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.

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. 

An Inheritance of Images



An inheritance of images piled haphazardly

in the suitcase with worn corners,

roaches chewing their way

into the hoard of negatives and photographs,

nesting next to those images of grays

and stark whites and blacks like smudges of charcoal.

All those photographs whose tones have faded

like a pile of slippery fish losing their color,

still stored in that suitcase like random statements,

no doubt curling from the heat,

needing to be flattened and then straightened

in order of exposure like facts in a story.

The last time at the old house in Walker

I pull the suitcase from under the bed,

being brave enough to open it, finding

myself sometime later, elbows on knees,

each hand holding an irregular stack,

becoming aware in the fading light

that no one alive can date all these statements,

can over the paralyzing randomness,

the piercing stillness of these lively images.

Opening the old brown suitcase

is acknowledging long ago everydayness,

flinging open long closed doors and windows,

seeing broken fingernails along sealed cracks,

the feeling of someone approaching,

bringing years tough and septia-washed,

the creak of imagined footfalls in the hallway

like a jolt from bad wiring on a Christmas tree.

Christmas Eve, 1993



Baton Rouge General Hospital

Christmas Eve, 1993

   Jen is restless, back under the surface, finally quieting before dawn. An early morning trip home, a shower, thinking about the two hours yesterday that Jen surfaced and treaded water, looking around at all of us in the room, anxiety attacking constantly. I don’t crawl into bed like I want after showering but drop by Ronnie McCallum’s for a quick visit then on out to Laurie’s. While waiting for her before going to my mother’s, I crawl under a blanket on the couch and doze. Have to laugh when I am startled awake by the sound of an IV machine on Days of Our Lives.

   The trip out to Walker to eat gumbo and visit family while watching the kids tear open presents doesn’t last long. Not like previous all day affairs when all of us get together and spend the entire evening laughing and reminiscing only about the good times, my father feeding the dressing to the dogs, Dee and I in the yard putting a trampoline together in ten degree weather, our fingers sticking to the circular metal, trying to stretch cold springs that give only slightly; and on Christmas Eve longer ago, sometimes my father and I fish, or he, Wayne, Willie perhaps, maybe his son, Dennis, will squirrel hunt early in the morning, the mist rolling close to the ground, the anticipation of presents to come the true Christmas gift.

   Visitors all day long. Jen is much shallower, as Dr. Rogers once said, aware of all noises, movements in the room, greetings and touches from family and friends. For a few moments she emerges again, but her disoriented look which should be heartening is only heartbreaking.

Homeplace



   Today a lifelong friend visiting either for two weeks or two years posted on his blog (http://wwwscriblets-bleets.blogspot.com/2012/03/old-roots.html) about the “feeling of being lost at home” when one returns to long absent youthful haunts. As I commented on the post, not that I ever take my homeplace for granted, but there is always a sense of personal renewal and appreciation when shown and described with other eyes.

  

   Have a look at my friend’s fine writing and get a peek at the patio where friends are entertained and afternoons are spent with a cold beer and the sounds of birds and the splash of the waterfall making music to accompany thoughts both large and small.

Violent Chess



Keeping a journal during all those dark days gave me an outlet, a foundation, something to grab and weather the everyday changes that shaped everything. It was a time of life folding back in on itself, the view from the hospital window of the old neighborhood, the history there, where even Jennifer lived as a child, and the history of the hospital itself, where I was born, where family members had died. Life repeating familiar patterns and doing the best to make memory make some sense of it all—and both memory and events co-existing in the now, both alive and in a dance as one.

