Iberville

There is nothing lovely or quaint or picturesque about this street.  Iberville.  I look down its grimy canyon from my spot on the balcony, past the balcony of the Penthouse Club next door where the strippers and the bouncers come out for their cigarette breaks, the girls in thongs and spangly bras, the men in dark suits, down to the end of the block where the Hard Rock dominates the corner where Iberville crosses Bourbon.  Below me, an Orleans Parish Sheriff patrol car nudges it’s way to the curb between two traffic cones.  The cop is off-duty, working a shift doing security for the Acme Oyster House, where the line to get in extends halfway down the block.¹  Fist bumps all ‘round.  Between Acme and Dickie Brennan’s cars pull in and out of the maw of the parking garage.  Through the dirty windows of the seven stories I can see the faint image of the elevators that lift the cars up and down to their appointed slots.  Music cacophonies from every direction.  Big Mike and his band are playing in the 21^st Amendment underneath us.  He’s got a fabulously fast and clean guitar player and the sound bounces off the buildings across the street and back up to our rooms.  Music flows down from Bourbon, up from Royal, superb musicians in every bar, partygoers drinking and cheering, louder and wilder as the night goes on.

Lynn and I sip tequila, watch the neon dazzler dune buggies, the girls and boys of all ages excited to be here, the occasional couple that’s had too much – we hope they make it to their hotel okay.

It’s loud, crude, dirty, and layered with hurt and history.  I feel right at home.  It’s splendid.

I’m shuffling the nighttime memory deck of New Orleans.  On my first visit² I met the dawn one morning on the banks of the Mississippi, still carrying the plastic cup of Jack Daniels I’d been nursing for hours.  With a friend I’d stopped into one of the daiquiri factories that line Bourbon Street, dazzled at the decadent glamour of it all.  Jack Daniels was my whiskey of choice in those days and there was a dusty bottle on a shelf above the rotating bins of fruity slush.  I asked for some.  The three youngsters working there huddled around the bottle.  One of them carefully filled a shot glass and poured it into the clear plastic cup.  That can’t be right – you could see them conferring as they looked at the half inch of liquid.  Finally one of them made an executive decision, filled the cup two-thirds full and brought it over to me.  “Two dollars?” he said, as if expecting me to argue.  I did not.

A few years later found me drinking long necks through the night at Déjà Vu, a 24 hour dive bar just north of Bourbon.  The bar I’d been in was about to close and I’d asked the bartender where I might get something to eat.  She directed me.  It was a hangout for the drag queens coming in after work, laughing and telling stories about the evening’s adventures.   I sat off to the side while the tall one with the raven hair and the red dress held court.  “Oh, honey!  You would not buh-leeve what that man said to me!”  Without realizing it, I was flirting with William, the very sweet waiter.  I’d ordered a burger & fries with my beer, and he’d stop to chat, and we’d joke a little.  He was telling me about his daughter who he was planning to see later in the week and perhaps that threw me off, not realizing how much my friendliness was being misinterpreted as mutual attraction.  It was just approaching dawn when I realized what was happening and, hoping to let him down easy, told him how much I’d enjoyed our conversation, wished him well with his little girl, kissed him lightly on the forehead and made my way back to my hotel.  I wished I hadn’t gotten his hopes up – I didn’t mean to!  Half my lifetime later I still feel guilty.

Post-COVID, I see that Déjà Vu is now closing at 11:30 every night, struggling for staff as is every joint in the Quarter.  Where do the drag queens go?  And in the news today are reports of salt water encroachment which will leave New Orleans without potable water in another month. Is the city I've known, which has survived hurricanes, floods, mismanagement and political neglect, finally going to disappear for good, replaced by...  who knows what?  Heraclitus was right – you can’t step into the same city twice.

I wouldn’t’ve expected, as a kid happily growing up in a very small town, that I’d become so much of a city boy as an adult.  But there was college in Milwaukee and then the move to DC in ’83.  Once I’d gotten a taste for the exotic, erotic, quirky crowded complexities of cities, I took every opportunity to go exploring.

The first time ever I was on a plane, I was headed for my fellowship interview at the National Library of Medicine.³  In the old suitcase my father in law’d dug out of his attic was the suit I’d bought for $3 from St. Vincent de Paul.  I was sure whoever was responsible for screening the candidates had made a mistake in inviting me, which they’d realize soon enough, so I didn’t know if I’d ever get back there again.  I went straight to the Mall, stashed the suitcase in a locker at the Museum of Natural History, and spent the afternoon at the Smithsonian Museums, thrilled by it all, trying to see as much as I could, gorging on the experience.  Took the Metro to Dupont Circle, got turned around, panicked a little bit, but found someone to point me to the bus to Bethesda.  Checked into my hotel, woke up to a beautiful spring morning and walked the two blocks to the library, coming past the last building on the street to see it shining like a spaceship on top of the hill.  Since I held no hope of getting the position I was untypically relaxed and had a fine time having fascinating conversations with the members of the three (!) interview committees.  Flew back to Oshkosh fascinated by the look of the Appalachians from the air, and, with graduation just two months away, knuckled down to the business of looking for a job.  But to my great astonishment, the call came two works later that I’d been selected. 

