Time and Tide ch. 1

TIME AND TIDE

1.

DON’T TAKE YOUR GUNS TO TOWN

South Boston, MA:

Guys that look like me don’t do well in prison.

They just don’t, it’s proven fact. If you’re not one of the blacks or the Mexicans or the skinheads or the bikers, you’re in no man’s land and you might as well kill yourself on the first night because you’d only last two days, maybe a week tops and that’s if you get yourself thrown into solitary. If you’re just an average guy who’s not quite white trash but who’s not exactly white collar either, the only way you even think about taking a long hot shower or eating a peaceful meal at chow time without finding your own dinner fork oscillating in your back is if you’re a degenerate mick convict who at one time worked for my old man, or if you’re still loyal to him now. And as blind luck has it, I’m a spitting image of the sonofabitch, the soft-spoken but equally seedy racketeer, loan shark, gunrunner and convicted cold-blooded murderer.

Billy Ray Burke.

I know that his death will mean my death but when you got nothing and when you know he takes away and takes away without ever giving a thing back, the color of your skin and the status of your prison popularity start to mean a lot less. When he took away that one thing in the world and came away with a menial forty-five year sentence, up for parole in twenty, the color of daylight, of your own blood starts to mean a lot less to you.

Leaning against the brick structure of Kelley’s Pasta Village on the corner of E. 3rd and L Streets, dragging on my Marlboro and slowly working my way into doing what I swore to myself I’d do.

Still dark, eerily early.

The sky a deep blue watery grave, the morning sun a ravenous, reclusive beast.

Car horns, ambulances, cop cars screeching and wailing and serenading the city with their monotonous nocturnes.

The unmistakable stench of diesel fumes and car exhaust, grime and garbage, dirt and desperation.

A massive hangover from of a night of blood drunkenness, the smell of Italian food that’s been sitting cold and clumpy throughout the night, forcing my stomach and the world around me to spin against one another like yin and yang.

I fish my cell phone from my pocket and check the time. Nearly five in the morning, the bitterly cold sea breeze whispering up the port and through the streets, as unseen and unmerciful as the Angel of Death. I stand and wait in this existential enclave of the city, crammed and packed into this blue-collar community, this hard knocks haven. Restless, can’t sleep, and honestly who could when you have as much weighing on your mind, your shoulders and your heart as I do? It was a long walk to get here, and I know it’ll be an even longer one into the loving arms of Boston’s finest.

The brown leather jacket covers the gray wife beater with the frayed edges and the snag and the sweat stains in the armpit, and that just barely covers the black Smith & Wesson .44 hiding in the waistline of my jeans. The one Billy Ray left for me ions ago, another lifetime ago.

The one I plan to raise some hell with.

Through the thick clouds of cigarette smoke, I squint over at the Exxon across the street, Newhill Plaza opposite the gas station on the corner of E. 3rd. At the gas station, I pay close attention to who goes in, and more importantly, who comes out.

Flailing headlights, the warm buzz of the occasional car and the clunking and roaring and grating motors that propel them, all blazing down L Street ahead of me and all around me. I wait for the cattle to clear the beaten path before I even attempt to cross the street and do what I told myself I’d do.

What I have to do or I won’t respect myself later tonight or any other night for that matter.

I run a surprisingly steady hand through the long and unruly dark blond curls on my head and use my dirt-caked fingernails to scratch my dry scalp. I reassure myself it’s simply a deep itch and not a nervous tick. I reassure myself that I’m not apprehensive at all because actually getting away with this crime is not something I’m really trying to do anyway.

I’m the ticking time bomb who will intentionally fail to detonate.

Now that the sunrise has finally managed to crane its neck up from over the top of South Boston’s brand new row of condos, I know I look more than suspect as the unrefined, tattooed construction worker type, loitering and staking out the gas station across L Street, Southie’s main drag. My location is completely intentional but no one else in the world would know that and after I’m apprehended, I’ll probably end up on one of those World’s Dumbest Criminals programs. Maybe I should’ve come later in the day, rush hour maybe when I’d bring a lot more attention to myself. It’s common knowledge that most criminals don’t want to be seen, noticed. But even though I look the part of the lowlife, the derelict petty crook, I think I’ll just take a seat on the floor and light up another smoke and wait until the cops take me willing and grinning to Cedar Junction Maximum Security Prison after I stick-up the Exxon.

It’s not like I have a deathwish or I’m scared to be a contributing member of society because I have been for the past eight years. It’s just that now she’s gone and she was the only immediate family I had except for Billy Ray.

I wait and I smoke and I continue to lean against the outer wall of the pizzeria until I see the subtle hints of the sunrise, batting its eye up from behind the John Hancock Tower. That’s when I leave behind any lingering apprehensions along with the shortened cig butt I crush beneath one of my steel-toed Wolverines. That’s when I secure the .44, take in a deep breath, wait for the Pest Control van to clunk its way through the yellow light and then cross L Street without waiting for the pedestrian crosswalk sign.

A jaywalking armed gunman, off to do the Devil’s work.

I cross the cracked tarmac, the wind constantly smacking me in the face instead of remaining at my back like the old blessing promised. I walk across the fading white line under the stoplights, stride to the narrow median between the four lanes, that slightly raised concrete island that serves as the halfway marker.

Terra firma, the point of no return.

It only reminds me that this is my last chance to turn back, to turn right around and go back to the hotel and pack up my clothes and head straight home instead of going to jail. It reminds me it’s not too late to turn in my room key and pile into my Nissan pick-up and drive right back to Charleston with my tail tucked firmly between my legs. It reminds me that I can learn to live with myself if I leave and go back to living in yet another compacted city where most my friends are either in jail or dead or completely different people than they used to be. Different people I wouldn’t recognize even if they knew the minute details of my life. Details like how my old man made his bones in the 70s and 80s, ran his own crew of Irish-American criminals early in the new millennium.

I come up on the median, that vexing concrete island, and I use it as the only green light I need to leave L Street’s center street divider and shove onward towards the Exxon. As I cut through, violently separating the holly bushes that surround the front side of the station with no regard, I pat the handle of the .44 to make sure it hasn’t slipped out of place and I’m suddenly reminded of one of the songs she sang to me before I was even old enough to appreciate it.

“Don’t Take Your Guns to Town,” Johnny Cash.

As I approach the pumps, the fresh fumes stinging my nostrils and throwing a swift sucker punch to my already groggy head, I silently tell her I’m sorry, tell her that I did take my guns to town but that I did it all for her and for the betterment of everyone else in this city. For the betterment of my own buried soul. I tell her it wouldn’t be coated in grime and sin if she were still here. Now I don’t know who I am or how what happened to her could’ve actually brought me to this. All I know is that there’s not much else to lose, and that now I’m preparing to walk headfirst through the fire and brimstone and the flames of retribution and all that other metaphorical horseshit. I prepare to turn the main drag of South Boston upside down and right back around again.

Two trucks at the pumps, both old, beat up, ridden hard and hung up wet, the beds boasting strings of roof shingles and lumber and grimy water coolers. I peer through the glass and into the station to see both drivers standing in line at the counter with their steaming coffees and their honey buns and breakfast burritos. Behind the counter, a moderately attractive young woman with pale skin and dark curly hair counting cash and punching buttons, beaming a toothy grin as she exchanges chit chat with the working-class heroes. I see that underneath all her coy, flirty charms, she’s a bored, ditzy tease who seemingly hopes for a tip even though you don’t give tips to the pretty gas station attendant girl, no matter how pretty she is.

The smartest thing for me to do would be to stop, wait for these two clowns to come out before I roll in and pull the gun. I figure just to show off for the checkout girl, they might try to get righteous and take me down. Which wouldn’t be the worst thing, except I might catch a beating and I’d much rather scare some chick half to death than to catch a beat down by sixteen simultaneously-thrown knuckles.

I go for the pocket of my jeans, pull out my Marlboro pack only to find it empty.

Damnit.

Guess I was so honed in on my target that I didn’t even notice I already finished off my last smoke. To compensate, I search through all my pockets and come up with the cracked, splintered toothpick I snagged from the counter at the Cracker Barrel a few nights ago, the one just outside of Charlotte. Snagged it while I paid for my meal and paid for the road CDs I picked up from the gift shop. Both extremely significant and guaranteed to fuel my need for an unbridled revenge.

Celtic Roots, and the 16 Biggest Hits of Johnny Cash.

