still,” she said, her instruction hardly necessary. She daubed at my face with a wet napkin. I stayed still and tight. I had to trust that she could do this right.
“I die,” croaked the man I’d felt compelled to assist. “And I wish, I wish . . .”
Pebbles tells me I was forgotten then. That the possibility of my infection from the bloody sputum of a homophobic raving drunk was released like a vapor and replaced with an entirely refocused sense of horror. I remember someone pushing me back, but still I refused to open my eyes. The uneven pavement below me was cool, but the sun targeted my clenched face and I saw red, literally. Like it was some kind of sick joke.
The small crowd descended upon the man who seemed prepared to utter his last words. Pebbles’ napkins were put to immediate use, and there was no more uncertainty. The group wordlessly colluded on a divers hands approach to curtailing his freedom of speech by committing an act of involuntary manslaughter. Paper napkins covered and filled all the holes in the poor man’s face. He was unable to complete his wish, all right. He was also unable to breathe, right up until the paramedics came marching in.
And he was a drunken liar. Gerald Pollin was not dying, he wasn’t even close to dying. And he carried no communicable diseases, though not for lack of trying. Apparently he’d come to New Orleans intent on becoming someone new via sexual experiment, but so far no one was willing to lend a hand unless Gerald was willing to fill it with money first. And more than horny, Gerald was cheap. More than cheap, he was a drunkard. Two days into his adventure all the rejections he managed to collect took the spirit form of the ignorant woman who raised him, and he found himself raving in her voice. What a meager inheritance.
And what he gave to me was paranoia. For the first time since I moved down south, I felt real fear. I sat in an examining room with Pebbles who bided her time perusing a colorful pamphlet about stroke symptoms. She’d insisted on coming with me to the emergency room, but before that she’d tried to convince the paramedics to take me before poor Gerald. It didn’t work, and her attitude was not very attractive, but there are rare moments when a screeching, shrill woman is the only person on your side, and you couldn’t be prouder of the spectacle she was willing to make of herself.
There was nothing wrong with me, but we were waiting for the Alprazolam to take effect, and the doctor thought we’d be better off cooling our heels in private. Since Katrina it’s a whole lot easier to get anti anxiety meds through legitimate channels, which is not to say I didn’t fully deserve a little chemical help at the moment. And since cancer had been wished away, medical centers no longer processed patients like cans in a factory.
The edge fuzzed for me eventually, and the bitterness in my throat became stale. Somewhere else in this cigarette stain colored hospital Gerald Pollin was having his face restored as if it were the infrastructure of an ancient city, with pipes being laid and walls being reinforced. He, and the rest of us, would be better off with the Las Vegas approach: implode the fucker and start from scratch. I wondered if he’d had this sort of thing done before, and if the reason his nose seemed to shatter like marzipan wasn’t due to a previous reconstruction. Whatever. He was in pain. If not now, then soon.
Gerald Pollin was an asshole, but he wasn’t meaningful enough to make me feel this defeated. He was an accident. He was banal. He simply didn’t possess the power to trouble me so deeply. And to be honest, I had a hard time fixating on him, especially after I sussed out his inborn limitations. There was no Demon Gerald, so what had me so rattled?
Pebbles recognized that I was ready to move. She asked, “We gonna call Val yet?”
“Uhm. What’s today?
“Friday.”
Good then. I hadn’t missed Sunday. In a tourist driven economy you can lose track of days, because every day is an occasion for parties, both heartfelt and hollow. “Death Wishing,” I said out loud.
Pebbles waited. She’d seen trauma before, apparently.
I told her, “A friend of mine is giving a speech Sunday. One of the Wish Local events. Would you care to accompany me?”
Pebbles settled in her bones, becoming all women at once, and what came out was very measured, closed off: “Will it cost anything?”
“No.”
“Val coming?”
“He might just.”
“Okay.”
“What happened today—” I wanted to say something that would isolate the experience and rationalize the behavior of all involved. We weren’t going to be questioned by any authorities, especially if we all remained silent, and even if Gerald retained memories of the trauma he was entirely unreliable. That left us with our own internal judges to appease. For the first time I was grateful for having been incapacitated by hysteria; I don’t know how I would have behaved otherwise. All I know is that up until today I had been living a parallel world where Death Wishing was no more real to me than the latest scandalized celebrity. It was an earthquake, but in another country that only existed on the nightly news.
I wanted to say something about it all. But Pebbles was staring me down something fierce, and all of a sudden I felt as if I had no right to say anything at all.
I was nothing, right? Just a moony old man to her. She took my hand, and I hopped down from the exam table. She was going to lead me down the hall. She was going to guide this shuffling fool out the door.
I bit down: and what did you do my lovely girl? What side did you take when Hat Man Gerald opened his poisoned mouth? Oh yes indeed, paranoia had me now. Answers are never as important as questions.
Pebbles made a move to replace the stroke pamphlet in its holder (a minor relief that she didn’t think we’d need to take it with us), but she ended up knocking the entire batch to the floor. She squatted to retrieve them and the whale tail of her thong breached from the waistband of her shorts. The Alprazolam granted me permission to stare at her backside, and I found myself reading a line of red words printed on the pink elastic waistband:—llo Kitty Hello Kitty Hello Kitty Hello Kitty Hello Kitty Hello Kitty Hello Ki—
I held my breath and made a wish. Girl was gonna kill me for sure. And Death Wishing? That mysterious bitch. I honestly thought she would pass me by.
3.
Esplanade was a shady avenue but not completely peaceful, lined with houses, small absurd businesses, a few wrecked places, and ancient trees that thrived on ashes and rain. A lot of garbage collected in its corners, but somehow our trash was a little less filthy and more homey than the rubbish on Canal Street, which was over exposed to traffic and impersonal commerce. Val’s Vintage occupied the ground floor of our town home, and it was a dark, gloomy shop, luridly portentous with a lot of indirect and unhelpful lighting, some of it on the novelty side—neon sculptures, illuminated masks, and the like. I had a corner in the back, a workshop space filled with my fabrics, dummies, and an industrial serger.
Saturday morning that’s where my dearest friend, Martine Bernier, teetered on a plastic milk crate, his ample midsection aglow from a gooseneck work lamp. My latest travesty was stitched around his abdomen. I’d started out running Val’s website and a service: V3C. Victor’s Cape and Corset Cleaning. It was a natural leap into corset construction. Seriously, you’d be surprised what a feller gets up to when his main vices, such as binge eating and drinking, are curtailed. Martine was a big man, taller than me but just as wide, and he’d stripped down to what looked like an old man’s v-neck undershirt but was really some luxurious silk blend thing. Subtle, antique styling was all the rage amongst well-heeled clubbers. A tranny dabbler on the holidays, Martine was tickled to loan his body to my art. Even so, he could only handle posing for about a half hour at a time before he’d want to go out for a Pimm’s or some other touristy libation. It also didn’t help that Martine would tolerate no serious drawing in of laces. He couldn’t take much pressure on his esteemed, well fed gut. Frustrating because I really wanted to test the engineering.
He’d found the whole business with