New Orleans Diary
November 1989
Friday 9 Nov 1989.
Somewhere in Kansas early in the cloudy morning. The telephone poles, I noticed in New Mexico and now here, are shorter than ones back home. And the poles lean this way and that and they are strung with more wires than I’ve seen, maybe thirty wires or so. This land is a lot like the Palouse country — except flatter. But I could be on my way to Grandma’s house by the looks of it. Fallow fields and scraggly autumn trees. Old weather-worn barns with rusty tin roofs, collapsing gulleys with puddles of muddy water. Ancient fence posts, falling, and barbed wire.
We’re in Missouri now.
Noontime, waiting for the dining car to open, listening to U2 on walkman. I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.
The train is a fine place to be. There are no pressures of the world here and one is free to read, think, write, or not do any of these things. One is free to speak to the person across the aisle or not to speak. One is free to think or not think, to simply watch the landscape roll by and let mind wander or simply go to sleep. And one is content to know that eventually the train arrives at one’s destination. But there is plenty of time, plenty of idle hours with no responsibilities.
Wednesday 15 November 1989 —
After several days in New Orleans, I finally seem to have come to myself enough that I am able to sit down and write in here. It helps to have a decent room finally — not that this room is “decent” by any decent person’s standards. But it is decent enough, with a pleasant view out toward Canal Street and the French Quarter. And there is privacy and quiet and cigarette smoke doesn’t seep under the door and I don’t have to share it with smelly vagrants (as I did at Le Dale’s in their “semi-private” room the night before last). I wish I’d’ve found this place earlier, but then I might not have got this particular room, which is much to my liking. Of course it is also infested with ants (and one of the grosser insects I have ever encountered [a giant cockroach] made its way into my potato chip bag) and there was what looked like the remnant of projectile vomiting on the bathroom wall and door jam and toilet seat. A little Scrubbing Bubbles bathroom cleaner and a roll of paper towels later, though and all is well. It is the first time I have taken a real shower (not squatting in a tub) since last week in Albuquerque. Plus I am paying under $10/night here. A damn good deal. Hurray! I’ve found my home away from home. #38 at the Orleans Hotel. Being alone is sad, but it is far better than being with someone you can’t stand. And if you have to be alone, I can’t think of a better place than this strange and friendly city.
New Orleans
17 Nov. 1989
I’ll have to admit I’ve been a bit out of it lately. The question is when haven’t I bin a bit out of it. I guess never, really; but I am at least getting used to it, resigned to it. I can live with being out of it.
Here I sit in the lobby of the Westin Hotel on the eleventh floor of Canal Place, somewhat nicer than the lobby of the Orleans Hotel. A pleasant place to sit: elegant furniture, soft solo piano, a view of the city and the old man river. Quite a coup, wouldn’t you agree, to pay $10 a night over at the Orleans, then come and sit in the posh lobby here at the Westin. Actually, I fit in much better here. I should be rich. If you’re rich you don’t have to be smart.
I am very tired and droopy of eyelid at this early hour of eleven o’clock. I am not feeling entirely well. This sudden 35-degree shift in the temperature caught everyone off guard. I’d love to curl up on one of these satin couches and go to sleep. Or ride the elevator up to my room overlooking the river and crawl into bed with a beautiful woman.
Well, back to reality, back to solitary confinement at the Orleans.
Saturday 18 November.
How negligent I’ve been. I should have been writing in here constantly my impressions and drawing sketches and such. Instead, I have wandered listlessly, gripped by despair and everydayness, waiting for something to happen. But nothing happens, for the most part, for you the individual, unless you the individual to some extent make it happen, or at least join in the happening of it. Now it becomes a matter of catching up. It is like the unsettling lyrics of the Pink Floyd song: “You missed the starting gun.” Instead of doing my work, I’ve been walking around in a stupor, trying in vain to make eyes at every woman that passes my way. Enough of that!
And enough of this. Here I sit in the little mirrored coffeehouse on the first floor of the Jax building. The mirrors allow me to sit here in the corner and see the entire room reflected. I can look at people this way. They take on a strange reality. And there I am. Or a new version of myself glistening and crisp.
