I didn’t want to hit up any Pride events, but I agreed to the parade because that’s what Patrick wanted; he was so hype to do the damn thing. He joked that he was just an “Iowa farm boy” (his parents both taught history at U of Iowa)—he’d been to Pride events, drag shows, gay bars, sure; but the Midwest didn’t have pageantry like ours, and he’d come to New Orleans recently enough to still be in young love with the place, as dazzled by its revels as a frat guy on Bourbon Street when its Girls Gone Wild vibe’s in full effect. He loved even the city’s smallest charms, like how I lived (and he basically lived with me) on Congress Street, the street just past Piety and Desire.
Me, I was born and raised in the 504, and the appeal of its various Fests (Jazz, Essence, Decadence) had eroded over the years. My mother said I always acted like an old head, which is pure lies—my soul grew fat on this city’s culture—but I did balk at the thought of days-long bacchanalia. I’d already skipped the Friday night kickoff party, though—the galleys to proofread! the workshop poems to critique!—so Saturday morning when I whine-yawned about the parade, Patrick was having none of it.
Charles D’Ambreaux, he said, you’re a party pooper to the nth. You know you’ll have a ball. If I can push your stubborn ass out the door.
Look, I said, I’ve been going to parades since before making memories. I got work to catch up on, rest to catch up on.
Lame, he said. Totally lame.
Millennial motherfuckers, I said. And lame is ableist language, FYI.
For years I’d been avoiding Pride; there was a commodified quality to things now, and a hypersexualized aura that felt detached from protest. Truth be told, though, my resistance was mostly banter. Patrick had convinced me to cut down on the promethazine/codeine syrup, but an unhealthy thirst was darkening my veins. I’d quietly reconnected with my plug to scoop a pint for Pride. I was gonna have my fun, too, and Patrick didn’t need to know about it. To mix it with Sprite in a Styrofoam cup, as is custom, would’ve been a giveaway, so I camouflaged the sizzurp in purple Vitamin Water.
Getting ready took me ten minutes, Patrick most of the afternoon. He’d cranked up the Madonna before commandeering bedroom and bathroom. Fine. I chillaxed on the living room couch, my earbuds blasting Mr. Stillz: NOLA-born gangsta rapper, my hero and Patrick’s nemesis. With one of his woozy codeine odes in my ears (The sizzy’s gonna kill me/but I’ma kill it first), I closed my eyes and drank deep.
After flirting with and discarding costumes for weeks, Patrick’s dreaming yielded this: orange tennis shoes; a white adult diaper; white wings strapped to the spread of his back; and rainbow wings painted on his face, starting wide on each cheek and tapering gradually as they flew up toward his temples. Patrick’s one of those white boys who just can’t tan—the sun only made his skin a palimpsest of freckles. For the occasion he’d busted out the bottle-tan, which rendered him fake-looking and fly in equal measure; the muscles he’d spent extra sessions exercising stood out in sharper ridges and curves. His strawberry hair flowed back in a slick wave.
He stood there assessing me.
You’re seriously wearing that? he asked. You look just like that freaking rapper.
Yeah? Thank you! You look beautiful, too, baby.
With my PRPS jeans, purple Reebok pumps, Aviator shades, and black hoodie, my style did swagger-jack Mr. Stillz’s. Not my prime intention, though. George Zimmerman’s trial was next month. I knew the conclusion was tragically, maddeningly, hopelessly foregone. All the more reason to embrace the hoodie: a public mourning for Trayvon Martin.
Nobody would even know you’re gay, Patrick said. Don’t you want to make a statement?
This is my statement, I said.
We stepped out of 808 Congress Street and started sweating as soon as we shut the door. Only lower-case pride stopped me from forsaking the hoodie when I realized, about five seconds in, how suicidal it was to wear it.
The parade was lined up in front of Washington Square Park, taking up a full lane of Elysian Fields and stretching all the way down to St. Claude. Rainbows, of course, were ubiquitous—flags and boas, headscarves and dresses, shirts, skirts, and Speedos arrayed in seven shades. White horses stood calm behind idling sports coupes, while the Camel Toe Lady Steppers, rocking electric green sequins and white tutus, spun themselves around to keep limber. Inside the park, beneath live oaks and palm trees, homeless men languished on park benches, some sleeping straight through all this gay mayhem, others puffing Swishers that embrowned the heavy air.
Want to inspect the whole lineup? It’s the best part.
Uh-uh, Patrick said. I want to be surprised when it rolls.
We had hit on our dynamic early: the one who’d already arrived and the other who could happily put off arriving. Patrick was full of I-just-need-to-figure-out-my-life talk—hence the hiatus from college, the stints as bar-back, waiter, Whole Foods cashier. My thirty-something stability (I was jogging toward tenure) spelled permission for his whims. He took care of his “old” man; I guided my twenty-three-year-old young’un.
