Cassandra Voices

Author: Ilsa Monique Carter

  • All About Amy

    “There are more tears shed over answered prayers than unanswered prayers.”
    Saint Teresa of Avila

    Can’t blame U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Barrett for being born Amy Coney. Nor would I fault my fellow New Orleans native for having Irish Catholic parents who, like mine, sent her to St. Mary’s Dominican High School. Back then it was cool. We were both in the same boat. And far as I know, we still are, that is if you’re in the habit of comparing educated middle class white females wielding our kinda funny Louisiana convent French accent. Women’s tuition is typically tubular. What I mean is, it’s wampum well spent.

    Sod it, hatched on the same patch of swamp, Amy n’ me should be two peas in a pod. However, I’m not ashamed to say gun control and reproductive rights are where we part ways. These were fundamental freedoms guaranteed in the Seventies and Eighties, for girls, rich or poor, growing up in The Big Easy. Matters of… deep breath… life and death.

    But in order to begin a coherent conversation on either issue, one must comprehend this. Paired like a couple of chromosomes, the right to bear arms or avail of an abortion are inexorably intertwined.

    The Honorable Amy once penned a unanimous opinion affirming the summary judgement against a claimant in the case Smith vs. The Illinois Department of Transportation, finding while egregious, it was not racial discrimination when a supervisor dismissed an employee for what was later stipulated “poor performance” as, and I quote, being a “stupid ass nigger.” Because they were both black. Thus, perhaps she’ll pardon my French when, with Malthusian enthusiasm, I need point out that, unlike me, Barrett is a breeder.

    The greedy GOP plucked this pro-lifer directly out of her indoctrination by a secretive charismatic Christian cult called People of Praise and would have you, me and Barrett herself believe the proceedings around Roe vs. Wade were about her unqualified opinion. One based on a bizarre Czar-like wish to not squish the least little fish. A sweeping generalization to keep inconsequential caviar in its crevice, no matter how marred things get. So, you see, as women we are now all set. In a bind. Because profoundly blinded by nothing more than good faith, the Sturgeon General’s brand of justice finds it sound.

    This is not my first rodeo. I’ve a habit of being in the right place at the wrong time. Managing marketing and advising on regulations in several sovereign nations for a British boss at a bank based in Hong Kong during a currency crisis and the Handover of our S.A.R. to the P. R. C.. Watching an IPO window slam shut on a tech boom not sparing the white knuckles of a thousand plus entrepreneurs, including Connecticut fat cats, four Finns in Malaysia and more than a couple of Kiwis that like a Trojan camel we tried to pass through the eye of a needle. Not tired, I got hired to launch Tokyo ops for one of the U.S. firms which then perished in their entirety when the Twin Towers fell. Sometimes you might as well call it a day.

    Only to sit spitting nails, like an old spy in from the cold, wearing a crusty trusty power suit at a hedge fund desk high up in the Empire State Building. Swearing my federal tax dollars were squandered by an incompetent Army Corps of Engineers, while Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath sinks New Orleans’ natural defenses into the drink. Five years on, an unfettered BP blast on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig heaved 200 million gallons of oil in the Gulf of Mexico. Left every last bivalve bereft.

    Thing is, for all the money in a world I can’t unsee as my oyster, I wouldn’t trade this front row seat watching Ireland’s Celtic Tiger tumble, jigging in The George the very night same sex marriage legalized. Seeing medical cannabis and safe abortion made less murky than a transubstantiation of the Magdalene Laundries into this tip top corporate tax haven. And learning how to ask for the Ban Jax.

    Where me and homegirl differ, is before we had graduation under our Prince of Wales plaid chastity belts, God didn’t see fit to show Amy how it felt to be raped at gunpoint and escape.

    Hence, the power of Christ has yet to compel the now anointed Coney concerning exceptionally unsexy circumstances. Those surrounding the sort of nonconsensual contortions likely to lead to a swelling belly aborted.

    Maybe I don’t have a womb with a wide-angle view at high tide, but my bet is Barrett’s not tangled in a “long game” as Margaret Talbot’s New Yorker article subtly suggests. At best she’s a half-baked Trump tumor deposited on the Supreme Court, but what if she’s been groomed Brothers Grimm style? The Manchurian Candidate meets Invasion of the Body Snatchers? She’s one of seven who, come hell or Haitian high water is spawning seven more into a scenario not of her own making. Ingenue actress? Goodbye RBG and Hello All About Eve? Or anchor baby for the alt-right?

    What I ask political strategists who bask in what few filthy cards they’ve slipped up their starched sleeve is a burning question. At what point did conservative Christians earn what they’d always yearned for? Carte blanche to pull up to the Republican bumper, and dive in like Flynn to the D.C. dumpster. When did The Religious Right become your Rumpelstiltskin?

    Knowing the ropes on the lesser navigated, one could almost say, fallopian-like, canals of Venice, I’ll venture vetting Casanova’s confessions is yet an even better trip. I for one am not impervious to stumbling on stuff our nuns neglected having Amy, blessed vessel that she is, translate directly from the French. Simply for shits n’ giggles mightn’t they have wiggled something cunning like Sade in to Sophomore English Lit? Not the sublime Nigerian-born British chanteuse…but the felonious philosopher of freedom. An equally smooth operator. I’ll explain.

    Couple hundred years before we were in high school, if memory serves, the year 1787 saw yes, a libertine, one of Fibonacci proportions, imprisoned in the Bastille. During his two-week incarceration, minus a lick of obscenity, the Marquis de Sade managed to nail a novella he named Justine or the Misfortunes of Virtue. Seems his fictitious femme fatale was willing to bend over. Take one for the team. Don’t know about Amy. Wouldn’t blame her for being game, but, as for me, I’m not. Not anymore. Are you?

    There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.
    Secretary of State Madeleine Albright

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  • DUMAINE

    “I’m leaving.”

    “Oh?”

    “Yes. I’m moving on. Been puttin’it off, but gotta go today.”

    “Baggage ready?”

    “Gonna do that now because it’s getting late.”

    “Why don’t I pack you a tuna fish sandwich, just in case?”

    “Yep. Good idea.”

