Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Einfuhlung

If there were stories that could take the place of life,
What would you need? Not even a house or wife.
Let the air resound with words and nothing else,
Not the earth, not water or fire, not even a face.

All our lives are given over to what’s human.
Animals can’t speak so they must listen.
I wanted to know how she spun and weaved
and cast a spell. It was not because she could.

She told me to go back and read John Keats.
Learn how he sees a sparrow at his window,
and finds himself pecking among the gravel.
You concentrate like him, you learn from her.

She was a hoodoo, ju-ju, gris-gris conjure woman.
She let the loas in. They gave her a lesson
then two and three and four and she learned how
to make what she never told when she could show.

Pretty soon the lungs begin to rupture, his blood
spilt on the Spanish steps, no telling what could
save him, not Marie Laveau, not even sparrows,
for he lived too soon, death was in his marrow.

The mother and daughter had the same name.
I could go back and live there but what would
I do? The wraiths say I need to start over.
I will when I find the words I never learned.

Mother gives daughter all she needs to know.
The daughter does all her mother taught her.
When the mother dies what of the daughter?
She does what she will. She cannot follow.

(30 November 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Egg

When of course you read Mother Goose
you’re in the back seat of the 38 Chevy
your daddy’s driving, mama by his side
many miles to get from Mother Hubbard
to the next tale and one before bedtime
you hear from the source.

My folks know everybody on the way
and some they never knew become old friends
and I can’t wait to get to Grandma’s house,
I go off and make sculptures out of mud,
we go on, and here we are, where the air
smells warm in slow rain.

The riddle of life: what happens to whom
and where the sky opens you always are.
The surgeon who lives in the countryside
goes each year, for two weeks, to aid the lame
in the jungles of Peru. Here at home
is his happiness.

Childhood is an egg that will break open
and who steps into the endless wide world
will go away and stay where the city
reveals what was never seen on the farm.
Could you have foregone this course or that one
and stayed innocent?

When I drive I tell my love the story
of lost children finding the only soul
is only half enough until lovers
learn to live where cold rain drizzles, runs down
window glass, falling upon the threshold
of the floating house.

(29 November 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Monday, November 28, 2011

Over the Lake, along the River, to the Sea

1.

Here’s the lake, there’s the river,
I don’t have a boat, I can’t drive a car,
In public I drink,
By myself I think.

It was before the flood,
We were in the mood.
When the pillar of salt was gone
I was alone.

You’d have thought the town was on fire
How I drank myself into the mire
Sleeping by the bayou
Where I woke without you.

If I could cross the bridge,
I'd be at large
Yet safe in Algiers
Under the rule of Leander Perez.

I drank and danced and found a love
I didn’t deserve, was lucky to have,
And I took her out of town
In the car she drives she owns.

2.

Here we are in the white city
Shimmering under the blue sky.

St. Francis feeds the birds,
Virgin and child here from Lourdes.

When we played by the shore
I can’t remember what you wore.

The war was over, I was free,
But who knew why?

I don’t recall which war,
I can’t remember saints, only sinners.

(28 November 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Sunday, November 27, 2011

Names of the Cities

Where rain is ice the feet take steps
knees bending slightly staying close
to the earth not even a squirrel dares
such weather I’m learning to walk in
and wish I could stride like my young
legs carried me twice into Mexico City

I wanted to see the flowers in the lake
Xochimilco and climb the pyramids
at Teotihuacan not even a child’s foot
regards with elan such steps so small
you would need to be goaded by spear
to the top where hearts were sacrificed

A hundred miles south of Winnipeg
I am most happily married to my soul
and she with me though days were long
fifty years from sun to dusk in her eyes
to the quickening body she gave to me
that long ago loving in the city Seattle

I found her finally in San Francisco
you know the song You left her there
and she was with me in New England
where Manhattan and Boston were
though New York is its own not for
everyone say those leaving Santa Fe

She carried me here when I wanted
to stay she said I was with her or I
would be nowhere and here I thrive
as the ice melts and the legs bounce
along steps quickening toes to heels
my body a wand when it is with hers

(27 November 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Saturday, November 26, 2011

Mnemonics

People I know don’t fuck nearly as much
as they say I do. I’m in it for the music.
I may drink and smoke and ogle the girls
but I know a major from a minor,
a sharp from a flat. Girls take off their clothes,
I take off mine. Who would want to say no?
They are not groupies, I’m not a rock star.
People say I gamble and fight too much.
I’m a pussy decked out like a tom cat.
I get hit, swallow my Adam’s Apple,
who could hear me sing? like a red rooster
early mornings, even though it’s pitch night
when I work myself up to reach the sky . . .

Lonely women take me home, love me good,
say I can fuck them all night if I want,
and I do but I’m older now and sleep
the day away, don’t come until the moon
appears. She’s been waiting, she comes along
when the sun kneels to get a good night’s sleep.
On my back, her face above, I’m alive.
The music never lasts as long as life.
You get older you shoot up so your world
comes down to enter hers. Then you can sleep.
People know her music is all I have.
We fuck through our clothes by the baby grand
she plays. Priests forbid you to come undressed.

I lose track, snow covers the years, I want
to keep going until the winter ends,
I smell warm air, tires lay down their slow beat,
horns find the melody, music begins.

(26 November 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Friday, November 25, 2011

One Way

I figured the time was ripe: I went home.
My father was dead, my mother alone.
She told me stories no one else would know.

My sister took her off to live alone.
I had no business there: My last trip home,
Mississippi headwaters my new home.

. . . that old home gone, polluted with shit stench
of Bar S cattle fattened by Mammon
on their one-way journey to perdition
wrapped behind the counter, beef same-day fresh.

(25 November 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Thursday, November 24, 2011

War and Peace

Cops fracture one’s skull,
lacerate another’s spleen.
Scott needs a third tour
of duty, but Iraq's near over.
Send him to Afghanistan.
Kayvan fought both places,
so he should go to Iran,
though he was born here.

I should go home to Glasgow
or Ulster. Maybe Cardiff,
even the Blue Ridge . . .
I got drunk to take the bus
out of San Francisco over
the Bay Bridge, then walked
through Oakland’s dull yellow
shadows to the Berkeley line.

Men kill men in the line
of duty. You become a man
that way, I was told, young.
Don’t blame women’s soft
loving bodies, their lips
on yours, the world’s reason
for bringing you into earth’s
orbit where only we say love,

or so we believe. Someday
creatures from a galaxy
yet unnamed will be unable
to go on. Poison, ours,
flooding their planet, they
elect to put us in thrall
to make peace where war was.
Ask God why He didn’t know

they exist. Maybe God doesn’t
either. That would be news.
Nietzsche walking mountains
looking everywhere gave up
searching. He knew God
was in the mind or nowhere,
saved a horse from the whip
the day he took God’s place.

(24 November 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

War and Peace

WAR AND PEACE

Cops fracture one’s skull,
rupture another’s spleen.
Scott needs a third tour
of duty, but Iraq is over.
Send him to Afghanistan.
Kayvan fought both places,
so he should go to Iran,
though he was born here.

I should go back to Glasgow
or Ulster. Maybe Cardiff,
even the Blue Ridge . . .
I got drunk to take the bus
out of San Francisco over
the Bay Bridge, then walked
through Oakland’s dull yellow
shadows to the Berkeley line.

Men kill men in the line
of duty. You become a man
that way, I was told, young.
Don’t blame women’s soft
loving bodies, their lips
on yours, the world’s reason
for bringing you into earth’s
orbit where only we talk love,

so we believe. Someday
creatures from a galaxy
with no name yet will be
unable to go on. Poison,
ours, flooding their planet,
they elect to put us in thrall
to make peace where war was.
Ask God why He didn’t know

they exist. Maybe God doesn’t
either. That would be news.
Nietzsche walking the hills
looking everywhere gave up
searching. He knew God
was in the mind or nowhere,
saved a horse from the whip
the day he took God’s place.