With social events, though, I rode shotgun. Here at the parade, I fell in behind him, slipping through the spaces his buoyancy cleared. The way he looked around for people, his tiptoes and calves were getting an extra workout.
At Frenchman Street, we posted up by Snug Harbor. While Patrick flexed his texting skills, I noticed a guy down the way cradling a baby against his chest. The baby swatted at the cascade of rhinestones flowing from homeboy’s neck, and her smile revealed the toothless ridges of her gums. She jangled the necklace again; yanked on Daddy’s auburn goatee. A short, gorgeous Latino joined them, kissing Baby all over her little head. (His little head? Can’t assume a child’s sex at a Pride parade.)
I drew Patrick’s attention to the father/father/child thing. God, he said, don’t you wish you’d had that?
It’s a pretty picture, I agreed. On the other hand, would I be the man I am if I’d had it?
Patrick made a rueful moue that meant, How sad that you think so, or maybe, You being less of “the man you are” might be better for everybody.
I looked back as Daddy lifted Baby above him, propping her head up with thick thumbs. Despite that support, Baby’s head bobbled. Infants, I thought, come into the world knowing one eternal truth: that the head sits so heavily on the neck—that it would be so nice sometimes, such a blessing, to lift it off and set it aside.
The parade started rolling, floats drifting past like steamships, ushering in and carrying off their washes of sound: the untz-untz-untz-untz of techno, queer classics like “I’m Coming Out” and “Freedom! ’90.” Women from Body Brite handed out dick-shaped candy attached to hair-removal coupons (Bare Is Better). A white convertible sailed slowly by, two Black drag queens ensconced in the crimson velveteen of the back seat, looking RuPaul fabulous, slow-waving like the blonde debutantes who once starred in whites-only parades. A hard-to-read gesture—parody of debutante culture? blithe inhabitation of that culture’s princessery? Probably meant as a shout of equality—Here we stand, baby, no better nor worse than you—but it struck me as latecomer striving, a desire for some historically fraught glamour.
You think cultural appropriation works both ways? I asked Patrick.
He looked at me. Charles? Let’s give our thinking caps—our thinking hoodies—a day off, huh?
He gave my clean-shaven dome a quick faux-dusting, the Mr. Clean joke that meant, Let’s drop this shit and be cool.
Patrick’s crew converged in stages. Dennis, rolling solo, showed first, offering a bone-grinding handshake. A carpenter Patrick had met when he volunteered with Rebuilding Together, Dennis looked like Hemingway and Kurt Cobain fused in one reluctantly gay vessel, with his rugged beard, flannel shirt, and wallet chain. Like me, he could pass for straight. Like me, he probably took a certain pride in that.
Still fighting the good fight? I said. Rebuilding our broken city?
I do what I can, he said.
Then, as if sensing that something else was needed, he said, You know, one house at a time.
I wanted to pick his brain about housing discrimination, but behind me I heard Hey, hey, hey! Ken and Rogelio came swaying into view. Rogelio, a young Colombian—Ken’s latest fling—held two Tropical Isle hand grenades by their green plastic stems, while Ken, a bald old queen with tallowy teeth, lifted twin tumblers of neat whiskey. Ken was a colleague—our Victorianist, a Wilde scholar, an appealingly mocking man now robed in a Roman-style toga. I liked him just fine, but it was Patrick who’d formed the real friendship, enamored of the gays-only potlucks Ken held at his shabby-chic house in Gentilly.
A round robin of hugs ensued. Ken bestowed over-wet kisses on each cheek. Old New England money honeyed through his voice as he started in on Dennis and me.
Charles, dear. Love how you’ve gayed it up for the occasion. You and your woodworking friend. The flamingest queens these streets have ever seen!
I know, right? said Patrick. Could they be any more gay?
I see how it is, I told Patrick. Ken shows up, and now you got jokes.
Dennis, what do you call this look of yours? Ken asked.
Lumbersexual, said Patrick. Except that’s for straight guys, so I don’t know.
Lum-ber-sexual, Ken said, pronouncing the word with arch puzzlement. Then a feigned Eureka: Oh, it’s symbolic! All that timber he’s harvesting!
So much wood, Patrick agreed.
Embarrassed and flattered, Dennis turned a crawfishy color, while Rogelio seemed a little confused. As I knew from my own experience with French, it’s hard to follow banter in a second language.
Y’all know what’s in those, right? I asked, indicating the drinks Rogelio held.
Alcohol, he said, proud of his one-word witticism.
