New Orleans: The Red Hours of Don Jose Torres-Tama

 in Nocturnal New Orleans & Other Lower Quarter Stories

“jaque mate” on the Esplanade

From one century to another, arguments and orgasms followed us along the Lower Quarter of the Esplanade Avenue border on the edge of Chartres Street.  “Cuba Libre” to her “Sex on the Beach,” Rum to her Bourbon lips, checkmate through her rook, reigned in like a willing pawn again.  “Jaque mate” to the hunt and spider crawl along the repetition of movies like “nine and a half days” because our budget was considerably modest.  

I loved her eyes rolled back in such a way that she was almost dead.  Her breasts above my pupils, upside down bells hanging on arrival, and when she crawled for me, it was her idea.  

I provided money, dollars from juggling fire on Jackson Square for awed tourists.   I was her mark, and I loved it.  She was my gran putita, like I had dreamed her, and I loved her eyes rolled back in such a way that she was almost dead.  

I loved the tortured lovers’ game over and again.  Her liquored scent always drew me, the bedside karma sutra handbook, her dilated eyes anticipating the ropes around her caramel wrists.

“Ay, papi, eres so kinky,” such a Cuban princess she played with snow and dolled lipstick rojo fuego engine red.  I played Ricky.  Honey, I am more than just a home.  I am a master Latino puto, whored into supple submission.  

I confess that I loved her eyes rolled back upon arrival like she was almost dead.  I never stayed for breakfast, macaroni or cheese whiz lunches.  I calculated my departures each time after she passed into a dream.  

I returned every third night to keep the promise of our appetite alive, from one century to another with arguments and liquor because fucking was our penance for each fight.  

I loved her dilated eyes rolled back into her head like she was almost dead.  Even now, she speaks through me from the grave in verse to remember her, “jaque mate” to the hunt and spider crawl.

Rosa of the Lower Quarter

Prelude, el pasado

It was a knowing he remembered from one century to another because they were repeating a love bewitched drama—un amor brujo y nocturno como una telenovela filmada en Venezuela—that unfolded like another over-the-top Latino television soap opera made in South America.  Now, they could act as loco lovers crossing sexual borders in this new dimension for the first time without the impediments of social reprisals.  

But as in that previous incarnation, he envisioned her new death as a quick violent blow—rápidamente como un golpe de estado—like a government coup.  All over again, she would die submerged in tragedy.  It was her preference.  A swift memorable demise was only befitting her new physical host as well, a super guapa Cuban American Princess raised in Miami and living in voluntary exile, like him, in New Orleans.  

La Rosa

Rosa was always prepared to die and wanted one orgasm after another just to deny death of any time poorly spent.  She preferred to die young each time anyway.  She feared loosing that seduction in her charcoal eyes, the appetite she encouraged with her hips in rhythm to some full moon that always followed her.  

She produced a nocturnal hunger in men, and gay women asked for her tables as well.  Rosa of the Lower Quarter was more than the waitress on Decatur Street who usually earned triple the tips of any other server at Vera Cruz Restaurant.  She was an entity of the moment, and all the dishwashers, black, brown, and white, eagerly welcomed her dirty plates in the kitchen.

She employed all that attention in attempts to make him jealous, but he was generally uninterested in playing Othello to her crazy-ass Desdemona—green being one of his least favorite colors, except when it was the pigment of women’s eyes.

Moreover, he pitied her as in that previous life.  She was his older sister who moved right in the wrong direction of a jealous bullfighter’s stiletto—becoming another García-Lorca grito y poema, un llanto gitano y la novia no se despierta.  She was more than a heartbreaking poem each time.  She was a scream in the night that nobody would hear except him.  

The few times sobriety accompanied their present love-making, they experienced the shame of their past lingering—the ghosts of having been siblings before.  They were better off when drinking the past under the table and swallowed in furious feral debauchery unmatched with any other coupling.  They knew how to fuck each other as if they had been practicing for three hundred years in solitude, and they had.

They were born and reborn always to be possessed by a Latin temperament in one way or another—always equating love with death and passion with abuse.

And he did love her—sometimes more than he would admit to himself, or even to her because he was destined to be her protector de un siglo al otro.  From one century to another, she would die in his arms each time through different means—her brown knight in weathered armor exhausted by their destiny.

