Boulevard, Page 2

  In the shop, where ceiling fans were creaking overhead stirring the cobwebs on all the bric-à-brac, he showed her his Alabama driver’s license and his library card for the Polk County Public Library. He also showed her a picture of Flora in front of the trailer on the outskirts of Pastel. “She’s my grandma.”

  “So if I find you dead in that room up there one morning, she’s who I should call?”

  The question unsettled him some, but he nodded. She wrote down Flora’s address and phone number and gave him a receipt for his five hundred dollars. That was when he learned her name was Louise Kimbro. He had expected her to be a Hendeman, because of the store window. She gave him keys and showed him which was which. “Jiggle the handle on that toilet,” she said, “or it’ll run all day. And don’t leave the lights on when you go out. And be careful you lock that balcony door.”

  He took the keys and hurried away, thinking he could reach the bus station before too late, to fetch his bag. Tomorrow he would look for a job. He had already forgotten about Louise by the time he reached the door, and she stood watching him. Something about him reminded her of Arthur. She liked Newell’s looks, his dark hair and watery green eyes. She liked his thin, pale body standing in the doorway, looking out at Barracks Street as though it were a moonscape. She liked something about him that she could never have described, something languid and lean. Back in the junk shop she listened for his footsteps on the stairs beyond the wall and slipped the rent money into an envelope and stuffed it into a filing cabinet in one of the rooms behind the junk store.

  Later, when Owen brought the delivery truck to load her Thursday deliveries, she realized what it was she had recognized. Newell had Arthur’s voice, the same gentle, drawn-out vowels, the same note of music in the speech. But the revelation was fleeting, since, along with the truck, Owen had brought his daughter, Millie, a ripe, pretty thing, and Louise never could keep her eyes off that girl.

  Newell rushed to the bus station as fast as he could, through the boiling afternoon heat, partly out of excitement at the prospect of unpacking in his new room, and partly out of a sense of panic that he had spent all the money he had saved, so quickly, just like that. He should have rented a room by the night at the Y till he found a job, that would have been more prudent, wouldn’t it? Because now he had only thirty days to find a job and earn enough money to pay the rent on time. Now he had less than a hundred dollars to his name.

  As long as he was walking with the distractions of the French Quarter, of Canal Street, around him, he could stop thinking about how poor he was, he could stop being afraid he would end up homeless on the street. He fished the key out of his pocket and opened the locker in the bus station, where several buses were idling at the gates, loading passengers for destinations everywhere a person could imagine. He had enough money left, he could take the bus home again, now, while it was safe.

  When he set the duffel on the bare mattress of his new bed, he realized with a thud that he would have to buy sheets. He had brought none. Looking around the room, he realized he would have to buy a lot of things, including nearly everything that he took for granted in a bathroom. His money was bleeding away from him, dollar by dollar. Why hadn’t he thought of this when he was packing, when he could have swiped a bar of soap from Flora, and some towels, even a set of sheets?

  He had brought his clothes and his cassette tape player with the five tapes he had managed to buy during high school. He had brought his high school diploma and his birth certificate, which Flora said he was sure to need when he got a job. The clothes fit neatly into the wardrobe, which had drawers at the bottom, with plenty of room to spare. The cassette player he put on the table beside the bed. This was the whole of his unpacking. When it was done, he sat in the chair for a while, looking at the room, feeling short of breath.

  He counted his money. A little over ninety-five dollars. He had to have soap and toothpaste, shampoo, deodorant. He had found a blanket in the bottom of the wardrobe, and it smelled pretty clean, so he figured he could make do with that for a while, since he had no idea how much sheets would cost, or pillows, or anything like that. He was lucky there was furniture in the room at all, he supposed, feeling a bit foolish to have brought so little money, to have been so naïve as to think the move would be so easy.

  The proportions of the room, the simple bed and table, chair and dresser, pleased him, however, and he could look around and know that this was where he lived now, with an address, with a lock and keys. All he had to do was find a way to pay for it.