I haven’t shaved or had a shower since her funeral earlier this week. Grandma and Grandpa Lundy, Aunt Maura, Doug and Ryan, a few of her co-workers, the priest, and me, standing in the rain at the Sister of Mercy Cemetery in Summerville. I was so overwrought with grief and guilt when I got the phone call back in Charleston, it took until I was halfway through Virginia to transition myself, to fill myself full of anger, rage, a relentless all or nothing vengeance. Didn’t even tell Doug what happened, just packed a bag and left town without calling in for work. I just split and if he doesn’t understand my reasoning for leaving my job behind and driving up to Boston, then he’s a seedy businessman who’s in love with his money and who knows shit about the human heart.

I chew on my toothpick, taste mint-flavored splinters and pocket lint. I spit the excess onto the sidewalk right around the time the first guy exits the station. I hear the second ask the checkout girl for a pack of Newports from behind the counter. Working man number one glances over at me suspiciously and I throw him a nod with a smirk that tells him to beat feet or get clocked in the noggin with my piece. He’s staring at me, seemingly sizing me up like he wants to kick some shit. I take it in stride, follow through with my best-laid plan, wait until Paddy McBlue-collar inside joins the Mighty Quinn out here and the two of them take flight in their trucks.

More for his sake than mine, I glance in the other direction, over across 3rd at Newhill Plaza, which appears even more desolate than the Exxon. Thinking I may have chosen a poor location for my heist, starting to feel just the slightest anxiety rise from my belly and trail down to my now quivering hands, I throw caution to the wind when I toss the toothpick to the asphalt, swing the door open, and step inside the Exxon as the first guy reluctantly returns to his vehicle.
Paddy’s leaning in towards the chick behind the counter, telling her some kind of joke about a priest and a rabbi while, judging from her reaction, his rancid breath forces the unruly hair nestling on her shoulders to dance a jig. She’s more attractive than I originally thought. Thin lips, a few endearingly uneven teeth, big blue eyes, same shade as mine. She looks like a cross between Natalie Portman and Scary Spice. Probably has the same story every other twenty-something gas station checkout girl has. Single mother, living temporarily with mama while she works insane hours to support a toddler, no child support check from deadbeat daddy.

Sounds familiar.

Paddy stalls like a used Chevy, overstaying his welcome, taking for damn ever to get to the punch line of his joke. Checkout girl stands frozen, halfway between disgust and faux anticipation. I stand behind Paddy, stare up towards the ceiling, huff and puff and wish I could blow this goon away for simply keeping me from what I’ve come in here to do. I cross my arms, place a shaky palm over the shamrock and sacred heart tattoos on the right, Spike, the ornery Tom & Jerry bulldog on the left. When he comes up on the end of his agonizing attempt at humor and suavity, the girl tosses him a sympathy giggle as I step up to the counter and crowd him, force him to subconsciously move aside. Fortunately, he does and I plant both hands on the coffee-stained countertop in front of me. Paddy shifts his body halfway behind me, halfway between the double doors. I turn and eyeball him, see what his hold-up is. His eyes glued to the back on my jeans, he’s either a queer or he has an uncanny ability to spot the outline of my thought to be discreetly placed pistol under my shirt and jacket.

His eyes on the covered .44, he takes the first swig of his coffee as he points to the gun.

“Bro, you ain’t carryin’ no pistol under there, are ya?”

Shit.

I can’t rightly pull a stick-up if Paddy here won’t put boot to fucking pavement and walk away. I think quickly, concoct an answer, throw it at him as he casually rests a hand on the top of the leather knife sheath on his belt, the top snapped shut.

For now.

He grins at me, cocks one eye closed like Popeye and guffaws in a way that could only make me want to quit smoking, today.

Aggravated that this shitbird can’t seem to mind his business like everyone else in this neighborhood does so well, I snap at him.

“Why don’t you move the stand-up comedy show to the street, work your sad-ass jokes to the morning traffic? Kindly, can you go ahead and do that for me? And by the way, no, it ain’t no gun. Why would I be carrying around a gun in broad daylight? I don’t even know you, man. Beat feet, leave me the hell alone and catch up with the Mighty Quinn out there so you won’t be late for Mass or the union meeting or the Patriots game or some shit.”

“Go on, screw, Jimmy. Lonny’s gonna catch a bad one if you’re late to the job site today. He told me you been slackin’ off lately, takin’ long liquid lunches in the park if ya know what I mean and I know you know what I mean. Leave this poor fella alone, will ya?” says the checkout girl with a slightly low-pitched smoker’s rasp in her voice, firing a furrowed brow at Paddy and a wink at me.

He stares me down, takes another sip of coffee, burping under his breath before scratching his junk ardently.

“You ain’t from around here, are ya, bro? Well, since you’re new to the neighborhood or whateva, I guess I can cut ya some slack. Today. Tomorrow, I might just cut ya, okay, talkin’ shit like ya got a mouthful of it. So, yeah, okay, apologies, sure, just yankin’ your chain or whateva. But talk to me like you’re my old man again, I will pull your fackin’ card, got me? Alright then. I’ll catch ya, Maggie, take it sleazy,” he says, spinning on the heel of his mud-crusted boot and pushing the glass doors open.

He stumbles off towards his truck as I figure the wind tossed the tail of my jacket up, allowing him to successfully call my bluff. I turn my head back to the checkout girl, and because I guess I’m so appreciative of her interjection, because she’s a lot better looking up close than she was from outside the station, I hold off on the urge to pull out my gun and snatch up all the cash from the register.

I opt for a new pack of smokes instead.

“Pack of Marlboro Reds, please ma’am.”

“Ma’am? Don’t think I ever been called that before. One pack of Marlboro Reds, comin’ right up. And don’t worry about Jimmy…he’s just a bitter ol’ dink who gets all pissy and jealous when I bat an eye at anybody who’s male, and who’s not him. He treats me like I’m his daughter slash girlfriend and if ya put those two together it equals just full on wicked perverted pukefest. He’s just mad ‘cause you’re young and cute and he’s not at all.”

“Young and cute, huh? Well, I guess that’s about the closest thing to a compliment I heard all day. Well, besides I talk shit like I got a mouthful of it, of course.”

“Of course.”

If I was ever considering pulling out my gun and scaring her half to death, I surely can’t do it now, damnit. Why couldn’t she have been some sloppy and rude trucker-type with a greasy Grizzly Adams beard and holey flannel shirt?

Maggie, you just threw a wrench into the spokes of my foolproof plan, botched up my entire day’s work.

She grins at my last comment, then speaks.

“Oh, by the way, I need to see some ID for the smokes if ya don’t mind.”

“What if I do mind? Need to see my ID? Wow. Guess I’ll take that as a compliment too,” I answer, a little taken aback as I awkwardly reach for my back pocket.

As I do, my fingers brush up against the handle of the .44, and because she insulted me by suggesting I was younger than I actually am, I nearly reconsider my plan to keep my peace.
After she grabs my smokes, she sets them on the counter and picks up my driver’s license, fastening a pretty blatant smirk on her lips while her tongue paws the inside of her mouth.

“South Carolina?”

“Yeah, Charleston.”

“Morgan Lundy? Morgan? That really your name?”

“The inconceivable, unbelievable truth.”

“Wow. Never met a dude named Morgan before. Kind of a girl’s name, isn’t it? It’s kinda like ‘A Boy Named Sue’.”

“I met Johnny Cash once, y’know. No lie.”

“Oh, go screw. No ya didn’t. Did ya really? No shit?”

“No shit. My Mom and I were eating fried chicken at a local dive in Nashville when the man himself walked into the joint with John Jr. I was young. Too young to remember Mom said, but I just know I recall shaking Johnny’s hand. Anyway, yeah, she got me his autograph. She said she nearly didn’t because it had been going around how flat-out mean the guy was. Said people in Madison County pretended like they knew him and he’d embarrass ‘em for it, call ‘em out, call their bluff. But yeah, I met the man in black, back in ’78 I think it was.”

Her eyes are wide, the lids heavy with a metallic blue eye shadow and thickly coated mascara.

“Geez Louise, you’re serious, aren’t ya? That’s pretty damn cool I must say.”

“Serious as a heart attack.”

As serious as the heart attack I would’ve given you had you not been such an attractive young lady.

“Well, Morgan Lundy, that makes me your number one fan I spose.”

I grin, pay for the smokes, tap the pack and light up. Her head lowered, Maggie peers up at me, crossing her arms and resting them on the countertop in front of me.

“So, this how you normally sweep all the unsuspecting gas station attendant chicks off their feet, huh? Ya just waltz in off the street all cool and Don Juan and spew out some story about how you met the man in black himself?”

