Prologue

Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop is a bar at the end of Bourbon a good stretch from the main strip. It looks pretty much like a dilapidated barn, but at night it is quiet, a rarity for a bar in this city, and the only real lighting is by candle. This makes it one of the few places in the French Quarter that I actually like. On this night, I was hanging with the Portland contingent for the first time and Will decided he was going to clue me in.

“So they’re together,” he said indicating the two girls, “And I’m bi, we’re a pretty sexually alternative crowd.”

My face remained like stone. If he thought he was going to shock me with this bit of information he was quite mistaken. I doubt such news would surprise anyone in Portland, much less in New Orleans, and I have enough homosexual friends to start a pink battalion. I realized it was time to show this upstart who the real sexual deviant was.

“Oh, that’s cool, I’m probably more sexually alternative than all ya’ll combined.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, I’m a celibate.”

I’m also very much accustomed to rendering people stupefied with my terse comments, but it is uncommon, even for me, to see mouths literally drop open. This was one of those times. Will’s immediate response was in a tone of utter disbelief, “Why would you do that to yourself?” This remark made me less sad that he ended the night in the central lockup. His question reaffirmed my belief that in our culture, it is acceptable to have sex with just about anything, as long as you’re having sex with something. Of course I’ve never taken a vow, so I’m not a celibate in any real sense, but there’s no institutional way to become one if you’re not in a religious order, and I’m always open to whatever romantic intrigue may be ahead.

Tale I

It was one of those nights that you can only get in a mire that has been paved over. It was 99 degrees at two in the morning, and the swamp seemed to be wanting to take back its own. I don’t really remember what I was doing in the Quarter that night, years ago, when I first moved here. I only remember it was a bad night, and I had ended it at the trolley stop waiting to get home. I just witnessed a very angry middle-aged woman tell her husband she wanted a divorce, then “she” walked up. She had on khaki pants and a jet-black button-up shirt. Her skin was very fair, green eyes and light red hair, a beauty.

From time to time, I play a game with myself and lose my inhibitions. This causes me to have no problem looking a beautiful woman in the eyes. Usually when this happens I get myself into trouble. She saw me and unbuttoned the cuff on her shirtsleeve. She rolled it up exposing some sort of tattoo, like a peacock ruffling its tail, pretending to take no note of me. She rubbed the tattoo in a seductive manner and rolled her sleeve back down. I saw this as odd behavior and shut my eyes, leaning my head back on the glass window of the shop I was propped up against.

When the trolley came, she took a seat all the way in the back. I sat in the middle. The trolley grinded down the track carrying its sparse late night cargo to their final destinations. About halfway home I had my chin propped in my hand staring out the window as she walked past me and slammed her bag down in the seat in front of me and violently slouched into the seat. This was an odd twist-I need to learn to keep my eyes to myself. I dared to be stupid,

“Are you okay?” I asked.

Instead of the verbal response I expected she turned and handed me a card. I looked at it and couldn’t make heads or tails of it.

“People get on my nerves.” She scowled. I sat staring like a slack-jawed opossum caught in the headlights of a barreling Mack truck blaring its horn, holding a meaningless card in its little paws.

“I noticed you staring at me at the stop” She said.

I managed to stammer out, “well, you’re very beautiful.” That was about the best I did all night.

Her simple response was, “I know.”

She proceeded to ask me if I would mind walking her home, telling me she would pay my way back onto the trolley. I decided that might not be the best plan, and proceeded to inform her that I had spent all my money and would actually have to take her up on that, hoping to diffuse the situation. She accepted, to my great surprise, and handed me a dollar, the fare at the time. She explained that since the Essence festival, a yearly African American music festival, was going on she was afraid to walk home alone.

The trolley doors slammed behind me as I stepped off on an unfamiliar stretch of St. Charles Ave. “So what’s your name?” I asked.

“Erin,” she said, “it’s on that card I gave you.” I turned the card over and sure enough, there it was. “The address is where I dance.”

