Tag: COliseum Theater

Lust for Kicks

Monday morning and back to the office with me this morning. I don’t feel fatigued, but I also didn’t want to get out of the warm bed or out from under my pile of blankets. But the coffee is going down easily and tastes marvelous, and the Lost Apartment is mostly clean; I didn’t finish the downstairs yesterday so there’s some touching-up still necessary tonight when I get home. I’m hoping that I won’t be too tired to do that necessary touching up. I certainly don’t want to leave it for the weekend, especially since I don’t have my work-at-home day this week since we’re having an “in-service” day so I have to come in.

Paul had a board retreat so he was out of the house for most of the afternoon and into the early evening. I worked on the kitchen and finishing the living room some, had groceries delivered, and made Greg’s Swedish Meatballs for dinner (they were superb; the alterations I made this time were the right ones). I also did some research when I was taking a break from cleaning–hurricanes, the 1970s, gay Hollywood during the days the studio system started crumbling–and also did some reading. I am pleased to report that The Hunting Wives is very well written and very different (already) from the series, which is kind of exciting. I also dipped into Shirley Jackson’s Life Among the Savages, and it staggers me how her writing style, that unique rhythm and voice she had, easily adapts from quiet horror to family humor.

I also started rereading Hurricane Season Hustle, the long-delayed Scotty book (why does it always seem to be Scotty books that get delayed?), and I have to confess that it’s actually not bad. The writing isn’t terrible and doesn’t need a lot of fixing, which is enormously pleasing. I simply have to write five or six chapters, the epilogue and prologue, and put some shine and sparkle on it. I am not so certain why I am always so down on my writing, especially in its sloppy early stages, because my low regard for it is not shared by most. I am working on not being hard on myself anymore–I certainly don’t need to prove anything anymore to anyone–and while I don’t think it’s wrong to think I can do better (because one always can), I need to be a bit kinder about it. Part of the reason I think I’m able to watch these Hurricane Katrina stories and documentaries now is because I am going to be dealing with, and exploring, Scotty’s memories of Katrina as the current hurricane is battering the Diderot House. I think the plot is kind of clever, and I am an award-winning author, after all. Is that confidence I feel? #madness.

We started watching Smoke on Apple Plus last night. It co-stars Taron Edgerton as an arson inspector, and Jurnee Smollett as a police detective assigned to work with him on two serial arsonist cases. It was created and written by Dennis Lehane (remember him? Mystic River? Of course you do.), and the first episode was interesting; both characters are complex and have a lot of issues, and the acting and writing is top notch. The show appears to be a slow burn (see what I did there?), and we are definitely down for watching more. We had an arsonist in the lower Garden District in the late 1990s; the Coliseum Theater was one of his victims as were several other houses in the neighborhood. Fire and water are the two elements that New Orleans dreads–how many “great fires” have there been here, anyway?–and maybe it is time for a novel about fires in New Orleans?

Then again, I’ve already done the Cabildo Fire. The Upstairs Lounge fire, too.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Monday, Constant Reader, and I’ll check in with you again tomorrow.

Randy Scouse Git

Tuesday morning. Huzzah! Yesterday actually turned out to be pretty good. After that initial sick feeling yesterday morning, I perked up once I ate and had some coffee and the rest of the day went beautifully. I had a great day at the day job, got everything caught up that I needed to get caught up, and so, overall, it was a great day at the office. Huzzah! I feel pretty good this morning, which is great. I slept really well, and feel rested this morning, which is all one can ask for after waking up to an alarm (I’ve never been a spring out of bed with the alarm person, as I would always rather not wake up). My COVID test yesterday morning was also negative, which was all kinds of awesome (I was worried when I didn’t feel great yesterday morning on rising). I picked up the mail on the way home, so tonight I can just come straight home after work and chill. I see blue skies out there through the branches of the crepe myrtles this morning, so probably no rain. We’re also in a heat advisory until at least seven p.m. last night.

