Errata (5 page)

I vividly recall spending one of the Saturdays prone on couches, first with my maternal grandparents in their oversized dilapidated farmhouse that overlooked sprawling fields, and then with my father’s side in their tidy cottage, surrounded by limited but well-producing acreage.  That particular day I was terribly sick, yet the visit was paramount, of course, so I spent it huddled and shaking under blankets while the adults visited in other rooms.  I heard no one ask with puzzlement why we didn’t stay home, considering.  I heard no humane propositions, nothing but the usual updating of goings-on about the town’s residents while I drifted in and out of sleep with fever dreams of my hands and feet amplified in size and weight.  A bucket was kept on the floor at the heads of the couches for when I needed to vomit, the same small light green bucket that I hunched over with pale desperation during the early morning trip out of the city.  Though I bristle when remembering this episode and others like it, most of the first-leg drives didn’t involve the bucket, and I remember them for another reason.  I’ve always been an avid reader.  At an early age before learning to pronounce words, I’m told that I preferred to carry a book in hand rather than a toy or blanket.  Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to read on the country visit excursions due to the motion resulting poorly for my stomach, so instead I invented word and number challenges.  I tested how high I could count between any two telephone posts, this was followed by counting forward and backward by 2’s, 5’s, 10’s and the like, then multiplication and division facts and eventually unruly negative numbers came into play.  I was especially drawn to 3’s and 5’s for an undefined reason, but one that I suspect
involves how their bold sense of presence compared to the numbers around them appealed to me.  Mostly though, I mentally fidgeted with language, preferring the luster of letters and words to numbers.  Again with telephone poles as my beginning and ending limitation points for contained associating, I worked through a flow like,
maple, apple, papal, lapel, epaulet,
or
, power tool, poor tune, pliable towel, positive turn,
restarting a different flow at each new totem.  Filing through the alphabet with letters as faithful amulets, playing with prefixes, suffixes, spelling forward and backward, reformatting words.  It was an enjoyable activity, those linguistic incantations, the only one that could suitably mute the drudgery of being a confined child who only wished to continue with the book left at home.  I passed several hours conjugating in this way, not only as an eternal passenger, but also at home and school.  My parents knew nothing of this pull and indulgence, were simply satisfied that their hyper son was quiet and physically placid, and then pleased with the practical results when my Spelling and English grades were strong.  The ritual held its own trapped coherence but was limited in expression otherwise.  At a certain point, probably when I began driving, what with its own concerns and obsessions to occupy a busy mind, the small-scale childhood pursuits generally ceased to be in the forefront of my thoughts.  Listing words that began with com, for example, could hardly stack up with executing the rules of the road, checking how many cars could be seen behind and how many in front, monitoring if the drivers on the cross streets were slowing down when approaching intersections, counting the number of seconds that passed between traffic lights or how many it took to attain a certain speed, not to mention pondering the lives of the other drivers and what personal traits were indicated by road manner. 

I’ve found that, for the most part, I only actively engage in the old language fidgeting on my insomnia nights, with the added element of pondering anything that comes to mind on a particular subject, for example, beards.
Facial hair, Melville, not Bruno Schulz, Vachal, Castro, not Cabrera Infante, a deceptive cover, beards, beers, beads, bards, breads, breasts.  And I may as well say it, C, t, b, d, r.  C.  Cuba, crocodile, constellations, confidence man.  T.  Tarot, 22, two-faced, taboo, The Pelican, the place.  B.  Books, bricks, beard, buried.  D.  Death, dirt.  R.  Rub.  C, t, b, d, r leads me through the pages, if not the ending, then the way out.
  This is equal blessing and curse, though it’s welcome to be savant-like and exist in a cloud of language and information rather than continue to dwell in that which has disallowed restful sleep.  Inventiveness is easier than self-evaluation, though it appears that the obstinate whispering associations are a barely-ciphered confrontation from a shrewdly unearthing subconscious.  My parents have no idea, and how could they, that this is the legacy they’ve passed along, regular loping drives that initially compelled whimsical yet intense compulsions.  Right brain flights of fancy bound by left brain analytical ruminating on their variations.  The pure intuition of words.  It’s but a small step for a habit, a mechanism for avoiding boredom, to be introduced into another context, from time passing to purgative release.  I don’t mean to imply that I’m an anguished seer caught up in rituals of numinous currents, far from it, but instead am fortified by the stimulation I’ve described.  It provides cathartic satisfaction with its mental asphyxiation from endless combination vapors and alternate breathing of underlying tension.  I guess it helps my senses make sense.