“Every once and awhile. Usually, I at least try to rob the place blind first.”

She giggles. I don’t.

“Y’know, you do look like you’d just go ahead and stick me up with the quickness. Swoon me away with all that southern charm and just take me for all the money I got. I know. I can just read it in your baby blues, Morgan Lundy. So, anyway, you’re from Charleston, right? Civil War and southern hospitality and shit. Whatta ya doin’ all the way up here in Boston? You lost?”

“No.”

“Ya visitin’ family or somethin’?”

That’s one way of looking at it.

“Yeah, something like that.”

“Nice,” she answers as she hands over my change and my receipt.

“So how long you in town for?” she asks, snatching my receipt right back from me, pulling a fountain pen from the Boston Bruins coffee tin by the register.

How long am I in town for?

Depends on how long my sentence is.

More than likely, I’ll be in town for oh, twenty-five to life.

“I guess I’d have to say that my stay here is pretty indefinite.”

“Ya don’t say.”

She feverishly scribbles on the back of my receipt as I listen to her multitude of earrings, her multitude of silver bracelets clank against one another like a wind chime symphony. When she’s finished, she holds the thin piece of slightly curled paper up next to her face and cocks an eyebrow.

In a fancy, discreetly nervous cursive, her name and phone number.

“Look, I don’t normally do this a lot ‘cause let’s face it, all the other bums in Southie are boozehound hooligan loser snorefests. If I give ya my number…will ya call me?”

“Maggie, I gotta be honest with you…I don’t think I’ll be calling anyone for a pretty long time. Besides, why would you want me to call you anyway? For all you know, I could be some kinda psycho killer, some kinda burn-out career criminal.”

I’m not there yet, but I’m slowly clawing my way closer as we speak.

“Oh yeah? Well maybe I like bad boys. You don’t even know. Besides, how bad could you really be with a name like Morgan?”

“What can I say, my old man had a sense of humor. That doesn’t mean I do.”

I give her a reluctant grin and accept the recycled receipt as I turn, take a few steps and exit Maggie’s Exxon station. I don’t even reply to her last statement, don’t even give her a parting word before pushing through the double glass doors and leaving the store. I don’t want to lead her on, lead myself on because I know I’ll more than likely never see her again after today.

And because I didn’t account for Maggie being so easy to look at and witty to boot, I secure her number into my back pocket just next to my gun when I cross the tarmac and storm into L Street Liquors just next to Kelley’s Pasta Village, using nothing to cover my face. I calmly walk up to the register, pull out the .44 and bark at the young slacker behind the counter, engulfed in the Guns & Ammo magazine splayed out in front of him. I aim my .44 at his chest, scream at him, scare him into handing over all the cash in the drawer. When he does, I hop up onto the counter and order the kid to put ass to tile. Before he complies, I watch him clumsily fumble for the red button under the counter, and I pretend not to see him push it in.

As I sit and wait for the cops, I hold my piece in one hand, and with the other, I count up the 522 bucks that mean absolutely jack squat to me. No money in the world could buy me what I ache for, what I’m willing to rot away for.

To die for.

As I sit and wait for the cops, I stuff the money into my pocket, set the gun down onto the counter next to me, and I light up another smoke.

As I sit and wait for the cops, I think about Maggie, how I finally found one girl in the past five years who I’d actually take out for a night on the town. I think about how I can’t even call her now because of all the days in my life, I had to meet her on the worst one imaginable.

As I sit and wait for the cops, I think about how I’ll soon be in Cedar Junction with Billy Ray and I won’t even care about being the fresh fish lone white boy with no allies. I’ll only care about being able to see my father again, the long-awaited family reunion.

When the cops finally squeal up on the curb of L Street Liquors, I sit and smoke, welcome them through the doors and thank them when they snatch up my gun, grab me and throw me to the dusty floor, grinding a multitude of angry, pointy knees into my spine.

I thank them when they handcuff me, read me my rights, curse me up and down, stand me up and shove me face first through the double doors.

Full of resolve, I peer up at the morning sky, take in a deep breath. I glance over across the street at Maggie, now standing outside the Exxon, crossing her arms and shaking her head with a dropped jaw. I throw her a nod, a grin before I silently thank the cops for finally arriving on the scene and promptly arresting me. I silently thank them for ushering me to the police cruiser and carefully shoving me into the backseat.

And I thank them because now I can finally go to MCI-Cedar Junction Maximum Security Prison and kill my father for killing my mother.

The Saint of Song, second chapter

2.

“My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk…” – John Keats,
Ode to a Nightingale

Waking up is always a fun endeavor, full of docile disorientation.

Attempting to function for the day ahead when the night before was spent dousing yourself in absinthe.

The room, the floorboards are jarringly cold. Jagged pinpricks, serrated icicles. No central heating and we’re just in the final stages of a bitter winter. I slowly climb out of bed and make my way over to the sink, careful to avoid splinters and dislodged nails in the floor. There, I find that no beautiful faces accompany my glance into the mirror this morning. My eyes are red and irritated, beady and sleepy, my short, bristly hair bed-pressed, good and slept on. The crucifix around my neck shows the contrast of silver on white, my pale chest its backdrop. Three day-old stubble lining my wide, boxer’s jaw, dark hair oily and unwashed for days. Crossing French and Italian flags tattooed over my heart, a sharp and thorny fleur de lis on my inner right wrist, the extremely significant words “Writ on Water” in a fancy cursive on the other.

Significantly written on Percy Shelley’s epitaph by Keats, significantly tattooed on my wrist by the aftermath of Lavinia’s death.

I turn on the faucet, run the water over my hands. It’s cold but I know it’s serving its purpose as I splash it on my face again and again. I slowly but surely embrace my return to reality when I grab a towel and blot at my eyes and wish that it didn’t take nearly fourth a bottle of absinthe to put me to sleep at night.

The residual effects can be astounding.

I had a thought to take this latest short story section to the post office by itself, but last night’s absinthe hallucinations have inspired me to add a few new lines of prose with it. The nights that The Green Fairy delivers Lavinia to me are the most inspiring. They’re the break from the norm on those nights that make me feel just a little more desolate than usual. Chaplin Shelley’s latest installment of his chapter by chapter short story, shipping out tomorrow to the Crescent City Neo-Romantic Review.

I am Chaplin Shelley.

I’m a ghostwriter for the Review. Weekly, I submit short stories, essays, or poems along with a new chapter from my latest novella. Chaplin Shelley is my pseudonym, come to existence as a tribute to the silent film star, and my favorite poet, who died nearly the same way my Lavinia did. All of my stories and poems are about her in one form or another. The wavy and wild black hair, the deep-set mahogany eyes, the full and pulsating lips of my muse…the elements that serve as true inspiration for my unsteady hand.

Every drop of ink is a drop of blood that I would gladly give to have her back. That’s the storyline of Tocco Freddo, Cuore Caldo, in which I describe her in full detail and pen how my troubled 19th century Italian protagonist is plagued and haunted by a curse and an unfathomable loss. He pricks his finger once a day and gives a drop of blood to a bucket of ice-cold salt water in a desperate attempt to bring back the lover he’s lost at sea.
I didn’t lose Lavinia at sea, but I did lose her to the Italian Alps and the obscure lake waiting with salivating teeth below.

Her soul rests at the bottom of that body of water, her body pines in the St. Louis Cemetery Number One, her spirit floats in and out of my home, in and out my absinthe fantasies. Not only does The Fairy help to numb the noise in my head, but her better hallucinatory effects at times allow me to catch a glimpse of Lavinia’s fleeting apparition.

One of the original songs in my head is there because of Lavinia.

“You and I,” Jeff Buckley.

It’s a dark, haunting song with beautifully relevant lyrics. Ironic that it’s make-up of white noise behind the droning, crooning vocals would be so symbolic of our otherworldly relationship at present, seeing as how it was our song before her untimely trip to the other side. Or to the purgatory where she resides now. It’s a dark place.

Her eyes tell me so.

My modern ghost story at present almost fit Morgan’s. This English band Portishead haunts my ears with regularity, with a dark and ghostly tune because I tried to help her and I failed miserably. She had told me that a spirit was haunting she and her roommates in the late-nineteenth century home they were renting over on Toulouse Street. She said that the apparition the house harbored was a little girl dressed in clothing that dated back to the 1800’s. Morgan feared the crawl spaces, the upstairs, and the unnaturally cold spots throughout the all but dilapidated house. I started to spend time with her in and out of the home, got to know her, got to see firsthand how the interaction between frightened French Quarter resident and creepy French Quarter apparition was taking its heavy toll.