(24 November 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Wednesday, November 23, 2011

The Long Run

Instinct tells the dog, Run!
One leg slows him down.
Winter slows everyone.

People catchers are in
the mix now dogs are in
the pound. People close in
on other people drawn
inside the kettle, thrown
into the torture salon.

Why do men torture women?
Is the world theirs to own?
Why was God a man
and lived alone?

Cats run with tails down
into the alley, then down
where they may drown
when the street darkens
and dark waters begin.

Who can stop to listen?
It’s no time now to mourn.

Know: Killers never win
in the long run.

(23 November 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Never-ending Conspiracy Theory

They shot him in Dallas forty-eight years ago today.
The shots echoed all the way to the Poultry Science
building in Pullman, Washington, where Roethke
was dead two months before, while the hens slept
with the roosters and those donning white coats
checked room temperature and humidity.
Eggs hatching under the bare warm bulbs faced
the door the roosters strutted through to see
who was where . . . even, some theorized, why.
The bar downtown filled with alcoholics who knew
roosters know to mount hens with requisite fury
to reproduce. Even where hens lay alone, cocks
were always strutting through the door, their bright
red coxcombs sheltering a short life’s mirth
between their wings. When a rooster dies a thick line
is drawn with a straight edge through his identity,

I always believed there were assassins on the ground.
Over the years you were told to give up such beliefs.
Witnesses died one after the other, strangely,
even the assassin of the assassin via cancer.
Conspiracy theory fell through democracy’s cracks.
Oswald took the rap, even Mailer said he was alone.
I know even less now than I knew then. I know
I shouldn’t care, but remember others who died
for no good reason. I never gave up. Some hens did,
some roosters stayed. Even Cathleen came home.

Yet every hour this time of day Americans die
somewhere, a death labeled natural or murder.
Where I was it was noon, we wore white shirts
when his wounds ruptured the one pulse a body needs.

(22 November 2011)\

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Monday, November 21, 2011

Down at the Park

Charley looks at his contemporary Elmer and mumbles hello, he’s none too happy to be here with his old friend who’s gone over to the other side now that the lines were drawn long enough ago to be considered at length before taking the crucial step across. Elmer is wearing his tea bags off the brim of his baseball cap.

Elmer replies Yo! as though . . . He looks a little stunned to find himself in the pockets of the Texas oil billionaire brothers: What’s their name, Cocaine? Reactionary politics is life blood to the comfortable couch he sits astride catching up, yes, always catching up, with the latest report so generously provided by Fox News.

If you can call it news, Charley says, echoing the admirable one on another channel no one who has only basic cable can ever see, and if they have no computer capable of running video clips who would even remember Countdown had nothing to do with Cape Canaveral back when little boys could participate in Reagan’s America by eating that well-known vegetable ketchup, which has now regained its former fame with Godfather Pizza (to be followed by TM) . . .

Elmer went over to the other side the first time Reagan quoted Tom Paine’s We have it in our power to begin the world all over again, which dovetailed nicely with John Winthrop’s desire to make Puritan America (don’t forget that adjective, Elmer, Charley insists) a city on the hill for all the world to see. It’s a wonder, Charley tells him, you didn’t volunteer for the Contras.

Charley goes into the streets. There he adds his voice to the voices around him that fill in for the absence of a sound system dismantled and done away with by the city’s Finest (during one of their first visits, all of which are invasions, the right to assemble to redress grievances being a highly contested part of the Bill of Rights since . . . when? Maybe always.) The city’s “finest” so-called: Who needs them to break your fucking skull, rupture your goddam spleen, run over your leg with a hog and claim you put yourself under it to call attention . . . Charley doesn’t have a job so he can find time to be where there are others who have no jobs and unless these people are heard and their needs met even partially, there may never be anything to do but go into the streets and exercise your franchise that way, after the baggers have given the Supreme Court permission to go the rest of the way in disenfranchising the poor by denying them the right to vote, having no photo ID, and No, Elmer and his ilk like to say, To step behind the curtain and take your own picture won’t do. And Charley replies, Even that takes money, Elmer.

Elmer is standing on the edge of the crowd. He’s frowning, of course, his hands are fidgeting with themselves, he shifts back and forth from one leg to the other.

What! No Fox News? Charley jibes. Not even watching TV?

I thought I’d find out how many hippies are here, Elmer says, . . . and pick up on the drugs and sex, man. He sounds like a time warp, if one were audible. Yet Elmer is as serious as a cop with a club.

Well, Charley says, there are unwashed hippies and drug addicts and ne’er do wells of all persuasions here. Por ejemplo, the sex is flowing like a river and you know damn well that’s why you hung out at the communes back in the day. Furthermore, the cops come in to make sure we don’t trespass on clean folks and get too near them and leave our stink on them, it might change them if they got too close to what’s actually here. At worst, they would risk beginning to think.

Tea bags swinging from the brim of his cap, Elmer moved through another crowd, sauntering up or down a street risking his skull and spleen if not for badges of belonging dangling. Elmer is taking a little time off now from Fox and imagines himself as one whose self-respect includes the need to go out among ’em, blend in as best he can (tea bags carefully removed before final descent into his own version of Sodom and Gomorrah) and hang around until he finds a little action he can’t refuse and thereby acquire another perspective, this time from another point of view, which is not to say “from another persuasion,” for men and women are in all this together, Elmer likes to say. Or so he dreams.

Charley lends his voice. He holds a sign. He moves with the others. He gives the bastards shit that have it coming. He has a birth certificate but doesn’t need to prove it. He was in Nam and made it back. He smokes dope every day. He goes home with women if they want, and that’s not to say he doesn’t know what to do without having to go up and down the street and hover around its edges looking for what can easily be mistaken for love.

Elmer didn’t have to worry about Nam. Now he receives a little money every week. His daddy not only knew a way to keep Elmer out of the draft and then the lottery but supports him now with Texas oil money, and it’s more than enough to keep Elmer watching Fox and changing channels during commercials and thereby discovering what Pat Robertson and his brethren have to add . . . Then there’s always the Playboy channel if you need to get off without going out. Elmer has a rich, full life, he always says.

Charley brings his own bag, to sleep in. Here he doesn’t do his own dope. He never drinks now. He showers on Mondays, not always at his mother's but mostly. When he lost his teaching job he found kindred souls who'd also lost theirs and between them they pooled their meager savings and kept going until now. Now much of the time they all live down here. Here the people he knows he considers, each one, a brother or sister he's working with to be and to stay free.

His mother lives alone and Charley sees her once a week at least, to be where he can help her get by, even if he can’t help financially. She has a pension, from when his dad retired two years before he died, and social security . . . as long as it may last now that the country seems about to experiment once more with being led by the man with no dog now, not yet, on the end of his leash.

Charley loves dogs and lets them run free. What he doesn’t love has no name but the old ones. Slavery: Let that stand for the rest. End the wars. Open the borders. What would you do if your people were brought here shackled from Africa? Or indentured to the rich man who lets you go free once you put in your time . . . White boy, you never knew the worst. There were too many masters here when your daddy arrived dirt poor, but at least he knew one day he’d be free.

(21 November 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Sunday, November 20, 2011

Passe?

Where are Tasers now that pepper spray is the fascist rage?
Was Malcolm right to say nonviolence would become passe?
Does the cream rise to the top so it may be bullet-skimmed
like Malcolm, King, Goodman, Chaney, Schwerner, Viola Liuzzo?
Cattle prods are as passe as high-pressure hoses in the streets?
Where did Sheriff Rainey, Bull Conner, George Wallace go?
Look wherever the word Occupy occurs: there their kind converge.