Day 12

Hannah craved attention some of the time and was repelled by the usual gazes some of the time, the head-to-toe assessments by the hopeful, the hunters, and the unable to resist speaking, commenting.  As long as they resisted commenting, because the comments were always the same, What’s your name?  You should smile more.  Mostly older men, many as aged as grandpa was, each of them wanting to use her to outrun their impotency, feigning inquisitive benevolence, hoping to play the game like grandpa played the game.  She quickly intuited at an early age how to boldly turn her head just so, beckoningly bite her lip, saucily affect a hip-out stance, and shyly drape her long hair, numerous simple ways to draw attention.  When she was in middle school this became the game before the game.  Now, ten years later, it felt like a consuming encasement she couldn’t scrape off.  She tried to scrape it off, but it wouldn’t scrape off.  The game wouldn’t scrape off, but her skin would scrape off.  In her contemplative moments, Hannah thought that if she was someone good, she wouldn’t like the game, but she did like the game.  One sweet day maybe the game would scrape off and she could be rid of it and start over unmarked, becoming instantly passed over by the overripe attentions that tended to honed in on her.  Now, ten years later, she liked the game, but disliked to be thought of as a game girl, and now, ten years later, she made a living off of the game before the game.  She kept the game before the game public and the game itself private. 

Several of the dancers at the various clubs offered extras, including the game, but Hannah went no further than the rudimentary rhythms of the backroom friction dance.  She was an aspiring model and posed for anyone who paid her.  She posed for artistic shoots and take-your-clothes-off shoots that she turned into artistic shoots so it wouldn’t seem like she was only a game girl.  As long as they paid.  The shoots were typically in hotel rooms and, although many of the photographers were professional, others were shooting her for no more reason than to serve as their game before the game, so when the shoot was complete, they expected the game.  Hannah always kept her canvas backpack close, so if need be she could adequately defend herself with the mace and a blade she also kept on hand.  If they refused to pay her, then she started destroying the room until they gave in.  Though modeling of this sort might seem like a dangerous line of work, it paid well, as well as or better than doing extras, even the game.  The clients couldn’t touch her, merely look, and they would do that anyway.  Their scrutiny accumulated to make her, so why not?  When she was on stage or having her photograph taken, Hannah felt in control.  The men became naïf little boy puppy dogs.  Unwarrantable, overstimulated, and eager to please.  But when she stepped off the stage or when the camera was lowered, the puppies turned back into ravenous men.  She knew that they would say or do anything to play the game with her, and she moved from one to the next, giving each a hint of it.  Revolving her wiles to tap out each benefactor and their often-groveling virility.  What they didn’t know is that she ached for the game too, needed it like a child seeking parental approval while playing, so the men were actually the ones in control.  She kept moving from club to club so that the discarded regulars would not realize the descending premium of her own consuming desires.  Hannah used a different stage name at each place, each stage name from a Velvet Underground song.  Candy, Jane, and Stephanie, but she kept Louise and Caroline in reserve and rarely used them since
Squeeze
was only a pseudo-Velvets record.  A few cops were recently trying to get her to dance for their private parties, promising a lot of money, but Hannah sweetly brushed them off with caution.  She was worried that they wouldn’t take the snub much longer and that she might not have a choice.  The word among the other dancers was that there was actually little money involved, if at all, because NOPD expected freebies, there were large turn-outs at the private parties, and they’d all be expecting the game.  One right after another.

