Part I.
Where do you think you're going?
Have you ever written something in a pane of fogged glass with a finger, carving careful strokes through beaded droplets of water, the skewed reflection of your index finger dragging along behind your real digit? The oil in your fingertips leaves a mark long after the mist fades and weeks later, if the mirror or the window fogs up again, whatever you wrote the first time will reappear, looking like words traced by some ghost of whoever you were when you wrote it the first time. I say "whoever you were" because people are always changing. I'm not the same person today that I was yesterday when I went to sleep. I won't be the same tomorrow when I wake up. Marcus Aurelius Antoninus said that, "Life is change." Of course, he said a lot of other stuff, too, but that's the only bit that I like. Reading crap written by Romans is like panning for gold: It's a lot of crap but every once in a great long while, someone says something golden, and you feel like you've just gotten suddenly rich-- even if you've just got a nugget that won't even pay your gas and electric bills for the next month.
Hey, don't hold it against me. I'm getting paid to talk like this. I'm a twenty-six year old freelance writer: What the ******** else am I supposed to say? It's not like I eat and breathe this s**t-- it's just that whenever I sit down to write something serious-- like something about genocide in Cambodia or how PETA is ruining the environmental cause, all that comes out it this philosophical crap. I mean, I guess that's not bad but I'm not looking to be the next Elliot. It's fantastic to be like this after you're dead, but quite frankly, I'm more interested in eating regularly than in being remembered and hated by AP English students for the next hundred and fifty years. I want to write something shallow and poignant. That's the stuff that sells.
Holden would say that I'm being a literary prostitute- that I'm whoring myself off. I don't care. I've always gotten the distinct impression that Mr. Caulfield wouldn't like me, anyways. Quite frankly, I don't think that he'd like most people who read "Catcher in the Rye," at least not most of the people who go around quoting it and everything. I think he'd say that they're a bunch of pretentious scholar wannabes who can't feel like they're accomplishing something unless they can pretend to be in someone else's head. He'd probably feel violated at all the people reading about Allie. Sick and twisted ********, all of us. But I'm just putting words into his mouth. After all, he's not real. There's no reason to even care.
My problem is this: I can't seem to write anything that I want to write. All that comes out is garbage like this. It's like an illness. I can see it happening. I can feel my fingers disobeying me on the keyboard, but I can't stop it. Degenerative.
I know how this all started, too. It started about five or so months ago, with a window and nine stupid words.
You see, I live in New Orleans-- the humidity capital of this continent and, like all freelance writers in New Orleans, I support my job by making waiting and shopkeeping my hobbies. On Tuesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays I work nights as a bartender in the French Quarter at a sleazy tourist-friendly club called "The Bourbon Cowboy." Can't get much more s**t-faced hic than that. But, tips are good and I get to drink myself stupid for free. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays I work at a stationary shop on Magazine Street. I spend most of the day cutting cards in the back. But, again, the money's good and even though I don't get all the booze I could hope for, I get free paper-- which is as good as alcohol for someone in my line of work. On Sundays I get down to my real job, and I use all of my drunken-job and hungover-job experiences to churn out a few good pages of shallow, though-provoking bullshit that I mail off to magazines or companies and then I settle in to wait for the rejection letters to come flying back to me.
Things were going pretty well for me. I had passed four birthdays like this and was looking forward to another fifty years of vomiting tourists, rooms that smell like packaging glue, eviction notices, and YOU SUCK letters from every writing magazine in the English-speaking world. Things were still going well for me one fine, misty Wednesday morning when, very hungover, I was heading back from The Cowboy just as dawn was raising its obnoxious head over the water-logged New Orleans skyline. I was on the streetcar, heading back uptown to take a shower before my other job. I knew that I wouldn't have time to sleep (I had to report to the office by nine and it was already a quarter past six) but I really needed a shower. Some frat by on spring break had thrown up all over me at about nine. The other girls helped me clean up the best that they could, but I could still feel his Luck Dog with Relish under my fingernails and in my hair.
New Orleans goes to bed at dawn, and doesn't wake up again until sunset so, being the long-time New Orleanian that I was, I was staring out the foggy window of the street car in a drunken, meditative stupor. I was wondering why I had wasted my life and my meager pairings of talent when I lifted my finger that first time. In the mist on the window, I wrote "Where do you think you're going?"
The streetcar pulled up at my block and I got off. I took a very long hot shower and went to work. I may have still been drunk. I forgot all about the trolley and my message to myself. As a writer, I'm doing stupid things like that all the time.
__
In New Orleans, the streetcar is the life and limbs. It takes you wherever you want to go-- but generally not on time. I am no exception. I depend on the streetcar to shuttle me between my jobs and my apartment on Broadway, where my cat and I rent out a single Bed, Bath, and Kitchen from a middle-aged yuppie couple who came down to help after Katrina but somehow managed to strike it rich in some hair-brained business endeavor and so they began renting out shitty apartments to down-and-out young people-- like me.
Whether I'm going to The Cowboy, the Stationary Shop, the grocery store, or my place (the full range of my motion) the streetcar is responsible for my safe transportation. Dozens of cars run on several different tracks, making it theoretically impossible to have to wait for a car for more than fifteen minutes. However, again New Orleans shows the world that it is stronger than logic. There is no average wait-time for a car, but I've personally waited an hour and a half for a car before I started walking to work.
On another misty spring morning about a week after my drunken Wednesday, I was heading to work-- via streetcar. I had plopped down in my seat and was applying my morning makeup when I glanced at the window, wondering what the whether would be like. The window was still foggy-- even though it was eight in the morning-- which was a pretty good indicator that it would be humid today. Again. For the millionth day in a row.
That's when I noticed it.
Written faintly in the fog were my words, written in my unmistakably alcohol-induced skrawl:
"Where do you think you're going?"
Didn't they ever bother to CLEAN these cars? I wondered savagely, and was just about to erase my phantom words when I noticed that, underneath my words was written:
"Anywhere but here."
I paused, my hand on the windowpane. Had someone answered my question? What did they mean, "Anywhere but here"? It was probably some emotionally challenged teenager who was depressed over zits and an incorrect dose of Xanax. What a stupid thing to say! What the ******** did they mean, anyways? Who cares? I was about to erase the message again, but I paused for a second time. More surprising than the content was the fact that someone answered. It felt, in some weird way, like they were talking to me.
Excited by this prospect, and not being able to think too clearly in the early morning, I reached into my purse and, after a few minutes of hasty looking, pulled out a sharpie. This would be a more reliable way to communicate. After all, sharpie would last longer than mist.
"What did you mean?" I wrote on the wall of the car. I replaced the cap to my repugnant marker, and left for work, feeling most proud of what I had done. Not only had I vandalized city property, but I had passively gotten back at the reason for my repeated lateness to work, and maybe- just maybe- I had communicated with someone. Even if it was a drugged-out teenager, I was excited. I wanted to see if they would write back. As you can probably tell, my creative sensibilities were already running too far ahead of logic. Thus began my series of most bizarre and unexpected events.
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