The New Orleans Chronicles: Part II
There are gonna have to be a lot of these.
Before we begin in earnest, let’s start with a quote from a former subscriber of Hot and Disabled. This was a public comment on a public post, but for those of you who might have missed it:
If there’s one promise I can make about the following, it’s that it’s going to be a random-as-fuck directionless bubble, because I just got back late late Monday night, (far later than scheduled thanks to a 3-hour flight delay) after which, Ian and I stayed up til around 1am enthusiastically reuniting, but my central-time body thought that was 3am, and somehow I still made it to the gym? Where my personal trainer proceeded to kill my biceps thoroughly dead. Point being: ain’t nothing cohesive about my existence right now, not a bit, and all that is seperate from the fact that I’m still reeling from every moment of the (I don’t know how else to put it) literary orgasm that was my whole week back home.
Sense tells me I should wait til I can be some degree of linerar about it all. But then a deeper, more all-consuming sense rolls in that says, “Dude. You only had one subscriber that wanted ‘direction’ from you and he’s gone.” Maurice Ruffin, a gem of a human and a powerhouse of a writer and a life-changing coffee date, suggested that I share that comment. Because, he said, driving away someone who’s clearly not your reader means you’re doing something right by the people that you are trying to reach.
Thinking all the way back to the start of the week makes me unbearably homesick and sad, so I’m going to do this in reverse chronological order. I vividly remember the last time I cried on a gradually-lifting plane because I was leaving New Orleans: it was the end of the summer, 2003. But now it’s just two days ago. I would have done almost anything to stay. Crossing a street where the drivers seemed pathologically anxious to get wherever they had to cross mellow residential Fountainbleau to get to, I actually had the wild morbid thought: “If I got hit by a car, at least I could stay longer.” That’s where we are, folks: laid up in a hospital in New Orleans sounded more fortifying to my spirit than leading an all-limbs-on-deck life in San Francisco. Let’s see if I can communicate why:
Forget what I said about chronological order in any direction. Time is a lie and we’re going all over the place. Let’s start with the realization of a long-time dream: to get my hair done at Fifi Mahonies, the aforementioned iconic wig shop run by one of my first life-altering queer crushes. (I didn’t get to see her this time around, but next time will come as soon as I can will it.) Several years ago, they expanded into a salon, otherwise known as a way to make their fantastical wig-magic into a concrete thing that becomes one day-to-day look? I had ached to get cut-and-styled by the mythical creatures who make this place go, but I never got the chance.
I’ve had it now, but you all know how I feel about selfies, and even though I’ve been compelled to break my cardinal rule while I’m out walking because holy shit I look undeniably good that’s just facts (it’s a reason why Ian and my reuinion was so enthusiastic and blissfully sleep-depriving), by the time I got home from my Seemed Like it Was Way Too Much to Do yesterday, I was too fucking tired to show off for the amorphous masses who may or may not exist. For now, words: My head is shaved, but for one lock in the front that’s a spectrum of deep red, bright orange, and deep yellow. I have no idea what my dad might have thought of it, but my godfather seemed endearingly fascinated. I’ve never dyed my hair before. When I told my goddess-stylist Tisha Breaux that I liked my natural color and wasn’t sure what colors went best with the red, she immediately just…knew. This is why we pay up at the beauty solon, a lesson that my grandmother taught me and which my dad kept alive on her behalf (for me, I mean) with a dedication that defied gender norms.
Kids born after Katrina are almost legal adults now. I can’t wrap my head around that. I arrived prepared to be the obnoxious old-timer seething about how this used to be that and that used to be this and none of you know you just don’t know, but I’m delighted to report that a surprising number of my Old New Orleans haunts are thriving. And if my gen-z illustrator for our upcoming erotic horror anthology and his graphic artist friend are anything to go on, the kids fuckin’ know. They just know.