Up and down the line of bodies the cops pass one at a time
pumping pepper spray in orange clouds covering those
whose right to redress grievances is contested by privilege
and ready-made laws stacked on judges’ desks ready to pull
when the call comes from the mayor to rid the city of vermin.

At the beginning of the third month of Occupy Our America
the hireling cops pass back and forth calmly in Davis, California,
and when canisters are empty they take another from the cop
charged to refill in readiness. Do they know how much it takes
to exterminate with pepper spray? stack and burn the bodies?

My friend from our Seattle days, circa 1960, living now in Berkeley,
asks, What would Mario Savio do? Bettina Aptheker? Bobby Seale?
In one held breath of years Jerry Rubin went to Wall Street,
Abbie Hoffman bought the farm. Angela Davis keeps the faith.
Let’s vindicate the octogenarian rebelle pepper-sprayed in Seattle!

(20 November 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Passe?

Where are tasers now that pepper spray is the fascist rage?
Was Malcolm right to say nonviolence would become passe?
Does the cream rise to the top so it may be bullet-skimmed
like Malcolm, King, and Goodman, Chaney, Schwerner?
Cattle prods are as passe as high-pressure hoses in the streets?
Where did Sheriff Rainey, Bull Conner, George Wallace go?
Look wherever the word Occupy occurs: there heir ilk.

The cops go one at a time up and down the line of bodies
pumping the pepper spray in orange clouds covering those
whose right to redress grievances is contested by privilege
and its ready-made laws stacked on judges’ desks ready to pull
when the call comes from the mayor to rid the city of vermin.

At the beginning of the third month of Occupy Our America
the cops go up and down the line calmly in Davis, California,
and when canisters are empty they take another from the cop
charged to refill in readiness. Do they ask how much it takes
to pepper-spray a body to death? stack and burn the bodies?

My friend from our Seattle days, circa 1960, now in Berkeley,
asks, What would Mario Savio do? Bettina Aptheker? Bobby Seale?
In one held breath of years Jerry Rubin went to Wall Street,
Abbie Hoffman bought the farm. Angela Davis keeps the faith.
Let’s vindicate the octogenarian rebelle pepper-sprayed in Seattle!

(20 November 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Saturday, November 19, 2011

Father

I revere tales my father told me to spare me
learning them on my own pulse. I have no children
and who would listen now, an age of emptiness
girdling the globe and the poor have only increased.
I was splitting a stump in his garage
the last day I saw him alive. And when he died
I kissed him on one cheek and knew he’d say, I’m dead.
As it was, I threw my back out wielding the adze.
For it was sculpture my father sought in his dreams
of bloody fingers from picking cotton so young
he should have been in school but his father was dead,
murdered in Sallisaw, his widow penniless
as all widows of tenant farmers . Still, there were
the mines where my father evolved into a mule
rather than remain a mole. Mule dragging the coal
up the tracks and all the way to the earth’s surface.
Invariably he woke riding the flatbed up
they rode down. Then all their coal-black faces emerged.
And one day he walked away and never returned.
The man for whom I was named, Floyce Been, was down there
in the mine exploding, my father surviving.
That was not the worst: He wanted me to tell him
why his mother and father could not get along,
not even loving seven children, two more born
to be buried one at a time next to his grave.
Having sired no children myself, how could I say
why they fought until a child was born and he left
to be alone with the sins he never confessed,
leaving behind the only book their children read,
the Bible containing family births and deaths.
He moved away from that God-forsaken country
starting over after the war with a homestead,
taming wild vineyards, building an auto garage
in his backyard, where he could be a boy again,
like he’d been when he happened not to be working
in the fields. With as many of his six brothers
strong enough to help him hike up the Model T’s
front wheels on a tree trunk, back wheels scotched with big rocks,
he worked until dark to resurrect the engine
from below, and day come again he bent over
the engine giving it gas to spark combustion,
all four wheels planted on the earth he also loved.

(19 November 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Friday, November 18, 2011

Of the Masters

Naked woman lying on the settee
Recalls the Goya, Modigliani
Adorning the walls of an old man’s room.
The old woman embraced by his two arms
Possessed twice their beauty in her long youth.

She was born in the North, he in the South.
They found one another in a city
In the shadow of mountains by the sea
Whose name Pacific betrayed its nature.
Where either dies one can never be sure.

His fingers are brushes to carry paint
To the canvas to trace her body’s tint.
Goya’s Maja, Modigliani’s love . . .
You see her, she sees you seeing . . . then love!

(18 November 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Thursday, November 17, 2011

No Poem

The swan is not a goose,
a goose is not a duck,

we fuck in water
and languish on earth.

To be among the trees
of my childhood,

to look across the plains
to your mountains

is to imagine home
your body as my own.

Too many die too soon.
They are abandoned

far from the laughter
licked by orange fire.

(17 November 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

First Snow

When the first snow falls
horses go through the corral
to munch on hay cast down
to the dry floor of the barn.
They huddle together warm
as a body is with a body,
stallion nosing the mare
switching his tail in cold air
hoping the earth will hold
their hooves like summer did.

(17 November 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Amor Fati

What happened to him in Roanoke?
Was he seeing Reynolds too far off
to call to? He read Greek and Latin
in translation: Homer and Horace.
He fought wars, came home, farmed
after serving the emperor: like them
in all but style, their words evaded his.
He quit reading, did nothing but write.
Blanche went above Memphis finally.
She found him waiting out of his mind.

(15 November 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Monday, November 14, 2011

Envoi

So I may call myself sane, I end my part in the story.
You will find what follows blessedly bereft of me.
I stayed another year at THE SALOON.
I lived in HOTEL HOTEL until that year ended.
I left New Orleans and will never return
now that Roanoke and the art of poetry are mine
to claim, to relinquish, to be in and with, to be alive.

(14 November 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Sunday, November 13, 2011

From Fort Smith

Ira said, Go to Fort Smith and see if my brothers are still around.
Adore had heard none of their names until now.
I said I might take a break from work and see what I could find.

What I found was nothing I could see, except old photos;
nothing I could hear but what one of Abe’s sons said;
nothing I could smell but the water dank in its well;
nothing I could touch but what little was still there;
nothing I could taste but the peanuts in his garden.

Ira’s need was to keep learning his horn, loving Adore
without children of their own.
They were already too old.

In Fort Smith I heard of a cigar-store Indian
standing many years next to a liquor store’s door.
The man who owned it was the only son of the father
of the woman Abe married. One brother, two sisters,
all from up around Tahlequah, but not from that town.

It was all gone now. But the words in the sidewalk
would last as long as the sidewalk.
TOM TAYLOR’S SALOON.

I came back and told Ira, who said he never knew
Fort Smith could be so prosperous,
and his brother’s lineage no less.
I told him about Pearl Taylor, Abe’s wife’s mother
and everything else Abe’s son told me.

The talk returned to New Orleans.
Ira was obsessed with learning to play his horn
maybe as well as that dark legend, Buddy Bolden.

Ira knew twenty years here had been everything.
I’d heard from Abe’s son that his nephew
was living in California. Called himself Juan
but was half gringo. Ira said he would be grand uncle
to this guy. How could he be found?

Adore said she had always wanted to go west.
I said I would go with her.
I knew who they meant, I could find where he lived.

I had never been to California but Betty had gone back
and she would know where he lived.
He would be with a woman named Irish Cathleen,
to whom he had been married all his life,
it seemed. And he would be seeing Betty on the side.

