I have a new found respect for the life of flea market people. First off, I worked the closing shift at the Tomato the night before and I got really pissing drunk for some reason so I didn’t want to get out of bed at dawn, which is when you have to start setting up because all the hardcore garage sale-ing blue-haired ladies cruise around looking for signs at first light in order to get all the good deals. Dan promised to help but he was stone cold passed out, so I set up the camera on a tripod and filmed my ass hauling all the shit out into the yard myself, changing the camera angle every once in a while and setting it all up on the tables, trying to make our loot look semi-presentable. There was quite a lot of stuff for sale and setting up took forever. Then I hung the signs up all over the neighborhood, which wasn’t hard, but I had to film myself ‘hanging up the signs too. I had filmed myself making the signs while drunk the night before and I had filmed myself putting prices on everything earlier in the week. Luckily my preparation paid off, getting a garage sale on film is a one shot deal and there are no re-shoots if the camera messes up or the battery dies.
A little after daylight peeked through the trees I was all set up so I took some bong hits and settled sleepily into a lawn chair, waiting for the people to arrive. It was off and on the whole day, and in the morning, just when I was beginning to think nobody would even come by, I got swamped.
My roommates woke up to find all sorts of people walking around in our yard and driveway, peeking in through the windows looking for more stuff to buy while I was scrambling around trying to haggle with Mexican ladies who didn’t speak English and trying to adjust the camera to preserve the insanity for my class project. I was wheeling and dealing with fistfuls of cash, even selling people the weird shit that I never thought we would sell in a million years—the shit I thought I would have to pay somebody to take away. An Indian guy bought the old Commodore 64 computer we had in the pile and I could tell by the look on his face that for the $5 he paid, he thought he was getting a bargain on top-secret technology. I sold several bags of children’s clothes from the 70’s for $10 to a Mexican family who had a van with a ladder. Even our friends who stopped by later in the day to make fun of our bogus stuff usually bought something. The camera ran most of the day, I just shifted the angles on occasion to make sure I had enough footage to edit and satisfy the parameters of my assignment. People kept coming up to make offers on the camera, naively trying to haggle me into selling them a thousand dollar camera for $20. Man please!
We actually made a lot of money even after getting Dan totally drunk and sending Jenifer on a smack run. Gabe is definitely the hook up now for heroin and he’s enjoying his status as a necessary step in the process of hooking up. He finally got Donut to introduce him to his dealer so he can get it cheaper and directly from the source without any of the middleman hassle. Whenever I have to deal with him there’s still a bunch of bullshit where he makes a big show of being put out (roll eyes here), but he’ll bend over backwards for Jenifer so she likes to go over there by herself. My stomach doesn’t spin anymore when I do smack and I really enjoy the warm relief that it brings to me. I feel so instantly comforted when I inject it now and I’m easily able to get a lot of stuff taken care of that I would normally dread.
“I’ve got the ways and means to New Orleans, I’m going down by the river where it’s warm and green. I’m gonna have a drink and walk around, I’ve got a lot to think about.”
Mardi Gras was bad ass this year! I didn’t want to write that we might be going down there ahead of time just in case we didn’t make it down at the right time again. The air was thick and grim, hanging upon us, tinged with the grey humidity that is Louisiana. The streets smelled like stale beer and sweat, creating a festering wound of a party. This time, Kirk, Jenifer and I all decided to make a spur of the moment road trip, mainly because Kirk wanted to break in the car his mom just handed down to him. It was kind of a wild and wooly week to remember but I’ll try and put down the highlights.
The crowds were more outrageous than I can ever remember. I suppose that as I get older, youth is starting to seem more impetuous or I’m getting less tolerant of drunken bullshit. The crowds just weren’t as friendly as I expected. Something was missing or maybe the proliferation of black gangs everywhere getting into tense mini brawls made the tone seem overly hostile. You can do practically anything you want during Mardi Gras except fight and fuck in the street but somehow we kept getting stuck in packs of people where two black dudes would end up fighting for some stupid reason or another and then get carted off to jail. When there was a scuffle it got difficult to protect Jenifer from the sway and pushing in the crowd but the police were usually on top of any bullshit before it got too crazy.
It was Kirk’s first Mardi Gras and he seemed more enthused by the experience than we were and I think he was actually enjoying himself. Kirk’s kind of a mild-mannered drunk and even though everything was all raucous and helter-skelter, he still had a happy grin on his face most of the time.
Jen and I were coming off a weeklong H binge so our bodies were edgy and less tolerant than they could have been, but fortunately we had brought along some glass vials of liquid morphine (which I scored from a friend who robbed a pharmacy) to help us deal with our mild withdrawals, but things were still kind of off-kilter in our bodies. Morphine is ok but it just doesn’t have the same punch that H does. M is a little more serious and it’s easier to overdose since it doesn’t really fuck you up, plus it’s a pain in the ass to fucking break open WWI style glass vials (ampoules) and try to suck all the juice out of them.
We had a great time of course. We saw John Goodman, the actor from Rose-anne, wander out on one of the balconies sweating and drunk off his fat ass. Girls’ tops started coming off and tits were everywhere as soon as he came out there, but John was pretty oblivious to it all. We went and walked down by the Mississippi and I picked up what I thought was a crumpled piece of paper off the sidewalk to be a good Sam-aritan and throw away, but when I looked more closely I saw it was really a crumpled up “THANK YOU FOR POT SMOKING” sticker and inside was about an 1/8th of really good weed! So thank you, whoever left that there for me. I thought Kirk’s eyes were going to pop out of his head when he saw what I had found; he’s never experienced the weirdness that follows me and Jen when we travel. We appreciate and accept good fortune but don’t dwell on it much anymore. That way lies madness believe it or not. We added the kind New Orleans weed to our own stash and frequently got high in the downtown parking lot.
New Orleans was still New Orleans. We ate beignets at the Café Du Monde, sipped their strong coffee and watched this teenage mime full of angst literally go fucking postal on the crowd that was watching him. He started yelling at the people (so they CAN fucking talk!) and he even decked some senior citizen before some jocks in the crowd held him down for the cops. It was one of the strangest things I’ve seen in my life. I’ve seen the street performers fight each other for intruding on pan-handling turf, but I’ve never seen a mime get violent, I just thought they were all gay, gentle-spirited boys.
A lot of daylight hours, a lot of walking trying to show Kirk everything in the city. If we hadn’t been slightly high and if Kirk had been gone it would have been very romantic for the two of us. One day we’ll get out here by ourselves. Not every journey can be comfortable; the most memorable ones often are not.