Boulevard (11 page)

But he went out anyway, wandered up and down the sidewalks looking all the men in the eye. He had lost part of his fear of them, now that he had a job, now that he knew he could stay. He went to Lafitte's, where the men congregated, some of them strong and masculine in their jeans, some emaciated, and others with large, round rear ends and thighs that tapered toward the knee. But he looked at them all and slid past the ones who lounged near the doorway watching the new arrivals and headed for a stool near the corner of the bar, beside the jukebox. Music came from the jukebox, though it was piped through the sound system, and so the music was changing all the time; but somebody played “Don't Leave Me This Way,” by Thelma Houston, which was his favorite song, and then “I Love the Night Life,” by Alicia Bridges, which was his second favorite song. So he felt as if this must be a lucky day for him, and he drank another beer for eighty-five cents.

Men were watching him from all sides, but this was nothing special, because they were watching each other too, and watching the door that led upstairs and the door that led to the street, and watching the bathroom door, and watching the bartenders and watching their own drinks, their own hands. If there had been a mirror
they would have been watching their own reflections, he thought. With the music so loud hardly anyone was talking, though occasionally someone would lean to the ear of someone else and say a few words. A lot of men were alone, like Newell, so he hardly felt out of place, and the second beer went down faster than the first, helping any anxiety he might develop. He sat wondering what time this place would fill up, what it would be like then, because the other night when he had walked past the bar had been stuffed with men, hanging off the upstairs gallery and overflowing into the street.

He had ordered another beer from the bartender and turned to scan the titles on the jukebox when a voice spoke to him, from behind, close to his ear and soft, “Hello there.”

When he turned there was Henry, wearing a red flannel shirt and a red handkerchief in his pocket. Newell remembered him at once and wished he would go away. He had been standing very close to Newell but took a step back, with an anxious look on his face that made Newell feel anxious too, and Henry's eyes seemed far too large and round, and what was he staring at? Irritated, Newell started to turn away from him, but instead noticed that other people in the bar were watching Henry talk to him, and this seemed to Newell more desirable than to sit there alone with the beer like so many of the rest, so he nodded to Henry to sit on the stool next to him, and Henry hopped onto it at once. He had a drink with a lime wedge floating in it, and he set that on the
counter. The bartender came along and slid a napkin under it, and Henry and Newell sat there listening to the jukebox, which was so loud there was no way to talk except to lean one head close to another. So Newell leaned a little toward Henry and asked, “This isn't the bar where you met me, right?”

“No, that was the Bourbon Pub. Do you want to go there?”

Newell shook his head and sipped his beer. The music pounded the walls, the ceiling, the countertops, making everything vibrate,
raining men, it's raining men
, he heard the words and watched Henry out of the corner of his eye, knowing that Henry was staring at him, feeling odd because of that, feeling as if he ought to walk away. But he went on sitting there because it was pleasant to have someone watching him with eyes so avid, and he wondered whether Henry could smell the new cologne the way Newell could smell the sweet stuff Henry used. But Newell was careful to keep his eyes moving, ranging through the bar over the hard, round shoulders of the men, many of whom had torn the sleeves off their shirts, every color of skin, every texture. He wondered if his arms looked like that or if they could look like that. He surreptitiously squeezed a shoulder, a forearm.

“I like this bar this time of day,” Henry whispered. The sound located him close behind Newell, invisible, speaking into Newell's ear. “Everybody comes here early. To get ready for the rest of the night.”

“Then where do they go?” Holding himself perfectly
still, with Henry's breath on his ear lobe.

“A couple of streets over to Travis's. Or over to the baths on Frenchmen. Or dancing. Or down to the waterfront, late. Then toward daybreak people eat beignets at the Café du Monde. Or cheeseburgers at the Clover Grill. Or else they drive to Susie's for breakfast.” He spoke plainly, but his words drew a map in Newell's brain, and he looked around the bar again, at all the men, and he remembered the men on the street outside, and he wondered. Henry's description framed the whole event. Newell could feel a sense of preparation in the air, everybody sizing up everybody else, the evening about to unroll like some magic carpet. “I like this time of night,” Henry added.

