May 28 2009
April 1st. 2009: “It looks like a locker room for dead people.”
Garth and I finally resolve to ride our bikes out to the marina on Lake Pontchartrain to look at sailboats and see if there are any for sale in our price range. We go to the bank to transfer some of his funds into my account, then to Robert’s Fresh Market to drop off our locker keys. After that’s done, we pause on the sidewalk alongside Claiborne Street to look over our Avis Rent-a-Car map of New Orleans. We want to make sure we have a definite route to the lake, so we won’t get lost. The ride would take all day even if we went in a straight line from Robert’s to the shore. According to our map, all we need to do is ride up Claiborne to Monticello, and take Monticello to Orpheum, which will take us all the way to the lake shore.
Everything goes well until Monticello suddenly cuts off in a dead end at some railroad tracks. There is no Orpheum in sight. We stop at the side of Airline drive, Garth leaving his bike dangerously close to the many lanes of rushing traffic, and he asks me to pull the map back out of my purse. He looks at it for a moment.
“This isn’t a good enough map,” He says angrily. It’s meant for tourists in rental cars to use for navigation thru the French Quarter. “The roads are all fucked up.”
“Can I see that?” I ask. Airline drive is one of the main arteries of New Orleans. I’m sure I can find us a decent route from there to the Lake. I reach for the map.
“I know where we are!” He says, turning away. “There’s no direct route!”
I turn away from him and go wander over by the railroad tracks and watch a train lite approach. He sits defiantly on the grass and continues to get angry at the map.
Fine. Obviously the only option is to get enraged. No sense letting me try to help. That’s not what I’m here for. There’s no chance my input might actually be useful or resolve the problem.
After five minutes, I turn back around and walk over to him. He hands me the map without looking at me and says, “The only thing we can do is just keep riding north.” Then he takes off across the busy street, leaving me to wait for loads of traffic to pass before I can catch up. He doesn’t even look back.
You have no patience. The minute you decide to become enraged with something, everything else disappears, including me, and whatever plan we may have had is immediately scrapped, even if there was a chance we could’ve followed thru with it. What if I get hit by a car while you’re riding off ahead being mad? You probably won’t even notice.
I follow Garth as he winds thru residential neighborhoods. I stay way back, going deliberately slow, not wanting to chase after him while he’s being irritated. After another ten minutes of riding, he stops again and asks for the map. I don’t even bother looking at it. Once he’s decided where to go, he hands it back and asks, “Do you want to keep going?” He can see I’m not happy. When I answer in the affirmative, he asks, “Are you sure?” I answer yes again and he rides off again.
It’s not the long, confusing route that bothers me; it’s you. I suppose I’m only good for carrying things and handing them to you when you need them.
He turns into a cemetery full of gigantic mausoleums engraved with Irish and Spanish names. They are the size of houses and they have intricate stained glass windows and finely carved angles all over them. Garth parks his bike and goes about taking pictures. I park too, and walk around in the opposite direction. After a while, I notice he’s taken a seat on a pavilion attached to a mausoleum by the river that runs thru the cemetery. I follow in order to keep track of him so he won’t ride off without me.
I walk all around the mausoleum. I go up and down the steps and read all the names. I walk right past Garth and say nothing. I act like he isn’t there… even when he looks over at me. I lean on a pillar two feet from the bench on which he sits. I look out at the river. It’s green. The trees are green. The grass is green.
Why am I being stupid? Am I really that offended? Is it really that big of a deal? So he has no patience… everyone has flaws… I have enough patience for both of us. It’s dumb holding grudges. What if he wasn’t here at all? What if we decided to part ways? What if I knew he existed, but couldn’t be with him? Why am I being dumb? He’s right there and I’m acting like he doesn’t exist. I want to be with him. I don’t want to not be with him. So why am I not being with him when he’s right next to me? This makes no sense. It’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of.
I around the pillar like a child playing hide-and-go-seek. I peek around just far enough for Garth to see my eye. He sees me looking at him. He leans forward. I hide again. Then I look around again. He sees I’m smiling at him. He gets up and walks over to me and kisses me. We stand and stare at the green water.
“These people are really excessive,” he says. “They take up a lot of space after they die.”
“No kidding. It’s really dumb. When I die, I want someone to take my rotting corpse and throw it in the ocean. I want no boxes, no giant mansion-size tombstones and crypts and mausoleums. I just want to die and be gone.”
We ride across the cemetery to the All Saints Mausoleum, a hug building full of crypts. It smells nice to cover up the scent of decay. Flowers bloom all around, water falls in fountains, huge Jesus statues leans dramatically. Stained glass windows depicting scenes from the bible reflect off of shiny, polished walls full of dead people. Many squares line up from floor to ceiling down isle after isle. Each is engraved with a name and dates.
“It looks like a locker room for dead people,” I say.
After leaving the cemetery, we ride a couple more miles and finally make it to the lake. We walk thru every row of the marina. We only see one boat for sale that looks like it might be in our range. It turns out to be $14,000. We ride out of the marina and around Lake Pontchartrain. It’s vast. It’s like a sea. I think of Lake Superior. It also looks like a sea. But Pontchartrain is brown, dead, eerie, foreboding. It even looks somewhat vengeful and evil. It’s the kind of thing that you instinctually have a desire to stay away from because it might be cursed. It has none of the magic of Superior. Superior is a mystical being. It feels like home, like your mother. It draws you in with some kind of magnetic magic. You feel like there’s something you’ve been looking for all your life that you might find if you stare out over Superior’s waters long enough.
We see no more boats. We stop for food and then make the long ride back home. On the way, we stop at Lane’s to look at the church in which we once lived. The wall is falling off and some squatters have made our old room look like the kind of dark, spastic lair that a nocturnal heroine addict would live in if they fancied themselves a poet. We buy some wine and beer and drink with Lane. We even help him hunt his ducks in the lot full of semi-truck trailers across the street. He lets us feed them. They follow him around like he’s mother goose.
