I was more startled than anything else, to be completely honest. I had an appointment at 11:30 at the CVS on the corner of Magazine and Louisiana (where the Blockbuster was when we used to rent movies and TV shows on video or DVD) to get my new COVID booster. I made another stop on the way there, to pick up a prescription, and then headed over to Louisiana Avenue for my shot. I had actually never been inside that particular CVS (the one on Prytania is only a few blocks from the mail service and thus more convenient for me to go to), and it’s actually a nice place. So, I checked in for my appointment, and when I was directed to the privacy screen for my shot, this incredibly lovely young man in his early twenties got in the Pharmacy line. Our eyes met, and tilted his head to one side as he smiled, and I thought, as I sat down and the pharmacist closed the screen, I thought, was he cruising me? As I sat there, I thought nah, way too young and besides, I look like shit. I got the shot, which I didn’t feel (shoulder was sore later on in the evening, though; still is a bit this morning), and as I rose to go, the guy was still in line and gave me the same look, only along with the eyes up and down first, and he was indeed cruising me. I kind of laughed to myself as I walked out to my car–I would have definitely pursued this when I was younger–and remembered again how oblivious I am to that sort of thing outside of gay bars. I always was. It never occurred to me that people might cruise me in public spaces that weren’t exclusively queer; friends had to tell me all the time, “That guy was cruising you!” It certainly isn’t anything I’ve even thought about for years, so it was definitely a compliment and I couldn’t help but laugh at myself as I shook my head and started the car, “you know, some younger men like older men, dumbass.”
So, if anyone is ageist, it’s me!
Yesterday, outside of the shot and some other errands I ran, was a lazy day for me. I didn’t do a whole lot of anything; I scribbled in my journal some but the book is beginning to take shape, which is lovely. I pretty much spent the entire day cuddling or playing with Sparky while watching college football games. It was delightful seeing Georgia humiliate Clemson and Miami annihilate Florida, and Texas A&M gave Notre Dame a scare last night. Tonight LSU plays USC in Las Vegas (GEAUX TIGERS!) and we’ll get a better sense of how good this year’s edition of the Tigers are. And Tulane won big, too! We haven’t won a season opener since Joe Burrow graduated (2019 season), so hopefully that will change this year. I think I am going to do a lot of nothing today, too–I’m going to clean the house and write for a while since the game isn’t until tonight–which feels good. I slept super late again this morning and have to think my body needed the rest. I feel good this morning, the coffee is hitting and I don’t feel tired or sore physically (other than the aching shoulder from the booster yesterday), and that way if I can get everything cleaned up, organized and filed today gives me tomorrow to run to the grocery store and write.
I did bite the bullet and renewed the digital version of the Times-Picayune, despite the paper’s descent into a MAGA propaganda machine. I need to be able to read the state and local news, and much as I love local independent reporting, they don’t have the capability to cover Louisiana/New Orleans like Louisiana Sedition can. And I am leaning, more and more, into the concept of writing environmental crime stories so outsides can see what is going on here in Project 2025 Land. I am absolutely fascinated now by the Devil’s Swamp Lake superfund site just north of Baton Rouge, and I’m also researching a short story called “The Haunted Bridge”1, which is over Bayou Tortue (sometimes referred to as “Bayou Torture” on some websites I’ve seen; which is also a good title), and has a ghost story about a young woman whose prom date raped and murdered her on the bridge and threw the body into the bayou; that could be fun to write. God, it’s so nice to be excited about writing again and being creatively engaged.
Oh, and congratulations to everyone who won awards for their crime writing this weekend at Bouchercon–Barrys, Anthonys, and Macavitys all! We didn’t win for School of Hard Knox, but the nomination in and of itself was a lovely thing. It was my eighth (!!!!) Anthony nomination, which is pretty amazing, I think. I’m definitely the most nominated queer at the Anthonys! And we did have a queer winner last night; Kristopher Zgorski shared the Best Short Story Anthony with co-writer Dru Ann Love, which is awesome. Yay for Dru and Kris! They do so much for crime writers, and it’s fun to see them getting started as crime writers themselves, and getting recognition of their own.
It does look like it’s going to rain today–we didn’t get hardly any yesterday, or maybe I’m confusing yesterday and Friday; it’s entirely possible. And this kitchen is an absolute disaster area this morning, so I’d best get going on getting things cleaned up around here so I can do some writing. Have a great Sunday, Constant Reader, and I may be back later.
