Notes From The South: No. 2

At the end of my first week in New Orleans, my new confidant took me to a bar at one of the ritzier hotels down on the edges of The Quarter. The bartender recognised her from a private show they had both been to the week before, at a jazz musician's sprawling music-studio. As they chatted back and forth, the bartender's drawl and accent started to remind me of the outer boroughs of New York City.

After he mixed our drinks and brought them on over to us, I asked him if he was from the East Coast.

"Nope. Born and raised here. Lived here my whole life."

"Oh. Interesting. Because you seem to talk with a New York accent."

He then launched into a story about how in the 50's and 60's there was a shortage of folks available to fill vacant school-teacher positions in Orleans Parish. The state came up with a raft of incentives in order to motivate teachers from the Tri-State area to move on down here. This meant, that several generations of local children ended up being taught how to read, write - and, yes - speak by folks from New York. The end result being that, today, large swathes of locals talk in a particular blended brew of Louisianan drawl mixed with a Long Island lilt.

After he finished his story - and without waiting for a response or a reaction - the bartender turned to the next customer and carried on with his work.

Subterranean Home-Stuck Blues

Sienna and I met on Bumble. We traded a handful of messages about dogs and divorce and delivery. And then we swapped phone numbers.

When we met up in person, it was underground in a long, thin rectangle of a basement bar. One clean length of the room was entirely covered with antique Singer sowing machines. They were mounted and drilled into the wall in a grid-like pattern. If I had to guess - and I couldn't imagine why I'd ever have to do such a thing - I would say there was seventy eight of them on that wall.

They sold burgers and beers and played loud house music. None of this seem to bear are real connection to the dense and heavy collection of rusted tools of garment creation that dominated the room. But that was ok, cause Sienna told stories and ate fast and talked about remorse and responsibility.

Sunshine and Patience

She was smoking when I met her:

I was smoking when she left;

Maybe it's got something to do with cigarettes.

Tex Perkins, 'Fine Mess'

---

Carly lived behind a thick, white door leading into a tiny, irregular-shaped lobby.

Inside the lobby the carpet was charcoal grey, the walls a white-washed pastel green and the two elevators - one on each side - a shiny silver. The elevator on the left lifted up to the apartment on the middle level and the one on the right took you up to the apartment on the top floor. Beyond them and facing out diagonally in the back left corner, stood an a emerald green door that opened up into her ground-floor apartment.

She moved out to London from Los Angeles in the early aughts. Back in the 70's, her father had trekked the other way in an effort to escape a business venture gone wrong. By the end of his second week in town, he had met her mother and by the end of the second month, he had managed to get her pregnant. They settled into a mediocre marriage of compromise and hope, which they then spiced up with deceit and ignorance.

Trust the Train

"Train arrives, sixteen coaches long."

The Carter Family sang that on a song called 'Worried Man'.

By the time Junior Parker recorded 'Mystery Train' for Sam Phillips, he had changed it to:

"Train I ride, sixteen coaches long."

---

My train is fourteen coaches long. I lost two a few weeks back. One of them got jammed up by heavy leaves on the tracks and got itself stuck. The other one stayed behind to help. Now I'm two short of the full set. I feel lighter - but also more alone. Sometimes, losing part of you means you move faster. And other times it causes an imbalance that just slows you down.

Freight trains pull through the center of New Orleans during the dead of night. They blow their horns loudly through the darkness. I can sleep through the noise, but I don't know if I'm supposed to. 

And Confused Rhythms

When the season turned warm, she folded away her tight black jeans and off-grey, plaid slacks and laid them into a couple of large plastic boxes with blue snap-closures. In their place, she filled the cast-iron, free-standing rack at the end of her bed with a parade of long summer dresses. Light, white and shapeless cotton, decorated with faded patterned grids of flowers, horses and fruit.

At night, when she turned up the air conditioner before going to bed, they all swayed gently in a confused rhythm.

