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heigh I had been encouraged to go see Robert Plant by a groundskeeper at the Chalmette National Cemetery; and he had picked the right guy to sell me on, because I always lean towards the epic, and when you give songs titles like “The Battle of Evermore” you’re certainly at least aiming big. I’ve enjoyed some of the highlights of Plant’s later career too, songs like “Shine It All Around” or “Please Read the Letter,” so it seemed he still had at least something left. Rock music seems to be like poetry: souls involved in it have a brief shelf life, and it is rare to find someone doing vital new work after forty; those who do typically require tremendous amounts of self-reinvention and a willingness to get multiple transfusions from other artists, often from very distant artists.

Regente Feijó Were it not for the fact that I had kept up a bit with Plant over the past decade, I would not have recognized him when he came out onstage: the curly blonde hair is there, but the face and body have so thickened and coarsened that it is hard for me to imagine him as the same person who fronted Led Zeppelin. I suppose we are all more or less sensitive to different forms of aging, as to different types of faces; and since when I look in the mirror I think my face is fleshy and graceless, I am sensitive to seeing someone age out of the grace I envy.  Plant looks a great deal like an old truckdriver now, and his face looks unusually American for an old British rocker.

But you can tell he’s Plant when he sings, and I have to say, his voice is quite extraordinary, and has aged unusually well: he cannot reach the high notes anymore, but they were always screechy for him anyway, and it is just as well that he takes his songs elsewhere now. But he still has a high, powerful voice, and his lower notes have grown much richer and fuller with age.

He performed for something like an hour, his songs divided into three categories: 1) Led Zeppelin songs, usually updated with some kind of Third World flavor (the traditional Paul Simon reinvention approach) 2) covers of traditional American songs 3) his own solo music, which has a general recipe: an exotic World Music drone, a Led Zep big drum line, and some mysterious, moodful lyrics.

It’s a pleasant enough formula, and it works, though my favorite part of his show were his few ventures into the “roots” music. He sang his own version of a Bukka White song, “Fixin’ to Die Blues,” which he didn’t have to say had been in his mind when Led Zep recorded “In My Time of Dying.”

I think I sensed from him some kind of guilt at the way he and the other early British rockers plagiarized the old Blues musicians, most of whom lived and died poor while their white plagiarizers became millionaires, got knighted, and bought castles. But as Vergil said of his own thefts of Homer, people do not know how much talent it takes to steal from a master. The old Blues music was full of all kinds of material suited for the radio, but it needed a great deal of transformation before that would be possible.  People like Page and Plant and Clapton added a great deal – and a great deal that was great too – and you can hear it when comparing Plant’s version of Fixin to Die Blues [embedded] and the original; some people will prefer the original, but Plant’s is different and certainly more popular in treatment. “In My Time of Dying” is even further developed.

Blues music is mostly for white people now, and the old power it had – witness Son House – is buried with those old black men who sleep in those graveyards from Mississippi to Michigan. But I had no problems listening to Plant sing these songs – oddly enough, a life of sex, drugs, and Rock n’ Roll seemed to have provided misery enough. Plant as he sang did in fact sound like he knew what it meant to be fixing to die.

The material of the song– being on one’s deathbed – is suited to the genre, and highly expressive in all its several lyrical versions.

Feeling funny in my mind [other version: “in my eyes”]
Believe I’m fixing to die.
Feeling funny in my mind –
I believe I’m fixing to die.
Lord I don’t mind dying –
But I hate to see my children cry.

Plant’s presence onstage is most impressive, and it was clear that the crowd wanted no one but him. He made strange motions to elicit applause, gently sweeping his hands down to the ground as if sweeping applause up from beneath the stage, but it was effective. He seemed above pleasing the crowd, but also above wanting to displease the crowd: being in front of a crowd was simply part of his life, and something he had to do well in order to live well. There were any number of songs I wished he had performed but didn’t – “Hey Hey What Can I Say”, or “When the Levee Breaks” – but it was a good performance, and I left with an improved opinion of the man, and a deeper curiosity about the Mississippi Delta, the cradle of all this music, where I was headed.