Screenshot
Yes, that’s a Nancy Drew title, and it fits two stories I want to write about–the one mentioned here and the Murder Bridge outside Emporia, Kansas. ↩︎
Wednesday and it’s Pay the Bills Day again! Woo-hoo! I didn’t sleep through the night–getting up a couple of times, but I feel rested and fine this morning. Go figure. I hit a wall again yesterday afternoon, and was very tired when I got home last night. I did have my Sparky time, collapsing into my easy chair and getting caught up on the news; he expects this time now, because I’ve trained him to expect that after I get home and he gets fed–just like he tries to wake me up every morning at six on the days I don’t have to get up. Friday I have to go to Quest to get labs drawn at seven in the morning, and I also have a department meeting that morning as well, so I’ll roll out of bed and stumble, bleary-eyed, to Quest, then come back home and swill coffee and get cleaned up to head into the office (since I am already there, I am just going to do my hours at the office rather than coming back home to do work-at-home duties.
We started watching The Decameron last night before giving up after the second episode. It’s a great idea and I love that they made a show about one of the great classics of history, but it just doesn’t really deliver completely. There were some great moments, and it might get better, and I also see why they made it; a bubonic plague show, after the pandemic? But it just wasn’t engaging in the way I would have preferred, so we watched an episode of Evil, which we’d been watching before the Olympics and had forgotten about. But it’s kind of a fun show–a religious X-Files, basically–and it’s engaging.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my own work–probably because I’m not really doing any of it at the moment–and why I write it and what can I do about the dumpster fire the world is turning into. I’ve mentioned here several times how much I wished we had a Louisiana John D. MacDonald type writer, addressing the exploitation of Florida and the environmental damage that exploitation hath wrought on the state (Condominium is a great book about greedy developers and corrupt politicians), and originally I always was thinking someone else would be better to do it than me. But…that’s really laziness on my part, because studying the ecological disaster Louisiana has become (with no bottom to the disaster in sight, especially given what we have in Baton Rouge now) was a lot of work. I’ve always wanted to address the situation in Cancer Alley1, which is a stain on the nation. Those communities are mostly black and completely poor, so you can imagine how much our politicians–including those representing those parishes–care about them. It is a disgrace.
And that’s not even taking into consideration the erosion of the wetlands, making Louisiana at even higher risk of disaster during hurricane season (which we are in right now).
And given what we are dealing with in terms of political leadership these days (Project 2025 is already here), someone needs to start talking about this stuff.
Why not me? Although I suppose it would mean resubscribing to the MAGA Times-Picayune again, which totally sucks. Heavy heaving sigh. Can anyone be a local crime writer without reading the local paper? Probably not, so I might as well bite the damned bullet and get back on that train at some point. I hate having to compromise my principles. But I also don’t have to enjoy it, do it? And with football season on the horizon, sigh. Their coverage of LSU, Tulane2, and the Saints is really the best. Sigh. I’ll just donate the same amount to the Harris campaign.
And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Wednesday, Constant Reader, and I may be back later; stranger things have happened.
“Cancer Alley” is the eighty-two mile section of the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, with a ridiculous amount of petrochemical plants and refineries in the poorer parishes, where the rate of cancer is insanely high and everyone knows it’s the factories poisoning everyone, but no one ever does anything about it. It is Louisiana’s shame, frankly. ↩︎
Bring back that lovin’ feeling now it’s gone, gone, gone….
One of the worst things about being a writer with a very vivid imagination is that I often think I’ve written more of a short story than I have, and inevitably am a little shocked when I open the most recent draft of the story and what I remember writing isn’t there…and then it hits me that I either thought the story through until that point, or I scribbled ideas for it in my journal…so that gradually morphed into oh I never did write that scene/story/ending. I then sigh in disgust at past Greg for not actually writing it into the story itself and then try to remember what I can of it as I try transcribing it. The loss of my short term memory also plays a relatively large role in this madness, too. Can you guess why I am mentioning that this morning? Yep, this was the case when I looked up two short stories to add to my collection; I was trying to decide which stories I have unfinished that just needed a revision and I thought I was there with several more stories than I clearly was when I looked at them last night.
