Bluebottle (3 page)

language.

'sawright

I say

'sawright

wit me

look like

yeh, we gon be here

a taste.

I think that may have been the first time I thought about all these different languages we use. Danny Barker used to talk
about that, how with this group of musicians he'd talk one way, that way with another one, uptown and downtown talk, and still
he'd have this private language he'd use at home, among friends. We all do that. To survive, our forebears learned dissimulation
and mimickry, learned never to say what they truly thought. They knew they were gon be here a taste. That same masking remains
in many of us, in their children's blood, a slow poison. So many of us no longer know who, or what, we are.

2

H
er hair had come out of a botde. So had courage, gait and gestures. But somehow it was all of a piece; it worked.

"Hope you don't mind if I tell you you're a good-looking man," she said as she sat down beside me. She'd successfully crossed
troubled seas between her seat at the bar and my table, listing but slighdy starboard. Now here was this new challenge: a
fair distance (as my father would have said) from up there to down here. Heroically she made it.

Matter of fact, I didn't mind at all. A lot of my own life was coming out of a bottle those days. This white woman made her
hobby drinking bad whiskey and picking up bad company in cheap bars, what business was it of mine. Lord knows I'd fished often
enough in
her
pond.

Never question what Providence spills in your lap.

She wanted Scotch and got it. Sat swirling it around in her glass the way stone drinkers do that first hit or two, savoring
color, body, bouquet, legs, letting those first sips roll across the back of her tongue, equal parts anticipation and relief.
Before long she'd be slamming it back. Not tasting it at all, just letting it take her where she needed to be. Before long,
too, her conversation would start to narrow, go round and round in circles like someone lost in the woods. I knew. But for
the time being she lay warm and safe in the bosom of that wonderland alcohol grants its acolytes, a zone where, for a short
time at least, everything fell back into place, everything made some kind of sense.

When I was a kid my mom would drape these pinned-together cutout paper patterns for clothes she was sewing us over the kitchen
table. She only did that when I was very young and soon gave it up—just as she gave up most everything else. But I loved sitting
there looking at those paterns: some kind of thin, opaque paper you saw nowhere else, pins holding it together, half on the
table and half off. Destined soon for the trash; but briefly it pulled one small part of the world together, gave it rare
form.

Dana, she said, shaking hands rather more fiercely than the situation called for. A journalist. Wrote a column for one of
the local papers. Maybe I'd even seen it. Society stuff mostly, who was seen where wearing what in the company of whom and
where they'd all gone to school, leaning on connections an uptown family, a couple of society marriages and her Newcomb degree
gave her. But now and again, hanging out in bars like this one or dredging her way through the Quarter, The Seven Seas, Lafitte's,
La Casa, she'd get on to something hard.

Hard
news,
she meant.

I remember—or imagine—or I dreamed—her leaning across the table, breasts pushing up towards her blouse's undone top button
as they came to rest on the tabletop.

You understand, Lewis?

Guess I did.

But I had to wonder how provisional
all
our understanding is, finally. Look, I told her: I'm a black man, still young. You're a white woman, what, halfway along in
life? We've come up in different worlds. Hell, we
exist
in different worlds. Always will. You think there's some secret passage behind the bookcase like in old movies, lets us get
from one to the other?

Felt for a moment like I was back at UNO, one of those embarrassingly intense late-night sessions debating such topics as
the problem of evil, whether to order pizza or burgers, and whether black folks had souls.

'What I think there are," she said, "are doors. We only have to choose to—" Her hand made the gesture of reaching out to push
a door open, hesitated, then fell on mine.

"In and out of lots of doors, are you, then?"

She nodded. "Had a few slammed behind me, too."

"Bet you have."

Then—seemingly without transition—we were talking about King Lear.

I remember throwing back a drink and lowering the glass to shout out (voice ratcheting up along the whole of the line, glass
thumping down on the final word; I'd suddenly become Sir Lewis Gielgud):

And my poor fool is HANGED?!

For all I know, I may have done the Canterbury prologue as well. Or gone on at untowards, unoccasioned length about Pushkin's
black grandfather.

Shortly thereafter we found ourselves on the street bearing aloft the opinion that we could do with food.

Streedights were shelled in rainbow. Buses heaved their way up out of the fog like mythical, half-remembered beasts and fell
back into it. Winds blew in across Lake Pontchartrain, bearing the infant Change in their arms.

When I turned to ask what she'd like, to eat, I meant,
she
came into
my
arms.

Then it got really strange.

At some level I'd known all along, I think, that I was dreaming, but till this point the dreams had clung tenuously enough
to reality that I could elect not to question, simply to go along. Now those bonds were forfeited and I was apart, at once
in
the dream and above it looking on.

Had I ridden my bicycle here? Apparendy so. And left it outside the bar, where now someone briefly squats down to remove the
rear wheel and tucks it beneath his arm as though this were his usual morning baguette, striding away untroubled. I follow
him into a nearby art gallery where he's about to hang it around the neck of a bronze ostrich and demand its return. He shrugs
and hands it over: no big thing.

But now the bicycle wheel's become a reel of film, and in the passover it's come partially unwound. Thumb jammed at the center,
fingers dialing, I start rewinding. Images click against my wrists.

"Guess you must show that to your wife, get her primed and wet, huh?" the bearded man behind the counter says. "Have to tell
you: I've handled my share of erotica through here over the years. But
that
damn near made
me
wet."