I will add a few notes about Jazzfest: New Orleans erupted in Jazzfest mockery a few years ago when it was announced that Bon Jovi would headline the festival – the accusation being that Bon Jovi has nothing to do with Jazz, or New Orleans, or the Blues, or anything, and his presence just showed that the festival was drifting off where all American culture was going: celebrity-worship over substance, and profitmaking above all. This accusation can be sustained, but in many ways Jazzfest has gotten so big and so popular that this is the most logical, and even the most appropriate direction for it to go. Plant and Clapton and Springsteen and Bon Jovi and all the other big-name musicians who have been at this festival in recent years are all accustomed to performing stadium music for stadium crowds; and now that Jazzfest takes place on a stadium scale, this is the only music that really works well there. The Gospel music belongs in a church; the Blues music belongs in a bar; the New Orleans brass belongs on the street. And all of those musicians do in fact perform at Jazzfest, not only at the fest itself but they perform at all sorts of venues through the city while Jazzfest goes on.

What is more, Plant and Clapton and others have also become museum pieces of a certain sort, as Rock music itself becomes another artifact of a passing cultural style. And they have much to say about the Blues and Jazz music that inspired their own styles, for they were its inheritors.

People in New Orleans were also complaining about the cost of Jazzfest – the day ticket I bought was $70 – and it was certainly the case that the crowd was upscale and almost all white. The crowd did not resemble New Orleans at all. It was mostly tourists, in fact.

I consider it one of the marks of a great Metropolitan culture to make its cultural riches accessible to its poor citizens, and I think the same should be done with Jazzfest, but I can say that there is no doubt that even as it is this great musical gathering benefits the city in myriad ways, not only as a massive local moneymaker: it employs almost all the great New Orleans acts, who are all invited, and brings them into close contact with many of the world’s great musicians, who come to perform and also to listen. And all these musicians fill the bars and clubs too, putting on all kinds of cheap shows, which all the New Orleans residents have stories about: being in the bar that night when Robert Plant came in and performed, or Mick Jagger, or Wynton Marsalis.

As for me, I pronounced myself happy with the day, and rode my bike on back to catch up with Johnny Angel.

I remember not that long ago there were used bookshops in all the better little towns in America, and in great cities like New York – which was really at the time just an assemblage of better little towns, with an ethnic flavor – there were very many great used bookstores. Invariably each was staffed by an older man, frequently a bachelor, and always someone who had not known much in the way of worldly success: not quite conformist enough for the world to do anything with, and not ambitious or extroverted to make anything of himself. We all recognized each other as a class, and together we constituted probably the group who gain the greatest pleasure from books, presumably because in our lives there were not many other competing pleasures. In any number of small towns in America – Saugerties, Oberlin, Havre de Grace, Geneva, Somerville, Kingston, Murray Hill, downtown Philadelphia – I remember these great booksellers, who carried and recommended – and loved – those myriads of books which no one finds on bestseller lists, and no one studies in schools, but will forever please the bookish thoughtful literate nonconformists of the world – The Sketch Book, Travels in Arabia Deserta, The Decline of the West, Dichtung und Wahrheit, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Rome and a Villa, The Haunted Bookshop, The Vicar of Wakefield, anything by Richard Burton, or Augustus Hare – books which seem to exist nowhere except in used bookshops where the proprietor always knows if he has a copy, and always knows where it is.

We thought the internet might improve the trade for such booksellers, but all it seems to have done is shutter their storefronts; I suppose many are still in the business, packing books out of some basement where no one comes in to ask them for recommendations or listen to them explain why they think Great Expectations will never compare with The Old Curiosity Shop (or is it Little Dorrit? Or Dombey and Son? I always forget. One of the Dickens novels no one reads is supposedly one of his best) as a novel. I will confess that I miss such men: I miss their simple love for certain great authors, their animated attacks against academia, the utter ramshackleness of their overcrowded shops, their strange ability to have good books onhand and let the trash books go their own way, the funny way they had to reach for their mouses when using their computers because of the sheer amount of crap on their desks.

