Cover Story: ‘Some Other Spring’

Third place

When Trapper and I should have been getting a divorce, we bought a house. And not your average starter home, either. We bought a turn-of-the-century four-plex six miles upriver from the French Quarter. We bought a house made of sticks in a swamp. Our closing fell on Halloween and it scared the hell out of me. It was like getting married without the alcohol. After we signed our names a hundred times and ate a bowl of candy corn, they handed us a 5-pound ring of keys and said, “Good luck. Don’t forget to hang an axe in your attic.” I had no idea what they were talking about. “What about an axe?”

“You’ll need it to get out when the big one comes.”

Oh.

We went directly out drinking. Fabulous Frank-the-bartender in his pink-sequined penis headdress sneered at my house-buying clothes, “What are you supposed to be?” I said, “Boo! I’m your landlord!” and explained. He rolled his eyes and shook his sparkly head, “I thought you were getting divorced.”

“Fuck you, Frank.”

Frank knew us. Trapper and I had been paying rent on two barstools downtown for years. Trapper’s was in front of a video crack machine and mine was next to any one who would talk to me. We weren’t landlord caretaker material; we were unhappy, married drunks.

And so it went. Our bad decisions were legendary. We ran off the good tenants and rented to our friends. I rolled up a jungle of vines like carpeting and found out it was poison ivy. We replaced a working stove with an antique fire hazard. We pestered our neighbors with loud music, late parties and tool borrowing. We left a wheelbarrow unsecured, which thieves used to steal all our neighbors’ tools. We never remembered to take the trash out, we filled up the flower bed with cigarette butts. We left a drainage project unfinished for so long it became a moat. When we should’ve bought a roof, we bought a boat. And then we went coastal. We hid from our house on the barrier islands and the blackjack tables of the Mississippi coast.

I failed the field sobriety test on the side of I-10 in freezing rain, in a red dress and heels, in Harrison County, Miss. They said Trapper smelled like pot. Was Trapper actually smoking pot while I was getting arrested? Probably. He said he wasn’t, but Trapper was trashed and given to lying. The police cheered, “Felony possession!” when they found the 3 ounces of weed in our truck. My stomach hit the ceiling. My heart froze. I clamped my eyes shut and said the Lord’s Prayer and started begging God to save my sorry ass. When I opened my eyes, there was wasted Trapper, bobble-headed in the blue lights coming in for a big, wet kiss. I wonder if everyone remembers where they were when they fell out of love? I was in handcuffs in the back of a police cruiser receiving an unwanted kiss when my feverish love spell broke. Trapper kept a blank check and a $100 bill in his wallet. I never understood why. Now I did: bail bond and cab fare. Do you know what will make 3 ounces of marijuana disappear? $1,500. Our party was over.

Trapper stayed in Mississippi and I moved back to the New Orleans house.

I had no idea what to do with myself. I went out to our regular haunts and just felt like an idiot. My fellow drunks had witnessed my hawking of emperor’s clothes for years. Even the most encouraging comments were humiliating. Apparently, my destructive behavior had been widely noted. I went out to dinner with old, unhappy, married drunk friends and they started their regular poison-dart game across the table and before I knew it, I smacked my gumbo spoon down and left. My heart was no longer big and easy. I was not fit to be out in my New Orleans society. So, for the first time in a long time, I stayed at home. I lurked around the house and poked at my unfinished projects and cried a river. My poor house looked like the orphan it was. It was the only one on the block with an unkempt yard and spilled trashcans and a moat. Its charm was still there; the cypress mantles, the egg and dart molding, the cast iron fireplace covers. How can you love a thing and let it go to hell? That house had been standing for a hundred years; it had certainly survived much worse than me. I was a one-night stand for that house, maybe a seasonal fling, maybe just one messy Mardi Gras.

I went to the corner store for more cheap beer and there was a marching band. It was the Funny Forty Fellows. It was Twelfth Night! Mardi Gras was two months away! My first Mardi Gras spun my head around; I came from Pennsylvania and stayed for 10 years. I believed in the transformative power of Mardi Gras. And I heard that Blaine Kern Studios was hiring temp help. Blaine Kern has built most of Mardi Gras since 1947, right across from the Quarter on the West Bank. Leviathan lives in there, Harry Connick’s 140-foot-long, animated, fiber-optic sea monster. So does King Kong, Mama Kong and Baby Kong. I really had no business taking a papier-mâché job for $7 an hour for only eight weeks, but I did.