I checked out the cold spots in the house for myself and found them to be very surreal, very abnormal indeed. Maybe I’d have been able to help her more if I had ever seen the apparition, but alas, I never did. She said that the little girl would appear to her out of nowhere in rooms all over the old house, smiling and offering her hand and speaking the same French salutation over and over again. But Morgan told me that in the blink of an eye, the girl’s hand would switch completely to hoisting a tightly fastened noose around her own neck. She would yank it upward into an awkward position that left her feet dangling from the ground, her face contorted and transformed into hideous post mortem.

The ghostly occurrence was enough to send a very human chill up my spine. I could sense a haunting presence in the house from the moment I stepped in, so I doused the areas in which she’d seen the girl with Holy water, offered the Lord’s Prayer with a crucifix for whatever mortal sin could’ve been fueling the little girl’s need to linger. I prayed with Morgan, proposed we switch living quarters for awhile until I remembered my flat was also frequented by a spirit, the one with the cold touch and the warm heart. I offered her any help that I could possibly think of but all my effort fell to nothing. The apparition continued to linger, I lost contact with Morgan, and according to the papers, she was later arrested for leaving behind too much evidence when she completely burned her antique home and the spirit within it to the ground.

She was the first.


My Doc Martens hit the litter and grime-covered street with a crunchy thud, which I find kind of pathetic considering Mardi Gras is still nearly a week away. My short story and even shorter poem, my prose, the one that features my memoirs of a frequently absent Lavinia, hang at my side in the black leather satchel strapped diagonally across my chest. Packed in with them, last month’s issue of the Neo-Romantic Review, and the grey, cotton t-shirt that Lavinia always slept in, now musty and well worn and threadbare. My black pea coat, scarf keep, and newsboy cap keep me from the sting of the breeze as I glance down at my watchband.

12:36 p.m.

I’ll drop off these manuscripts at the post office, get a bite to eat, then kill some time before the show tonight. Diabolique and Sed are playing at Snug Harbor on Frenchmen. They both have a dismal, melancholic sound, which means there should be plenty of miserable people there at the show, all boasting sad songs, all in which for me to offer my help. Nearly every time that either band has played before, I’ve gone to see them. To absorb myself into their sound, their lyrics, their lives.

Not a lot of people out today. We’re just after a good rain and the wind is kicking up fiercely like a wounded war horse. Another dull weekday and most of New Orleans, save the tourists and the homeless, are out working a real job, a good nine to fiver with a good life. A good husband or wife or lover to come home to, a good hobby or charity to see to on the weekends, which, most days, makes me wonder what it’s like to have a normal life.

I honestly can’t remember anymore.

I don’t own a car, because realistically, there’s no need for one when you live in the Quarter. All my stops today are in walking distance, so I do the obvious simply because I couldn’t afford a car even if I wanted one. I guess I receive a pretty decent-sized paycheck for my writing in the Neo-Romantic Review, especially when you consider what kind of work I do for them. I guess that’s how you could say I make my living. I’ve been writing since my teen years, on through high school and into college, taking an interest in English literature, history, and the respective histories of art and music. From there I started to write poems and novellas, expressing my strife as The Saint through analogies and metaphor-laden words, writing whenever I could, whenever the noise in my head would allow me to. At home, in the Orleans Café, at the pigeon and powdered sugar-laced tables of Café du Monde.

Cameron Dupree and this so-called Saint character already have jobs, with undeserved, subjectively glorified names. The writer in me needed his own name, his own job, his own anima. Chaplin Shelley is the man behind the pen, scripting out the pain of Cameron Dupree and the woes of The Saint. Chaplin is who I turn to when I want to bleed pints and pints of ink and live my life vicariously through someone else’s.

Chaplin is my savior, my saint.

I drop the manuscripts off at the post office on Canal, soon to be delivered to their new home at the Review. I’m up to a hundred dollars a submission, which is not bad at all considering that the payment goes to a ghostwriter who’s not on the regular staff and who no one at the Review has ever met. My checks are sent to my P.O. Box and usually, I’m paid in haste. The twenty in my pocket now will buy my lunch and my admission to the show tonight.

When I make my way from Canal Street over to the Orleans Café on Decatur, I see that all three dining rooms are as vacant as usual. I’m the only regular at this time of the day, and that just seems all too sad and pathetic to me. Makes me feel like the staff sees me as a loser with nothing better to do with his life than to come into the same establishment nearly every day of the week, order the same lunch, and exchange the same faux friendly grins, salutations, and goodbyes.

They just don’t know me.

I have a job.

I worked last night, this morning already, and I’m on the job again tonight. Actually, if you want to get technical, I work twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week continually fighting off the songs that try to overcome my ears and jockey for position.

Right now, I hear yet another one.

Lynnette was a girl whose song I read while at the public library on Loyola Avenue. She was a pathological liar, and her song attested to that fact. She wasn’t even a big fan of The Cure, the band who performed the song, as she told me that a friend of hers had introduced it to her on a mix CD. Every time she told a lie, no matter how ludicrous or asinine it was, it would remind her of the song. She approached me, told me about her problem, admitted that she had one in the first place. She told me that sometimes she’d get into conversations and people would ask her things and she’d say the first thing that came to mind, no matter if it was a bold-faced lie or not. People would catch her in them but she would stick to her story. Sometimes, she would actually go do far as to believe them.

I told her I would test her, train her, teach her the classic art of rhetoric. I even offered to take her to someone else if my methods didn’t work. So one day I told her to meet me at the library to see how she’d progressed, she said okay, and then never showed. When I called the phone number she had given me weeks earlier, an elderly woman named Bernadette answered, having never heard of our dear friend Lynnette. Last I heard, Lynnette had lied her way out of Loyola Law and lied her way into a drinking problem. She then lied her way out to California, selling herself for a ride and bite to eat. Apparently, she’d planned to lie herself into becoming a model slash actress.

She was the second.


I stumble into the Orleans Café and give a tired wave, smile, and reply when Sherry, the pixie-haired, forty-something, proverb-spouting waitress asks me how I’m doing in her crackly voice. I take a page out of Lynnette’s book and tell her I’m good before taking a seat at my regular table in the corner by the French doors, already pulled open to Decatur. And with the typical loser image of the guy with no life, I order the regular. Fried crawfish tails, sausage and chicken Gumbo over Spanish rice, and a large glass of ice water.

Sherry brings me the water and I sip it slowly and though I deem it extremely detrimental to my soul, I can’t help but think of Lavinia. Sadly enough, the ice water always forces me to remember her because she died an icy, watery death.

Last year she jumped on a plane to set down in Milan, so that she could rent a car and drive up into the Swiss Alps and reunite with her estranged Italian business mogul father in Switzerland. During Italy’s coldest months of the year. She drives slow, obeys all the traffic laws along the thin lanes leading up to the Alps and she’s eagerly anticipating the reunion with the father she hasn’t seen since childhood and everything’s as it should be until a flashy little Fiat comes zipping around the corner of the mountain road and skids on the ice coating the tarmac and smacks the left side of Lavinia’s front fender, causing her to lose control and plummet off the side of the mountain where she landed roof first in the all but frozen Lake Lucerne below.

The fall, no, that didn’t kill her. The water did.

The ice water did.

Trapped by a malfunctioned seatbelt?

Trapped by an inflated airbag?

Trapped between the caved in roof and the driver’s seat?

Between the roof and the steering column?

Did all the nerve endings of her skin cells cry out in a muted shriek when the sub-zero pin and needles scalded her warm flesh, when the stark realization of finding no escape clause clutched her throat and dragged her under and kept her a prisoner with a life sentence owed to the end all be all watery grave of all icy watery graves?

Doesn’t matter because she drowned.

End of story.

She drowned because that’s what the officials told me, what her father told me. And I should have been with her. I wanted to be, but she wouldn’t let me because she said I had too much work to do as The Saint and that she’d return home to me in New Orleans in no time. She wouldn’t agree, she’d never agree that I should have died with her, both of us blue and buried in a sea of ice and silt.

She loved me, truly loved me and I know it because she made her way back to me.

Part of her anyway.


My plate of crawfish tails come cold with a hard, glazy shell covering the tartar sauce. My Gumbo is a dome of clumpy rice and sausage and chicken. The ice water can wait until I absolutely need it. As of right now, it’s bringing back far too much for me to handle.

Some people think back on world-changing events and actually try to recount where they were at that exact moment, what they were doing. Where were you? What were you doing when JFK was assassinated, when the space shuttle Challenger exploded, when O.J. was acquitted of all first degree murder charges?

