Johnny!

Johnny!

The bus station was nearly four generations old and was like an old shell. It felt to him like an old mother whose favorite reminiscences are selfless rather than romantic. It had been pieced together very plainly, out of necessity. He liked how it all was necessity in a bus station – hot, greasy eggs and toast with little packets of condiments for hamburgers and cinnamon rolls that stuffed you for the long trip. Cigarettes, fare information on a tack board, toilets, sinks, mirrors in the ladies’, coffee. But he wasn’t going anywhere. At first he couldn’t remember who had sat down on the bench first, the old lady coming from Charlottesville, or himself. She wore a purple feather hat that looked as soft as the one breast he had ever touched and, even though it was odd, he wanted to put it back in its old hat box for her, when she was done with it, and put it under his bed every place he went, or lie his head beside it when he slept outside. ‘That old hat box …’ he laughed to himself. He hadn’t even spoken to the woman yet, but he felt her warmth, even in the warm air; the warmth of many years. He remembered after a moment that he had sat down first. He felt lucky. She was delicate, but strongly made. There weren’t too many people you could say that about, he thought. The door to the station was open – they hadn’t started the air conditioners in that part of the country yet, and the slow intermittent breeze it let in was promising. She immediately felt his attention, but couldn’t make out a guess of good or bad, which was unusual for her. She had a hand on each knee with no rings. He hadn’t seen very many old women without rings. He thought maybe she had arthritis.
“Where you from, son?” she said, throwing the last in carefully as an imploring safeguard.
“California. Where are you from?”
“N’Orleans.”
“Oh, wow.”
“I was born there,” she said. “In the summer …” she paused in her blue and white, respectably dusty, cotton dress and white leather sandals – clearly a gift from someone, he thought. “The air back there is what turns people bad, into thick, romantic messes … the air makes you slur your words, not the alcohol like people think.”
“I don’t drink,” he said to please her even though it was true.
“Good,” she said. “Quite a few pro-fessional drinkers where I come from … might as well be actors the way they go out for that sorrowful drama.”
When they called her bus and she got up, putting one hand on her purple hat for a moment, he felt abandoned. “Bye,” she said sweetly, “You take care now.” She shuffled past him. He waited for her bus to leave before going out. Its air brakes released and the engine filled itself with power. He rose. The warm air surrounded his skin like a halo and as he walked through it he felt what she had said.
He’d never been sick – he didn’t remember ever having had the chicken pox, not even a headache. He’d traveled alone for four years, sleeping outside or renting rooms in places that weren’t the quietest all the time, but were either gray or dusty or felt gray and dusty and immediately quiet. He was a thin boy; 16 and tall and strong, with short brown hair and murky green eyes the color of the muck just below the surface edges of a shallow summer river.
He had left his mother waiting on the beach for her husband who’d gone off to get more beer for her small body and his fat hairy one; he’d realized even then that it was killing her faster. He’d gone home to get his backpack with one book, Hunger, four razors and a bag of pretzels, some Cokes, a stick of his mom’s gum, an extra shirt, some socks and boxers. He had decided not to take any of dork-ass’ cigarettes, because he didn’t want his mother to get in trouble for it. And he’d decided not to bring his toothbrush either because a guy he knew from school had bragged recently about not brushing his teeth for two weeks, and even though he knew it was stupid, he wanted to try it. “When you finally brush the shit off they feel amazing,” the kid had said. He’d get a new one later.
The day he left home he had fifty dollars and threw rocks into the short, mutant bushes by the railroad tracks, and lay on his back thinking about his mother and how his History teacher, Mr. Ball, might actually miss him because he had really liked his report on dirigibles the week before. He waited two hundred yards away from the tiny train station slightly afraid because he didn’t have a flashlight and didn’t know what would be in the haunted attic of the boxcar he jumped into. He had fallen asleep and woke to the cold of twilight. He knew the evening train would be along soon.
Four years later he’d been to 48 states and still had the same backpack, covered in band patches, his copy of Hunger, and his Ramones T-shirt, which he wore all the time. He traveled alone, following the steps of his black Converse like the steps of a successful older brother. He didn’t drink but smoked sometimes; it put him more at ease with the older, friendlier, more worn down people he met when he sat in a crowded coffee restaurant, truck stop or bus station, or sat on the curb to drink coffee and some old lady stopped and asked if he knew the Lord, or some bearded man stopped to ask for a cigarette and maybe offer him drugs or a cell phone. What he learned as he went from place to place, from scene to scene in the wide, flattened U.S. he didn’t necessarily note, but let soak in like a deep suntan. He got scared sometimes that no one knew him and wondered who he was even talking to when he thought about things. A couple of times he had thought he was going crazy. He wanted someone to read his thoughts, to want to.
