Tuesday, July 31, 2018

the last book I ever read (Rick Moody's Hotels of North America, except six)

from Hotels of North America by Rick Moody:

Under circumstances of regret, during the long nights of regret, you should be back at home, but you are not back at home, because you have to go somewhere you don’t want to go, somewhere no one should have to go, namely, Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Well, sure, you can go there without incident if you are fervently interested in things gridiron and you can go stand on the lawn and watch as the twenty-year-olds with the shaved heads pass down the main drag along the campus in their flatbed trucks, waving their bruised fists. Oh, look, there is the tight end; oh, look, there is the safety. Another winning season. If you are interested in things gridiron, your heart will rise up at this address. If not, this will not be your experience. I wish I had never been there. I will never again go to Tuscaloosa, I will not go to La Quinta on McFarland Boulevard, no one can make me unless I can be assured that each day in Tuscaloosa I will be served grits. And I do not mean cheese grits. Were it not for the tasty grits, I’d be happy to permit the southern part of the country its long-delayed secession.



Monday, July 30, 2018

the last book I ever read (Rick Moody's Hotels of North America, except five)

from Hotels of North America by Rick Moody:

My feeling then was of forlornness, of the desperate inadequacies of this human linguistic apparatus that we employ to forestall, a little longer, aloneness, and of how futile these fumblings so often are. In the next lurch of solitude I began trying to add to the list of things not to say to someone in your marriage: Don’t ever use a pen while lying on the bed; don’t ever forget to put the cap back on a pen after using the pen; don’t ever use a pen if it’s new; put items in the refrigerator at ninety-degree angles; do not throw things in the bathroom trash if there are already a lot of things in the trash; don’t ever lie on the bed, made or unmade, in your clothes; don’t get into the bed without having showered; don’t put your bag on the bed, don’t put your bag on the chair, don’t put your bag on the counter, don’t put your bag on the table; don’t ever do the laundry; don’t bite your nails; don’t put the toilet paper facing out; don’t put the toilet paper facing in; don’t accelerate quickly; don’t wear those colors together, don’t wear those colors together, don’t wear a stripe and a plaid, don’t wear that shirt, that looks bad on you, that looks bad on you, and that looks bad on you, and that looks bad on you, and that looks bad on you too, are you sure you want to wear that, that looks bad on you;; please stay out of the house one night a week, please stay out of the house a couple of nights a week so I can have some privacy; don’t put that there; don’t put that there; that plastic cup was given to me by my grandmother; don’t use my towel; don’t use my bathroom; you don’t understand your own family; you don’t understand your own role in your own family; you don’t understand what people think of you; you don’t understand other people; you don’t understand me, you don’t understand yourself; I need money for clothes, I need money for credit cards, I need money for school; don’t cut your meat on the plate, that sound is awful, cut your meat on the cutting board before putting it on your plate; don’t touch me.



Sunday, July 29, 2018

the last book I ever read (Rick Moody's Hotels of North America, except four)

from Hotels of North America by Rick Moody:

The sign advertised artisan-crafted guest suites, and, during my somewhat desperate (and ultimately unsuccessful) trip to interview for an HR position at the Tillamook cheese factory, I was curious to know how the artisan had crafted these particular suites. Did an artisan consist of some slightly inbred white supremacist from the eastern part of the state working on the finish of the handcrafted teak bar in the suite over the course of seventy-two hours, never once needing sleep because of the stimulants employed when energy flagged? Or was there an aging dropout from the dot-com world, someone who had retreated to this charming beach town to work on some artisan-crafted guest suites while transitioning from the dot-com sector, sobbing in the room over the cherry he was using for the desk, whereby he lightly stained the surface of the wood with human tears? There was a subheading on the sign out front that boasted an “in-room Jacuzzi.” I wondered, naturally, if the absence of a plural in the matter of Jacuzzis indicated a single Jacuzzi in a single room, the rest of us being, as the saying goes, shit out of luck. Or were there in fact multiple Jacuzzis in which multiple groups of intoxicated golfers and their paid associates could make double entendres until the clock ran down on the Jacuzzi timer. In certain hotels, or motels, or bed-and-breakfasts, etc., it is important to get the proprietor to give you a tour before you settle on a specific room. Often the employees will resist this tour, and you will have to scale the rhetorical heights in order to procure it. Because I am a motivational speaker, I have surpassing persuasive skills. You need to start slowly, in a muted and nonseductive way, using honeyed and time-tested approaches.