About ten different kinds. Might taste like Kool-Aid, but it’ll floor your ass with the quickness.
Oh, don’t go policing this young man, you prude, Ken said. Just then, “Y.M.C.A.” made its inevitable appearance, soundtracking a float of bow-tied Chippendales types. Ken and Patrick loosed their punning tongues: Balls on Parade! Battle of the Bulge!
These boys, I told Dennis. In liquor, in wit—who can keep up with ’em?
He leaned in and said, Does it ever intimidate you? All the wordplay and whatnot?
Naw, man. You?
All the time. Makes me feel like a bad gay, you know. Insufficient or something.
Look, bro: Takes all gays to make the world go round.
He tugged my hoodie. You gotta be dying in that thing.
Just standing up for what I believe in, I said.
Dennis maybe didn’t follow the comment—he swerved to another subject: Vitamin Water?
I got to babysit this one, I hollered.
Without looking back, Patrick flipped me the bird. That added mirth to Dennis’s smile; we could now be comfortably word-free. We watched Patrick wobble-wobble shake-it-shake-it to one of Big Freedia’s frenetic bounce anthems. The flap of his angel wings lagged half a second behind the beat, but for a white boy, Patrick could really twerk.
I’d finally slipped into the pulse of the day. Patrick was right: I’d been too hard on Pride. So what if gayness was being performed? Heaven knows the gangsta rap I loved was Blackness being performed—not even Blackness but “Blackness,” cellophaned and made safe for white-kid consumption. That didn’t kill the joy in the performance, though. What I loved about rap and poetry was an acrobatics of language—printed on the page, pumped through speakers: didn’t matter. The display in front of me formed a correspondence. Maybe all art, I thought, even the most earnest elegy, amounted to an inspired and preening performance.
Or maybe the codeine was kicking in.
The motley contingents kept ferrying by: Lords of Leather on a fleet of sputtering Harleys; a walking group carrying a banner, Some Christians Are Gay—Get Over It (and Join Us!); an elderly woman with a homemade sign: I Love My Two Gay Sons. Patrick dashed into the street and kissed her. They embraced like he’d known her forever.
That was the boy I fell in love with.
Some gutter punks on tricked-out bikes pedaled by, toting papier mâché sculptures of gay heroes, and in their wake came a rag-tag brass band. They played a second-line rendition of “In the Air Tonight,” joying up Phil Collins’ dirge with horn blasts and antic percussion. Behind them, skinny Black boys and chubby Black girls walked it out under rainbow parasols, stutter-stepping, spinning, straight-up second-lining. Yaaaas! I said. Yaaaaaassss!
Amazing, I thought, how they shone as individuals and comprised a group, unified by nothing so rigid as choreography. Patrick, Ken, and Rogelio clapped along; even Dennis jigged a little. Loose-limbed from the sizzurp and the sweltering sky, I slapped Patrick’s arm and said, Check this.
Slickly I slid into the second line, wielding my drink in lieu of an umbrella. The old dormant rhythms erupted. I danced like I hadn’t since I last went to Zulu—had to’ve been more than a decade earlier. The girl next to me looked over in vehement welcome. She chanted, That’s right, that’s right, get it boy, get it boy, and I felt as home as I’d felt before the advent of lust, when I sat in a pew hearing my mother’s voice soar through “Keep Your Eye on the Sparrow.”
Patrick trotted alongside like a band-booster parent ready to retrieve a fallen baton or dropped drumstick. He cheered me on while keeping a respectful distance, instinctively aware that a white boy couldn’t just plunge into this.
When I stepped aside near Ursulines, he greeted me with a sweaty hug, made a little awkward by his angel wings. He said, I told you you’d have a ball if you came out.
I winked at him and tipped my head way back to drain the “Vitamin Water.” A trickle dribbled down my chin. Passing out seemed not impossible and I wanted to take my hoodie off so bad, but I remembered my pledge to keep it on; remembered, too, the portable happiness in my pocket, the telltale blood-redness of the prescription bottle. I needed Sprite to mix it with.
Dennis, Ken, and Rogelio rejoined us, offering praise and applause. I gave a dignified bow, straightened up solemnly, and said, It’s refreshment time, baby! I’ma make a dash to the Golden Lantern. Anybody needs a drink, I got you.
Ken lifted his toga, revealing the flask strapped to his thigh by a corsage; Rogelio had barely touched his hand grenades; Dennis made a motion like, I’m good. Only Patrick was in need: Two more of these, please. He leaned in for a kiss and handed me the bottles with their identical backwash.
Y’all stay right here, now, I said. I ain’t aiming for no wild gander chase.
