GPS (3 page)

Strangely, in the days before the storm made landfall the paper had granted her a month off on the simple promise she would be back in early October to spend the next year, or longer, trying to explain to the rest of the world what was happening. Perhaps the Pic was already sensing most of the substance of her work thereafter would be extracted from the desolate streets in which she and Jeff ended up toiling almost every day until spring. And for those months it was, at least the months after the couple’s September escape from their devastated hometown.

Strange, Jeff always thought, that a Times-Picayune journalist would be
leaving
New Orleans in the days before Katrina with no plans to return for a month, but who was he to judge? He was going with her, as the Zephyrs had evacuated to Oklahoma City on Aug. 26, three days before the storm made landfall. When they got back, Jeff and Riley also managed to make time to move from their pre-marriage apartment into a house. Another odd Katrina irony, Jeff now thought.

As the storm approached, Riley’s parents had hatched their own cut-and-run plan, offering to their daughter the house on Carondelet Street they’d moved into after getting married in 1972, with an understanding they didn’t care to return except for visits to her. About the same time, Jeff and his wife got the hell out of Dodge too. They cashed in some of Jeff’s vault of frequent-flier miles and headed west to Arizona.

Jeff’s tenet of, “I’m not flying anywhere I’m not being paid to go,” of course, had to finally give way. That had been Jeff’s line for years, and his distaste for flying eventually led to this whole driving-everywhere idea that Riley had sprung on him. The couple’s pre-Katrina flight to Phoenix — where Riley spent the month evaluating her life and crying over what she called her lost hometown and Jeff spent the month evaluating the many different flavors and intensities of whiskey — was the first and only pleasure flight the couple ever made other than the two Dominican trips, and it fell well short of its billing.

In the months after their return, it was double-duty — hauling, dragging, sorting and sweating, and late-night writing for Riley. Both of them burned the candle at both ends right into Jeff’s next baseball season. But the couple rejoiced in the fact it had managed to live all but that first month of its post-hurricane life in the Carondelet Street house, the one which Riley’s parents fled when they “finally got out of that poor, heartbroken old town.”

“
In two, hundred, feet, turn right.”

Jeff was amazed when the GPS woman had methodically chirped out exact directions to that familiar Carondelet Street address. He steered street by street from his crappy new, yet very old, place on Esplanade Avenue on the northeast end of the Quarter to the place where he’d spent the last two and a half years of his life and his marriage — mostly happy, he thought.

His old address was one he thought he’d earned for the long term, one that would be tied to him for a long time. While it might have been mostly Riley’s paycheck that had allowed them to make the choices they made while they lived there together — including him switching teams like an aging free agent — Jeff felt he’d paid his dues when he was covered in mud and sweat that post-Katrina winter. It was a time when he often had to leave that scene of despair and fly to Florida during spring training, sometimes doing both jobs on the same day.

Anyway, it was the address that immediately came to him as he started tinkering with the GPS that morning. At first, he just sat on the couch and stared at it with skeptical interest from across the room. But soon, he had pushed his coffee mug aside and was fumbling it around in his hands and frowning at it like a Rubik’s Cube before finally figuring out how to snap the windshield mount into place and connect the power cable to its source.

Jeff had come stumbling into his apartment in the middle of the night after hauling some serious ass from Georgia. He’d skipped the middle innings in Savannah, and the late innings, and the hotel room and just spent the night driving back. Why?

“Well, to stew over my life here at home, of course,” he had said aloud to the empty room, still smiling. “To type my ex-wife’s address — my former address — into a GPS and take a spin by the old house.”

Retrieving the GPS off the fridge in the garage was one of the first things Jeff had done when he arrived home barely awake enough to steer the car up to the curb. A hundred miles earlier, he’d had a mind to stop at the store to buy a bottle for when he got back into town. He went straight home to bed instead, but not before flicking on the garage light to see, in the hulking shadows of his mostly-unused-at-the-moment furniture, that little box on top of the fridge with the words
“WARREN SAT-NAV SYSTEMS”
written on the side.

