Boulevard (3 page)

He had bought all the soaps and shampoos he needed, a washcloth, a can opener, plastic spoons, some cans of soup. He could eat the soup cold, he figured, three cans a day, and that would have to keep him alive until he found a job. Tonight he began with a can of cold chicken noodle, opening the can and drinking the broth, spooning the noodles into his mouth. The noodles had a satisfying texture, he ate greedily, and he knew as soon as he had eaten that the three cans of soup a day would never feel like enough. But he had less than seventy dollars now, and he had to stretch the money as far as he could.

He studied the ads in the newspaper for a while, and
stepped onto his balcony. Barracks Street was so close to Decatur it was considered by many people to be a dangerous part of the Quarter, and Newell may have felt something of that character as he stood on the balcony. Close enough to the waterfront he could smell it, dank and dusky. He stood at the iron railing for a long time, one foot in the lower rung, leaning out, watching. The empty shop on the corner attracted some young men to stand under the awning, and cars stopped there, and one or another of the young men slid into the cars and rode away. This happened intermittently as he stood there, till the corner emptied. The figures moved with mysterious knowledge—he could only study them and wonder. More young boys came, and the same thing happened. After a while the corner emptied, and nobody came, and he went inside.

His watch said after eleven. He had meant to call Flora, but by now she would be asleep, with sheets of toilet paper wrapped around her hairdo. So he took off his clothes, cleared the newspaper off the bed, and standing on the balcony, shook out the blanket, in the night in his underwear, certain somehow that no one was watching, that it hardly mattered whether anyone saw, then returned to the room and locked the balcony door. He lay on the bare mattress with his folded jeans for a pillow, the scratchy blanket on his skin, windows open, breeze moving through the room. He was glad for the ceiling fan. But he would have to buy curtains for the windows. He would have to buy a hot plate and some pots and pans.

He slept, exhausted by the day and the bus ride, the overnight journey; all night he dreamed he was on the bus again, riding along the highway with the Gulf of Mexico sliding by the window, in and out of sight. Crossing wide spans of water, the bus gliding as if on a cushion of air. All night he dreamed he was still traveling to the city, still arriving. But he was already lying in a room of his own, already in his own bed. When he woke up and realized where he was, he felt afraid and glad all over again.

A can of cold chicken rice soup for breakfast, and water from the tap. He would have to buy a glass—he should have thought of that the night before. But he would surely pass the A&P again today. Or find one in the junk store downstairs. He dressed in his best Sunday pants, a dark brown polyester that never showed the slightest wrinkle, dark blue socks, shiny black shoes, and a white shirt with long sleeves. At the mirror in the bathroom he stopped to reflect that he was pretty good looking, with his hair combed the right way. He flossed his teeth and brushed them till they shone. He wished he had some cologne to make himself smell good, but at home he had always used Jesse's big bottle of Brut. He strapped on his watch.

First he called Flora, collect, from a pay phone inside a grocery store. She accepted the charges with resignation and said, “Good lord, Newell, I was about worried to death, I just knew somebody had drug you off some-wheres.”

“I'm sorry, I just was reading the want ads last night and I forgot to call. I had to find a phone. They're not on the street where you can see them.”

“New Orleans is a different kind of a place.” Flora spoke as though she ought to know.

“I like it. I'm out looking for a job this morning. Wish me luck.”

“I wished you'd come on home is what I wish.”

“It'll be all right, I got plenty of money left. I got me a nice room. It's not on Bourbon Street, where I wanted it, but it's close. It's on Barracks.”

“Oh,” she said.

Silence for a moment. “Well, I don't want to run up your bill.”

“You better not,” she agreed.

“I'll call you again when I get a job. When I get a phone.”

They said the other things they were accustomed to say, that he was her little squirt and she loved him, and he wished she would stop calling him a squirt, but that was all it was, she said, that was all that made him in the first place.