Well, of course in New Orleans all this exists, and it is at Arcadian Books, where Russell Desmond sits day in and day out in a tiny room which seems that if he tried to put one more book in it he himself would have to sit outside. As it is, you are tripping over piles of books in the two-foot wide somewhat-circular path which makes its way through the tiny shop. Books are three deep on the shelves – Russell says he has 15,000 of them in the one room – and there is a couch which is easy to miss because it is entirely covered with books in boxes. Russell sits at a desk – which is, again, camouflaged with books the way the army camouflaged bunkers with bushes – by the window, with multiple tomes open in front of him all day long. His passion is 19th century French conservatism – and let it be said that Louisiana might be the only plausible place in the world for such a passion to exist – and when English translations of such writers appear, it is often his work. He also writes essays about them for appropriately obscure periodicals. On this particular day he was reading de Tocqueville – pronounced correctly, with a short ‘o’ and the double-l nearly subsumed into the long ‘i’ – in French. “People read Democracy in America – or more likely, a few chapters of Democracy in America – in their first year or two of college and they think that’s all de Tocqueville did. They marvel at how insightful it is, how amazing, and then they forget about the fact that that really was just the beginning – de Tocqueville had decades more development ahead of him, and all the insight is there, but it’s so much deeper and wiser later. And nobody studies this, which is crazy, but there you go.”

It was like I had never left. He said he remembered me, but I kind of doubted that. It had been five years since I had been in his shop, and as everyone knows who works in retail or teaching, you remember your first customers, but the middle and later ones have to remember you – there are too many of them. But I had seen him at Easter services, when he was ushering at the Jesuit church downtown, and he knew I was coming.

“Five years? God, has it been that long?”

It probably seemed like a shorter bit of time because, again, we were not really individuals so much as brothers in a certain fraternity, and the conversation he had leaped into with me he had been leaping into with all the other members of the confraternity who had passed through his shop in the past five years.

“So I’m doing a bike trip up the whole Mississippi River. I’m looking for books about the river. What have you got?”

“Oh God, the Mississippi? Do you have a trailer for your bike? There’s a lot of stuff.”

“All I’ve really got is the Twain stuff.”

“Right.” After recommending a collection of travellers’ accounts of Louisiana, he pointed me to a dozen travelogues about the whole river. He started pulling them out and dumping them on top of one of the boxes of books which sat on the couch. I inspected them, but was unhappy with all of them; I came to the conclusion that what makes a travelogue interesting is an interesting author; a boring author can go around the world and note down every single uninteresting thing and miss all the good stuff, whereas Goethe would have something interesting to say about a journey across the room to his chamber-pot.

“Do you have Olmsted’s In the Cotton Kingdom?”

“Sure. Standard.” This was another book for initiates – it turns out that Frederick Law Olmsted, besides being one of the few great landscape architects of all time, was also a superb travel writer, with just as good an eye for telling detail as he had for tree-form and leaf. His account of his Southern travels before the Civil War is the most comprehensive picture of that society in existence – built up out of innumerable tiny details, whose number and suggestiveness immediately establish credibility. It is a slightly exhausting book, the way real life is exhausting, but for all those with an appetite for reality, it is captivating. I wanted to look it over while in the South myself. When Russell dropped it onto my pile I nearly decided to leave it behind – it must have weighed three pounds in hardback – but I wanted it and it did in fact come with me.

“Do you have a guide to the wildflowers of the lower Mississippi?”

“You know, I don’t, and I’ve been looking for one, but I don’t know of one. I do have the guide to trees of the Southeast, which I buy new just to have it onhand, because it is the standard work. Let me show you that.”

Tree guides were less useful – trees are easier to identify in the field without help – but looking it over, I thought I might be able to learn the Southern oaks with this book. I picked it up. “I don’t know what to do about a flower guide. I looked at the Zoo, but their gift shop had no scientific content – it was just merchandising directed at kids.”

He grimaced and waved his hand. “Oh, what some of these institutions are doing, it’s a disgrace. I mean, is it about knowledge or is it about selling stuffed polyester garbage? ‘Save the environment,’ give me a break. You might try the Botanical Gardens, I mean, they should have one, though these days you never know.”

I wasn’t sure I was going to have enough time to get over to the Botanical Garden, which as I recollected was not the best. The rest of today I would be at Jazzfest; I was hoping to go into the Atchafalaya Basin tomorrow with a friend from the Army Corps of Engineers to talk about the single greatest danger to the existence of New Orleans, which was the Atchafalaya River. And Monday it really would be time to start cycling.

“I think I’ll take these two books,” I said.

“Going with the classics.”

“As always. So how are things here? You seem well, actually. It’s a pleasure to see the place – it’s not much changed.”