They sat through more songs on the jukebox, and Henry asked if Newell would like to go to the Corral, and Newell said yes and thought they were leaving the bar, but, as it turned out, the Corral was the bar upstairs; he felt comfortable there, in the noise and smoke. Henry and Newell found places for themselves along the wall, and Henry bought drinks and they stood there, sipping, Newell watching the other men linger, exiting, coming in the door, passing by on the way to the jukebox or the bathroom. Newell felt, as he had since he got the job at the bookstore, that his eyes had opened fully and he was really seeing what was around him for the first time. Where once he had seen only a mass of faces, now he could distinguish groups of men in the bar, and different types of men in each group. Some of them were lean and
sullen and had a polished look to their skin, especially to the skin of their faces, like women's faces, Newell thought, though these were clearly masculine men. Some of the men were pale and soft, some slim and soft, and these soft men spoke with a lilt and stood with a slight curve to every part of the body, and spoke with soft curved arm gestures and tracings of the hand through the air. Some of the men sat at the bar and stared hungrily at the others, clearly here alone, stooping over their drinks with a furtive air. One of these men was wearing a business suit and had a wedding ring on his hand, a banker or insurance salesman, and Newell wondered if he had come here by accident, if he had failed to notice that there were no women here. There was one man wearing a woman's wig and polka dot blouse tied to leave his midriff bare, his hairy navel sunk in a few pale folds of fat. He had a lot of friends around him and laughed and slapped his hands on the bar and whooped and threw his hand up in the air and lit a cigarette on a long, thin cigarette holder with rhinestones at the tip. He stopped talking only to freshen his red lipstick and his friends surrounded him, chattering and laughing, and all of them looking around the bar to make sure other people were noticing their fun, their friend with the wig, the lipstick, and meanwhile the music from the jukebox pounded as three men in leather clothes stood over it slipping in quarter after quarter and choosing song after song. The bartenders whirled and slid along the counter slipping their hands across each others' backsides as they passed one another, with the noise so
loud they had to lean close to the customers to hear what they were saying; two of them wore flannel shirts and the other a halter-type T-shirt that outlined the smooth curves of his body. Everyone moved to the beat of the music in some way, the bartenders neatly dancing in the little space they had, and the men at the bar tapping their fingers, keeping time with head movements or undulating at the hip, some of them singing along with the record, or appearing to sing along—hard to tell, since nothing could be heard except the music.

He and Henry stayed at the Corral a long time, where men were playing pool, with more men lined along the walls to watch them, and lined up along the walls in the other room to watch the bartenders, and lined outside the bathroom to watch each other there as well. This upstairs bar had a balcony, and Newell and Henry walked onto it, stepping out of the noise into the humid air that fell on them like a weight. They looked at each other and smiled, and Newell now felt curiously warm and grateful that Henry was with him, but still uncomfortable about it, especially when Henry stared at him too long. “I like to come out here for the quiet.”

“It's cooling off,” Newell said.

Henry gestured, and Newell looked at a group of shadows standing farther along the balcony, formless except that a point of orange light, a cigarette ember, hung in their midst, and Henry said, “People smoke joints out here. Nobody cares.” At the same time Newell smelled the smoke, which he recognized from the one joint he had
ever tried to smoke in Pastel, with his cousin Joel, one night in back of the cemetery in the bend of the river, the same smell of grass and earth, and it had thrilled him then as now because it was illegal, and yet here were these men on this balcony in the middle of a bar right out in the open, far more daring than Newell's taste of the smoke beside a moonlit grave. Next thing he knew, Henry was lighting one too and handing it to him and he took it, as if he had always taken such things, and he put the hand-rolled tip to his mouth and pulled in, and coughed and felt the rasping of the smoke along his throat, and wanted to cough again but refused. They passed the joint back and forth.