  Spreading out the newspaper, he studied the want ads. He felt better when he saw listings for restaurant jobs and hotel room service jobs, cashiers and clerks, work he figured he could do pretty easily, if only he could convince somebody to give him a chance. He marked some of the places he wanted to apply tomorrow, after consulting the map to make sure he could find them, and since he was living near downtown he was within walking distance of nearly all the jobs he read about.

  He folded up the newspaper and counted his money again, then went downstairs. He stopped in the junk shop to ask Louise where the best place was to buy what he needed, and she told him how to find the A&P on Royal Street. He found it easily and wandered among the cramped shelves. The store was crowded, people were stepping around each other constantly, and Newell found himself caught up in the game after only a few moments. So many men, in particular, here. Young men in flannel shirts and tight jeans. In tight T-shirts with the sleeves cut away. Young men with beards, sideburns, moustaches, chest hair bristling out of their shirts. Men of all colors and sizes, sliding among the canned goods and displays of produce. Buying liquor, which shocked him. In Alabama you could not buy liquor at a grocery store like this. He had come to a new world, for sure.

  He spent more money than he meant to, nearly thirty dollars. With his bag in his arms, he walked down Royal Street, gas lamps lit at the doors of buildings, high balconies hovering above, the sidewalk uneven. The street was a wall of buildings, fences, and gates, and he had the feeling that all this was to hide what went on inside these buildings, these courtyards. Over the tops of fences he could see the backs of houses, many with smaller buildings running perpendicular to the back. These must be what were called slave quarters—he’d seen a slave quarter apartment described that way in the classifieds. Rooms where slaves had lived. Devorah, his friend from high school, might have lived in one of those rooms, in those days.

  Every stranger’s face he passed seemed mysterious in some way. By the time he reached his room again, his heart was pounding from the newness of it all, the beautiful shapes of the buildings, the uncomfortable feeling when he looked at the slave rooms, contrasted with the graceful twists of wrought iron, the Spanish moss draped over a brick wall, the glimpse of an interior garden, a fountain singing behind a closed wooden gate. A city full of everything, bad and good. He had done the right thing by coming here, he was sure of it, no matter how risky. Even if he failed, even if he ran out of money and had to go home, he was right to try.

  He had bought all the soaps and shampoos he needed, a washcloth, a can opener, plastic spoons, some cans of soup. He could eat the soup cold, he figured, three cans a day, and that would have to keep him alive until he found a job. Tonight he began with a can of cold chicken noodle, opening the can and drinking the broth, spooning the noodles into his mouth. The noodles had a satisfying texture, he ate greedily, and he knew as soon as he had eaten that the three cans of soup a day would never feel like enough. But he had less than seventy dollars now, and he had to stretch the money as far as he could.

  He studied the ads in the newspaper for a while, and stepped onto his balcony. Barracks Street was so close to Decatur it was considered by many people to be a dangerous part of the Quarter, and Newell may have felt something of that character as he stood on the balcony. Close enough to the waterfront he could smell it, dank and dusky. He stood at the iron railing for a long time, one foot in the lower rung, leaning out, watching. The empty sh
op on the corner attracted some young men to stand under the awning, and cars stopped there, and one or another of the young men slid into the cars and rode away. This happened intermittently as he stood there, till the corner emptied. The figures moved with mysterious knowledge—he could only study them and wonder. More young boys came, and the same thing happened. After a while the corner emptied, and nobody came, and he went inside.

  His watch said after eleven. He had meant to call Flora, but by now she would be asleep, with sheets of toilet paper wrapped around her hairdo. So he took off his clothes, cleared the newspaper off the bed, and standing on the balcony, shook out the blanket, in the night in his underwear, certain somehow that no one was watching, that it hardly mattered whether anyone saw, then returned to the room and locked the balcony door. He lay on the bare mattress with his folded jeans for a pillow, the scratchy blanket on his skin, windows open, breeze moving through the room. He was glad for the ceiling fan. But he would have to buy curtains for the windows. He would have to buy a hot plate and some pots and pans.