When you drive across the Mississippi River bridge, the sun rises over the sign that says “West Bank.” It is a disorienting part of the country there, where the river flows north for a minute and divides the Creole city from the Cajun suburbs. The West Bank calls itself the Best Bank, and the city charges them a dollar to drive across the bridge. In spite of the free ferry, mostly everyone stays on their own side of the river. I started at 7 a.m., punched an ancient time clock and got the low down from Brent. There was a factory bell that rang for a half-hour lunch and two 15-minute breaks, the shop guys played volleyball in the parking lot, and some folks sat up on the levee after work and had a few beers. The paper girls were nice. The sculpture girls were weird. The painters were mean. And, he explained, “You want to do good, but not real good, because not everybody can do real good. Same goes for fast.” Then he dropped me off with the other two paper girls.

Brent was right, Alice and Helen were real nice. They were from the West Bank, like Brent, with a hard Brooklynese mixed up with that Cajun lilt. We huddled around one gas burner and they explained how to make the wheat paste and how much nicer warm wheat paste was to work with when it was cold like this. It was freezing in there. Helen had on winter gloves with rubber gloves over top. To make the paste, you mixed flour and cold water in a bucket until it looked like pancake mix and then added boiling water until it was a nice thickness. Simple enough, but it took me three times to get it right. They said it was always like that with new people and paste. There were giant rolls of brown paper and they showed me how to tear off the straight edge on each side, because it always showed. And they were right. It was one of those things that once someone pointed it out to you, your eye was drawn to forever. With armfuls of paper and buckets of paste, we walked through the warehouse stuffed full of gigantic sculptures: enormous flowers, jumbo dragonflies, all the Muses, the Cat-In-The-Hat, Egyptian gods, Marilyn Monroe, suns and moons, the disembodied heads of Picasso, Einstein, Rhett and Scarlett and on and on. And Helen pointed out, on an elbow here and a paw there, the tiny crime of the straight line, the negligence that broke the paper’s spell.

In a back corner of the warehouse, by the loading dock doors, were the three sculpture girls. I was struck by the fact that they all looked a little like me. All three of them were smallish, dark-featured girls. One of them was sculpting a relief of a cornucopia out of Styrofoam with sandpaper, creating a million little white balls that swirled around their corner. They waved to me from their snow globe, but they didn’t come out. They hardly ever came out.

The paper girls helped me settle into my first project, a life-sized front of a ‘55 Cadillac made of Styrofoam. They gave me pointers about navigating the curves and small places. They asked the simple question, “So where do you live?” And I blurted out that I had just left my husband of 10 years last week. They backed away slowly. I loved them most for leaving me alone. Papier-mâché was so strangely satisfying to me. The simple puzzle of shapes, the act of smoothing and patching, of liquid becoming solid. It was like a tranquilizer and the visual circus was incredible and dense and still. The festive lunacy frozen in motion was such a tailored asylum.

When the bell rang, the paper girls came and got me. We passed the two painters along the way. Their area was roped-off with caution tape and they didn’t look up. They were playing chain-gang music. I chatted with Helen and Alice during break. They were kind but cautious with me. By lunchtime, I had finished the Caddy. Helen came to inspect it. “Now, what did Poo-Poo tell you about fast and good!” They were thrilled. I was in. They invited me to lunch.

“So who is Poo-Poo?”

They pointed at Brent, on his cell phone with his mama. Brent was always on the phone with his mama. It’s a West Bank thing, adult men speaking with their mothers several times a day. I had to ask, “So, Brent, how did you get a nickname like Poo-Poo?”

“Well, my uncle used to work here and my grandma called him Poo-Poo since he was a little baby and so when I started working here, they just started calling me Poo-Poo, too.”

And he didn’t mind a bit.

I papered most of Endymion’s “2001 Space Odyssey,” which included astronauts, a space car, Saturn and a giant baby. I papered a huge grasshopper, a ladybug and an ant, and an 8-foot-tall egg with a monster hatching out of it. My station was in the corner opposite the sculptor-girls, overlooked by a tired Neptune. His trident was loose and the sculptor-girls used it to improve the radio reception. They were intense little ladies over there, covered up in Styrofoam snow. I was mesmerized watching their figures appear out of the blocks of foam.