    In the bedroom, I flung the doors of all three floor-to-ceiling closets open wide, which were designed like the entrance of a cathedral, doors that for the greater glory of God, make man minuscule, put you in your place. The perspective of my many possessions purchased, carefully cleaned and stacked up high in an orderly fashion was somewhere between repulsive and overwhelming but mostly beyond my reach. I selected a few books and that fuzzy bear my parents brought back as a gift from Germany, but little else before closing the suitcase.

    She caught me off guard, intercepting me in the hall on my way out, to hand over a brown paper sack as promised. I’d forgotten she’d offered the favor. Preoccupied, I guess.

    “Listen, there’s a chocolate pudding and an apple in with the tuna fish sandwich too.”

    “Thank you.”

    “Okay, bye-bye”

    Glacial and dark by design, her house inhaled the heat if by the gliding open of a sliding glass door, its hermetic seal was compromised. And like a large lung, the house then exhaled a quixotic draft of cooler air, which carried me with it out on to the balcony. Before she’d bolted the door behind me, no matter how briskly, and believe me she was… The sweet swelter had swallowed me whole.

    Across the street, its source obscured by a high fence hugging lush foliage, smoke was rising. Must be the Mexicans. Like too many magpies, they gathered around their granny on her tiny purpose-built patio. No one was more thrilled than she to be grillin’ again.

    Yes, our side of Bayou St. John was on low boil, but the houses on its opposite bank undulated in a mirage. So I was leaning left, feeling in my bones, a future of possibilities and personal freedom lay that way. Right hand tightening its grip on the sweaty suitcase handle, I stashed the sack lunch under my moist armpit, elbow clamped in to keep it there and descended the wrought iron stairs. Pausing at the bottom, I opened the suitcase to put the brown bag in with the rest of my treasures. Now, really on my way, I was again delayed by the obligatory exchange of pleasantries with Steve, our landlord and neighbor below. As it happens he was walking his well-dressed Chihuahua whose name was N’est-ce pas which is French for “Isn’t it so?” Keeping in mind a direct question can indeed be misperceived by older gentlemen as intrusive, in a carefully modulated tone I dared ask,

    “Pardon me Mr. Steve, but why does your dog have on a colour coordinated raincoat and galoshes?”  At this juncture, in unison we surveyed the quivering creature sporting four knee-high Wellingtons on palsied paws.

    “Because it’s a brand new set I just bought that was too cute to leave in the closet even if there isn’t a cloud in the sky. You gone for good this time?” he answered, giving me the eye and theatrically inspecting my little luggage.

    “Afraid so. You two, do take care.” Turning, I saw mucho macho matching heads. The Mexicans were like one monstrous centipede, lined up as they were for a last look over their high wooden fence. We both yelled “Adios” and waved at them but they did not disperse. Didn’t move a muscle. The scorching sun on my scalp said, don’t take all day for this stand off. With better things to do, I would leave the bayou behind.

    I hadn’t got halfway when I spotted the strangers sitting on their front steps just as if they’d lived here forever. They were smoking those cigarettes that smell better than the store bought ones, but you have to roll them yourself. Though unknown to me and mine, these people were in a really good mood, so pleasant in fact that I paused. Especially on account of how thirsty walking with a heavy suitcase made me, and the hissing sound the ice cold can of Dixie Beer let out when they pulled the crackling metal tab stopped me in my tracks. Without hesitation, I held it to my forehead for a minute then next to my neck and drank it slower than heck, so as not to get one of those excruciating brain freezes, to which we Southerners are prone.

    The new tenants invited me inside. Said I could bring my suitcase with me and I did, gingerly placing it on the coffee table, which frankly it monopolized in an absurd fashion. I sat down on their silky soft sofa, but not before being welcomed to do so. Everything of theirs was smaller than ours, and they smelled strange, but were so nice to show interest in what I cared enough about to carry with me. They confirmed my bear was genuinely German. And though I knew every word in my books by heart, indeed they politely declined to borrow them, just as they didn’t care to share my tuna fish sandwich three ways. Said they’d just eaten and instead offered me one of their piping hot homemade brownies. After I don’t know how long, what most intrigued them was that a midget could memorize her digits. I proved my point by borrowing their pencil and a notepad of pretty purple paper to jot down my home telephone number.

    We were having such fun, I nearly forgot they were foreign. The shades were drawn, and I guess I’d been there a while, when one prolonged blast from the building’s main buzzer led to two terse raps on the first floor apartment’s soft hollow-sounding wooden door. Furthermore, when it swung open, you could’ve knocked me over with a feather. Glaring from the hallway, hands on hips, was Mom.

    Like stumbling on an oasis in the nick of time, an accidental magic had occurred. That haphazard ambience which happens in abandoned colonies with greater frequency than you might imagine. Well, that mystical moment had passed and with a firm grasp on my suitcase, Mom was on the march.

    “Step on a crack, break your momma’s back,” I sang real low, hopscotching on one foot, alongside her back to a home that in my eyes was about the same size as The Superdome. Right or wrong, now that meanders of mine are no longer confined, I see Herbsaint-soaked curbs cloaked in ceramic smiles, their teeth-like tiles intelligently fired in the truest hue of Belgian blue. They spell out street names like: D-A-U-P-H-I-N-E, D-R-Y-A-D-E-S, or D-E-S-I-R-E. But the four corners of a sublime world that will always keeps me squarely entertained are contained in time, and still say D-U-M-A-I-N-E.

  • V.I.P.

    Pint-sized, the pub was a little too far off from Glendalough for foreigners to find.

    It hadn’t been designed for domesticated dads on the quest to Clara Lara Fun Park, but the Maze in Greenan grew close enough to spew a few tourists and persistent purists seeking a pew, found Byrne’s quaint. That faintly disowned dollhouse quality evaporated when the bottom of your boot slapped its splintered threshold. Indolent heads within would spin to squint right through you at the sun dipping down behind the clip clop of a horse drawn hearse bearing another soul for the sake of a wake.