Where was I? What was I doing when I found out that Lavinia never made it to her father’s Swiss villa, that she had lost control of her rental car before it careened off the mountainside, that it smacked and broke through the icy top layer of Lake Lucerne and that she hadn’t survived the tragic accident?

I was drinking a glass of ice water, sitting in this exact café at the same exact table that bears the eerie aura I feel right now and that I feel every other time I dare to sit here.

I can’t think of any good reason to come back to this place over and over again except that it reminds me of the day I lost her. That it just may bring her back to me somehow. I fully expect to see her burst through the front door one of these days and throw her arms around me. That’s when she’ll laugh at me, tell me that it was just a big misunderstanding, that it was all just a bad joke taken too far.

So here I sit and wait. She’s coming.

That’s the only reason for this routine.

I eat the food and pretend to enjoy it as Sherry watches on and asks me repeatedly if everything’s okay with my lunch. By now, she’s probably wondering why I haven’t touched my ice water since she first brought it over. If she knew, she’d probably never serve it to me again, call me mental for asking for it in the first place.

It’s all sentimental, Sherry.

It’s all for sentiment.

The smells of Gumbo and Jambalaya and Po Boys and tripe sausage like an avalanche of hourglass quicksand. The optimistic overtones of the Cajun accordion like the snapping heartstrings of the Lucifer’s lyre. The whispers, the shrieks that stem from the multitude of musical mishaps, the saddest songs in the world, daily coalescing to surround me, to come to a screeching halt inside the confines of my head.

Overrun and overwhelmed by my thoughts on the past and the present, by their never-ending stories, the musical maladies and by Lavinia, I stand, walk over to counter, and I pay for my sub-par lunch. Sherry thanks me, tells me that she’ll see me tomorrow, and she even spouts a new proverb at me as I leave the diner, the one about how I should never look a gift horse in its mouth. I retort that if I ever got my hands on that gift horse, my looking it in its massive choppers would be the least of its worries. I throw up a wave and a reluctant grin on my way back out to Decatur and as my foot hits the outside pavement, Jared’s song starts in sync with the step.

It’s a depressing number I picked up when I couldn’t help him overcome the loss of his love for life, which was a direct result of the loss of all feeling in his legs. A car accident had left Jared paralyzed from the waist down and he told me that he felt like anything resembling a life was over for him. I met up with him at Café du Monde, where he officially asked for my help. How could I refuse, but how could I help him? His problem seemed unfixable in my mortal hands. I did the next best thing. I befriended him, traded stories and hardships. He said that all he really wanted was a real, lasting relationship and that he needed someone to see him for who he was on the inside, someone who would love him unconditionally. I told him that true love is the most beautiful and the most fulfilling feeling that two people can share, and I told him that I spoke from experience.

I introduced him to Lindsey, a girl I knew from Snug Harbor and Jared’s sweet and genuine disposition won her over. He was healed spiritually and mentally and he saw that true love really could transcend his view of the world and his position in it. But it wasn’t long before Lindsey embodied the ugly part of that world to him. Jared soon realized that she was shallower than any of us had thought when she dumped him for a pre-med named Sebastian. She retained that her new beau would give her more stability, as she felt she was more evenly yoked with him. Jared was mentally and physically destroyed. He reverted back to his bouts of manic-depression and chased a bottle of Percocet with a bottle of Jim Beam. He was revived before he officially overdosed. He was rushed to the ER to have his stomach pumped and to have all his further actions monitored. He was eventually diagnosed as manic depressive and was labeled as a potential suicide threat at Community Care Psychiatric, where he still resides today.

Strike three.


Saint Cecilia lived in the second century A.D. in Rome under the reign of Emperor Marcus Aurelius, and was martyred along with her husband and brother-in-law under the Roman prefect, civil and military official Turcius Almachius. She was born Christian to a noble, senatorial Roman family, but her family later arranged for her to marry Valerian, a young man from a wealthy pagan family. Though married, Cecilia held onto her purity and eventually helped to convert Valerian over to Christianity, the sacraments given to him by the exiled Pope Urban. She converted many, healed many aching souls on the way to her canonization.
On her wedding day, it was said that Cecilia peered into Valerian’s eyes and although then marrying a known pagan, it was then that the sweet sound of music flooded her ears and her heart.

Along with Valerian’s brother Tibertius, a Roman soldier named Maximus was also converted to Christianity and the three men used their wealth, resources, and love for God to bury the Roman Christian martyrs in the Appian catacombs. This was of course against Roman law and the three men were brought before Almachius and sentenced to death. In the wake of their executions, Cecilia continued on with their work, burying martyrs in the catacombs. This of course was the cause of her arrest and she was ultimately sentenced to join the men she had turned to God. Just before her arrest, she converted the interior of her home into a church. As a direct result, her attempting to prolong the Christian sect in the face of the Roman polytheists, the prefect’s officers attempted to murder Cecilia by boiling her alive. When the attempt on her life failed, they resorted to having her beheaded. The appointed executioner began the decapitation of Cecilia. He tried three different times and when his attempts failed to kill her, he panicked at her miraculous survival and fled the scene. She survived three more days before succumbing to her wounds.

The day she passed, she woke and stared into the eyes of the family and friends surrounding her, and before she died, it’s said that the sweet sound of music flooded her ears and her heart.

She healed many.

She died a martyr.

Her surname was never recovered, but upon her death, she was named after the location of her house, which literally translates to “beyond the Tiber”.

DiTrastevere.

My mother’s maiden name.

I make my way through Jackson Square, walk to the St. Louis Cathedral, and I can’t help but feel very reverent, very unworthy. The old wooden doors are polished ornate oak, overwhelming and luminous. Crackly creak like a banshee moan when I pull them open, the dark isle now illuminated by the deathly gray hue of the overcast morning. I walk delicately, quietly, as if I’m afraid of waking the dead, disturbing the old ghosts who still carry on their secret after-hours communion. No one else is here and that’s the way I like it. No one to judge me. No one to tell me that I don’t belong in the sight of the saints, the Madonna, the Christ. No one except for those old spirits who watch me as I pray, the ones who know that I’m sincere but also know that

I’m the saint who doesn’t belong among the church’s canonized few.

I am a lost soul.

I know not where I belong.

I’m not bad enough to be counted amongst the heathen, not good enough to walk alongside God’s army of martyrs. So for now, I walk alone, the shadow of man, hoping one day to prove myself worthy enough for Heaven’s guardians, the protectors of paradise.

My footsteps echo as I walk the dimly lit isle, small beams of dust-filled light and the whistling of the wind making their narrow passageways inside the church with me. Just ahead, the main altar, carved in the Baroque-style, and above, the mural of St. Louis announcing the Seventh

Crusade to the eagerly determined defenders of the Church.

They all await my surrender.

I am unworthy of His name, the name of the Lord.

I seat myself on a pew.

I talk to God.

You’ve sent me on a mission Lord, and I am thankful to suffer the repercussions just as You did for me. You’ve called me out, singled me out, chosen me to be The Saint of Song and I am doing all in my power to fulfill all expectations. Raise me to thy right hand, give to me the stigmata of Francis, the determination of Patrick, the might and strength of Michael, the ecstasy of Teresa, the resiliency of Cecilia. Reassure me that my deeds are good and pure and that they will see the light of day in the end if it be Your Holy will. Grant me the power to see it through to the end. Guide me, direct me with Your spirit and make me a better servant in Your name.

My eyes fixed on the altar, my body and my spirit His instruments, I humble myself.

I close my eyes, welcome the darkness and the brief stoppage of the music inside my head.

A Saint by Any Other Name

Here is the promised remastered first chapter of The Saint of Song.

THE SAINT OF SONG


1.

“…among rough ashes sat he for his soul’s reprieve,
And all night kept awake, for sinners’ sake to grieve.” – John Keats,
The Eve of St. Agnes

“Some lives of men are as the sea is,
Continually vexed and trampled with winds.” – Dante Gabriel Rossetti,
St. Agnes of Intersection

Noise.

Haunting, overbearing, claustrophobic noise that resonates like a self-constructed nuclear bomb, an incessant, vociferous sonic boom followed immediately by the flesh-mutilating parade of shrapnel like fluttering butterflies with razorblade wings.

Music.

When music, the saddest music in the world is programmed into your head, one heart wrenching song after another, simultaneously played one after another like an amateur children’s choir belting out conflicting choruses, at what point do you begin to go insane? When the music begins as a soundtrack to your life and ends up a symphony overrun and played out by escaped asylum patients, an opera re-enacted and performed by the living dead, at what point do you begin to lose all hints of your sanity? Or do you choose to simply grin and bear it, to accept your fate and live your lonely, desolate life in the shadow of the way normal people do?