Sandy and I found an apartment in Silver Spring,  just across the DC/Maryland line and for the next three and a half years, nearly every weekend took the Metro into the District.  We had little money for restaurants or shows, but the museums were free.  I’d had an art appreciation class in college – Renaissance to Modern Art – that’d had a huge impact on me.  Sandy had graduated with a degree in fine art and I’d learned a great deal through her, but it wasn’t until DC that I had the luxury of wallowing in great museums week after week after week.  Growing up in my small town and then off to college, books had been my entry into other ways of being in the world.  Music had always played a huge part in my life, now painting and sculpture brought new ways of seeing and being.  I gravitated toward abstract painting, non-figurative sculpture.  Rothko, most of all, became a touchstone.  Standing in front of one of his luminous paintings, close to it so that it filled my visual field, feeling it gradually open itself up to the point where the endless subtle variations of color began to shimmer and vibrate,⁴ I could sidestep the endless analytical chatter in my head.  I’ve always been hyper-verbal, and Rothko (and others) led me to ways of understanding that didn’t require words.  Much the opposite, in fact; they required me to use sensibilities that were antithetical to the linear logic that words push the mind toward.  I didn’t want to know what they were “about”, I needed to experience what they were.

We moved to St. Louis, but my connections to NLM, and then my expanding range of professional activities led me back to DC at least once a year for some meeting or conference or panel or task force for the next three decades. 

There was always that fluttery feeling, flying into National, watching the monuments, picking out the dome of the Library of Congress or the clock tower of the Old Post Office, that I was home again.  I’d do the things I was there for.  Grant application reviews.  Conferences, conventions, consultations. So many presentations!  But when the last session was done, or the meeting was wrapping up, and people were jockeying to share cabs or walk to the Metro to head to the airport, I’d demur.  “Oh, I’m staying over tomorrow,” I’d say.  Walk back to my hotel – one of the Kimptons, probably, those idiosyncratic boutique hotels that blossomed across the district at the turn of the century.⁵  I’d have a drink in the bar, pull out my laptop, catch up with whatever email’d come in during the day.  Maybe I’d walk into Georgetown, stopping at Bridge Street Books, always buying two or three.  Likely as not I’d have dinner at Bistro Français, where the maître d’ would recognize me as I stood in line in the narrow hallway, and gesture me forward, lead me to a quiet table with good light because he knew I’d have a book with me.  I’d write a letter to Lynn about my day, about what she’d be ordering if she was here with me, how lovely she’d look.  Maybe I’d then go round the corner for the second set at Blues Alley⁶, before taking the long late night walk back to the hotel.  On another visit it’d be The Shakespeare Theatre for an exquisitely tender and poignant Tempest or Stacy Keach rattling the walls as King Lear.⁷  Next morning, another hour or two of work in the hotel room.  Then a day of museums, punctuated by a leisurely lunch while I read and wrote.  Maybe the National Gallery of Art for the latest blockbuster exhibit.  Prior to their 1995 retrospective, I knew little about Jimmy Whistler beyond Arrangement in Gray and Black: Portrait of the Artist’s Mother.  I entered the exhibit mildly curious, I came out changed, and became a passionate student of his work and life.  Thereafter, every visit had to include a stop at the Freer which has one of the two best collections of Whistler’s work, along with the Chinese scrolls, the Japanese prints that I’d already loved and that I learned were such an influence on him.  Weary by late afternoon, I’d stop at the Old Ebbitt for oysters and whiskey, inevitably falling into conversation with a person next to me curious about what I was writing in that book of mine.  Back at the hotel for a bit more work, a bit more journal writing before heading out again for dinner.  It could be Al Tiramisu and I’d end up sitting at the little four seater bar talking with Chef Luigi while he ordered my meal and recommended the wines.  If it wasn’t too busy, we might finish the evening sampling some of the grappas he’d brought back from his most recent visit home.⁸