Adore also wanted to go along to make sure this Juan
was the same Johnny they knew from here.
Adore was not that careful, but she was skeptical.

(13 November 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Saturday, November 12, 2011

When Johnny Goes Back

She said she was going, but she didn’t, not right away. She kept the room at Mama Doll’s with Johnny’s mother’s blessing, even knowing her son was thrilled he would get a change of scene where he planned to see his wife and his mistress on alternate days . . . or in some such pattern. Nor did his mother mind when I started sleeping with Betty, especially since I discovered I knew one of her girls already. Blanche was there, had been there, she said, since moving out of “our” hotel room, as she remembered it, more than a little fondly, it seemed. Blanche already knew Betty and had shared her memories of J. C. before I finally visited the house on St. Charles Avenue. I never understood the way women shared their men, if they did. I damn sure never had been shared, so-called . . .

I kept my room in HOTEL HOTEL, just in case. Redhaired women were said to have hot tempers–how could they help it? wearing on their heads hot coals smoldering in ashes and liable to erupt in flames any moment . . . Betty was my first redhead and most likely would be the last, in fact maybe she would be the last of all. I wasn’t exactly Lothario incarnate, Casanova reborn . . . Anyway, I kept drawing from memory and writing letters in my bandbox of a room, and working every day at THE SALOON except one. Ray said he was having a great life with Allison–that was the only name I knew–though he still went to his mother’s house every night, getting in late usually and laying it off to working after hours at the bar. Allison was from one of the city’s better-known families. He was amazed he was getting by with as much as he was. They checked in to the St. Charles Hotel in the afternoon, had dinner and drinks downstairs (where many different languages were spoken casually and sometimes, it seemed, all at once. . . ), and upstairs, as he said, “fucked our brains out.”

After Betty was overdue to arrive, Johnny started calling and his mother set him straight about expecting Betty to put up with him when he’d be living with his wife on California Street, by Golden Gate Park, across the bridge from Betty in Sausalito. Doll had been there, she knew Sally Stanford very well–this was a spell before the retired madam was elected mayor of Sausalito--and her own son wasn’t fooling her one bit. Johnny wrote Betty short, sometimes mournful, always whining letters, or that’s how she put it. I didn’t know, she never showed me one.

After another month Betty said she had to go back. She’d taken more time away than she’d planned. Her roommate would be wondering why; she’d never been gone this long before. Even now, she declared, she wanted to stay. Later on, she wrote to me about her life in Sausalito, living with a man considerably younger than her. But maybe that was another man, a later one, I really didn’t care to know about any of her men after that, and said so, though she kept on writing and I kept on replying. I stayed in New Orleans and when I wasn't here I went back to the mountains to see my sisters for a few days at a time, at most. Sure, I missed Betty, but Blanche and I took up company again, during her off hours.

I worked for Ray another year and then started planning to go back to live at the homestead, where I’d grown up. Roanoke wasn’t far away, and I thought I would have the best of both worlds, and now that I’d lived in New Orleans a while I never knew where I might take a notion to go next. I might even talk Blanche into coming with me.

(12 November 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander
WHEN JOHNNY GOES HOME

She said it but she didn’t do it, not right away: she kept the room at Mama Doll’s with Johnny’s mother’s blessing, even knowing her son was thrilled he would get a change of scene where he could see his wife and his mistress on alternate days . . . or in some such pattern. Nor did his mother mind when I started sleeping with Betty, especially since I discovered I knew one of Doll's girls already. Blanche was there, had been there, she said, since moving out of “our” hotel room, as she remembered it, more than a little fondly, it seemed. Blanche already knew Betty and had shared her memories of J. C. before I finally visited the house on St. Charles Avenue. I never understood the way women shared their men, if they did. I damn sure had never been shared, so-called . . .

I kept my room in HOTEL HOTEL, just in case. Redhaired women were said to have hot tempers–how could they help it? wearing on their heads hot coals smoldering in ashes and liable to erupt in flames any moment . . . Betty was my first redhead and most likely would be the last, in fact maybe she would be the last of all. I wasn’t exactly Lothario incarnate, Casanova reborn . . . Anyway, I kept drawing from memory and writing letters in my bandbox of a room, and working every day at THE SALOON except one. Ray said he was having a great life with Allison–that was the only name I knew, except she was from one of the city’s better-known families--though he still went to his mother’s house every night, getting in late usually and laying it off to working after hours at the bar. Allison was from one of the city’s better-known families. He was amazed he was getting by with as much as he was. They checked in to the St. Charles Hotel in the afternoon, had dinner and drinks downstairs (where, as I recall, everyone seemed to speak a different language . . . ), and upstairs, he said, “fucked our brains out.”

And after Betty was overdue to arrive, Johnny started calling and his mother set him straight about expecting this woman to put up with him when he was just across the Golden Gate from her in Sausalito, and his wife living by Golden Gate Park, on California Street. Doll had been there, she knew Sally Stanford very well–this was a spell before the retired madam was elected mayor of Sausalito--and her own son wasn’t fooling her one bit. Johnny wrote Betty short, sometimes mournful, always whining letters, or that’s how she put it. I didn’t know, she never showed me one.

After another month Betty said she had to go back. She’d taken off more time than she’d planned. Her roommate would be wondering and she’d never been gone this long before. Even now, she declared, she wanted to stay. Later on, she wrote to me about her life in Sausalito, living with a man considerably younger than her. But maybe that was another man, a later one, I didn’t see either one because I never went to California, I stayed here and when I wasn’t here I went back to the mountains to see my sisters for a few days. Sure, I missed Betty, but I enjoyed Blanche’s company again, during her off hours.

I worked for Ray another year and then I started planning to go back to live at the homestead, where I’d grown up. Roanoke wasn’t far away, and I thought I would have the best of both worlds, in addition to a world I already knew and now that I’d lived in New Orleans a while you never knew what you might take a notion to do next. I might even talk Blanche into coming with me.

(12 November 2011)

When Johnny Goes Back

She said it but she didn’t do it, not right away: she kept the room at Mama Doll’s with Johnny’s mother’s blessing, even knowing her son was thrilled he would get a change of scene where he could see his wife and his mistress on alternate days . . . or in some such pattern. Nor did his mother mind when I started sleeping with Betty, especially since I discovered I knew one of her girls already. Blanche was there, had been there, she said, since moving out of “our” hotel room, as she remembered it, more than a little fondly, it seemed. Blanche already knew Betty and had shared her memories of J. C. before I finally visited the house on St. Charles Avenue. I never understood the way women shared their men, if they did. I damn sure had never been shared, so-called . . .

I kept my room in HOTEL HOTEL, just in case. Being a redhead, women known to have hot tempers–how could they help it? wearing long red hair a lifetime--wearing it short might make them more a handful. Betty was my first redhead and most likely would be the last, in fact maybe she would be the last of all. I wasn’t exactly Lothario incarnate, Casanova reborn . . . Anyway, I kept drawing from memory and writing letters in my bandbox of a room, and working every day except one at THE SALOON. Ray said he was having a great life with Allison, though he still went to his mother’s house every night, getting in late usually and laying it off to working after hours at the bar. Allison was from one of the city’s better-known families. He was amazed he was getting by with as much as he was. They checked in to the St. Charles Hotel in the afternoon, had dinner and drinks downstairs (where, as I recall, everyone seemed to speak a different language . . . ), and upstairs, he said, “fucked our brains out.”

And after Betty was overdue to arrive, Johnny started calling and his mother set him straight about expecting this woman to put up with him when he was just across the Golden Gate from her in Sausalito, and his wife living by Golden Gate Park, on California Street. Doll had been there, she knew Sally Stanford very well–this was a spell before the retired madam was elected mayor of Sausalito--and her own son wasn’t fooling her one bit. Johnny wrote Betty short, sometimes mournful, always whining letters, or that’s how she put it. I didn’t know, she never showed me one.

