PrettyFakes

I’m riding back to Jackson on the train and in a two-second flash I see her on the side of the road, straddling the rail of the bridge over Pontchartrain. I ain’t worried she’ll jump or anything like that. I see the box in her hands and I know what she’s going to do, just what she always does when I leave. Or when anybody leaves. She’s throwing me in that old lake, throwing us in there too, mashing on that big old Jesus Nintendo reset button and I can feel that dirty water lick up around my neck, tickling my ears and then twirling up around my scalp. And I sink deep in the waters north of New Orleans.

I.

I sort of know where she hailed from, but not really, some cracker town north of Birmingham. Her dad worked the strip mines, ripping coal from the ground an acre at a time. I met him once: he told me about drooling explosive pink slurry into eighty-foot deep holes. They fucked it up once and when it blew a big rock landed on his left leg and cracked it open like a chicken in three or four places, making it where he could never walk right again or, more importantly, do any kind of work or get up out of his chair.

He got his worker’s comp, which is no substitution for decent pain pills of any sort, and proceeded to sit in front of a brand new RCA television and watch John Wayne movies on TNT and bitch about his wife and his daughters, and how they didn’t clean the house the way it should be or something, not that he cared before he was suddenly crippled up and then got with God and then was a deacon, which is always the worst of all.

Tulip hated to talk about any of this but it would come up when she talked about her sister. She talked about her the way you see guys talk about quarterbacks or some shit. She wore these jeans, with the knees ripped out, like a video, whatever that meant. She smoked Marlboro Reds because of her sister, who had died when she was real little, and she was always threatening to go down to Barely Legal or Chris Owens and make some cash on the side, because that’s how she said her sister did it when things got tight.

When we met she was living in this hotel on Tchoupitoulas. It wasn’t very nice but she liked it, it was supposed to be an ex-coffee warehouse, and the floor had these wooden boards that flowed like waves through the room. The window opened up on a brick wall, which I thought was bullshit, but she thought was hilarious. She thought the weirdest things were funny, and she’d take jokes too damn far. When Anchorman came out she saw it three or four times at the movies, just watch it over and over, even got it on DVD later and tried to rig up a player to the hotel teevee, which didn’t work, but she kept the tape anyway. Will Ferrell jokes in it about how his arms are guns, it’s not funny but it’s kind of gross funny because his shirt is off and he is chubby, and one night she went down to a place on Magazine and got AK-47s tattooed on the insides of her fucking arms.

If you don’t know what AK-47s are, they are the types of guns the Russians used in Afghanistan during the 1970’s, when they were trying to suppress an uprising by the indigenous peoples. They take 7.62 mm ammunition and they are damn straight deadly. They are automatic weapons in the assault rifle form and so are supposed to be illegal in America, although I have seen them at least four or five times since the storm, right afterwards by a guy wearing a NOPD t-shirt although he didn’t look like a cop at all (he had dreadlocks, which I am pretty damn sure is against the rules for cops to have).

So Tulip got these fucking things inked on her arms, she thought it was hilarious because of that movie and because I know about guns because of my dad, who is a weapons specialist for the National Guard (although he is not mobilized, he is also injured like Tulip’s dad, which is sort of how I picked her up one night, but even though I have 1 cousin in Iraq and 2 cousins in Afghanistan, counting a cousin once removed even though Afghanistan isn’t on the teevee).

I am not the hottest chick in the room but when I am done up right I can turn any goddamn head, boy or girl, and on the night I met Tulip I was actually trying to snag this boy that was bartending at the Balcony. He had this little bit of fuzz on his chin but was a real big Tom Waits fan, and had real delicate hands. God, but I love a baby college student who wants to be an artist. They are always so excited that you want to fuck them and even though it will not be that good and will end too soon when they drop out you will have a poem or a painting as a souvenir. That is better than then you will get from any fucking marriage or shitass ring. You will get the fucking truth and guts of baby love spilled out onto paper about how much they can’t live without you, or they have to hold you, or something amazing and making you feel like a goddess. I had a senior at UNO write her thesis on my band and how our music was a new style of feminist transgressive. It isn’t at all, I know what I’m doing and it’s not that special, at least not if you have ever even heard one Ramones record, but to be treated as special is good enough.

So I was trying to impress him with some kind of music shit and talking about Les Pauls, which will more than seriously hypnotize your standard boy, and she walked into the room. And I know I sound like an idiot, like in some shit Jennifer Anniston movie or something terrible on teevee, but I swear the breath was knocked out of me. She was wearing a white button-down dress shirt with “Frustrated Artist” stenciled over the chest, and the little blonde hairs running down the inside of my arms stood straight up on end. She sat down at the end of the bar, and the Balcony, they have this terrible thing where they will throw all the busted mixed drinks and shots into a plastic tub at the end of the night, and they call it Jambalaya, and it’s in this tub with a tap on it and a shot is two bucks, like three bucks cheaper than anything real.

And she orders a double Jambalaya, which is nuts, because first of all it means she knows about the shot, and second of all, it’s crazy because she wants more of this Suicide drink. You know, when you were little, and at the ball park, and you’d get a soft-sided Coke cup and drizzle the juice of Dr. Pepper, Mt. Dew, Diet Whatever and Sunkist all in one cup, a Suicide. It never tasted like anything but Pepsi in a Coke cup but that was all right, it was that you could do it.