New Orleans

This time they found each other in New Orleans, living in Spanglish in Babylon by the bayou, the most northern port of the Caribbean where Southern decadence was a gay holiday and drinking was a civil duty.  

New Orleans was a postcard of romantic decay, frozen in historic grandeur.  After the oil bust, the bankrupt “big sleazy” of the late 1980’s made for an idyllic pueblo for another memorable bout.  And sex and death were always cavorting openly in the old Quarter, or loitering in Decatur Street dives like the Abbey and the Dungeon, buying drinks on the house for everyone still trying to act alive and upright at 5am.

This Southern mini-metropolis of provincial gothic inclinations and exaggerated social tolerances, of humidity and sweat, was the perfect battlefield for the pain and pleasure that sustained their tormented love.  Where else was life and death celebrated simultaneously on any given day?

And Rosa knew that she could never find a more complete love from anyone else.  How could she?  Certainly, she never quite loved herself, and somewhere in between the reckless hunger that often placed her in complicated situations, he had managed to love her unconditionally—even if it was for three months this time around.  

She exhausted even those days of grace, but they continued with a desperate tango of love and hate for another three years until her death.  Of course, there were plenty of other lovers they each put up as actors who inevitably played unsuspecting characters in scenarios that the poor suckers were not even aware of.  

Metairie

Who else would have picked her up from some motel in Metarie, where she had spent a night with two dealers of substances powdery and otherwise illegal?  She called him at 7AM, waking up in a panic, and begged him to come and get her.

Without any ounce of hesitation, he did so—playing more the concerned brother than a pissed off lover.  The two men were left spent and snoring to early morning cartoon reruns of “Bugs Bunny.”  The scene resembled a David Lynch film vignette, smelling of morning after decadence begun when a devil’s moon played a peeping Tom in the purple night.

He was surprised that she would risk exposure to the morning light.  Not that at twenty-six she was old, but her soul was ancient and the exhaust of lifetimes pronounced themselves around her eyes in the early dawn.  Her large-framed Gloria Vanderbilt sunglasses served well to form a mask of dark plastic to the waking world, and in the space of a frantic twenty-minute wait outside the motel lobby, she consumed three black coffees and four Benson & Hedges Menthol 100’s.  

With her after hours apparel of black tube top, ebony cotton flamenco skirt down to her ankles, and numerous silver bracelets on each arm sparkling in the sun, she was a peculiar picture, a brunette working girl, perhaps, waiting for her John, or a Latina black sheep Goth chick with runny black eye-liner who lost her way to Metarie.  She usually appeared to have been transported from another century—a witch sentenced to the modern world of tortured love affairs or santera de amor perdida en sus tragedias.     

El Mississippi

The smell of French Quarter bars was still tangled in her hair, and as always, she would return to her atelier to wash the night sins into the Mississippi, because that river being so murky and muddy was the watery disposal for everyone’s sins in the Quarter.  If you were to ever bathe in the Mississippi, not that many do, you would wash in three centuries of Vieux Carre sins—of old world blood, urine, and sperm.     

Finally, he pulled up in his tanned Toyota Corona wagon, threw open the door, and she slipped in trying to assemble her disheveled appearance.  She had been a bad, bad girl once again.  It would take many gallons of water to wash her sullied body this morning, but the river was patient and would absorb her sins.  The river was forgiving, more than any human.  It had forced itself to forgive the Europeans who traded humans for folly and profit because holding onto this rancor could swell it against the aging city.  It could surely forgive another night of sins for everyone in the old Quarter, and its baptisms would come through the leaky faucets of every tub awaiting a hot bath for the cleansing.

El argument all over again

“Are you jealous that I spent the night here?” were her first words—not even a thank you.  

He drove and remained silent.  Silence was the one challenge she could not entertain because her lives were about filling the silence with noise—grand noise and screams like the more joyous screams a few days ago from his balcony, when she was coming again and again for him.  

“I don’t care for your judgement anyway?”  

He just drove and remained silent, shooting straight down Airline Highway back to town.

“Say, something, coño!”

He did not respond, keeping his eyes focused on the road and passing cars before him.

“O.K., but at least roll down the windows, Jose, because your silent treatment makes me too cold.  I know you are trying to be ‘el cool boy’ and so Buddhist ‘unattached,’ but I think you are trying to hard to convince yourself that you do not love me!  Ay, do I detect a smile, a dent in the armor?”  