Even that level of technology had made Jeff want to sleep first, preferring to see the magic of satellite-guided travel in the morning. So he had descended the garage steps and fetched the box and, after a quick peek inside, had left it on the table which, along with the couch had made it out of what was now Riley’s house and into general use in his apartment. Then he’d made the short trip down the hall to his bed.

There, his cat, Lefty — which he always wished was named after Lefty Grove or even Steve Carlton but in fact had been named by a forgettable former girlfriend for the cat’s propensity to lead every action since kittenhood with his caramel-colored left paw — watched in disinterested daze.

Lefty had proven not long after his and Jeff’s arrival in New Orleans in the late winter of 2002 that he — like many other males new to the city of New Orleans — might not be able to handle what the streets had to offer on a nightly basis here, so the otherwise black cat spent his time dominating the apartment alone, with only the sounds of the city and a self-feeding, self-watering dish he likely often feared would run out to keep him company.

“
Arriving at destination, on left.”

There was Riley’s clunky Jetta parked out front, her ‘Eracism’ bumper sticker fading almost as fast as the woman’s free time to devote to worthy causes, and to unworthy ones like Jeff. As he neared the house, Jeff gave the gas pedal an extra nudge and quickly pushed his own crappy Celica past the house, as always laden in Mrs. Peletier’s bougainvillea, bringing back enough memories to force Jeff to not even consider glancing over at it as he passed.

“
Off-route. Recalculating.”

“No fucking kidding, off-route,” Jeff agreed to himself, as he fumbled to find the CANCEL button on the right side of the GPS, which he had wrestled into place at the center of his windshield that morning, thumbing up his driving view into a comical pattern of smudges.

“
Turn right, then, turn right, then, turn right and arrive at destination, on left.”

Jeff began fighting with the buttons on the GPS to make the woman shut up, but ultimately he opted to yank the adaptor right out of the cigarette lighter. Riley’s little gift had served him well. He couldn’t wait to drive on streets he didn’t know as well as these, couldn’t wait to be forced to rely on that woman to find his way for him. Oh God, the irony in that, he thought, roaring back toward Esplanade without any consideration of how far away his next right or left was.

Was that the elusive triple play of Riley-related funnies he’d thought of just today, the fact that she’d bought him something to help him find his way about two weeks before handing him his walking papers?

That thought deserved a drink and perhaps a little more thought and a little additional drinking. It was Tuesday, he didn’t have to be in Albuquerque until Thursday night and this was just the way things were going for Jeff right now. He even remembered to yank the GPS off the windshield when he pulled up to his apartment, and he began loudly impersonating his new-found friend on his way in the door and up the steps.

“
Turn key, then, open door. Walk up, 20 stairs, then, turn left. Walk 20 paces, then, turn left. Unzip pants, then, take piss.

“And when I leave for New Mexico, you’re going to do most of the driving for me,” he said minutes later as he set the GPS back on the table.

Like he often did, Jeff sauntered east on foot about five hours later, away from the Quarter, after leaving Lefty to his own devices for the night. The other cat in his life, The Spotted Cat on Frenchmen, was his first and likely last stop for the evening, but that didn’t mean it was going to be a short night. It meant if the atmosphere was dead when he got there, he’d simply wait it out.

- 3 -

The thing about The Spotted Cat, and New Orleans in general, is that it really is the drinking man’s place. For one thing, if you wait your turn, you can almost always steal a seat at the bar, and usually the tourists aren’t likely to wait you out. Combine that with a typical balmy night and a wait staff that understands the needs of the drinker, and losing track of time really can become something of a pastime.

Jeff added another layer of proof to that theory, doing the closest thing one can really do in New Orleans to close down a bar — he made sure he was the only one still there at 3:34 a.m. and called it a night. Much later that morning, Jeff and Lefty did their usual — a quick living room pow-wow during which he felt guilty for all the time he didn’t spend with his only real companion. But both of them were resigned to the fact Jeff just didn’t have the kind of life that gave him all of his nights at home, cooking and entertaining and hanging around with his cat.

