The Futilitarians Page 9

  We were all quiet and a bit nervous, especially when she produced a key and let us into what might be considered a basement in other places, but in New Orleans was more like a dank, low-ceilinged enclosed garage beneath a raised unoccupied house. Crowded with boxes and a couch jammed up against them at such an angle that made clear it was being stored and not used. I remember a bare bulb hanging, though my memory has possibly superimposed it.

  Then Ellen started yelling at us. “‘The first rule of Fight Club is: You do not talk about Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club is: You do not talk about Fight Club.’”

  She lowered her voice some. This life is our cross. Here we are, together to engage and discuss, duke it out, support each other in our fight with this cross. Here we have gathered in our own Fight Club. Struggling with the classic existentialist questions like: pseudo life or authentic life? In the David Fincher film, based on the Chuck Palahniuk novel, protagonist Tyler Durden addresses life’s cross through splitting his persona and creating an underground fighting club. “First you’ve gotta know, not fear, know, that someday you’re gonna die.”

  Though Ellen was kind of freaking us out as we huddled in the shadowy clutter, the place itself a way station for not immediately useful stuff, it made sense for her. She shouted more Tyler Durden at us. “‘We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War is a spiritual war. Our Great Depression is our lives.’” Ellen is a fighter, in conversation, in life, and mostly with herself, always tussling with her “black mind,” as she calls it, but also clasping it to herself, like when exhausted boxers collapse into each other with something that almost seems like protective affection.

  His first fall

  Fragrant chain-smoking Christine took us down the street about a block from Ellen’s station, closer to the river, where tasteful renovations by wealthy out-of-towners were just starting to tighten up pockets of the neighborhood, bringing buildings up to code, installing new weatherboards, filling Dumpsters with decades of decay and modest though funky home repairs. She brought us to a newly restored corner building housing an outfit of newcomers, designers and artists, who were purporting to be community organizers through an online platform that gathered “neighbors’” input about what changes and improvements were wanted for the neighborhood. They were never around, and no one really knew who they were. Through some investigation by Christine and others, we learned that they were working with real estate developers and hedge fund managers, riding the tide of “creative place-making” and padding their résumés with “community” design projects that required no more than stickers and posters and a slick website.

  Christine proceeded with a lamp-lit, street-corner screed about the inequity between those with the tools and the connections and those without, and the exploitation of the community for professional gain. New Orleans has accrued centuries of street-level stoop culture, many Creole cottages and shotgun houses built right up to the sidewalk, neighbors communicating concern and sharing news through stoop sitting and “door popping.” Besides the disconnect with local culture, and the reluctance to actually engage, what made this type of digital carpetbagging particularly noisome was that in the early days of the rebuilding, locals and thousands of volunteers from all over the country sweated and bled for the city, back when it was dangerous and difficult to be here. Made it safer for the “creative class” and “entrepreneurs” to swoop in for the tax credits and profit from the residual cachet of disaster glamour. Technology, while a huge boon to the rebuilding, also ensured that you didn’t have to get your hands dirty, or even physically interact with the “community.”

  In hand-drawn opposition to this, Christine made a sign from the side of a cardboard box, using colorful markers and crayons, with lots of arrows and underlining, the old graphic methods of emphasis, and hung it with twine on the stop sign in front of these community organizers’ door. “STOP SPEAKING FOR US.” “A DIGITAL ECHO CHAMBER IS NOT A STOOP. A STOOP IS A STOOP IS A STOOP.” “SPEAK TO YOUR NEIGHBORS. LISTEN TO YOUR NEIGHBORS.” Why did Christine choose this for the first fall? A first failure for this new enterprise? Jesus was all about neighbors, about listening to and respecting each other as brethren, equals. Her sign stayed up for a few days, buffeted and twisted by the spring breeze. Sometimes the message faced the renovated storefront. Other times it faced the street.