He had never been to New Orleans. Smutville had not intrigued him because he knew somehow that the Jack-the-Ripper genuineness was over. He went finally because of the old lady with the purple hat. He had been walking from Anaconda, Georgia to the ocean; it was April and he hadn’t seen the ocean since September. He considered her significant enough to change his course.

II.

He had been sleeping outside in the Ninth Ward, which sits next to the Quarter and is its poorer, soldered brother. It’s full of old, formerly grand homes whose depression has swallowed their tenants, and it is where Desire and Charity moon over the past, bordered by Elysian Fields. It has the air of a silent film star eighty years out of its element, who, while everything is booming around them, maintains an air of silent supremacy that is in large part confusion. The Ninth Ward seems to be in permanent hiding. He made a little camp across the street from the Mississippi river, whose banks there are abandoned cement docks with abandoned metal warehouses on them, and soon discovered that no one came out that way anymore. He walked a few miles next to the cement riverbank mourning the several fallen fish shacks and took in the hushed dignity of the old trees who have seen it all come and go and fall, and who now watch it go into the slow isolation of the failure to streamline sun tea and red pickled eggs. He was sure they wanted the dirt banks back, which they had shared with the river. As he walked along the one-lane, uprooted street in the afternoon he pictured the young old woman with the purple hat walking from her big, white home to Patsy’s Fish Shack for dinner. She had a man in a white button-up shirt and bluish-gray pants with her. She was so red-smiling, fresh and delightful that he smiled openly at the piece of color she was against the browns and greens of the wild riverbank.
After a few days he wandered the way of the Quarter. He came across Elysian Fields and Esplanade Avenue feeling the buzz of it coming at him. The North and West edges of the Quarter are quiet; he stuck close to the edge of the Mississippi and came upon Decatur Street, on the West side, and the first place he stopped was Molly’s. He went in because it was airy and empty and he could smell the Chinese food. He sat at the bar and asked for some coffee and a menu. He was dirty but didn’t smell and didn’t look too bad. His Carhartts and Ramones T-shirt were a little holey and he carried his green backpack like a student, maybe. It was eleven-thirty in the morning. The bartender, Judah, gave him some black coffee and two packets of Sweet-n-Low. They could hear Long in the back cursing in Vietnamese, saying “Johnny!” in between, and they smiled at each other.
“His delivery guy’s late,” she said. She had bleached blond hair and lots of soft wrinkles. She wasn’t old, but she smoked and did shots with the customers, which was hard on her looks. “He’s never been this late before.”
He drank some of his coffee and looked over at the doorway at the back of the bar that lead to China Dragon, where he could hear Long banging around in his tiny kitchen. In a minute he came through the bar carrying a large, warm plastic bag.
“I go deliver myself!” he said as he passed.
“Wow,” she said, “He’s never had to do that before.”
While he was gone his phone rang several sets of times.
“Should I get it?” she said once.
He shrugged. He wanted to help her but didn’t know what to say.
Judah stood there smoking and looking at the window, out at the hard sunshine. The tense light that strained in through the dirty humidity gave a glow to the bar that made him feel like he was inside the walls of a thick green glass bottle, like one he had found by the railroad tracks outside Tuscaloosa. The phone kept ringing and he could tell it made her nervous.
When Long returned he came through the bar looking like a cartoon madman. His eyes were huge in his round head and he bore his way through to the calling phone like an African locust.
“Too many order!” Long shouted after several calls. “Johnny,” Long yelled to him through the door, “You come here!”
He looked over just with his eyes and then back down at his coffee, waiting.
“He’ll give ya free lunch,” Judah said like a mother to her child. “And you’ll make some tips.” She smiled. Her teeth were brownish but almost straight. He raised his murky green eyes to her and thought she was pretty. She was wearing a fuzzy pink vest.
He looked over at the door. They could hear Long on the phone again.
“Johnny! I got four delivery now …” He literally sounded as though he were drowning in a large steel vat of warm friend rice, sinking through the peas and carrots. He put on his backpack and headed for the back of the bar, picturing the face of the old lady for a second, whom he had taken on as his vision of peace, which he would have felt unfair doing if it weren’t for the fact that it took no effort on her part.
“Johnny, okay – here address,” Long pointed at one of the tickets on the plastic bag.
‘This guy assumes a lot,’ he thought.
“Hurry, hurry … lunch rush. When it over you go, other Johnny come later. Here key to bike outside. You go now,” Long pushed on his shoulder. He wanted to punch him, but just took the stack of bagged Styrofoam to his chest and walked back into the bar.
“You got a map?” he said to Judah.