Saturday, July 28, 2018

the last book I ever read (Rick Moody's Hotels of North America, except three)

from Hotels of North America by Rick Moody:

My cousin Dennis asked me if I would consider officiating at his nuptial event, and I agreed and therefore needed to find a way to get myself ordained fast. Now, it occurred to me that officiating at weddings was a sideline, a moonlighting gig not at all dissimilar to my primary business line of motivational speaking. What kind of wedding-related oratory, after all, is not motivational at its core? Just about everything that comes out of your mouth in the nuptial theater inspires, transports. It seemed just and right that I should apply to the Infinite Love Church, which is one of those seminaries that ask of you only the eighteen dollars that will thereafter enable you to carry out the scared rites associated with marriage. The Infinite Love Church requests that you read a few rather sugary pamphlets about their ecumenical views, and then they send you an e-mail confirming that you are in law ordained, after which you are advised to contact the county clerk wherever you are intending to serve to ascertain that an online ordination is considered valid in that state. In this case, the affianced parties were Dennis and his bride-to-be, Olga, of Ukrainian origin. Olga had been in this country since she was seven and had no trace of an accent. She favored brightly colored athletic gear, a little on the baggy side, as though she were trying to hide a third breast. She had read a lot of Dostoyevsky. I learned all of this at a meeting I had with Dennis and Olga, which seemed like something that I ought to do before conducting the nuptial ceremony. If you’re officiating, and you’re trying to seem as though you are an intercessor, that the Word of God speaks through you, then you had best meet with the parties concerned.



Friday, July 27, 2018

the last book I ever read (Rick Moody's Hotels of North America, except two)

from Hotels of North America by Rick Moody:

An Ikea tends to be huge and laid out like a Vegas casino, so it’s easy to give the in-store security, even the plainclothes people, the slip. The store provides a lot of opportunity for walking, which is cardiologically sound. I personally like how much the indoor-outdoor parking lot at the Ikea in New Haven is overrun with birds. There are birds roosting in there all the time. Sparrows, especially. You might think that an Ikea parking lot, if you’re stuck in there for a few days, would be devoid of meaningful wildlife, but you’d be wrong. In addition to the birds, I saw raccoons in there, trying to scale some of the dumpsters. And there were squirrels and some rats.



Thursday, July 26, 2018

the last book I ever read (Rick Moody's Hotels of North America, except one)

from Hotels of North America by Rick Moody:

Sometimes this obligation, this intensive search for value, can lead me, internationally, to the old Europe. The Groucho Club, which is a sort of residential club in the City of London, neighborhood of Soho, is noted for the exclusivity of its bar and the eminence of its many patrons. It is true that not all of these persons are financial analysts, but when you consider that the Groucho Club hosts, on a nightly basis, stars of stage, screen, and popular music, then you can understand why I would have been obligated to berth myself there. The networking opportunities were significant. During the nights on which I was present, when I made my needs apparent to a certain bar employee, it became clear to me that there was a Pet Shop Boy on the premises, and while I understood only vaguely what a Pet Shop Boy was, I was even then extremely chuffed, as they say in London, about the possibility of talking to the Pet Shop Boy about opportunities that I saw with certain undervalued securities. His support could make all the difference. If it was necessary to snog with the Pet Shop Boy or members of his retinue in order to demonstrate the seriousness of my mission, then I would snog.



Monday, July 23, 2018

the last book I ever read (Florida by Lauren Groff, except eight)

from Florida by Lauren Groff:

The mother cannot sleep and she thinks of Laure Le Poittevin, Guy’s mother. How terrible for her to outlive her two sons, both of whom died very young of secretive sex leading to syphilis, which spread through their bodies and cracked into insanity. How lonely it would be, the mother thinks, looking at her children, to live in this dark world without them.

She watches as the new light in the morning wakes them up. She is so weary. Her sons belong in their own beds. She doesn’t belong in France, perhaps she never did; she was always simply her flawed and neurotic self, even in French. Of all the places in the world, she belongs in Florida. How dispiriting, to learn this of herself.



Sunday, July 22, 2018

the last book I ever read (Florida by Lauren Groff, except seven)

from Florida by Lauren Groff:

She cleans the house while the boys play with Legos, though the place was supposed to have been already cleaned before they arrived; this is why they had to wait until the afternoon to see it. There is nothing she can do about the smell but keep the windows open and hope for a speedy decay. They eat pasta and carrots, and go for a walk before bed, and on the way home there are cooking odors, people just beginning their evenings in vacationland, the sun still bright overhead.