   Down there, below the hospital window, two streets over from Bernardo, Bill Leet lives on Wabash, near Coco Lumber Company, where among the lumber bins thousands of secret passages exist for nighttime forays: seeing how close we can sneak up to the nightwatchman, Charlie, before he discovers us; retrieving the softest wood from the scrap pile and whittling rifles and Tommy Guns for games of War, swords for stabbing the yielding trunks of banana trees, crumpling the large leaves with a single stroke; if they are out of favor with us, spying from woodpiles on Jimmy Thompson and his brother Dan (who failed an early grade and is only a year ahead of us). It is behind Bill’s house, on Park Hills, where the field lined with four oaks serves as our most serious playground. Nighttime Molatoff Cocktails (blame Jimmy for those) exploding among abandoned Christmas trees, all in the name of Battleground and Battle Cry and Battle of the Coral Sea, tend to bring adults and cops so we mostly keep to football, bloodying each other if we hit hard enough, always the dirt on jeans and shirts Glory Mud. Skills honed there serve us well when we play football for Bernard Terrace Elementary in the 5^th and 6^th grades.

   Dan Thompson talks the coach into letting me on the team after I am sick and miss tryouts. No more practice uniforms are available so I borrow pants, jersey, and helmet from friends. No shoes, most playing barefooted. I am fast if nothing else and shortly become the starting Wingback in the Single Wing formation that the Bernard Terrace Panthers utilize. We win more games than we lose, beating neighborhood friends who play for the Dufrocq Ducks. I am hell on the reverse. Ball centered to Dan at fullback instead of the quarterback, a few steps forward like he is plowing into the line, turning and handing off to me, flying around the left end, the joy of yardage gained like an elixir. It is my first taste of attention from schoolmates I don’t know. (Later it is the laughs I get at rehearsal as a smartass Wise Man in the Christmas Pageant who slyly puts his crooked staff between his legs and aims it at Mary Toups, the perfect Virgin Mary every boy in school is in love with.)

   The following year, using the T-formation, joined by classmates on the first string, the Panthers go undefeated. Bill Leet is the starting fullback and punter, coming up to me during one pregame warmup for a strategy session, asking if he should practice his punts, giving away his punting distance to the other team. I play right end and the end reverse still works. In a Jamboree game at Memorial Stadium we run the reverse five times and then Bill fakes the handoff and half of the other unblocked team comes charging through the line to smear me for a loss; just before they do I show empty hands and we all turn and watch as Bill weaves his way downfield. I run for a long touchdown but it is called back and the shortened game ends scoreless. The rest of the games we win, many of the players going on to play junior high and high school ball. Although we go out for practice in the 7^th grade a few times, Bill and I discover DRAMA, realizing football practice takes place at the same time as rehearsal, girls without pom-poms more plentiful around the stage, recognition coming without battering heads and bruising bodies.

The Five of Us

Keeping a journal during all those dark days gave me an outlet, a foundation, something to grab and weather the everyday changes that shaped everything. It was a time of life folding back in on itself, the view from the hospital window of the old neighborhood, the history there, where even Jennifer lived as a child, and the history of the hospital itself, where I was born, where family members had died. Life repeating familiar patterns and doing the best to make memory make some sense of it all—and both memory and events co-existing in the now, both alive and in a dance as one.

   My mother once tells my brother Wayne that I caught a lot more hell from my father than either he or Willie did. Oldest brother Willie is out of the house and in the Air Force in Korea at age 17, marrying Marie Reeve from Omaha while he is stationed in Nebraska. Wayne marries Peggy Cole in the late 1950’s, during LSU’s championship football season. There’s no memory of the three Cothern brothers sharing the same room, much less the same bed. Age six or seven when Willie joins up, still there should be one old faded image of how the Cothern boys share space on Bernardo Street. Wayne I remember, pulling the covers off of me while sleeping on his back, clenching sheet and blanket between his arms, wadded material in his hands, under his chin, dreaming of beaches and hula girls, the blanket tenting above him. And those thousands of school mornings we wake to the same whistled reveille. High note, low note, notes in a circle, high note, low note. Again and again until we rouse. Finally, one morning, Wayne sitting up quickly, saying, For Chrissake, Mama, can’t you just wake us up without all that whistling?

   Back then my father doesn’t drink everyday but when he does fears and frustrations and the ashes of anxiety and perhaps lost dreams fill those days with invisible clouds, tension everywhere, falling around us, and like the milk supply and the Strontium-90 scare in the 1950’s, always there, nourishing and insidiously eating away at dem bones, hoo-yeah.

