Two months after he lost his job teaching algebra at St. James Preparatory School for Boys, and one month after his wife left with the kids and the cash and the car, Clem built a bonfire in his backyard that aroused dozens of neighbors from their sleep— neighbors whose prior impression of Clem had been formed solely by news clips concerning his dismissal.
Fuel for the fire included the souvenir foul ball he had retrieved with his mother as an eight-year-old child; the clothes his wife had left behind with the intention of reclaiming later; his collection of cigar boxes accumulated despite never having smoked a cigar; ten jars of Vaseline petroleum jelly; and the pair of oars from his first and only collegiate victory in the men’s double sculls.
The firefighters at station #7 were able to put out the flames before any real damage was done. The neighbors declined to press charges, but two policewomen, one short and one tall, who happened to be driving by when the smoke began to billow, gave Clem an earful and issued him a citation he had neither the money nor the intention to pay.
Isn’t this funny, Clem thought at the time, although he didn’t dare reveal his amusement. The one is so short and the other one is so tall—and both of them are women!
The truth is he did have enough to pay the fine because for almost a year he’d been salting away a portion of his income into an account he kept secret from his wife.
At home he spent his days building things in the garage, hammering, rasping, sawing. He built an elaborate cross.
He tried out his son’s skateboard and bounced up and down on his daughter’s pogo stick.
He streamed movies like The Count of Monte Cristo, starring Robert Donat, and Porky’s Revenge with Tony Ganios as Meat Tuperello.
He launched paper airplanes in the backyard.
He masturbated frequently, usually after dinner.
On Sundays he read the newspaper front to back, even the ads. Another violated peace agreement in the Middle East, another mass murder in a church, another hijacking—the third one in a month—this latest by a group calling themselves the Patriotic Reactionaries Instigating Chaos, or PRICs, for short.
Fed up with the state of his life and the world, three months after his wife left, and against the advice of his lawyer, he decided to take a trip to New Orleans to relive some of the wild times he had had when he was single and young, when after college he and a friend had moved to the French Quarter—the Vieux Carré—the Old Square.
He rented a car because these days it was too dangerous to fly.
As he pulled out of the driveway, he rolled open the window and shouted, New Orleans, Loooeeeeeziana!—a town where he and his friend had once beat up a homeless man for suggesting they were gay.
He rented an apartment off Jackson Square only blocks from the loft where he and Caldwell had resided. The manager who showed him the space asked, with a little nudge, if he would be living there alone, and he said yes.
After the manager left, Clem discovered ferret shit in the built-in hutch. The previous tenants had kept ferrets, the manager told him, and gerbils, too. On second thought, what Clem found might have been gerbil shit.
Outside, the muggy air reminded him of Africa, or at least the Africa he imagined in his mind, since he had never set foot there. He told himself that if his wife and kids ever returned, he would take them on a vacation to Burkina Faso or Equatorial Guinea or somewhere.
On Toulouse, the window display in a Voodoo shop contained an assortment of stiff-armed, black-faced dolls.
Napoleon House was still there with its paintings and busts of Napoleon, even a uniform in a glass case the owners claimed had been worn by Napoleon.
What he always liked best about New Orleans was the people. A family passed by and he thought the boy might have winked at him so he winked back and grinned.
A transgender woman crossed his path, if that’s what she was, wearing a summer dress and heels, with triceps that looked like she’d been kneading dough all day and an Adam’s apple the size of an avocado.
He wondered aloud if she had had an operation to remove her male genitalia or if it was all still right there underneath that yellow dress.
On Decatur Street he remembered the night he had met Elspeth Cleaves. He had gone for a walk along the river when he saw her sitting on a bench, crying. She had one of those British accents—Geordie, she called it—and was fleeing the man she was supposed to marry in Newcastle upon Tyne.
Clem comforted her and they got drinks and savored some of the city’s unique offerings together, from the scent of cayenne pepper to the slimy taste of raw oysters to the cold, arched feel of a street musician’s glistening saxophone. When he thought she was ready he escorted her back to her hotel, where they had sex in spite of her initial resistance.