She sings the boys the Magnetic Fields’ “Book of Love” and reads to them from The Little Prince, and they fall asleep quickly in their sleeping bags because they can’t understand French and she might as well have been singing whalesong. Oh, but she loves the language in her mouth, the silk and bone of it, the bright vowels and the beautiful shapes a mouth makes to speak it.



Saturday, July 21, 2018

the last book I ever read (Florida by Lauren Groff, except six)

from Florida by Lauren Groff:

The mother decides to take her two young sons to France for August.

She has been ambushed all spring by quick fits, like slaps to the heart. Where they come from, she doesn’t know, but she is tired of keeling over in the soap aisle or on the elliptical or in the unlit streets where she walks her dread for hours late at night.

Also, Florida in the summer is a slow hot drowning. The humidity grows spots on her skin, pink where she is pale, pale where she is tan. She feels like an unsexy cheetah under her clothes.



Friday, July 20, 2018

the last book I ever read (Florida by Lauren Groff, except five)

from Florida by Lauren Groff:

Walk outside in Florida, and a snake will be watching you: snakes in mulch, snakes in scrub, snakes waiting from the lawn for you to leave the pool so they can drown themselves in it, snakes gazing at your mousy ankle and wondering what it would feel like to sink their fangs in deep.



Thursday, July 19, 2018

the last book I ever read (Florida by Lauren Groff, except four)

from Florida by Lauren Groff:

On the mantel in Meg’s house, there are pictures of Meg with her children as babies, secured on her back, all three peering at the camera like koalas.

She, too, has often felt the urge to ride nestled cozily on Meg’s back.



Wednesday, July 18, 2018

the last book I ever read (Florida by Lauren Groff, except three)

from Florida by Lauren Groff:

It began with the chickens. They were Rhode Island Reds and I’d raised them from chicks. Though I called until my voice gave out, they’d huddled in the darkness under the house, a dim mass faintly pulsing. Fine, you ungrateful turds! I’d said before abandoning them to the storm. I stood in the kitchen at the one window I’d left unboarded and watched the hurricane’s bruise spreading in the west. I felt the chickens’ fear rising through the floorboards to pass through me like prayers.

We waited. The weatherman on the television repeated the swirl of the hurricane with his body like a valiant but inept mime. All the other creatures of the earth flattened themselves, dug in. I stood in my window watching, a captain at the wheel, as the first gust filled the oaks on the far side of the lake and raced across the water. It shivered my lawn, my garden, sent the unplucked zucchini swinging like church bells. And then the wind smacked the house. Bring it on! I shouted. Or, just maybe, this is another thing in my absurd life that I whispered.



Tuesday, July 17, 2018

the last book I ever read (Florida by Lauren Groff, except two)

from Florida by Lauren Groff:

My husband had to leave. He’d just fired one handyman, and the other was on his own Caribbean adventure, eating buffet foods to the sound of cruise-ship calypso. Let’s pack, my husband said, but my rebelliousness at the time was like a sticky fog rolling through my body and never burning off, there was no sun inside, and so I said that the boys and I would stay. He looked at me as if I were crazy and asked how we’d manage with no car. I asked if he thought he’d married an incompetent woman, which cut to the bone, because the source of our problem was that, in fact, he had. For years at a time I was good only at the things that interested me, and since all that interested me was my books and my children, the rest of life had sort of inched away. And while it’s true that my children were endlessly fascinating, two petri dishes growing human cultures, being a mother never had been, and all that seemed assigned by default of gender I would not do because it felt insulting. I would not buy clothes, I would not make dinner, I would not keep schedules, I would not make playdates, never ever. Motherhood meant, for me, that I would take the boys on monthlong adventures to Europe, teach them to blast off rockets, to swim for glory. I taught them how to read, but they could make their own lunches. I would hug them as long as they wanted to be hugged, but that was just being human. My husband had to be the one to make up for the depths of my lack. It is exhausting, living in debt that increases every day but that you have no intention of repaying.



Monday, July 16, 2018

the last book I ever read (Florida by Lauren Groff, except one)

from Florida by Lauren Groff:

I have somehow become a woman who yells, and because I do not want to be a woman who yells, whose little children walk around with frozen, watchful faces, I have taken to lacing my running shoes after dinner and going out into the twilit streets for a walk, leaving the undressing and sluicing and reading and singing and tucking in of the boys to my husband, a man who does not yell.



