Writing Exercise 3: From Memory

Watching the news from New Orleans and Gulfport, I got that same sick, empty feeling that I had four years ago watching news from lower Manhattan. These places and these people will never be the same. One anchor said “our tsunami.” And I thought, why are the networks airing Days of Our Lives and As the World Turns when something like this is happening? In this real day of our life.

I’ve been to New Orleans and to be honest, I didn’t like it much. It was July and the air smelled thick and fetid. The parking valet at the hotel filched my favorite raincoat out of my car (I didn’t notice until I got on down the road). Two young guys stumbled out of a bar on Bourbon Street and vomited right in front of me – at 10:30 in the morning. It was so hot and humid, I put ice cubes down my shirt as I walked to a Payless on Canal to get replacement flip-flops. A man in a pizza joint grabbed my newspaper off my table and when I asked for it back, said, “Obviously, you-ah naht frum around heah.” I was alone on the trip and felt strangely vulnerable, even in daylight.

That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t go back. New Orleans makes you come back. It’s the city of Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams and Anne Rice (her huge house was painted a garish shade of purple when I saw it). Every street and streetcar has been written about by someone drawn to New Orleans by the potent voodoo of what someone else wrote about it.

Here’s how Charles Bukowski wrote about it in a poem called Young in New Orleans:

starving there, sitting around the bars,
and at night walking the
streets for hours,
the moonlight always seemed fake
to me, maybe it was,
and in the French Quarter I watched
the horses and buggies going by,
everybody sitting high in the open
carriages, the black driver, and in
back the man and the woman,
usually young and always white.
and I
was always white.
and hardly charmed by the
world.
New Orleans was a
place to
hide.
I could piss away my life,
unmolested.
except for
the rats.
the rats in my small dark room
very much resented sharing it
with me.
they were large and fearless
and stared at me with eyes
that spoke
an unblinking
death.
women were beyond me.
they
saw something
depraved.
there was one waitress
a little older than
I, she rather smiled,
lingered when she
brought my
coffee.
that was plenty for
me, that was
enough.
there was something
about
that city, though:
it didn't let me feel guilty
that I had no
feeling for the
things so many others
needed.
it let me alone.
sitting up in my bed
the lights out,
hearing the outside
sounds,
lifting my cheap
bottle of wine,
letting the warmth of
the grape
enter
me
as I heard the rats
moving about the
room,
I
preferred them
to
humans.
being lost,
being crazy maybe
is
not so bad
if you can be
that way:
undisturbed.
New Orleans gave
me
that.
nobody ever called
my name.
no telephone,
no car,
no job,
no anything.
me and the
rats
and my youth,
one
time,
that time
I knew
even through the
nothingness,
it was
a
celebration
of something not to
do
but only
know.

So here’s your exercise this week. Remember a place. Write about it Bukowski-style (but shorter maybe?). No sentiment. No frippery. “Don't play the violins,” as my poetry prof, Jack Myers, always said. It could be N’awlins, if you wish. Or anywhere that you experienced a sense of being outside yourself, a little afraid maybe – and afterward, you realized the place had changed you.

In the “comments” area, post your poems (I even hesitate to call them that for fear someone will get out a rhyming dictionary). Read over Chuck’s again. Notice the shape of it. Emulate that, if you dare. Copying styles of writers is a great way to strengthen your own skills. It's like, if you're used to playing Bach, you try a little bebop. Jack Myers had us do it with every assignment. So I shall copy the style of a great professor and do likewise.

Can’t wait to read what you write.

And do what you can, however you can, for the people of the Crescent City.