I managed to work on the book some, so it’s not like the high-energy day I experienced at the office swirled its way down the toilet once I got home. The work went slowly, and I only managed somewhere between 300 and 500 words at best, but they were words and it was progress, so I will happily and gladly take it. My main character is slowly taking shape, as is the story, and I am adding characters to the story to flesh it out more. My New Orleans of 1994 is also taking shape in my head; the question is how accurate are my memories of the city in that year? I see some visits to the Historic New Orleans Collection are probably in order. I can’t remember, for example, what kind of store was in the building that is now Coquette at Magazine and Washington; was it hardware or paint? What was in the Starbucks building across the street from there? Where were the empty lots on Camp Street in those days? And above all else, cannot forget the Camp Street on-ramp to nowhere, which kind of looked like a modern art installation until it was torn down, and when was it torn down? When did the Coliseum Theater burn down? When did it close from showing films? (It’s the theater Brad Pitt walks out of after seeing Tequila Sunrise in the movie version of Interview with the Vampire, and when he walks out you can see the on-ramp in use, so that means it was disconnected from the highway system after the movie was filmed…) And what brand was the grocery store that was the Rouse’s on Tchoupitoulas back then? Was it a Schwegmann’s Super Center or was it a Sav-a-Center? It was both at some point, and there was also an A&P on Carrollton right after the intersection with St. Charles.

Today will be slightly easier than yesterday at the office, as I managed to get caught up on almost everything yesterday so today I have some administrative things to get done and see clients. The schedule didn’t look terribly busy when I left the office yesterday, so I should be able to get my other work done around clients. I am also trying to get my shit together still from the long years of survival-mode, and have got to make that damned to-do list. I also need to start outlining the book–what’s written, so I can easily look when I need to rather than having to reread every chapter to find something, or find out if I already said something or ensuring I am not being repetitious (which is always a problem with my manuscripts). I also figured out how to solve a problem with a story I’ve written and can’t seem to sell anywhere; the tone is wrong. I was trying to show the shift from acceptance to murderous anger in someone who is down on their luck, but it struck me last night that the shift doesn’t work, especially given what the story is about. That also means changing the opening line, which I thought was a winner, but it’s not…otherwise I would have sold the story by now. There’s a flaw I didn’t see until this past weekend, and so I have made notes in my journal and will get back to working on that story. I’ll pick a day to work on it and will shut off the novel for that one day at least. I know I am almost finished with the collection, and the revision of this story for the last time will bring the collection to almost completion. I’d like for it to be over ninety thousand words long, and I am right around eighty right now, so it needs two more stories, and I think I know what the other one will be already. Woo-hoo! Progress of a sort, any sort, is still progress.

I also got an idea for a short story to write for an anthology I’ve agreed to write a story for last night, too. It’s a Sherlock of 1916 New Orleans story, and the title I came up with, “The Adventure of the Voodoo Queen’s Necklace,” is a winner, I think. You know I’ve been trying to write a lengthy story around the destruction of Freniere in the 1915 Hurricane and Julia Brown; it occurred to me that I could set it in 1916 and write about her shortly after her death. “When I Die” is still a workable story, about desire curdling into hatred–and how that thin line between love and hate in our minds is so easily exploited by supernatural forces. Oooh, that sounds even better. Also, when I was getting home from work last night I noticed the construction on the last vacant lot on our block and it occurred to me how precisely I could write my “I hate the construction on our street” story, “Condos for Sale or Rent,” and made note of that last night as well. So…the spring of inspiration is certainly not running dry around here, I just need to force myself to actually do the writing, which…a Greg at rest tends to stay at rest, doesn’t he?

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a delightful Tuesday, Constant Reader, and I will most likely be back later.

I‘m not sure why I find beaten wrestlers lying prone in the ring so sexy, but it’s probably best left packed.

Queen of New Orleans

I am always delighted when people think I capture New Orleans perfectly in my work.

I love New Orleans, and while I, along with everyone else who lives here, reserve the right to be irritated, exasperated, and annoyed with the city–God help you if you talk shit about the city if you don’t live here (“bitch, you live in Metairie”) in front of people who do.

Trust me, it won’t end well.

I fell in love with New Orleans officially when I came here to visit for my thirty-third birthday, which was a lot of fun and probably one of the best birthday weekends of my life, if not the best one pre-Paul (we had yet to meet at that time). I do sometimes wonder when I think back to visiting, and then living, in New Orleans in the 1990’s, if there’s nostalgia involved in my memories. That New Orleans no longer exists; the flood waters from the levee failure after Hurricane Katrina ended that time with a very firm line of demarcation so that everything was thus defined ever after as before and after. There were also the post-flood years in which the city was being rebuilt and rescaled and rethought and repopulated, but it’s never been the same as it was before the flood and it never will go back to that. There was a definite sense before that New Orleans was stuck in time and nothing was going to change anything–something drastic was needed to solve all the problems. It was thought at the time that the one positive was that maybe New Orleans would rise from the ashes like the mythological phoenix; a hard reboot that could fix everything.