Friday, July 13, 2018

the last book I ever read (In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History by Mitch Landrieu, except nine)

from In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History by Mitch Landrieu:

Six million human beings were enslaved in our country. The largest number of those human beings were sold into slavery in my city, New Orleans. There is good and evil. Right and wrong. Truth and falsehood. The false narrative that has taken hold, a perpetual state of denial that has been left unchecked, has strangled the South that I love and made us weaker as a nation.



Thursday, July 12, 2018

the last book I ever read (In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History by Mitch Landrieu, except eight)

from In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History by Mitch Landrieu:

Slavery was the reason for the war, and as we learn in unblinkered histories, Southerners protecting their “traditional” way of life committed horrendous moral crimes against people of African descent. And yet, in 1884, when the Lee statue was installed, the Daily Picayune captured a mind-set of prevailing power: “We cannot ignore the fact that the secession has been stigmatized as treason and that the purest and bravest men in the South have been denounced as guilty of shameful crime. By every application of literature and art, we must show to all coming ages that with us, at least, there dwells no sense of guilt.” The Cult of the Lost Cause succeeded.

I decided that this sanitizing of history must end. The monuments do not represent history, nor the soul of New Orleans. They were not tools for teaching. Instead, they were the product of a warped political movement by wealthy people supporting a mayor who was determined to regain power for white people, to reduce blacks to second-class status, and to control how history was seen, read, and accepted by whites. As the mayor of this multicultural city, trying to rebuild not as it was but the way it should always have been, I concluded that Wynton was right. They should come down. They are not of our age, nor of our making, and they deserve no prominence in our city.



Wednesday, July 11, 2018

the last book I ever read (In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History by Mitch Landrieu, except seven)

from In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History by Mitch Landrieu:

On August 27, 2005, a Saturday, I sat in Lawless Memorial Chapel at Dillard University for the funeral of Clarence Barney, the longtime leader of the Urban League in New Orleans. Marc Morial, Dutch’s son, who had served eight years as mayor of New Orleans before becoming president of the National Urban League in New York, sat next to me. Both of us worried about the news of a massive storm building in the Gulf of Mexico. Hurricane Katrina was growing in scope and intensity more than any storm we had ever seen. Mayor C. Ray Nagin and Governor Kathleen Blanco were discussing whether to order a mass evacuation. That would mean a huge allocation of state and local resources for first responders and public shelters. Many people weren’t waiting to be told to leave. By Saturday afternoon a record outflow of vehicles from the metropolitan area, including Jefferson, St. Bernard, and low-lying Plaquemines parishes, had caused gridlock on the highways headed east, west, and north. Everyone was racing away from the monster gaining force in the Gulf.



Tuesday, July 10, 2018

the last book I ever read (In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History by Mitch Landrieu, except six)

from In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History by Mitch Landrieu:

We saw it all coming in Louisiana years ago. When people are scared and hurting, when the jobs are drying up and they get angry, and a demagogue arises pointing the finger at black people and brown people—blame the other—it takes a counteroffensive not just to expose the lies but to offer people hope and a belief in the better impulses of democracy. When the truth is lost, the battle to fill that vacuum is a sinister spectacle and a struggle from which good people can never call retreat. From our days with Duke, I can tell you how to end it. You have to confront those tactics straight up, shine a bright light on them, and reveal the truth. And then you must confront the bigotry behind them head-on, stay on course, and pull the tree up from the root. There is no other way forward.



Monday, July 9, 2018

the last book I ever read (In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History by Mitch Landrieu, except five)

from In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History by Mitch Landrieu:

The parallels between David Duke and President Trump, as demagogues, are breathtaking. Duke shadowboxed with his past to suggest he wasn’t a hardened bigot; many white voters in the district like him for “standing up” to blacks—an issue that had little bearing on the needs of that suburban district. Trump has found a way to depict Mexicans and immigrants as rapists and criminals; urban cities as dark, crime-ridden places; black athletes as unpatriotic; refugees as welfare and government-assistance mongers. Trump’s Make American Great Again slogan is the dog whistle of all times. The meaning is deeply hidden in the world to the unassuming eye and ear but comes on like a freight train to those who are attuned to its meaning. It seems so benign, but the word again gave the line its punch. Again fills African Americans with dread. Exactly when were we great before? What are we going back to? And by the way, your great wasn’t so great for me.