When I grope for bus fare back out on the street, film tucked beneath my arm the same way he'd carried it, I drop the reel.
It hits the pavement and begins smoking. Burns its way through like a cattle brand, making a kind of patterned manhole. I
lean over and look. There's a whole subterranean city below. Streets, buildings, cars. Someone walking by down there looks
up at me. Our eyes meet.

I awake lying on the floor, eye to eye with Dana, who's just stepped into view above me, naked except for the press pass alligator-clipped
to one nipple. Swampy, mothball smell off her body.

'You're ready, aren't you, Lewis?" Definitely I seem to be ready. She lowers herself onto me. "News at six?
Good
news for a change?" Body warm as a bath. Completes itself with my small emendation. Press pass swinging gaily back and forth
as she moves above. "Don't forget me, Lew." Moving ever faster as a long moan escapes her. "Whatever happens, don't forget
me." She throws her head back in abandon. When she brings it forwards again, her head has become a grinning skull.

"Jesus!"

I started awake—really awake thistime—heartpounding, fingernails pushed hard into palms. Probably crescents of bright blood
there.

"Bad dreams, my boy?" Standing by the window, from the sound of it.

I heard the tab rip from a beer can, which cinched it. I was getting pretty good at this. Think of men in old movies sitting
faithfully before their sonar screens listening to blips.

"My boy, your black ass," I said. "Been reading those damn British novels again, haven't you. Thought you told me you were
done with those."

"Yeah. But sometimes what we're done with isn't done with us, you know?"

Time rolled itself millimeters thinner.

"You're a Trollope, Slaughter. A slut, just like Molly Bloom. I ever tell you that?"

"As well you as another."

"Good to see you, Hosie—in a manner of speaking. Thanks for coming."

"How you doing, boy."

'There you go with that boy shit again."

"What can I say? Three generations—"

"—out of slavery. I've read Himes too, remember?"

He pulled the tab on another beer and held it out to me. I reached and found it. Always had his shoulder bag with him those
days. Never far from a corner store here in the civilized swamp.

"I most assuredly do remember," Hosie said. "And I'm here to tell you I can groove on that. Know where you're comingfrom.
I hear you."

Once he'd written an entire column on local government in current catchwords and cliches, another time a whole essay in song
tides. Hung out in cafes and bus stations and bars just to listen to people talk, then he'd go home afterwards and write it
all down. I often wonder what Hosie would have thought if he'd lived into the rap era. He'd have loved hip-hop's special language—
flavor, down
on, up for.

'What time of day you think it is, anyway?" he said. Man never did have any sense of time. Forever ringing doorbells at three
in the morning only to say, authentically surprised and apologetic: Hey, I wake you up? I could hear his hand rubbing at the
window.

"Everything gray out there. Tops of buildings look the same as sky."

He downed most of the rest of his beer at a gulp and belched magnificently.

"Raining," I said.

And hard, from the sound of it. Water would be rising inch by inch towards midtown porches, trash at curbside all over the
city levitating, the Corps of Engineers' clever pumps chugging away at their efforts to push water out of the city and back
up to sea level.

"Weather will continue bad, yes. More calamities, death, despair. Not the slightest inclination of a change anywhere. No escape.
The weather will not change."

"Henry Miller."

Very good, sir. Your prize."

He set another beer, cracked open, on the nightstand. Three there now in a perfect row. I'd counted them the way movie cowboys
count expended bullets.

"You love them so much, Lew. Literature, the language itself."

"You taught me that, Hosie, a lot of it."

"I did, didn't I? I did." He was quiet a moment. "And I wish like hell they'd never let you down. Everything does, you know,
sooner or later."

No answer to that. I didn't try. Rain bucketed down outside. Somewhere a phone rang unanswered; stopped; started up again.

"You've all been taking turns, standing watch," I said.

"Guess we have at that."

"Why?"

He didn't answer, but walked back to the window. I tried to imagine, to summon up within myself, what he was seeing out there.
Pinpricks of stars. Diminutive fires of the planet. Everything, as he said, gray. As though we were in some reverse aquarium,
a cube of air complete with its own strange creatures, with water all around.

I never found out exacdy what it was that had hurt my friend so—something working in him a long time, that finally found purchase.
In future years I'd come to recognize similar things scrabbling for footholds within myself. They were already there, of course,
even then. Sometimes at night I heard them breathing.

"We care about you, Lew. That's not enough?"

Guess it would have to be.

"I've got a story to write," Hosie said, and left.

DAYS MARCHED IN and out much as Hosie had, appearing unannounced, just as suddenly gone, banners bright or damp. Elsewhere
in the world, wars were declared or fought undeclared, sons left home, workers tore open fingers and drove steel rods into
their eyes, history smoothed its skirt in place over lap and legs. LaVerne and Hosie brought me tapes: T. S. Eliot, Yeats
and Dylan Thomas reading their own work, a five-cassette
Dead Souls,
Francois Villon.

Two times a day someone appeared, generally an intern or resident, infrequently a nurse, to clean and dress wounds in chest
and thigh. Med school professors swept through with students like so many gulping pilot fish in their wake. Meals arrived
on covered trays, medications came, phlebotomists entered apologetically, social workers asked about diings that were none
of their business and went away when I made no response.

LaVerne, Don and Hosie were there frequently, from time to time others: Sam Brown from SeCure Corps, Frankie DeNoux, Bonnie
Bider, Achilles Boudleaux. Doo-Wop even stopped by one morning on his rounds. Things awful slow out there, Captain, he told
me.