Paradox Road

I was sitting on the couch, naked and reading Turganev, beads of sweat dripping from my chin down onto the yellow pages. It seemed that with each passing minute the heat became more and unbearable. Louisiana summers weren’t no joke. I tried to do my best in ignoring this fact, and undertook the illusion that if I could somehow escape into the dinner table conversations of Russian intellects, my life might suddenly make a change for the better.

Carol lay stomach down on the sheet-less bed with a magazine in front of her. She wore a blue slip hiked up to the bottom of her ass, and a badly stretched white tank top, loosely displacing each of her breasts out of the shirt.

Held by two screws, and dangling like the root of a loose tooth, the ceiling fan blew gusts of hot air across my face. Armies of flies lay dead; belly up; buzz-less; melting into the dust-caked carpet. Empty cigarette cartons were strewn across the room. A half pint of whiskey stood at the edge of the couch. I took a sip. It was room temperature. I could feel blue flames dancing on the back of my tongue. I spit the whiskey out on the floor. Steam shot up to the ceiling like an exploding gieser. Just a hallucination. Caused by dehydration. Yes, that was the logical explanation for it.

Here we were in a dirty rooming house in New Orleans, Thursday night, and the weekly rent due the following morning with five dollars to our names. Hastily, I found myself raising an imaginary fist into the air; cursing the South, money, unemployment, God, humanity, and anything else I could foolishly label as the cause for our unrighteous suffering. I conveniently blocked out the fact that we had partied in nearly every bar in the French Quarter for the past three weeks, oblivious to any thoughts of work or income.

Catching myself in between thought, I came to the realization that it was too late to be thinking like this. I was only wasting my time. I opened the book and continued reading about nihilists rambling page after page.

A couple of minutes later I noticed what had been a regular occurrence since we first arrived in New Orleans; a roach the size of my palm was casually making his way from one side of the room to the other.

Grotesque as these insects were, I was willing to let them be. After a week I’d learned that no matter how many you killed, there would always be a second regiment marching full steam ahead, pulling up the ranks. True soldiers. Hell, they even roamed around the homes of the rich. Carol, on the other hand, was determined to have every last roach in New Orleans brutally murdered. She considered them to be vile, ghastly. She wanted them all dead. In a desperate hope that the roach might go unnoticed, I pretended to read.

“Ahh! Oh my God! Look at that thing! Get him! Kill him! Get him! No, he’s getting away!”

Carol stood straight up on the bed screaming. The cooking magazine flailed around in her left hand while her right index finger hysterically pointed in the direction of the roach. She looked like an army scout that had just spotted a spy crossing into foreign territory.

“Oh, come on, let the poor guy go,” I said calmly.

“Let him go? Let him go? What are you crazy! Get that bastard! Get him!”

If I didn’t kill the roach I was only setting myself up for an unnecessary futile argument. Plus I was mostly to blame for this mess we were win. It was my idea to come down here in the first place. I put the book to the side and grabbed one of my tennis shoes. I proceeded to get down on the carpet on all fours like a bloodthirsty predator. I thought about taking the shoe to myself and calling it good.

Creeping up behind the roach, I raised my arm back behind my head – with an uncanny similarity to those twisted evangelists one sometimes comes across alone in late-night hours of TV channel changing – and with what little strength I had, brought down upon him my non-existent vengeance. I lifted the shoe. Unscathed, the roach darted towards the bed.

“It’s sill alive!” screamed Carol.

“I know!” I yelled back.

Like a hyperactive child yet to learn the world on two legs, I chased after the roach and slammed the shoe down again. Despite missing half of its body parts, the roach made a desperate attempt for the dresser. With the last hit I took all the life out of him. You had to admire one’s tenacity for survival.

Carol, now sitting on the bed with her legs crossed Indian style, hardly resembled the hysterical woman I’d just had to deal with. Her eyes had that glassy look of tranquility, and a partial smile was emanating from her thin lips.

“Baby, you got him. I’m sorry you had to do that. You know much I hate those things,” she said.

“Sure, no problem,” I said, nearly out of breath, stretched out on the floor.

For what seemed like an hour, but was probably only a few minutes, we sat alongside one another on the bed. We said nothing and stared straight ahead in a sad state of lost-eyed wonderment. Restless thoughts bounced back and forth in my brain. I found myself questioning how, in a matter of three weeks, after moving from Baltimore with the excited hopes of starting over, we’d managed to blow all of our money and couldn’t find any work. We were down to saltine crackers and a jar of peanut butter for lunch and dinner.

Carol placed her hand in mine. All the life was now gone from her eyes. The bright green that surrounded her pupils was fading away. It hurt me just to look her in the face.