A group of black women just sat down at a nearby table. Black people — especially those I’ve encountered here in New Orleans, mostly mystify me. Partly it is that I have never encountered such numbers of them. Such arrogance, sassiness, seriousness, and foolishness I can’t catch onto. Also, I can rarely understand a word they are saying when they speak among themselves. For the most part, they keep to themselves and are essentially indifferent to white folks. I suppose history, in part, has made them who they are.
I’ve had two somewhat baffling encounters with individual blacks. In each case, the fellow said something to me out of the blue which I at first took to be an insult of some sort (the precise nature of which wasn’t quite clear) but which turned out to be a polite complaint about the weather.
Then, yesterday, I went to the new Eddie Murphy movie about good black gangsters versus bad white ones in the ‘30s. And here I was just about the only white person in the theatre. A minority. Hmm … and then the same thing again at Popeye’s where hordes of them had gathered on account of the Bayou Classic. I seemed to hear on girl say, “He in the wrong place.”
Another observation about black people in New Orleans: they never wear their hats straight on their heads.
For the most part, they don’t have nothing to do with white folks, but that’s understandable, I guess. The trouble is, the situation is self-perpetuating.
Smelly city, broken land of dreams!
Agnostic lovers clutch to seeming
After-births aborted in your streets.
How dost thou keep thy faith in this repeating?
20 Nov.
Yesterday I rode the bus out to UNO and hung out in the library there. Reading the graffiti on the library desktops was most revealing. There is a lot of racial bitterness and hatred boiling beneath the polite southern surface.
The night before last, I went out to the art museum. Was impressed by the 18th-century miniature watercolor portraits by—damn, I’ve forgotten the name—something like John Smith or a name of that sort. Anyway, they were astounding. One of Degas’ ballerina paintings was interesting. Otherwise, not much astounded me there. Then I went walking through City Park as dark fell. That was quite eerie. The park was much more vast than I had anticipated, and I lost myself in it. It didn’t seem like the best place to be lost on a starless night — or any night, for that matter. I felt like I had stumbled into the world of Love in the Ruins or something — the ruins of the old south: vines sprouting through the rubble of sidewalks, an abandoned stadium, falling and rusty chain-link fences and gates locked with rusty chain locks. The came upon the ruin of what must once have been an elegant fountain in the center of the park. It didn’t look dirty or misused, just left to ruin, decrepit and dingey, with just one item of graffiti which said it all: “White folks gonna lose.”
The above was written while waiting for the bus. You do that a lot around here. The buses don’t even pretend to run on any kind of schedule. You just go to your stop and try your luck. Usually one is just pulling away.
Now I am sitting on the john in the Loyola library. I am actually sort of disappointed about the Walker Percy thing. I went about it all wrong. But what can you do? This is where he was teaching when John Kennedy Toole’s mother got him to read A Confederacy of Dunces. I can see why he wdnt’ve minded teaching here. It’s a nice place. At any rate, I think I’ll catch the bus to Covington tomorrow and who knows what might happen there.
Now waiting for the bus under the New Orleans Centre walkway to the Superdome. I’m looking forward to going to Covington tomorrow. I have felt somewhat trapped in this city, fascinating place though it is. It would be nice to tour Louisiana by car sometime. But this has also been pleasurable, and somewhat unsettling, to come to a place that I have encountered so often in fictional form. Now I see that it is indeed a real place — so real, in fact, that one can often detect more than traces of a rank odor, suggesting life and death, fecundity and decrepitude. Today I slept till 10 and vegetated till noon, as has become my custom of late. (I also seem to be sleeping a long 9 or 10 hours and dreaming a lot lately, although I couldn’t recount any recent dreams. Perhaps I am gearing up for something great when I return to Washington, or perhaps I am merely falling deeper into the pit of I know not what.) Rode the St. Charles streetcar to Loyola, walked around Loyola and Tulane, found the Covington phone book on microfiche, a book on St. Tammany Parish for wh. WP wrote the intro, went to Maple St. Books and bought a hardback copy of The Moviegoer, asked a couple of questions about WP, rode the streetcar back (reading the epilogue to The Moviegoer — a repetition beyond repetition), walked to the train station and bought a ticket to Covington.
Now I’m back in my hotel room. Time to do my laundry.