He would be aware through the rest of the night, at times, that the drug had altered his perception of the world, but since the world he was coming to know was itself a narcotic, acting on him in that way, he was never quite sure whether the night seemed so strange and long because of the drug or simply because of itself. They stood on the balcony in the warm breeze until the throbbing of music from the Parade, a block down the street, became insistent, and Henry asked Newell if he wanted to go dancing, and Newell nodded and they picked their way through the bar and stepped onto the street. Henry led Newell to the Parade where Henry bought a bottle of Rush and paid for the cover charge for both of them. From upstairs flowed rivers of sound, the same beat Newell had heard everywhere, on every jukebox, and they arrived at the top of the stairs to the dance floor, a
sea of undulating heads and shoulders and arms thrown high; and Henry leaned into Newell's ear and whispered, “This place is my favorite, except for the waterfront,” at the same moment that one song melted into something new, a woman with a trumpet of a voice singing, “It took all the strength I had not to fall apart,” a song Newell had not heard before, but which caused a sensation on the dance floor. A crush of people carried Henry and Newell forward, toward the whirling lights and globes and the shifting mass of bodies.

They never made it as far as the dance floor. They danced under one of the arches beside it, and bodies pressed them from all around. Newell's head was spinning, and the music hardly helped him orient himself. Soon Henry had opened the bottle of Rush and shoved it under Newell's nose, saying, “Take a breath up your nostril.” Newell did, and felt the harsh rush of whatever was in the bottle, a wind through his head and the feeling that the music was slamming at his bones, and he began to dance as Henry inhaled the stuff too and threw back his head and smiled.

The music never stopped, one song blending into the next, Newell and Henry danced, with Henry holding the bottle under Newell's nose and the heady, intoxicating scent flooding Newell, the music suddenly more intense inside him, his heartbeat like hammers, and Henry passing the bottle of Rush to adjacent dancers, faces that appeared in Newell's sight then vanished again, and parts of bodies undulating against him, the dance floor packed,
and the feeling of unity with all the rest of them, their arms and legs rippling in the same wind as it coursed through them all, the music whipped around them like a storm, and everybody blowing. Everywhere he looked, men were dancing with men, everyone with everyone, while the music spun the room into a frenzy. A first glimpse of ecstasy rose in Newell, like a window opening, and he was amazed by the feeling and empty, completely empty of everything except this one moment, the beat of the music, the beat of his body on waves of it, and the feeling of a tribe around him, exalted.

At a certain moment he looked across the room to the center of the dance floor, and, as if the crowd had parted especially for that reason, he saw a blond man he had seen before, and recognized him in some way, an unmistakable perfection, his skin golden, his hair cut close to his scalp, such a look of strength and health, a perfect body in the light. For as long as they were dancing, Newell could hardly look anywhere else. But within a couple of songs, Henry took Newell by the arm and led him outside onto another balcony. Even through the closed doors the muted bass line of the dance music made their bodies vibrate. A breeze brought a scent of storm coming, a cool edge to the night. From far away came the lowing of ships passing on the river. Newell could almost see in his mind the curve of the river and the lights along it, the lights of the ships doubled in reflection in the river. He gripped the black iron rail of the balcony and leaned out over the street. Behind, doors opened and closed, and
the music washed over them whenever the doors were open. Newell's head pounded. Henry asked, “Do you want something to drink?”

“No. I'm fine.”

“It's going to rain,” Henry said.

“Not for a while.”

“How do you know?”

Newell shrugged.

“You tired of dancing?” Henry asked.

“Do you want to do something else?”

Henry looked at him with the tip of his tongue visible, just behind his teeth, and his eyes big and round. “We could walk to the riverfront. You ever been there?”

“You mean at Jackson Square? I walk there a lot.”

Henry laughed. “No. I'll show you where I mean.”

On the street again, they drifted toward the river along St. Peter, Newell following Henry's narrow, stooped shoulders among the other men. Newell realized with a start of surprise that they were headed toward the old brewery, to the deserted warehouses along the riverfront; soon they had crossed beyond the Moonwalk and hurried along narrow streets till they came to a loading dock, which Henry scrambled to climb, beckoning Newell to follow, at the top of which they slid through a door that somebody had propped open.