She had a smoker’s laugh. “You’re not even from here, honey?” she shook her head, smiling as though some great mischief were unfolding. “Shit -- let me see those tickets.” She drew him a map on a napkin with only the street names he needed, with numbers in between showing how many streets separated them. He liked her long, pink nails. He had a great respect for gaudy femininity.
He nodded at her. “Thanks.”
Long is Chinese but from Vietnam and is less than five feet tall. His restaurant, China Dragon, sits behind Molly’s bar on Decatur Street in a fortification of indolent businesses that are all part of the original Ursuline Convent. His delivery guy, who he calls Johnny, slang for incompetent, lumbers down it every day twenty times at least almost popping; a slothering, bloated slab wobbling on a junk bike delivering Long’s food that is the staple of several below-minimum-wage shop keepers who restlessly wait through each day and week for their alcoholic checks. Johnny makes between forty and sixty dollars in twelve drudging hours, which he spends immediately at the Abbey, two doors down, before going home with his friend Carver who makes sandwiches at the Red Fish Grill; or more often than that Johnny stays out all night, when people are kind, and then goes to work for Long in the only brightened morning.
Johnny, real name Frank, called Franco, Fat Frank, Frankie, Big Frank, Big Man, drinks a lot of coffee from Molly’s bar, which all the bartenders give him for free, sometimes slipping milk in for nutrition. The old wooden benches in Long’s “courtyard,” the paint mostly gone and splintered, surround two black tables, meant for diners, that are washed in a white and gray filth that is visible in the daylight’s reflection coming straight down past the square of apartment buildings which hangs over the run-down scene like an empty bull ring. People come to visit Frank while he waits for an order, which Long doesn’t like. They sit across from him and bullshit about certain strippers, especially the new ones to town, and their friends’ drunk- and drug-capades, most times giving him a few shots out of a cliched flask.
Longs cooks and takes orders by phone from eleven to eleven inside the 10’ X 8’ shack and calls, “Johnny!” when an order’s ready. Frank takes the plastic bag, puts it in the front basket of his limping 1960s Schwinn, and saddles the narrow alleyway heavily past the garbage cans which fill the side entrance to both Molly’s and Long’s. He rides the edge of falling over like a kid on cough syrup through the Quarter, so fluid and slow that he seems like a figment of the heavy-lidded humidity.
Long doesn’t like Frank, but he’s worked for him for a year and Long is used to drunks; he thinks of them as less than men, and considers them deserving of their self-made slavery. Not too many tourists come that far up Decatur, tending to stick to the trendy recycled blues cafes a few blocks down on the other side of the street, next to the Mississippi River. Molly’s is a place where the local drunks feel comfortable, though they are sometimes joined by the tourists who consider themselves a little smarter and more adventurous than the average T-shirt and sunscreen sporting dough people. These “travelers” occasionally order some Chinese food from Long and dine in, but choose to eat their food in the bar rather than in the cut-off courtyard.
Long is a pervert, and perverts are well liked in all parts of the Quarter. Tall and short women with big breasts stretching threadbare tanktops come behind Molly’s to squeeze Long’s girlishly smiling face between them, and he laughs out loud but doesn’t give them anything for free, not even one eggroll. They’re perverted too and they like that he’s short and strange and fearless.

III.


He rode Long’s ten-speed faster than Long’s strong but short legs had ever been able to. It was easy to find addresses in the square Quarter; its straight-forward layout didn’t match the manipulative lives of the people who brought themselves there. As he passed, many locals would try to catch his eyes in theirs and search for imitable meaning. He liked the performers who did their Vaudevillesque acts in the middle of the street, and the mimes who stood stark still covered in gold metallic paint or dressed as Uncle Sam. On Bourbon he was struck by how colorful even the trash was -- how it played off the scenery and people as though it were more alive than they were. All day he underwent the bastardization of the old Quarter with its drifts of white tourists, sweating his ass off. When it began to slow at four o’clock, he was offered a job:
“You fast boy. Johnny no-show, you want job?”
He was amazed he asked. “Yeah, I guess.”
Long got him a bowl of plain white rice and he watched Long pour the juice from a pot of boiling artichokes into a pitcher and take a glass.
“You drink, make you strong.”
He ate his rice at one of the lone black tables and brought his bowl to Long, who was washing large steel pots and oversized utensils, when he was finished.
“Where you stay?”
“I have a place.”
“You be here ten-forty-five.”
At eleven that night he walked through Molly’s where the crowd talked at itself loudly and Judah had gone home. He walked up Decatur, the young, white locals carrying plastic cups down the sidewalk past him as down their own hallway. He was glad to go unnoticed through everyone’s illusion of command and charm and each block had less people until he was out of the Quarter.
