Pass Christiane

Craig was 11 years older than me and I was a zoo of insecurities. He was born in 1985. The year Reagan was sworn in for a second term, the year Whitney Houston released Whitney Houston, the year Michael Jackson sang "We Are the World" to help the starving Ethiopians, the year the FDA approved a blood test for AIDS. I was born in 1996. The year the Unabomber was arrested at his cabin. The year Rent opened on Broadway, the year Osama bin Laden published The Declaration of Jihad on the Americans Occupying the Country of the Two Sacred Places. The year they killed Tupac and JonBenét Ramsey.

We hadn’t been dating for very long when Craig asked if I’d go on a trip with him to Louisiana. He grew up on the Gulf Coast in a small town that had been destroyed by Katrina. His family evacuated and no one had been back since. I was touched by the invitation. It was such an intimate trip. I figured he must have really been into me. Or just he didn’t know anyone else with as little going on as I had. It was going to be winter soon, and there was nothing to look forward to. I was pretty aimless. And only just reaching an age where you start to realize that you're aimless. Still, it felt good to be thought of.

At the airport he rented a big truck that he let me smoke inside of. I adored him. We decided to go straight to Craig’s hometown. On the way out there, in the truck, I asked him a lot of questions. I like knowing where people are from, knowing the sorts of things they did as kids.

“Do you know anyone who still lives there?”

“I don’t, actually. I didn’t really have good friends till high school and they mostly didn’t live in my town.”

“How did you meet them?”

“Online. Were you alive for LiveJournal?”

I told him I’d never heard of it.

“I’m aging myself,” he grinned. “It was sort of like MySpace. Or Tumblr. Just before MySpace or Tumblr.”

We merged onto the highway and Craig pointed out a stadium, the Caesars Superdome.

“I saw Wynonna Judd perform there when I was a kid.”

“Really?”

“I was seven. And I loved her. She was coming to New Orleans but my mom said we couldn’t afford tickets.” He paused before glancing over at me.

“Are you squeamish?”

I told him I wasn’t, even though I am, but not in a way that is always worth mentioning.

“I started ripping my teeth out. To get money from the tooth fairy.”

I nodded along.

“You know, to pay for the tickets,” he explained.

“My mom eventually caught me. I was biting down on a shirt and sobbing while I yanked on my tooth. She flipped out. She must have borrowed money from my aunt or something, cause we got the tickets. She dressed me up as a cowboy.”

I smiled as I thought of Craig as a child cowboy. His mom sounded kind.

We avoided the interstate as best we could and passed through a town where all of the houses were built on stilts. I’d never been to the South before, so I’d never seen anything like it.

“Does your town look like this?” I asked.

“No,” he laughed.

The rest of the landscape was unremarkable. It went by as a collection of billboards for different things that vaguely depressed me: casinos, local politicians, injury attorneys. I couldn’t remember the name of Craig’s town, and was afraid to ask, but then I saw the Welcome sign on the side of the road.

“Pass Christiane,” I read aloud, “is a weird name.”

We drove past sad, prefabricated little houses bedecked with American flags. The road ran straight and simple as a residential bleakness rolled out in front of us. I thought it was sort of beautiful, though. The beach had white sand and the water was something close to blue. I noticed the water didn’t have any waves. Some of the oak trees and old houses had withstood the hurricane but most of the town was clearly new: post-storm and charmless. But the recent developments mixed with older ones in an interesting, haphazard way. I couldn’t imagine growing up in a place where so much of life is governed by poverty and natural disasters, where the homes are manufactured off site, only to get destroyed again and again. We drove to his old cul-de-sac but all the homes had been paved over and turned into an apartment complex. Craig said he wasn’t sad that his house was gone.

“You aren’t sad at all? Seeing it gone like that?”

He said no, but I thought he seemed sad. I could see the town bringing up feelings in him that were too personal to say out loud. I thought he seemed nervous, like he was afraid to stop the car. I thought about suggesting that we get out and walk around, but I noticed there weren’t really any sidewalks in Pass Christiane.

His elementary school was gone, too. The lot where it had been was overgrown with weeds and littered with propane canisters and cinder blocks and fire extinguishers. We laughed at the disarray and took photos to send to his mom. I thought about my own mom and how she wouldn’t have cared if I were ripping my teeth out. She would’ve just let me keep on hurting myself.

I started to say something but Craig interrupted me.

“You see that liquor store?”

“Yeah.”

“I knew the people who owned that store.”

“Who were they?”

“My high-school girlfriend’s parents. The Nguyens.”

“You had a girlfriend in high school?” I said this flirtatiously, teasingly. But Craig had a weird look in his eye.

“Yeah,” he paused, “it’s actually really tragic, though. She worked there after school. One day, someone came in to rob the store and they killed her.”

“Jeez.”

“They shot her in the face.”

I remember the way he emphasized in the face.

“She was the first person I ever had sex with,” he continued.

I didn’t know what to say so I just looked at my phone, thinking that was a weird thing for him to have said.

After a while, I asked, “What was her name?”

“Mai.”

There was another brief, uneasy silence between us.

“How old was she when they killed her?”

He made a face, a kind of grimace, “Sixteen.”

I lit a cigarette as the truth about the frailty of my stupid life rippled through me. Some big storm could rush in and leave just as quickly, taking away your house and leaving whatever it left. Without announcement someone could shoot you in the face at the liquor store after school.

We went back to New Orleans, to the hotel, and had sex. It was serious, passionate sex. The whole time I pictured Craig and Mai. Afterwards, Craig fell asleep almost immediately and I stared at him for a while. It made me sad to imagine the sorts of things Craig did as a kid, like pulling out his baby teeth or mourning his dead girlfriend. I eventually fell asleep, too. I dreamt that Craig was trying to kill me. I was locked in a bathroom. Craig had a gun and was calling out my name and in the bathroom I was holding a knife.

The next day, Craig was doing work at the hotel, so I tried to find something good to do on my own. I wanted to go to this old cemetery but you had to hire a tour guide and it was expensive. I didn’t really have money of my own to spend.

“Too many vandals,” the security guard explained. “They do weird shit,” he said, widening his eyes.

“Do they dig up the bodies?” I offered.

“Yes,” he said, his voice ebullient, adolescent. “I don’t know what they want with them. They’re just as dead as salamis.”

He laughed loudly then, too loud. I just smiled back at him.

“And once, they broke in and painted all the tombs pink,” he raised his eyebrows. “Bright, bubblegum pink. So now visitors need a guardian.”

I nodded while the guard looked past me oddly. We stood in silence as both of us wiped sweat off our foreheads.

I felt tense. Vacations seemed to produce in me the opposite of what they were supposed to. I didn’t feel relaxed. I was plagued with horrible thoughts about myself and my loved ones. I seemed to just stumble from one activity to the next, in flight of any negative emotions. There wasn’t much to do in New Orleans besides walk around and drink. So that’s what I did. I couldn’t decide if I liked it. The city seemed soiled, like it was full of wrongly made-up people. The architecture felt evil and corrupt.

I studied the other tourists, thinking maybe they knew something I didn’t, that if I watched them closely enough maybe some knowledge about how to have a good time on vacation would transmit itself to me. A lot of the tourists traveled in big groups and drank frozen cocktails out of plastic glasses shaped like penises. I walked to one of the stands selling the penis cocktails. The woman behind the bar seemed to be in a state of ecstasy, like she was thrilled to be working. Her enthusiasm disarmed me.

“I’ll have a daiquiri,” I told her.

She nodded eagerly before reaching toward a stack of regularly-shaped cups. I pointed to the rack of penises.

“In one of those, please.”

She beamed up at me as I paid. I shuddered at the cost, but Craig was meeting me soon, and I thought that the penis daiquiri would make me seem fun-loving, free-spirited. But really I felt idiotic, standing in the street with it. I finished the drink before he even arrived and threw the cup in the trash, tipsy and remorseful.

Most of the bars were crowded and loud, so we settled on one that was quieter than most. It was the kind of bar that’s probably always empty. There were only two other people inside, so we sat down, happy to be relieved from the crowds. It seemed like the kind of place that people cry in. The bartender was bruised and covered in scabs. She had whiskers tattooed on her cheeks and a fox tail attached to her belt. She freaked me out but I felt like we couldn’t leave once she acknowledged us. She spoke strangely, there was something clipped and skittish about her. I assumed she was self-conscious about the scabs, but she held intense eye contact with me while I ordered. The only other person in the bar was an old man destroyed by alcohol and sunshine and something else. His face was a yellow matted wrinkle of scar tissue. A small dog sat at his feet. We kept glancing at each other, so I smiled at him. I asked him if his dog was friendly, and he told me no. It was clear that it bothered him that his dog wasn’t friendly.

Then he scooted over and sat down next to me. The old man told me he was in love.

“I’m in love.”

“Oh, yeah? Who are you in love with?” I asked.

“With Fox,” he whispered, confidentially. He gestured with his eyes toward the bartender.

“I come here and I visit her. All the time. But I know she’s out of my league.”

He hung his head.

I didn’t think Fox was out of his league, but I wasn’t going to say that.

“Well, have you told her you love her?”

I could sense that Craig was annoyed by the two of us, me and the old man, our conversation. The old man answered yes. At the same time Fox asked Craig where we were from.

“So where are you two from?”

“New York,” Craig answered.

They kept talking but I could only make out some of what they were saying, because the old man was telling me about how he couldn’t work, but got by on collecting checks from the government for something doctors had done to his insides.

“Fuck the V.A.,” he said.

So I said it too. “Fuck the V.A.”

We clinked glasses.

And then he said it again, forcefully, angrily.

“Fuck the V.A.”

The old man offered me a drink. I said no, and he offered again, insisting, but then Fox interjected.