He thought of her now as he sat down to lunch. The waitress brought him a shrimp po’ boy that he could not remember ordering. On a muted television the U.S. Navy repulsed a kamikaze attack in a movie about World War II.
After lunch, two brawny young men were walking his way down Ursulines Avenue. He moved to the side but the bigger one veered and bumped into him with his shoulder. The men kept walking even though Clem nearly fell to the ground. They looked back at him and started laughing.
That night the man who bumped him appeared in a dream. Clem was a refrigerator repairman and the muscular man was his assistant. They were both wearing refrigerator repairman outfits with their names stitched into their shirt pockets. Clem’s name was Arnie. His assistant’s name was Ricardo.
Clem was crouched behind a refrigerator gripping a busted line when water started to gurgle out of it. He panicked because water was getting everywhere. His assistant just stood there, staring down, offering no assistance.
Clem snapped awake in a sweat, wondering what it all meant. Then he realized that it was just one of those dreams where your subconscious is telling you to get up and pee.
The next night he decided to have some fun.
On Iberville he was pleased to see that the Blanchard Café was still there, and that dancers still performed behind the bar on a long, elevated stage. The women kept their clothes on but many of them had firm, well-developed legs below the hems of their dresses.
He looked around nostalgically and noticed at the back of the room a tiny, shifty-eyed woman who was probably the proprietress standing with her arms folded in front of a black curtain. Clem pictured illicit activities taking place back there. Not prostitution necessarily, but Voodoo rituals of some sort, or late-term abortions. Or even a secret government autopsy on an extraterrestrial corpse.
A large woman wearing a green dress came on stage. Clem wanted to compliment this woman and remembered a line from a funny movie he had seen recently on cable. “If that dress had pockets,” he cried out, “you’d look just like a pool table.”
The woman stopped dancing and glared down through the dim light. She said, “If you had a dick, you’d look like a man.”
Though in Clem’s mind his observation was the more accurate of the two, the men at the bar found her response considerably more amusing.
A few minutes after she finished her dance, the woman marched up to Clem, dipped two fingers into his glass, and flicked beer in his face. As she was walking away, he noticed she wore a different dress now: red, not green. She looked better in the green dress, he thought. Then, because her fingers might have germs, he asked for another glass of beer.
The next day he revisited more of the old haunts. The hotel lobbies were just as he remembered them. Police cars raced up and down Canal Street, as they always had, with their sirens screaming.
He sat down to lunch at the Fatted Calf, where from the corner of his eye he caught sight of someone familiar gesticulating wildly in one of the booths. It turned out to be the trans woman he had seen on the street the day before last.
She was talking to another trans woman whose back was turned. Or maybe it was just a regular woman—cisgender was the term he had learned recently from watching PBS.
Clem wondered if the trans woman had possibly followed him there and slipped into the booth when he wasn’t looking.
He paged through a newspaper left on the bar. A submersible had imploded somewhere deep in the Atlantic. Another bomb had blown up on a plane, this one over Pittsburgh, detonated by a group called the Reactionary Organization for Demagoguery and Doom, or RODD.
When his food arrived, Clem asked the man behind the bar if he would turn on the baseball game. The guy acted as if he hadn’t heard even though he was standing right there drying a glass. Clem asked again a little louder this time and the guy looked up wearing a scowl. Reluctantly, he changed the channel and then walked to the other end of the bar.
The game was in the middle of a rain delay. The play-by-play announcer and the color commentator were telling old baseball stories in the booth with the rain-soaked tarp as a backdrop between them. The rain gave the blue tarp the appearance of a storm-wracked sea.
It made Clem think about rowing. In addition to teaching algebra, he had been the boys’ rowing coach at St. James. He would miss coaching boys more than anything. He especially liked discoursing on the sport’s unique nomenclature.
The shell is another term for the boat.