Now, I have never been in a strip club before in my life, but I was pretty sure she wasn’t a performance artist. We proceeded down the street to her house. Through our small talk it was discovered that I was a student of religion.

“Oh, I’ve done some ghost hunting in my time,” she said.

“Don’t ask me where I got the equipment.”

I was wondering exactly what equipment would be needed besides a video camera and a notebook. I was also wondering what ghost busting had to do with religious studies, when I notice the pentagram necklace around her neck.
“What’s this?” I asked.

“Oh I’m a Wiccan.”

So I was walking down the dark street with this faux witch, who apparently had no problem putting the antics of Bill Murray (granted, a genius in his own art) on the same level with the high theology of Thomas Aquinas. I was slowly coming to realize that I’d rather be walking the other way, alone, when it came out that she was married.

“He’s cheating on me anyway, I’m to the point where I want to put up cameras all around the house to keep track of him.” I glanced longingly back down the ever-widening stretch of empty street toward St. Charles.

“Oh, we’re almost there,” she said, noticing my averted eyes. We stopped a block or two from her house, I assume because her husband was there, and parted with a hearty handshake.

By the time I was heading back down the long road to the trolley alone I was glad I had taken her dollar. The last thing I needed was to get wrapped up in an affair with a vain, possessive, pagan, racist stripper who happened to be unhappily married. The visions of her butch husband alternating successive hook punches onto my jaw was all I needed to see in my mind’s eye to convince me to chunk that card into the refuse before boarding.

Tale II

Butler’s Black Pearl Lounge is within walking distance from my house. It is one of those joints that is so hip that my presence is needed to counterbalance the coolness of the joint. I usually show up on Saturday nights with my flannel shirt, receding hair line and obnoxious drawl to bring back to the middle a crowd of people who are, unbeknownst to them, too fashionable for their own good. Just by showing up, I put a drag on this dimly lit bar, covered in retro Schlitz ads and Atari paraphernalia, as Nag Champa wafts through the air. As I walk in, an almost imperceptible sense of somberness comes over the place, as people begin to realize that the world created by Butler’s is apt to corruption by outsiders and only a shadow of the true world of hipness where no such intrusions would be tolerated.

The other week I showed up with Will, who had been drinking since noon. It was about 11:30 when we came and by the third round of drinks that I realized that perhaps Will had a problem, and maybe I shouldn’t be encouraging it. He had much failure that night, not being able to find anyone to dance with him. Repeatedly I pointed him to girls sitting in their respective corners bobbing to the music and repeatedly he returned alone to curse my name.

The barmaid who usually works on Saturday night is mythic in her beauty. She looks like an elfin princess who floats rather than walks. Her hair is short and black, accented by full lips, high cheekbones, and dark eyes. Will asked me her name and I pleaded ignorance. “She looks like a Sarah,” he said.

“She looks like an Erin to me,” I rebutted, unconsciously drawing on some long-ago conversation I may have had with her. The next time she came by he asked her and she affirmed that her name was Erin.

“I’m Will and this is my friend Phillip.”

“I know Phillip, I’ve seen him around here and at the Maple Leaf.”

This time the jaw that dropped was mine, and I am not easily surprised. The shock was in being recognized at all, though I have only been to The Maple leaf once, about four years ago. I never returned out of protest for being asked to pay a cover after having already ordered a few drinks. Regardless of whether she mixed me up with someone else from time to time, the fact remained that I was a recognizable person in her mind. This fact alone necessitates sexual attraction, in the male mind. This odd universal belief for men called the Male Belief of Acknowledgment Clause states that any form of acknowledgement of a man by a woman is to be taken as a direct solicitation for at least romantic, if not overtly sexual, activity.

There was a brief conversation wherein she invited us to come the next night to listen to reggae music. She returned to her duties. “I asked her name, and she was staring at you the whole time!” Will whined, still smarting from his rhythmic rejection. “I think she’s into you.”