One of the ghastly things for me about being a writer is thinking I’ve written something when I actually haven’t. I was tired yesterday when I got home from work; I hit the wall at some point in the afternoon, so I succumbed to Sparky’s demands and let him cuddle with me in the easy chair when I got home from work. Paul worked at home yesterday, so when he came down we watch John Oliver and then finished Dirty Pop, the Lou Pearlman documentary. It did feel weird not having the Olympics to watch, but this is that fallow two weeks or so between the Olympics and college football getting started. Has the NFL preseason started? I am terrible about that, but since I no longer (refuse to) pay for the Times-Picayune (a ringing endorsement for the red candidate from their editorial board was the final nail in that coffin once and for all) it’s harder to remember about the Saints. I shouldn’t be surprised; the billionaire who bought the paper also is a dyed-in-the-wool Republican who ran for governor back in the day. Maybe I am wrong, but I don’t remember the paper being slanted so heavily to the right back in the day. Anyway, there’s certainly no excuse for me to not get a lot done this weekend other than laziness….and laziness isn’t necessarily a bad thing, either; I think it’s your body telling your mind to rest. I also have a four day weekend this weekend for my birthday, so that should be really nice. I suppose I should make a to-do list of projects to work on for those four day–definitely taking books to the library sale will be number one on the list.
I did sleep really well and got up pretty easily this morning. I’m still in that I could fall asleep again if I went back to bed stage, but the body is starting to awaken and my mind is feeling sharp. I hope I don’t get tired this afternoon the way I did yesterday, but I don’t really have any control over that. It didn’t, in fact, rain yesterday as was promised; it’s possible again today as well and we’re hitting a heat index of 112. Yay. It didn’t seem so bad yesterday as I drove home, picking up the mail on the way. I’m still listening to the podcast My Dad Wrote a Porno, which makes me laugh multiple times in the car; it’s attempt at being sexy and provocative laughably bad, and their reactions to Belinda Blinked are hilarious. There’s many seasons of this, so I should be set for listening in the car for quite some time. I just haven’t been in the mood to listen to music lately while driving, which is unusual. I’m just tired of all my playlists and albums on Spotify, and I’m so disconnected from what is popular music that I have no idea what everyone is listening to these days, and odds are I wouldn’t care for it if I did. (The first time I heard something popular and thought what the fuck is wrong with kids today was when I was in my thirties…so yes, I’ve been a cranky old man shaking his fists at the clouds for thirty years)
One of the things I have been doing in the evenings is paging through a book I read several years ago called Weimar Culture: The Outside as Insider by Peter Gay (I’ve had Weimar Germany on my mind since about 2015 or so) and it got me to start thinking about my work as art, and its place in the overall world of queer art and literature. I don’t think students of queer literature in the future will be reading and/or studying any of my work, by any means; I think the only thing I have going for me is being prolific and producing a lot of work. I think there are many queer crime writers whose work would be seen as more influential and of more literary and artistic value than mine–Michael Nava, J. M. Redmann, Ellen Hart, Kelly J. Ford, Lev Rosen, Christa Faust, Margot Douahy and John Copenhaver, just off the top of my head, are far more likely to make up the reading list for a Queer Crime Lit class. We really do have some amazing queer crime writers out there currently and some pretty amazing ones in the past. I was thinking about writing about queer crime and its giants, but as a queer crime writer myself the possibilities for giving offense are simply too great for me to even attempt such a thing. I also haven’t read every queer or queer-oriented crime novel, either, so it would hardly be definitive, like Michael Bronski’s Pulp Friction. Besides, I’m hardly an academic; that kind of writing isn’t really my style. I admire it, wish it was a voice and style I could slip into comfortably, but it’s really not.
I would, at some point, like to engage in scholarship. Maybe after I retire. Maybe I could take an on-line class on literature and/or one on writing essays. So many potentialities, so many possibilities…kind of nice.
And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Tuesday, Constant Reader and one never knows; I may be back later.
Wednesday and we’ve made it to mid-week, Constant Reader. Huzzah? Huzzah indeed. The weird vibe of the week continued through yesterday–everyone at the office seemed to be a bit off-balance too, and I am not entirely sure what this week’s weirdness is actually all about. But I got some things taken care of–rescheduling my doctor’s appointment, picking up a delayed prescription, and some other annoyances (for the record, I hate having to make phone calls and yesterday required several of them). But day job duties will be all caught up today before I leave to come home, and so I won’t have a lot of catching up to do when I return from my trip. It also occurred to me last night that of course my own vibe is off this week–the trip is looming in my subconscious, but it’ll be nice, ultimately.