Sunday, July 8, 2018

the last book I ever read (In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History by Mitch Landrieu, except four)

from In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History by Mitch Landrieu:

Terence Blanchard felt the weight of history. Long before I began reading and relearning about New Orleans’s booming antebellum economy as the nation’s largest slave market, Terence knew that every day, to get to his high school, named for the president who championed civil rights in the early 1960s, he had to pass by a mounted white warrior, a symbol of the war to preserve slavery. Terence got the message promoted by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, politicians, and city officials associated with the Lost Cause all those decades ago. In their telling, the South had fought a noble war, for honor and independence, and it would rise from defeat to rule by white supremacy. Terence got it, he swallowed it, and he hated it.

That message went right over my head when I was young. I have often heard it said by elders that you can’t know how a man feels until you walk in his shoes. It has taken me the better part of forty years to find those shoes. This is what I have come to call transformative awareness. We are all capable of it; but we come kicking and screaming to a sudden shift in thinking about the past. To get there we have to acknowledge that we were inattentive, insensitive, myopic, or God forbid, hateful in our earlier view. This is one of the hardest things for human beings to do, especially when someone calls us on a belief. It is much easier to make the change when you know that the person to whom you offer an apology will readily forgive you, but hard as nails if you think condemnation will follow.



Saturday, July 7, 2018

the last book I ever read (In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History by Mitch Landrieu, except three)

from In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History by Mitch Landrieu:

In 2010, when I was first elected mayor, New Orleans had a 60 percent black citizenry and a rich, flourishing African American culture, vital to our economy. But in the first few years of my term, I honestly didn’t think much about the presence of Confederate monuments. The big hurdle was to jump-start the rebuilding process after Hurricane Katrina had left my city on life support.

In 2012, when Trayvon Martin was killed, protests sometimes began and ended at the statue of Jefferson Davis, or Lee Circle, where Robert E. Lee stands on a huge pedestal at a major traffic juncture. It heated up as the country struggled with police violence from Ferguson to New York to Baltimore. The statues were often “tagged” with spray paint. “Black Lives Matter.” “RIP.” “BLM.” “No justice, no peace.” Our departments of property management or sanitation often had to go out to clean the graffiti. The connection did not seem as obvious to me at that point.



Friday, July 6, 2018

the last book I ever read (In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History by Mitch Landrieu, except two)

from In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History by Mitch Landrieu:

Louisiana’s governor at the time was Jimmie Davis, a country-western entertainer famous for his song “You Are My Sunshine.” He had served a term as governor in the 1940s and made a comeback as an avowed segregationist in 1959, at a time when the Louisiana legislature was purging African Americans from the voting rolls. Southern white resistance was growing against the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v Board of Education ruling that racial segregation in schools was unconstitutional. In Baton Rouge, the legislature in 1960 pushed laws to thwart desegregation of the schools, which under federal law would soon begin in New Orleans. Governors like Orval Faubus in Arkansas, Ross Barnett in Mississippi, and George Wallace in Alabama all used ruses like this along with fearmongering tactics to keep African Americans out of white schools and colleges. The racial demagoguery triggered violent behavior; two men died in the 1962 riot at the University of Mississippi sparked by the registration of James Meredith, the first African American student to attend the school.



Thursday, July 5, 2018

the last book I ever read (In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History by Mitch Landrieu, except one)

from In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History by Mitch Landrieu:

New Orleans mirrors a map of the world, a city where people of many countries have settled, shaping a beloved culture that has been enriched with jazz, Creole and Cajun cuisine, and so much more. We’ve shared culture across racial lines, but we also have played a seminal role in some of the saddest chapters in American history. More humans were sold into slavery in New Orleans than anywhere else in the country. Hundreds of thousands of souls were sold here, then shipped up the Mississippi River to lives of forced labor, of misery, of rape, of torture. As we entertain visitors from around the world along our beautiful riverfront, it is hard to fathom that at this very spot, ships emptied their human cargo from Senegal, marching their captives down the street to what is now one of our famous hotels, but there are no historical markers on that path. No monuments or flags to the lives destroyed.

New Orleans is where black Creoles launched a legal challenge to segregated public transportation, a case that led to the 1896 Supreme Court decision Plessy v Ferguson, which enshrined Jim Crow’s “separate but equal” into law. In 1892 a mixed-race man named Homer Plessy attempted to board a whites-only car but was arrested because he was one-eighth black. Sixty years later, Freedom Riders coming to New Orleans were beaten to a bloody pulp. Today, though, even as white identity politics rage, I take comfort that my city understands that diversity is our strength, greeting visitors with warmth and a cultural effervescence, even as we resolve to work hard to evolve and heal. We all have so far to go.