The coxswain is the person who steers the shell and acts for the crew as the on-the-water coach. Newbies always mispronounce it, so the first day of each season he would begin practice by explaining that it’s “cock-sen” not “cock-swan.” Then he would make a little joke about it to break the ice.
A stroke is the action of moving the oar through the water to propel the boat forward.
The four stroke parts are: Catch, Drive, Finish, and Recovery.
The stroke is also the rower who sits closest to the stern.
German rigging is a way of setting up which side of the boat the oars are on. Instead of alternating from side to side all the way down, in a German-rigged boat two consecutive rowers have oars on the same side.
Catches a crab is when the oar blade is at an angle instead of perpendicular.
A Power 10 is a call by the coxswain for rowers to do 10 of their best, most powerful strokes.
Clem started in on his jambalaya.
He noticed that the trans woman and her friend were now sitting on the same side of the booth, kissing. They were really going at it, massaging each other’s faces with their hands.
The trans woman’s hands were bigger than most female hands but the other person’s looked just like a normal woman’s.
It bothered Clem that he could not determine with any certainty whether they were two trans women, a trans woman and a man in drag, a trans woman and a cis woman, a cis woman and a man in drag, two profoundly unattractive cis women, or two men in drag engaged in some kind of performance art or public spectacle.
He decided to get a closer look by pretending to go to the restroom. He paused next to the couple but could not ascertain their genders due to the intensity of their embrace.
He continued into the restroom so it wouldn’t become obvious that he was spying.
Inside he felt foolish because he did not have to go. He entered a stall to really sell the thing even though no one else was around. He remained in the stall for two minutes, he counted, and washed his hands for a full forty-five seconds before going back.
On his way out he noticed the word “Men” on the opposite door and realized he had made a mistake, he had been in the women’s restroom the whole time. Now he really felt foolish. He turned to look as he passed the booth but the two “women” were no longer there.
When his wife had been pregnant with their firstborn, Clem and she took a vacation to Amsterdam, a last hurrah before the pending accountability of child-rearing. One evening when she wasn’t feeling well, he told her he was going downstairs to the hotel bar but instead took a cab to the red-light district, where he bought a ticket to a live sex show.
The theater was small and mostly empty. Because he imagined the seats to be unsanitary, he stood alone against the back wall.
The first act consisted of two pale fleshy women, naked except for knee pads against the hard wooden stage, alternately stimulating each other with a vibrator that sounded like the mowing of distant suburban lawns. While the women performed in a mechanical, indifferent manner, a thin, mustachioed man walked the aisles selling concessions.
Minutes later that same man appeared on stage after one of the women had exited. By then he too was naked. The remaining woman got down on her hands and knees and the man proceeded to enter her from behind.
What really made the act work was, while they were having sex, the man made amusing comments about how “wonderful” she was as a sexual partner. “Oh, this is great,” he would say sarcastically. “What a wonderful big fat ass you have.”
There were more acts, most of which involved multiple participants. Only two things stuck with Clem later. First, at no time did two men engage in sexual acts with each other. Second, whenever someone spoke, they did so in English, as though the performances had been orchestrated with just him in mind.
Clem thought about that show as he headed for a park that in the past had been known as a marketplace for hookers. Chocolate and Vanilla were the names of the prostitutes with whom he and Caldwell had tried unsuccessfully to negotiate. One was Black, the other one white, although the opposite of the ones you would expect. Apparently, they were being ironic.
Nothing looked the same now. No working girls, no swirling fast-food garbage. Just a playground with rubber tiles and hard yellow tubes, and a covered wading pool surrounded by a fence.
He shuffled back in the direction of his apartment, taking Barracks Street rather than Ursulines to limit the likelihood of running into the buff man who had appeared in his dream.
Near the river a perky young woman crossed the road in his direction, skipping in a caricature of self-satisfied juvenescence. She asked if she could try on his hat, a trilby that he had purchased during his original stay there and brought along as a physical link to the past.