Last night I was okay when I got home from work. I did some laundry and worked on the neverending sink full of dishes, which has been particularly annoyingly Sisyphean lately. I did some more research last night, and also stumbled on a peculiar unsolved murder/accidental death of a nineteen year old named Noah Pesgrove, from last September in Oklahoma. It’s an interesting case, involving a four day birthday party (!!!), obviously lots of drugs and alcohol, and then his body was found about a mile away, naked other than a pair of mismatched shoes. It really sounds like a drunken accident, like he fell out of the back of a truck bed and landed on the back of his head. But the other injuries are strange, as is the fact the body was found curled into a fetal position and covered with a bloody tarp. This is the kind of thing that could have easily happened any number of times when I was in high school in Kansas (I never was invited to these kinds of parties, ever, at either high school–which was probably a good thing) which of course made me think some more. I’ve already written one horrific short story about a high school murder at a party, so is writing another simply repeating myself? And why do I always revert to young people when I have these ideas? Shouldn’t I be writing about older gay men now?
I’ve also been thinking a lot about my career lately, and trying not to look at it in a mostly negative way, which is par for the course. I’ve never really had a plan for my career, with established ambitious goals and so forth to work towards. I did have a plan back in the early days, but Katrina’s floodwaters washed that all away, and so I’ve kind of been moving forward a little blindly, mostly focusing on what I wanted to write without any thoughts to any kind of cohesive career path forward, which is unfortunate. Then again, I rarely plan for the future in any meaningful kind of way, either–but that’s pretty fucking obvious, isn’t it? I’ve always pretty much, since Katrina, written what I wanted to or what I was asked to write (with a cash offer) without any thoughts about how that particular book might advance my career in a more-upward fashion. I never established myself firmly as any kind of writer–although I suppose I am mostly known as a crime writer, and I’ve pretty much always stuck to that kind of novel, even if some of them are a stretch. Some are borderline supernatural on top of the crime, but other than that and the occasional outright horror story, I’ve mostly focused on crime. I have any number of book and story ideas that are neither, but I never try to pursue writing those. Maybe I should? I always think that my short stories are really where I get to play with voice and pacing and style, and each one usually teaches me a little something more, gives me another insight on how to make my writing even stronger.
I also stumbled over some local assholes posting on social media about the Tulane protests, spearheaded by some trashy local bitch who claims to work for the Times-Picayune, so I started collecting screen shots for the formal complaint I intend to file with the paper’s management. Among her marvelous posts were demanding to know why no one is investigating the “protestors aren’t students” (um, you’re supposedly a journalist, ma’am, maybe put your fucking phone down and investigate) because she “knows what Tulane students look like (???1)” and “Tulane’s students are studying for finals so their parents can take them to Europe for the summer” and other horrific, bitchy commentary that was completely unworthy of any adult sentient adult who’s not a puppy-killer like Kristi Noem. Reading her and the approving responses to her bigoted bitchiness literally made me shake with rage…and then I realized bitch I write crime fiction–prepare to die in a book and I realized, Scotty’s nephew goes to Tulane…hmmm. And of course, our governor is very busy turning Louisiana into Gilead, and we have no recourse. Our Supreme Court is racist garbage and will rubberstamp anything Landry signs into law, and we certainly have no recourse with the US Supreme Court, which makes ours look positively progressive.
Maybe that’s my metier for the future; writing about how the Republican Party is taking Louisiana back to 1850. Come on, Landry, flame out like Jindal did.
And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely day Constant Reader, and I may be back later.
Typical Uptown white bitch shit right here, am I right? What exactly does a Tulane student look like, because I’ve worked with any number of Tulane graduates, and I can tell 1. their parents weren’t rich and 2. they did not fucking look alike in any way, shape of form, you miserable bitch. So, since she “knows” what a Tulane student looks like, let me share with you what an Uptown white bitch looks like: tennis skirt or yoga pants, a sleeveless blouse, bleached hair and bad lip fillers, make-up designed to repel from forty yards, driving an expensive white SUV with a diamond tennis bracelet at her wrist, holding her phone in one hand and a Starbucks cup in the other while she goes through lights and stop signs obliviously, with an overwhelming Karenish narcissism and a complete refusal to realize or recognize there are other drivers. ↩︎
Sunday morning in the Lost Apartment and how the hell are you, Constant Reader? I slept super well last night–much better than Friday night, which felt really great–and am a-rarin’ to go this morning. Yesterday was a good day, frankly and surprisingly. I woke feeling rested and well, managed to get some things going in the morning, and kept getting things done for most of the day. I also took it a little easier than I usually do, resting and relaxing for a bit before getting up again to do something else. Thus I managed to get some things accomplished.