After another month Betty said she had to go back. She’d taken off more time than she’d planned. Her roommate would be wondering and she’d never been gone this long before. Even now, she declared, she wanted to stay. Later on, she wrote to me about her life in Sausalito, living with a man considerably younger than her. But maybe that was another man, a later one, I didn’t see either one because I never went to California, I stayed here and when I wasn’t here I went back to the mountains to see my sisters for a few days. Sure, I missed Betty, but I enjoyed Blanche’s company again, during her off hours.

I worked for Ray another year and then I started planning to go back to live at the homestead, where I’d grown up. Roanoke wasn’t far away, and I thought I would have the best of both worlds, in addition to a world I already knew and now that I’d lived in New Orleans a while
you never knew what you might take a notion to do next. Hell, I might even talk Blanche into coming with me.

(12 November 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Friday, November 11, 2011

What It Takes to Get Happy

I kept a pad of drawing paper behind the bar and sketched people from memory. Mostly my mother and her three daughters, my only siblings. Also, some characters I recalled from around the home place, all neighbors except for those who appeared nowhere but in my dreams when I was living there, and they were most visible to me now. Not much got done but work, as you can imagine: I was working full time now with one day a week off, when I took Betty out to picnic and make love and talk about what she was going to do when Johnny returned, when she planned to tell him she was in love with me. We also saw Ira and Adore at the café one night a week sometimes, but mostly one night every other week; we were too busy discovering one another when we had the time.

Ray had this wonderful woman who was a widow with two children, and he was wildly in love with her, and she with him, it seemed. He’d bring her by for dinner at the Absinthe House and afterward they’d cross the street for an Old Fashioned, for her, and a Jax for him. If the place was too busy they had one and left, but usually now, with the fall approaching, the clientele grew sparse before and after dinner time. A lot of drunken tourists were still coming around, but fewer now. And, as you know, dear reader, Hurricane Betsy was not far off.

I got a letter from home from one of my sisters saying our mother was ill and not expected to last and she would surely love to see me before she died. So I was gone when the hurricane arrived. And stayed to settle matters after the funeral and see to it our two most trustworthy neighbors would help the girls around the farm when they needed it, which wouldn’t be too often but still, it was good to get such assurance by the time I left.

The pumps had recovered the two weeks of flood waters Betsy unleashed. Gentilly, the Upper and Lower Ninth Wards, among other places (as you may remember), were inundated. Talk was the levees were intentionally breached to safeguard the Vieux Carre. LBJ came to town and swore the city would be protected by its levees next time: he would build new ones . . . The amazing part was how no one I encountered talked much about what had happened to them personally, though it was big when it was going on, or so I was led to believe. And forty years up the line, as you know, Katrina was waiting (by which time I would not be around to witness it either . . . )

Johnny was back in town almost as soon as I left, or so I learned later, and Betty was suddenly unavailable again, and after all that planning . . . Word was they spent the two weeks of Betsy at Mama Doll’s. Now I put myself into my work, taking over almost completely for Ray, to the point where he only worked one day a week, the day I took off and now I simply kept working every day and he seemed happy to be free, even raised my pay so I could move to a little better place, but I didn’t; for the time being there were too many memories in that dump, and I hadn’t sorted out yet what had happened while I was gone.

One night I entered the café where Ira was playing and Adore standing by the door, as she invariably did when he was on. I walked in and she took my arm and nodded to show me the table where Johnny and Betty were. Now, mind you, I hadn’t had a drink yet. I walked to their table and sat without looking at them and with no invitation. Neither one of them said a word. I sat with my back to them while the set continued to its finish.

Ira came over and Adore too. Johnny and Betty said hello to them and I turned around, as though surprised to see them sitting at the same table with me, telling Johnny I didn’t realize he was in California until I ran into Betty on the street one day. He said, Yeah, J. C., I heard all about it. Rather than ask what he’d heard, I let it go. Ira said I should come around to Adore’s and visit. Adore whispered she could fill me in on what was happening anywhere here. And with that Ira and Adore went outside to take the air. I turned to Johnny and said, Welcome back, and to Betty, I’m happy to see you happy. Neither responded. I didn’t give them much of a chance, I was gone that quick.

Outside the three of us had a great laugh and that night, after work, I went by Adore’s and recognized the place, like she’d said, by the chicken’s foot she’d have hanging on the door. We three got drunk and Ira and I told stories about the mountains and Adore one or two about growing up here. Oddly, Johnny and Betty didn’t come up again, not that night. About a month later Betty left town. No one knew why, but I, for one, guessed Johnny’s wife was somehow involved. I heard this from Ray, mind you, the last person I’d have expected to tell me, but then, he’d known Johnny far longer than either me or Betty. He believed Johnny’s wife was the reason. She wanted him back in San Francisco . . . so when Betty said she’d go back to Sausalito Johnny was all set to have things the way he wanted.

(11 November 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Thursday, November 10, 2011

What's What, Who's Who

1.

Betty said she was from California, Sausalito. I said nothing all the time she was talking about it, I was tracing the aureoles around her nipples with one hand’s fingers and with the other hand massaging her vaginal lips. Of course I had been taught to say “tits” and “cunt” or “pussy,” and so on . . . when I was a strapping boy just learning what my penis, rather “cock” or “boner” or . . . was for. The neighbor girl was older than I was, but she taught me good, I mean “well.” And she took me out in the trees and lay down and pulled me down by my penis and put it between her legs and even though I had masturbated to prophesy this moment I was surprised to be so surprised that a woman felt so very good when she replaced the imaginary one . . .

She said I ought to come with her to her little house on the hill in back of the town where you could see all the boats as well as the restaurant called Trident and the people crossing the street . . . I started to tell her about Roanoke but she did to me what was unique to each woman who blessed me with her favors, I mean what she did with her mouth and her tongue and what has gone down in the history of lovemaking as one more tool in a girl’s bag of tricks in her crib. Betty did it differently than my first lover and differently than Ruby, and after Betty I would make love with a woman whose mouth and tongue would feel and make me feel more differently still. Betty also taught me how to slide my tongue between the vaginal lips and find her clitoris, . . . and I could go on but why bother? This is history every human learns on his or her own.

I asked her questions she answered about Sausalito and San Francisco and she told me about Marin County and Sonoma County and took me to the Virgin Islands, St. Croix, where she’d lived . . . but I was doing with her what HOTEL HOTEL was intended for, or so I figured, seeing the women guiding the men up the stairs from time to time . . .

Betty said she wanted me to see Mama Doll’s, but I was uneasy thinking about men paying for it. The girls with their guys going up the stairs were too appealing to my, what I learned early on were labeled the “baser instincts.”

I was more concerned about ol’ Johnny and how he’d take what was happening here when he returned to town.

2.

Once Ira and I got to talking in the café he told me his brother killed a black man (he didn’t say “nigger,” nor did I say it or let it go uncorrected, it was after all 1965). That’s how I got to New Orleans, Ira said. Then he told me about what happened and about the child his brother had sired that he would never see now, and I asked what the black man’s name was, I knew a black woman from a town called Woolwine whose brother was murdered by her lover, and sure enough it was Ira’s brother, Rich, killed Ruby’s brother Rufus . . .

Eventually Ira told me the whole story and how he kept going south when he reached Memphis and his three brothers took off to the west, bound for Fort Smith, Arkansas, the toughest town in Indian Territory, where they could lose themselves among the thieves, murderers, and other blackguards who disappeared there until Isaac Parker was sent to clean up the place and became notorious, he’d heard, and came to be called the “hanging judge.”

