She asked me to hold it as she lighted the tip. I sucked it all in, and held my breath as instructed.
She then said I should sit down before exhaling, so I did. I couldn't help but note the look of glee on her face, it seems she thought she had blown my mind.
She then asked me to breath out, and I did. What followed was, to put it plainly, rather underwhelming. Many years after that, I chanced upon a bottle of alkyl nitrites when it was passed unsolicited under my nose by a guy who as fucking me. Its effect was mainly a headrush. This was what I felt after sucking on that tube, with maybe a hint of stimulant that simply didn't last long enough to allow me to appreciate it.
She asked how I felt, I feigned being blown away, and resisted the temptation to tell her that IVing the same stuff was far better. She then offered me a drink of some cheap spirit. I gladly gulped it down, as I was quickly plunging into a state if panic and depression.
"Careful with that Patty, she be dawgish," my friend would tell me almost every time she'd see me after having repeated the above ritual on her own (referring to the other neighbor).
"Err... 'dawgish'?" I remember asking in confusion.
I made a reputation amongst my neighbors as being the clueless, somewhat-white guy from Canada. I managed to win this neighbor's favour by letting her borrow a 'dollah' to buy food one day. It didn't take long for that one dollah to become a daily request, and by the time I left, almost an extortion. I do not remember her name, but she called me "Az", and I was her "friend," particularly when a dollah was involved.
That is of course not to say that I didn't make any reasonably genuine friends. Once the word was out about my sexuality, I turned, almost overnight, into my co-workers' counselor. One turned out to be a single-mom with an abusive husband. At the time I had known her, she was just starting to recover and a few days before I left she had gone to Alabama where she planned to start a new life. The other ladies had similar, if not so shocking, stories. Mind you, this information regarding my sexuality was strictly off-limits to the Mexican girls (with whom no one could communicate anyway), and to the Palestinians. Such is the way things are, sadly. The ladies also warned me against letting my "friend" know, too.
The panic and paranoia I felt that day seem to be part and parcel of the culture there. Everyone was sharply aware of a certain fleetingness of the city they lived in. What's more, people lived in a rather dog-eat-dog (or shall I say 'dawg'?) world. Don't go here, there, and there at night. Yesterday so-and-so's brother was mugged and there was gunfire. Things like that. And it didn't even end at the people: the city is surrounded by boggy jungles that vibrated with all sorts of strange noises, and everyone knew that going near the jungle is certain death.
Yet for all that, I couldn't help but notice that people were more or less kind-hearted, despite their perceived state of dangerous existence. This might have been because back then I was naive and believed that everyone will be good to you if you treat them as though they were good. And while I don't believe that anymore, this remains my default method of treating people.
One day, toward the middle of my stay, I mustered enough courage to take the series of busses required to cross the Mississippi and reached the historic town. I couldn't help but notice the fact that it cost so much to cross the river (I honestly do not remember the actual figures), but it seemed as if the city was deliberately designed to keep people under a certain living standard at the "west bank". There really was no way for them to cross, judging by the fact that they cannot even live paycheck to paycheck.
I spent a whole day in the Vieux Carré. What was most bizarre is the fact that we had a city here littered with french names, yet no one appeared to speak French - so much so that it seemed like there was a mass error in the naming of the streets and locations. I had some lovely seafood for lunch, and for once actually enjoyed okra. The area was exploding with culture and every establishment blasted music - mostly jazz and blues, as one would expect.
For a city so alive, there certainly were many cemeteries. And what beautiful cemeteries there were! I can easily say that the cemeteries were my favorite part. It was in this area, as well as the downtown in general, that I noticed for once that there existed a class of more or less affluent (or well-to-do) blacks who really gave the city its culture and its flavour. They seemed to be worlds away from the ones I lived amongst on the other side of the river. Indeed, one is tempted to imagine the river as a border between first- and third-world countries.
And indeed, the ladies at work told me that they really never cross the river except once a year for 'Maurdee Grawh.'
That said, the one thing that both sides had in comon is the people's palpable sense of the ephemerality of their existence. It was hurricane season, and everyone of whatever ethnicity or wealth, was looking out for the "next big one". Not long after my visit to the old city, a tropical storm lashed by and only spit and splattered around the city.
But near the end of my stay, something big was confirmed and indeed, one night I was awakened to the house shaking, the wind outside was howling in ways I never heard before, and as it progressed the howling turned into roaring, and pieces of trees flew across the sky. At two occasions the sky would light up an erie green colour that would last for a few seconds. It eventually turned into strong rainstorm, but by the next morning it was evident that this was not an ordinary event. There were trees littered all over the place, a dozen or so crashed cars, no power, and broken glass everywhere.
This was, as a matter of fact, actually a "big one," indeed - it was a category 5 hurricane. But as we were not at the centre of its path, the damage was not as everyone expected it to be.
When I left New Orleans, another hurricane had already formed in the Atlantic. Only a week later, it had grown into another category 5 Hurricane and named Katrina. It ripped through the city, and I was told that everything had changed since then, yet it all remained the same...
[I might add another entry later].