    Byrne’s was dim. A tiny terrarium brimming with the torpitude of one too many scorpions sizing each other up to skim. These regulars would’ve been pegged as extras in a spaghetti western if to a man, they weren’t planning the next Tet Offensive. Almost posthumous their hostility arose like a mausoleum wall, a tall wave that drained down in to a frown of disdain aimed at your jugular. And still smug from having made the trip, you gave in to its grip at your throat for a remote reason. The profound desire to drink on the QT.

    They pointed toward the tumbleweeds out back when you needed to pee. And speaking of shoot-outs, I’ll spill the beans. Whatever you’ve heard about the casualty, it wasn’t involuntary manslaughter or a willing killing spree. It’s just an empty building left standing there. The little bar wasn’t bulldozed so far or bought but I’m distraught at any cost. Something’s been lost. I’m concerned that Byrne’s chose to turn up its toes.

    Inculcated in the mulch, every human needs a hutch condoned, a venerated touchstone. We’re a race that embraces the serenity only a proper pub extends to the psyche of men. Octopus-like a good publican can placate a pelican like me, simultaneously serving his minions and concoct potions or a myth of origin over porridge. And all without a pen.

    Moving over to the other side of these mountains, put paid to one perspective. The perfect pub is not a given, but decisively lived by certain soldiers who sharpen their blade on a constant crusade. Or not. Some people don’t bother anymore, what with the smoking ban, and joke if you can about choking into a breathalyzer at a morning roadblock. Locking up a driver on his way to work for where he lurked last night ain’t right.

    Borders breed discord. And barely a hare’s breath from Kildare, soon as I laid eyes on its pleasing proportions, I resorted to Seamus Mooney’s. The golden mean of authentic pub architecture should not be seen in its medieval and muscular design. King Solomon’s mines might buy more splendour to polish and sorely miss when it’s demolished. But the magical math, the real ratio kicks in when we leave a patriarchal landmark. If bereaved by darkness, we don’t have to head to the parking lot because we’re in crawling distance from home. Mr. Mooney’s genome heaved with a hundred years in the bar business but by far his most redeeming feature as a host was offering creature comforts just a laugh away from me gaff.  On foot, torch in hand, you understand the pitiless rhythm of my pilgrimages soon overruled scrimmages about the new tenant that moved in to the Old School.

    Seamus would’ve stood out even if the village weren’t so small. Always impeccably attired he presided like an influential sufi over precious sessions in a men’s shed of broad shoulders surgically enmeshed. Blameless and merely mortal, Mr. Mooney one day sealed his portal to his disciples’ dismay. I’ve the memories of a minx amongst Manxmen. And for that, when I pass a cherished pub now perished, I know I owe them an eternal thanks.

    These refined emporia of euphoria do decline into mostly ghostly relics in the sticks. Their saintly bones are tainted, facades repainted and tarted up for retail. Or I suppose like Moses in the reeds, you find them floating in weeds behind a sign saying For Sale.

    It was four years before I figured out Fridays were fun at Fletchers. Wade into its winsome symmetry, and there’s a sort of trinity that wins: See, Sound, Smell. This holy well of Tommy Fletcher’s had it in spades. Like a cathedral on speed it met all my needs for alcohol and deep thinking drinking pals. Tommy was born right upstairs and he’s kind of famous, a king of Kildare because once he ejected The Rolling Stones from his bar. Tommy did this in spite of band member Ronnie Wood being a fairly good customer in Fletcher’s hallowed halls. Even the boxer, Conor McGregor, comes from Crumlin to Naas in honour of this place. No fight there. But what licked me like a ton of bricks, was Tommy’s retirement. It hit me hard. How to retard this tide of bad luck? Like a nemesis I stalked the auction of this licensed premises. And it doesn’t suck for Tommy, because Fletcher’s fetched over a million bucks.

    But seriously, when they send in the clowns, where will our bender be? Do you not cringe at being hurled in to a world without a whiff of irony, undefended by the odd binge? Thirst aside, when that very important pub has died, if the last snug hugging Lugnaquilla comes unhinged, we’ll not have the first place to hide.

  • Kilbride

    SINGLE. That’s what my train ticket says. It sticks out in the rain like a young tongue between the teeth of an old machine’s slot. Besotted as I am with the tingle to mingle, naturally I snatch it whispering, ‘Thanks a lot.’

    Koreans claim a girl is gold till she’s old. Silver tarnishes on the shelf, which itself if left unvarnished will end up driftwood. There I stood, pretty petrified in Manhattan’s Meat Packing District, watching a guy with more hair plugs than spark park his Maserati. Momma was right, nothing good happens after midnight. I took flight, aspiring to retire in Gay Paree with Pinocchio the day he proposed.

    A prenuptial meal sealed the deal with the heir’s parents. In scintillating Italian, I sprinted to recite the forgettable motto printed on the spaghetti. Where There’s Barilla, There’s Home. La Mama beamed at me like we’d won the lotto. I was blotto. Not at all the polyglot who swirled in similar circles, but her only son had got a girl. She gushed with glee, ‘Si! The Barillas! You know them too?’

    In a few years, the fourth generation pasta multinational was brought to its knees by a boycott thrashing brothers Guido, Luca and Paolo for gay bashing. So maybe their branding should be Where there’s Barilla, There’s a Homo.

    Sapience and savagery ensued even as the finer points of European protocol eluded me. There were frequent free-for-alls that called for much wine and few true friends. At the end of such an evening we were down to three when I dashed out for smokes. Zooming back in to our baroque ballroom what did I find? My fidanzato in a bind. The kind that demoted me to a fag hag bragging we’d a new majordomo employed. Rome wasn’t destroyed in a year and I hear Emperor Tiberius too was queer.

    St. Theresa said, ‘More tears are shed over answered prayers than those left unanswered’ and I have to agree. See, long before these cards were dealt, I felt quite at home with subcontinental husbands, you understand, none of them mine. The mostly male sales team in Mumbai joked Shiva, their divinity, would deliver me a bloke.

    Torches on the porch of a temple barely extoll the size of a drowsy leviathan yawning its jaws wide to swallow women of an ilk willing to wallow in a rainbow riot of silk. I lacked their long black hair powerfully perfumed by flowers. But no slacker, I simply slipped, tight-lipped, right into the river of dimples, hoping to elope.

