Fri., Jun 22, 9:15 p.m., Dos Jefe’s
Lush Muffin has grown very tired of Art’s company. She desires male companionship and Art, as usual, is a poor substitute for the real thing. She fishes through her purse and captures her cell phone.
“Luigi,” she says hoarsely.
“I’m taking a shower,” Luigi replies, with the sound of a cascade of water in the background. “Nice to hear you’re still alive.”
“Ditto.”
“What’s up? I’ve got soap on my head and I’m afraid it will dry out my scalp if I don’t rinse it soon.”
Lush Muffin loves the fact that Luigi Lucriccio shaves his head. “Are you planning on heading out?”
Luigi coughs. “I don’t know. I feel brutally beaten, like I’ve been dragged behind a freight train over a street of shattered glass. It’s not pretty here right now. I’ve only been up for a few minutes.”
Lush Muffin cackles. “You’re worse than me!”
“And that’s saying something.”
She bristles. “Well, are you going to be a man about it and come find me or are you going to wallow in pathetic-ville?”
“Wallowing is not my forte. Let me sweat out some of last night in this shower here and I will call you when I’m out.”
“Okay, but hurry. I’m bored.”
Art hears the last sentence, grips his red snapper and downs the entire drink. He is, of course, better looking than Luigi, but just doesn’t seem to get any credit for anything he does or says. Arthur Cole feels like the most underrated man on the planet.
Wed., Jan 12, 2:53 a.m., Audubon Park Riverview
Having wandered down the street from the Monkey Hill Bar deliciously drunk, Elizabeth and Luigi hold hands, laughing at nothing in particular, at the fact that they’re laughing and there’s nothing either of them can do to stop it. They’ve made it all the way through the park, across the railroad tracks and up the hill which is, in fact, a natural bluff of high land at a point where the river’s curve is extreme and abrupt, that curve causing, after hundreds of years, the land on this particular stretch of the river to be higher than at most other points.
They sit down at the edge of the bluff over the river. Beneath their dangling pairs of feet is a rubber coated chain link fence, under which sit piles of crushed rock. This is to keep the river from eroding the base of the bluff. In the battle of man versus nature, this is a temporary victory for man.
Elizabeth squeezes with her left index finger and thumb a spot on her right elbow, for no apparent reason, holding her right arm up and eyeing her skin in the dim light of the urban evening.
“My arms are fat,” she says.
“What do you want to do when you grow up?” Luigi asks.
“I want to grow up to be the invisible woman,” Elizabeth replies. “That way, I can sneak into your house and fondle you when you least expect it,” she says, grabbing Luigi between the legs.
He smiles. “I think I’d like that.”
Elizabeth abruptly relinquishes her grip. “What about you, Luigi? What do you want to be when you get out of elementary school? A fireman?”
Luigi tosses his head back and sighs. “I don’t know. I think about what I’m doing with my life, which, admittedly, seems like less and less each day. Invisible sounds awfully nice, come to think of it. Then I just wouldn’t have to deal with all of this adulthood crap.”
“Crabby man!”
“Sorry,” Luigi chuckles. “It’s just that, well, I like you and I’d love to be able to just spend every day frolicking wherever, just hanging out, you know? No real pressures, no deadlines, no job, which, I’m surprised I still have one, given I’ve taken off the last ten days just to hang out with you.”
“Well, it has been fun.”
“You’ll get no disagreement from me.” Luigi reaches out and puts his arm around Elizabeth’s shoulders. “I just sit here and wonder what would have happened if you and I hadn’t met at Sunshine’s New Year’s Party.”
“You’d be asleep, going to work tomorrow,” Liz quips.
“Sleep. So overrated.” He pulls Liz close and they kiss, a sloppy, drunken mouthful, tongues roving in every possible direction.
Fri., Jun 22, 10:00 p.m., Dos Jefe’s
Luigi Lucriccio flings himself through the double doors of Dos Jefe’s as a gunslinger would enter a saloon, his unbuttoned velvet, tiger skin print vest flapping in the rush of wind created as the air conditioned inside air swooshes through the open doors and greets the stale, warm, humid summer evening. His bald head is reflecting a streetlight outside. As soon as he crosses the threshold, that reflection is erased, replaced by the multi-colored ambience of the neon lights directly above the doors.
Lush Muffin’s eyes become transfixed; he is cute, in a biker-turned-intellectual kind of way.
His reluctant smile meets her gaze. Luigi knows she’s gorgeous, and that in itself allows the smile to form automatically, but it’s tempered with the knowledge that she is also the devil, at least as far as his health and sleeping patterns are concerned.
Her straight strawberry blonde hair sits as a floppy helmet atop her head, the length of which drifts to where it barely dodges against her shoulders. She smiles in return, purposefully and without Luigi’s reluctance, her top lip retracting towards her nostrils to reveal her gum line above her upper row of teeth. When Lush Muffin smiles, it is always a genuine reaction, never forced, and Luigi is beginning to realize that he is becoming, in her eyes, the genuine article.
------------------------------------------
Late September, 2005
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Tue., Sept. 27, 2005, 9:50 a.m., Jefferson/Orleans Parish Border, River Road National Guard Checkpoint
The not-so-curious thing about the checkpoint is they are stopping people in crappy cars and letting those in more fashionable vehicles pass through undeterred. Unfortunately for Arthur Cole, his car is in the former category. His 1988 Yugo GVX might be the crappiest car ever built, and he likes it that way. He enjoys the fact that he can keep the thing running and that other people despise his automobile. It suits him just fine. Except for today. Today, he gets to find out if the false credentials his buddy emailed him are good enough to get him into the city, as it is still closed to the general public since the Hurricane.