So Ira knew Ruby and I told him all about her and her daughter Delia, whose father was his brother. Ira’s woman listened to it all. I suspected she’d heard worse and had seen worse still, and may even have suffered more agonies than I knew Ruby carried with her everywhere. Adore, was the only name she’d ever had, she named herself she said. I said, You have a beautiful name, it’s the only one you will ever need. She didn’t smile but then I didn’t expect her to. I was nothing if not honest, and I sometimes wondered why I stole my brothers’ money while they were sleeping and took off south and got away scot-free, that wasn’t what I called honesty, it was more like necessity.

But I didn’t say a word about that to anyone, I was ashamed of myself for doing that and if there was a God I didn’t have to tell anyone else, I didn’t even have to handle snakes to see if they could find out what nobody else knew, I did know they would because I was brought up that way, to know the snakes would kill you if you tried to hide your sins, and so I steered clear of church after that. I didn’t consider the cathedral in Jackson Square a church. I had to go to Roanoke to find out about Catholics and when I came home to visit and told the folks about it they didn’t have any time to listen, so naturally I started hanging out with priests. They always made time for me and I remain grateful to this day.

Betty and I fucked all the time we were not eating and drinking and listening to music, and she thought Ira and Adore were a lovely couple and she wanted to be around them as much as I was, which meant they got to know her and heard about Johnny through her and about his mother’s whorehouse, which Adore knew about too, being a child born and reared in New Orleans, though she was careful to add she’d never visited . . .

(10 November 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Wednesday, November 9, 2011

The Man from the Blue Ridge

Johnny left town to do business with his wife in California, Betty said. She was sitting on a high bar stool: I was admiring her rose-colored toenails and her long legs tapering near visibly beyond her thighs, as well as her animated accent she said was inherited from her Prussian grandfather who rode the rails to freedom . . . Ray had been so happy with my progress he gave me a day off if I put in my request at least a day early; which I did now, after Betty said she’d be delighted to have dinner and drinks with me night after next.

To make it clear, this need I was feeling after weeks since Blanche, I took her by HOTEL HOTEL to show her the room, the bed that virtually filled it save for an end table where I was stacking my near-daily, no, -nightly, drawings and writings, mostly letters I was working on and unable to send until I was satisfied; a closet full of too few duds was next to the window two floors, walk up, above the street. I screwed up the courage to say she was welcome to stay here any time she wished, and she replied, What about tonight?

Dinner and drinks went well but surprisingly quickly. Two hours gone by, we were in bed and I was fucking one of the finest women I’ve ever known, a truly passionate lady with a repertoire of lovemaking gambits she introduced me to, including her demand that I pull out and orgasm on her belly, a feature I admitted to her I would have to practice before it came easy to me. She laughed and slid down between my legs and we were going again . . . After two hours there we went to the café where I wondered, to myself, if the beautiful brown lady might have returned.

There she was. The horn man was a new one, he was the same guy who’d started working the docks the day before I quit. He was riffing on an old beaten-up bugle, but how he could make that thing talk. She was standing more transfixed than usual, her back to the wall beside the door and at break time she walked toward him and he toward her and I said to Betty, That guy’s from back home, I'd bet. I heard him talking on the job and he sounds like he's from the mountains. He just met one of the more beautiful women in New Orleans.

Next night I went back alone and, as it happened, I met them both between sets, sitting at a table holding hands, eyes locked. I sat at the table next to them. When I got the chance I remarked about his down-home accent and he verified what I thought: He was from a little town not far from where I was born. his name was Ira and hers Adore. I couldn’t help but mention the bugle. He’d been playing that thing since he found it one day and got it in shape to learn to blow when he was something like ten years old.

Now that I’ m making good money, he declared, I’m going to buy me a real horn. His woman just smiled and never took her eyes off him and she held him with a long kiss as he left the table to begin the next set. I offered to buy her a drink, but she said one was enough, thank you just the same. She said she was from here and had never lived anywhere else, adding, Where else could you hear music like this and be a black woman who can’t help but fall in love at first sight with a white boy who can make an old bugle do sweet talk?

(9 November 2011)

Tuesday, November 8, 2011

Urban Spaces

1. Betty and Johnny

On her third day–or was it her fourth?–she woke before Johnny.
The house was quiet, the women worked until dawn usually,
his mother told her. They stayed out in the Vieux Carre
and came through the back door stealthily, marring the quiet
with their hushed banter, ascending to the third floor,
where only the new whores worked and slept: lived.
There was always a room free for unexpected guests,
not her but him. Johnny lived all over the continent, Canada
to Guatemala, though he always had a home here, his momma said.
Her girls and customers called her Doll. Johnny didn’t know
anyone who knew her real name, and he never told anybody.
It was nobody’s business. She had her reasons for being Doll.

Betty showered first thing and when he heard the sound of water
Johnny got up and came in, and you know, reader, what happens
when a man and woman are just getting to know each other’s bodies.
Downstairs Betty made toast and coffee, three or four days in a row
now of domesticity, she wasn’t accustomed to kitchens. He was.
They returned upstairs, made love again, then went out to walk.
They strolled a long way. Better exercise than riding a streetcar.
Betty kibbitzed how being a whore would ensure you were alive
not only with men but with the madam taking good care of you.
Johnny said she was being romantic, being a whore was nothing
like that. He oughta know, his mama had been one long enough . . .
They reached Canal, where it intersects with Bourbon Street.

2. The Woman by the Door

I was working getting the place swept up, waiting for the tourists.
Ray was stocking his cooler, putting the beer newly arrived on ice.
I was working here only. The lovers’ three or four days had stretched
into weeks, I never saw one without the other. I learned to mix drinks.
I was getting the hang of it all, Ray said, faster than he’d thought I would.
They wanted to know if I’d had any luck. I told them nobody knew
where Gomez was, or if that was his real name. He'd never returned
to the docks, though the boss hadn’t seemed perturbed in the least.
A new guy was there, who started the day before I quit. He was
familiar, I thought, he acted like some guy from the Blue Ridge,
as though I might’ve seen him before, he even talked a little like me,
though I knew he was from the mountains, a far piece from Roanoke.

A weekend or two later I returned to the café where Ruby and Delia
found their musicians, and there she was, the beautiful brown woman,
standing by the door, as she had the first night I had been there already
when she entered and stood by me and I left rather than feel the need
rise in my loins and make a fool of myself by startling her out of what
filled her, and when I looked at her she was still transfixed, it seemed.
I went out the door and walked to St. Louis Cathedral again, this time
packing my own pencil and sheaf of paper. I sat in the pews drawing
the altar, the priest in full frontal view and holding forth solely in the way
I imagined he would cajole and soothe parishioners as a shepherd his sheep.
In the back of the church, standing,I drew the beautiful brown woman
in profile, the only way I’d seen her: I felt like Picasso in his cubist advent.

(8 November 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Monday, November 7, 2011

And Here She Was

The Mexican did not come back to the docks.
Nobody knew his name, though the boss did,
after saying he didn’t know no Gomez . . .
The guy’s name is his own business, he spat.
I kept on working another month. No one,
nothing turned up. At the house Barbara said
his name was Gomez, she knew him quite well,
he was her lover briefly when she came to town
from New England, she had no idea he was
what he was now, obviously, after she heard
Betty’s story. Jack was Barbara’s new lover,
soft spoken, shy even. He loved Jack Daniels
and shared his Tennessee love with Barbara.
He was the guy who managed the downstairs:
the movies, the free drink, the hors d’oeuvres,
the couches and pallets lining the courtyard.
The brass bed upstairs was the bed he slept in,
and that was that. The horror story was ended,
he declared. For such a mannerly Southerner
he could display a sharp temper. He went back
to being the nice guy, everybody’s friend, lush
with purpose, the surprising house Casanova.
Nobody but his now former boss knew the name
of the Mexican. They called him Gomez because
that’s what he told them. No one knew otherwise.