After doing some kitchen organizing yesterday (and filing), I started going through that box of clippings and magazine copies, to better organize them in another box, and found all kinds of things that are marvelous. I’ll do some scanning today, so that there’s an electronic version of everything preserved for all time. The Queer Crime Writers group has expressed some interest in archiving some of the articles and reviews of crime authors and their books…it was funny, but it’s been a long time since I looked at those old issues of Lambda Book Report, and while I am still proud of them, it’s been long enough that I can look at them critically and see the mistakes and flaws and so forth. It was also kind of interesting because I forgot, for one thing, that I interviewed Margaret Cho for Lambda Book Report, or that Paul used to do author interviews, and so forth. It was kind of cool experiencing the nostalgia of seeing them, or the old Saints & Sinners programs from the first years, when I had to do the layout and design for them (which is why they all look so amateur hour) but I also used to do that for Lambda Book Report too. There were also clippings from other gay papers, including the local IMPACT News which then became Southern Voice-New Orleans before folding completely, the Times-Picayune, Gambit, and St. Charles magazine. It’s hard to believe, really, that I’ve been in and around the publishing business for as long as I have. It’s also kind of eerie. I’m trying not to be a cliché, but seriously, where did the time go?
I also walked to the Office Depot during the afternoon rainstorm yesterday to get ink for the printer and some notepads. I live for the 5 x 7 legal pads, and I’ve been down to my last one for quite some time, which inevitably throws me a bit off-balance, as I use them for everything, from grocery lists to “what to do today” lists” and making notes to myself to remind myself of things. I just feel better knowing there are eleven notepads in the cabinet, next to two blank journals, for me to use if and when I need one again. It’s odd how comforting that knowledge is, so it’s clearly one of my (many) neuroses.
I also started watching a true crime series on Hulu–Paul was meeting a friend for dinner and drinks last night, so I was left to my own devices–about Billy Milligan, a serial rapist who had dissociative identity disorder at a time when not much was known a bout it; many people to this day don’t believe Milligan actually had the disorder, but was simply a very good actor (The Crowded Room series on Apple Plus is based on his story), but I stopped watching by the fourth episode. Do I believe DID is a thing? Sure, why not? Even if the Sybil case turned out to be a fraud, I do think the mind is capable of splintering like that when faced with a horrific trauma; ironically, this illness was depicted beautifully over the years for Victoria Lord on One Life to Live (winning her portrayer, Erika Slezak, a ridiculous amount of daytime Emmys over the years); it began when first shown as part of the melodrama with some research done into it; as more information about it became available and more studies were done, that was also explored over the years as it reoccurred, finally culminating with the truth that she was molested by her father–that was the initial trauma that shattered her mind. I’d like to write about this sometime myself, because it’s interesting to me, but it would take a lot of research because I’d want to do it right, you know?
I got a lovely compliment on a story I contributed to an anthology yesterday, which was unexpected and lovely–especially since I hadn’t felt confident about the story when I sent it in. It’s another Alabama story, which makes me happy, and I pulled up the electronic last version I had with me here at the house and…it’s full of mistakes. I just hope that wasn’t the version I sent in. But it’s a story I wrote a long time ago, based in some sort of reality. When we used to visit Alabama in the summer time, my aunt and uncle lived in the county seat in a nice brick one-story three bedroom house whose back yard gently sloped, gradually ending in what my cousins (and everyone) just called “the ditch.” I never really knew how it was created or where it came from–in the story I referred to it as a branch of the river that was dammed up and so it dried up–but it was about twenty feet wide and fifteen foot deep; and the bottom was just as I described it–littered with rusting cans and broken glass and other debris. But it was also cool down there as it was completely shaded by all the trees lining the sides (that’s what gave me the idea that it may have been a branch of the river; it does kind of look the shores of a river); there was also a path from the back of the house to an ancient wooden footbridge to cross to the other side. I wrote the story “The Ditch” originally years ago, I think possibly for a Horror Writers Association anthology, and it was rejected. I liked the story but knew it needed more work, and when I dragged it out to use for this anthology I did a strong revision. It is a much better story now than it was, but please God, tell me I didn’t turn in this error-riddled version. More on that anthology as it develops.
I also made a list of things I need to get done today (yay for little legal pads!) and am feeling pretty good about everything this morning. It really is amazing what a difference sleep makes, isn’t it? I woke up early this morning, am enjoying my morning coffee, and I finally feel like I am part of my own reality again (it always takes a while for me to readjust to my normal daily routine). I also have some writing and reading to do today, and I hope to get to work on the page proofs either today or sometime this week.