I am that shadow.

I am the neo-Romantic poet, the Byronic hero, the solitary man.

I am a saint.

Le Saint de Chanson, the Saint of Song, wrapped up in a package of depressed agony, cursed torment. I am willing to help others out of their pain only to induce my own. Sainted by the people, I am their canonized ghost, their glorified specter, willing to take away their agony and bear it for them instead. Until I decide to pass along this curse.

Gift. Curse.

Two in one.

I am the savior of tormented souls, all but my own.

I am The Saint of Song. I am Chaplin Shelley. I am Cameron Dupree.

In nomini Patri, et Fili, et Spiritu Sancti.

She reduces me, seduces me with her numbing nearness. She leaves me to dine ardently on the final words spoken to me in my waking dreams, our divine appointments. She holds me in the palm of the moment, squeezes ever so gently. She brings me to a higher state of being on a lower playing field. We were born in the wrong century, she tells me with her hollow eyes. We were never meant to part, she pleads with her vacant, dimly lit stares like dying headlights careening around the snow capped mountain that took her from me. I can’t go on living this way, dying this way because our status in this world only spins and hovers spitefully, painfully like yin and yang, life and death. This is what I tell her but she’s too busy reminding me that she’ll always be waiting for me, somewhere deep and dark in which I’ll never find her no matter how many times I sojourn to St. Louis Cemetery Number One and rest with her sobbing monument that’s been left behind. She consistently reminds me that I won’t be able to find her.

Not yet.

The law of gravity depletes altogether when she hovers above me, lowers herself down to me and I find my trembling hand reaching out to her. It pours through her and out the other side of her transparent, shapely form, like a warm mist of sleep propelled by a lucid dream. The touch warm, icy hot, all for nothing and done in the greatest vanity. Eyes filled black and empty and emotionless, as if the doctrines of her in-between world will allow nothing more. Her sopping, untamed locks as dark as a dreamless sleep, unruly as they lash me in the face with their bittersweet punitive measures. Her ample lips part ever so slightly but she utters not a sound, not a whimper or a gasp or any other plea for help, not like the ones she made two years ago a full continent away from me, alone and muffled beneath waves of icy, unforgiving waters.

I attempt to kiss away the icicles, the salty tears frozen solid over her cheeks but my chapped lips travel through that mist and then find nothing but stagnant air, nothing but this same old dilapidated flat with the cracks in the ceiling that form gawking eyes, furrowed brows, with the floorboards that bow and shift into the same monstrous, surly smile. They remind me this is all just a show, just another cameo made by Lavinia’s spirit that was never really here to begin with. This monotonous room forms its conspiracy theory with The Fairy and I’m once again left fooled and ridiculed by inanimate objects and in love with a girl who can never love me back.

Not in this life.

She fades into me. She views, lives, extracts portions of what it’s like to be me now that she’s no longer here. She fades through me, out the other side and through the thin mattress and box springs of the bed and I don’t even feel myself roll over on my side and hang my heavy head over the edge, peeking underneath to find nothing below the underside of the bed. Nothing but those sinister, bowing and gloating floorboards.

I fall flat on my back, crash to the mattress like an anvil to scorched earth. I take in a deep breath, remind myself that her visits never fail to turn out like this, that she never stays with me, that she considers it a visit but that that I consider it a reminder of something I can never have. I remind myself that maybe she really was never here to begin with, that it quite possibly could be another brazen trick spawned by The Fairy. Either way, Lavinia’s come and gone like a thief in the night, like the whispering, decimating Angel of Death, come to plant her ethereal kisses on the epitaph of my soul. She’s come and gone yet again, no stranger to the rules of engagement set forth by the otherworldly powers that be. She’s come and gone, no different than the last night or the few and far between nights before that.

Come and gone, washed away by the tide of my tears.

Close my swollen eyes, concentrate on the sound, the noise now that Lavinia can no longer be the pleasant, desolate distraction that temporarily freed me from it. I concentrate on the sound, the songs in my head, the music lacing my eardrums that battle for precedence and complete control of my round the clock disparity. All the others have faded for now. The Fairy has made sure of that. But the ethereally graceful presence of Lavinia has caused the two songs we once shared to stick around, to stick it in and break it off like the rusty blades of twin bayonets. Ghostly, melancholy, the crooning of lost souls in the night, singing to me because I’m the only one willing to listen and to free them of their pain and I’m once again dismissed of the scarcely-found ghost that is my Lavinia just here before my tired eyes and reintroduced to the endless noise because her visit and the noise are always enhanced and then diminished and forever leave me to dine on their fatal aftermath.

The absinthe helps me sleep.

It helps to numb my eardrums, to take the noise away even if only for one temporary moment at a time. It helps to keep the haunting music at bay.

It helps to show me the gracefully grotesque spectacle of Lavinia’s fleeting spirit, floating and pining and hanging from the noose of the moment, of her post-mortem condition.

It seeks her out, brings her to this familiar haven, then forcefully shakes me and wakes me and reminds me it was nothing more than a trance, another absinthe-laden hallucination.

It shows me what could’ve been, a distorted sense of what’s happening presently, and an even more macabre view of what’s yet to come. The absinthe is a flame in my body, fuel for another day of saintly monitor, a battery charged jolt that makes this all too human shell run when my brain doesn’t agree. The emerald-hued liquor like liquid fire, forcing me to view Lavinia in all her spectral glory as she continually visits me in my murky green visions.

And every night, they end the same.

The bottle, like all the others stockpiled underneath my bed, was sent to me from Uncle Jean-Benoit in Lyon.

Absinthe, the Green Fairy.

La Fée Verte.

This, my poison of choice, made its American debut here in 1807 at the Old Absinthe House on the corners of Bourbon and Bienville, adjacent to my flat just on the other side of the street. The liquor eventually attracted too much attention, and in 1912, the Department of Agriculture issued a food inspection that banned absinthe in the United States. What started out as a prescription for jaundice and rheumatism, and what had spawned creative expression for Picasso, Verlaine, Wilde, and Whitman, became illegal due to its hallucinatory effects and its fatal aftermath if consumed in excess.

But I don’t drink too much.

The absinthe helps me sleep.

It helps me block out the noise that plagues my ears twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

The absinthe helps me sleep.

Stiff and weightless on my marble slab of a bed, tightly grip the bottle in my hand, rest it on my bare stomach and watch it rise and fall with the fleeting momentum of my shallow breaths. I allow my eyes to drift from the ceiling to the room itself and I find it all too consumed by a looming darkness, lit meagerly by the candles mounted on the walls next to my bed and spread sporadically around the flat. The smell is one I can only identify as antiquity and debauchery, the kind that suggests it’s a well lived-in flat on a well-worn corner of Bourbon Street.

My bed in the corner of the room, my tiny excuse for a kitchen directly beyond the foot. The cabinets and cupboards are eroded and chafed, the doors hanging ajar from loosened screws. Cobwebs in the nooks and crannies as if they’ve been nothing short of abandoned. In the opposite corner stands the front door, coated in an aging, peeling blood red hue, the color of my bed frame. Next to the door runs a wall, and on it, the flat’s original nineteenth century Roman arches still stand out in the framework. The red walls surrounding are ruins abandoned in all hopes of restoration. They’ve begun to flake and chip, to display the old red brick underneath, the layers of white and gold-tinted mortar over the top of them. A door in the middle of the wall, but it’s one in which I never use. There’s no need to because the wall’s already busted and broken through to the bathroom on the other side.

The entire flat boasts living vines and ivy and weeds that creep up from the corners, flora and fauna breeding from all the cracks and clefts in the ceilings, walls, and floorboards. A once extravagant period chandelier hangs from the ceiling. The small fountain in the center of the bathroom no longer runs with water. Against one of the walls sits my off-white antique bathtub on its four wobbly legs, grimy and spotted with usage. Floating there just over it, the drab moonlight from this angry tundra of a night peers in from the window. The glass is cracked and corroded, the heirloom red shutters on the outside busted and broken. There’s an ill-maintained view of Bourbon and Bienville from the balcony that’s all but collapsed, coated poorly by its original white paint, chipping and decayed and skeletal.

And last but certainly not least, the old sink under the stained and scuffed and cracked mirror that at times reflects not only my face, but hers.

Mon fille belle. Mia ragazza bella. My one and only.