“Oh, here in the shop no, there’s no change. How are things going? I don’t know. You know, I look at all these other people, and they’ve got their houses and all this money and their careers and I think, ‘Really? Is this what gets ahead?’ You know, you think when you’re younger that it’s some kind of merit or something, but then you get older and you just say, I don’t know. You know, my brother, I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love him to death, but I just think, ‘He’s very successful, and what am I going to have?’ I don’t know, I’ve just been thinking about it.”  He was not as young as he once was – much of his light hair was gray now.  “You know, a few years ago I had a few people in the shop, this couple and this other guy, and this girl – I’ve got to say, she was stunning. You know, girls like this, they’re trying to get interested in books, and basically they all buy one of two things – for some reason they always buy Jane Austen, or Edgar Allan Poe. I don’t know what it is, but it’s always one of those two. So she got some Poe short stories, and her boyfriend, he was all into ‘modern poetry,’ and I have some good stuff here, but what he got was just dreadful, I could tell he had no idea what he was doing, he was so clearly a pretender. And his friend, I could tell what kind of guy he was, kind of conservative guy, well-dressed, not the same kind of flash that the pretentious poet had, by any means, but he was interested in conservative politics and he ended getting a copy of the Federalist Papers and some of the writings of Tom Paine. And I thought, you know, this guy, he’s the most straightforward of the three of them, but he chose something with substance – something that he’s actually going to read and think about, and makes sense for his life. And you know, there it is. She was completely with the wrong guy. And here’s the topper – as they’re about to leave, the poet-guy steps out with his girlfriend, and says to me that his friend is picking up the bill. So he gets the girl with all his pretend nonsense while the other guy with substance pays for it all. I thought that pretty much summed it all up, academia, politics, economics, life in general.”

I thought there were any number of places where I could object to this particular story, but the feeling was what mattered: the feeling we get that we are in the presence of a continuously unfolding injustice, which stretches from cradle to grave and is sadly – tragically – renewed with every birth. We all know this feeling, whatever we may think constitutes good evidence and cause for it.  Whether or not the world should belong to such as us – well, perhaps it shouldn’t.  He and I had bonded over the Latin poems of Baudelaire, which I found in his shop.  It had occasioned another tirade.  “Baudelaire is one of the greats, and he wrote all these poems in Latin, and no one even looks at them, I mean, maybe if you’re lucky someone has read Les Fleurs du Mal – I’m not even going to mention the people who have never heard of Baudelaire, I mean my God Lord knows there are enough of them – but there’s so much more that people never go into.  There’s an entire ocean of great literature out there, people, and it’ll get more than just your ankle wet, but you have to actually go in at some point.”  Actually he didn’t use that last metaphor, but I could write dialogue for Russell all day long, he and I share so much.

But of course we nonconformists contain many bristly points which we do not share.  I learned also that Russell had been reading the writings of Jefferson Davis. “It’s not politically correct, but honestly, some of these guys really stand up. Davis was brilliant. No one wants to say it now, but you go read that stuff and tell me it doesn’t stand up.”

I should have asked him what precisely I should read, but I did not at the time. I’m sure it does not stand up, to be honest; everything I have read of those men suggests precisely the low mentality one would expect of a slaver.  I was already familiar with this side of Russell. On earlier occasions he told me that “All the heroism, all the true nobility, was entirely on the side of the South in the Civil War,” which is false from top to bottom (and which I mentioned in conversation later on the trip, with interesting results), and he also said, “Lincoln was the worst president this country ever had. The whole crusade mentality that has been such a decisive factor in our foreign policy so many times originates with Lincoln. You look at all the presidents before, they didn’t have that. Now it’s pretty much a continual danger that some American president will go off on some crusade or other. It’s almost expected now.” I spoke with someone else about this too, also with interesting results, later on my trip from South to North. Here all I will note is that there are many people – a surprising number, in fact – all through the South, who imagine, as Shelby Foote said, that it is July 3rd, 1863, and it is still possible that everything can turn out entirely differently.

In fact, it was probably the Mississippi River that determined the war, for it was a huge, flat, almost indefensible highway, slowly pushing from North into South, flowing through the wealthiest area of the Confederacy and right through the middle of its one great city.  Victory was impossible, if not given their indefensible cause, then given the river, and the river was a given.

