The New Orleans Chronicles: Part III
The Anne Rice archives, and.
I don’t usually post when I’m in deep and incessant pain, but this morning, I don’t know what else to do. Never in my life have I missed New Orleans this much, I’m almost grateful for it. If we’re weighed down with sorrow, let it be new sorrow, right? The loneliness I’m in the thick of right now feels like a weird colorful version of what used to weigh me down when I lived there as a teenager. There was so much I wanted to be, and all I could actually do well was write, and who the fuck cares about that? Many, many people, it turns out, and I’m still reeling (or perhaps, she’s still reeling) from the still-raw kinda-bleeding knowledge that you can actually win people over with a turn of phrase if you do it right. I mean, I knew that as a reciever, obviously, but I never imagined myself in that position of what I still hesitate to call power. I know it’s power, but it feels so strange to claim it. The people in my life and imagination who’ve claimed that power over me are still larger than life to my mind. I can’t do what they can do. Not yet.
Anyway, let’s talk about the Anne Rice archives. I told you we went, but I don’t think I told you what went. Perhaps only the nerdiest-of-hardcore-nerds will consider this an exciting narrative, but we’ll see. We looked up directions, initially, not to the general Tulane campus but to the Howard Tilden Library, which, it turns out, is located near nothing but an uncharacteristic-for-New-Orleans food desert that included a crepe-and-coffee place that doesn’t open til 6pm. Not promising. But we were saved by the sweet people who run the kosher cafe in the Halal. I ordered a tofu-scramble-thing and I forget what Addie got; I had a minor panic attack when I thought we couldn’t get a cup of coffee there, but it turned out the coffee was outside the door because they keep kosher, but as it turns out, my coffee is kosher as all get out because I take it black. Don’t go putting anything in my shit if we’re drinking hot beverages. (Unless it’s black tea. Good black tea has strong enough tannins that my stomach does require some milk for that.)
Special Collections was initially intimidating: signage seemed to indicate that we'd get kicked out for unscheduled breathing. The liberating reality, though, was that the librarians were more than excellent at their jobs: they were thrilled to welcome scholars who were also fans. When Agnes was giving Addie and me an informative tutorial about how to search the archives, she indicated a drop-down menu where we could click on individual book titles, thereby unfolding an entire submenu of all the various categories of materials related solely to that particular book.
I don’t remember which of us said “wow” and which of us said “OH my GOD” but we definitely did it in unison, making the librarians laugh. “It’s nice to see researchers who are so enthusiastic,” Agnes said. “People are usually so quiet!” We did our best to be, since we were in a library and all, but it is a mindfuck of an experience for a lifelong fan to find themselves learning so much from so many angles when you thought for decades that you were already as immersed as one could get. Someone asked why she stipulated that her diaries couldn’t be opened until after her death, but my Southern ass knew the answer to that one before we even cracked them: “Because she’s talkin’ shit about people who are still alive!”
Indeed indeed. One of these people is Joyce Carol Oates. She didn’t seem to know the woman personally and had nothing too vitriolic to say, but she was unimpressed by the venture of hers that she was reading when the journals were written, lamenting that a promising scene of dinner on a Saturday afternoon did not, as she had hoped, bode for an inspiring rest-of-the-book. (I debated naming Oates here, but if the lauded author who’s known to Gen Z as the lady who’s constantly wrecking Twitter discourse came after me, a queer disabled unknown, for details about what my patron saint said about her that’s publicly accessible, that would be the literary-drama boon of my personal millenium, so I’ll just go ahead and scatter my seed. I mean that seed. I mean!)
“There are no more literary giants,” Anne Rice laments between her private covers. “I want to be a giant.”
I have 3 reactions to this:
1.) and you were. Rest easy, queen.
2.) hahaha how daring and cocky and shameless and wonderful.
3.) ….yeahhhhhhh so do I.
There’s folder called No Tom Cruise, specifically devoted to the voluminous articles dedicated to a national campaign I’d been too young to be contemporarily aware of to keep Tom Cruise from RUINING LESTAT, which he of course notoriously went on to do (at least to cinematically do. Lestat, of course, being more powerful than every other vampire by the 40-year end of his memoirs let alone of us will never actually be ruined.)
In a hyperrealistic short story about San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury, when she lived there, she wrote this:
“We'd been smoking pot since about six o'clock, and two of the girls had gone to sleep. That was about all they ever did was go to sleep, both of them. One of them was Rod's girl, and the other was Jake's and they just sat around grinning and whispering that everything was groovy and then they went to sleep. That was being a girl to them. Dressing right, boots, beads, the bit, and just fading out. They never had one idea cross their mind except by force. And they didn't know what to make of a chick that talked. I talked. Too much, most of the time.”
Emphasis mine, because, shit, that’s me, on the outside of all this. They don’t wear the beads anymore, these SF chicks, but they sure as fuck don’t wanna argue, and neither do their dudes: my debate skills which can definitely win me some points with your average New Yorker do me no favors here, which is fine, because I’m not looking to date, though I kind of accidentally did date in the cave-dwelling-ancient days of last year when a certain depth of hopelessness took over and I thought only one person in the world truly understood me and it wasn’t the one I was living with. I was wrong, gloriously and wrenchingly wrong. Ian’s superhumanly-fine with the fractured path toward my evolution, but I’ve got an internal burn deep in my chest that has nothing to do with how Buffy-level hard my personal trainer worked me yesterday. As it happens, I’m not even off-topic, because Anne Rice had a journal entry about someone who occupied a similar role in her pre-icon life:
“I want so much to see the imprint of his bare wet foot on a bathroom floor, to see him sleep with the eyeballs pulsing beneath his lids as they move to watch his dreams.”
“I long to kiss his fingertips, to know him once or twice and never again.”
I felt fairly un-scholarly writing those quotes down, but you never know: I might write a book on the psychology of affairs and fantasy and the ways our trauma and insecurities and lifelong fears play into them. I’m no therapist, but that’s the beauty of it, enough people who know these things have been informative on the topic. I could be something that’s not informative. Something that mirrors the enticing force I must have spoken with when a random dude sitting next to my friend and me in the bar at Brennan’s actually turned to me and said, “Your stories have been very entertaining.”
“Oh good,” I replied. “Got any insights on our personal lives?”
“No insights,” he said, without any trace of shame or embarassment. Which, oddly, was fine. Felt fine. New Orleans senselessness is a senselessness that makes blood-and-soul sense to me. Not like here. What the fuck is wrong with everybody here. Maybe I’m overgeneralizing. Ian asked me if I would like San Francisco better if my um, whatever the ever-loving hell the term might be, was not here. I said yes, of course I would. We live in the same building. I want to go home. Even if he moved first, though, I still would.
I’ll say this, though: Ian and I have an excellent life. And it’s one that I appreciate more deeply now than I ever could at any time before I left or in the last eleven years. I only wish that you, my readers, weren’t all remote. I realized as I was reflecting on my trip that I couldn’t remember the last time that multiple dear friends of mine were physically accessible and we could all hang out. I even have some new friends now. And we were all together.
Now, back to this unfathomable loneliness, which, mercifully, loses its edge when Ian is around because I now know that many people besides his complicated ass appreciate my company as much as I appreciate theirs. I’m sloughing off the last thick dead skins of an impossible 7-year period. I spent a stretch of life excited that Existence would be one thing, a terrified raging sucidal period fatalistically sure it would be another thing, and now?
I don’t know. I’m just kind of like — well, I’ll have Madame sum it up:
