The Futilitarians Page 10

  I never met any strippers like the ones profiled in “gentlemen’s magazines,” focused and empowered and putting themselves through business school, their dancing just a means to an end. I met ones like Rebecca, sweet or nice enough, who got caught up in the means and lost their way toward the ends. Maybe Rebecca would let some of the brash front-of-the-house fantasy cling to her for self-protection when I was there, because if anything, she always seemed so vulnerable, so eager to build up her identity through men. Getting naked might be a destruction of our day-to-day identity, but with stripping, as you disrobe you become cloaked in another identity, that of pure commodity. And what replaces the destroyed self? Drugs, impersonal desire, strobing lights and techno bass lines, heavily fingered dollars strapped to your thigh, many of which were paid back to the house.

  A brutal and tawdry digression from Nate’s and Bataille’s intellectual treatment of eroticism and nudity, perhaps, but the manse where we gathered was known at the time not just for its robust gay scene, but also for its stripper scene, dancers lounging under the patio-bound palm trees and by the heavily chlorinated pool. Nate had wanted to deliver his lecture in the proximity of nakedness, but the guy working the door wouldn’t let us back there without paying. Plus, when we tried to explain what we were doing (a mistake), they thought we were some religious group that might burst into protest, so Nate gave the lecture on the front porch by the oleanders, people walking by with towels rolled under their arms, shooting us curious glances.

  Jesus is nailed to the cross

  Our existential plumber, Kevin, walked us away from the river down Louisa Street and up Burgundy, back toward the railroad tracks and warehouses at Press Street. It was almost midnight, nearing Good Friday, the day the crucifixion is observed. He brought us to a spot across from Southern Coating and Waterproofing, which still had trailers in the fenced-in parking lot left over from post-Katrina days of widespread transient shelter, near Montegut Street, one of many in our neighborhood named for old riverfront plantations. Our gardens and our weeds thrive in this alluvial soil.

  Kevin sat on a stump near the curb, so some of us had to stand in the street, and he took something out of the bag he’d been carrying all night, a piece of Katrina-salvaged scrap wood, with text written on it and a spike nailed into it. With his dark beard and dark eyes and measured, reassuring delivery regardless of content, Kevin looked as though he’d always belonged seated on that stump, semicircled by attentive followers. He explained that this was the place where he had been held up at gunpoint one night when returning home to his wife and toddler son after a bartending shift. The text on the wood was a page of Shel Silverstein’s Giving Tree, about a tree and a boy who love each other. As the boy grows older and less interested in just playing in her shade and swinging in her branches, and develops more worldly desires, for money, for shelter, for escape, the tree gives and gives and the boy takes and takes. Kevin read aloud to us from the stump:

  But the boy stayed away for a long time. And when he came back, the tree was so happy she could hardly speak.

  “Come, Boy,” she whispered, “come and play.”

  “I am too old and sad to play,” said the boy. “I want a boat that will take me away from here. Can you give me a boat?”

  “Cut down my trunk and make a boat,” said the tree. “Then you can sail away and be happy.”

  And so the boy cut down her trunk and made a boat and sailed away.

  And the tree was happy. But not really.

  And after a long time the boy came back again.

  “I am sorry, Boy,” said the tree, “but I have nothing left to give you—My apples are gone.”

  “My teeth are too weak for apples,” said the boy.

  “My branches are gone,” said the tree. “You cannot swing on them—”

  “I am too old to swing on branches,” said the boy.

  “My trunk is gone,” said the tree. “You cannot climb—”

  “I am too tired to climb,” said the boy.

  “I am sorry,” sighed the tree. “I wish that I could give you something… but I have nothing left. I am just an old stump. I am sorry…”

  “I don’t need very much now,” said the boy. “Just a quiet place to sit and rest. I am very tired.”

  “Well,” said the tree, straightening herself up as much as she could, “well, an old stump is good for sitting and resting. Come, Boy, sit down… and rest.”