  He meets his blessed mother

  At the time of the Way of the Crisis, Sara was working for an events coordinator who handled spectacles like bowl games, inaugurations, and the Blue Angels Air Show, and I’d sometimes picture her at work in headphones, clutching a walkie-talkie and making decisive hand signals. She always sat on the right side of my grandmother’s Duncan Phyfe couch in our living room and hardly said a word for the first three months of ECRG meetings but brought extravagant desserts with overpowering frosting that I would find distracting throughout the evening.

  Sara had drawn the fourth station, where Jesus meets his mother. She led us several blocks away down Royal Street to Mickey Markey Park. Playgrounds are such strange places to be at night—empty swings, the metal slide catching the streetlight in a menacing way, the ghosts of living children—and also suited to nocturnal adult behavior that the temporarily abandoned play equipment and poor lighting maybe attract.

  Sara, single, in her twenties and with no children, explained that she brought us there because Markey Park is where she sees women she knows from different contexts in their role as “mom” and thinks about them in relation to their kids. Sara talked about her sometimes-strained relationship with her own mother and read a selection from Vivian Gornick’s memoir Fierce Attachments, which is about how Gornick’s relationship with her rather intense mother evolved as their lives accumulated. The book shifts between the densely synthesized light and sound and people of Gornick’s childhood in Queens to walks with her aging mother around Manhattan. In the passage Sara read, Gornick reflects on her and her mother’s “mutual disability,” while looking at a store’s plate-glass window, how they appreciate good clothes but hate to shop, so end up with limited, haphazard wardrobes. “The clothes in the window make me feel we have both been confused the whole of our lives about who we are, and how to get there.”

  I don’t think she knew this at the time, but as Sara talked she stood next to a concrete bench and small garden that were part of a memorial created by some neighbors and friends for a three-year-old child who’d died a few years before in an accident, the son of good friends of ours who’d moved away after Katrina. An impromptu visit to his grandma’s, a broken window screen two stories up, the mother looks down to stir her yogurt, and her son is gone. The grief at the funeral, our friends’ broken faces in the front pew. In his memory, we planted small sweet olive trees, African irises, cast-iron plants and monkey grass around the bench.

  Beneath the uneven wash of the playground’s floodlight, Sara also read a dark, questioning poem by Louise Glück called “Mother and Child,” about the mysteries of birth and existence and family, which ends with the lines

  Why do I suffer? Why am I ignorant?

  Cells in a great darkness. Some machine made us;

  it is your turn to address it, to go back asking

  what am I for? What am I for?

  Then, Sara handed out white blackboard chalk and asked everyone to write “What am I for?” (which, for some, became “What am I here for?”) all over the playground. Some wrote on the pliant, rough safety surfacing beneath the equipment, some on the slings of the swings, others on the concrete memorial bench. Sara wrote it on a skateboard that some kid had left behind.

  Simon of Cyrene is made to bear his cross

  My station. We stayed in the park, gathered near the shadowy play equipment, and I talked about Simon’s role in the Passion. Jesus’s physical exhaustion was holding up the procession, so the Roman soldiers found someone in the crowd, most likely strong-looking and, possibly, as some
believe, very dark-skinned to force the cross upon. In that time, living under the empire meant that if a Roman soldier asked you to do something you had to drop everything and do it. Simon had no choice. It would’ve been considered one of the worst indignities, humiliating, to be forced to carry a condemned man’s cross for him through a crowd. Simon came to watch and suddenly he was part of the spectacle. What was Simon’s reaction to being chosen? How long did the wood, this alien burden, cut into his shoulder? Did he say anything to Jesus as he hoisted it back to him? Did some sweaty, bloodied, exhausted intimacy pass between them? There’s speculation that instead of the experience fomenting resentment in Simon, he was moved to follow Jesus’s teaching, mainly because in Mark’s Gospel, the names of his sons are mentioned, which is considered a great honor. Simon was the first to take up Jesus’s cross, literally, and endure a segment of his suffering. When, through oppression or circumstance, we are forced to do something we might not have otherwise done, it must define us in some special, sharper way that spontaneous acts do not. You come up against the Roman spear and you react, outwardly and inwardly.