Wherever I travelled for a meeting, some committee or board or task force or project that I was on, there was always somebody who arrived a little late (because they were flying in the morning of) or had to leave before the official end of the agenda (because they were dashing to catch a flight to whatever other urgent activity they were involved in).  They’d dash in, rollaboard parked near the door, coat flung across it, then dash out, quick apologies, goodbyes, one eye on the watch.  They were busy, they were in demand.  Going from one conference room, one office, one auditorium to another, until the rooms must’ve become indistinguishable from each other, the same whiteboards and flip charts and projectors and overcooked coffee and trays of donuts and sliced fruit.  I always flew in the day before.  Not for me the dawn rush to the airport, gambling that the flight delays wouldn’t get me and that I’d be able to snag a cab soon enough that my late arrival wouldn’t annoy the hosts/organizers too much and they wouldn’t have to spend too much time catching me up and getting on with things.  I wanted to breathe the city, find a great restaurant, a local bar, take an hour or two stroll in an art museum.  I’d use my vacation time to stay that extra day, happily pay for the extra night of hotel.

I despised the conventional talk about work-life balance.  As if there was a me that was totally focused on my job, and another me stranded on the other end of the existential cosmic teeter-totter, trying to tend to all of my other desires and obligations and I was supposed to arrange my days so that one side went up and then the other in some kind of equilibrium that would keep me sane and healthy.  But I never stopped being a library director, just as I never stopped being an amateur musician, or Lynn’s lover and husband, or the guy trying to write his way to understanding.  On Rough and Rowdy Ways, Dylan channels Whitman – “I contain multitudes”.  I wasn’t pursuing a “balanced” life.  I wanted a life that included and influenced and mingled all the ways of being that I was trying to become.

The cities are branded with the signal events of my life.  My first time to San Francisco was not long after I finally left that first marriage.  This was ’91 – before the public internet, e-readers, smartphones.  I packed seventeen books in the big pocket of my garment bag – Rilke, Neruda, Harrison, Levine.  “Transitional objects” Suzy called them.  Totems that would carry me through the wreckage, guilt, and hope from one stage of my life to whatever the next one might be.  There was a decent bookstore just below Union Square in those days so I bought a few more.  It was the first time I read Neruda’s Odes, giving praise to the simplest things.  I needed to focus on the simplest things.  Sandy called me one night – she’d just gotten word that her first husband, Roger, had died suddenly.  She was distraught.  Was it reasonable of her to reach out to me in that moment?  I’d moved out six months before, divorce was in progress.  I knew this was traumatic for her, but I felt manipulated.  I had nothing to give.  “I can’t help you.  You should not be calling me.”  She’s sobbing hysterical on the phone.  “I’m sorry, but I’m hanging up now.”  And I did.  I don’t feel guilty about that one.

Fifteen years later I’m there with Josie.  She’s a year and a half.  Her mom & grandmother are in training each day for the business they’re planning to open so I’ve got the Bug all day for five days.  We go exploring.  I know the city well by now.  I plop her in the stroller and we head down to North Beach.  She wakes up as we hit Washington Square park and I get her out and we walk slowly around the perimeter, investigating the million brand new things, until we come to the little playground in the corner.  She’s not quite talking yet, but gestures clearly that we have to go to the swings. She was a maniac for swings.  I’m dressed all in my usual black, western hat to cowboy heels.  Jeans and a sport coat.  Sunglasses.  The other nannies are all Chinese.  They watch me.  I smile.  Push my girl in the swing.  The nannies see that Josie is happy, so maybe I’m okay.  I look across the park at the elderlies doing Tai Chi – smooth movements, calm and in tune.  I take her to the sorts of restaurants I like.  Trick I learned from Marian – have a sheaf of old newspapers in the stroller.  When the hostess seats you, pull them out and spread them under the kiddie chair they’ve brought out.  “She’s a little messy” you apologize, but they’re charmed and grateful and after they’ve helped mop up the tomato sauce that’s all over her face and hands you help them scoop up the papers, and you’re on your way.  We go to SFMoma, where I hold her in the crook of my arm and let her lead the way, pointing me to the paintings or sculptures she’s most interested in.  I push her stroller up in front of one of their classic Rothkos, crouch down next to her, telling her about the artist, about how his work had evolved, about how to let the colors flow around her.  I become aware that there are more people in the gallery and look over my shoulder to see a tour group of maybe a dozen, semicircled behind me, earnestly listening to me lecture about modern art to a toddler.  Their guide nods encouragingly, but I’m embarrassed and flustered, apologize, move on.

Eight visits over the course of twenty-two years.  It was the last city I travelled to on my own.  The short circuit in the spinal cord made traveling alone unsafe and unwise, and before the first year was out, impossible in any case.  That was ten years ago and it seems unlikely I’ll be back.  But I could still spend another ten years telling nothing but San Francisco stories.