Sometimes, lying in bed or reclining in the tub, I half expect to see the front door fling open, as I often hear it open and close in the night. It doesn’t slam obnoxiously or begrudgingly. Just a subtle open and close to let me know it’s there. Sometimes, I hear the creaks in the floorboards and the soft thumps of footsteps. Sometimes, I’m almost positive that I feel her cold, delicate fingers stroking the hair from my face as I sleep. Sometimes, I catch a face in the mirror behind me as I’m shaving or brushing my teeth and I know it’s her.

Every time, it’s her.

Le coeur de mon coeur.

Lavinia.

The eyes are the windows to the soul and every soul bears a piece of music that coats it in representation. Everyone has a soundtrack or a particular list of songs that sort of dictate their life, the way they behave, the way in which they perceive the world around them. I read that song of the troubled individual, eye contact the conduit, and their stare sort of telepathically allows me to hear the soundtrack of their misery. Not everyone can tell what’s at the core of someone’s soul, but through a most divine attachment, I can.

Most of the time I get Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, showtunes and the up tempo accordions of generic Cajun music down every street of the French Quarter. But my work begins when I hear the sadder songs, the ones that deal with depression, rejection, disconnection. The scene for this sort of music flourishes on Frenchmen Street, on the outskirts of the Quarter and I go to the shows there and watch the bands, mingle with the young adults who look like me and listen to the music I do. That’s where I attempt to heal the sick. The live music brings them out and they all seem to know who I am and it’s usually them confronting me with their song, their problem.
When I can’t help them overcome their obstacle, their song becomes a permanent addition to my head, an unwanted attachment to my ears. I hear it over and over again, one day after another and it’ll continue to be this way until I decide to pass along this curse. There were three songs that kept me in a constant state of depression in the beginning, and now there are six more that plague my ears. Six more lives I couldn’t change. Six more problems I couldn’t solve.

I hear them all day, all night.

I hear them one at a time.

I hear them simultaneously at random volumes.

They never allow me the luxury of manipulating them.

They all take turns.

They get irritable and pushy and fight for an assumed position over the others.

The people of the Quarter tell me all their problems because I ask them to. They indifferently tell me all their problems as if I can fix them, as if they don’t know or don’t care that if they choose to hold onto their misery, that they don’t bear it alone. That I take their musical malady and wear it on my shoulders like a one thousand pound albatross, wear it and wear everyone else’s within the confines of my head. The people of the Quarter tell me their problems and if I can’t fix them then their songs become my songs, overrunning my thoughts and dreams, my sleep like the wrench that ruptures the machine. My brain spinning its already wobbly wheels, all the gears and frayed belts squealing and smoking and poised to implode.

All because I choose to be the saint they all expect me to be.

And all I have to do is tell someone, anyone, the original song that troubled me and my gift/curse as The Saint is passed to them. But I won’t do that. As tormented as I am, I won’t do that. I wouldn’t want anyone to have to go through what I’m forced to endure every day of my life and I guess that’s why I’m The Saint, the canonized ghost.

The Saint of Song, king of chorus, deity, dictator of crescendo and diminuendo. The gift passed to me by a young derelict in the crowded streets of Lyon, France, years ago. He has given me a new life, a supernatural existence, full of purpose and meaning and never-ending nights filled with self-doubt and alcoholic gluttony. I never asked for this, but at least now I know the path God has chosen for me.

In order to escape the thoughtless reminders and the murky vision and the haunting shell of Lavinia hovering above me and shimmering with ethereal bereavment, I allow my lids to fall fast and sharp like twin guillotines because the music is actually starting to fade a bit.

Maybe now I can sleep.

He Knows Why the Caged Bird Sings

So the year was 2004, I was taking a English Literature class at JC, and as I already had a fascination with historical figures, this was the moment I also developed one for the Romantic poets; John Keats, Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron. I looked forward to every class and my instructor always pushed me to be a better writer in the class. During the time of the class, I was beginning to write poetry, usually pretty cryptic stuff, almost like a neo-Shelley meets a neo-Poe. I hooked up with the some other poets when I started attending poetry night in Charleston, hanging out in dank dives and reading aloud on a stage. Well, right around that time, my mother and sister decide they want to travel to Italy and that they want to take me with them. So, when we arrived in Rome, of course the Forum and Coliseum topped my list, but I was also really excited to catch the Keats-Shelley museum just next to the Spanish steps. Long story short, I bought some books, saw Keats' deathbed and death mask, and bought postcards of the two poets' graves, also located in Rome in the Protestant cemetery.

Just before I left for that trip, I decided I would trade in the poetry and attempt my first novel, written in the first person. The novel was called Le Saint de Chanson, which is French for The Saint of Song. The storyline followed a young man named Cameron Dupree living in the French Quarter of New Orleans. Cameron had a gift/curse, one in which he could see...okay, back up. Okay, the story followed the premise that every person has a soundtrack to their life, a certain song or group of songs that dictate their mood, and the way in which they perceive the world. Cameron's gift is that he can hear the song of every person he passes on the street through eye contact. If the song is melancholy or depressing, effecting the way the person behaved, Cameron tries to help them. He asks why the song is there, what happened in their life to put the song there, and what he could do to help. Cameron usually does this on Frenchmen street, where the younger generation of brooding young adults usually hang out and attend shows played by local indie bands. The problem is, he's not always successful in helping people.

The curse part of his gift is that whenever he fails to help a person out of their misery, their song is passed to him and he's sorta forced to bear it like an albatross for them. He hears their songs, the not so subtle reminders of his failures, all day and all night at various volumes, disrupting his sleep and rarely allowing him a peaceful silence. He combats what he calls "the noise" by drinking straight absinthe every night, which numbs his body and usually quiets the noise in his head. Only problem is, absinthe is known for its hallucinatory effects and he knows that "The Green Fairy" he drinks nightly may or may not, depending on the night, bring to him ghostly cameos made by his dead girlfriend, Lavinia. Cameron has to try and push aside his own pain and misery in order to free others of theirs. Around the French Quarter, he's the equivelant of a B-movie actor, a minor celebrity/Quasimodo-esque freak in a town full of tourists, party-goers, and those skeptical of his gift.

I wrote Le Saint de Chanson 5 years ago, and ever since, I've considered it as a mere project. Until now. Because I'm going through some rough times in the crime fiction field, I decided maybe I'd give the contemporary/suspense/fantasy/historical fiction genre a spin. The story is now entitled The Saint of Song. Just so I don't sound like a scatterbrain, I brought up the Romantic poets because in the story, Cameron refers to himself as a Neo-Romantic, and he's a huge fan of Keats, Byron, and especially Shelley. He makes his meager living as a ghost writer for the fictional Crescent City Neo-Romantic Review. He's a big fan of the Romantics, because I was at the time, and still am. I took that Byronic hero born in the wrong century and placed him in a city with lots of character, with a tainted history of culture, conflict and ghosts. The ghost tours in New Orleans are amazing and therefore, so is the one that's at times featured in the living room of Cameron's delapidated flat. I was into three films at the time that helped inspire Cameron's character; Heath Ledger's sin-eating priest in The Order, Johnny Depp's absinthe-addicted Scotland Yard inspector in From Hell, and Audrey Tautou's chipper philanthropist in Amelie.

There have been a few TV shows in recent years that sort of mirrored my idea; a tormented character with amazing powers to see the dead or to read minds, shows like Medium and The Listener. With the success of those shows, I'm hoping that maybe my idea will have some significance with agents. Who knows? I'll very soon be posting the first chapter when I get it totally reworked. Depending on some reviews I get from a select few readers, I'll be totally re-vamping and getting the thing out there. The poets were a big influence on the story, but so were actual historical events, which is what I referred to in the last post about my outlandish dream of Egypt. Should be good.

White Boy in the Land of the gods

So I had this sweet dream last night. I guess the scare with the whole Muslim extremist community was over or something because me, my wife, my mother and my sister were on vacation in Egypt free of fear and anxiety. I'm not quite sure what part of Egypt we were in; Thebes, Cairo, Alexandria. I'd like to think maybe it was Alexandria and that we were in ancient times because not only are we walking streets made of sand between limestone buildings, but I'm looking around and perusing on my own when J calls me over because there's this commotion in the distance with crowds of people lining the streets. And all the sudden it seems like we're on the set of the Mummy movies because I start to witness some weird magical and mystical type things. I see barges of the royal family being pulled by 12 foot tall slaves wearing the cobra headdresses and skirts with no shirts, statues of Anubis and Horus and Osiris and Isis lining all the barges in this procession. It's an awing site for sure. Especially when the barge bringing up the rear beholds the one and only Cleopatra VII, reclining on a bed with her black braided wig. In the past few years, I've often wondered what it would be like to really see her, but this was as if it were really happening, like my family and I had actually stepped back into time to catch a glimpse of Cleopatra along with her royal Ptolemies. The image below is how she appeared in the dream.