So she orders this and the asshole bartender rings a bell, or something, this terrible and embarrassing tradition that I didn’t even know they had, and here I am coming to this place for the better part of a year. I wonder why I hadn’t ever seen her before, because that spiky little haircut with those green eyes would have been hard to miss.

So this is right after the storm, and I am still flush with money from sheetrocking every damn house from here to the levee, and I sidle up like John Wayne in one of those stupid old movies and say, this one’s on me, and I’ll be damned if it didn’t work.

II.

We are laying in her bed on Tchoupitoulas, I realize, and the sun is sneaking through a hole in the curtains, and all I can feel is my head and my left foot, which are pulsing in rhythm like that crap Cubano music they play at the daiquiri joints on Bourbon. I can’t find my glasses but I can see pretty okay down to my feet anyway and my little toe on my left foot is blue like somebody snapped a fountain pen over it. I think shit, I broke it, what did I do, and Tulip’s coming awake, and I start to get that feeling in the back of my throat that tells me that I’m embarrassed because I drank too much and did shit I can’t remember.

But then she rolls over, pushes her head under my arm, and bites me on the ribs, and giggles, and I feel that broken toe throb, but I don’t mind at all.

III.

It’s damn cold outside, and I hate it when it’s cold, and Tulip wants to go on one of her walks, and I just flat refuse and she storms out like Andy Capp in the newspapers. I love her more than just about anything but don’t mind it when she leaves, I can’t breathe in this little room with her here. On her walks she picks up the little bits of brick and dirt and metal garbage that she pastes into pictures of flowers on cardboard that she paints. For the most part it is what some people call folk art but every now and then it is really beautiful. I never like to go with her because she is always seeing something like an old pull-tab from an old can of Coke, and saying, oh man! Don’t you just think this will fit perfect in the blackeyed susan I am doing, and I never know how to answer, because I just don’t see that way, and every time she notices that I can’t is a terrible thing that hangs in the air between us.

For the past two weeks the moment she has walked out the door to go hunting I go right over to her little hope chest, really just an old piece of cherry wood that is no bigger than a cigar box. When I met her it was empty. Over the past seven months it has gathered all these little bits and pieces of us, of me, like napkin rings from places in the French Quarter where we would have lunch, this stupid sketch some Jackson Square con artist did of me riding a cartoon horse, receipts from where we would have drinks at the Balcony, a cork from a bottle of ten dollar wine, just stupid stuff. But things that meant that she was keeping pieces of me.

I wanted to keep looking in the box to see what she was adding, because I worried that one day she would stop putting prizes in there. Almost more than I wanted her to love me I wanted her to want to have pieces of me. I wanted her to want me like you want your favorite song, want to hear it all the time. I wanted to matter to her.

IV.

The truth is that you can get a train ticket to New Orleans from a lot of places, and it is not that expensive. When I came down here from Jackson it was twenty-two dollars. You’d stop in this little places on the way down, in Copiah, and in Lincoln County, and you would wonder about the people that would stop and watch you riding the train. You wished that they could get together the twenty dollars and the old suitcase and change their name, too. It’s not running away when you aren’t scared.

When I went to the station, the lady said the ticket was forty-four dollars. I said, it is only twenty-two on the way down. She stared at me, and I said, why does it cost more to leave, that doesn’t make any sense. She kept staring and I gave her the forty-four and then I played a game in the arcade where you shot at what I guess where supposed to be terrorists, because you were sort of in a desert. The gun you used was sort of like an Uzi but when it kicked, in this little plasticky way, it ruined everything, because it wasn’t scary or strong or anything, even though Uzis are kind of little in real life. I burned the last of my food money on that damn game but any game where you can shoot rockets at helicopters is hard to pass up.

Getting on the train was like getting on plane only without some of the idiot bullshit. When I sat down I put on my headphones and turned up my tape of Zen Arcade and mashed my right arm against the window, which feels good because it’s cold, and my arm’s still all rashed out from the new tattoo. There’s a family in the seats ahead of me and they had gotten Subway at the station, and the little boy kept chanting to his mom, Open Chips, Open Chips, over and over, and he was real little, but probably not too little to open his own goddamned Doritos, and I am getting madder because his mom is ignoring him for some reason and not opening them. Finally his sister, who is probably only like six or seven, opens them for his dumb baby ass.

Then he is pointing at me, in my ripped blue tank top, and saying she has guns on her arms! Mommy, she has guns on her arms! And the mommy looks at my arms, not in my eyes, and she has this weird smile, and she says yes baby, she has guns on her arms, and I grit my teeth and look her in the eyes and say, these are not guns, these are AK-47 assault rifles, and the train hiccups as we begin to move towards Jackson.

Hüsker Dü – Pink Turns to Blue.

Tags: Balcony Bar, City of New Orleans, Husker Du

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 10th, 2008 at 8:48 am and is filed under Gorjus, In the South, Polaroids, The Rock and The Roll. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.