He handed her the hat prepared to tell her how good she looked, thinking of the best place to suggest they go for a drink. But she did not place it on her head. Laughing, she ran back toward the friends that Clem now realized she was with: three college-aged men, or maybe a little younger, and two equally nubile young women.
The girl gave his hat to one of the boys, who put it on and refused Clem’s request to return it, instead adopting a funny walk and joking with his male companions while the girls pranced around and giggled.
Clem followed them for two blocks. “You have nice muscles!” he said suddenly to the boy wearing his hat. Some inner compulsion made him blurt it out.
And so it was that Clem got beat up by three teenagers on Barracks Street and ended up in the emergency room with a black eye and a broken rib.
Once he recovered, Clem decided to return home. Enough is enough, he thought. New Orleans had become dangerous and strange. As he had not heard of any recent bombings, he opted to fly.
On the highway he remembered taking that same route to drop Caldwell off at the airport. A doctor had diagnosed his friend with alcohol poisoning and recommended he leave town. Along the shoulder of the road, they passed a semi-truck engulfed in flames. You could still make out the slogan on the side panel: Moving You to a Brighter Future.
For Caldwell that brighter future included living with a famous rock band and selling his motorcycle to fund a heroin addiction.
Clem’s future began by traveling around the big cities of Europe until he woke up in a Berlin youth hostel in a puddle of his own vomit.
His kids’ future, in the cartoon-like burlesque in his mind, originated as an Almond Joy in Clem’s back pocket and was delivered to his wife’s ovum on the wings of a jolly sperm.
Chocolate’s future took place mostly in prison after she murdered her abusive pimp with a kitchen knife.
Vanilla got hooked on crack but went into rehab and became a community organizer.
At the airport, he decided to abandon the car at the curb rather than return it to the rental car business.
You’re lucky, the man at the airlines told him. I have one seat left.
He wasn’t lucky. Until recently he had avoided disaster by means of a complex system of camouflage, like a seahorse or a stick insect. “Get some help” were his wife’s final words before she walked out the door.
Clem purchased souvenirs for his kids at a gift shop in the airport: a Lego set for his son, a t-shirt for his daughter that read I [heart] NO.
At the gate a blonde woman peered down at a book titled The Pornography of Meat.
A sweaty man with a large travel bag nestled between his legs kept fidgeting and checking his watch. His bag was distended at irregular points, and Clem imagined a collection of antlers in there, from seasonal kill.
A little girl wearing a clean white dress sat with her mother at the next gate, licking one of those old-fashioned lollipops you never see anymore, the flat, circular kind with multi-colored spirals.
The blonde woman noticed Clem looking her way. She raised her book but seconds later peeked over it, obviously interested in him. He smiled. All at once she packed away her things and stormed off.
At the counter she pointed him out to the woman who worked for the airlines.
The little girl stared ahead while continuing to lick her lollipop.
A man’s voice over the intercom announced the beginning of boarding. The man across from Clem unzipped his bag and turned a dial on the misshapen object inside, which Clem could see now was covered in aluminum foil and surrounded by wires. Clem heard a click and watched a green light come on.
While bent over, the man’s half-zipped jacket revealed a t-shirt with an image of an angry mob on it and the words, Patriots Engaged in Nationwide Insurgency and Sabot—
Clem could not read the rest because the man, noticing the breach, nervously zipped his jacket and scooped up the bag before hustling toward the gate.
He’s having an even worse week than I am, Clem thought. I might be able to trade seats with someone and talk to him, maybe calm him down a bit—even make a friend.
Clem looked over his shoulder as he entered the tunnel. A security guard had arrived and was glowering at him with his arms akimbo and his legs spread apart.
The girl with the lollipop gave Clem an affectionate little wave. How angelic she appeared. Yes, that was it: just like an angel. For one magic instant he came to believe again in God.
He marched down the ramp away from the unsmiling security guard, closed the gap between himself and the man with the knobby bag. Not once did he think how, at forty-two years, he could fit all he had learned, about himself and the world, onto a boarding pass or a t-shirt, or even onto a postcard of the Old Square.