He applied to a lot of restaurants in the French Quarter, including Brennan's, the Court of Two Sisters, the Magic Pan, the Coffee Pot, Café Sazerac, and he applied at bars like Pat O'Brien's, the Oyster Bar, and even Preservation Hall, which was apparently famous for something he didn't even know about, jazz. Some of the places he could tell right away he would never be hired, like the
Café Sazerac, where all the waiters were a lot older than Newell; others, like Pat O'Brien's, hardly seemed like the kind of place he had come to New Orleans to find. But he had already decided he would take anything that was offered. He applied at the downtown hotels to work in room service, even applied at a place that was still under construction and couldn't hire anybody before the first months of 1979, almost a year away. He applied at a couple of banks to be a cashier, though he could tell he was not the right kind of person to get that kind of job—he was dressed the wrong way, he had the wrong air about him. More restaurants along Canal and Carondelet and up St. Charles, where the streetcars ran, places that catered to the downtown lunch crowd. In every place it was a plus that he had an address but a minus that he had no telephone. He would call them himself, he said, or come by again.

But he found he sparked more interest in the restaurants in the lower Quarter, a place called Circle K on Dauphine and Dumaine, and two places on the other side of Esplanade, the White Biscuit and Betty's Kitchen. These restaurants were staffed by men his own age with managers not much older, and the customers were mostly men as well. In these restaurants, the fact that he as yet had no telephone hardly seemed as much of a hurdle.

This was Friday, his second day in New Orleans, but by the end of it he had walked the streets from Poydras to Frenchmen, and he had introduced himself to the managers of nearly a dozen restaurants. So he went home in
the heat of the afternoon, lay across the bare mattress and rested.

He fell asleep without intending to, and woke near dark, a breeze stirring through the open door to the balcony. He walked to the door, smoothing down his hair and straightening his shirt—the smell of the river again, heavier in the afternoon heat, but no boys on the corner today.

Now he could see that he was not the only one living on the street; a number of the second- and third-floor balconies showed signs of habitation, including porch furniture and potted plants, hanging baskets made of twisted twine. He studied the balconies up and down his block for a while, the day darkening, the sky bloody red.

He ate a can of soup and walked to the riverfront, straight up Decatur among what seemed to be abandoned warehouses, till he came to some stores that were open but very dark, machine shops, maybe, or garages, and then to retail places, a Christmas store, tourist shops that featured something called pralines and boxes of beignet mix. He came to Jackson Square and wandered among the tourists with their cameras and souvenirs. At the end of the square the gray cathedral loomed over the plaza, where portrait painters were still working, switching on electric lamps, determined to paint as long as the tourists were willing to sit and pay. Newell idled in this setting, reading the historical plaques on the buildings, learning about the Cabildo, the Spanish colonial administration, the Pontalba buildings, soaking up breezes that carried
the dank smell of the river. Beneath all the other sounds came the lowing of ships' horns, cargo carriers moving upriver to the container docks. Memorabilia shops for the tourists and supply shops for the artists crowded the square around the church. Newell stood in the shadow of the tall tower, watching pigeons chasing one another on the stones of the square, squabbling over bits of hot dog and bread. On the plaza stood a hot dog vendor behind a stand shaped like a big hot dog on wheels, and the man behind the hot dog stood as tall as Newell but at least as wide as the wiener truck, a huge round man with his chin sunken deep into a waddle of fat, and bunches of fat hanging over his belt and along the sides of his trousers. He had a forlorn, weary expression, standing with his meat fork in hand, ready to spear a wiener for anyone who might feel the need.

At the door of the church sat men and women who were begging for money from the people going in and out of the church. He walked among them and looked at them closely, their gray clothes, their filthy skins, their voices cracked as they asked him for money. He ignored them except for looking at them, but he could hardly tear his eyes away from their misery, since he was nervous that he might end up this way himself, homeless, as he assumed these people were, living in the dirt of the street.