Kadair's

  Below the hospital window, a short block away on the west side of Bernardo Street, on the corner of Park Hills Drive and Florida Boulevard sits the old Kadair's Camera & Records building where many of the photographs in the suitcase were developed. Forty years ago, it is the place to flip through albums of Broadway shows, Slaughter on 10th Avenue with a man posed, knees bent, one arm above his head, the other out to a dark-haired woman doing a dance split on the floor, her short black skirt bunched up around her legs. Stand and peer into glass cases at 35mm cameras with lenses pointing back at you, 8mm movie cameras with windup cranks on the side, the mysterious early Polaroid Land Camera ready to pop up and spit out instant images.

  Kadair's is part of a string of businesses along Florida Boulevard, a few blocks from the sign at South Acadian and Florida that reads:

You Are Now

Entering

Florida Boulevard's

Vibrant & Dynamic

Business District!

  Big deal. Ten blocks of squatty buildings stretching to North Foster. Beyond that there are few businesses until later, in the late 1950's, early 60's. Sears Roebuck moves from downtown to further out Florida, then the Bon Marche Shopping Center is built, considered classy but is nothing more than a large strip shopping center. Much later, further out Florida, another shopping center is constructed, this time an honest-to-goodness mall. Kadair's opens a branch store there, at Cortana Mall, and it is there in the 1970's, when the girls are young, the marriage between Dee and myself still fresh, that I go to work selling cameras for the Kadair family, for Howard Kadair, the kid working behind the counter at the original store while I pursue albums and drool over the glass camera cases.

  Looking back, our work ethic reflects the times, when so much of the 1960's still bleeds over into a laissez-faire attitude of the early 70's, a let's-party-because-the-bomb's-still-out-there syndrome. All of us at Kadair's in Cortana are young, some married, most finishing up at LSU, and we don't take shit off of anybody--especially customers who want a 35mm camera but don't know from Instamatic crap. If they are rude, we are also. If nice, hey, we wait on them. When the weather is bad--tornados buzzing about, hurricanes on the coast--the mall is home to real trailer types (as Sarah Reed calls them), folks who know the value of getting out of their tin foil homes, strolling around with fried chicken legs while the storm rages overhead. We have a Cretin-of-the-Week contest and judge the results from Polaroid pictures. Anytime one of us gets a candidate--say, a fat lady with underarm stains and torn stockings or someone with shit on his boots, feathers in his cowboy hat, and rotten teeth, or a kid with a rolled-up t-shirt and lurid tattoos or even a Japanese buying a camera from us--one of the other salesmen without a customer gets out a Polaroid and saunters over on the pretense of testing the camera. Snap. Zip. Watch it develop.

  There are boxes of Polaroids taken of each other posing and goofing off in the storeroom or drinking wine or beer we keep stashed in the refrigerator next to the VPS film. We drive customers crazy by turning the sound up and down on the bank of remote control televisions while they are watching them. The frustrated customers turn and look around, see us engaged in quiet banter, totally unaware of them. The customers turn back to the televisions, the sound magically restored just as their fingers almost touch the volume control. And of course we look at every roll of processed film that comes back from the lab.

  We have regular customers who call themselves professional photographers who shoot housewives in messy bedrooms, posing on the bed in lingerie, their fleshy legs dimpled with fat; giggling teenagers who give themselves away when they drop the film off and whose pictures show Bobby or Jimmy or Eddie driving a convertable with his dick sticking up like a floor-shift; and even one nun who takes pictures of herself in the mirror with her black dress hiked up to reveal a shaved vagina being saved for Jesus. Kadair's lab doesn't discriminate, as Sarah is fond of saying. A shaved vagina is the same as a shot of Ralph and Lulu on vacation at the Grand Canyon.

  When I quit Kadair's, I take some of the best Polaroid shots of the crew there, some of Sarah--standing at the register, ringing out the receipts at closing, one barefoot resting on top of the other, working, smiling, laughter forever caught in her eyes.

