Being homeless was really boring. That was probably why homeless people spent all the money they panhandled on cheap highs—how else would they get through the days? When you had a home, hours passed magically, spent on just being. Sitting on your couch. Straightening things on your coffee table. Stroking your luxurious piles of toilet paper like a basket of soft little kittens. Adrift like this, Andrew found himself vacillating between an unimportant A and a nonsensical B for useless swaths of time that felt like forever but turned out to be minutes: Walk to the St. Louis Cemetery so that he could see the Superdome on the way, or spend $1.25 on the bus so that he would get there in time for the free tour of the voodoo queen’s grave? Trust the guy sitting next to him at the coffee shop or lug his giant duffel into the bathroom? Eat now or wait until later, so that he would have something to do at the twenty-four-hour diner where he was planning to spend the night?
He hadn’t really slept since leaving Dorrie’s house. Last night he’d tried to make it through the uncertain time between midnight and sunrise at a weird twenty-four-hour bar with a Laundromat in back, but he’d fallen asleep against one of the dryers and woken up to his beer spilled across the floor and a shiny black boot tapping his cheek. Back on the menacing, jasmine-scented streets, Andrew tried to talk himself into sleeping tucked into a corner somewhere, but in the end, he’d stumbled across the Café du Monde, where all the waiters surprised him by being Asian, and waited out the night eating beignets very, very slowly—beignets that he thought were not quite as good as the ones at Downtown Disney’s Jazz Café—a shot of fear running through him every time he saw a flash of red hair.
Time was endless, yet it also slipped away without borders or edges. It was hard to remember what day of the week it was when the ground under your feet was constantly shifting. America usually felt like iPhones and pizza and swimming pools to Andrew. L.A. was America. New sneakers. Sunshine. Pot and blue balls. Phoenix was America. Sprinklers and blow jobs and riding shotgun. Vegas was America, all of it. But if there were monsters and magic anywhere in this country, they would be here in New Orleans. New Orleans was an ancient doppelg?nger city that grew in some other America that never really existed. Dorrie belonged here. He didn’t. He didn’t, but he was going to stay until tomorrow anyway because yesterday he’d picked up a free paper and found a listing for an open mic. Right now he was holding out for Wednesday at eight thirty p.m., when he could finally sign up and do the material that had knocked him off the stage at that midnight cabaret. Once that was done, he’d decide what to do next.
Andrew knew it was probably kind of offensive to think of himself as homeless. He could stay with Nash, but he didn’t want to because then Dorrie would know where he was. He could ask Saina for money. He could ask Fred or Tak or even Mac McSpaley, any one of those guys would probably PayPal him a hundred bucks. But he wasn’t ready to do that yet, so all he had right now was what was left of the $250 he’d gotten from poor Mac for his TV. Not bad, but not really enough for hotels. If this was an ’80s movie or an episode of a Nickelodeon show, there would be a $5,000 prize for the open mic and he’d win it with a comedy routine instead of a song and it would be magically enough to buy everything back for his dad. Why couldn’t life have clearer trajectories?
He’d win it anyway. Even without a prize, he’d win it.
Church bells, always in the distance, rang out again as they had done every hour that he’d been in this city. A gust of heat and sugar and fried dough hit him as he leaned his head into the donut shop.
“Sorry! Um, can you tell me which way is downriver?” The woman behind the counter stared at him. Blinked. Tapped the glass with her long silver nails.
What the fuck? The donuts in here were purple. All of them. Row upon delicious row of purple-glazed confections glistening behind glass. Andrew stepped in.
“Also, can I just say that this is some excellent donut styling? All the cool donuts are wearing purple this season.”
She extended a talon and pushed up her glasses. “Where you trying to get to again?”
“Just any stop on the 39 line. Someone gave me directions, but he walked away before I realized that I didn’t understand them at all.”
“You are downriver already. You’re in Bywater, so you’ll want to take the 88 past the bend to the 39.”
“Man, what do you guys have against north, south, east, west?”