The Pallbearer's Social

The first chapter of an adaptation of the play The Pallbearer’s Social.

The Well

   Lacey left instructions to have the pallbearers for her funeral gather in the Well of Mercy Bar, just across the street from the Absent Friends Funeral Home. The bar was a converted grocery store (next door to Harold’s Pool Hall & Jeep Shop) with two old Standard Oil gasoline pumps bleeding rust from all sides, both still standing on the side of the sagging building and serving as hitching posts for folks who needed fresh air after drinking too much. Old metal signs from the bar’s heyday were still nailed to the outside walls, fossilized scales advertising Grape Nehi and Coca Cola and Royal Crown Cola, 7up and its First Against Thirst slogan, Viceroy and L&M Filters, Sir Walter Raleigh that Packs Tight Smokes Sweet, Hav-A-Tampa Cigar, Bayer Aspirin, the First Choice for Fast Pain Relief, Ken-L-Ration dog food, and Bordens Ice Cream and the smiling cow head with flowers for a necklace. There was a handmade sign among the metal ones and one sign on the front door, both declaring in a scrawl, Private Party! Closed Until 7 PM!

   There was still an outside bathroom used by the bar regulars who at some point in the evening stood around in the parking lot, some leaning against the old gasoline pumps to steady their swaying as they slurred words with friends who were standing off the concrete island and scratching with the toe of their boots a smoother place to plant themselves among the dirt and crushed shells.

   The Well of Mercy bar was pure south Louisiana, football helmets and jerseys of different teams hanging from the ceiling and twisting in the stale air, the gear of LSU, Tulane, the New Orleans Saints, the local high school team, all sporting name tags hanging from lengths of fishing line. The jersey from LSU, purple and gold, had the number 20 on it, the number 17 on the green jersey from Tulane, and the Saints jersey with the name Taylor on the back, all dusty and fading from years on display. Behind the bar a handwritten menu with curling corners was tacked to the wall listing what po’boy sandwiches were available: roast beef, ham and swiss, catfish, shrimp, oyster, crawfish. An old upright piano sat in the corner of the bar alongside a snare drum, both near the juke box and an old style South Central Bell public telephone; tables and chairs were scattered about, both showing plenty of wear: the cloth-backed vinyl tablecloths stained and torn, the padded chair seats split and the material inside clearly visible.

   Alone in the bar and lounging in one of the chairs while looking around, it occurred to the guy dressed in a dark suit at one of the tables that the Well was still the hub of civilization here in Travellers Rest, some folks spending more of the evening in this watering hole than they did at home, and it was sad and funny to Adam Macauley to know living here hadn’t changed much, the after work idleness still the same: drinking and forgetting the everydayness of drinking and forgetting.

   Adam glanced at a journal he had been reading. It was all there, the important parts anyway, the transcriptions of Lacey’s sessions, many of the pages copied from her own journals she kept all of her life, meticulously copied by Adam with one of his favorite ink pens he collected, dog-eared entries of his own musings, and even recollections of conversations that all pertained to Lacey, no matter when they took place in those long ago days.

   Putting the journal on the table, Adam got up and slowly toured the bar, checking his memory against the way things were now, smiling when he came across his carved initials on the top of the piano, letting his hand fall to the keys and playing a chord. He dusted his hand off and glanced up at the ceiling, remembering rifles and two black pajama uniforms of the Viet Cong once hanging among the football jerseys. Back at the table—sitting and extending his legs out in front of him, closing his eyes and letting flashes of Lacey play out in his head—he had no need to open the journal for any prompting, from thousands of readings over the years he knew the placement of every comma and period, every single word written there.

Atomic Shadows

There were two big old boys in the neighborhood living a street over from us on Lafaso, Mert and Dick Tugwell, older, maybe my brother Wayne’s age or maybe even older than that. They are nice guys, fun-loving, always horsing around with the younger kids, and I am one of those one day, doing whatever, maybe trying to tackle one of them by wrapping arms and legs around one of their stout legs. One of the Tugwell brothers reaches down and pries me off, grabbing my legs with one hand and the other hand on the back of my neck, lifting me up and making gorilla noises like he is going to slam me to the ground. When he does release me on my feet, I am aware of slight pain under my ears, his thumb and middle finger pressing under my ears while suspending me above his head, like some native in a Tarzan movie holding up a sacrificial child. It is not long before there are rounded lumps under each ear the size of a tennis ball. What is lost is whether I go to the doctor then or the next day or go quickly to the emergency room. The next distinct shadow is being in one of the hospital rooms, one bed only, windows always presenting a view of home.