Breaking the uncomfortable silence, Carol asked me, “What are we going to do?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“No, seriously, we don’t have anything. How the hell are we going to eat?”

“Maybe one of us will find a job tomorrow.”

“We haven’t found a job in three weeks. We’re not going to find one tomorrow. I don’t even want a job now. I hate it here. I hate it”

“Yeah, but where are we going to go? We’ve got nothing.”

As if she was about to burst into some unwanted form of hysteria, Carol said, “Oh God, I don’t want to be homeless. We’ll be stuck here.”

“Maybe you can call your mom, have her wire out some money.”

“What about your parents.”

“I can’t.”

“Well, I can’t either.”

“I know, I know.”

The conversation made an abrupt halt, and suddenly I found myself ready to run out the door. I couldn’t cope with the reality of the situation. I’d been wandering aimless around for quite some time, town to town, job to job. I’d come to the realization that I’d probably never settle down. But then I met Carol. We’d been together for three months now. I’d somehow convinced her to move down to New Orleans with me. I told her this was the city where wild things happened. I told her about the magic of the Big Easy, despite the fact that I’d never even been there. All I had to go on was the books I’d read. But now, finally sober, I felt a need to be responsible, to find ourselves a way out of this mess. Instead, I grabbed a hold of her hand, dragged her outside, and walked towards the Mississippi River. I convinced her that what was needed now was some fresh air and a place where we could think clearly.

As we walked down Esplanade Ave. and past the million dollar mansions on the border of the French Quarter I looked into the immaculate living rooms with a sense of disdain. The only word I could think of was opulence. I wondered if those people that lived there had actually worked to buy those homes or if they had been passed down by their parents. Were they just the offspring of all the old plantation owners that ruled so much of the south? What difference did it make? Here we were, struggling to find some kind of sense in life, and ten feet away, comfortably at the dinner table and living room couch, sat the representation of what I thought to be, distorted success. These people didn’t have a clue as to how us on the other side of the street lived, nor did they care to. I found myself filled with a somewhat violent and jealous anger.

Finding a bench along the river, I wearily put my head on Carol’s lap. What would Twain do? I let my eyes drown in the sight of the small ripples in the water and the reflection of a half moon.

Resting her fingers on the top of my head, Carol asked me, “Do you think we’ll ever be happy?”

I stared out at the water and watched the ferry cross the river over to Algiers. I also thought this is not a good sign when the girl you’ve been with for three months is asking this kind of question. I don’t know if it was the moon or the Turganev, but I started to talk nonsense.

“I don’t think you’re ever just completely happy. I mean overall demeanor. It’s just more of something that comes and goes. You don’t really have any control of when it’s going to hit you or how long it’s going to last.”

“I mean I love you, but it seems like I always feel sad. I didn’t like Baltimore. I don’t like it here. I’m starting to think wherever I go I still won’t be happy. I feel like the more I’m around people I can’t stand them. Why do they have to be so stupid?”

“I don’t’ know baby. Maybe we should find a cabin in the mountains. I’ll hunt rabbits, go fishing naked, and read Thoreau and Whitman. You can cook deer meet over a blazing fire. We’ll brew our own beer, sit on the roof every night, get blind drunk, and scream at the unforgiving moon.”

We sat silent for a couple seconds and then joined in an uncontrollable fit of laughter. It was a strange sounding laughter. The kind of laughter that seems to have stayed idle for countless years, nestling in the gut of one’s stomach in solidarity. Bottled, pressurized, waiting for one good, hard, unleashing twist of the hand. All of my bodily functions went numb and I fell to the ground. I wiggled feverishly. Lying on the cement with my legs and arms in the air, I looked like an old dog scratching its flea-infested back.

Finally the laughter died and that all too familiar silence took a hold of us. The depressing thoughts of just seconds before came back to me. At that moment I was overrun with the desire to somehow – with a magic wand I suppose – reverse the earth, planets and cosmos into a chaotic orbit; back to the time of my birth, or just prior to. All of these actions would cause the path of my life to be altered. After a few seconds of closed eyes and puerile meditation, nothing had changed.

I took Carol’s hand and walked back to the room. We stopped at a convenience store and bought a couple of sodas and a pig tongue bringing us down to two dollars and change.

When we got back to the room Carol headed over to the bed, undressed herself down to her slip, and put her head on the pillow. I sat in my regular spot on the couch with my hands in my hair, and stared at the carpet.

Seconds later, Carol walked back and forth across the room. Her nose was raised and a curious expression painted her face. She smelled something burning. I was unable to smell anything besides the distinct malodor of our room. I dismissed it as someone who might have burned some food in the kitchen on the second floor. Either that or someone was hitting the crack pipe hard.