My favourite dress of all was the one with all those Champagne labels on it. No label appeared more than once and there must've been twenty different champagne houses represented - each label more obscure than the next. It was almost as if a frustrated sommelier had been driven out of the industry and now made clothes adorned with wines she wished she was selling instead.

Three Blind Mice

Jade knew which of her stories would be my favourites. Even from before I had ever heard her speak any of them. She knew which colours to brush up in the background; what songs to plug into the soundtrack; the right buttons to lean on in the middle; and that exact, hushed volume to drop down to at the end.

Like a fortune teller with a neon sign, a round crochet tablecloth and a front parlor in old East Hollywood, she read my tells and told me the tales I needed to hear.

Her stories were based on real events. But more than just the names and the places had been changed. 

There were stories of train rides home from concerts that happened before she was born; heart break over boys she never loved; a blood cancer diagnoses that wasn't hers; glossy, golden hoop earnings coming out for a fight that led to her getting booted from the very same high school she also rode all the way to graduation; and of tender kisses with fallen legends behind broken windows and shattered bamboo blinds.

When I talk about her now - to say a therapist or a handyman or a Hinge second-date - I cop to be being played. I admit it. I know it now. I know that her stories were only a facade - a veneer without an off-switch. A pretty and useful surface. Her only method for radiating - but never reflecting - beauty. But it was still only a surface. And, if you lasted long enough for a chance to scratch at it, underneath was just a plunging void that felt like that fast and sudden drop you experience as you fade into sleep on nights of exhaustion.

Amusements of Others

Two Ariels.

One a man and the other one will always be a girl.

Both had jet black hair. That black that almost looks blue. One had curls that she would spend hours in front of the mirror every Sunday, Wednesday and Friday burning down so her hair hung limp, flaccid and straight. The other also had curly hair, but you'd never know it for he buzzed his short and kept it hidden under a baseball cap.

Both drank hard and both had that telltale, pink tint around the edges of their eyes.

Notes From The South

I never used to change a single guitar string on its own. Like, if one broke I'd buy a new set of six strings and start afresh. I don't do that anymore.

I guess consistency of sound doesn't mean to me the same thing it once did.

There is a concrete walkway by the river, lined with dried out rosemary bushes and collapsed wooden pylons. The pylons stick out of the edges of the river-bed, scattered and pointing up and out in all different directions. Blackened by decades of rising and falling water levels, some are rounded at their end-points and others are shattered and jagged.

They all look like they fell there so perfectly - it all seems so well timed.

What It Was

Kellie died while I was away. I was in Denver, meeting with a potential client and I only found out after I got back. It was sudden and it was shocking. She was coming back from dinner and her date's car slammed sideways into a pylon out the front of a gas station. The date walked away with only a few scratches and Kellie died instantly.

No one got to say goodbye. No one expected they would ever have to.

Kellie was a barista at the little bicycle shop just east of downtown Austin.  A flat roofed, low-slung, single story, rectangle building. Almost like a garage. A brick wall runs two thirds of the way from the back, splitting the building in half length-ways. E-bikes, raised repair benches and racing posters fill up the right side and a coffee bean roaster, pine-coloured communal tables and a cafe counter fill up the left.

The grey and brown interior of iron and concrete is separated from the picnic tables outside on the sidewalk by ceiling-height, glass windows. The owner's uncle had built those picnic tables when they first opened to act as a barrier between shop-front and the gas station next door. The very same gas station of Kellie's horrific end.

Out of Range

"I used to care, but things have changed."

That's a Dylan lyric. It's from a song he wrote for a movie and it's the most liberating shit I've ever heard. 

I mean - yes, it's true that we all get the choice to lay some of our burdens on down. That isn't especially unique. But that isn't what he is saying. He isn't saying he is the one who has changed. He isn't saying that he has let go of caring about you and now he feels lighter and freer and changed.