Exit one happy-ass Charles D’Ambreaux. I passed a corner store on the way to the Lantern and figured I might as well duck in there instead if I was only buying beer and soda. I stumbled. My feet took off on a quick skitter and I started laughing, a cackle worthy of Patrick’s beloved Disney villainesses (always more fabulous than the heroines, he said).
I was still laughing as I busted into the corner store. Whoo! I said in the cashier’s direction. What did people do before A/C?
Probably didn’t wear black sweaters in June, he retorted.
True enough, I said, figuring I’d walked right into that snark.
I rounded up the bottles and approached the cashier. A white boy with dreads in serious need of a new twist rolled into the store, straight to the counter. He cut in front of me with the most oblivious assuredness in his stroll. While I waited behind him, smelling that blend of incense and B.O. hippies generate, I stared at his T-shirt (I’m Rick James, Bitch!), then at his filthy feet, the long, grubby toes jutting out of his beat-up Birkenstocks. He pulled a credit card from his cargo pocket. The world, I thought, had never touched this boy, never taught him to question who he was or where he belonged.
Pack of EZ Widers, he announced.
Need your receipt?
Nah, man, I’m good.
The hippie peaced out, taking most of his odor with him. I stepped into its remains and set my drinks on the counter. I sniffed an “ahhh” of fake delight, hoping for a conspiratorial smile that never came.
When I handed him my own card, the clerk sent a frustrated puff of breath at me.
Doesn’t anybody carry cash anymore? he said.
It’s 2013, I said.
(Why hadn’t he asked the hippie that question?)
(Did I want to know the answer?)
He swiped the card. Uncomfortable seconds stretched between us like droplets easing from a showerhead. Then the telltale beep of trouble.
Do you have another one? One that actually works?
This one works, I said. It’s just been swiped so much. What you do is put a plastic bag—here, let me show you.
When I reached toward a bag by his elbow, he startled. Whoa, whoa, he said, holding up his palms. The fuck? I wondered. What, had he seen Menace II Society and assumed we were all O-Dog, robbing convenience stores, holding pistols sideways?
I was just trying to show you, I said.
No trouble, man.
You really think…? Really?
Instinctively I looked around for someone who’d seen it, somebody who could obviate the need for me to explain. The store was empty. He kept up that bogus, crucified pose that set off a ringing in my inner ear.
The irony landed: The hoodie, my gesture of solidarity with a victim of racism, had only served to unleash more of the same.
Alright, I said quietly, I see how it is. Can I just have my card back please?
He wouldn’t put it in my hand—too risky, that touch—just zipped it across the worn countertop where I left the unbought bottles. I backed out of the store, flashing my palms in a mirror image of his.
It’s all so ridiculous, so schoolyard, how they bait you till your rage starts blurting and they can paint you into another stereotype: angry Black man. Tamp down the wild blood, our exemplars preach. Act right. Pull up your pants. Stop grabbing your crotch. Wash that heathen slang out your mouth. Don’t be so damn loud. Don’t you know we have to be twice as good? I’d enacted that advice so long, it was like breath.
Problem is, it’s like breathing but through a choked gullet, an invisible foot on your throat. All those soft retreats leave you with a head full of shouting, the inexpressible noise of what you didn’t say, should’ve said, weren’t swift enough to spit in the moment. Can I have my card back, please? Why did I ask? Why’d I say please?
I walked almost subconsciously toward the Golden Lantern, slipping past bodies, desperate to find Sprite for my sizzurp. I wondered for the fifty-fifth time whether Trayvon had really been carrying sizzurp, too, or whether, as I suspect, people invented that charge so they could blame him for getting himself murdered. As if codeine might constitute cause. Shame to admit it, maybe, but after enough run-ins, one white person’s slight can make you resent them all, approaching each with refreshed suspicions. There’s a Mr. Stillz rhyme to fit my feeling: Got a chip on your shoulder?/Well I got a whole bag/Fuck with me, I turn colder/Leave you with a toe-tag.
The anger I should’ve aimed at that clerk was ready for everyone else. Stranger walks into the saloon, doors swinging behind him; all the regulars turn to glare; hands hover above holsters. One raw look could blossom into violence.
It was a blessed letdown, the Golden Lantern. The crowded sea parted too peaceably, the smiles were too disarming, the whole dive-bar style too chill and unpretentious. The bartender, another ginger boy—Patrick’s doppelganger, if you shaved this kid’s beard—actually passed over a cluster of white women to serve me. What can I getcha, baby? he said, his tone scrubbed free of condescension or impatience, lewdness or judgment. He was friendly: C’est tout. He filled a Styrofoam cup three-fourths full of Sprite, like I asked him—I was done with camouflage. I slipped him a twenty and told him to keep the change. I hadn’t said please, though, and I didn’t say thank you.
