The New Orleans Chronicles: Part I
Please don't make me leave this place when I've just picked up my heart
I don’t know how to put anything into words. Even starting this, trying to tell it, trying to begin it, my chest fills up with that light-and-heavy sensation you feel before you start to cry. I did start to cry — from joy and disbelief — when I had my first PJ’s granita. At the airport. I felt more at home among the hilariously packed airport bars and this travel PJ’s coffee and the jazz over the speakers and the gigantic digital ad for Crystal hot sauce than I knew it was possible to feel. New Orleans is a phoenix city, people have always said. I was not, I’m ashamed to say, a keeper of the faith. When I was last here and saw the culture of my soul aggressively penetrated and shattered by suburbanites, I thought for sure that New Orleans had gone, that my dad had gone, that it had all gone, that I would belong forever nowhere, forever (whatever passes as forever for motals) be of nowhere.
It never occurred to me that the same people who never came to this city wanting to be of it (as opposed to demanding that it entertain them) would leave the moment they were under pressure. When the pandemic hit and the communities came together to keep each other alive and suddenly it was clear that the days were over for their sterile made-in-the-image-of-Leavettown, and those motherfuckers? They’re gone. You know who’s left? Everybody I remember.
My hair’s been transformed but you can’t see it yet because Ian doesn’t even know what I’ve done, thankfully he loves crazy shit like the art piece that my head is now. This is who I’ve always been on the inside. I’ll give you the compliment one of my oldest friends gave me: you look like a Phoenix.
If you know me in that daily-life sort of way you know that I’m careful with getting properly drunk: I haven’t done it since 2018 because frankly I haven’t had a whole fuck of a lot to celebrate in that sense. Moments here and there, sure, but inhibitions belonged in them for a whole host of complicated reasons. I think my teenage selves are proud of me for waking up with a hangover twice. The first was two martinis with an unforgettable meal of homemade pasta and rabbit. The second was two glasses of rose and two different cocktails, one a morbidly funny mess of flavors that did not go together at all, the other an aphrodisiacal violet dream of a concoction made with butterfly pea that came with a marigold-looking edible flower. The meal with that was Happy Hour at Brennan’s, one of New Orleans’ fanciest and most iconic restaurants, and, as it happens, the place that gave us the Banana’s Foster. So you better believe we gorged on that devilish/godlike dessert of vanilla ice cream and brown sugar and bananas all soaked in the richest possible rum sauce and served on fire like my finally-fully-alive soul.
The fact is, I’m angry. I’m angry that I’ve spent 6 years in a scenically beautiful state who claims to love weirdos and they do, but they love quiet, introverted weirdos, not loud nymphomanial locquacious blood-drinkers who curse like a sailer, that ain’t their jib. Which I didn’t know, you see. I thought there was something wrong with me. And I have issues, you all know that by now, but the West Coasters who hate me aren’t aware of those. They don’t hate me because I have issues, they hate me because I’m me, and I spent a lot of years masking without even realizing I was doing it, because, to go by the feedback I was generally getting, I was unsuccessful at masking.
Turns out, however, that I had a lot of people fooled, including myself. I am so much fucking crazier than I have ever shown California. If I brought this back to New Englad they would bring back the burnings, I swear. I am in every way hyperwrong. But I’m back home, in the one city in America that doesn’t see me that way. And I would do almost anything not to have to go back. I didn’t even bring my headphones on this trip, and I’ve been dependent on those things for the past two years. Turns out I was just blocking out their shit — I’m fine with my own thoughts, and I’m fine with the world. I want the world, it turns out, I’m hungry for it: from the moment I’ve stepped off the plane, it’s been come in come in come in come in but in a healthy way, with boundaries. I can’t imagine wanting to block out the glorious snippets of conversation I overhear. Addie and I have been walking everywhere, and I do miss my ab machine and my rows, but on principle I can’t imagine wanting to hole up at the gym, pretending I’m on another planet. In New Orleans, I love this burning wild feverish hopeless violent loving beautiful planet. I love all of it, I love everything. Even the moments late at night that I’m crying in the dark about the one person who temporarily made NorCal bearable: even that moment, I love, because it’s New Orleans dark, and New Orleans dark is friendly. New Orleans night understands.