It didn’t. Some of the old problems remained, some of them were eliminated, and new ones arose. The streets still collapse into potholes and constantly need repair; the sidewalks still tilt and get broken up by ground subsidence and live oak tree roots. There’s always something for the locals to complain about when it comes to life and living here in New Orleans. When Paul and I first moved here all those years ago, we had no idea what we were in for–but the nice thing was it was the first place I’d ever lived where I felt like I chose it; Mom and Dad chose where I lived for most of my life. I chose Tampa over Houston, but it wasn’t from an overwhelming decision that I desperately wanted to live in Florida (I didn’t; I moved for my job). But New Orleans–New Orleans was the first place I ever visited that I wanted to live. It’s really the only place I’ve ever wanted to live, or had an opinion about, or actually felt anything for; I am a New Orleanian, and a Louisianan by extension.

It’s really beautiful here, and I thought so when we moved into this crumbling neighborhood in a decaying city whose best days looked to be past already. In the daylight the city’s scars and wounds and damage is clear; but in the night, with shadows dancing and the light limited, it was still so gorgeous it can steal your breath away–and great apartments were enormous, high-ceilinged, hardwood floored, and cheap.

1996 was a whole different world; Bill Clinton was about to be reelected, gay sex was still a crime, and “don’t ask don’t tell” didn’t solve anything; it just made the realities of being a queer in military service even more difficult. There was still the remains of the Camp Street on-ramp to the Crescent City Connection on the neutral ground on the other side of Martin Luther King Drive; the Coliseum Theater was still there–closed and shuttered, but still existing, and there was this incredibly beautiful old house that was a ruined, crumbling wreck that looked haunted and absolutely fascinated me; I wish I’d taken pictures of it. (It has obviously been renovated.) Paul and I moved into the Lower Garden District right before it’s renaissance and gentrification. We lived on the Square; the park was just outside our front door and down the walk and across the street. Coliseum Square was dark at night then; all the streetlights in the park were either shot out or burned out, and the fountains were dry and rusted. The beautiful, graceful live oaks were there, of course, resting some of their heavy branches on the grass. All the big gorgeous houses around the park were derelict and run down, gorgeous ruins waiting for a buyer with money and a love for old houses. A gay couple bought one of them and spent the next year renovating it; it’s still a stunningly beautiful house. One by one those old houses were bought up and remade–and now Jennifer Coolidge lives in a house fronting the park (she sometimes comes to our corner at St. Charles for parades during Carnival).

I always think of Scotty as kind of a gay personification of New Orleans; the two are always entwined in my brain. Uninhibited, unashamed, unabashed, and always up for a good time–you could say that easily about them both. It’s really funny that back when I created him I didn’t think there was enough story in him to be a series–and here we are, on the eve of the ninth being released. Obviously, people responded to him in the way that I wanted them to; they’ve embraced his weirdness and eccentricity, and that of New Orleans as well. I couldn’t create a character like Scotty who lived anywhere else; anywhere else he wouldn’t work, would be judged harshly and looked down on by people for his hedonistic attempts to suck all the juice out of life as he can.

And I’ll probably still be writing him when I die–which, hopefully, won’t be for a long time yet.

The Wedding Song (There Is Love)

Thursday morning and my last day in the office of the week–tomorrow I took the day off for miscellaneous appointments and things (and yes, a trip to Metairie is required, sigh) which will be nice. I don’t have to get up super-early to go, for one thing, so I can allow myself to sleep in a bit, and then I can leisurely enjoy my coffee throughout the morning before it’s time to head out there. I am also going to stop at Costco on the way back home, so it’ll be a big day for one Gregalicious. I imagine by the time I get home I will be hot, sweaty, crabby and ready to spend the evening inside with the air conditioning.

Such an exciting life I lead!