After that month I had a cache of money saved,
staying at HOTEL HOTEL made a difference,
working weekends at THE SALOON helped,
I still had not visited Johnny’s mama’s house,
I feared I was too weak to resist temptation’s
underworld, besides I had eyes for Betty only,
and Johnny was too involved with her for me
to have a part in her scenario: her daddy lost
his farm and moved the family to a little town
her lover drove his blue Ford convertible down
to squire her through the hurdles to pregnancy
and birth at Fort Riley, Kansas, where the army
sent him. Her husband and her brother fought
and she divorced. It was not amicable. Daughter
Sherry lived with her daddy now. Betty feared
Sherry would stay with him. Her brother Ted
went to jail for drunk driving, too many times.
She worked around the clock waiting tables,
going from one café to another, saving money,
and here she was in the fabled Land of Dreams.
She met Johnny her first day in town, in a bar
where he was waiting for stripper Lili St. Cyr
to take the stage, saw her at the door and here
she was at his table, her red hair and long legs
above and below, and Lili St. Cyr never showed.

(7 November 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Sunday, November 6, 2011

Of the Thunderstruck

I told Ray I was working already, making more money than ever before in my life. What as? A stevedore, I have broad shoulders. To myself, I said something like Be grateful to find an easier job even if the money will be nearly nonexistent after weeks of what you’ve drawn from working in the hole. I also thought of the Mexican, Gomez (according to Barbara, the Chaplin aficionado). I needed to ask him about that night, find out what he thought he was doing, then tell Big John and his friends Johnny and Betty what I knew. Most of all, I wanted them to find him and do with him what he deserved. My, my, wasn’t I being a Galahad . . ..

It was Sunday so I started working for Ray right then, after telling him I’d have to stay with my present job a while longer, but would like to work weekends until then, when I could afford to end my brief career as stevedore. I told him it wasn’t just the money, but this Gomez and what happened at his house that night. Ray knew all about it from Big John. He understood. He said, Just don’t dilly-dally and leave me in the lurch . . . He did need someone, he admitted, there was a woman he needed to spend more time with, and he added something about how he had to keep his love life a secret from his mother, that Southern proclivity so many families down home suffer from, the children at least . . .

Johnny and Betty dropped by mid-afternoon. They seemed to have recovered their composure after last night. The thunder had struck and they’d been spared the lightning, or at least he had. Yet she looked surprisingly unfazed now . . . When Johnny asked and I told him where I was staying, he offered me a free room in his mother’s house on St. Charles. Betty laughed when I said, She runs a whorehouse, doesn’t she? She seemed happy. Johnny didn’t mention the gang rape, nor did she. They talked about New Orleans–this was her first time here–and when they found out I was new here from the Blue Ridge Mountains, wanted to hear my story. I said, There’s nothing to tell, I was born and reared in the mountains and this is the first city since Roanoke I’ve lived in. I added I was looking for a way to do what I thought I could, and the city was the only place I knew would allow it. Either sing or write or draw, maybe paint, even try acting. Betty was recovering from a divorce, living with Johnny while the papers went through,
waiting for word on the custody of her daughter. Johnny said he wrote. He had a brother who wrote too, who’d just gone to Vietnam. His other brother was already there. Hard to say what he does, Johnny said. I quipped, Everyone does something, so they say . . .

Before they left The Saloon, I thanked him for the offer to stay in his mama’s house, but I needed a good night’s sleep if I was going to do hard work all week and help Ray on the weekends. Johnny understood, Betty was disappointed, and I must say I was too if it meant I couldn’t be under the same roof with this long-legg’d redhead with freckles and wearing no more than she needed to be decent on the street. I caught myself. What was I thinking? Was I all a sudden on some kick of “I’m not surprised she got raped, she must’ve been asking for it” . . . I watched them walk off, her anyway. I was smitten.

(6 November 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Saturday, November 5, 2011

Mugged

Barbara didn’t return. I had enough conversation for the time being. I bid the boys adieu. I walked to the wharf. Before I found the bistro where I’d been the night I saw the beautiful brown woman standing by me in the doorway, I heard the music: the horn man and the drummer, sax and bass to boot. I pulled back a chair and sat by the open door. Leaning back and up against the wall, I drank too much. The music kept going and reached its peak after I was in my cups, chair square on the floor now. These guys were talking too, a language I loved back home on the front porch in the summer and next to the stove in the winter. I could sing, and did. I thought of Blanche and walked to her hotel. The desk clerk informed me she’d been gone a few days, had left no forwarding address. He added, She was working, decided to find a place of her own, she said. I was too drunk to thank him and left in a huff. In the momentarily empty street I roared, Fuck it! at the top of my voice, thinking that’ll empty the street for sure, but still it was not empty enough: this guy comes around the corner and a guy comes the other way. The corner man had something that felt like a gun when he pressed it against my ribs. The other guy wore brass knuckles and didn’t hesitate to show me. Give us what you got! muttered the corner man. Empty those pockets inside out!. Brass knuckles hovered. When that was over, I was done: I made my way back to The Saloon and asked Ray for work. He poured two cups of coffee and said, Sure, J. C., I’ll give you a job opening up and closing the place and sweeping and mopping the floor, washing the glasses, a full-time job, when I’m here you’re here, long hours, J. C., and plenty of time that you can learn to tend bar and wait tables, the more valuable you are the more money I’ll pay you. He said, Any friend of Big John’s is a friend of mine.

(5 November 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Friday, November 4, 2011

On Bourbon

Like someone said, a sign you enjoy eating is how much time elapses between bites . . .
It was one way I attempted to appear more civilized than I had been up until now.
Rocky came by, Big John introduced him as his roommate, I said I’d had the pleasure,
Rocky nodded, introductions were polished off and Rocky went to the bar to drink.
Barbara and Jack listened closely to Big John tell how Johnny and Betty had fared
in their search for the Mexican. Not well. They were sleeping in Johnny’s mama’s
brothel on St. Charles. I wondered how Betty could do that, Barbara read my mind,
asked out loud, Betty seemed to flow out of her funk, said she didn’t remember much.
Jack kept listening. He was drinking Jack Daniels. I never think about what people eat.
My eggs creole were finished, I had assumed my atavistic role as a mountain cave man:
I ate too fast when I was hungry. I drank nothing. Nor did Barbara. Betty was a little tight.
Johnny said he couldn’t drink now after what happened last night. He’d walked around
the Vieux Carre, Big John took him to a place on the wharf where they thought Gomez–
whose name they now learned from Barbara– . . . he might frequent one bar or another,
though it had been Jean Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop where the three met, but he damn sure
would not be going back there for a spell, not after Big John informed his friend there.
Big John had been in the CIA and counted Allen Dulles, his old boss, a veritable saint.
You could get the head waiter to talk about the Kennedy assassination if you were careful
not to make it sound like you needed to know. Our friend Jack was a man without a past.
Barbara had a British accent, I noted now. Curly blonde hair fell in ringlets on her neck.
I invited her to see my hotel room, she said Maybe, I should run Jack here home first . . .
If she felt up to another night away from her bungalow, she would be sure to stop by.
She’d been combing the projects, doing her social worker thing, she said she had to work
doing something or she might as well leave town and find someplace in Europe to live.
Big John was listening to her. Betty was feeling better, laughing when Barbara mentioned
the Virgin Islands, where Betty had lived two years teaching and literally enjoying life:
literally was her word. Jack and Johnny kept quiet. After dinner, the four of them gone,
Big John offered to buy me a drink across the street. That’s how I met the young owner,
Ray Fox. He saved his money, put it together with a family stake, and bought The Saloon
outright. A hefty price, you can be sure, he said, adding, But anything on Bourbon Street
goes for more than even God might be willing to pay. Big John praised him up one side
and down the other. I listened, I’d learned how to from Jack. Barbara said she’d meet me
right here. I thought I might as well tell her she most likely would not care for HOTEL
HOTEL, she’d see it as a dump and me as even more a ne’er-do-well than she probably
already had pegged me for, so I’d buy something she wanted to drink or eat and suggest
we hang out a while at her place. Then, thinking of hotels, I wondered how Blanche was
and where. Then, of course, I wondered about Ruby and her daughter Delia. Ray Fox
and John Biggs the Third seemed happy enough talking about the way the street grew
just while they had been living here, which for Ray meant longer than he’d had The Saloon
since he was born and reared here and, Big John told me later, still lived with his mother
in her widowhood, one of those staunch Southern boys who looked after their parents
until they met their maker and then married, but not until. I nodded. I knew all about it.

