The Secret Blog#1

Long ago there was a fictional young man that started out from the midwest with a backpack and some money and was going to hitchhike to New Orleans. Along the highway in Mississippi, he fell in with some odd fellows that looked a lot like the creatures that drew Pinocchio astray. Huck Finn also encountered them I think- pretty much in the same part of the river. Our young waif got led astray and spent some time at various places consuming alcohol and other substances and when he finally got to New Orleans his money was gone. He stayed one night in a hotel with a credit card that he could not pay when the bill found him and then found refuge in a shelter on the edge of the French Quarter. And since there was no money, he no longer could be intoxicated. He was not addicted to anything luckily enough. He was lying in the grass, reading Faulkner, one afternoon and an older gentleman stopped to talk to him. The older gentleman had just hitchhiked in from Texas and a bad divorce. He was living under the Canal Street Ferry Wharf. They talked and discovered that they both loved books. The older gentleman had money but wasn't ready yet to decide where to live and what to work at. The older gentleman asked our waif what did he want to do? Our waif thought he might like to be a printer. The older gentleman suggested that under the wharf might a easier place to sleep than in a mission. Our waif wondered how one took a shower and kept clean. The older gentleman showed him how to use public bathrooms and where to find launder mats. Our waif decided that he should find a job. He got all cleaned up and went to look and was hired by the first place he went. The day he got his first paycheck, he moved out of the mission into a very grimy studio-like apartment that smelled of cigars and vomit and urine. He let the older gentleman sleep on his floor and they shared meals for a little while until our waif got paid again.

Then as all things in the Big Easy do, they drifted, the older gentleman found a room, because he only slept a couple of hours a night and it was easier to stay up and read. He had grown up in an orphanage and he hated sharing anything with anyone. He decided he wanted to work in a bookstore, so he started helping out in one until the owner got so guilty that he was hired. Our waif worked at being a printer until he decided he hated it and accidentally got hired by a guy who owned a bookstore- mostly because the guy liked his young body.
It turned out the older gentleman was working for the same guy at a different shop.

We won't describe what really went on in Mississippi or in the Mission. Those things you have to find out for yourself and perhaps you don't want to.