You may or may not remember that this is actually a research trip: Addie and I have spent, now, a total of eight life-changing hours over a course of two heroically nerdy days pouring over the Anne Rice archives. The Great Lady’s will stipulated that her diaries — which she kept obsessively in a nearly-endless series of thick-as-fuck hardcover journals starting in the 60’s and going until 2017 — were not to be made accessible to researchers until after her death. And so, here we are, able to go in, all the way in. Into her complicated, wild friendships. Into her turmultous technicolor moments. Into the unfathomable grief that struck her when her five-year-old daughter died of lukemia that, in many deeply painful ways, defined the rest of her life. We’ve touched the handwriting that unravelled entirely during one of her many, many drunken spirals. How did I not even know that she battled acoholism with ferocious strength in the years before any of us knew who she was? I’ve said elsewhere that I don’t turn to alcohol — my own destructive coping mechanisms simply take other forms — but something leapt out of me about her expressions of intense despair: I had never read anything so familar.
I was shocked that she sounded so like me when expressing emotions I could never have felt as a teenager. A lot of this despair — I’m not making this up — had to do with California, with not feeling she could write what she truly believed in Berkeley or San Francisco. I hear you, sister, I wanted to say. They’ve been ripping us up for this long, have they. Well, you made it. I’ll make it. There you go, helping me again, changing me again: you don’t need a human body to do that.
I don’t even know if I have it in me to talk to you about the fan mail. I’m still processing it. The tapes of the hotline and the people who called the hotline have not been digitized yet, so this time around I won’t have the experience of listening to 14-year-old me, gushing and immortalized, but I’m in there. I so vividly remember calling her up on the white landline phone next to my bed, sitting on the floral comforter I hated and would never have picked out for myself. I was calling because she was my lifeline. I had no idea I was stepping into history and becoming a part of it. Honestly? I had no idea she could die.
I’ll quote one fan letter here, because I keep thinking about it: “P.S. Are they real?”
Of course they are, child, of course they are. You think we’ve all been altered by something that’s fake? Vampires are simply hidden because there’s no bearable point of reference for who they are anymore. I want to disclaim these sentence, so that I don’t sound crazy, but I can’t. The self who did that automatically is gone. I plum forgot who I’d been trying to please.
Addie feels like my oldest friend, even though we hadn’t met in person before this wild immense extraordinary oh-my-god-what trip of a trip. We travel together well, which is a benefit when you’re sharing a modest-sized apartment with a person for a full week. I think the retroactivity of the connection comes from what startlingly similar teenagers we were, despite our thoroughly different backgrounds. They are from Houston, so the Southern connection is real, but everything else, I don’t have language for.
Thanks to the combined wisdom of Addie and Ian, my proposed erotic horror collection it’s not solely my work, it’s going to be an anthology of erotic horror, and you know what? Now that I have an illustrator, which is a whole other tale of magic involving Musa and her preternatural penchant for knowing who should connect with whom, I’m not going to plan for this to be a self-published endeavor. I have a hypothetical co-editor I’m trembling with nerves about approaching, who lives in New Orleans and is a major reason why I love erotic horror the way I do, and always have (even if I didn’t actually admit until 2021 that that’s what my love was).
We’ll have a website featuring my young illustrator’s designs with a Call for Submissions: it’ll have its own email and twitter account. We’re doing this for real. We’re doing this for real because one of our most unsurpassable literary deities of erotic horror no longer walks among us, and everything we can do to fill that cultural void is worth doing. It won’t be vampires. That’s been done. Together, we’re gonna carve out some shit that’s never been done.
I’ve barely told you anything, I’m realizing now, not because I want to keep the details from you but because it’s going to take me weeks to process this week, maybe months. I don’t even know. It’s possible that if I’d lived here for the past two years, I might not have needed a Substack, which first began as a sheild against what I was getting on the street. Here’s what I’m getting on the street these days:
small child, pointing: she has rainbow hair!
young dad: she does have rainbow hair.
It’s not a rainbow per se, the “cold” points of the spectrum are not represented, and there’s very little actual hair to speak of, what’s there now is — well, here I go, telling you too much.
If I’m not dreaming, Addie and I are having po-boys with the great Maurice Ruffin tomorrow. That’s what I believe we confirmed. Over text. When I texted his phone number. Which he gave me. There’s a medium-to-quite-large chance I might spontaneously combust before we make it to Domilise’s for our food, but if I still have any molecular cohesion left by the end of tomorrow, I’ll probably write about it. Unless I reach some earthly state of Nirvana at which I am finally so at peace that the written word and getting your attention with it no longer matters. We shall see.
Don’t make me go back. I’m fun when I’m not spending my every waking moment keeping rage at bay. I’m fun when I need not exist in defiance.