Nearly everyone in our building was using crack. There were the regular users and then the recreational, weekend types. It didn’t bother me. I just didn’t want any part in it. Most places I’d stayed in before had their share of drug users, but everyone in the Treme seemed to be hooked on crack.

Now it was a little after midnight. Soon the landlord would be banging on the door for money we didn’t have. I asked Carol if she wanted to go for another walk, but she declined.

I was just about to put on my shoes and a tee shirt when Carol leaped violently out of bed. She said something about seeing a flame from above shoot down on to the street. We ran out the front door and around the house. We looked up at the room above ours, and there it was.

On the balcony a man was wrestling with a mattress half engulfed in flames. The room lit up like yellow madness behind him. Carol and I stood there, stoically caught in a brief moment of shock. The whites of Carol’s eyes filled with flames. The man yelled into the night, “Somebody help me! Help me dammit!”

Carol rushed over to a payphone and dialed 911. I didn’t have any words of wisdom to the man on the balcony so I ran back into the house and pounded on the doors of the other two rooms on the first floor. I shouted, “Fire! Fire!” I stood at the bottom of the staircase and yelled as loud as I could to the people upstairs. My neighbors leisurely walked down the stairs. Most of their eyes were half-open and bloodshot. As each one came down, they said, thinking this was some kind of surprise party, “Eww, it’s a fire drill, a fire drill!”

“No!” I screamed back. “This place is burning down!”

I ran outside with the other roommates and looked up at the second floor. The man with the mattress was gone, the room all flames. I felt the powerful heat of the fire on my cheeks. Windows shattered. Pieces of wood flew out into the street. A luminous torrent of red and yellow flames shot up in the air. The thick black smoke devoured the night. All of us stood there like horrified spectators.

I thought everyone had made it out of the house safely, but suddenly, my attention was drawn by the blood-curdling scream of the woman next to me; “Oh shit!”

Trapped in the last room on the second floor was a quiet older man I’d often seen sitting on the front porch. I’d say he was close to eighty and senile. Every time I walked by him I thought how horrible it must have been to be that old and to have to live in this kind of dump. Faintly, I could see him looking out the window at the flames. The fire blocked the staircase. The only way to escape would be to make the twenty-foot leap.

The old man opened his door to find ten-foot flames no more than a few feet away from his room. He looked confused, still half asleep. Everyone yelled for him to jump off the balcony. He stood there looking down for a couple seconds.

“Jesus Christ! Jump man! Jump!” the frantic crowd yelled.

He didn’t move. His face told you all there was to know. He realized this was the end of the road. All over. Not much you gonna’ do. He walked back into his room and closed the door. In my belief, he lay gently down on his bed, inhaled a big gulp of smoke, and closed his eyes. Maybe death was easy for him.

Woman screamed. Two men next to me pelted the old man’s door with rocks. Carol turned her back to the fire and covered her eyes. I watched it all like it was a surreal movie playing before me in slow motion; the flames shooting into the air, the stupefacted look in everyone’s eyes, the mouth’s wide open like dead fish on ice at a Saturday market, the people running in circles like headless turkeys. It was chaos at midnight and as I stood there expressionless, I consigned my emotions by violently pulling on my hair. The room went up in flames. We stood there like frozen statues. The stars went dim. The moon turned Halloween orange. The cosmos fell off the merry-go-round. Behind the curtain the sun let out a reverberating laugh. Purple flames. The whole spectrum. Just darkness. It was all fucked up.

You could hear the sirens in the darkness. When the fire trucks arrived three rooms were destroyed. The fire took on a schizophrenic life of its own, switching back to the other side of the house. The whole neighborhood was out in the street. Soon complaints began to arise about ruined stereo equipment and furniture being destroyed. These same people just moments earlier were crying, “That poor old man. Stuck up there. All alone.”

Struggling to find some kind explanation for all of this, I slumped against a wall and cried. I just couldn’t control it.

There was a group of us standing out in the street, helpless and not knowing really what to do. I noticed a woman that looked completely out of place for this neighborhood talking to various people. Countless layers of makeup caked her face, giving it an appearance of plasticity. I realized that she was a reporter from one of the local stations. She would place her hand on someone’s shoulder and say, “Yes, I’m sorry this happened. I know how you feel. Yes I understand you don’t feel like talking about it, but did you know the man? But I was just wondering if I could have a little word with you on camera.” I knew she was just doing her job, but I had a great feeling of disdain for her right then. A few of the crack heads liked the attention and obliged. The others stared at her coldly and kept quiet. The reporter made her way over to me. She wanted me to tell her what I knew. I said nothing.