My friend Tom and I, after a few beers at a local saloon, went on down to the Mississippi to get a look. As we stood there, the cool air off the river blowing the hair back from our faces, a little man – he was so little I thought he might be a dwarf – with a beard asked me how I liked the French Quarter.

“I love it,” I said. “Like pretty much everyone else.”

“Yeah,” he said, in a strange, high-pitched voice. “Well, if you want to see where things are really at, like the really cool neighborhood, you have to come to the Lower Ninth Ward. That’s where I live.”

I wasn’t sure if this person was being facetious or not. The Lower Ninth Ward was interesting as a kind of symbol of Hurricane Katrina devastation and the problems of how to redevelop the city, but I had no doubt it was not “where it’s at.” But I decided to let this person be; he was just a harmless booster.

After we were a safe distance away, Tom said, “I bet you don’t see that every day in the Catskills.”

“What?”

“That bearded lady over there.”

“What do you mean?”

He laughed. “John! That was a bearded lady!”

I thought Tom was being facetious. “I thought that was a guy, like a midget or something.”

“Didn’t you notice the voice?”

“His voice was very high, that’s true.”

“She’s a bearded lady! I’ve seen her around before. I think she works in like freak shows and things around town.”

I had no doubt that he thought she/he was a bearded lady, and who knows: I had to admit that in New Orleans, it was possible.

I stopped off while uptown at my old parish, Mater Dolorosa, to see if I could see my old pastor, whom I knew simply as John.  He was the only priest I have ever known to inspire me to come to mass every Sunday; he was one of the few priests that I have ever felt really respected and loved his parishioners.  I rang at the parish office and asked for him, but he had retired; the secretary made it very clear I would not be seeing him around there anymore.  She wasn’t terribly friendly about it; perhaps she was busy.

He always used to say, “The Lord is with you,” instead of “The Lord be with you.”  When I first heard this, I thought it was another of these nonsense feel-goody things Vatican-II-type priests might say; but like most forms of nonconformity, it made me think.  I looked at that Greek and Latin forms, which lack verbs, and so the translation using the indicative, rather than the optative, is not obviously wrong.  And the more I thought of it, the more I thought his was the better translation.  God is with you, realized or not, wished or not.  Indeed that might be the key realization.  Wishing it might be counterproductive, in that it suggests that God is not there, or that God’s presence was the kind of thing we could attain by wishing.  All you can do is realize.  His translation is at least suggested by what Samuel says to David: “Omne quod est in corde tuo vade fac quia Dominus tecum est.”  “All that is in your heart go, do.  For the Lord is with you.”

But like good people everywhere, he had been shuffled along by the world.  If I were running the world, I’d promote people like him until all the important decisions were made by such men.  But I suppose most priests find themselves pretty busy, so I presume the church has not banished him to idleness.  He was a good man.  Though I suppose it must have been difficult to work with him: he was like the cool teacher in a school: his masses were always packed, and no one came to the masses held by other priests.  He gave short – always under three minutes – incisive sermons, and I always felt I learned something when he spoke.  It was a pleasure to come back week after week, and after years I presume he had long forgotten me, but I had not forgotten him.

Tulane University.

I walked along Freret Street to Tulane University, where I looked for Richard Campanella, a New Orleans expert who I thought would be worth talking to about the Mississippi River. But I rarely schedule things – this gives me freedom to be spontaneous, and it allows Fate to determine the outcome of many things, but it also means I often cannot see a certain sort of person – the busy sort. I suppose this is fine – I never have much to say to busy people anyway, I’m willing to let them run off to whatever else they are doing.  And other times I miss connections which might well be great – it’s hard to know.  I found his office, which was punctiliously and interestingly decorated; but the man himself was not there.

Magnolia grandiflora in Audubon Park. I can look at stuff like this all day.

I stayed uptown until evening; this was my old neighborhood when I lived for a spring in New Orleans, and I was very fond of it. I ate lunch at the Camellia Grill, where everyone sits cheek-by-jowl at the counter, which makes me feel less lonely than sitting alone at a table; I inspected the magnificent Audubon Park, enjoying the live oaks and irises and magnolias; I thought I would visit the Zoo, as at this moment in my life nature is my great pleasure and consolation, but it was closed to the public in order to accommodate a massive school visit. The kids were definitely the loudest animals in the place, and I did not envy the teachers who were trying to corral them. Though I was enjoying everything, it was not until the evening that anything really worked out as I had planned, when I saw an old friend, Tom, in a bar down in the French Quarter.