  Forced or not, helping others is central to being a good human, maybe our only true calling as we engage in our brief activity here on earth (after all, wasn’t that Jesus’s main message?), and it should be celebrated, even if in a goofy and obvious way. Like with pies. The neighborhood was part of the theme for the night, and one nearby business down on Dauphine Street was Hubig’s Pies, an industrial bakery that had been operating fragrantly among the shotguns and Creole cottages of the neighborhood for almost a hundred years, making fried, glazed single-serve pies that you could grab from cardboard trays next to cash registers all over town. I loved the peach. Its famous mascot on the wrappers and the sides of the white delivery vans was Simon the Pieman, aproned and corpulent, brandishing a big pie. I brought a bag full of Simon’s pies to distribute, in case anyone needed a snack during our night journey. On each pie wrapper I’d written phrases in Sharpie that we utter throughout the day without even thinking, all these small gestures of burden lifting. “Do you need a hand with that?” “Here, let me help.” “I can get that for you.” “Do you need to talk?”

  A few months after the Way of the Crisis, Hubig’s bakery burned down to the ground (tired graveyard-shift employee, unattended oil fire), causing an early-morning citywide rush on Hubig’s pies as the news spread. The loss hurt, but we’re used to it. New Orleans has such a penchant for losing its best. But the fire was months away, we were still at the playground after Sara’s moving piece about mothers and meaning, eating pies, surrounded by the chalky questions we’d all written.

  His second fall

  Once, at a party at Michael’s house, I was exploring his second-floor studio and came across an easel set up in front of a window. A sharply realistic sky occupied the canvas, contours of clouds, depths of light and blues all achingly rendered, and across the bottom, the slate roofline of the French Quarter building across the street. You could’ve held it up to his window and convincingly replaced the view, though the world would’ve immediately deepened with beauty and skill and attention. I remember looking at his tidy palette of oil paint and tiny brushes and thinking, What’s the cost of all that perfection? Weeks before, on Mardi Gras afternoon, Ellen, Tristan, Brad, Kevin and his wife, and I ended up sprawled around Michael’s kitchen in our costumes, drinking champagne that he had on ice in the downstairs bathtub and eating red beans and rice as the crazy day wound down. As he always brought a bottle of champagne to the ECRG (arriving late and leaving early to meet a date), I wondered if he kept a case of champagne in his bathtub year-round, as a kind of ballast to the wrenching intensity of the work in the studio upstairs.

  Michael brought us to the railroad tracks at Royal Street and Press Street, the latter named for the old cotton press that operated there about 150 years ago. Homer Plessy was arrested there in 1892 for boarding a whites-only car, prompting the “separate but equal” Plessy v. Ferguson court ruling, a series of events considered by some to be the beginning of the civil rights movement. The intersection is both crossroads and no-man’s-land—sidewalks, curbs, and streets all busted up from eighteen-wheelers loading and unloading from the warehouses, glittering with shards of broken bottles from kids drinking on the loading docks at night, a brutal mosaic we walk over daily, a puzzle that’ll never quite come together.

  Under the tepid streetlight, Michael unfolded a piece of paper from the back pocket of his khakis and read an account of Jesus’s fall, from Jesus’s exhausted, bewildered point of view. Stumbling on the road’s crude paving, bones crushing against stones, stone tearing skin, pain searing from knees to groin, blood on stone, dirt-sweat stinging eyes, blurring the road, the figures closing in, staring impassively…

  Michael never looked up from the page, and read hesitantly, with a self-deprecating pathos. And all the while, he asks himself, “Why won’t they help me?” and “Why am I doing this?”

  Later, Michael explained to me that, no, he wasn’t a masochist, he was just remembering how painful it was as a kid when he’d fall off his bike, how helpless he felt, and he just took it from there.