“I think, she’s a bit out of my league,” I said. I am unfortunately endowed with the horrible curse of retaining some modicum of reason no matter how much I drink. I get buzzed easily, but it takes a lot to get me drunk, and I hadn’t come near my limit, though I had had more then my usual already.

“You shouldn’t sell yourself short,” he proceeded, bolstering my dormant pride. He continued to talk and I continued to listen, constantly reminding myself that all the facts that he was spouting were completely ambiguous.

The time had come: Will had finally been rejected by every woman in a bar where people were packed wall to wall like sardines, and he wanted to leave. He walked up to Erin and shook her hand, delivering one last tip. “Ya’ll are leaving?” she said. He shook his head and turned to go.

I walked over to her and leaned to her ear, “I don’t think I’m going to make reggae tomorrow but do you work Saturday?”

“Ten o’clock,” she said.

“I’ll be here Saturday and see you.”
She waved goodbye and we left.

“What are you up to?” said the voice of reason in my brain, recognizing my submission to Will’s propaganda. Maybe I was more in my cups then I thought.

“Ah ah,” I answered, “but, that was completely ambiguous too.” So I had made a hasty move, forgetting one of my greatest precepts: patience is a virtue and haste is a form of violence.

I met Clay in the Coffee shop to discuss the situation, laying out all the facts as they were, and noting the ambiguity of the situation, but also playing up the Male Belief of Acknowledgement Clause. I then laid out my master plan, which consisted of showing up Saturday night and waiting around to see if anything happened. He agreed to accompany me.

Saturday arrived, and I lay in bed all day, barely stirring to exercise and cook. Clay, Laura and I arrived about 11:00 and got our libations. Erin was sitting at the end of the bar conversing with some patrons. I waved to her and she waved back. We went over to one of the Atari consoles so that Clay could put to rest a theory, wide in scope, about the pending war in Iraq having something to do with Donkey Kong. We played a few rounds and sat on the couch. Laura noted that the barmaid was looking at me, making me wonder if it was perhaps the Human Belief of Acknowledgement Clause and not only the Male Belief in Acknowledgement Clause. It didn’t seem to occur to Laura that maybe she was just checking to see if that drunk greaseball who was making eyes at her last week was still stalking her or if he had left.

Laura suggested that it was time to freshen the drinks and that we should go to the bar and sit. We did this and got another round from the male bartender. This time I got water, as I judged that I had been drinking too much over the last few weeks. A discussion was started about the fact that I have no game, and all agreed on that point. Erin came by and Laura asked her “Is that a real Chia Mr. T in that box up there?” As the conversation unfolded, my eyes glazed a bit and I began to stare at the corner of the ceiling. This is a bad habit of mine that I indulge in when the conversation holds no interest for me. I often snap back and have to make up for what I missed by assuming parts of the discourse absent to my memory. When I came to myself this time, Erin was gone. In her place was the male bartender who was lifting his shirt to reveal a slightly out of shape gut and a Mr. T. tattoo on his upper right chest, complete with gold chains and feather. Even more odd than this was the fact that, by some strange set of circumstances, I had actually seen this tattoo before. After more discourse on the merits of Mr. T in the modern paradigm he walked away.

Clay leaned over to me and said in my ear, “The boyfriend reference was noted.” Actually it wasn’t.

I asked him what he meant and he said in a deliberate tone stressing each syllable, “That guy was her boyfriend.”

My eyes smiled as I rubbed my hands together. The hasty stroke oft goes astray, but this had worked out better than my fears, or my expectations. I did “try to get the girl” in my own lame way, just by showing up. Now I could stave off criticism that I’m too passive about romantic opportunity. I can remind the accuser that recently I made a desperate attempt to snare the affections of a beautiful bartenderess, but despite my constant barrage of amorous assaults she would have none of me. On the other hand I didn’t have to suffer the mental consequences of actually getting rejected or the practical consequences of having a girlfriend. My serene celibate lifestyle, filled with days of quiet and nights of peace remain intact.

I downed my water as we wrapped up our conversation and we left not too long after.

Literature