Once he was safely inside the deserted area where the fish shacks were, he took his thin, dark blue acrylic blanket out of his backpack and lay on the broken grass and hard dusty dirt with his backpack behind his head. It was a loyal backpack and kept its shape for him to lie his head on comfortably every night.
He looked up at the uncommitted sky and the few visible stars. He had the old familiar thought that it was stupid to plan on anything, that we just live and die. It was a thought he had almost every day at some point, and every night before he could relax. A breeze came through and he thought it smelled a little salty. He hoped the old lady was around, sitting on her daughter’s porch, and wondered what she was thinking about. He knew old people stayed up late, several old people had told him they needed less and less sleep as they got older. He pictured Judah’s long, pink nails running down his stomach, but a thought of Long prevented him from anything else. ‘I outa kick his ass for calling me Johnny all the time …’ He had liked the artichoke juice thing for some reason, and thought maybe Long would be alright if he didn’t have the short man’s complex or whatever was going on with him. He thought of his mother for a second before he fell asleep, but then drove it down as he focused outward on the night and its sounds of small animals rustling in nearby bushes and the river’s millions of eddies swelling and recanting a few hundred yards away like a long birth canal to the ocean.
He woke just as it was getting light and stretched hard. His last dream had been about a girl he had liked in school. They were on a boat and the water was rough. They were both running about the boat tying things down and then his mother’s face appeared in the sky like God to watch him struggle.
He thought the air smelled wonderful in the morning, like certain women, like the old lady, who had their own fresh smell that reminded him of a cool-looking lavender bottle of “toilet water” his mom had kept in the bathroom but never used. He wished he knew the old lady’s name so he could find out where she lived and possibly visit her. He would walk by first, just to check out her house, and then maybe pass by one evening when she might be out on the porch cooling off. He put his blanket away and walked up the cement ramp across the road and over to the edge of the abandoned cement dock to look at the slow-moving river. He pictured himself floating in it not much bigger than a wood chip and thought how what you’re surrounded by, what’s on your skin, is so important, whether it’s dirty clothes or a clammy-feeling hand or cold snow in your sock, or the pulling water of a fit and experienced river. He didn’t know if a river was a thing or not. He supposed it was and it wasn’t. He’d seen a river so clogged with logs and mud it seemed destroyed, so maybe it was a thing. But he was sure if the sun got hot enough and all the water on earth dried up, the riverbeds would be like haunted carcasses.
“Frank’s dead,” Judah told him as she poured his coffee. It was nine and he was really early. “The delivery guy you’re replacing?”
He nodded.
“He had a heart attack last night right there at the Abbey, at about three a.m. They said his eyes bulged out and he coughed real hard and fell on his big stomach.”
He pictured one of those huge rubber buoy-balls with the handle little kids sit and hop around on. “Wow … how old was he?”
“In his thirties. He must have had a bad heart, and a bad liver. Long doesn’t know yet, he won’t be in for an hour at least. The guy was a loser, but he was so dependable; you get used to people.”
He didn’t give a shit. He’d never even seen the guy. It was weird he had his job, but the guy might as well have had it fifty years ago for all he cared. He thought about how much he liked bars in the morning, before all the “lucid” conversations, and the lonely thoughts that came in to be executed.
“Why’s Long call him and everyone Johnny anyway?”
“It’s like his insult. He doesn’t like drunks, he hates them, and he thinks everybody here is one, which is pretty much true,” she laughed her rough laugh. “But his restaurant’s here, so what does he expect … one time this big guy came out from using the bathroom back there,” she gestured with her cigarette toward the swinging door that lead to Long’s courtyard, “And started calling Long a short little somethin’ and Long egged him on, calling him a drunk loser and shit, until the guy tried to hit him. Well I swear if Long isn’t the fastest little weirdo I’ve ever seen; the guy couldn’t do it, he couldn’t catch him with his fist or even grab onto him … Long dodged every one until the guy got frustrated and spit on the ground and turned to come back in here, and Long kicked him in the ass on the way out!”
He laughed. It was the first really funny thing he’d heard in a long time.
When Long came in and Judah told him what had happened he only said, “That right” and went to work.
At five past eleven Long called to him for the first order of the day.
“Johnny!”
He went through the bar doors into the courtyard where Long was standing holding the heavy, warm plastic bag.
“My name’s not Johnny, it’s Nathan … and if you call me that one more time I’m not gonna work for you.”
Long looked at him like some people look at the Mona Lisa, trying to find and possibly communicate with her soul. He wasn’t used to real pride anymore.
“Okay. Nathan. Here order.” He handed it to him. Nathan took it down the alley and onto Decatur Street, where a couple of doors down people had placed a few heat-wilted flowers on the sidewalk outside the Abbey.