Tuesday, July 3, 2018

the last book I ever read (Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation, excerpt nine)

from Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation by Robert W. Fieseler:

Later that summer, on August 15, a New Orleanian who had taken a risk by offering to help to Troy Perry during the last week of June 1973 died of metastatic lung cancer in the French Quarter. Clay Shaw had perished at sixty. Earlier in 1974, Shaw had suffered a blood clot to his brain and underwent a surgery that rendered one side of his body paralyzed. The condition had forced him to resign from his coveted post at the French Market Corporation, a job he’d assumed courageously—given the efforts it took, following his trial, to hold his head up high. According to an obituary printed in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Shaw died with a $5 million civil lawsuit pending against former New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison. With the primary litigant deceased, that case now couldn’t proceed.

Clay Shaw’s obituary made the front page of the Times-Picayune. The city’s paper of record took stock of the man as “one of the founders of International Trade Mart and the man acquitted of charges of conspiring to assassinate John F. Kennedy.” The New York Times called him “the businessman who was acquitted of plotting to assassinate President Kennedy after one of the nation’s more sensational trials,” while mentioning the accusations of homosexuality. Indeed, Jim Garrison’s crusade marred Shaw’s reputation in death. None of these obituaries would recognize Shaw’s gesture of compassion for the Up Stairs Lounge victims. Even in his more vulnerable condition, Shaw had attempted to help others.



Monday, July 2, 2018

the last book I ever read (Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation, excerpt eight)

from Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation by Robert W. Fieseler:

Buddy Rasmussen, the bartender of the Up Stairs Lounge who had saved twenty-odd patrons, disappeared after giving his full account of the blaze to police detectives. Buddy was emotionally crippled, and he spent most waking hours with Bill Duncan, a close friend. Buddy barely left Bill Duncan’s apartment, which was situated on Iberville Street catercorner from the blackened edifice of his former workplace.

An entire chapter of Buddy’s life—his triumph in building a profitable business with the bar’s owner, Phil Esteve—had been reduced to cinders. Adam Fontenot, his great love, was also gone forever. Through the dull throb, Buddy could hear the hubbub at the Chartres Street intersection, where the detritus and rubble of the Up Stairs Lounge attracted large crowds. Motorists in packed cars drive past the site as if it were a fun house. Tourists lined up and nosed past the doorway to the stairwell holding cups of open liquor, a practice synonymous with New Orleans. The Jimani bar, untouched on the first floor directly below the rubble, had already reopened to serve passersby.



Sunday, July 1, 2018

the last book I ever read (Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation, excerpt seven)

from Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation by Robert W. Fieseler:

As Perry circulated throughout the Quarter, Roger Nunez tossed fitfully on the couch of his friend Cee Cee Savant at 606 ½ Iberville Street—just two doors down from the Up Stairs Lounge. Pungent odors wafted through the open windows as Roger attempted to sleep. His dreams were night terrors, and he periodically yelled in his half-awake state, drenched in sweat. The night before, Roger’s roommate had found him drunk on the street and guided him home.

In testimony she would give to deputies from the Louisiana Office of the State Fire Marshal, Savant recalled a knock on her apartment door early that Monday morning. Two plainclothes officers, she remembered, flashed their badges and asked to speak to Roger Dale Nunez. She said that one of the officers had questioned Roger out in the hallway, while the other man kept her away. When the conversation with Roger got loud, Savant grew enraged, and the officers agreed to leave. This entire episode supposedly lasted less than thirty minutes. “They think I started the fire, but I didn’t,” Roger Nunez told Savant afterward, and she quieted him with two sleeping pills. Later, Savant awoke half-sober and noticed that Roger’s jaw was swollen. He claimed to have a toothache. She asked if he’d been in a fight, and he replied woozily, “I don’t want to talk about it.”

In his sleep, Roger saw a horrible, violent blaze that he kept reliving in a loop. At the end of this dream, he was met by a row of accusers, who told him that he had set the Up Stairs Lounge fire and wouldn’t accept his denials. He’d wake up shouting things like “I didn’t do it!” and “Help me, I didn’t start it!” and “Tell them I didn’t.” Although this behavior might seem incriminating, what exactly went on in Roger’s sleep is hard to decipher. Fire had already played a significant role in Roger’s life. His arrest record, in fact, noted a burn scar on his right elbow, a place where heat had met flesh and scalded deeply. No one knew how or why. Moreover, Shelton Nunez, Roger’s young uncle and contemporary, had perished by flame in a terrible explosion on an offshore oil rig three years earlier.