And on that note, I am heading back into the spice mines. Have a lovely day, Constant Reader, and I’ll check in again at some point, no doubt.
I’ve told this story any number of times; how the writing of the book was derailed by two awful things that happened in my life, and how I finally got back to writing again in the spring of 2005, managing to finish this and turn it into literally two or three weeks before Hurricane Katrina came barreling ashore and changed everything in my life, and the long recovery time from that paradigm shift, trying to adjust to the new reality I was facing every day. It felt weird going over the copy edits, weirder still doing the page proofs (I actually had the incredibly sharp-eyed Becky Cochrane and Timothy J. Lambert do it for me while I was visiting the Compound, thanks again, guys!), and even stranger having to tour and promote a book about New Orleans set before Katrina while still dealing with the recovery.
I’ve told those stories before, and that isn’t really what these entries are about; these entries are about the books themselves and how I came up with the stories and so forth, and the writing of the books. The primary problem, of course, is that I wrote this book between and around tragedies; the two year period I call the Time of Troubles that began on Memorial Day weekend in 2004 and ran through about 2008, really; because that’s about how long it took after all those issues for me to feel like my feet were beneath me again and I once again had a grasp on my life. I don’t remember what the original story was about, other than it centered on the Krewe of Iris, Scotty’s Diderot grandmother’s best friend who’d married a much younger muscle-stud Russian, and that’s really about it. The Russian would have something to do with a Colin case–and it would turn out actually be the case that brought him undercover to New Orleans in the first place during Southern Decadence; in Jackson Square Jazz we find out what Colin’s real job is, and that he was in town originally about the Napoleon death mask–but he was also in town to keep an eye on the young muscle-stud Russian who’d married Scotty’s grandmother’s best friend. It wasn’t really working, and I didn’t much care for the story, to be honest; I’d already asked for an extension before Memorial Day weekend in 2004 when all the shit started happening; after Paul was attacked they took it off the schedule and told me not to worry about it. (I appreciated the courtesy greatly at the time, but at the same time had this sinking feeling in the back of my head uh oh, they may not want another one after this–which turned out to be correct. But I dismissed the fear as part of my on-going struggle with Imposter Syndrome. It took me about six months, more or less, to get back to writing. I started my blog right after Christmas that year, and there I was writing every day again, and by January of 2005 I was ready to get going on this book again. I remember rereading everything I’d already done, not liking it, and deciding to scrap it and start over with the same essential premise: rich older society woman in New Orleans has married a much younger Russian boy-toy; Colin is investigating the boy-toy; and it’s Carnival season. Shortly after getting about halfway into a new first draft, the Virginia thing happened and I was derailed again. After that was over and I went back to the book…once again I didn’t like what was happening in the story and I threw it all out and started over again.
But this time, I hit my stride and four months later I turned the book in at long last, along with a proposal for a fourth, Hurricane Party Hustle, which was going to be set during an evacuation and would wrap up the loose ends left at the end of Mardi Gras Mambo.
And of course, three weeks later Katrina changed everything, and Hurricane Party Hustle went into the drawer.
Last night I dreamed it was Mardi Gras again. It seemed to me I was standing inside an iron gate, watching one of the night parades go by. The sidewalks in front of the gate were crowded with people, all shouting, with their grasping eager hands up in the air. Out beyond the edge of the curb, I could see people sitting in lawn chairs. Still others were up on ladders, with coolers and plastic bags of booty piled around them on the ground. Fathers and mothers were holding up babies, while black kids with the crotches of their pants down around their knees walked behind the crowd, weighted down by the ropes of beads around their necks. Beads were flying through the air, some getting caught and tangled in the branches of the towering gnarled oaks lining the avenue. The heavy upper branches of those oaks also blocked out the glow of the ancient street lamps so the night seemed even darker than it should. I could hear a marching band, playing a recent hip-hop hit, and the strange clicking sound of the baton girls’ tap shoes on the pavement. The air was heavy with the heavy fragrance of hot grease, corn dogs and the strange melted yellowish-orangey substance the vendors put on nachos that purports to be cheese—but no one is really sure what it is. A group of flambeaux carriers were passing by, dancing that odd little circular dance they do, their propane tanks popping and hissing, throwing long and twisted shadows that also danced inside the iron fence I was behind. Right behind them a huge float pulled by a tractor was coming and the crowd’s shouts became louder, more desperate, more pleading. On the float’s front was a huge white clown face, its bright red lips parted in what passed for a smile but seemed to me to be a frightening leer. The masks on the float riders glowed supernaturally at the hordes begging them for generosity in the strange light cast by the moon when it cleared the thick clouds in the cold night sky. I stood inside the black iron fence, my arms wrapped around me against the cold as an increased sense of menace and dread built inside me. Something bad was going to happen—
Oh, get real, Scotty!