  And the tree was happy.

  Kevin told us that the tree, like Christ, willingly sacrificed for another, that the passage represented for him the point beyond which there is no return, the sacrifice moving toward completion. While a metaphor for giving completely and unconditionally and without judgment, the story can also be interpreted as an allegory of destructive codependency. Kevin said he chose it because it creates passionate and often-divergent interpretations. And it’s true; as we walked back toward Clouet Street, those who knew the story had strong opinions about it—it was either inspiring or infuriating. For me, as a child, the story turned uncomfortably recognizable at “The tree was happy. But not really.”

  The next day at the Rib Room during our annual Good Friday lunch, my siblings and I drank Rusty Nails and ordered lamb, carrying on one of our father’s more perverse traditions. Dad took Christianity seriously but was sometimes irreverent about its symbols. Sipping at our cloying drinks, more out of obligation than desire, Susan and I told Soren, whom my father had named for Kierkegaard, inserting a bit of philosophical measure into our roster of biblical names, about the Stations of the Crisis. When we got to the Giving Tree/crucifixion station, his face contorted dramatically. “God, I fucking hate that book,” he said. “That’s one of the most perverse pieces of children’s literature ever. That boy was the worst thing that could’ve happened to that fucking tree.”

  Jesus is taken down from the cross

  This was Brad’s station. He led us from Burgundy Street back to the field in front of our house, where we had started. Earlier that day he had stashed an eight-foot ladder behind one of the overgrown trash trees. He retrieved it, set it beneath one of the limbs, and climbed up to where it looked as though two paper grocery bags were hanging by a rope. From the top of the ladder, he talked about how, according to John’s Gospel, when the Roman soldiers went to take down Jesus’s body, one of them pierced his side with a spear, and blood and water ran out. My husband tore away the paper bags to reveal two taut, clear plastic bags, like giant IVs, one full of red wine and the other full of water.

  Then he took out a utility knife. (He works as a scenic painter for the movies, and I’m always finding utility knives in his pockets when I’m doing laundry, their small specific heft weighing down his paint-splattered cargo pants, which are filled with the day’s detritus, the blue rubber gloves, the cheap face masks that I fear aren’t keeping enough of the chemicals he works with out of his lungs, lots of potato chip and candy wrappers. Show after show, year after year, always the same contents.) He told us to have our cups ready—we’d been carrying them around all evening, drinking out of backpacks—but first, he said, let’s spill a little on the ground and take a moment to think of people we’ve lost. He stabbed first the wine bag, then the water bag, and we watched the thin streams from high up in the tree glint in the yellow glow of the security light across the street and trail to the ground.

  It’s gotten too easy to catalog the people we’ve lost. As the water and wine spattered the dirt, I acknowledged them in my heart—Dad, Rebecca, and Rachel—and then thought about the people I’ve gained through loss. When Brad’s partner and the mother of his first son died nine months before I met him, their child, now ours, was three. He had been trying to figure out how to grieve and be a dad. “It’s too soon!” people said to me when we first started dating. “Besides, he has a kid.” While it was overwhelmingly and immediately obvious we should be together, it was still a difficult start to what would turn out to be the best relationship I could ever hope for, and
I also leapfrogged into becoming a mother.

  I was introduced to Chris at a rooftop party, my first social outing after Rachel died, when I was still feeling raw and fragile, self-conscious in my grief. His first words to me were “Oh, I just met your younger sister Rachel a couple of weeks ago, at a St. Patrick’s Day party, God y’all look alike. Is she seeing anyone?” I walked away without a word as he continued to talk to me about her, and after I was out of earshot my friends filled him in as to what had happened. He’d met her, been attracted to her, hours before she killed herself. Was maybe one of the last people to see her alive. For a while I avoided him when I saw him out and would always think, My God, there’s that guy… Years later, at a Halloween party, dressed as a ghoul with a slashed throat, I ran into Chris, in ripped jeans, a T-shirt, and bandana, brandishing a sign and a borrowed bullhorn, a protester protesting Halloween. We finally started talking about our first meeting, about Rachel. He told me that after he was told what had happened, he went and sat on the edge of the roof by himself, looking out at the night city, wanting to throw himself off the ledge. He would eventually become our younger son’s godfather.