Addie, whose smile is radiant in person, was a wondrous travel companion, and not just for reasons of bottomless-literary-nerd compatibility, although that was certainly healing in infinite ways. When I was living in New Orleans from ages 12-14, writing, and the lack of sex I was having or drugs I was doing along with it, made me an outcast. I don’t know if I can ever describe how impossibly lonely I was for most of the time in those years. Writing erotica was my escape then, although at those ages (being the city’s only virgin), it wasn’t about sex, but about long sustained makeout sessions, usually with Christian Bale, as detailed painstakingly in hard-cover journal after hard-cover journal, with the sexiest music I owned playing on my stereo as I wrote. At that time, I didn’t think I was honing a skill: I honestly think I believed that no one I could want would ever desire me back, as evidenced by the two years of unrequited love I suffered at the humbly oblivious hands of a high school senior that, in writings about that period, I’ve called Michele Rose. I wrote this shit because there was no way it was actually going to happen. My friends who didn’t write were out living, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde.
(This is undoubtedly the reason why requited attraction mantains a potentially-explosive grip on me. For a period-appropriate summation of a protracted moment in which an impact of this nature took over my life and consciousness recently, there’s no more eerily-appropriate narrative source than this live performance of Garbage’s “You Look So Fine.” My youthful obsession with lead singer Shirley Manson and with this song in particular did not guide me to the most responsible decisions later in life, but it’s all good now.)
Between writing that and this moment, I did two things: first, I broke my cardinal rule, so without further ado or enough caffiene, I present to you my new hair.
All right, confession, because by now what wouldn’t I tell you? I broke my cardinal rule one other time before today, in a bar bathroom with such irresistable lighting that I just had to, I don’t know, join my generation, but only for a second:
Well damn, I look narcissistic now that I’m having you stare at basically 3 posters of me. But the thing is, my lifelong hunger for performer-type-attention has always been at odds with my deep-seated phobia of how I look in still-photos, the kind this economy is made of, so bear with me while I reconfigure my entire being.
Because I’ve come to understand that there’s no way on any planet I can even begin to sum up that week in New Orleans in two parts. Without even giving you the details yet of my ecstatic coffee date with Addie and Maurice Ruffin, I have to tell you that at that very same coffeehouse, a girl with frizzy red hair who hated basically everything about herself used to sit with her notebooks describing all the hot people who walked by, thinking, one day I’ll grow up, and I’ll write things, and the writers I adore will be my friends. How she knew this to be the case even in the depths of teenage despair I will never be able to explain, but in the intervening years between then and now she’d given up on that many, many times. For years, she was ashamed of being me. When I spent a week in Berkeley mental institution for clinical depression in 2017 I kept thinking, “People used to tell you that you were smart. Maybe you were. People used to say you were a good writer. Maybe you were. But you’ll never write again. And you were probably never that good.”
Fast forward to a dark wood table where Maurice and Addie are talking about memoir as Maurice looks at me and says, “When is your tell-all coming out?” after proclaiming, “You are a character, Sarah Sunfire.”
Is it possible to remain entirely upright with one’s eyes open while actually having fainted? Because I’m pretty sure that’s what happened to me for at least a few consecutive seconds that afternoon. And later, when I said to Addie, “You’re the first author I’ve been close enough to that I can actually text you about parts I like while I’m reading your book,” they answered, with clear surprise, “Really?!”
The vindicating assumption having been that I’ve been riding this horse for years. But no, not so, just dreaming about it. I once made a parody-level fool of myself at Chicago AWP because I was gone over a debut novelist’s single phrase. And I’ve shocked/possibly frightened two big-name screenwriters in the days before social media when no one was supposed to know who screenwriters were, let alone go all-out groupie at them. That’s been the extent of my “Writers in my life” life until pretty fucking recently.
So I’m adjusting to a lot. Is it a directionless bubble? Maybe. But bubbles are free and iridecent. I hope that’s eventually how reading about being transformed by home is going to feel.