    Inside the candle-lit cavern, my manicured hands slipped sandals off to bare ten professionally pale toes. Posed with new Indian skirts tied high around my thighs, I waded into the ankle deep creamy waters washing around like an albino hurricane had hit this technicolor dreamscape. Two thousand years of time telescoped before me, obscured by fragrant wreaths of incense, illuminated in the half-light. Hordes hankering for a husband, filled vessels of all shapes and size from a fountain somehow flowing with holy cow’s milk. In multiple slaphappy chapels, the onslaught slung their supernatural soup, sowing it from amorous amphorae over obliquely symbolic and cucumbersome stones.

    After a first pail, without fail, pre-filled buckets lucked into my hands. I nodded, trodding toward a line of lingams ready for anointing. Disjointed fingers pointed up at big bells dangling while juveniles jangled them. Bollywood Pollyannas tugged ropes thick as tree trunks that terminated with a thud in frayed coils on the floor. More deafening ding-dongs added their clang to the hellish cacophony of peals peppered with lusty squeals of laughter that licked the length and height of tall walls heaving with an insane Samsara sensation. I thanked the banker boys for not leaving when I stumbled out wet to the waist, in a tantric sweat, and betting on a new mantra. Marriage means never having to sell your sari.

    I’m no Mata Hari. I never intended to blend in. For better or for worse, my university decreed me a couples counselor. Landing in L.A. like a fish out of water, I was the Episcopalian shiksa slurping down sushi at a Jewish/Catholic wedding. The Zen garden variety… unique to the Hollywood Hills. Thrilled to be a bridesmaid, I saw my friend say I DO in Hebrew. Were it welded to my cupped hand, I couldn’t have held up her huppa any higher. Cross-examined about my own samurai, I had to admit he’d sent me alone. So the bona fide Freudian father of the bride took me aside and specifically advised against pacific playboys. I deployed instead to Hong Kong, toying with a ping-pong plan to wed.

    There’s no escape. Scraping the sky on the 50th floor with a harbour view, a trusting housewife in this life can’t rise above putting on the gloves. I was just dusting when I paused over a passport page busting him for distorting his age. Shorty’s I.D. reported he was ten years senior to the tall tale he’d told me. With laser-like pupils and no scruples, I skipped the sweeping. What other secret was he keeping? Deposited securely in his closet, sitting up erect, was an anatomically correct bedtime biddy. A hideous golden-haired booby trap, so real she could’ve given you the clap. Tawdry applause for the doll’s bridal veil, a vital tattle-tale on the dilapidated Japanese Dorian Gray. There comes a day when you’ve had enough. This wife-sized effigy was stuffed with promises to miss him. I LOVE YOU signed, Sue.

    I knew, unlocking the door, he’d look tired when I inquired, So um, how’s Suzanne? A man frozen with fear can suddenly show ten falsified years. He merely loosened his tie with a sigh, and started to tell the third lie. He’d tarried to marry because he never divorced! Of course, Madame Butterfly desisted to wed a polygamist. You see I was done shadow boxing and even Muhammad Ali would insist the shadow had won.

    I’ve heard it’s never as good as the first time. I wouldn’t know, I wasn’t there. My first proposal took place whiIst I sang a Latin cantata in the church choir. Once home, I waltzed in to a Superdome-sized quagmire. My step-mom was on the phone in a fevered pitch about somebody getting hitched. At least she hung up on the family priest before demanding, When did you last see Old Dick? I kicked off my black and white shoes. Dirty ashtray. Used glasses. The usual clues that Dick had dropped by.

    Dick was an odd duck. He puttered around muttering in the marina aboard a boat he’d been living on and fixing up for years. Said it had potential and when he was done he’d sail around the world with his battered cat for company. Alongside Dick’s vessel, Dad kept our well-loved wooden skiff. If resolutely, I saluted, Dick hadn’t computed I was jailbait cruising away most summer evenings with thirsty first mates. I rowed right out in skin tight sweaters on winter weekends too.

    The sun streaked his tousled tobacco-coloured locks all morning on deck, after which Dick lolled, smoking cigarettes he rolled in the shade. Leathery face immersed in an overdue library volume, he didn’t mind digressing when politely pressed upon. He’d don a corduroy jacket over his dirty denim and with a dab of perfume, come quick, if called to our house for a digestif. He always stayed for dinner but was equally content to stick below, as sailors say, in his boat’s galley. Carefully the thin skipper prepared cosmopolitan picnics of kippers, escargot at his own pace or a hardy foie gras, all of it from tins. Sometimes he shared them with me, as if we were lost at sea, on mismatched plates of chipped china with paper napkins. You couldn’t call it lunch or dinner, nothing definitive but something sinful in-between. Little by little I lingered, for lady fingers and caffè corretto, his crocodile eyes crinkling, without an inkling of the cardiovascular task he was about to ask.

    The flask rather empty, I gathered my step-mom not happy the sap had thought long and hard. She not so pleased he sought parental consent to make an honest woman of me and hit the high seas. The crux of it is, Old Dick was banished to Biloxi. The young psych nurse unrehearsed in this sort of mistaken urge to merge, stood her ground. There would be no more messing around. Shaken, she stirred herself a stiff drink. If I was 15, I think, no offense meant, none taken.

    Thrice wed in her own proxy war, my workaholic mother swore, ‘You’ll marry more in a minute than you can make in a lifetime.’ In my prime, I put on a skirt and flirt full throttle with a bottle to quiet my constant cogitations about a hodge-podge of wedding invitations lodged in my black mail box.

    A petty tom cat can break your heart. Yet, if you’re drawn to pawn it for spare parts you’ll like that even the town bike is recyclable, as typed in this ad sent by dear old Dad: Diamond bridal ring set $4000 Robeline, Louisiana. 14k white gold Total weight 1.5 ct. with 3 bands Size 4. Was wore for a very short time by the devil. Retail price is $8000-$9000 What I’m selling it for is negotiable. My loss is your gain.