He remained indifferent and silent.

“You know I would have preferred to be at your house last night, but you did not answer my calls.  Either, you were out or had some company, maybe, to keep yourself occupied.  Perhaps, there was no vacancy at “Casa Jose” because the night management did not answer the phone.  So what is a girl suppose to do to make you love her the way you want to?  You keep pushing me away towards other men.  Is that what you really want?”

And with a rage that had been building over centuries, “Pues bueno, cabrona, you make me laugh, and the best part about this game is that I will have my revenge in print and on the stage.  You are such the catastrophic drama queen, and at least, I will make art from estas pendejadas while you prepare another grave for yourself?”  

“You’re going to write about me?  Well, how many poems will it take to equal the fantastic orgasms you get for free?  Never enough—nunca!  So why don’t you paint me instead?  That’s how I wan to remain—frozen in oils for you—hanging above your queen-size bed, so I can watch your every move with some other gringa puta that you’ll eventually choose before me!  What is it with you and all those gringas anyway?  Do they know how they’re just another girly notch on the belt of your Latino mucho macho male ego?”

“Que bien, good one,” as he snapped his right fingers to her rant, applauding her assault with one hand.  It began again—the verbal sparring.

“Mira, mujer, it’s not a matter of them just being gringas.  They are French, Australians, Danish.  It’s a cultural exchange!”  He laughed to himself in a rather egotistical tone.  “Actually, it’s a little sanity that is starting to become as attractive as your fatalities?

“So how come you eventually come back to me?”

“That, mi querida, is because I am perversely addicted to your drama—even when it gets painful.  Because just then, you become even more desirable and I want you.”

“No, you ‘want me’ because nadie, mi querido, nobody makes you scream like I do.”

“Te crees tanto, pero si, and that also.  But next time I’m not going to rescue you.  You’ve maxed my sympathy credit, cuídate Rosa.  You’re on your own, now more than ever before.  Estoy cansado de jugar tu héroe, cabrona!  I’m not playing your sappy hero and caring lover anymore, baby.  Se acabo.  You have used up all of your ‘get out of jail free cards with me.”  I am tired of caring for you, Rosa.”  

Her calls.  Her feet.  Her proposals.  

She loved hearing him pronounce her name with that slight roll of the “r” that only a true native Spanish-speaking Latino could enunciate.  She loved hearing her name birth through his thick lips.  He was driving rather fast, in a hurry to complete this mission, but a delicate calm swelled inside of her.  A few tears fell loose from her eyes.

He avoided looking at her tears as much as he would have to reject the propositions that would eventually follow.  He hated seeing women cry because it always reminded him of his mother’s tears filling his bathtub as she was bathing his five year-old body—holding back the weight of a love betrayal by his father.  
 
But now, they were back downtown at her Esplanade Avenue apartment, and he parked the car with a jolt that snapped them out of the growing weepy sorry-ass scenario.

“Oye, if you give me whiplash, I’m going to have the judge sentence you to daily back massages,” she complained, trying to lighten the mood while wiping her eyes with the one tissue left in her purse.

He resorted to silence again.  It was 7:45am.

This was usually when he was rising and slipping out of bed—her lying unconscious like a dreaming Vamperella—having separated him once more from his life source, time and time again like a miserable video loop until either he was inside of her and asleep, or she had passed out.  He hated rising to morning in her bed after he had promised himself the night before that he would never see her again.  Exactly then, he would imagine himself a stupid fly in the worn cliché of her spider’s web.  

He was always dying another death each time inside of her, but he was drawn to her—even more when she called him inebriated at 2AM with multiple “White Russians” speaking for her, making naked proposals too delicious to turn away.  He was only a man, and she knew that.  Thus, it was never too hard to pry herself between his body and the sheets of his bed.  After all, in her mind, his bed was her rightful place, and the others were merely renting space when her absence was forced by his Catholic abstinence, when he was trying to be a good boy and give her up.  

She was the drug habit he was trying to quit, but her advances were never easy to deny.  When he managed such a feat, he had to call upon his highest considerations, the beliefs in all the deities he worshipped had to be beckoned to control the lower Chakras she naturally stimulated.  At least a dozen Ave Maria’s (Hail Mary’s) had to be chanted, and he had to keep his tongue busy with the names of Lord Krsna.  Incense would have to be burned and offered to the Ganesha altar in his bedroom to contain his senses.  Multiple oral prayers to give him the strength to say “no, mujer” had to be made.  
It was a ritual that he would often begin by midnight before her calls were expected.  He even rehearsed short scenes in his head where he was saying “No” to her over and over again.  