I took a scrap home and carved a fish in my back yard. It wasn’t perfect, but it was definitely a fish. I was admiring my fish when I saw my neighbor standing in the weeds of my driveway, scowling. I hadn’t seen him since that tool incident, and here I was looking like I had exploded a bean bag and holding a 3-foot fish. I didn’t know what to say, so I said, “I’m working at Kern Studios!” Those were the magic words. Mr. Angry Neighbor melted. He belonged to a Krewe that built their own floats. I told him all about Kern construction and gave him my fish. He loved my fish. I apologized for being a rotten neighbor and told him the house would be on the market. He turned my fish over and over in his hands and waved it at his wife through the window. He hugged me and wished me happy Mardi Gras.

I finished papering a life-sized 10-year-old boy. That one was weird, smearing paste all over the body of a small child. Then, I had to fix up a sphinx over in painter territory. The sphinx was made the old way, with a chicken-wire frame, newspaper, then the papier-mâché. It had to be patched first, so I spent a day behind painter lines. I said, “Good morning.” They said nothing. Painter-Man and Painter-Lady were maybe a decade older than me, hippie-looking and consistently unfriendly. They weren’t very nice to each other, even.

Funny things came over the PA system there, in West Bank speak: “Attention: The Purple People-Eater is blockin’ the loadin’ dock. Please move the People-Eater and be careful wit dat eyeball.” Or frequently, “Attention: Poo-Poo, ya mama is waitin’ in the parkin’ lot.”

The painters never cracked a smile. I spied on them from behind the sphinx and looked for clues to their misery. Chain-gang music was on a mixed CD the painters had obviously made themselves. It had a lot of old-time hero-suffers-and-dies ballads and Johnny Cash’s “Fulsom Prison Blues,” “I sold my soul to the company store,” some Metallica agony rock, and all the suicidal Billie Holiday music. “Some other spring, I’ll try to love. Now my heart clings to faded blossoms. Fresh when worn, left crushed and torn, like the love affair I mourn. Sun shines around me, but deep in my heart, it’s cold as ice.” The bell rang before I slit my wrists.

I took a walk outside and ran into one of the snow-covered sculptor-girls finishing an apple. She worked the seeds out of the apple and put them in her pocket. She looked at me sheepishly and spoke, “I collect apple seeds. I keep them in an little jar.”

“I collect cat whiskers,” I said.

“Do you really? I collect cat whiskers! How many do you have?”

I had 17. She had 22. We stared at each other for a minute and then we had a laugh, us small, dark whisker collectors. We suddenly had everything in common, except the snow. All the sculptor-girls lived across the river and were very busy with their own art. They had shows, commissions, openings. They were the real deal. I was so impressed. I was accustomed to my previous tribe of drunks who wanted to do things and never did. I had to ask her what was up with the painters. “Well, there are two of them,” she said, “I heard they’ve been here for 10 years.” And? “Everything you see in here, the two of them have painted.” Everything? That was unfathomable. “So, they probably don’t do anything else.” Why didn’t they get other painters? Why did they stay? She shrugged and shook the snow out of her hair.

I was glad to wrap up the sphinx and get out of painter territory. The PA came on, “Attention: Poo-Poo, go get God and cut the ice off.” God turned out to be this monstrous old head shoved in the back of my corner. On my tippy-toes, I could touch his nose. God was made of the old newspaper construction and was regularly transformed by adding or removing facial features. He had been Zeus, Gandolf, Caesar and George Burns. He was last used as Old Man Winter and had blue and white glittered icicles all over him. Poo-Poo wrestled him out of the corner with a forklift. God was dusty and one of his ears was coming off. The paper girls gave me the God job because it was a mess and they had both redone God before. This year, he was going to be Groucho Marx. They had built the nose and mustache and glasses, so all I really needed to worry about was patching his head where the ice was. Poo-Poo got up on a 16-foot ladder and went after the icicles with a reciprocating saw and they went airborne. Layers and layers of paper with blue and white glitter shredded to bits and flew everywhere. Poo-Poo’s mama ducked in the dock door and let in an updraft that caught God’s ice and sent it twinkling toward painter territory. It floated down into the paints, it stuck to all their wet stuff, and it stuck all over them.

The painters went ballistic. They screamed obscenities at Poo-Poo in front of his mama, which is more than a West Bank mother can take. Poo-Poo’s mama lost her mind. She grabbed Neptune’s trident and went after them. They ran and she swatted, through the warehouse and out the dock door. When they came by us, I saw a flash of a painter-smile.

I climbed up the ladder and started patching where the ice had been.