“State your business,” the unsmiling National Guard trooper with his very large M-16 says. The man is much taller than the Yugo and has to sort of crouch down, bending over his gun in order to look Art in the face.
Arthur Cole takes his credentials from a manila folder in the passenger seat (seat is a liberal term for it, seeing as how it’s more a mess of coils than a proper seat, the upholstery having long since disintegrated) and hands the document to the soldier.
After a cursory glance, the trooper hands him the paper back. He surveys the car once again and says, “I wouldn’t go anywhere off the beaten path in this thing. You’re not going to make it very far if you do and there are no garages to get your car fixed.”
“Thank you, sir,” Art nods and drives his Yugo into the comparative squalor that is the recently flooded Parish of Orleans.
Mon., Sept. 26, 9:58 a.m., Jefferson/Orleans Parish Border, Airline Highway National Guard Checkpoint
Sunshine smiles at the boys with the big guns. She waves. They wave back, not even gesturing for her to stop so they can check her fake credentials she downloaded from a friend. Her red Mazda Miata has its top up for now, unfortunate, because had it been down, she might have attracted even more attention from the boys, maybe even a phone number or two. That probably could be helpful, seeing as how her house is probably difficult to get to, at best, especially in her Miata. Gwen, who stayed throughout the storm, promised they would be able to get there in her Jeep. The only thing that means is Sunshine will have to put up with Gwen, an unpleasant but necessary requirement, given the fact that Sunshine’s second story apartment’s neighborhood was under eight feet of water and there is a certainty that a good deal of debris still litters Banks Street.
Sunshine has no illusions about staying at her own house; there’s not liable to be power or water for months. But she’d sure like to get some of her things out. Things seem to mean more to her these days than they did before August 29th.
Not that Gwen doesn’t have a good heart, she just annoys Sunshine to no end. Thanks to Gwen, however, she’s got a place to crash tonight. Tomorrow will be decision day, whether to head back to Texas to her parents’ house with her tail between her legs yet again, or to hopefully find another friend with which she can room until her place becomes livable again. So far, she’s had no luck. The friends she’s been able to contact (cell phone service is still quite sketchy and the primary mode of communication has been through text messaging) haven’t come back to the city yet. At present, Gwen is her only option.
Mon., Sept. 26, 11:30 a.m., 3801 Banks St. (front yard, sort of)
Sunshine has never cried so much in her entire life, going back, she thinks, until her first memories, sometime around age three. She is kneeling in the mud, her mud caked hands gripping at her platinum blonde hair, streaking Sunshine’s normally tonsorially perfect coif with chunks of wet dirt and clumps of dead grass. Her white sundress is smeared around the knees and ankles with the wet, probably toxic soil. The wail of her voice can only be described as that of a panicked howler monkey moments before its death.
Gwen stands impassively by her side, smoking a cigarette and staring at the charred front columns—what is left of Sunshine’s house. With her unencumbered hand, Gwen gently strokes Sunshine’s head, being careful to avoid the soiled parts, of course, and whispers, “Shhhh. It will be all right.” Gwen takes a deep pull from her cigarette knowing that there is nothing right about what she sees.
Everything behind the cement columns in front of the house seems to have collapsed into a two foot high layer of black nothing. Usually, when one sees a picture of a burnt house, there are some things one can recognize, maybe the corner of a picture frame or trophy or something, but it appears that anything metallic was completely melted and, from what Gwen can tell, the metallic objects are melted into black amorphous blobs, looking something akin to giant robot turds, atop a completely incinerated, square, house sized sandbox of black ash.
Mon, Sept. 19, 12:14 p.m., Atop the Ruined Roof of the Superdome
Archibald is upset.
The most exciting time of his life, surfing Hurricane Katrina at the mouth of the Mississippi River, has been followed by three week period of boredom. With a capital B.
He’s drinking a screwdriver. Archibald refuses to think about the fact that he had to run all the way to Baton Rouge to steal oranges from the supermarket to make the orange juice for his drink. Or the fact that drink ice is currently NOT AVAILABLE in this city, what with the lapse of electricity and its cohort, lack of refrigeration. No. He chooses not to think about that, for he can see the Entergy crews busily repairing the city’s electrical infrastructure and therefore restoring drink ice to his now quiet little Bourg. The warm screwdriver will soon be a thing of the past.
And the experiment survived. Okay, that’s not necessarily a good thing, but it’s not a bad one either. The fact that his regeneration machine operates without the need for public works was as necessary today as the day they started. And, as bored as he has become with his experiment, he doesn’t relish a new assignment, fraught with learning the language of a new species and especially finding what it is they like to drink that brings them pleasure. For all Archibald knows, a new assignment’s drink of choice could be sand, and, well, since he’s been an ostrich on this planet for nearly one hundred years, Archibald has had his fill of sand.
He decides, for boredom’s sake, to make a mental list of the things that he loves and hates about this planet that has been his home for so very long.
He loves:
Scotch
Orange juice
Anything with alcohol that can be mixed with orange juice
Surfing
Nipples
He hates:
Mimes
Cameras (they steal your soul)
After composing his mental list, Archibald decides that, on balance, this planet isn’t really that terrible, not perfect, but not the worst spot on the map. He just needs something, something that will make him feel alive, a task, an errand, a complicated web of lies and deceit, anything, to motivate him thorough the next day and the next.