He sings "things" have changed. Stuff outside of him. Like a new bank account; or a broken-down bike; or a better option; or stronger boundaries; or a global fucking pandemic; or a filled up notebook; or a different diet; or maybe even the weather or something like that.

Other shit has changed. And those changes - those that happen around us and to us - are enough to make you no longer care. He is saying that you all gotta do is hang around long enough and things will change and your caring will go away.

White-Wash

The thing about old bathrooms is that they never really look clean. Not matter how hard you go at them.

Like, you can foam them up and get down on your knees and scrub deep. And when you're done, they certainly look like they were just cleaned. You will certainly be able to see and smell your handiwork.

But they never really look Clean.

Do you know what I mean? Do you know the difference?

On The Radio

"And I wouldn't trade a tree;

For the way I feel about you in the morning:

Anyhow, I love you."

Guy Clark, 'Anyhow, I Love You'

Guy Clark died before I moved to Austin. That sounds odd - like I was waiting for him to pass before I could head on over. No. That's obviously not what I mean. I meant, that I never got to live in Austin at the same time as him.

There is something to walking the same streets, at the same time, as the great American poets. It makes you feel recycled. Like a soul tracing footsteps a second time.

And the thing about it is, Clark didn't really spend that much time living in Austin. He moved out to Nashville in the 70's and lived there till the end of his days. But, he was always a Texan and his music was always of Texas. The languid delivery; the sparse gaps in the imagery; the certainty of the moment and the clarity of a heavy past - all those things are particularly Texan.

Because, at their core, Texans are always certain. Certain of what has been; certain of what will come; and certain of what it is right now.  And yes, those long hot Austin days do wear down the volume and speed of their delivery - but nothing shakes that certainty. Not even when they are clearly wrong.

---

Forget You

I never thought of her as brave. Others did, though. They believed in her pain. But it was all I ever heard her talk about. Something about that didn't seem right to me.

The bravest people I know, talk about their own pain. But they also talk about the pain they've caused others. And the way she would tell it, she was only ever on the recieving end.

I was consulting to a small restaurant group in London. They had a cocktail bar down a lane-way in Old Soho. The sorta place that would open at 6pm, but not get interesting till after 11. She'd come in most every night on her way home to her apartment on Dean St. and pull up a seat up at that corner where the bar met the wall. She'd order a bowl of fries, a small salad and throw back a couple of Vespers -  on the rocks, with a lemon peel garnish. Always the same order.

No Work Shown

Down in London town, stretched out under a bend in The Thames, lies a stack of concrete rectangles, lines, circles and elevations. Set against the dirty white of the clouds and the brownish-blue waters of the river, the grey tangle rises into a sprawl of low-rise buildings. One of these stubby buildings is the immense Hayward Gallery.

Just like the jumble of disconnected shapes outside, the rooms and the corridors of The Hayward run together in a way that make no sense. Yet, somehow, they also fall in perfect order. Angles form and shift in front of you as you walk along. You never quite know if you are walking into or out of a room. At times, sunlight pours in from random cutouts above your head. At other times, dark corners draw you in like you're locked down under the earth in a fall-out shelter.

Never The Stories I Don't Wanna Tell

Above her bed was a large ceiling fan. An expansive thing that moved very little air.

Her bedroom was a square room, up in an attic. Down below it, a living room led to a kitchen and in between that was a curved, stucco archway. Stepping under the archway - and leaning up against the wall for support - you'd climb a thin, L-shaped, pine stairway and step through the peeling, rouge door.

And the fan was the first thing you noticed.

You couldn't help but notice it.

It extended out across the ceiling, reaching all the way to each the wall. Four, dense, wooden blades curved in a sorta S-swirl to their end point. A dark and aged gloss shone off each blade, reflecting the sunlight pouring in through the small window. The tips were gilded in faded brass.

She told me that the fan was actually a propeller. A wooden propeller off a World War One fighter plane. She did not know how it got up there into her little hiding place from the world. She was renting and never bothered to inquire with the landlord.