  

The Final Frontier

  In the early days of the space program, Bill Leet and I are always experimenting on lizards in the name of furthering scientific research. And once Bill’s father asks why we are torturing those animals. And we have Orville and Wilbur disbelieving looks on our faces, confused by the question of why the thrill of experiencing flight may not translate to some green lizards. After all, isn’t there a Russian dog orbiting above our heads, sending yip yips back to earth so one day Death Rays can be launched from orbit?

  Having graduated from games of Indians slaughtering Pale Face Settlers, our bows and arrows are now launchers and missles. Borrowed hankerchiefs become parachutes drooped over the point of the arrow, strings on the four corners knotted neatly on the shaft. So before the first lizard is launched into space, Bill’s bicycle is turned over on seat and handlebars, the back wheel now the Johnsville Centrifuge that will generate up to 40 g/s. Strap the first lizard down and start the back-wheel centrifuge slowly, building up to a speed where the spinning pedal is difficult to hold. Apply brakes quickly to test rapid deceleration. Look and find the first scientific principle: when placing the astronaut lizard on the centrifuge, always make sure the head of the astronaut lizard is also secured.

Settling in Baton Rouge

   A year of farming, having their first child and naming him Willie, once battling a pair of snakes using their chest-of-drawers as home, a year for W.T. at Wesson Junior College, then on to New Orleans after Onetia's sister-in-law, Zita, writes about a job for W.T. in a grocery as a butcher handling salt meat for $10 a week. At first Onetia and W.T. live on Valmont, renting from Marshall and Effie Wilson (no relation), then later, after W.T. goes to work as a regular butcher for Mr. Saniford at $15 a week, they move to Arabella, near the streetcar barn, and they are living there when Onetia miscarries their second child. They move to Willow Street and rent a place for $7 a month. Being a butcher in New Orleans, even in the tough times of the Depression, seems infinitely better than toiling in the fields under the hot Mississippi sun. Banks continue folding and over 10% of the state's population is unemployed. Onetia's brother, Dick, and his wife, Zita, transfer to the 7-Up plant in Baton Rouge. Tough times striking home for all.

   Back in Mississippi for a while, W.T. jobless after Mr. Saniford's store closes, eventually another letter from Zita arrives, again offering help in finding employment. To raise money so W.T. can go job hunting in Baton Rouge while staying at his brother-in-law's, Onetia sells her wicker furniture to W.T.'s mother for $10, then settles down with her son to wait for word from Baton Rouge.

   It is 1937, maybe a little later, when W.T. finds work at Central Tradeway, again as a butcher, working for Mr. Crespo at $30 a week. Dick and Zita and W.T make the 150 mile journey over rough roads to Mississippi, no doubt visiting relatives while there, bringing Onetia and Willie back to Baton Rouge with them. After Zita and Onetia find a small room to rent, W.T.'s father gets permission to cross the Mississippi state line with a borrowed schoolbus, carting their furniture (minus the wicker set) to their place on Government Street. They settle in for a while, then find a house on Flowerdale Lane, where a second child is born, Wayne, and after a time to help with expenses, renting their front room to a woman and her two children.

   During the next couple of years, their family growing, Onetia and W.T. move to Istrouma Avenue (which later becomes Capital Heights Avenue) before buying a piece of property of their own for $250. Even with the approaching world war, life seems fine; a steady job for W.T., friendly, helpful relatives in the same town, other family within driving distance, two healthy sons, a small piece of the earth of their own.

   It is 1941 when W.T.'s father and another man, perhaps named Hemphill, with materials purchased from Currie Lumber Company, build a small house, on the small lot, on Bernardo Street in Lofaso Town, Lot #48, Square #3, two short blocks from the Baton Rouge General Hospital, where a third son, Raymond, is born in January of 1945.

