the French Quarter. These kinds of people, of course, thrive on Drama. It's their meat and bread. The only analogous crowd, from my experience, would be theatre people. But service, as I've said during the diary entries here during my bartending days, is theatre. It's always showtime, or you go home with very few tips in your wallet. Just another form of prostitution, for all intents and purposes. I shake my ass behind the bar; you throw an extra buck on the bar. Thanks, John. Thanks, Suzy. Have another?

MY EXCUSE is that I have been an insomniac most of my life. As an infant, because I was so sensitive to heat, my parents had to drive me around in their car with the windows open at night, hoping I'd eventually sleep. As a child, I would refuse to go to sleep because I was afraid I'd miss something that went on in life. As an adult, I regularly awaken at three in the morning, the most dangerous time for the soul, according to the writer Lawrence Durrell.

I often forget the Rules of Sleep.

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LEAP DAY (29 February, 2004: Today is extra, isn't it? We add it so that we can keep the Julian calendar close to synchronous with the rotations of the giant star around which our solar system revolves and gives us the seasons we honor. In most places outside of California, here in the United States, there are distinct seasons that people must honor. In another time, it was the changing of those seasons around which we planted, husbanded and harvested our crops. Now agribusiness does that for us and the family farm is mythical.

Meanwhile, as old institutions fade into the dust, we create new ones based on the machines which are the centers of our lives: televisions, cell phones, automobiles, computers).

Above, you will have noted how I keep the radio central to my own morning ritual. That is Rod being atavistic again. Radio shows, when not part of the commuting process, have not been central to any adult's life in the United States since the 1940s.

On this extra day, I plan to be simple as dirt. I shall write and cook a pot of beans and turkey necks to carry me through the week.

Have I told you yet, my darling, that I bought a television? Don't gasp. Yes, Rod Amis owns a television set now. So I can watch Gwen Ifill on "Washington Week in Review" and that crew of fellow old-fogies on "Sixty Minutes" of a Sunday night. (You'd expect those to be among my favorite television moments, no?) It happened because I helped a couple of friends move. I love seeing them together. I love that the guy is happier than I've seen him in all the years I've known him.

Anyway (the segue everyone seems to use these days in conversation), the woman offered me her TV set for $50. She even let me have the television on credit until I had the money to spare to pay for it. I paid for the television set this weekend, after getting the four year old money back from my former assistant Kevin and after paying Entergy, our local utility.

To celebrate my ability to pay a couple of bills, Matt took me to the Port of Call, a renowned eatery here in the French Quarter, and bought me a hamburger and some beers. The P ort of Call is known to make the best hamburgers and steaks around. Locals and tourists stand in line to get a table there. This was my second trip to the place. Ian and Mary took me the first time. It is beyond my budget, as yet, because I still owe lots of people money.

THE GOOD NEWS is that I shall be able to pay off my last New Orleans debt this week, before paying my rent. After that, I'll begin whittling away at my debts in California, Michigan and Florida. One day, I'll really be "free and clear" again.

"Good Lord, Rod! Why are you always focused on debt?"

As I've told you before, my love, I never forget. Just as I don't forget my enemies, I certainly can't forget my friends. Yes, it takes me a while to make recompense, but I always, always do. It's a matter of honor. Honor is all I have.

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AS MATT AND I NOTED OVER BRUNCH yesterday, part of living in New Orleans is being prepared to accept unexpected developments and eventualities. Nothing ever goes as you plan it here in the Not Big and Nothing Easy About It. That's why we have such a flexible sense of time here. We make accommodations for the ghost in the machine.

When I made my constitutional to the local super market, Robért's (pronounced Row-bares, you heathen, because we are still proud of our French heritage here in Nawlins. The Mayor of New Orleans would have gladly spirited the Emperor here when he was exiled by the damned English.) When I reached Robért's, it was to find that smoked turkey necks were not being offered today. I made the accommodation of going for pickled rib tips, instead. It's just seasoning meat for the beans I am after, after all. I decided to get more carrots, too. (I have a thing for carrots in my stews, my love. When we are finally together, don't forget the carrots.)

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I'VE BEEN ENTERTAINING the idea of letting my full beard grow out again. I've gotten used to the grey hair now. I believe I can live with looking like Hemingway or Dellums now. Just wish I was as handsome as Mr. Dellums is but I'll always have what we used to refer to as "chipmunk cheeks."

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MY MAJOR MALFUNCTION RIGHT NOW is that my biological clock has been off-kilter since Mardi Gras. It keeps awakening me at three instead of six in the morning. That is becoming a vexation. I'm used to awakening at three in the morning, yes. But, normally, I can simply smoke a cigarette, roll over and go back to sleep - if I have nothing to worry about. Since Mardi Gras, I have found myself wholly awake. The hours tick by until I must make coffee and go to work. As I said, a vexation.

The only means of accommodating the problem is to sleep during the prime hours of the evening. That could become a bad habit.

Go on to the political side of this "Glass House" in Part Two +++ HOME +++

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