Journeys - 1974
I was in New Orleans, living in a boarding house room on Rampart and working at a printing company on the streetcar line out past Canal Street. I thought I wanted to be a printer, so I was entry level, cleaning a two color press and jumping up and down and loading paper and cleaning the printing plates on this press as the Printer got it ready for the the run. It was manual labor, but the guys that hired me thought I had promise.
I was lucky, came into town with hardly any money and rented a place in the first place I walked into and got hired in the first place I applied at. The studio apartment was the worst, smelled of cigars and urine and I cleaned it a bunch of times but it never got any better. And it had a shared bathroom down the hall. The manager was this older lady with her grandchild and refused to let anyone in the building come in with overnight guests. This was not going to work for me. So I found a worst place over on Decatur Street (a block from Bourbon Street), which was one small room in the slave quarter portion of the building, but the shared bathroom was just across the courtyard. The manager there liked me a lot and put up new curtains for me and made sure I always had my own toilet paper. And wanted to share my little room sometimes I'm sure. Anyway, when I moved, the old lady manager asked if I'd be willing to drive her and her granddaughter to Nashville for pay. We worked out the details and I needed the money, so I agreed. It would just be one long weekend, maybe missing just one Monday at the printing company.
So I made the trip. She had a car and I rented a trailer and loaded it up and we took off out of New Orleans late on a Friday night for Nashville. I had really injured myself at work and had one of my fingers in a brace from accidentally running it into the print rollers on the press. A lot of this became a novel "The Smallest Creatures"
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0787FWCYQ/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i1
published by The Book Folks, but years later. It was originally going to be called "The Cowboy and the Witch" which I carried around in my head for a number of years and then one evening with a television writer friend over wine and donuts in LA, helped me flesh it out as a dramatic thing.
The other almost little journey I was tempted to make was, in my loneliness, I had made friends with some people in a cult that were ready to send me off to Boston to get brainwashed by the home guru. Luckily, when I showed up to run off with my stuff to Boston, they revealed that their true mission was to find a new recruit that could teach the guru's sons how to play basketball. I hated basketball most of my life until I sired a basketball player. So sanity prevailed.
I finally started to make friends with other writers and artists there and got a job in a bookstore where I supposed to be. New Orleans was my Paris, I always figured. I hitch-hiked to California next to find my way. I wanted to be Jack Kerouac.
I was in New Orleans, living in a boarding house room on Rampart and working at a printing company on the streetcar line out past Canal Street. I thought I wanted to be a printer, so I was entry level, cleaning a two color press and jumping up and down and loading paper and cleaning the printing plates on this press as the Printer got it ready for the the run. It was manual labor, but the guys that hired me thought I had promise.
I was lucky, came into town with hardly any money and rented a place in the first place I walked into and got hired in the first place I applied at. The studio apartment was the worst, smelled of cigars and urine and I cleaned it a bunch of times but it never got any better. And it had a shared bathroom down the hall. The manager was this older lady with her grandchild and refused to let anyone in the building come in with overnight guests. This was not going to work for me. So I found a worst place over on Decatur Street (a block from Bourbon Street), which was one small room in the slave quarter portion of the building, but the shared bathroom was just across the courtyard. The manager there liked me a lot and put up new curtains for me and made sure I always had my own toilet paper. And wanted to share my little room sometimes I'm sure. Anyway, when I moved, the old lady manager asked if I'd be willing to drive her and her granddaughter to Nashville for pay. We worked out the details and I needed the money, so I agreed. It would just be one long weekend, maybe missing just one Monday at the printing company.
So I made the trip. She had a car and I rented a trailer and loaded it up and we took off out of New Orleans late on a Friday night for Nashville. I had really injured myself at work and had one of my fingers in a brace from accidentally running it into the print rollers on the press. A lot of this became a novel "The Smallest Creatures"
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0787FWCYQ/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i1
published by The Book Folks, but years later. It was originally going to be called "The Cowboy and the Witch" which I carried around in my head for a number of years and then one evening with a television writer friend over wine and donuts in LA, helped me flesh it out as a dramatic thing.
The other almost little journey I was tempted to make was, in my loneliness, I had made friends with some people in a cult that were ready to send me off to Boston to get brainwashed by the home guru. Luckily, when I showed up to run off with my stuff to Boston, they revealed that their true mission was to find a new recruit that could teach the guru's sons how to play basketball. I hated basketball most of my life until I sired a basketball player. So sanity prevailed.
I finally started to make friends with other writers and artists there and got a job in a bookstore where I supposed to be. New Orleans was my Paris, I always figured. I hitch-hiked to California next to find my way. I wanted to be Jack Kerouac.
No comments:
Post a Comment