    Let not what God has joined together be torn asunder by this blushing bard’s unbridled blunders. These undotted I’s and uncrossed T’s are rushingly written. Smitten by time spent under a lime tree, I’m tempted to see the whole world through a glass half empty. And me being not to the Manor bourne but just outside, a stone’s throw from Kilbride.

    Feature Image: © Jennifer Hahn

  • HEY POCKY WAY

    In the year of our Lord 2019, what remained engrained was an émigré from the hoi omphaloi of confusion and strife. The Easter in question came late on the calendar but much like the highly controversial transubstantiation, the bitter end of Holy Week started as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be. In other words, all at once.

    Living in the mountains one can’t escape the effects of a full moon and my particular suburb of the Vatican that is Ireland has finally ended its unconscionable 90 year Good Friday booze ban. So there I am in the supermarket, and U2 with whom despite a vast disparity in our respective net assets, I’ve been periodically privileged to mingle, were piping over the sound system. I noticed there was a sale on vodka. So I mixed a pitcher of Bloody Mary and let the games begin. Think Joaquin Phoenix playing his role as the emperor Commodus in that movie he stole from Russell Crowe called Gladiator shouting ‘AM I NOT MERCIFUL?’

    So, I whipped up a polenta, mostly because I was craving grits and I’ll let you in on a little secret… they are and always have been one and the same. Irresistible on my second drink, just ask anyone I’ve shamelessly hit on, I stirred the pot and began to twang melancholy as Dolly, “I beg your pardon, I never promised you a rose garden.”

    Dancing barefoot in one’s own living room provides all the benefits of a Pilates course or an extramarital affair with none of that nasty documentable collateral damage and I am nothing if not prudent in my pursuits. The solitude of sleep did not elude me, furthermore it elucidated a dream from my childhood.

    Hours before church I awoke with a lurch to the bleat of an atypical fauna for the sauna that is my beloved Big Easy. A live goat was yoked to a wagon loaded with lovingly hand decorated eggs and sticky store-bought jelly beans. From the centre of this embarrassment of riches, the obligatory bunny leaned toward me like a chocolate Tower of Pisa. Its stature notably stunted by the harsh amputation of what had been fine upstanding ears. Still partially wrapped in jewel toned tin foil, the spoiled candy was a solemn crime scene yet somehow reassuring in that its carnage by friendly fire was an annual event.

    This animal sacrifice was no trespass by a neighbouring spaniel, fancy treats foraged while we ate our porridge. No indeed, it was none other than the predictable ritual of our pedigreed bitch. The eternally fertile Irish Setter, Kathleen Haggerty O’Shane, whose thirteen pups had been hijacked under cover of darkness was addicted. Probably on account of those bags of Oreo cookies I shared with her on a regular basis.

    It was not our habit to bet if she’d get the rabbit, just when. Only then did we pause in alarm for the second act. Not charming at all in fact, while the goat, who had taken this opportunity to escape, was being confiscated by local authorities, our impeccably bred show dog’s finale included an overwhelming urge to purge her decadent sins with a roiling encore of blood and semi-digested chocolate-soiled tin regurgitated across the floor. Cave Canem.

    Years pass and now I’m an extra-cold Cava sippin’ lass livin’ ass backwards but six hours ahead of the time zone I left behind. The import tax on Champagne resigns me to Spanish bubbles for washing away my troubles with a lava-like curry. I write in a hurry because no matter how bold, the past becomes a blur and then you’re just old. It’s late and I’d hate to mention how many Mardi Gras I might’ve seen. It’s not the naughty nights that get you, but more the mournings.

    Cancer snuffed another friend on Friday. Felt like a power failure and I can’t find the phone number to report the fault. Alternatively, I’m thinking Lent put a dent in my drinking year. At least the feast of Easter promises a queer quench for that wrenching thirst.

    Easter is called Pâque in French and in Louisiana’s patois, especially around Ascension Parish like Lafayette, ‘pâque-ing’ is a verb that refers to a sort of seasonal combat. Kissing cousins bang boiled eggs that, in anticipation, were dyed on Good Friday. We bang’em until one breaks. See, that’s the loser and beware because next time, it could be you.

    If you were from Orleans Parish like me, at this stage you’d break into a funk tune by The Mighty Meters, ‘HEY POCKY WAY.’ The illustrious musician, Dr. John, explains: ‘This talk was the Indians’ own Creole language, part French, part Spanish, part Choctaw, part Yoruba, and part mystery to an outsider like me. What the first one said basically was, ‘Where yaatt, bro?’ or the like. And the second one said, ‘Everything’s oaks and herbs’ – which means everything’s cool because they had smoke lots of herbs. If the second one responded ‘No om bah way,’ then y’all had problems…

    Saw my first lambing, leaning on a doorjamb here in Wicklow. Don’t forget Joaquin, bein’ a prophet of PETA, wouldn’t have watched the wool I’d always worn being born in the dappled light of a chapel-like barn. It’s the darndest thing to recall my Crescent City slicker’s eyes finally falling on a supersized old poster of Bertie Ahern looking unconcerned. Ain’t no harm in nailing him way up there in the rarefied air, with spare farming gear. After all, Christ rhymes with heist.

    Libations risen from Malin to Mizen Head, the grateful dead will come back one day and like pearls before swine, even porcupines and protestants will line up in designer tops. The corks popped should sop every drop of the popish black pool while the so-called cool twine their way like vines exhausted by Pentecost. When the last ground seems lost, between you, me and Jesus, even he knew it’s no use hanging around.

    Amazingly, I awoke safe under a duvet in bed. Miraculous, mostly because my mandatory mid-century modern spiral staircase whose perilous design challenges both the sensual and sober, lends that compulsory edge for this over-examined life I’ve yet to deem not worth living.

    It’s dawn and smoking the last cigarette in the house, a prayer comes into my head… ‘If I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to …’ Never mind that. Take me to the river. Considering the difference between the words slaughter and laughter is a single  ‘S’, a letter of the alphabet which also sits, like a little snake, at the beginning of the word ‘sacrifice’, my advice to you is : Never let’em get your goat.