  He slept, exhausted by the day and the bus ride, the overnight journey; all night he dreamed he was on the bus again, riding along the highway with the Gulf of Mexico sliding by the window, in and out of sight. Crossing wide spans of water, the bus gliding as if on a cushion of air. All night he dreamed he was still traveling to the city, still arriving. But he was already lying in a room of his own, already in his own bed. When he woke up and realized where he was, he felt afraid and glad all over again.

  A can of cold chicken rice soup for breakfast, and water from the tap. He would have to buy a glass—he should have thought of that the night before. But he would surely pass the A&P again today. Or find one in the junk store downstairs. He dressed in his best Sunday pants, a dark brown polyester that never showed the slightest wrinkle, dark blue socks, shiny black shoes, and a white shirt with long sleeves. At the mirror in the bathroom he stopped to reflect that he was pretty good looking, with his hair combed the right way. He flossed his teeth and brushed them till they shone. He wished he had some cologne to make himself smell good, but at home he had always used Jesse’s big bottle of Brut. He strapped on his watch.

  First he called Flora, collect, from a pay phone inside a grocery store. She accepted the charges with resignation and said, “Good lord, Newell, I was about worried to death, I just knew somebody had drug you off some-wheres.”

  “I’m sorry, I just was reading the want ads last night and I forgot to call. I had to find a phone. They’re not on the street where you can see them.”

  “New Orleans is a different kind of a place.” Flora spoke as though she ought to know.

  “I like it. I’m out looking for a job this morning. Wish me luck.”

  “I wished you’d come on home is what I wish.”

  “It’ll be all right, I got plenty of money left. I got me a nice room. It’s not on Bourbon Street, where I wanted it, but it’s close. It’s on Barracks.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  Silence for a moment. “Well, I don’t want to run up your bill.”

  “You better not,” she agreed.

  “I’ll call you again when I get a job. When I get a phone.”

  They said the other things they were accustomed to say, that he was her little squirt and she loved him, and he wished she would stop calling him a squirt, but that was all it was, she said, that was all that made him in the first place.

  He applied to a lot of restaurants in the French Quarter, including Brennan’s, the Court of Two Sisters, the Magic Pan, the Coffee Pot, Café Sazerac, and he applied at bars like Pat O’Brien’s, the Oyster Bar, and even Preservation Hall, which was apparently famous for something he didn’t even know about, jazz. Some of the places he could tell right away he would never be hired, like the Café Sazerac, where all the waiters were a lot older than Newell; others, like Pat O’Brien’s, hardly seemed like the kind of place he had come to New Orleans to find. But he had already decided he would take anything that was offered. He applied at the downtown hotels to work in room service, even applied at a place that was still under construction and couldn’t hire anybody before the first months of 1979, almost a year away. He applied at a couple of banks to be a cashier, though he could tell he was not the right kind of person to get that kind of job—he was dressed the wrong way, he had the wrong air about him. More restaurants along Canal and Carondelet and up St. Charles, where the streetcars ran, places that catered to the downtown lunch crowd. In every place it was a plus that he had an address but a minus that he had no telephone. He would call them himself, he said, or come by again.

  But he found he sparked more interest in the restaurants in the lower Quarter, a place called Circle K on Dauphine and Dumaine, and two places on the other side of Esplanade, the White Biscuit and Betty’s Kitchen. These restaurants were staffed by men his own age with managers not much older, and the customers were mostly men as well. In these restaurants, the fact that he as yet had no telephone hardly seemed as much of a hurdle.

  This was Friday, his second day in New Orleans, but by the end of it he had walked the streets from Poydras to Frenchmen, and he had introduced himself to the managers of nearly a dozen restaurants. So he went home in the heat of the afternoon, lay across the bare mattress and rested.

  He fell asleep without intending to, and woke near dark, a breeze stirring through the open door to the balcony. He walked to the door, smoothing down his hair and straightening his shirt—the smell of the river again, heavier in the afternoon heat, but no boys on the corner today.