“They can buy their own drinks,” she said, waving her hands dismissively. “They’re from New York. They’re rich.”

The old man laughed.

“That doesn’t mean they're rich,” he said.

In response, Fox picked up Craig’s credit card from behind the bar. It was a heavy, gold plated card. As she waved it around, I remember thinking she had a point, that usually people with those sorts of cards are rich.

“See,” she slurred. When she smiled cracks appeared in the scabs on her face. It made me squirm just to look at her.

The old man laughed quietly, but then his laughter turned into coughing. Violent, hoarse coughing. After a while, between coughs, he asked me:

“Isn’t she foxy?”

“Yes,” I said.

Fox turned up the music as Craig and I went and sat down at one of the tables. I could hear Fox and the old man talking but I couldn’t make out exactly what they were saying. Their dialogue was mangled. They both seemed so diseased and downtrodden, their faculties getting wrecked one by one by forces over which they had no control.

I looked over at Craig.

“You’ve got the face of a killer,” I whispered.

He laughed. “What are you trying to say?” And then he burrowed into me.

At the hotel we drank more and I read about the hurricane. I learned that evacuees committed suicide in the Superdome. I read that thousands of foster children went missing all along the coast, while prisoners, left in their cells, waded neck deep in sewage water. I was too young to really remember Katrina and Craig wasn’t interested in what I was saying. It was information he already knew. I noticed I sounded drunk, reading aloud. I started to read about places that stayed vacant after the storm. Most of them were prisons, but one of them was an amusement park.

“I want to go here,” I said, holding my phone up to his face.

“Is it open?”

“No. But a lot of people seem to go.”

Craig told me maybe but then he turned off the light.

After he fell asleep, I googled LiveJournal and found his LiveJournal. He had hundreds of entries. I was impressed by some of the writing. I searched “Mai” but nothing came up. But then I tried “girlfriend” and a lot came up:

......................................Dear Girlfriend,
They say the best place to hide a dead body is right under everyone’s noses. And that’s how it feels, like your so close to me, to everything, but I can’t grab onto you. The night you died I felt like something got removed from me. Something like an organ. I still feel so sick. It’s like you’re still here, watching me, watching me do this to myself.

I read a lot of his other entries. I was surprised by the sentimental reaction they withdrew from me––memories and experiences that weren’t mine. I looked at Craig until I fell asleep. I liked watching him without being seen by him.

The next morning we drove to Grand Isle. The drive was long and the whole route looked sort of bombed out. Craig was speeding but the things going on outside seemed to be moving slowly. I saw an amputee kicking the back of a car. The amputee was really angry.

When we got to Cajun Country, there wasn’t anything to do. Most of the businesses were closed for the season. So we drove around and I brought up the amusement park again.

“Come on, let's go,” I whined. “I've been reading about it, it seems really easy to get in. I don’t think it's a big deal, lots of people seem to go.“

“It makes me uncomfortable,” he said. “I don’t wanna get in trouble.”

“Come on, it’s on the way back. Let's just go look at it.”

A couple of hours later, we could see it. The arches from the rides were visible from the interstate. The sun was setting and the park looked cool, pushed up against the colors in the sky. The front entrance was predictably eerie, almost blandly so. It was overgrown with weeds and covered in graffiti, the rides all halted and rusted.

Craig parked the car and said he was nervous. I said it didn’t seem like anyone was even patrolling the park. But it was definitely kind of scary. The whole area seemed deserted. It was like a diorama of destitution and bad taste and failed enterprise. Dogs barked from neglected yards filled with scattered auto parts. It was a neighborhood without spirit, without prospect. Just the looming silhouette of a busted out theme park.

We didn’t make it very far into the park before we heard the security guard shouting. I started to quicken my pace and turn a corner, but the guard had already seen us and there wasn’t anywhere for me to go. I turned around, embarrassed.

Surprisingly, the guard was armed. He pointed his gun at us, and told us not to move. He was fat and his hair was trimmed close to the scalp, like a beaver pelt. He seemed ecstatic, pointing the gun at us. He reminded me of the girl selling the daiquiris only he was evil. They could have been siblings. He’s like her evil brother, I thought.

He ziptied our hands together and I thought that was funny. A gun, but no handcuffs. He put us in the back of his car, which was just a normal car. Craig was clearly stressed out. I felt teenage.

I opened my mouth to say something like,

“Can you imagine? He has a gun? What if he had shot us?”

But I didn’t. Then I started to try and apologize. Or make light of the situation. But I stopped myself again. Craig didn’t say anything either and his eyes had that weird look in them again. He seemed to be losing his drift. He was looking at the back of the driver’s seat like he was trying to read it or something.

I thought about poor Mai, the stupidity of her graceless death. I couldn’t face Craig so I stared ahead at the security guard. His uniform was too tight. He was sweating and breathing hard. I wondered what his hopes for the future might be. I bet they’re small.