(4 November 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Thursday, November 3, 2011

Back at the House

He, I mean I found the house in the dark in half the time it took me earlier in the day.
Maybe because I was alone.
When I saw someone coming or someone following, I took an abrupt turn, you never knew
who might be after you if your pockets were not empty.
All that turning and turning, switchbacking, led me to the place in no time. Why not say
I was known as a night owl back home,
complete with meanderings in the dark woods, God knows what else, I think I climbed
a tree once without realizing I had no wings
if I should fall . . . Well, mountain boys are known to be odd, and I can’t excuse myself.
Such thoughts in a city filled with music if you were in a part of it blessed with light . . .
And there it was, the wall, the music coming from the silent movie’s soundtrack.
It was City Lights.
The blonde was not sitting on the couch. There was no sign of Gomez.
This guy offered me a drink from his bottle of Jack Daniels.
I asked him about the blonde. He said, O she’ll be here, she never misses a Chaplin.
I asked about Gomez, he said Who?
Charlie was in the boxing ring. Charlie was in love with the blind flower girl. Charlie’s eyes
unmistakable in what they convey as the movie closes . . . such ardor and delight . . .
What happens after the feature film? I asked the Jack Daniels man
whose name was, in fact, Jack.
Jack said, They show a lot of porno upstairs, I’ve heard. I never go up there, he said,
pointing to the stairway from here to there.

It resembled some world of kitsch, but I didn’t know the word then,
though I did know shit.
When the blonde arrived she acted happy but surprised to see me. I asked her name,
she told me, but I had to ask again, later.
Both times she said Barbara. Finally, she asked what J. C. stood for.
Both times I slid by without answering, both times asking her about herself
as though I needed to know before I could answer her.
The Immigrant was showing. Did they have a complete repertoire of Chaplin? Sure,
Barbara said, Why else would I make a point to show up every night,
they even save me a place on the couch. Jack offered her a swig of Jack Daniels
that she politely refused. Champagne is more like it, she smiled. That’s my drink.
But I never drink when I’m here. Why, I asked. Too much to lose, she said.
So you do know what goes on? Sure, who doesn’t? I just didn’t know Gomez
was involved.
We played it all back, she didn’t ever want to see what went on upstairs, she said.
She’d always loved Charlie Chaplin,
she never passed up a chance to see him, wherever he showed.
The three of us held forth. After a full house on the couches and pallets last night
we three were all there were tonight. The projectionist, if there was one, never appeared.
Barbara asked Jack for the last sip of the Tennessee sippin’ whiskey. He handed it over,
She left The Immigrant before it ended,
took Jack and me with her. She drove to Bourbon, we dined at the Absinthe House.
Rocky was there, so was Big John, and Johnny and Betty
who looked thunderstruck yet absolutely sober.

(3 November 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

Tchoupitoulas

Gomez didn’t come to work. No one was at the house.
The one I finally found.
I told Big John–the name he preferred–tonight
would be another night.
I fully expected Monsieur Verdoux to be wall-screened.
Big John took me to meet Juan and Bettina,
the red head on the bed
the night before, being systematically raped
by all the wolves in the pack I was invited to join
but refused.
This guy named Juan said, Call me John, and Bettina
preferred Betty.
It must’ve been Big John introducing me as J. C. made me think
you don’t simplify things without complicating everything. Or so I remember now. I would have to come back to that one after this was over, I promised my cerebellum.
We were on
Tchoupitoulas Street, it seemed inevitable somehow, I was always finding Tchoupitoulas on the sign outside wherever I was inside. I even went out and looked at the water when I wasn’t working.
Johnny, he said, not to confuse me with Big John . . . Betty said she was born Elizabeth, being a gringa, as Johnny said he was a breed. I said I was born in the Blue Ridge, I had no excuse. I said nothing about my father’s
African blood. We passed a black man on the street and he was drunk enough to say hello, and Big John quipped, They used to hang niggers from lamp posts for less . . . I knew the man was far enough up the street to miss it, and I said nothing as a way of saying nothing. In fact, I kept it up. The three of them were going to walk the city, at least where they thought the Mexican might be. They didn’t call him Gomez, which vindicated my silence as I bid them adieu.
I went into an all-but-empty bar where the bartender helped me drink a bottle of Old Grandad. Rocky was his name. When the conversation moved to New Orleans food, he asked if I’d eaten at Kolb’s off Canal. Great Wiener schnitzel, Rocky said, adding, a friend of mine is head waiter there. Ask for Big John.
When the Grandad was gone, I left to find a place to stay. I was wandering around in the dark now. There was a neon sign beckoning me: HOTEL HOTEL. I went in and got a room for the night. Then I decided to find out if Gomez’s house was open tonight. Maybe the blonde would be watching Chaplin again tonight. Maybe Gomez would be there, I had The Saloon’s number, I could find Kolb’s if I could find The Book.
The desk clerk said, Leaving already? No luggage? Don’t you want to see the room? I said, No need, you got dinero, amigo, don’t worry, I have more.
Outside the street seemed unearthly quiet.

(2 November 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Tuesday, November 1, 2011

On Bourbon Before "Back Home"

I had too much, too many to care for
to let time slip by like an eel.
Without the past, there’s no present,
much less future. The eel is under glass,
in water, same that pours over the dam.
I parked where I could. The day was soon gone.
At least I arrived early, before rain
clattered on the tin roof where the eel swam.
It was said to be electric, science
says so. Once I had my drawing down pat
I left, the paper clutched to my belly
and dry when I drove away. I drove home,
wherever that was, then. I remember
only the eel transfigured on paper.
There was no water. The eel haunted air
alone. I wanted to touch it and see
if I lived. Did I draw it to find out?
How much do you think your art can demand
of creatures you will never understand?

Sitting here, on Bourbon, six years before
I saw her last, I already recall
another fleeing on her naked foot
from me to Berkeley, to make a life there
fit for her ardor, small towns all too small,
only men’s bodies, bitter as moonshine,
she tires of drinking. They all want the same,
she sneered. I would go to California
someday, there she said the sun and blue sky
over the Pacific would grow as large
as what love promises that it’s not love’s
to give. It’s here I will discover her
closer than I knew an ocean could reach.

The young guy is talking to the older one
whose red hair shimmers as he tells the young
fellow behind the bar whom he’s hunting,
and begins to leave until I stop him
and ask, This Mexican . . . his name Gomez?
He calls out, Ray! Bring us another drink!
He holds out his hand: I’m John Biggs the Third.
Just call me J. C. I work on the wharf
with this Gomez. Is he the one you want?

(1 November 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander