Chapter 09

Fri., Jun 22, 6:15 p.m., 1000 Valence St.

Judge Mule stares straight ahead at a point on the wall just above the fireplace mantel where the paint has begun to fade, probably from his housekeeper using too much Pledge on the woodwork and by way of collateral damage has begun to affect other surfaces, not just the wood. He finds himself staring a lot lately, mostly into space, but occasionally at imperfections, not so much as to make a mental note to cure the imperfection, but more just to have a place to catalog the things that are out of place. Last night has its own folder, if not it’s own drawer in that catalog. And now another thing has him troubled: the Laphroaig, his favorite Scotch has, for the most part, been consumed, and not by Judge Mule.

He has had the same housekeeper, despite her foibles, for seventeen years, and in that time, not a drop of liquor has ever been pilfered, nor has anything else for that matter. Nobody else, to his knowledge, ever enters the Mule household since the passing of his wife nearly ten years ago, with the exception of an odd plumber or electrician when something goes on the fritz.

When something goes missing, as it never does, it is certainly a moment for the Judge’s catalog, one that is so brimming with recent events that even the normally calm and logic-minded Judge Mule finds himself swimming a bit upstream. The Scotch cannot be an accident. To make matters worse, he knows that he had at least half a bottle yesterday evening because, as the police arrived, he, himself had a glass, at which time he noted that the seal had been broken, and not by him. When this occurred to him, he just figured that the crazy individual taped to his Bentley had taken some of it as part of his crazy drug binge. Now that the bottle is almost empty, he cannot make the same assumption, a point which troubles Judge Mule deeply.

Fri., Jun 22, 6:21 p.m., 3931 ½ Prytania

“Muffin?”

“Yes, Art.”

“Have you taken your bath yet?”

“Yes I have and I am as silky as silky can be.”

“That’s fabulous. Sunshine needs a drink.”

“So do I.”

“So meet us at the bar.”

“Um, which bar?”

“You know, the bar.” Arthur Cole cracks himself up sometimes.

“I think you’ll have to be a little more specific.”

“We’re going to the Bulldog. It’s free beer glass night.”

This registers to Lush Muffin as the night when the bar allows a person to keep the glass every time one orders a beer from one of the myriad spigots lining the wall behind the bar. “Yet another night of kitchen stocking madness.”

“You got that right. So get your buns in the car and meet us over there, pronto.”

“I will be there as soon as I can get my slinky self behind the wheel.”

Fri., Jun 22, 6:25 p.m., 3931 ½ Prytania

After collecting her car keys and purse, Lush Muffin heads out of the front door of her apartment on Prytania Street. After she opens the door, it becomes immediately apparent that something is not right. Directly outside her door where her driveway sits, there would normally be parked a late model, forest green Honda Accord. Tonight, this is not the case. The car, it seems, was abandoned during the previous evening’s festivities. Not only was it abandoned, but the aforementioned abandonment took place during the depths of a blackout. This is problematic, at best.

Lush Muffin stares at the oil stained pavement hoping to glean from its amorphous patterns where on earth she could have left her car. Probably somewhere on Frenchman Street, she figures, as the last place she remembers being was D.B.A., which would also make sense because she also remembers talking to a man who is a professional rickshaw driver and why in the world would she want to take a car if she could have a man pull her around the city in a rickshaw? Duh. Logic dictates the car is safely stowed in the Marigny, probably right across from D.B.A. Thusly, the proper course of action is to proceed directly, by cab, to the Bulldog and leave the salvage operation for tomorrow. Tomorrow is a much better day for such an undertaking. Tomorrow makes tonight much more manageable.

Fri., Jun 22, 6:43 p.m., The Bulldog

The Bulldog, located on Magazine Street two blocks downtown of Louisiana Avenue, is one of the more popular places in Uptown New Orleans for the twenty and thirty-something crowd to commune and inundate their livers with alcoholic beverage. Located in the heart of the Isle of Denial, that Isle being the non-flooded areas of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the Bulldog was one of the first establishments to open after the storm and immediately gained a following of devoted and passionate drinkers.

To say that alcohol consumption, already at near epidemic levels, increased in the city after Hurricane Katrina of New Orleans is something of an understatement. Many people who returned shortly after the hurricane, unable to deal with the realities of a desolate city, broken infrastructure, absentee insurance companies and a general mood of despair, flocked to the city’s few open watering holes in numbers that nearly overwhelmed the city’s liquor distributors, a major task considering the abundance of drinking that took place on a much larger scale before the Katrina, even if the number of people who had returned numbered in the tens of thousands, compared to the five-hundred thousand who lived in the city before the storm. Since there was absolutely nothing else to do in those sweltering, brutally hot, empty days following the storm except seek out other so-called survivors and commiserate, the bars were human magnets, and the humans had mouths that needed both nourishment and verbally-expulsive exercise. Telling storm stories to other recently displaced residents was the only activity available to people, and the natural place for those conversations to take place would be somewhere where people could medicate and socialize at the same time.

“Remember when we first met here,” Art says while watching the bartender pour is first beer of the evening.

“How can I forget,” Sunshine replies.

“Mold.”

“Refrigerators.”

The decomposing refrigerator Art and rolled to the street one day in late September 2005 reminds him of an odor both sickly sweet and putrid, the ten pounds of previously frozen deer meat inside the taped shut refrigerator’s freezer undoubtedly contributing to the myriad bugs and other life forms seeming to come streaming out of every pore of the fridge each time it was jostled. “Anywhoo.”

“Anywhoo.” Sunshine finds her mind wandering a bit. The whole ostrich thing seems a little too real for it to be a hallucination, which, of course, it has to be, but still. “Artie?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think Karl Cerullo is crazy?”

“I haven’t given the matter much thought, and I don’t know him very well. But from what I do know, he seems somewhat normal, at least in comparison to you, which is, by all standards, not necessarily sane.”

“So yes?”

“Define crazy.”

“Batshit insane.”

Art caresses his goatee for a moment and then replies, “Can’t say that I’ve made that assessment of the man, no.”

“Oh.”

“Well, why do you ask? I mean, he’s your friend, so you should know him better than I do.”

“That’s the thing, Artie. He’s never seemed crazy to me, that is, not until this afternoon, right before I left Dos Jefe’s.”

“Why? What happened?”

Sunshine takes a long swig out of her freshly delivered cosmopolitan, lets out a heavy sigh, turns to face Art directly and says, “Artie, the man started telling me this story, a story about aliens and, well, he told me that he was Vladimir Lenin, incarnate.”

“The Communist.”

“The one and the same.”

“Well, that would qualify as batshit in my book, if he’s being serious,” Art says with a chuckle.

“Sure it does, Artie, but that’s not all he said.”

“Oh, do tell.”

“Well, he went on to say that the reason he was telling me all of this is because, um, and this is where it gets even more bizarre, he tells me that he has to tell me about him being Vladimir Lenin because there’s this alien, see, and the alien is an ostrich…”

“Not with the ostrich again.”

“Listen.”

“Sorry.”

“And this ostrich alien creature wants to make friends with me because he needs a playmate.”

“A playmate?”

“Yes, Artie, a playmate.”

“Wow, that is weird.”

“Yes, and in my case, the power of suggestion seems to have gotten the better of me.”

“That is really fucked up, Sunshine. Are you sure you’re up for being out and about?”

“Oh, I’m not going to let it bother me anymore. Just felt like I needed to get the whole thing off my chest. It’s all so odd, though. Karl just went off to the bathroom, and bam, returned batshit insane.”

Arthur Cole suddenly finds himself with his thinking cap on. “Hey, Sunshine?”

“Yes Artie?”

“What if, the same person who dosed your drink dosed his drink?”

Sunshine ponders that while rubbing the rim of her glass between her lips. “Well, that would make a bit more sense, wouldn’t it?”

Arthur Cole believes he has become the pinnacle of reason. “It is the only explanation.”

Fri., Jun 22, 7:06 p.m., The Bulldog

Lush Muffin’s arrival, as usual, is perfectly timed to coincide with another round of drinks in need of purchase.

“What took you so long?” Art asks.

“I had to take a cab. Kind of lost my car last night.”

“Again?” Art snickers.

“Hello, Lush Muffin,” Sunshine says, waving a palm-up finger.

“Sunshine. How are you doing, my friend?”

“Incapable of anything good to say, I’m afraid. I think somebody dosed me at the bar earlier.”

“Oh no! Did somebody do something naughty to you?”

“No. Just seeing things, is all.”

Lush Muffin smiles wryly. “Well that actually sounds kind of fun!”

“I’d call it scary. But I’m over it.”

Lush Muffin smiles and begins to look nervously at Art. “Who does a girl need to screw to get a drink around here.”

“Stop being figurative with me,” Art says.

Lush Muffin cranes her neck back around Art. “Anyhow, Sunshine, I had a couple of messages on my voice mail, from different, random people, something about Earl Patton getting thrown in the slammy. What’s that all about?”