Whatever my illness is—ruptured lymph nodes or salivary glands?—it keeps me in the hospital as a pampered patient for weeks, doctors coming and going and hushed whispers to my mother, nurses coming and going and a daily series of injections in my buttocks, first one cheek and turn the other, please. There are two other particular shadows imprinted during that time.

After several days, my backside looks like a human dartboard, a chaotic pattern of blue on both cheeks like bruised fruit. And the injections sting and the hurt lingers. Finally one of the nurses starts giving me a sharp slap on whatever cheek is up for duty right before the injection. It works, her sharp swat masking what quickly follows. Bless you, nurse-angel, whoever you are.

The other ghost image is books—probably many of them comic books—scattered always over the bed, on the nightstand, stacked on the window ledge. There is no television in the room, I don’t think, I would remember that, so the days are spent in adventures far beyond the hospital room, with Batman and Robin and Superman in thrilling deeds of capturing criminals and rescuing always grateful ladies in distress. There is the absolute joy also of my mother reading to me, being able to lie back on the pillows and watch the changing sky while those escapades play in my head, the imagined stories fulfilling some need in me I didn’t know I had, allowing me to leave behind any pain in my neck and backside, presenting an escape route from the hard truths of growing up in the neighborhood nearby.

School Days

Baton Rouge High School opened fifteen years after the Civil War and finally relocated for the last time on Government Street in the late 1920’s. By mid-century, it is easy to imagine James Dean coming down the front steps of the Late Gothic Revival main building dressed in jeans and white t-shirt with a cigarette behind one ear. Turning to his left, he would saunter along the sidewalk through the shade of huge oaks, heading toward his ride parked behind the school. Of course, really, earlier in the day—during first period—he would have been sent to the principal’s office and maybe expelled for the day—or at the very least—told to go home and change from jeans to appropriate pants and to change his t-shirt for good measure. He would have been asked to put the cigarette in his pocket and told he could smoke it during lunch recess in the Bullpen, which was actually under the bleachers facing the oval track and the grassy area in the middle where the football team practiced every hot afternoon. Cool Mr. Dean, the future icon of disillusioned youth everywhere, would have passed an exit door from the one-balcony auditorium with a wood floor stage where Elvis and Faron Young played in May, 1955, a mere five months before the Porsche Spyder sports car Dean would be heading toward crashes and kills him near Cholame, California.

Eight years after Mr. Dean takes his imaginary stroll, the school campus looks pretty much the same—maybe the oaks grown some in height and girth, the same bleachers and another bunch of boys in the Bullpen under them to escape the direct heat, the pattern on the ground around them like sun through enormous blinds, many of the cars in the parking lot probably now the same model year as the famous Porsche. For all the studens (still no jeans to be seen), sitting in classrooms with tall windows during long days of study, they want to be hip like dead Mr. Dean and pretty like Natalie Wood and sensitive like Sal Mineo, but they also want to be cool, literally, for they are always hot since air conditioning won’t be installed until 13 years after they graduate. No Negroes in desks beside them, some students slightly more aware and the others only vaguely from parental whisperings that there was a bus boycott ten years earlier that gave Martin Luther King the blueprint for the Montgomery bus boycott. While marches for Civil Rights are taking place in the city around them—primarily by Southern University students—it is a time of innocence for most, uninvolved and not knowing, more important the day to day tests and romantic maneuverings and the scandal of Mrs. Dugas’ 10^th grade daughter dropping out of school because she is pregnant.

Living in Louisiana

And here we are again, four years after Gustav took down 25% of the canopy in Baton Rouge and seven years after Katrina flooded New Orleans and killed almost 2,000 people, here we are again with that helpless feeling again of hearing sirens in the distance of fire trucks racing down streets nearby and watching wind and rain out of windows and sliding patio doors, the trees bending unnaturally and limbs flying off and the thump of them hitting the ground and leaves swirling and littering the streets and yards like it is winter and time to rake into piles not brown but green with recent life.

Unlike other recent hurricanes and with winds not quite as high, Isaac is so slow moving that the destruction may be worse in some areas, the winds and flooding water grinding south Louisiana down by its stationary persistence.

In this age of instant communication (before many lose power) there are Facebook posts on supplies gathered, the inevitable lists of alcohol purchased to last for the duration of closed stores, discussions of the impact of cancelled football games (for many hurricanes seem to hit the last week of August), posts from people who once lived here and now expressing concerns from states far away, and one post from a woman in New Jersey who once lived in and still calls New Orleans home, her post letting everyone know that her friend was tired of the woman’s post about her concerns for family and could not understand why people still lived in this part of the country, that friend showing her ignorance by not stopping to think that all parts of the country experience disasters, natural and man-made. Why would anyone want to live in Manhattan, someone responded, when planes sometimes crash into tall buildings?

