Tennessee and me
Death is one moment, and life is so many of them.
Tennessee Williams
This was one of the first years since returning from California in 2005 that I did not attend the Tennessee Williams Festival. The reason – dinero no hay. I let lapse my MOMA, NOMA, Ogden, City Park, Pitot House, and everything else membership because charity begins at home when you are starting over.
I was reading that Tennessee died in 1983 and frequently haunted Marti’s. Fancy that. I was in Atlanta and returned to New Orleans in 1980 and lived in the Quarter and frequently haunted Marti’s and the Chopping Block.
Those days are vivid in my mind, I was with my first love, Ken McElroy, and my brother, my sister’s beau and Ken owned the Vieux Carre Motor Lodge and the Burgundy Inn. I was the front desk person during the day. We frequently hosted theater groups playing the Saenger. I weighed 118 lbs, wore my hair long, drove a brown and tan Gremlin with a V8 engine, and smoked and drank and danced my life away like there was no tomorrow.
I was also a fag hag when I wasn’t with Ken and had another friend who had worked at the Playboy Club who used to sunbathe nude with me in my postage stamp back yard.
Was I aware he was around the corner, at the bar next to me? Most likely not, I was in love and painted a king size sheet that I hung from the wall of the parking lot on Rampart and Barracks that said, “KEN I LOVE YOU UNCONDITIONALLY” because I was listening to Donna Summer’s Unconditional Love one night and felt inspired.
The first woman who ever made a pass at me was in the Chopping Block one afternoon. The first time I knew what it felt like to be cheated on was Ken taking home a woman he had met that same afternoon on the barstool next to me.
I lived an entire lifetime in the four years I called that one small patch of Quarter home eating Jazz Alley burgers from the Golden Star and drinking ice cold root beer from the vending machine. A tall dark man held me up at knife point and took my purse that contained my $200 Dunhill lighter in the parking lot of the hotel. Often, I’d go home only to shower and then go to work – looking fresh as a daisy – oh youth.
Easily, I might have become a character in one of Tennessee’s stories. Or maybe I was.