  • Old School

    I felt him sliver under my shirt as she belted me in with a quicksilver click. The shoulder strap muffled my mouth and eclipsed an eye. Mom sipped her coffee, singing along to the song on the radio, ‘One less egg to fry … ’ Only half of what lay ahead was in sight, but one wide eye watched her cigarette ashes take flight and land in one hundred percent humidity on the dashboard. Sticky plastic sword in hand, I grappled with an apple for breakfast in our Volkswagen, spieling, ‘Nein, nein, nein,’ all the way uptown. The Beetle was a shade of blue I think you’d call Tiffany.

    The epiphany that something sublime writhed round my collarbone, that I hadn’t come alone occurred before lunchtime. Frank and furtive, Alfred recoiled pretzel-like in the well of my tender clavicle, his tiny tongue darting at everyone in my kindergarten. Fraulein’s wrists regrettably garbled into a sort of swastika, as she hissed, ‘It won’t be long now.’ The kids thronged to see me prove the venomous Frau wrong. To her dismay, I displayed his length, with all the strength of my Lilliputian limbs. Adamant even, that while he had not a leg to stand on, my king snake, Alfred the Great’s congenital regalia exhibited double genitalia. I was only bested by Mom’s suggestion I stroll my two-penised pet in the yard. I’d hardly let go when he stole away, and you know, I bet she planned the hole thing.

    ‘Roll’ simpered the director. I’d been pimped and primped, as per the script. It was cool to skip school and spend all day in a pool of hot light. The blazing burlesque began with the future governor grilling me over an antique desk. He gave me the third degree and being only four, I took The Fifth. If the camera had closed in tightly on Edwin Edwards, it might’ve seen the politician took pains to burn book learning into my brain. The necessary votes were sustained, note not without substantial commercial gain. The campaign to elect the high roller hit a nerve. As 50th Governor of Louisiana he served an unheard of four terms during a legendary sixteen years. I fear that’s longer than he spent pent up in federal prison for conspiracy, money laundering, racketeering, extortion and fraud. The ‘Silver Zipper’ is still lauded to this day for his rebuke of the KKK’s David Duke, ‘We’ve both been wizards under the sheets.’ This is my ode to a sweltering state still sheltered by Napoleonic Code.

    A child is a sponge, able to absorb the plethora of Playboy and Cosmopolitan’s iconic chronicles accumulating on the coffee table. These juicy pages, Dr. Seuss, Shakespeare’s complete works and other tearjerkers make for a berserk library. Wary I’d acquired precocious social skills, my father enrolled me in an experimental public school program where pupils deemed pliable were thrilled to be drilled under controlled conditions. Seditious teaching techniques were scrutinized, I expect for their effect on us like fruit flies in an elite Petrie dish. We learned Latin in togas, and outside in the arena, laughing like hyenas, lay the hoi polloi. We graduated to the vulgar gate of a junior high school, massive and without barriers to entry, except for the metal detectors at the door. The Creole elite monopolized the air-conditioned gym, while the Latinos rolled in the leafy shade of live oak trees outside. One hot day, I pushed a fellow, pell-mell, out of a second floor window, garnering for myself an enduring infamy as a ruffian, a femme fatale, gone feral. Maintaining my new found tough talking notoriety mortified my mother. Veering around in her Volvo, she voiced her vexation that my vocabulary had evolved.

    Mom resolved to commit me for a stint at a sporty Spartan school, just south of Bayou Sauvage. Not for fauves, was this amply proportioned concentration camp on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain, presided over by a megalomaniac vegan grammarian on mega-doses of vitamin C. At lunch break, saving me for last, Mr. Bentham spanked the bad boys’ backsides, swinging that baseball bat in a tiny room at the top of a tower, underpinned by bunkers where a curious curriculum was cobbled together by his wife. It operated like a panopticon, from which he took a jocular view through his binoculars. Noontime came soon enough, confined with the solitary Dr and his most contrary students. Stockholm syndrome smarts, but art transmogrifies the purge of pubescence, and it seems there’s really no scourge for true incandescence.

    The time was right to wear black and white. I was in like Flynn with the Dominicans. The inquisitive sisters came from Dublin’s Cabra convent, to cope with girls who hoped to propagate with Jesuit-made men. Something about that sub-tropically pugnacious khaki uniform issued by Saint Ignatius drove me right up the nearest palm tree. So much better was it built than our off-kilter tweedy chastity belts, I confess to cross-dressing. Borrowed one from a boy named Boyle. The nuns were sore. Defrocked my puerile attire at the door, but not before Harry Connick Jr picked me out. Don’t doubt he had sonic pitch way before he got hitched. Back then, the seminarian parked his bike on my porch. We sat scorching on the swing, talking about most anything from Buddha to the birds and the bees. Pleased as rum punch, Harry had that hunch to go hear the now dearly departed Hunter S. Thompson at Tulane University. Perverse Promethean. Slurred convictions. Should we blur fact with friction? Bless the good doctor’s heart, before I tested his best thesis, Hunter self-canonised. Rest in pieces.

    Image (c) Mike Skinner.

    Without a real care in the world, I twirled my pencil and stared at the exchange student’s daring hairdo. It was an iron curtain beehive and I didn’t behave. I connived to perform a vivisection, a dissection on something alive. Why stab a frog when you can go whole hog on the foreigner? Who knew she had haemophilia? My heresy hastened a schism with Superior Sister Delia. Habitual offenders get sequestered until the end of the semester. Clearly the clergy weren’t big on surgery, and saw me as the straw that broke the Carmelite’s back. Sacked in March, I was informed the Archdiocese would have one girl less.

    Yes, knowing the New Testament by heart, I had a strong start at my next school. When they mentioned the Second Coming I didn’t dumb down. A class clown, I waywardly won the award for Wit and asked the valedictorian to the prom. A ticking bomb squad, we patrolled the bars in a police car. Arguably an all-nighter, it was getting lighter when I limped in to the parents. An errant heir, in their purview, I’d scantly measured my curfew, and was out of control, ergo, out on my ear. No clocks to tick-tock, no loud locks to click, nor bones to pick. Newly emancipated, it went undebated, I dinner dated and drank Chablis insatiably.

    The class voted me Best Personality. There was no award for promiscuous thighs, but the guys prophesied when my dimples were done I’d contemplate a wimple. Be a nun, take the cloth. In a slothful simulation, one day I’ll mirror the moth. Before it’s too late, negate earthly aggravation, and commune with the moon for celestial navigation.

    Did the university need another Margaret Mead, who can’t stand the ant in Anthropology? Documentaries about Mbuti Pygmies put a bee in my bonnet, and I wrote sonnets about insects being my bugaboo. Through Totem and Taboo, I found Freud, the human zoo and allow me to assure you in our age, the cage is online.

    Flunking math, my path went west, for the best PhD at a mountain monastery. Those Jesuits wouldn’t quit till I’d got the gist of Psychology. One day my professor tidied his toupee, promising that with a little private practice he could improve my score by 69. I dodged the codger’s inclination to roger. Not a priest in the least, he’d hoisted his own petard, ignited by my vapid paper, ‘The Southern Belle: An Exaggerated Sex Role and its Indications for Therapy’.

    God gave me sisters, but I relate to baroque A-listers, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Mexico’s Tenth Muse was a philosophical feminist who knew foolish men were led by a thread through love’s labyrinth. Not full of papal bull, through a plague this phoenix flew till she too was dead. Would Wicklow Head’s Pharos light the shipwreck of my lustrated soul’s intellect? Erudite. An Anchorite. Can I join that club? A Petrarchan archetype parked at the pub, gallivanting like Dante. A dilettante, my Ezra Pound of flesh extracted, exacting in the end. Outspoken. Unbroken. A bar nun.

    I hear after the hurricane hit New Orleans, some of the Dominican mendicants came back to their convent in Ireland. I hear too, albino crawfish are indigenous to our bit of the Liffey. The river runs under this old school house where I live, and shiver about how much there is to know. So I claw my way to the water’s edge on dodgy days and see no smart salmon but I crane for cunning crustaceans. Trust the clever are forever caught up in what we’re taught, lest our thoughts paint palimpsests. Suggest we cut class but keep an eye out for that old snake in the grass.

    Featured Image (c) Sonny Carter.

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  • Sic Transit Gloria

    I learned to drive in a field when I was five, from the same grandfather who taught me how to ride a horse and chew tobacco. At age ten, I took my other grandfather’s El Camino out on Highway 1, the longest road in Louisiana, from church camp all the way to vacation bible school. That spiritual summer, compelled by the power of Christ, I think was the first and last time I truly felt the thrill of being behind the wheel. Once legally licensed, I found myself in a few fender benders, reluctantly dealing with mechanical malfunctions often due to my feminine indifference in the face of minute maintenance. I recall nonchalantly applying mascara in my rear view mirror, moving at about 80 miles an hour, when someone shouted from the next lane, Hey Miss, your car’s on fire! And indeed it was.

    Walking to work one morning, right off Rue Royal in New Orleans’ Vieux Carré, I ran into the Chicken Man, a local voodoo practitioner of some repute. Ebony face smiling out from under his ivory cowboy hat, he stopped to ask me how I was doing, and I answered, I could be better. He offered to help, if somebody put a gris-gris on me. I just shook my head, I don’t know Chicken Man, I’m just sick and tired of my grandma’s old Pontiac breakin’ down on me. You got a mojo for that? 

    He brightened, Pretty Lady, I got a mojo for everything. Come by tomorrow and I’ll have it fixed up.   So I did. At the back of his shop, the cool cat sat, in a candle-lit cloud of incense, amongst a hocus-pocus host of saints and skulls. His pink leather palm presented what looked like any other mojo, a little silk sachet, a kind of bouquet garni, containing some pungent mumbo jumbo botanicals tied up with a cord into a necklace.  I wrinkled my nose, before I caught myself and inquired, with all due respect, Do I have to wear it around my neck all the time or put it under my pillow every night? 

    He shook his head, amusement playing at the corners of his mouth, before suggesting, It‘d be more powerful dangling on that dashboard of yours. 

    What do I owe you, Chicken Man? 

    Averting his eyes, he answered, What you think its worth.  Suddenly sheepish, I gave him the paltry five bucks I had, saying I’d be back with more once the mojo started working, and a week later, I was.

    How’s that old black magic treating you, Gallery Girl?  He knew I sold sub-Saharan sculptures down on the corner and Royal Academy equestrian oil paintings further up the street on Saturdays.

    Well Chicken Man, it’s like this. Wednesday, I was driving up St. Charles on my way to meet a couple of acquaintances, for gin and tonics at Fat Harry’s. And right when I ran that yellow light at Napoleon Avenue, somebody else hit me, seeing red. We spun around, and took out a fire hydrant with us, exploded up like we struck oil, or something. The car is totalled. I just got an insurance check in the mail for thousands of dollars. So I don’t know, you tell me?  He slapped the counter, disgorging a baritone chuckle and said, not without some pride, Yeah, that voodoo is a funny thing, ain’t it? Now that car of yours ain’t gonna break down on you no more.

    Soon I met a Saudi prince who was training in Texas as a NASA astronaut. Before going up in the space shuttle, he spent a weekend in the Big Easy and at a party, took a shine to me. He flew me to Houston and I headed straight for the hotel spa. Four hairy Germans I’d seen on MTV, joined me in the jacuzzi, who turned out to be a band called The Scorpions. They were playing that night. After a massage I met the boys from Deep Purple, by the pool. They invited me on a tour of Southfork Ranch, with the promise of a jigger with JR Ewing on the set of the TV show, Dallas. Alas, I declined, more inclined to stay with my sovereign space cadet, and with no prior training I crash landed the shuttle simulator at Johnson Space Center during something they referred to as, The Hawaiian Scenario.

    Back home, I began to receive boxes by UPS, laden with hand-beaded veils, silk caftans and silver coffee sets, directly from the Arabian Peninsula. The most intriguing object arrived in a velvet presentation case bigger than a shoe box. Nestled within was an extravagant necklace rendered in 24 karat gold, depicting the space shuttle flying over the royal palace at Riyadh, flanked by palm trees and crossed swords, crest of the House of Saud. The Canadian jeweller I worked for weighed the necklace, matching earrings, ring and armful of bracelets, made his calculations, and counted the cash into my hot little hand. He snickered, imitating my Saudi suitor, Desert Flower, sell my love gift to buy a Toyota.