“No, I want to be alone.  No, I prefer not to tie you up tonight.  No, because I have cut off my penis and given it away for medical research.”  That one comment produced an even better response of “Ay, you could have had the clinic send it to me for a thorough inspection.”

Either that, or he had to be engaged in a devoted act of art making that was arriving at a spiritual climax, at a creative nirvana that could match the kind of orgasm her opened legs promised.  On occasions, he did manage to put his art making as a solid front to her encroaches, but if he was determined not to let her tempt him, he would have to disconnect all the five phones in the house not long after midnight.  If she was working, her calls would arrive as her shift was ending.

The calls came with a familiar soundtrack of “I want to come over and get naked for you, but I want you to love me and not just have sex with me.  I want sex, of course, but I want you to want me.  Am I sounding like a Donna Summers song?  You could have all of me in any way you desire, but you have to promise to love me in the morning.  I’ll accept even your lies that you can’t live without me if you love me tonight.”

Most nights, he lacked the will to refuse her because he was only a man.  Well, at least at twenty-seven, he was growing towards manhood, and his body often waged a war between the daily raw sex he desired and the higher calling of his other natural self, the self-disciplined and spiritually inclined soul.  But it was her vocation to wave the red flag of basic desires against any flags he put up to confront her.  Lastly, another woman in his bed was the ultimate strategy to keep her away.    

As expected, she was direct with him, and to keep with custom, she made a sort of half offer that morning to test the potential, knowing that this was not the best time for her bidding.

“I would ask you to come in, but I know your daylight savings schedule will probably not allow it.  I know our time is best spent at night when our sins are more natural and your wolf is out of his monastery,” she teased him.

“Since when, do you use my metaphors?”  

“Since I listen well, guapo, and besides with all your little poems strung together, you are no Sandra Cisneros.”  
“Since when do you know Sandra Cisneros?”  

“Since I stole the ‘Woman Hollering Creek’ stories from your night stand last month.”  

“I’ve been wondering how that book disappeared.”  

“Pues, now you know, and maybe I’ll write a story called ‘Never love an Ecuadorian.’”

“It’s ‘Never marry a Mexican.’”

“I know, but you’re no mejicano, and I’m too young to get married—unless you’re asking.  I see no rings on these fingers.  Do you have one?”
   
He laughed and she stepped Cuban lady-like out of the car—bare feet to the pavement.  She had removed her shoes from the start of the ride, and he had channeled his best altar boy Catholic sense of denial to avert his eyes from them.  He loved her painted nails.  She painted them with all the delicate care that only a Latina woman has for her feet.  He dared not to look.  One glance of her firehouse engine red toenails, and he became superman in the face of kryptonite.  

It was that simple.  He was that weak.  

Often, It was her feet that led him back to her.  To have them in his mouth again while he came was enough to play that broken record for another broken night.  He wondered how this seemingly harmless foot fetish could land him in these messes.  He knew better to never let a Latina woman know such secrets because she would only know to use them well.

“Seguro, que no deseas even a short visit for coffee.  I can make you that strong Cuban coffee that you love so much—cortadito o cortadita como yo!  I’ll wash my feet for you.  Maybe, I’ll even let you rope my arms and use the blindfolds—como te gusta.”  Her propositions became more enticing with each delectable fantasy placed on the altar of his imagination, but he had to deny.

He smiled with all the teeth God had given him.  For a few seconds, she thought she had him, but he remained determined—pulling the door towards him.  

Jose, el lobo at night

As some kind of Obie-Juan-Kanobie Jedi warrior, he proceeded to channel the force within and pull away from her Dart Vader-like temptations to the dark side of her apartment with the windowless bedroom.  He accelerated away because he knew their time was the nocturne—too early and too many other secrets would be revealed.  If he gave in, she would devour him again like some Latina Java the Hut on a diet of weak hearts.  It could take weeks to escape and build new resistance.