The woman in New Jersey vented in a long post exactly why south Louisiana—New Orleans in particular—is so special, and, finally, halfway down in her Facebook rant about her friend’s utter lack of understanding and compassion, she hit upon exactly why people stay and endure whatever comes in this part of the country: it is home.

     No matter if there are hurricanes spinning off deadly tornados or straight-line summer thunderstorms that knock trees down quickly, no matter what forces align and threaten the house occupied, there are pets buried in the backyard and relatives in the cemetery down the road. It is football on the weekends and tailgate parties with good friends that take place near the stadium or in the back yard. It is also a heritage of place given voice by Louisiana writers imparting a sense of family and history—whether that history is ground blood-soaked or merely littered with storm debris.  It is simply home, the place of growing up and learning the hard truths of living anywhere. 

Amanda

Amanda knew at an early age that she would kill herself. It wasn’t a thought that particularly concerned her but one of quiet recognition that the day would come. She lived her life with that quiet knowledge, growing up loved enough and bright enough for good grades in school and getting a college degree with easy grace she knew she would never use because of how it would all end, the year and manner to be determined. What did surprise her though as she lay on the bed with the gun beside her and naked with makeup on and hair brushed and shiny was not that she was only a good and competent dancer (she had long ago realized that), that she couldn’t have a career doing it, not the months and two years of traveling the West waiting tables and dancing in burlesque and strip clubs to make ends meet, the surprise now that the end was near at age 24 was not any of that but one of location. Not so much Albuquerque, the city for the first few years humming with possibility since there were so many dance clubs with fun people learning the steps or perfecting routines of blues dancing, the swing, Latin jazz, always parties at the clubs or rented spaces, the dancers in costumes and body paint with wild abandon like Mardi Gras in New Orleans, strings of white Christmas lights in loops along the walls, draped over the piano, the lights sweeping the dance floor and the thumping music as partners also, the surprise now for Amanda not so much the city straddling the Rio Grande but the end coming in her small Komfort Travel Trailer parked to the side of Billy’s driveway, an extension cord from her friend’s house snaking through tall trash-strewn grass and weeds. 

Death Dealing

Nights after my father has been in the woods on his day off, he knocks his muddy boots against the back steps and the wooden sound, quick and dull, always precedes his entrance into the house. My father pulls the squirrels out of the back of his hunting vest one at a time and tosses them on the newspaper spread out on the kitchen floor by my mother as soon as she heard his car in the driveway, saying as she layers the paper, Talmadge and his mess, my father tossing the squirrels on the paper, dealing dead and stiff and cold creatures instead of cards. There is no sign on most of them of having been shot down from the tops of oak trees, the hair on their tails when he arranges them in a row the only thing still lifelike about them. A beer and sharp hunting knife at hand, he settles down on a low stool and picks one up, his hand and the dead squirrel moving up and down to gauge the weight of it before he pinches up the skin and fur on the stomach and makes an incision large enough for two fingers.

Christmas Collage

The first Christmas after my father dies is rough. Dead not even a month, all the usual trappings of the season have a hollowness in them. All the good will among relatives is sincere but tinged with loss and a sense of defeat, a sense that a door has been violently flung open and something allowed in that is unspeakable—for there is not talk of remember when, no he was a good man and did the best he could for all of us, no spoken love expressed or the ache of absence, and certainly no fifty-eight was too Goddamn young to die. And when eyes do meet, the acknowledgment of feelings and knowing all things have changed comes with a slight lifting of eyebrows, a slight tightening of lips in something less than a smile.

But we carry on and avoid the obvious and eat good food and talk of inconsequential things and do what we can for my mother, the bravest one in the room. It is when the keys to the old Volkswagen my father used for work—trips to and from the docks of the Exxon plant—it is when those keys are given to Dennis, the oldest grandson, that emotions begin surfacing.

The gifts I give my mother and brothers and their wives are 25 photographs of my father, three framed collages of his life: as the only child before his brothers are born held in the arms of Papa Cothern and him next to my grandmother and all three standing in the dirt yard in front of their farmhouse; photographs of my father as a schoolboy, a freckled Mississippi Huck Finn; of him older and lanky in a basketball uniform with a ball held high over his head; one of him and my mother posed in the side yard against the Bernardo Street house; a photo in a pith helmet in the wooden bateau he built, the 10 HP purple Mercury engine on the transom pushing him up the Amite River toward his catfish lines; one of him the previous Christmas in his recliner, his jaw cocked to one side as he opens a present.

When the Christmas paper is torn on the framed collages by all at the same time, when the rips are large enough to reveal some of the photographs, the emotions come with words from choked voices and there are no dry eyes around the Christmas tree and the white tissues suddenly appearing in the hands of my mother and sister-in-laws are flags of surrender.