If I do have bad dreams, I don’t remember them when I wake up. I’ve certainly never been troubled in my sleep, even though crazy things always seem to happen to me. I’m just one of those people, I guess. For whatever reason, the Goddess has decided to throw some wild stuff at me—she always has, even when I was a kid—and what can you do? I just don’t think I am one of those people who were destined to have a nice, normal, quiet life. Maybe it’s because I was named Milton Bradley at birth. Yes, that’s right. Milton Bradley. My older brother started calling me by my middle name, Scotty, before I started school and thank the Goddess, it stuck. Can you imagine how cruel the kids would have been to someone named Milton, let alone Milton Bradley? And then of course there’s the gay thing. I was lucky—my parents are pretty liberal and were delighted to have a gay son—like it somehow proved how truly cool they really are or something. They are pretty cool, actually.
By now, I’d taken to starting all of my New Orleans novels with a Tennessee Williams quote; for this one I chose a line from Vieux Carré: “You’ve got a lot to learn about life in the Quarter.”
I had opened Bourbon Street Blues with a parody of “The name’s Bond, James Bond” and I’d done something similar with Jackson Square Jazz–“Danger is my middle name”, riffing on Trouble is My Business. I decided to open this book with a parody of the opening line of Rebecca: “Last night I dreamed I went to Mardi Gras again.” But that entire opening paragraph of du Maurier’s is so fucking brilliant, I couldn’t help myself and made my entire first paragraph a parody of that opening. I then decided that from then forward, every Scotty book would have a Williams quote and each prologue–where Scotty introduces himself and his cast of characters and gives backstory so I don’t have to do it in the text of the story itself–would parody the opening paragraph of a famous novel, rather than just the first line (I am actually struggling to find the proper opening to parody to start the prologue for this one. I’ve used Rebecca, Peyton Place, The Haunting of Hill House, and Lolita, among others so far already; I’ve tried with this one to use An American Tragedy, Atlas Shrugged and The Great Gatsby thus far, with no luck. I’ve tried Valley of the Dolls several times for other books in the series already, but I can’t ever get it to work for me).
I do remember that the one thing that didn’t come across in those earlier drafts that I had abandoned was the sense of insanity that Carnival always brings with it; that feeling of “controlled anarchy” we experience those two weeks of parades, of knowing you have to schedule your entire life around a parade schedule–true even for those who do not live inside the box, as we say here; the box being the Uptown parade route–I always have to schedule my job, my trips to run errands uptown, everything, predicated around having to get home at least two hours before the parades start, and am incredibly lucky if I can get a parking spot within three blocks of the Lost Apartment. The thing I kept forgetting in those earlier versions was the books are meant to be fun. Granted, I was hardly in a mental space to write something fun…and of course the decision to really take it completely over the top the way I did was something I still think about to this day and wonder, where on earth did you get the idea for identical triplets?
Which, while crazy, made more sense than the cloning story I tried to write the second time.
Maybe those bad things happened for a reason? Because I couldn’t be more pleased with how the story and the book turned out. I also ran out of room to finish the personal story…but I also was operating on the assumption I’d get a contract for a fourth book. If not for Katrina, Kensington might have made another offer and Hurricane Party Hustle might have been the fourth Scotty than something just sitting in the files.
The book was released on Fat Tuesday, 2006. Paul and I had been out of town–the truncated Carnival/parade season seemed almost too sad to handle, so we’d accepted a gig to speak at the South Carolina Book Festival. We flew back to New Orleans the Sunday morning before Fat Tuesday. I’d checked my email that morning before boarding the flight to Atlanta (we changed planes) and then our cab driver couldn’t get closer to St. Charles than Baronne Street. A parade was going as we got out of the car, and we had to cross the parade (it was in the high seventies and sunny) with our luggage–I’ll never forget looking up as we got ready to cross and catching a bag of beads with my hand just before it connected with my face–and got home. I checked my emails and my word! SO MANY EMAILS.
You see, that day’s edition of the Times-Picayune carried Susan Larson’s review of the book, and it was a rave! Everyone emailed me as soon as they saw it–I still bask in the glory of that review–and I was about to embark on probably the most ambitious book tour of my career.
I just didn’t see, though, how I could write another funny, light book about a city still in ruins whose recovery was still questionable.