So I'm freaking out at my family. I'm like "That's Cleopatra that's Cleopatra!," as if everything else I'd seen in the procession was totally normal for a day out on the town in Egypt. Then I ask "Where's the camera?" but no one has the camera as it was left inside our hotel room. I remember the sinking feeling that accompanied that realization. No camera. I had seen Cleopatra in the flesh and no one back at home would believe me. My plan was to grab that camera, beat feet up the street ahead of the procession and snap a picture of her.

But alas.

Okay, so dreams are a little nuts sometimes and they fastforward and suddenly I'm on the streets again but this time it was at night, I'm alone, and I'm not sure which hotel is ours. My sister and mother are out somewhere else and I'm trying to get back to J in the hotel room. The streets are pretty spooky at night, especially when they're completely abandoned and I'm all by my lonesome with the mystical possibilities of ancient/modern Egypt. So I'm trying to find my hotel and sticking my head into darkened huts, through curtains I probably shouldn't be sticking my head through and that's when I hear this fast approaching, thundering choas that turns out to a tiny army of hovering Anubises and Horuses made of glinting metal, glidng in formation straight past me and into this tiny haven, like the gods' night brigade patrolling the streets of ancient Egypt. And if that wasn't weird enough, I finally find the hotel and as J and are down in the lobby warming up by a huge fire in the fireplace with the innkeeper, this old gravel-faced Egyptian, I ask him what goes on at night around the royal palace, obviously because I want to sneak over there and get a snap shot at Cleopatra. The guy shakes his head, waves a finger at me, tells me that he's not allowed to talk about it and that he advises me not to go. Though it was a little disheartening, I really didn't want to go ahead anyway and get my head chopped off or something.

Where does all this come from you ask?

Well, it's no secret that I love all things ancient Egypt, as I'm already making plans to teach it one day along with the Romans and the Greeks. But why did Cleopatra and the Egyptian gods filter their way into my dream? I'd never dreamed about the Egyptians before. Was is because of the book laying open and unleashed beside my bed, the one that boasts the title "The Book of the Dead?" I checked it out from the local library with the intentions of learning Egyptian hierogylphics. Was it because J and I perused the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC this past summer, spending hours upon hours in the Egypt section alone? The same place where J informed me that everything we were seeing seemed oddly familiar to her, as if her North African ancestory finds itself aligned with that of the pharaohs? Was it because while we were on the same vacation, I was reading a new nonfiction entitled "Cleopatra and Antony" by Diane Preston?

One of them? All of them?

I dunno. But it sure as heckfire came from somewhere strange and awesome and has me re-inspired to write some historical fiction. I have two already planned, and one already written, one which has elements of historical fiction throughout. Think I may try to get it out there to some agents once I've edited. I'll be posting the few chapter or so very soon.

So thanks to my family and thanks to Horus and Osirus and Anubis and Isis and Cleopatra for my vacation to the far reaches of the earth, for my night out on the town in ancient/modern day Egypt.

Crazy about Swayze

Great minds think alike I suppose, especially when it comes to American movie icons like Patrick Swayze. I briefly noticed that Adrian McKinty's got a Swayze section up today, with reference to the '91 movie Point Break. I've been a little melancholy for the past few days and it's pretty much because of Patrick's untimely passing. Lots of actors have been speaking out about him and they all suggest that he was a beautiful person with integrity and that's totally what the man gives off to me as well. On Larry King Live last night, the old bag of bones was talking to three of Patrick's co-stars from different movies or TV shows, and they all just happen to represent my three favorite works that feature Patrick Swayze.

First up was Gary Busey, who's a little more odd and unpredictable after his head injury but still warm when spreaking of his Point Break co-star. Point Break is one of my three favorite Patrick works, and if you've seen his performance as surfer/bank robber/good-bad guy Bodey, you'd know why. No one else wouldv'e pulled off that role like Patrick and I have to admit, even though Keanu Reeves is a bit cheesy in it at times, I watch the film every time I see it on TV. One of the best endings I've ever seen in a movie.

Next up was C. Thomas Howell, who worked with Patrick in my personal favorite Swayze vehicle and one of my favorite movies overall, Red Dawn. In the movie, Patrick plays Jed Eckertt, a young man who graduated high school the previous year and who still has a younger brother, played by Charlie Sheen, attending the high school. In a bout of alternate history, the Russians and the Cubans combine forces to overtake America, putting those with guns or military experience into concentration camps and before firing squads. Jed picks up his brother Matt and some of Matt's classmates and they all head to the moutains of Colorado to hide out from the invaders. Jed is the natural leader of the group, and after his and Matt's parents are killed by the foreign seigers, the group of kids fight back, referring to their guerilla group as the Wolverines, the mascot of their former high school. Patrick was great in Point Break, but Red Dawn is Patrick at his best. There's a remake of Red Dawn coming out next year, and if you ask me, the filmmakers and actors, escpecially the one playing Jed, have a lot to live up to.

Last was Larry Gilliard, one of Patrick's co-stars in the short-lived cop drama, The Beast. Short-lived, but it was a great show and I watched it every week. Terrific writing, wonderful acting, especially from Patrick Swayze who played the do things my own way Detective Charles Barker. I was extremely sad that the show had cease do to Patrick's failing health. I knew that his cancer was getting the better of him, but I have to say I was just as shocked to hear of his death as I was with Heath Ledger's. Patrick Swayze had a lot of good years left, and before he passed, he was doing a lot to raise awareness on cancer, epecially the type that took his away from the world.

He was a wonderful actor and even if you didn't know him, his integrity and willingness to go the proverbial extra mile was clearly recognizable. I am truly saddened not only for the movie world, but for his wife and his family, who were all by his side when he passed. I'll continue to watch Point Break and Red Dawn every time they're on TV not just because I love the movies but because Patrick Swayze was simply a joy to watch and from what his friends have said, a truly beautiful person who will be missed.

An anthology of Anarchy

So there are three seasonal shows that I watch religiously, never miss. Two of them, The Ultimate Fighter and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, start next week. The third, Sons of Anarchy, started Tuesday night and I have to say that the anticipation of the new season had me giddy as a school girl with a massive crush. Since the first season, Sons has given me an appreciation and an apprehension towards outlaw motorcycles gangs, especially being this close to Denver and to the Sons of Silence club who peruse those streets. Judging from the monikers, the Sons of Silence might have even inspired the fictional Californian club on the FX, rated-MA show. It's more like a dismissed HBO series than one shown on FX with it's harsh language, sexual situations, and levels of violence.

The show boasts one great actor after another, including the legendary Ron Perlman as Clay Morrow, the founder of the Sons, Katey "Don't Call Me Peg Bundy" Sagal as Gemma Teller Morrow, and as Gemma's son and Sons co-leader, Jax Teller, played by Charlie Hunnam, an English actor most known for role as the young leader of the Green Street Elite, West Ham United's football street brawlers in the film Green Street Hooligans. Other members of the cast always fun to watch are Scottish actor Tommy Flanagan of Braveheart and Gladiator fame, the attractive but consistently Spartan-browed actress Maggie Siff, and new to this season, Sir Henry Rollins, whom my wife has had a few run-ins with in LA, and whom she refers to as a "mean old man" who likes to pester teenage girls out his back window while he's working out on his home gym. This season, he's the unofficial leader of a Neo-Nazi troupe moving into the fictional town of Charming, California, strongly encouraging Clay and the Sons to cease their gun trafficking deals with the IRA so that they can get their share. But that's how the Sons make their dough, keep their pockets lined, so who in their right mind thinks that they'll stop their deals for the sociopathic, wild-eyed Henry "I'm a Liar" Rollins?

Sons of Anarchy is well scripted, compelling TV with a whole lot of major and minor characters for you to love and to hate. Viewers will be the most surprised to see the transformation Katey Sagal has undergone from Peggy Bundy to Gemma Morrow. She's no longer the bubbly, dim-witted thrift-spending big haired thorn in Al's side, but is now a wise, tattooed tough-talking wife, mother and grandmother with a cigarette-ridden voice and a soft spot in her heart for the men of her club and women who love them. Any fan of the crime genre will enjoy Sons of Anarchy and it's new spin, as dizzying and fast paced as the chrome wheels of a outlaw hog.