  Now he could see that he was not the only one living on the street; a number of the second- and third-floor balconies showed signs of habitation, including porch furniture and potted plants, hanging baskets made of twisted twine. He studied the balconies up and down his block for a while, the day darkening, the sky bloody red.

  He ate a can of soup and walked to the riverfront, straight up Decatur among what seemed to be abandoned warehouses, till he came to some stores that were open but very dark, machine shops, maybe, or garages, and then to retail places, a Christmas store, tourist shops that featured something called pralines and boxes of beignet mix. He came to Jackson Square and wandered among the tourists with their cameras and souvenirs. At the end of the square the gray cathedral loomed over the plaza, where portrait painters were still working, switching on electric lamps, determined to paint as long as the tourists were willing to sit and pay. Newell idled in this setting, reading the historical plaques on the buildings, learning about the Cabildo, the Spanish colonial administration, the Pontalba buildings, soaking up breezes that carried the dank smell of the river. Beneath all the other sounds came the lowing of ships’ horns, cargo carriers moving upriver to the container docks. Memorabilia shops for the tourists and supply shops for the artists crowded the square around the church. Newell stood in the shadow of the tall tower, watching pigeons chasing one another on the stones of the square, squabbling over bits of hot dog and bread. On the plaza stood a hot dog vendor behind a stand shaped like a big hot dog on wheels, and the man behind the hot dog stood as tall as Newell but at least as wide as the wiener truck, a huge round man with his chin sunken deep into a waddle of fat, and bunches of fat hanging over his belt and along the sides of his trousers. He had a forlorn, weary expression, standing with his meat fork in hand, ready to spear a wiener for anyone who might feel the need.

  At the door of the church sat men and women who were begging for money from the people going in and out of the church. He walked among them and looked at them closely, their gray clothes, their filthy skins, their voices cracked as they asked him for money. He ignored them except for looking at them, but he could hardly tear his eyes away from their misery, since he was nervous that he might end up this way himself, homeless, as he assumed these people were, living in the dirt of the street.

  Others watched him, though he was scarcely aware that anyone noticed him at all: others watched him standing at the edge of
the crowd of tourists on the square, in his awkward clothes, his hair combed back from his face, so fresh from the country. He was new in town, and there were always people to notice that, to watch him avidly as he stood beside the gate to the park. A look of yearning about him, palpable to anyone who cared to notice.

  Instead of heading home at once he walked up Bourbon Street and back, and the vitality of the French Quarter at night overawed him; he could feel the whole constellation of its life around him, the layers of streets and cars and people, the ghosts of skyscrapers hovering in the shadowy sky. The long street engulfed him like a dream. He passed along the strip bars, the music bars, the country bars, the jazz bars, the piano bars, the ragtime bars; he stopped at a full-size picture of Chris Owens at her own show bar and wondered what it would be like to be a beautiful big-breasted woman like her, to have raven hair that tumbled and rippled down your back, to be so popular that you could have your own nightclub. He ambled along the street, which was closed to cars except at the corners, where traffic crossed on the cross streets. He marveled at the balconies of the hotels, the apartments draped with Boston ferns, clematis, confederate jasmine, ivory, warm lights spilling down through the ironwork. He stopped to smell the egg rolls at the Takee-Outee, wished he dared spend the one dollar seventy-five cents required, because the smell made his mouth water, but he walked away from the rows of shish kebabs and the egg rolls and the skewers of fried shrimp, the grease glistening under the lights. He stood in the doorway of an arcade where teenage boys were playing pinball or some of the new video games, with quarter after quarter to slide in the machines, and the boys all different shades of brown hunched over their games, their buttocks clenching and unclenching with each play.

  He stood on the curb outside and looked first one way, then the other, up and down Bourbon Street, a riot of bobbing heads and color, voices rising and horns blowing, scratches of music, now and then some single voice rising distinctly above the rest, like the hawker in the doorway at the strip club where the female impersonators were strutting up and down the stage behind him, visible through the doorway as they passed along the runway, bright and colorful: a man who was pretending to be a woman and making money for it, a clear sign that the world was larger than anything Newell could ever have learned about in Pastel.