I learned all of this and more (well, most of it, and the rest is solid speculation) before we arrived at the World’s Fair gates featuring mermaids and water gods at the foot of Canal Street.  Hannah laid her burdens down, unmasked them, and did it like she had an aversion to emotion, then produced the two pricey season passes that she quickly explained away by claiming that a friend gave them to her.  As opposed to the usual manner of this type of engagement, the longer the evening continued, the quieter and more elusive she became, rather than the other way around.  It seemed that revealing the earthy truths about the game and how she made money didn’t feel exposing whatsoever to her, but actually served in her mind as the quick establishing of a wall of distance to set us apart, to be blatantly provocative and make it clear that I was daytime, she was nighttime, and this was her predisposed narrative to convey it.  Or maybe her interest in me brimmed early on.  We rode the largest Ferris Wheel in the world, danced poorly to Clifton Chenier’s bluesy zydeco at the Jazz tent, huddled in the cable car across the river (rather than my preference of taking the significantly lower to ground monorail around the fairground, which held no chance of being stranded above the Mississippi like the cable cars), walked around eating, and ended it all by marveling at the fireworks display.  All of it a feast of wonder.  She smoked the entire night like she’d never seen a lighter and could only light a fresh cigarette from the remaining stub.  Not too long ago, I‘d smoked, if it can legitimately be called that, but no longer.  It was simply a two year long affectation that resulted in burning holes in half of my limited wardrobe.  Hannah singed me more than any cigarette could, though, initially by the sad side of her matter-of-fact desirability (she must’ve read it on me, because she put me on notice, Don’t be one of those guys that wants to rescue me), then as we watched the fireworks and stars while she squinted, having lost her glasses, and mused, I love
Beauty and the Beast
.  You know, the old movie that looks like it was dipped in silver.  The director Cocteau once said something like,
We see the constellations, but the stars that form the constellations don’t know that they do.
  It was too obvious a reply, but I couldn’t resist, Do you think any two given people can automatically form part of a larger shape?  It depends, but I’ll bet two people marked with the same sign, two Scorpios, form two claws, of course, but the third Scorpio’s the stinger.  Anyway, does it matter?  Lips lie.  Men only want one thing. 

I knew that with her sublime mistrust she considered me another transparent little boy puppy dog, no more than a benign viper, but that made me want her more, with her constant red glow, her face like Eve’s face.  I would’ve said or done anything at that point to play the game with her (and still would), but she was several moves ahead, unexpectedly asking me to drop her off a couple streets from the block where I found her at so that she could stretch her legs, then quickly jumping out of the car and politely thanking me for a nice time, turning to the sidewalk before I could respond in any fashion other than driving on home with a meandering smile and a gentleman’s ache, an affliction of longing.  I suppose that I’m only the most recent of a discarded populace to have been left in her wake, but one evening with her only built up my appetite for another.

Day 13

The one aspect of driving a cab that’s proven the most difficult for me is also the chief expectation of the customer, getting from the pick-up spot to the destination directly and quickly.  I understand without question why the passenger desires this structure, but the approach seems a limiting notion and it bores.  No more than a token contribution at guiding each of them beyond the surface of the city to the reach beneath the streets.  I’m neither terse nor efficient in the way I think or speak, so why would I pursue a quick common route from say a bar on Frenchmen Street to a hotel on Canal Street, when instead we can have the pleasure of seeing the collapsed balcony spilling off of the house over at Barracks and Burgundy Streets, the gaslight glow in select blocks, or follow a pattern antithetical to the guiding expectation of the streets’ layout? Different ways to recover knowledge.  This isn’t a tactic to pad the fare and, in fact, all but the drunkest of passengers or those peculiarly intimidated by the Quarter’s layout (ill-perceiving the grid-like old town of limited building scale as an inscrutable metropolis and its one-way streets as competing solutions to a multi-directional maze), all but these inept customers question me eventually, some suspicious and others quizzically surprised.  I’m usually too impressed to take offense when they question the route or actually recognize a landmark or business that we‘ve already passed once.  Don’t mistakenly think that I’m trying to be any sort of tour guide.  That would be too exact a routine, well mostly, except for the guides that shift their stories to random buildings, relocating history and lore to less congested blocks to avoid the other tour groups and potential wait.  My driving style is contrary to that of those cabbies who don’t actually know the streets, because I’m well aware of the best to-and-from courses, which are mostly throughout the same blocks anyway.  Instead, with or without fares, I like to pass the time by spelling my name with the car’s route or driving a pattern, maybe a nice stair-step, on one end of the Quarter, and then its mirror image on the other end, creating new ways to view, interpret, and address the city, though I would never reveal this.  Imagine the response to my reply of, Yes, we’re back where we started from and moving parallel to Barracks, the street we turned off of, but in an opposite direction, river bound.  Don’t be alarmed.  Next I’ll loop back up on Esplanade, and then make a left on Dauphine.  I assume you realize how a capital A is formed.  I’m not driving like an ox intentionally.  If it comes to the point of potentially losing the fare, then turning off the meter and spouting off a silly insider tidbit tale (wait until you hear about the scandal that happened at this house) massages their declarative and to-the-point perceptions of my navigation.  I can understand being uninterested in matters of chance or the cracking open of different ports of entry, but you’d think that a few more customers might not mind a most unconventional way to rise above the conventional and applaud my unfortunate originality at being arch with limited knowledge.