At this time the cameraman set his camera up off to the side. He was determined to focus in on the group in an attempt to capture the morbid and sorrowful look on each of our faces; that if he angled the camera just right, he might find his award winning work at the beginning of the morning news. For whatever reason, I was set on doing all I could from allowing this to happen. I unbuttoned my shirt, placed my hands on my hips, and fully exposed my pale-skinned beer belly. I proudly displayed the cigarette burns that marked my stomach from previous nights of drunken boredom. The cameraman gave me a dirty look, covered the lens, and turned the camera off.


Hours later the sun made its way into the strange and humid morning sky. The smell of smoke and ash was everywhere.

Late that morning Carol and I were allowed to go back into what was left of the house. As we walked through the downstairs hallway a light layer of smoke visibly floated beneath the ceiling. We opened the door to our room. Inside it resembled a southern swamp. Black, murky water a couple inches deep flooded the floor. Ash, wood, and drywall were scattered across the room. The few things we owned were somewhere beneath the rubbish. I attempted to lift a large slab of drywall covering my clothes, but painfully watched it dissolve into a milky substance and fall back to the floor. It was hard to believe this was the same room that just hours before had harbored our ruminations of failure and disgust.

All I wanted were my books. I’d given up on the idea of the typewriter still functioning. Carol wanted her jewelry that had been given to her by her grandmother. We found both of our wallets under a piece of wood. I was determined to cover one book in particular. Saroyan’s Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze. Scraps of wood and wall flew every which way. “Come on Willie, where the hell are you. Ah, not Willie!” I could feel the smoke melting into the pores of my skin. The stinging in my eyes became unbearable. I don’t know how firemen do it. I gave into the fact that finding Saroyan was not only hopeless, but quite idiotic. I’d tortured Carol enough. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

We gathered what we could into a trash bag. At the time of the fire all Carol had on was the tank top and a slip. I had no shirt and a pair of shorts that had a rip going all the way up to the waist. A couple kind souls from across the street donated some of their clothes to us. Carol was given a red and yellow flowered muumuu dress fit for a 250 lb woman. I was given a flannel, knee-high stockings, and a pair of battered, paint-stained penny-loafers. We looked like two deranged clowns that had escaped from the local mental ward.

We were given a voucher for two nights by Red Cross in a slum motel across town in the 9th ward. Shortly after boarding the bus an older woman stared at us, completely baffled at our appearance. I couldn’t help but say something. I thought if I didn’t, this poor woman’s going to live a life of quandary, all of it tracing back to that one Friday bus ride. I told her the place we were staying at had just burned down. These were the only clothes we had. Suddenly her perplexed face transformed – all in the drop of the eyebrows – to that of sympathy. The woman said, with a bobbing up and down of the head that made me think of a jack-in-the-box, “Oh, I saw that on the news this morning.”

Our voucher was for two nights, but we had no plans of staying more than one night. Carol made a phone call to her mother in California and I left a very distraught message on my father’s answering machine. We had enough money wired out to cover two Greyhound tickets to Northern California.

So, with our trash bags in hand, we embarked on a sixty-hour bus ride west. Through this may sound like a case of extreme paranoia, we thought if we stayed in New Orleans any longer, a hurricane would strike, pick us up off the ground, and with its tumultuous tongue, spit us in the trajectory of the Gulf of Mexico. Years later I would watch this unfold on television as I sat in my house in Los Angeles, a different woman at my side, old memories and tears in my eyes.

Shortly after we boarded the bus Carol was fast asleep. She looked peaceful and exhausted. I half-consciously stared out at the window as the bus crossed through western Louisiana and into the mundane vastness of Texas that seemed to stretch incessantly beyond the horizon.

I tried to put some order to my thoughts, some kind of logic. Sobering up was a bitch. It killed the illusion that you like to believe is your life and forced you to really look at things. I’d seen most of my friends go on into career jobs, they were all financially stable, most of them married, and here I was still living life on a whim. I thought it was romantic, and truth be told, it really could be, but like anything, there could be dire consequences. It was one thing to do the crazy writer thing, but I felt like I sort of had to get my shit together; or something close to whatever that meant. If I didn’t Carol was going to leave me.

By the time we got to San Francisco Carol and I were completely out of our minds. Sleep-deprived, traumatized, broke, we wrapped towels on each of our heads in the fashion of Hindus and yelled to imaginary people we saw running alongside the road out the window. Our laughter filled the entire bus. We kissed. We hugged. We felt each other up underneath the blanket we placed on our laps and passed out on each other.

I didn’t really know what the hell to expect. Maybe we’d make it. Maybe we wouldn’t. What was done was done. Onward and upward, as they say.

As the cab pulled up to the ranch home outside of Petaluma Carol said, “Ah, we’re home.”

“Yeah, home,” I said.