We had grown close when I was going through my divorce, and had come down to New Orleans for some warmth and healing; he had let me stay at his place while I looked for a room of my own, and lent me his bike for the duration of my stay. Now it was his turn for a divorce. And since it was New Orleans, the whole experience had an extra insanity which made the whole thing funny but also much much more powerfully sad. He had married a woman with an eight-year-old son, and when I had last seen them five years ago I saw difficulties there which I had no idea how to manage: Tom and his wife disagreed about discipline and how to raise the boy, and I found the child disrespectful and difficult and sullen and entirely attached to his iPhone (or whatever expensive device it was) – at the age of eight. I do, sometimes, wonder about what kind of adults are being made by these machines that have attached themselves to our children. In my teaching days, I found that the most delightful and natural children – the ones who had bright eyes, asked questions, did things, spent time outside, noticed birds and frogs, and in general seemed alive – all almost without exception lived with strict rules about television and computers, often to the point of not having them at all. For Tom and his wife the kid was quite well formed already, by very different rules, and I would not have known how to deal with such a situation.
Well, as the relationship started going south the boy naturally exploited the division between his parents to get what he wanted, and rebelled outright against his stepfather. This came to a head during an argument between husband and wife which was particularly bitter. The boy – who is gaining strength – attacked my friend Tom from behind, and Tom slammed him against a wall and pinned him there. His wife called the police and had Tom taken out in handcuffs.
The experience in the St. Tammany Parish jail had changed my friend. He ended up spending two nights there on the concrete floor, awaiting “processing.”
“Isn’t there some kind of law about that? Don’t they have to charge you and do something with you quickly?”
“They said the computers were down. They didn’t process anybody. John, lemme tell you, I think some people had been there for weeks. They said they couldn’t do anything about it without the computers – they had to run background checks and all that. It was only because I got my father and my mother working on them, calling them constantly, that they let me out. And I’m missing work and everything, it was bad. Probably I only got out in two days because my dad’s in the military.”
“And you’re white.”
“That probably helped too.”
“But aren’t there laws about this?”
“I’m sure there are, but when you’re there you just want to get out. That’s all you care about. You don’t care about the law. Personally, I don’t buy that stuff about the computers. Once they decided to process me it all happened pretty quickly and it looked like they were using computers. I think they just didn’t have any space in the prisons. So they let me out when they figured I wasn’t actually going to prison – that way I wasn’t going to take up any space. But the other guys, John they got nowhere to put ‘em. So they just let us all rot there, like thirty guys all in one cell, you’re sleeping on the cement floor, and John, some of these people, they’re real scary. I mean, get this. We had these two guys, and they got to talking, and it ends up one of them was in for a drunk driving case. Well, it ends up that one of the people who died in the crash he was in, was the girlfriend of one of the other guys in lockup. Swear to God. So this one guy, he starts talking like, “You betta watch yo back mothafucka Ah’ma getchou!” and all this shit. He was really pissed. So everyone in there, we try to settle them down, but that one guy he kept sayin’, “Now I know who did this shit man he killed her, he killed my girl, Ah’ma fuck that nigguh up. He killed huh, man! He KILLED HUH!” So the other guy, he goes off to his corner, and – oh, you’ll like this. So get this. You know Bob Barker?”
“Like, from The Price Is Right?”
“Yeah, like ‘Come on down!’ and shit?”
“Have your pet spayed or neutered.”
“Right. Well get this. Bob Barker took all the money that he made on the Price is Right, and I don’t know why he did this, but he invested in a company that makes prison toiletries and shit. So like when you get taken in, they give you a little toothbrush, and it says ‘Bob Barker’ on it.”
“WHAT?? That’s insane.” I was laughing, and so was he.
“Oh yeah, you can look it up. So anyway this guy who killed the girl in the car accident, he goes off to the corner and we can see he’s doing something. Well, he’s scrapin’ his toothbrush on the cement floor. And so someone says, ‘Hey theah whachou doin?’ and he says, ‘I’m sharpin’ my Bob Barkuh man I ain’t gunna wait fo’ this shit to go down.’ So I was like, ‘Get me out of here, this is insane.’”