The series was, for the moment, over–with the personal story not resolved the way I would have wanted, but it could stand as it was, should there never be another Scotty story.
Rereading it, I couldn’t but laugh at some of the outrageous twists and turns the plot took.
And winter has arrived in New Orleans; a cold front that of course would be considered spring or fall most everywhere else north of I-10 arrived overnight. It is amusing that our local weather people are talking about a cold front when it is seventy-four degrees outside. But that’s at least a ten degree difference from yesterday, and it is getting close to mid-October, so the colder weather is fairly overdue.
Colder, not cold.
I’m hoping that today is the last day of this lingering whatever-the-hell-it-is; that one more day of soup and vitamin C and juice and DayQuil will not only make today bearable but will also cure whatever it is that ails me. I really loathe being sick–not, of course, that anyone else really likes being sick. Although I suppose there are some who do.
Yesterday as I spent the day covered in blankets in my easy chair I finished reading Circe by Madeline Miller (already wrote about it, but buy it–it’s fantastic), and then fell into some New Orleans history worm-holes on the Internet on my iPad. The history of New Orleans is so rich and vibrant; bloody and filled with not only death but defiance. It started with me seeing a post from the Historic New Orleans Collection of an article about Prohibition in New Orleans–which was pretty much ignored and not really enforced as much as it should or could have been, perhaps–and I thought to myself, self, there’s probably a really good novel that could be set in this time period dealing with Prohibition and everything else going on in the city at the time. Was it James Sallis’ Lew Griffin series that was set in the past? Which reminds me, I need to revisit that series anyway.
I am kind of amazed, really, how little of New Orleans history I actually do know. I mean, I know who founded the city and when, when it became Spanish rather than French, when it was sold to the United States, the Battle of New Orleans…but there are a lot of gaps in my knowledge. I do know some about the uglier parts of the city’s history–the homophobia and racism, Delphine LaLaurie, how I-10 was deliberately routed to destroy prospering African-American neighborhoods and of course, the hideousness of the Upstairs Lounge fire and aftermath–but there are so many gaps, as I said before. I know about the murder of the police commissioner that led to the mob violence against the Italian immigrants, and the horror of the battle of Monument Place; I know about the Axeman murders and Storyville and Bellocq and his photos of Storyville prostitutes.
But there’s so much more, and so much I don’t know. This is why I always laugh when people call me a “New Orleans expert.” I am far from that. I know neighborhoods and streets, houses and the Quarter. But there are entire populations of the city I don’t know much about; the Greeks and the Islenos, the Vietnamese in New Orleans East, and the growing Latin/Hispanic populations. There are neighborhoods I don’t know, and the West Bank is, for the most part, completely unknown to me.
In other words, I need to explore. I need to read more New Orleans history, and I need to get out in my car on weekends and drive around, exploring and visiting and sight-seeing. I do feel that my next series will most likely be set in New Orleans’ past; it’s just that I don’t know when or where or what it will be. I’ve experimented with the past in short story form; “The Weight of a Feather” (included in Survivor’s Guilt and Other Stories) may not be set in New Orleans, but the main character is from here. “The Blues Before Dawn”, an in-progress story, is also set in the past…and I think it’s an interesting time/subject to take up. (I don’t know how to end the story or even what the middle is, if I am to be completely honest; but it has a terrific opening and I am sure the story will come to me someday.)
I think one of the primary problems I’ve had over the past few years, that sense of feeling disconnected from the city that I’ve mentioned before, comes from, in all honesty, not reading the newspapers here. When the Times-Picayune became the Sometimes Picayune I stopped reading it; I will only visit their website to read write-ups on the Saints and LSU games. The New Orleans Advocate is doing a great job of picking up the slack, but I never think to pick it up and read it. I need to be better about that; I need to be better informed on what is going on in the city. There’s currently a scandal brewing–or it’s already brewed–about the Archdiocese and one of the Catholic boys’ schools in town; it’s what you would expect–sexual abuse and a cover-up; which has happened so many times now in other cities as to be almost a cliche. There’s a novel there as well, even though when I had the idea a long time ago–years before this scandal brewed up and made it onto the public radar–I was told it wasn’t an interesting topic and no one would want to read it.
I disagreed then, and I disagree now. I think it’s not only timely, but people would read it. It would have to not be a cliche, and it would have to be cleverly done, but I think it would work quite well.
And now, I feel the fever returning and I need to go lie down again for a moment.
Queer and Loathing in America 