I locked myself in a bathroom stall, hung my hoodie to dry, and emptied the remaining codeine into the Sprite. The A/C iced my total-body sweat. Now I could be still in that muted space as the waves of opiate love cruised through me.
Movement in the next stall snared my gaze. In the foot-high exposure beneath the partition was a pair of kneeling knees and arched white Reeboks, scuffed and a little out of style. Then another pair of shoes descended, facing his. The grunts grew audible. Slurpee sounds. I eased into eavesdropping mode, and the affection next door, the gladness in it, began to blot out my rage.
Ears cocked, I sank back into my fierce first days out of the closet, when I indulged my massive desire at every chance—got spaceship high, fucked with porn-star swagger, and tried to take pride in all of it. I told myself, You’ve earned the right to shuck shame. I did my best to exercise that right. (So often the shame comes swinging at you anyway—especially after orgasm.) That’s how I’d thought of it: in parks and public bathrooms, on couches, floors, and futons, I was exercising sacrosanct rights, fuck what the law books said.
Then the hunger for commitment crept in. Love, that interloper, loitered in the shadows, itching to take advantage. Patrick walked straight out of the crowd offering his heart and his urgency. He needed a daddyfied something, and I was helpless not to oblige. J’avais été damné par l’arc-en-ciel, as Rimbaud says, damned by the rainbow, condemned to happiness.
What you gain in soul-sharing commitment, though, you surrender in variety. Public sex, I found, didn’t jive so well with monogamy, or at least not with Patrick. At times, I craved the eager anonymity of the john, the alarming rush of hook-ups like the one in the next stall.
Which had me totally swollen now, straining against my jeans. I unzipped to let my erection breathe. If I could see their ankles and feet, surely they’d seen mine. I rested my cup atop the toilet paper roll and started stroking myself. I knew they knew I was listening. And watching whatever was watchable: My shoes frankly faced their stall, I didn’t even pretend to be pissing. Oh, yes. They knew I was listening and watching, and they liked that I was getting off on the sound of them. I graduated from voyeur to participant, which only increased their fever.
My phone tweeped and blurghed in my pocket. This would be Patrick, who was surely pissed. I’d lost track of time. I fumbled in my pocket to silence the phone. I didn’t want my neighbors to stop. A hot narcotic wave spread through me. I nearly buckled beneath the pleasure, my moans growing indistinguishable from theirs. I was jerking faster now, rough strokes that leave a warm hurt in their wake. We were runners in a last-dash sprint toward the ribbon, and as I pictured them—receiver seizing the servicer’s skull to drive himself in that much harder—I turned and shot right into the toilet.
In a brain-burst of release I fell against the wall. I felt more a part of a community than I had all day—more than when I’d joined the second line, even. I don’t think the straight world ever gets it, how tenderness can bloom between strangers in the damp of these semi-public spaces.
I cleaned up. My breathing regulated itself. The knees below the partition rose from the floor; the feet straightened, did a few toe-lifts to uncramp those long-arched soles. I mummied myself with a few loops of toilet paper and made my exit before they did. If I replaced the living idea of them with the stark reality of their faces, this would only downgrade our collective pleasure.
As I left, I reassembled my public self. I committed the empty codeine bottle to the trash, pulled the hoodie back on: principles are principles. Now that I’d released all that heat, I dawdled toward Frenchman, thinking wistfully of my earliest days with Patrick. Back then, after sex, drained and receptive, we’d prop up in bed and read poetry. He had a clusterfucky bunch of roommates and hated going home, so I patted the pillow next to mine and said, Stay. And I gave him a voice to curl into. I was teaching the best seminar I’d ever designed, The Derangement of All the Senses: Hallucinatory Poetry from Coleridge to Mr. Stillz. I’d chosen readings according only to my pleasure, with zero respect for the usual continuities, as seemed to fit the theme. This gathered an ideal student salad—white kids, Asian kids, Latin kids, every Black student in the program.
I read most of the verse aloud to Patrick (one whiff of lit-crit and he was like, Spare me). Fetally he’d curve against me as I gave him their words: Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Ginsberg, Thylias Moss. Rimbaud hit especially hard—Patrick went on to read the collected works and several bios, just as I had when I’d first discovered that rowdy French child.
Then came what was supposed to be the grand-closing hip-hop unit. Mr. Stillz split the class in half, and not even along demographic lines: two Black students, both women, were the most vociferous critics, and one gay white kid who’d sleepwalked through the semester came awake with indignation.
Maybe their outrage was understandable. In Stillz’s lyrics, bullets explode heads like tomatoes, pelicans swim through the oceans of blood he spills in the streets, and pussy juice runs profuse enough to fish in. But his music wasn’t all that way, I said—there were post-Katrina protest songs, stories of his painful childhood, of his drug-induced ecstasies. And anyway, shouldn’t art pack the power to upset us? Can’t verbal assault be part of the metaphysics?
The discussion moved beyond debate into a zone of near-mutiny, and when I told Patrick about it, he sided with the haters. We’d been arguing about Stillz ever since.
Where Royal Street and Frenchman intersected, Patrick was waiting like a manifestation of that memory. Arms crossed and face bitter, even beneath its rainbows.
Forty minutes for a drink and a piss?
Let me explain.
Where were you? I texted, I even called.
Sorry, my phone was on silent.
And you didn’t even remember my beer!
Doesn’t seem to be stopping you, I said.
He was holding a half-empty hand grenade; Rogelio must’ve realized one was enough. I apologized again, tried to explain about the store clerk, how I needed somewhere to power down.
And did you need someone to help you with that?
Not at all, I said.
You sure? You’ve got that look. How do I know you didn’t fall back into smelly bachelor ways with some twink trick at Lucky Pierre’s?
I went to the Lantern, I told you, and there ain’t no boys.
He kept puzzling over my face. If you could sniff someone with your eyes, that’s about what he was doing. Then he peered into my cup. I could see him doing the math, a good student showing his work, skipping no steps to rush ahead to the solution: his drink is bubbly and purplish; his pupils look substantial; and he’s got himself a Styrofoam cup. He solved the equation out loud:
Oh my god, you’re on syrup!
Yeah. What about it?
We talked about this. You said you were gonna slow down a little.
Don’t worry—this shit’ll make me slow down a lot.
Oh, uh-uh, bitch—
Bitch? Who you calling a bitch?
—not gonna use Mr. Stizzle’s rhymes to rap your way out of this.
I have slowed down. If you meant stop, you should’ve said so.
Should I be worried?
Look, it’s a special occasion, alright? And you look pretty waxed yourself.
He jiggled the mostly drained hand grenade and said, Rogelio gave me one before they left.
Why’d they leave?
Honey, Ken’s lived in New Orleans long enough to smell a storm when it’s coming. They went to catch the parade again on Decatur.
We started trudging in that direction. I told him I’d been standing in the stall zoning out and thinking about us, about those bomb-ass weeks reading poetry in bed.
We need to get back there, I told him.
He didn’t respond, clearly working through his thoughts re: the syrup thing. We ducked in Oz so he could hit the bathroom, down two ill-advised tequila shots, and grab a beer for the road. Angry drinking. I resisted the urge to mention the pot—you know, the one that always calls the kettle black?
The parade was already way down Decatur, almost out of sight. We walked that way without any serious intent to catch up. As we passed the iron-gated entrance to Jackson Square Park, we saw the statue of Andrew Jackson on his rearing horse and, rising beyond it, St. Louis Cathedral, the creamy façade and sharp steeples I’d been seeing my whole life long. Somewhere back there, by the cathedral’s steps, a megaphone unleashed seal-like barks. Patrick expanded with drunk-ass glee. Ooh, he said, let’s see what the Bible thumpers are saying!
Oh Lord, Patrick, spare me that foolishness.
Come on, he coaxed. It’ll be hysterical.
I had beaucoup reasons to avoid this charade, every last one of them legit. When you occupy the fringe of the fringe, you can make a religion out of staying away, and this celebratory day had already twice turned ugly. But when Patrick snatched my hand, I let myself be pulled down the garden path, around the Jackson statue and toward the back gates, where the street preacher’s amplified cracks crystallized into language.
Beware the fate of Sodom! he shouted.
We stopped just outside the park, behind the benches where tourists sat gawking, behind the tables where pliers of street trades (tarot card, crystal ball) were losing business to this messianic clown.
You do not know what will befall you when you die!
Tan, bald, hiding behind sporty shades and a goatee, he looked like a wrestler gone bloaty. Yellow letters, descending his long black sleeves, spelled out JESUS IS LOVE. His choir of cronies posed solemnly behind its soloist on the cathedral steps. They’d set up there instead of marching alongside the parade—a beautifully self-defeating strategy. Among that vanillafied phalanx was a lone Black man, a glum turtle peeking warily out of his shell. I couldn’t help thinking: Judas, Brutus, Benedict. The rest of them were synonyms. The signs they hoisted—black, red, yellow, all the lurid hues of hazard—tabulated the sins of my brethren.
WARNING
DRUNKARDS FORNICATORS
MASTURBATORS ATHEISTS
ABORTIONISTS REVELERS
SODOMITES HYPOCRITES
BLASPHEMERS LIARS
and GENERIC HEATHENS
HELL
Generic Heathens, I said. That’s my favorite.
Patrick scoffed. A rare hint, he said, of creativity.
Two olive-skinned boys, shirtless, very young, started skipping across the flagstones, a little ring-around-the-rosy disrupting the space between God’s Army and their spectators. Remindful of the lovely gutter boys Caravaggio painted, and of Mallarmé’s “Afternoon of a Faun.” Patrick applauded those faunlets, while tourists captured it all on their iPhones.
Obey the God of the Bible! thundered Preacherman.
The faunlets did a rhyming singsong: But this is the way God made us/We’re obeying the nature he gave us.
You were born a man, but you were not born a queer!
A group of frat boys stumbled past, their backwards caps emblazoned with names like Morehead State, USC Cocks, Oregon State Beavers: the double-entendre schools. They hollered: Tell those sinners, sweet Jesus! Lord-a-mercy! Hallelujah!
Your wake-up call wasn’t enough! the preacher continued. AIDS was loosed upon the world by sodomite blood, the unnatural mingling of bodily fluids!
I got your bodily fluids right here, said Morehead State, giving his crotch an aggressive shake.
Seriously? Patrick said.
They’re being sarcastic, I said. Your irony detector’s impaired.
The corruption of the blood is the proof!
Frat boys are ridiculing homophobia?
The world still has the power to shock us, I marveled.
During the back-and-forth bellowing, the faunlets continued skipping-to-my-lou, adding nanny-boo-boo nonsense for additional sonic disruption. Pedestrians gave the whole scene a wide berth, swerving behind the benches or turning around.
You have enraged your God!
Not my God, someone screamed.
Your God, who offered you a second wake-up call eight years ago!
Man, y’all are fucking with my profits, muttered a palm reader.
Three minutes in and I was done. The septic reek that haunts the French Quarter was suddenly overpowering—no nearby jasmine to smother it. Loud as fuck, a bum vomited in the garden; a horrified couple whisked their children away. The frat boys got bored and walked off. Who could blame them? Nothing hilarious about brute intolerance. I felt aggravated with Patrick for dragging me here, but I was more exhausted than angry. Beneath the hundred-degree heat, the obscene humidity, and my utterly sweat-soaked hoodie, my limbs felt as fogged and heavy as my head. On sizzurp you’re fine as long as you keep moving—it’s sitting or standing still that’ll kill you.
Eight years later, people!
This city’s so ratchet, I said.
Eight years after Katrina you still haven’t learned your lesson!
Every day in New Orleans is an apocalypse.
We were in Tourist Central; we might as well do as the tourists do, I suggested: get coffee and beignets at Café du Monde. Try to sober the fuck up. I was leaning hard, no doubt, but Patrick was lavishly drunk, his forehead sprouting sweat beads, the rainbow wings a smeary paste that made his face seem melted. And beneath the whole hot mess of him, a rage was gathering. It was real talk, I thought, what Baudelaire wrote—that alcohol’s pleasure always mounts toward a crisis, leaving the drinker volatile and ridiculous.
If Katrina didn’t wake you up, what will?
Is he seriously…? Katrina happened to teach us a lesson?
Don’t even try looking for logic. Let’s just leave.
But Patrick was already gone, flown to the outrage he hid behind his sunniness. He rushed up to the cathedral’s steps, perilously close to the preacher.
Hey, genius, he said, how come the storm affected more straight people than gays? Were we responsible for 9/11, too?
I hung back, waterlogged and hopeless, lamenting the entire day. Didn’t Patrick know? That there ain’t nothing you can do to change these haters? Damn if he wasn’t trying, though. He couldn’t drown the preacher out, exactly, but the clash of their voices tore the words themselves to useless shreds.
—a plague and flood—
—Betsy, Ivan, Gustave—
—bring down all of—
—every earthquake, monsoon, tsunami—
I tried dragging him off like a toddler mid-tantrum: the clenched-teeth exasperation, the violence of an arm too forcefully gripped. He pulled away. He refused all caution and control. I love this man, he said in a voice that seemed torn from his throat. I’m a human being—we’re human beings.
In a blaze of defiance he clutched my skull and kissed me. My tongue recoiled—his was a slithering intruder, tasting like day-old coffee spiked with beer. I pried his hands from my head, and the face he showed me then, a face I’d never seen before, was a muddle of paint and wild feeling.
You’re ashamed now? he said. You can’t kiss me in public?
Patrick, I hissed, let’s get the fuck—
You are! Oh my god! You’re ashamed to kiss me in front of these nut-bags!
You’ll never change their minds, so stop playing their game.
Because that’s how progress happens?
And then, a stunned caesura, as if some global remote control had muted everything but us. The preacher had stopped blasting; the choir’s signs stopped bobbing; the faunlets stood hipshot, their puzzled heads tilted. Bystanders broke the seal on eye contact. I had the sense of being circled by some vast surveillance. Cameras were going. This whole thing, I realized, could wind up on YouTube. What if my students saw this? My colleagues?
I thought then of that disastrous class on Mr. Stillz. Thalia Curtis loomed before me, unforgettable Thalia Curtis. She overused the word “instantiation,” but she was maybe the smartest student I’d ever had, a hot-blooded thinker, forever on point. She was the one who had shut down the Stillz discussion, choked the air right out of the room.
Puncture the armor of his style, she ranted, and he’s just shuffling clichés around, dressing up tired postures in new similes, keeping misogyny alive with clever metaphors. And those awful “no homo” jokes! He doesn’t “explore” troubling ideas—he regurgitates them. “I get that pussy wet enough to fish in it.” That’s genius?
With that, she’d swept her things into her knapsack and jerked out of her chair. I can’t even deal with this, she’d said, I need to leave out right now.
Here in Jackson Square, I felt the same holy-fuck ache in my stomach, the same hot needles jabbing my neck. And Patrick’s voice, upbraiding me: You’re being such a coward, Charles. Hiding behind practicality.
Thalia was right in at least one way: Sometimes you got to leave the fuck out. I hurried around the corner into Pirate Alley, between the cathedral and the Cabildo—caught, as it were, between Church and State. A dizzy fluorescence distorted my vision. Patrick’s voice was at my back: No wonder you like that rapper so much—you let homophobia slide right off you.
Sometimes I think that was what did it, his invoking my idol just then. He could never understand how Stillz articulated my pain.
When Patrick laid a hand on my shoulder I whipped around, full of the false clarity of rage, and I slashed at him with the sharpest words I could find.
You ain’t after progress, bitch. You’re just wasted and pissed off. Your face looks like pre-school artwork. You’re wearing a fucking diaper. That’s your protest? That’s how progress happens?
That shut his face up fast. His silence only urged me to hurt him more.
You know what I don’t need? I don’t need one more white person telling me what to think or feel or listen to. Don’t you ever call a Black man out like that in public—you don’t know what it could cost me.
Charles, he said as I walked off, Charles, wait . . .
He trailed off. He knew better than to chase after me just then. Probably went back and turned his misery on the preacher. I could imagine him gathering up his righteousness, marshaling our fight as evidence of Christian hypocrisy. How can you claim to do this in the name of love? Look how your hatred affects human hearts!
Futile, earnest, heartbroken histrionics.
Moving swiftly down Pirate Alley, I passed Faulkner House Books, and the little fenced-in garden that is the Place de Henriette Delille. I made a right on Royal, a left on Orleans. When I reached Bourbon, catty-corner from Tropical Isle, home of those hand grenades, I’d gone far enough to pause. I leaned against a wall, huffing, hands on my knees, waiting for my heartbeat to stop its helicopter choppiness. The heat was as brutal as ever, but with twilight coming on, the day had turned a hateful shade of lyrical, the sky dimming to purple above the sunset’s fuchsia. A skim-milk disc of moon was emerging. A few stars dangled like blingy earrings.
People always want me to be a loudspeaker. LGBT rights, Black rights, women’s rights. We need more men like you, they say—strong, educated black men who can set an example and “speak out.” And they always find me insufficient: not Black enough, not gay enough, a reticent activist, endorser, not investigator, of gangsta rap’s worst aspects. Patrick was just like them—wanting me to represent my nature in some blazingly public way. Easy for him; he’d had about the smoothest coming-out in queer history. With his loving, Liberal Arts parents, the inborn privilege of his skin. He may have hated gangsta rap, but I’d seen his browsing history: the fetishy interracial clips, the Black-thug-tops pounding white-effeminate-bottoms. When he Googled the letters “BBC,” it wasn’t the British Broadcasting Corporation he was after.
As I entered the full-tilt assault of a Saturday night on Bourbon Street, I pulled my hood low over my forehead. No longer a symbol of brotherhood or protest, now it was strictly a disguise. I threaded my way through the crowd, which thickened as I neared the gay section. I didn’t care whether my kicks got scuffed, the cuffs of my jeans soiled or torn. I was glad to be alone inside that crush of bodies, not because I shared their ecstasy but because after such scrutiny in Jackson Square, after feeling so specific, it was almost a relief to be seen (if anyone saw me at all) as a straight-up stereotype—hooded hoodlum, criminalblackman, eternal fitter of police descriptions—and to be forgotten by the people I passed once they affirmed that I hadn’t made off with their wallets.