I slept really well last night–an enormously pleasant surprise, given the questionable sleep I got the previous two nights–but according to my Fitbit, it was yet another bad nights’ sleep. I am beginning to think my Fitbit doesn’t know what it’s talking about when it comes to my sleep, you know? I feel rested and a bit groggy this morning, which hopefully the coffee will take care of (fingers crossed) but I will say yesterday I felt a bit out of it for most of the day. I didn’t get nearly us much accomplished as I’d intended when I got home from the office last night–I didn’t really do much of anything, to be honest. I wrote for a little while before retiring to the easy chair, where I fell into a spiral of videos about French history, which is always fun for me. When Paul got home we watched Obi-wan Kenobi, which I am really enjoying, on-line haters be damned, and the little girl who plays Princess Leia is fantastic–it’s completely believable she would grow up into Carrie Fisher’s Princess Leia, and props to Disney Plus for pitch-perfect casting. The show is also doing a really great job of filling in some gaps in the story of Star Wars, too.

Today hopefully will be a good one. I want to get some more writing done–for whatever reason, “Never Kiss a Stranger” is finally taking shape the way I want it to, although now I am worried that its going to wind up being far too long, and far too melancholy, than I want it to be. Its a melancholy story, really, so that’s probably a really good thing, but…I don’t suppose melancholy is the right mood; I am thinking I want to go for a Daphne du Maurier tone (which I love); I don’t want to call it gothic either, but if you’ve read du Maurier you know what I mean. Hmmm, perhaps I should dip into her collection Echoes from the Macabre again, to get a better sense of what I am talking about here…that is actually a really good plan, now that I think about it.

You can never go wrong rereading du Maurier.

One thing that is interesting/kind of fun about writing this novella is that it is set in a place that no longer exists–New Orleans in 1994. I was talking to some of my younger co-workers (ha ha ha, they’re all younger now, I am the old man of the department by a LOT now) about how different New Orleans was when I moved here in 1996 than it is now; and I was thinking about that some more last night. Gentrification hadn’t really gotten started in the city yet; it was a crumbling, dying city whose glory days were in the past. The Lower Garden District was considered a bad neighborhood back in those days; we moved in just as it was started to regenerate…but there was still a crack house next door, and of course the Camp Street on-ramp to the Crescent City Connection was still there, about fifty yards of concrete climbing into the sky and just ending (if you ever watch the Brad Pitt/Tom Cruise version of Interview with the Vampire, there’s a scene when Louis–Pitt–leaves a movie theater in New Orleans that is showing Tequila Sunrise. That was the Coliseum Theatre, which was closed but still there when we moved into the neighborhood. It burned to the ground a few years later. Anyway, as Louis/Pitt walks out, the camera pans back and shows a highway on-ramp with cars going up–that was the old Camp Street on-ramp, still in use when the movie was filmed but not when we moved here two or three years after the movie’s release). I also imagine that on-ramp, when it was still connected to Highway 90, was a bitch for traffic in the neighborhood, since the bridge backs up all day now; I imagine there were times when that ramp backed up all the way down Camp to probably the Garden District. Where it was now is a lovely neutral ground that separates Camp and Coliseum Streets, beautifully designed and landscaped so it seems like a perfect extension of Coliseum Square. That’s why I want to write about that time period, when gay bars still occasionally got raided by the cops, when there were still two bathhouses in New Orleans, when many of us could only be openly gay when we went to the bars in the Quarter on the weekend, and how frenetic and wild and crazy those weekends were; all the gay bars in the Quarter were packed every weekend, and of course, deeply closeted gays from the surrounding areas–the rural parishes and Mississippi–would come into the city so they could let go and be free.

But even that wasn’t a guarantee of anything, either. Death stalked the gay bars back in those days–another reason I want to write about that time–and you couldn’t really trust the cops and sometimes it was dangerous to walk back to the lower Quarter or Marigny where you’d parked your car. There was this weird sense of being an outlaw; despite the Lawrence v. Texas decision there’s still a sodomy law on the books here in Louisiana, and once this Supreme Court gets to decide Lawrence v. Texas was wrongly decided (because make no mistake, this Supreme Court is definitely going to dial us back to 1900, and it wouldn’t surprise me if they decided to take the right to vote away from women, too), once again my sex life will become an enforceable crime in Louisiana yet again.

Sigh.

Well, writing that last paragraph certainly made me melancholy. Too bad I don’t have time to work on the novella before heading into the office. Have a great Thursday, Constant Reader! I will chat with you again tomorrow morning.