  Now, let’s all partake together, in communion. We tightened our circle beneath the improbable tree-fountain with our cups, eager though sheepish about how beautiful it was, catching wine and water streaming down in the night, some splashing onto our arms and hands. Brad came down from the ladder and joined us. It was rigged but it was miraculous.

  After Jesus is taken down from the cross, his suffering is over, he can let go. We can all let go. The bags deflated in the tree, wine and water mingled in our cups and in the dirt and scraps of grass trying to grow in the tree’s shade. We took our wine inside the house and talked some more, ate more cheese and bread and grapes and the insane cupcakes that Sara brought. Had a modest Last Suffer, because, really, it was the lightest of jokes, so light it practically dissolved as you spoke it. We played records, some new releases, some older things we’d been dragging around since high school and college, like Bob Dylan and Prince and the English Beat and Billy Idol, with chewed-up covers and no sleeves, but the vinyl still sounded great and clear, though the occasional hissing skip would jolt us into attention and one of us would get up to lift the turntable’s arm.

  MAY

  The Dark Wood

  The ruins of the old St. Claude Furniture Store had no roof, just a concrete floor with some tenacious scraps of red linoleum, two long, high brick walls, and no back. Memories from before the interior turned exterior. A few dirt mounds along the wall sprouted spiny, exotic-looking weeds and spent bottles of fortified wine, and we swept up a couple of used condoms as we readied the place for the event. It resembled a spare, centuries-old Central or South American fortress, with palm trees and mimosas crowning the tops of the walls. Susan decorated it with candles and votives and statuary she’d pulled out of the trash over the years, a lot of it from after Katrina, during the Great Disgorging—damaged possessions from hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses left to molder on curbs. She’d also painted a huge red carnival devil with a six-foot-tall gaping mouth on the building’s ramshackle façade to serve as the entrance. But Tristan, ever the cautious carpenter, warned against taking a saw to the old plywood, pointing to the brick soffit above it leaning perilously over the sidewalk. He didn’t want to nudge years of decay toward fresh catastrophe. The devil’s mouth remained blocked. “We can just tell people to enter through the devil’s ass,” Tristan said as he packed up his unused Sawzall. So we directed people around the corner, to the backless back of the building. “The façade is unstable” was our unofficial theme for the night.

  We had decided to have a sort of undercover ECRG meeting at a public event. I was already taking part in a reading organized by Nate, and what I read would constitute that month’s text, secretly dedicated to the group, most of whom would be in attendance. I was reading with a hot young fiction writer who had just published a story in a fancy literary magazine and was getting a lot of buzz, and a writer from Mexico City who was nervous because he’d never read in English in public before and drank Jameson’s from a shiny elegant flask, which flashed in the jury-rigged work lights whenever he tipped it back.

  I was happy with the low-pressure middle slot that evening, facing about a hundred people in rows of white folding chairs, a few who’d ridden in on bikes through the devil’s ass. A security light beyond the wall on a pole by the street kept turning off and on with a tiny low hiss, arbitrarily. About halfway through my reading, delicate Formosan termites arrived. They swarm and harass parts of the city every May around Mother’s Day, a phenomenon that sounds like the opening of a Gabriel García Márquez novel. Their frail, collective power can swath streetlights and porch lights so intensely that sometimes you have to turn off all your lights, even televisions and computers, and sit in the Victorian dark to keep them away from your old wooden home. The Formosans began alighting on my pages and I had to brush them off the words as I read this fragment of a piece, “Condolences from Death Row.” Over the past four months, the ECRG had become an essential part of grieving my father, a dependable rallying of supportive souls on the Tragic Plane. Last month’s procession had solidified our commitment to the project, and buried in the piece I read was a message of gratitude to the ECRG, my fellow travelers through the dark wood.

