Desire Street. There used to be a streetcar here. Now the rails are mostly covered but from time to time they poke out through the bad roads. Potholes and badly rigged wiring. Houses with personality.
“A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it’s curved like a road through mountains.”
This street is straight. This town is curved.
“We are all dancing at the foot of the volcano,” says Mel. This is an end of the line town. “Like Brighton,” I venture. But hotter. And connected to a bigger country. There’s theatre on the streets, there’s music and madness, and juju and art. Katrina was a huge thing for this town, much more so than COVID. The place was destroyed. Empty lots still sit next to the places that were swarmed by venture capitalists in the wake of the disaster. You have to be able to buy outright here, because insurance on a mortgage is off the scale. This is the Mississippi Delta. Flooding is easy.
In the French quarter, amidst all the trumpeting and song, the vibrant life, there are still gas lamps burning in the fronts of houses. Somewhere in the world where that still happens even despite the fires of the hurricane. A conflicting happiness to see them. The true environmental damage is done by the corporations, we all know this. Let the weird bar have a flickering lantern a few years more. None of us are perfect.
So we listened to music, we looked at buildings, we walked to the delta, we met the queens. We ate some of the best Vietnamese food. “Transferrable skills – this is a swamp. They came here and were better at catching shrimp and growing rice.
I knew I would like this town but I hadn’t expected it to get into my blood so quickly. Mel has been biting at me to get here for Mardi Gras every year for about a decade. Next year she and J9 will be the queens of their crew. I think I’m gonna have to make space in the calendar.
For now I’m just happy for the fact that despite all my expectations I’ve landed full on my feet again, living here on Desire in a house with Mel in the other room and we have a kitchen and shared bathroom and a door I can close and I am not on anyone’s sofa and don’t have to juggle my time to anyone else’s schedule. Thank the good lord for old friends.
It is cold here but bright. The only sound is the trains, and that’s a universal thing in America as they have to honk as they carry their freight as the line often crosses roads with no barriers. “Everyone knows someone whose car was hit by a train,” says Mel when I ask about it. But it was the same in Virginia, in Arkansas. I remember it being the same in Maine. “It’s a romantic sound, something from a bygone era,” says Mel. And yes. Maybe I’ll miss it when its gone. Like airport announcements.
AlBarclay 