Each of America’s great cities has its own particular hold on me.  Growing up in Wisconsin, Chicago was the big city, real in a way that the far distant coastal cities couldn’t be.  It holds a singular place in the Lynn and Scott stories.  Just a few weeks into our love affair, we decided she’d come up to Wisconsin to meet my family.  I’d drive to Chicago from St. Louis, collect her at O’Hare (where she’d’ve flown in from whatever business trip she’d been on).  We’d stay a couple of nights at the Blackstone, then continue north.  Good plan.  It had been a couple of weeks since we’d seen each other and at that stage of the relationship the physical longing was, shall we say, intense.  It was rush hour and the drive in from the airport was bumper-to-bumper and appeared to take several days.  She spent the drive teasing me, inching her skirt up while I tried to watch both the car in front of me and her legs that were right there.  Right there!  At the hotel, we checked in, grabbed the keys, dashed upstairs to our room.  Forty-five minutes later I lifted my head from the pillow.  “Shit.  I left the car running.”  And locked.  Pulled my clothes back on, walked nonchalantly down to the lobby where the implacable doormen had been keeping an eye on it.  They’d seen us come in and expressed no surprise.  They politely directed me to the parking garage. 

By late the next afternoon we were a little dazed and depleted and went out walking, Lynn in her big white fluffy coat that she’d named after me.  We were hungry for the restorative power of oysters. At the Palmer House, equal in history and opulence to the Blackstone, we made our way to the concierge desk, asked the young man there where we might find some oysters.  “You’re wanting to buy some?” he asked.  “No,” we leered.  “We want to eat some.”  “Oh,” he said, catching our drift.  “Well then.  I’d recommend Shaw’s Crab House, just on the other side of the river.”  Shaw’s bar was mostly empty and we sat near the middle, ordered two dozen oysters and glasses of Johnny Walker Black, neat.  We fell into conversation with a small, elderly woman, sitting by herself a few stools down.  She had a wry, sly manner and you sensed there was a shimmer about her, though we couldn’t see it.  Violet.  She was the first we met of the angels we don’t believe in.  The bar started filling up.  It was Friday, the offices were emptying out.  The crowd was boisterous, thirsty, demanding.  The bartender kept our whiskey glasses filled, on the house.  Sitting just to the right of the taps as we were, we provided him with a bit of a buffer from the expanding after work crowd.  Violet had disappeared, but she’d cast a protective spell around us.  Sometime later we caught a cab to the Parthenon, a favorite of Lynn’s, where we drank ouzo and she dissolved into tears, still aching over twenty year old heartbreaks.  I had the waiter pack our food in to go boxes and bundled her (and her coat named Scott) back into a cab and back to the Blackstone.

The headquarters of the Medical Library Association are in Chicago and Lynn and I did separate three year terms on the Board of Directors.  With that, along with a variety of other conferences and projects, we were in Chicago at least once a year and frequently more than that, sometimes separately, often together.  Every trip included time for the Art Institute.  Maybe I’d have lunch in their café before strolling the galleries.  I knew where my favorites were, split my time between the new exhibits and whatever from the permanent collection was on display.  Always a visit to the Whistlers, the Rothkos.  One year Lynn and I were walking along Michigan Avenue, not far from Shaw’s, doing some aimless window shopping.  We were standing in front of a gallery advertising old master and contemporary prints.  Lynn said, “I think it’s time you owned a Whistler.”  Up we went, and sat in a small room while the attendant brought in their Whistler etchings and we lined them up and I spent an hour looking and thinking and when I’d narrowed it down to three and was having serious trouble picking among them, Lynn stunned me, saying to the gallery manager, “We’ll take all three.”   

I could spend another decade just telling Chicago stories.

I treasured the anonymity of cities.  I used my eccentricities as a shield.  I’m not good at casual interactions with strangers.  I’m awkward, easily embarrassed, endlessly worried about saying the wrong thing.  Cities have room for strangeness.  What might stand out in a small town as unacceptable or even threatening is scarcely noticeable in a city.  Sometimes even cherished.

I’ve never felt allegiance to any particular place or to any tribe.  There was a time in my mid-teens when I believed I must really be an alien, dropped in from another planet or an alternate dimension, I felt so out of place in the world.  That was the drama of teenage angst and I got mostly over it, but the sense of alienation has never faded.  I feel affection for my hometown, but it holds no exclusive tug on my heart.  When the house we were raised in was torn down my sisters were bereft, but I was fine with it.  It felt better to have it gone altogether than to have strangers living there.  I have no “heritage” that helps define me.  Nothing that I’m trying to protect.  No place can claim me.  Every place, any place can be home.