    True, the the transaction afforded a sporty new Japanese import which I drove cross-country to my new home in Haight-Ashbury. There’s an old song about leaving your heart in San Francisco, well that’s where I left my last car. After you go over the Golden Gate Bridge a few times the parking tickets start to slow you down. It was the wild west, and I went to work at Wells Fargo Bank. The South was my stage and the powers-that-be ponied up for a Mustang convertible from which I coached my mostly male confederates to deposit fat checks.

    I left California’s colourful Victorian hilltop houses for Hong Kong’s Victoria Peak, where an outdoor escalator, snaking 800 meters through equatorial territory, exported 80,000 expats in our power suits from well feathered nests, down to towers full of tycoons in the harbour. One day during a typhoon, gliding in gleaming Gucci shoes, I slip on the slippery slope. I flip and finally flop face down. The Prada purse spills open my personal life. My new Nokia cracks and the briefcase breaches the confidentiality agreement upon which my financial future relies. Across the ground I crawl on Armani clad knees to gather a promising career’s required gear. Nearby, Cantonese neighbours watch the other gweilo, (ghost people, foreign devils) march over me with ruthless efficiency, toward their next promotion. When I shuffle in to my office like a wet cat, the Managing Director bellows, Pack your bags, Moneypenny, you’ve been reassigned to Mumbai! 

    My boss at the Bombay Stock Exchange called me the « Secret Weapon », once I commissioned thirty custom-made subcontinental saris. On a tour of the Taj Mahal in an Indian congressman’s propaganda plastered car, we were mobbed by a crowd mistaking me for Sonya Ghandi. She was 20 years my senior and from Lusiana, Italy not Louisiana, USA but how to say that in Hindi? Traffic outside the Taj Hotel was terrifying, with women wretched from profound poverty pressing naked brown babies against tinted windows hoping for a hand out. I went for my wallet, and perhaps to protect me, the chauffeur, from Chennai, activated the child safety lock. If he hit a local, company protocol dictated we speed to Sahar airport to take the first flight exiting Indian airspace. When I did that, the plane set down in the Land of the Rising Sun.

    Taxi drivers in Tokyo wore pristine white gloves. So did subway staff who pushed people, politely sealing them like sardines inside trains, avoiding delay. They bowed deeply during departure, except in the event of a suicide. Seppuku on the tracks is second only to finishing yourself off in Mount Fuji’s forest. On 9/11, I watched a Japanese TV presenter fly two paper planes between his thumb and index fingers in to a tiny origami model of the Twin Towers. Turning off the television, I crumpled my job contract for a fledgling hedge fund. The entire hiring team in New York had died.

    I ride the Red Line from Tallaght to town and something about the announcement Next Stop- Hospital makes me uneasy. It was Monday morning, when I was last on the LUAS, Gaelic for Speed. A gargantuan guy fell asleep, his head heavy on my shoulder, tinny tunes belching from his ear-buds. A teen turned abruptly, his backpack exfoliating my face. I felt faint and rose rapidly toward the doors. Scurrying ahead was a small Muslim in a tightly tied violet headscarf, set on getting out, when without warning, she collapsed into my arms. The scrum scattered, leaving us like lepers in a circle of stares. Uncaring, the train resumed its route to Smithfield, while the corolla of fair freckled souls muttered advice at me. When the doors slid open, I locked her armpits in the crook of my arguably larger limbs, and dragged her to the wet sidewalk. Asking her name, I examined her pupils for dilation. Finding a phone in her plethora of packages I wondered if ABDUL was her husband. Sweating, tears tumbled down her dampening cheeks. Pedestrians paused to diagnose diabetes or epilepsy, and someone called an ambulance as she stammered, I’m pregnant. Her fine boned brown fingers fluttered in mine until the Fire Brigade arrived.

    Before anyone asked, I blurted out, This is Annie, she’s 24, 14 weeks pregnant and she hasn’t eaten today. She’s a social worker for people with disabilities. The medics nodded, like bored horses, installing her inside the ambulance. The doors thumped shut and it sped away, along with that part of me that wanted to take care of her and her baby for the rest of their lives. I could have been a grandmother by now, but I forgot to have kids. Standing there in the wind, I worried about her, and then about me, before closing my coat. Lighting a cigarette, I quickly cut across the square.

    I’m a little uneasy, loitering at bus stops. Secretly, I become that seven-year-old that was nearly snatched by a creep who coaxed me into his Cadillac while waiting for the school bus. With local law enforcement’s « Stranger Danger » lecture fresh in my head, I fled just like Officer Friendly said. I fled as far as I could go on little legs made of marshmallow. Now I’m not bolder but older and yawning under a Dublin donut shop’s awning advertising, Aungier Danger. In relentless rain I rearrange my mane, bonding with a distinguished blonde delighted I’m from across the pond. The boisterous bus whisks us to Wicklow. It’s full of familiar faces further back, but we flock together up front.

    As the miles go by, my mobile Mona Lisa smiles, slipping off shoes, distracted, detaching clip-on earrings, the way women do on long bus rides. We fuss about budgets, discuss what’s distressing, and she’s …undressing. She fidgets a bit with her scarf, her wig, all her self-possessed feminine grace going whirligig, in to a big bag between her feet, like a grinning sheela-na-gig. Her prominent profile petrifies when she presses the pink plastic button to signal her stop, uttering huskily over the clitter clatter in the dusky half light, This is me, and bolts off the bus. Clearly, a chrysalis doesn’t need a Chrysler, because as if by sorcery, only a lone man can be seen in the tail lights, marching on the motorway. I watch through the window, as he grows smaller in the gathering gloom, then look back at the button, but I don’t dare press it. Lunging in the lurching double-decker, I hang on tight to tell the driver in a hoarse whisper, This isn’t me. Briefly he beams, then turns to stare straight ahead, his two shafts of light searching the night. His foot finds the metal gas pedal and we careen down the dark tarmac to a faster moving future.

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