  His third fall

  When you first pick it up, it’s not that bad. You kind of feel like a hero, “Look at me! I am strong! I can do this—this thing that should be difficult is easy for me!” and then a minute goes by and another and after ten it is no longer fun. You are no longer the hero. You hurt. After about fifteen minutes you question how long you can do this. In thirty, you feel forgotten, you wonder if anyone has ever done this before. Here you are. In pain, dust at your feet, dust on your tongue. There is no one. You are alone. No wonder Christ is a curse word, like a blister or a burn.

  But a cross can be a crossroads as well, not just a torture device, a spiritual barbecue grill, but a changing of course. An “I am no longer going down that road that I have mistakenly chosen. The road I thought the world to be when I was young and imagined it as I was, optimistic, full of wonder. If you give me beauty, I will do the same. Not court orders and medical bills.” At a crossroads you can change your mind, change your course, find new things, perhaps something that means more to you than where you started. Perhaps something that you were meant to find.

  This was Susan’s station and this is what she wrote and read, also by the railroad tracks at Press Street and Royal. She had been living a very, very difficult stretch of adulthood involving disasters both natural and unnatural—a house flooded in Katrina, illness, divorce, death, her oldest child’s drug addiction. The bureaucratic gauntlet she ran to reassemble her family’s flooded-out life was soon followed by those of civil and criminal court and various medical institutions. It was the kind of stretch that constantly eviscerates you, making you question every decision you’ve made since adolescence. And then you have to wake up each morning and stuff your guts back in, like the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz after he’s been torn apart by the flying monkeys, get up, and keep stumbling down the path arm in arm with your other damaged and determined companions. But suddenly it also became a time of artistic success and freedom for her, a widening out of her life that could only funnel in more hope and opportunity. At the site of her reading, she left behind an old metal funeral stand with a collage on it. It was so lovely, someone had claimed this gift by the next morning.

  I used to have a pile of crowns. I was in a Dumpster and found a suitcase. I imagined severed limbs yet touched the clasp regardless. The suitcase was pale blue and dusty. When I opened it, I found several old Mardi Gras crowns with jewels made out of paste or glass. I kept them in a pile, on a piece of furniture that was my great-grandmother’s. The doors of the cabinet looked like temple doors or tombs and have small glass knobs. Over time I gave the crowns away, one by one. They were precious only when shared.

  He is stripped of his garments

  In our neighborhood, there’s a grand old manse turned club, built in the early nineteenth century, with a wide raised porch acros
s the front where you can drink under ceiling fans at eye level with a tall bank of pink oleanders. There are airy, double parlors off the ample center hall, a bar in the back, and, outside, clothing-optional swimming that you have to pay extra for. Once I was waiting at the bar for someone, having a glass of wine, and down at the other end near the door to the pool was a completely naked woman, her slim body damp, receiving a drink from the bartender with both hands, one leg slightly raised behind her, for a moment like neoclassical statuary.

  Nate brought us to the club to give a lecture based on Georges Bataille’s Erotism: Death and Sensuality, how the erotic act involves the attempt to destroy one’s personal, day-to-day identity (the state of discontinuous existence in which we all live) in order to become closer to death (which is when we reenter continuity). Disrobing is a key part of this. It helps destroy our individuality, because our clothes are part of the symbolic order by which we define ourselves.

  When Rebecca first started dancing, around nineteen, we tried to dissuade and discourage her. But when it was obvious that the pull of the lifestyle was too strong, we would at least try to make sure she was okay. I checked up on her a few times at a few different clubs, always backstage. She would seem upbeat, say she was having fun, making money. But it was hard to tell, because she was probably high, and also because those places are purveyors of artificial expression, of transactional fantasy. At least the front of the house is. Back of the house, the fantasy evaporates. Once I was backstage with her in a “gentlemen’s club” in Baton Rouge. It was too bright and a little run-down, with doorless bathroom stalls reflected in the mirrored wall in front of the counter where the dancers fixed their makeup, adjusted their outfits. As Rebecca and I sat at the counter, a girl came in after being onstage, squatted on a toilet with a three-inch wad of money strapped to her thigh, and did her business, her full reflection between Rebecca and me as we talked.