Memoirist Idol

Lost After New Orleans

Bags of Crawfish, potatoes, and old Ramblers

It was my college roommate Mike’s old Rambler that took us to New Orleans. Some of us, I think are still there. Some of us never left that house on Decatur Street. A few of us are still wondering how and why we wandered, and others must have wondered why some of us didn’t make the proper moves, why our hands didn’t keep wandering when they could have.

But let me go back.

I didn’t choose Mike to be my housemate. I was living in the Episcopal church house for free with Rufus, an older English major who had invited me in.

“Rent is free,” Rufus said, “but the catch is no parties, no alcohol, and no Pot!”

He knew me kind of well.

“And every Sunday morning you have to either stay in bed or get out because the children’s Sunday School class meets in the living room.”

Our bedrooms were upstairs, and sometimes I stayed, listening to the clatter and the “Jesus Loves the Little Children” noises, and sometimes I headed over to my friends Laura and Teresa’s apartment. Sometimes I spent the night there, too, but never with Laura or Teresa.

When Rufus moved out, he suggested, recommended, and actually asked Mike, who had just returned from some Alaska and whose parents lived across Plowman Street from us, to move in. He asked Mike before he asked me if it was okay to ask Mike. However, he didn’t ask Mike if he smoked Pot.

And since I had no say-so in this new arrangement, the first thing I did was to ask Mike if he smoked Pot.

“Well of course,” Mike said. “Is that a problem?”

“Only for the church crowd,” I suppose, but they never got wind of it until the night, eight months later, when Mike almost burned the house to the ground because he lost the hot rock of his joint in his upholstered bedroom chair upstairs. He left, thinking it was out. I came home to a wall of smoke. I smelled like smoke for weeks. But that’s another story, except to say, that Mike ran upstairs to grab his bag of pot, so yeah, something survived the fire.

Mike also served in the Army Reserve, and one week, he had to be in New Orleans, so he suggested that I accompany him. He had a new love who was going, too, and she knew someone who knew someone in New Orleans and so we had a place to stay.

“You wanna bring someone?” he asked.

Sure I did, if I only knew someone. My old girlfriend, who was with me on the night of the smoky house, had gone back to her old boyfriend, because he was cleaner and old, or maybe I never knew her reason. But that left me wondering, and looking for someone else.

And then Laura suggested Teresa, who, it turned out was quite willing to go with me.

I had known Teresa since junior high. I thought she was cute. I never asked her out, though. I thought Teresa would never like me. I thought Teresa was out of my league. Once a group of us played touch football, and I saw Teresa looking at me. And even though I looked back, I still never thought…

We were great friends, though, used to hit the Birmingham gay discos together and in crowds. We’d laugh, get very stoned, and dance to “Got To be Real” in all that Disco Heat.

The four of us in a Rambler heading to New Orleans, accompanied in another car by another friend named Terry who, God knows, had discovered us and wanted to go. No room in the Rambler, though, or our friend’s inn. So I don’t know where Terry stayed in New Orleans though he appeared every day, but at least for some distance on that ride down, Teresa and I rode with him. He smoked Pot, too, or at least he did then.

Terry also knew a spot in New Orleans where they boiled crawfish in the traditional Cajun way. A neighborhood market, a place I’d never seen and I’d been to New Orleans before. I still don’t know if the crawfish was the best, or if it was the red-skinned potatoes boiled with them, all sealed in a giant bag where you could continue shaking all the mudbugs and spices together as you ate.

Later, after Mike’s reserve time, the five of us sat at Pat O’Brien’s being tourists and drowning in hurricanes and Pina Coladas like some of us, anyway, could do this forever and survive. One or two of us likely could have, and maybe still are. Surviving.

Back at the inn, Teresa and I slept together every night. Together, we slept. Same bed, same sheets, different pillows. You know.

I can’t say for sure even today that had I moved closer, she would have, too. All I can tell you is that years later, a bunch of us went to hear some music at Brothers Music Hall in Birmingham. Teresa drove me home, and on the street outside my parents’ house, for whatever late reason you care to name, we leaned into each other and kissed for all we knew.

“I’ve never seen you so forceful,” she said to me as we slipped apart.

A few months later, she got engaged; another year later, I did too.

Her marriage didn’t go so well, but she had the children. No idea where any of them are.

Terry, at least, has written a book, full of Christian principles and anecdotes. I think he’s living in south Alabama somewhere. I see him on Facebook every so often. He’s apparently glad that Roe got overturned. To my knowledge, he has no children.

And Mike.

One night on the way home from his soon-to-be brother-in-law’s bachelor party, that might just as well have been in New Orleans as anywhere (yet it was truly in Birmingham) the coke-laden Rambler Mike was driving didn’t make the right turn in Pelham, and so went down the embankment and Mike finally died after lingering on for a night.

I was gone from there by then, and so the call I got referencing his sudden death both did and didn’t take me by surprise. I didn’t wonder so much about what had happened, because i already knew.

I still see him in many places — he and his old dog Shag — but mainly I see them in New Orleans, whenever I go. And often, when I don’t.

Man, I really recommend this piece

by Kris Heim who teaches us about Allen wrenches, shower rods, the game of Gold in cards and that you can really really tell any story in one sentence if you have the right mindset!!!

Here’s another story of mine, too:

https://terrybarr.medium.com/membership

And thanks as always to Memoirist Idol creator KiKi Walter!