That was evident in the decor of the Esplanade upstairs apartment, which looked onto a classic New Orleans courtyard, complete with a stone fountain and wrought-iron patio chairs. Like most of the things in Jeff’s life, the old courtyard was a good thing left waiting to happen.

He often gazed down from the apartment window and imagined himself having drinks with some mysterious New Orleans female in a perfectly swept, lush green courtyard, his cat of some 10 odd years curled up in its own chair. One look out that window now suggested no life whatsoever down there, just a square of windswept debris that in all likelihood still contained relics of Katrina’s wind and water onslaught.

Jeff knew, as he looked down at Lefty rolling back and forth in front of him, that it was pointless to try to explain to an animal the whys and hows of anything, especially to a cat. They have a way of calling your bullshit, and to them it usually boils down to the same question: Are you staying or leaving? As usual, Jeff was leaving.

Baseball was his business, whether he liked it anymore or not. And the midsummer days he often got to spend watching the Zephyrs in Metairie, practically in his backyard, were still weeks away. This time of year was the one that, at least for those committed to delivering the best talent to the major leagues, required focus and serious drive, both of which were in short supply for Jeff these days.

As if in constant commitment to doing things the hard way, Jeff was sizing up his first-ever drive to Albuquerque from New Orleans. It was a little shy of 1,200 miles, but the way Jeff saw it, it was a drive littered with worthwhile places to stop and stretch your legs — Shreveport, Dallas and Amarillo chief among them.

The plan, he supposed, was to leave home sometime early Wednesday afternoon and make some of those stops, and that was supposed to be part of the beauty of this whole driving idea, whether it was how Riley had intended it or not. You eat what you want, stop when you want and you don’t have to listen to some worn down flight attendant who’s long since lost the card that says all the bullshit like,
“Even though the bag may not inflate fully, oxygen is flowing,”
and,
“Make sure you secure your own life vest before helping others.”

“Bitch, if this thing goes down, I ain’t helping anyone except myself to the liquor cart,” Jeff used to tell himself ritually before every flight left the ground.

Long drives were nothing, he thought, in comparison to being locked in a flying missile owned by an airline. Too often, those airlines packed their sardines in and wheeled them right out onto the runway before putting the captain from the flight deck on the speaker so he could announce in that garbled pilot-talk that comes out in painstaking increments, as though being read off a telegraph machine in the cockpit, the most aggravating thing you could hear while strapped into a winged city bus that is parked about 50 feet from real food, drink and toilets.

“
Ladies and gentlemen — from the flight deck — looks like we’re — going to be sitting here — for a little while — as we — get the official OK — from — Dallas-Fort Worth to go ahead and — take off here — and it looks like we’re — sixth — seventh in line — and we’ve got — mostly cloudy skies — over Dallas right now — temperature is — oh — about 51 degrees right now — so — be — patient — and we’ll get you on your way to — Dallas — Fort Worth — here — in just a few minutes.”

Jeff learned to hate pilots, mainly because of that and also because they tended to hang around airports. In his final act of preparation for what he figured would be at least a 14-hour drive, Jeff pushed the GPS firmly into the underside of the Celica’s windshield, then sprayed some window cleaner into a paper towel and vigorously began to wipe off all the glass around the GPS unit.

“
Warren GPS technology. Welcome.”

The woman’s voice made him rear back fast enough to thump the top of his head off the Celica’s rearview mirror. He knew instantly what it was, he just wasn’t prepared for how quickly it was speaking to him. “Dammit!” he shouted, wanting to smack the GPS right off the window, but deciding to keep his free hand on his stinging skull for a moment longer instead. He didn’t notice that he’d barely plugged the unit into the cigarette lighter when it spoke.

Jeff slid into the driver’s seat and was soon zipping down Esplanade, knowing fully where he was going but still taking delight in letting some unseen satellite force guide him out of New Orleans and onto I-10 West.