Others watched him, though he was scarcely aware that anyone noticed him at all: others watched him standing at the edge of the crowd of tourists on the square, in his awkward clothes, his hair combed back from his face,
so fresh from the country. He was new in town, and there were always people to notice that, to watch him avidly as he stood beside the gate to the park. A look of yearning about him, palpable to anyone who cared to notice.

Instead of heading home at once he walked up Bourbon Street and back, and the vitality of the French Quarter at night overawed him; he could feel the whole constellation of its life around him, the layers of streets and cars and people, the ghosts of skyscrapers hovering in the shadowy sky. The long street engulfed him like a dream. He passed along the strip bars, the music bars, the country bars, the jazz bars, the piano bars, the ragtime bars; he stopped at a full-size picture of Chris Owens at her own show bar and wondered what it would be like to be a beautiful big-breasted woman like her, to have raven hair that tumbled and rippled down your back, to be so popular that you could have your own nightclub. He ambled along the street, which was closed to cars except at the corners, where traffic crossed on the cross streets. He marveled at the balconies of the hotels, the apartments draped with Boston ferns, clematis, confederate jasmine, ivory, warm lights spilling down through the ironwork. He stopped to smell the egg rolls at the Takee-Outee, wished he dared spend the one dollar seventy-five cents required, because the smell made his mouth water, but he walked away from the rows of shish kebabs and the egg rolls and the skewers of fried shrimp, the grease glistening under the lights. He stood in the doorway of an arcade where teenage boys were playing pinball or some of
the new video games, with quarter after quarter to slide in the machines, and the boys all different shades of brown hunched over their games, their buttocks clenching and unclenching with each play.

He stood on the curb outside and looked first one way, then the other, up and down Bourbon Street, a riot of bobbing heads and color, voices rising and horns blowing, scratches of music, now and then some single voice rising distinctly above the rest, like the hawker in the doorway at the strip club where the female impersonators were strutting up and down the stage behind him, visible through the doorway as they passed along the runway, bright and colorful: a man who was pretending to be a woman and making money for it, a clear sign that the world was larger than anything Newell could ever have learned about in Pastel.

At a certain point on Bourbon Street the streets were no longer barricaded and the tourists no longer wandered, but there were still a lot of people walking on the street, nearly all of them men. He passed a corner where two bars faced each other, and the doors of the bars were all open, so that he could see inside as he was walking. The bars were also full of men, lounging on stools facing outward, or leaning against the bars, posing, very few of them talking to anybody, listening to the music that pounded from beyond the doors. Newell walked past the doors and through the crowd on the street, and he could tell people were watching him critically; he knew he had on the wrong kind of clothes, that he looked like somebody
who wasn't sure where he was. Trying to keep his eyes to the ground, but unable to avoid staring at the men on the streets and in the bars, he made his way down one block, then two, and after a while he came to the sign for Barracks, and turned there and found his way home.

He stood in the middle of his room with the thought in his head that he had been for a walk down Bourbon Street and had come back from it, that Bourbon Street and the French Quarter were still out there if he wanted to go back, and the feeling of anticipation filled him completely, so that he was for the moment unworried about money, about finding a job, about all that. For a moment he was simply delighted to be here, at home in his one, narrow room with the breeze blowing through the open balcony door.

But when he lay down under the blanket he found himself thinking only of the latter part of the walk, when he had passed through the invisible barrier on Bourbon Street into the country of men, where men had been all around him, watching him, and he had watched them in return, with no need to say anything about it. He tried to remember a particular face to think about, to dream about, before he fell asleep. But the faces were a sea; he kept going under when he thought back to those moments, thinking from one face to another.

On Saturday rain fell morning to night, a low drizzle along the streets. He had only two cans of soup left, so sometime today he would have to go to the A&P again and spend more money. But he lazed in the room most of
the morning, stood out on the balcony for a long time. Even in the rain a few people with umbrellas were walking, and some of them went into the junk shop downstairs. Later, when he was drinking water again out of the bathroom sink faucet, he thought maybe he could go downstairs and see if there was a plastic cup in all that mess in his landlady's store.