Catholic Girls Not Starting Too Late

   Unlike Dee, growing up, moving eight or ten times with her mother and two brothers, moving so often that I joke during high school about dropping her off after school one afternoon, going the next morning to pick her up and the neighbors saying, Oh, the Eislers? . . . They moved to another house last night, unlike Dee I know only the Bernardo Street house, the garage behind it, know only the security of sameness of the neighborhood: the Silvio house next door, old man Silvio's vegetable garden and the mums he grows for All Saints Day, the Parent house on the other side and those daughters of all ages, Marlene, Evelyn, Claudette, as interested in things mysterious as a skinny-legged boy browned by the summer sun, the Calvaruso house two doors down, Shirley Calvaruso, always a bit overweight and a little self-conscious about it but available one summer for holding hands and experimental kisses. Catholics to the north of us, Catholics to the south and west, Catholic families with brave Catholic daughters, willing for garage games: House, Doctor, Spin-the-Bottle.

Swimming Underwater / Chapter One / The View

   The view from the hospital window is of the old neighborhood, experiencing the past as present. Rooftops and trees along Bernardo Street two short blocks away. Where it intersects on the south with Florida Boulevard its lane-like narrowness is apparent. Ten houses squeezed along its length and there's North Street and beyond that Roselawn Cemetery. There are whispered lies long ago of ruthless blacks digging up new graves for valuable rings, but strolling through the headstones forty years ago, reading inscriptions and calculating the time between the chiseled dates, there is rarely fresh dirt, just weeds and plastic flowers bleached white by the sun.

   The house on Bernardo is still there in memory. Where I grow up. Where, later, Dee and I raise our daughters. Although now among oaks on a few acres 17 miles east in Walker, Louisiana, moved years ago after my father died, the house still resides a short distance from the hospital, a simple frame design built in 1941 by my father and his father, Papa Cothern. Two bedrooms, front and back porches, kitchen, living room, one bathroom. The table in the kitchen is there also, in that phantom house on Bernardo, a reminder of a time when family and food are still linked, when meals are markers of everydayness; chrome, tubular legs, formica top, 1950's to the max, the surface of the table bears its history in nicks and mars and scars from countless gatherings: field peas and okra and tomatoes and corn and butterbeans and summer squash and hot dishes of black-eyed peas that slip off the crocheted table pads and darken the polished surface, boiled crabs, platters of fried chicken and bream and bass and rabbit and squirrel and crawfish tails, bowls of strawberries and milk from Louisiana Creamery left on the doorstep before dawn, lemon and egg and coconut and apple and cherry pies.

   But there is other food as well, different: fried squirrel heads cracked with a tablespoon, tiny white brains scooped out. sardine sandwiches on mustard bread, butter and sugar sandwiches, fried Spam sandwiches loaded with mayonaise, Vienna sausages and its petroleum-like gelatine.

   And then there are the holdiays as land mines.

   The entire pot of soupy cornbread dressing before stuffing the turkey sitting on the table, father, three sheets to the seasonal wind, taking it, feeding it to the dogs, saying, Well, Goddamn, that son'bitching squirrel dog dove straight into that stuff.

   On the 4th of July, folded towels on the kitchen table under buckets of homemade ice-cream and fireworks in the backyard, the lighted punks like fireflies in the evening air; the holiday turkey and ducks and hams and enough pitchers of ice tea and lemonade to dot the table like sentinels; more food at Christmas and, glancing from the kitchen into the small living room, presents spilling downward on both sides of the tree in an avalanche of foil wrap and curly ribbons of green and red and gold, carols of goodwill and sentimental journeys trumpeting from WWL in New Orleans while my parents argue silently with each other through the doorway, my mother in the kitchen, frowning, getting back a disapproving tilt of the head from my father in the living room, his recliner upright, the air of seasonal generosity around them electrically charged with potential arguments like explosive coal dust in a mine or chaff in a silo.

   Once, long ago and late at night, peering into the kitchen from another doorway, brother Wayne's head above mine, one eye each to the crack in the bedroom door, mouths rounded in astonishment, father smashing every plate, saucer, cup, whatever, in a raging windmill approach, jagged pieces of china like the broken oyster shells of the driveway covering the floor entirely, surrounding table and chair legs and the soles of mother's shoes. The image remains, not what is being shouted by father or the placating words from mother, but the sight of her hands, open, palms toward him, an image not of exposed silver grains on paper stored in the brown suitcase with other photographs, but one of memory, not subject to yellowing or the septia wash of time.

(Chapter One to be continued.)