I went out to our balcony late afternoon on one of our last days, thinking I'd sip some coffee and read for a bit after our jazz brunch.  Or maybe make some notes about The Gumbo Trio, three elderly gents who did a beautiful rendition for us of Miles’s “Blue in Green” on banjo, soprano sax and double bass.  Or maybe about Mr. Johnson and his wife, who’d been having brunch every Sunday afternoon at Mr. B’s for years.  Lynn and I were celebrating our 28^th wedding anniversary that week and Mrs. Johnson said they were as well, although they’d been together nearly 20 years before that.⁹  But instead I just sat, looking down Iberville, watching the people in the street, imaging those other times here, other times in other cities.  It was in those cities, those museums and restaurants and bookstores and dive bars that I found the pieces of my self that connected to the pieces of the world.  Aren’t we all just the constructions we’ve built out of memory, the things we’ve learned and loved and learned to love?  Lynn teases me because I’ve never been interested in the pursuit of happiness, I’ve just wanted to understand what’s going on.  So naturally, in that very Taoist way, by not pursuing it, I’ve been happy more often than not.  As far as understanding what’s going on, I have learned more about people, about the way they make the choices they do, about their darkness and their grandeur.  But the more I think I know, the more I see how much vaster is my ignorance than the young man could have conceived.  The mysteries contained in a single human being, gleefully and/or angrily and/or stupidly and/or passionately and/or gloriously making their way through the world are infinitely more complex than I once thought was the case for the entire universe.  The imp on my shoulder, whose name is Hubris, tugs at my ear, “Y’know, I’ve been always trying to tell ya’...”

The days and nights of walking unfamiliar streets in the great cities, watching the rise and fall, the shift and churn of neighborhoods and skylines (Heraclitus again), are over for me.  Now the explorations have a smaller compass and going on my own is not an option.  Lynn named the Rollz Motion, my assistive device that converts from a rollator to a transport chair, Buzz Lightwheels.¹⁰  She rolls me a couple of blocks from our hotel to whatever interesting restaurant I’ve chosen.  I flip Buzz to a walker so I can enter on my own two feet, slow and awkward and painful though it be. I worry at my limitations, at the burden I am for Lynn, but at the closing party of the conference that brought us to New Orleans for this visit, I shocked and delighted us both by standing on the edge of the dance floor and dancing with her for two songs.  My feet stayed put, but the sway of my torso and the movements of my arms were fluid and smooth. 

Here in our house, perched above the lake, my cities are all around me.  Here’s a bookmark from City Lights.  A Charles Lloyd record returns me to Chicago’s Jazz Showcase.  There are t-shirts from museum shows, matchbooks from dive bars long gone.  There are Whistler etchings on the walls, art books and exhibit catalogs crowd the shelves in the living room and my study.  The walls brim with memory.  My cities.  I’m home.

1. Lynn wants to lean over the rail and yell, “Go to Felix’s across the street!  It’s much better!”  She’s loyal.

2. Medical Library Association annual meeting, 1988.

3. NLM is part of the National Institutes of Health, and its buildings are on the NIH campus, just across the district line in Bethesda.

4. According to one study it takes a full 30 seconds of gazing intently at one of his pictures (Rothko always called them pictures, not paintings, and he was very precise in his use of language) for the eye to adjust sufficiently.

5. I see that in recent years, following the absorption of the Kimpton brand by IHG, my three favorites – Rouge, Topaz, & Helix – have all been sold to different outfits and homogenized.  Pity.

6. One of my three greatest concert experiences happened at Blues Alley.  Branford Marsalis and his dad, Ellis, were touring behind their 1996 album of duets Loved Ones.  Branford was the musical director for Leno’s Tonight Show at the time and I was expecting to see the brash, cocky side of him that I’d seen on tv.  Instead I saw a young man deeply respectful and clearly a bit in awe of his father.  The interplay between the two of them was stunning and there was no question who was in charge.

7. I saw many fabulous performers at the Shakespeare Theater, none as brilliantly ferocious as Keach in Lear.  Here’s what I wrote about it at the time: https://tscott.typepad.com/tsp/2009/07/king-lear-at-the-shakespeare-theater.html

8. Despite all the walking I did in those days it’s no wonder I weighed forty-five pounds more than I do now.

9. Mr. Johnson called me over to his table so he could see what was written on my shirt:  There Is No Culture Without Black Culture.  A good shirt to wear in any city, but particularly so in New Orleans.

10. Greatest assistive device ever!  https://www.rollz.com/ They’ve launched a motorized version in Europe and as soon as it’s available in the States we’re snapping one up.