We were both laughing, because it was all completely crazy – mind you, this man is one of the nicest people I know, a math geek who stands up very straight, wears pretty wide eyeglasses, rigs up engines to make them more fuel-efficient, and always holds doors for old people – the kind of guy who could give his life to raise another man’s children. The thought of him thrown in jail like this was completely incongruous. But this was also New Orleans laughter: a kind of laughter that kicks in when you realize there is no other way to deal with the ten or fifteen layers of sadness implied in all the madness. In a land of many prisons, the prisons are full; celebrities are following their brokers’ advice and investing in growth industries like prison toiletries; a man loses the woman he loves for another man’s dumb drinking; people are thrown for weeks at a time into cages which would not be up to code for the housing of zoo animals, and this sort of thing is so expected that people have evolved behaviors (like sharpening toothbrushes) to deal with such situations; he, my friend, had been left there just like any other animal, for days; and his marriage was breaking up. As mine had. As so many of our friends’ had.
“So John I’m never going back there. I’ll tell you that. I’m going to remember this. I’m never going back. My wife, I can’t trust her. If she can do that to me, I know, I can’t ever go back.”
There was more. He was going to court-ordered anger management therapy. “So the theory is that we have all been trained to use violence of some sort to get our way, and it worked – but now, it’s not going to work any more. So we’re all going around and telling stories about how we learned to use violence in the past. It’s actually pretty interesting, hearing people’s stories.” Then he broke into a big smile. “But I have to say, sometimes I’m sitting there listening and I just want to burst out laughing. I mean, I’m in there for what we’ll call a relatively minor incident. These other guys around me, they’re there for like, attempted murder and shit. And they’ve got stories, man. It’s shit that’s so crazy that sometimes I just want to burst out laughing in the middle of the room, because I can’t imagine it, but I keep my mouth shut. I don’t want anyone to stomp me out, you know what I’m saying.”
“Stomp you out?”
“Stomp me out. Let me tell you that story. So there’s this one guy, and he’s talking about how he ended up in jail for attempted murder. He served his sentence, now he has to take this class. So – and let me just preface this by saying there are two white people in the room, me, and the therapist, who’s a woman. Man, you should talk to her. I bet she has some stories.”
“Doctors, you know. Rules about confidentiality.”
“Yeah, but I don’t know, probably if you slept with her she’d start talking.”
“True.”
“So anyway, this guy says he’s living in the projects with some girl, and he finds out his girl is cheating on him. So he’s all upset and threatens to kill her and all that. So she storms off. Then she comes back with the guy she’s sleeping with. And so he says, ‘God-damn that little nigguh, he gets right in my face and starts telling me how it’s gonna be. And Ah’m lahk, god-damn, that little nigguh ain’t gunna come into my house and tell me how it’s gonna be. So I had to stomp that nigguh out!’”
“So what exactly does it mean to ‘stomp someone out’?” I asked.
“That’s when you have someone down on the ground and then start kicking them in the head.”
“Gotcha.”
“It gets better. ‘So I kicked that little nigguh’s ass, and he goes upstahs, and you know the way it is, sometimes shit like that happens and everything coo, sometimes they come up behind you and they shoot yo ass. So I went up theah to make shoowah everything coo between us, and then I go back downstahs and my woman she staht acting all nice, like, ‘Honey lemme make you some iced tea,’ and Ah’m like what the fuck is this shit? So then she says, ‘Honey, come in here,’ and I come in the kitchen and she’s been heating up some oll in a pot, and she takes the pot of boiling oll and she tries to throw that shit on me! God-damn was good I knew what she was up to, o she’da fucked this nigguh up!’ So then he pulls up his sleeves, John, and there’s little pink scars all over his arms, from the boiling oil she threw on him. And he says, ‘So I says to myself, “Damn, I gotta stomp this bitch out too! So I stomped it out, and now, here I am.’
“John, I just can’t believe this stuff is happening – it’s happening all around us, John. There’s people heating up oil to throw on other people, right now stuff like this is happening.”
“God, it’s insane.”
“It is, John. It’s insane here. But you know something? I think that once my ten weeks are over, if I ever get real depressed in the future, I’m just going to go to one of the classes. I actually leave feeling a lot better.”