  The envelope was facedown on the living room floor under the mail slot, mixed in with glossy campaign propaganda, the usual meaningless slogans, endorsements, toothy family portraits. This was a real letter with real handwriting but then, as I picked it up, a moment of confused dread. Next to my name and address was rubberstamped DEATH ROW in black. The stamp’s imprint had that singular aspect from pressure unevenly applied, the bottom of the letters dark and resolute but the tops ragged and noncommittal, ghost spots blanking the middle of TH RO. The penmanship on the envelope was careful, cursive, rounded, small. I’m in one of the few professions where one still encounters swaths of handwriting on a regular basis—education. My students come from a variety of demographics, and if I had to peg this writing’s provenance, I would’ve said Uptown Catholic-school girl, maybe Academy of the Sacred Heart? Plaid skirts, loafers, the mindful tutelage of nuns.

  The return address was the Louisiana State Penitentiary, Angola. I admired the elegant loops of the L and the S, something I never quite mastered myself. More specifically, it was from Death Row G, from my brother’s pro bono client. Though I knew the name, I wasn’t expecting a letter from him. The back was stamped NOT CENSORED, NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR CONTENTS, LOUISIANA STATE PENITENTIARY MARCH 20, 2012, LA. STATE PEN. AN ALL-MALE PENAL INSTITUTE. This letter had been fortified with some dark and insistent bureaucracy, or worse, by some guy only doing his job, but it wasn’t sealed, just had a dainty piece of tape across the tip of the flap’s V. The next evening at dinner, I showed my brother the letter and he said to himself, incredulously, “Where’d he get the tape?”

  A few months before, in late December, I’d interviewed my father and brother about their pro bono capital-punishment cases, which they’d been handling for about ten years by then and which they always talked about with a different tone and intensity than their other legal business. At one point their clients had been in cells side by side and would compare notes about their Gisleson lawyers: the father, a seasoned ex–federal prosecutor, the son, at the time, a brand-new attorney who’d never tried a criminal case. One would recount his elder attorney’s courtroom successes and the other would wonder why the apple hadn’t fallen closer to the tree.

  Actually it wasn’t really an interview, it was drinks and lunch and a tape recorder at the Rib Room, at table 5, next to a high rounded window onto Royal Street, a proscenium framing cast-iron balconies, arched transoms, and hanging ferns, the kind of lovely amnesiac view cherished by tourists and locals alike, a French Quarter postcard tacked over the city’s troubles.

  That month my dad did what he’d been doing the past two years of living with leuk
emia, nose-diving into the desert of zero immunity and the ICU only to pull up at the last minute, leaving us all—family, nurses, doctors—dusting off our clothes and craning our necks at his ascent. He did it again! His nurses called him the rock star of the Touro Infirmary oncology ward—he’d invited them to our family Christmas party and they’d actually shown up. As he did with most things in his life, he litigated his illness, read all the pages of fine print that accompanied his medications, cross-examined his doctors, mapped out defensive strategies of his symptoms and treatments on legal pads. That afternoon at the Rib Room, a few days after Christmas, he was drinking wine and excited about his record-high platelet count and the possibility of going to MD Anderson for a bone-marrow transplant. He sounded good, though I had to discreetly push the tape recorder toward his weakened voice a few times as he talked about the death penalty, his legal career, the mysteries of the human personality.

  Near the end of lunch, he mentioned that the next week he had four days of chemo lined up and then planned on going up to Angola, to Death Row, to see his client on the fifth day. Talk about “ineffective counsel,” he joked. A genuine practitioner of gallows humor, he’d often say he was fighting to keep his client from lethal injection, but he was the one getting poison shot into his veins on a regular basis.