But he was far from an innocent, and he, too, had been out the night before—making his rounds with the wolf in his walk and the animal ready to leap from his pocket.  The only way to keep her away was to throw another woman in front of her—una gringa—especially blondes raised her Cuban coraje up the mercury, and he was searching them out specifically for some coolness.  

He needed a more tempered dynamic that was easily feasible with gringa girls of Puritan descent, who in turn desired a caliente Latino hombre to take them south of the border.  He was agile at performing the cheesy stereotype with his suave dance feet and slick attire to match, but he was also armed with an art school vocabulary.  He could pimp a litany of painters and writers for verbal seductions.  

He was a well-rounded hybrid Latino provocateur connected to his roots and schooled in the more modern strategies of 20th Century gringolandia sexual politics.  And, yes, he suffered from the common re-conquest dreams of many Latino men in “el otro lado,” who were “on the other side” exacting Moctezuma’s revenge, one gringa woman at a time.  He had some predictable machismo post-colonization blues to work through, Latino male issues of “la chingagda” in the belly of the beast.   

His night fishing was successful, and he had to return to a West Virginia girl dreaming in his queen size bed who would wake soon to wonder why and how she was abandoned in the house of some man whom she just met.  Upon leaving, he pulled the wine velvet drapes over the large ten-foot windows to secure the bedroom from any light that could interrupt her sleep before his return.

It was 8am, and after a stop at the nearby French bakery on Ursulines Street, he arrived well prepared to greet this new stranger with chocolate croissants and café au lait on a breakfast serving tray—such a performance abetted his lustful purpose further, and just to be over the top, he rang a little porcelain bell to wake her.  It was all part of the petit dejeuner love show.

What young girl would not be openly charmed with this thoughtful morning greeting by a half-naked Mestizo Latino performance artist whose bed was decorated with black pillows on blood red sheets in a room already bordello burgundy, and the scent of her sex on his face.  

He knew his rituals well.

He had cultivated this practice into a performance that was easily staged and repeated in the grandeur of his haunted house on the edge of the Lower Quarter.  She could have never imagined that only an hour before he had picked up his wild x-lover from an Airline Highway motel in nearby Metarie.  His exit was stealth and his re-entry grand like some sort of brujo de amor, magician of love.  Another slight of body maneuver had been pulled off, and he expressed no hint of the drama that had ended only minutes before.

It was only when the phone rang in the middle of their eating that caused some consternation on her part—especially when it rang seven times before he picked it up, just enough to answer it and hang it up again.  It was a perplexing move to her, but he was inconsequential about it.  They kept eating and she didn’t ask.  

He became even more mysterious then, and they began the morning ceremony with explosive caffeine kisses when decisions for more sex are not clouded by liquor and the absence of light.  The phone rang again and again in intervals of fifteen minutes apart for each call. After three attempts, it stopped ringing.  

Three blocks away, Rosa was putting the receiver back in its cradle with her left hand as her right caressed the ache between her thighs.  She was hungry for him, but she would not let this yearning keep her from a well-deserved breakfast of her own.  She would serve herself.

It would be easier for her to sleep then, and she imagined him full of anger hammering her into ecstasy from one century into another.  If they did not see each other tomorrow or the day after, there was always the next incarnation.  She would surely satisfy him in some future life with her tongue well versed in the contours of his body and knowing just where her teeth were needed.  After all, he was already marked with a bite on his inner left thigh that she had planted only days before for any other suitor to find and question.


she was woman too

With her blonde boy asleep in the other room, I loved the depth of hungry mothers.  Why not?  She deserved her legs in the air.  She was woman, too, nearly twice my age, but hungry woman too.  Her view of Santa Ana, the Cathedral, and the open space of “ever wonder what a mother likes in the night of freedom without a husband.”  On all fours she was woman, too, for a pretty brown boy of legal comfort and taboo, to eat into the morning of delivery and tow trucks, the sound of police sirens and her surrender.

Without that special pleasure moaning, because for years, she had been a devoted mother—not a woman on all fours looking back into eternity.  She was forty in the middle Quarter, and I was twenty-three.

The Cathedral bells ringing seven a.m. from her window alarmed us into enough consciousness, and we began again before her boy was off to kindergarten school, and new crayons had to be purchased from the corner store below.   

Why not?   She was woman, too, not just a mother abandoned to her duty.  She deserved her legs in the air with Santa Ana and Cathedral bells, reminding us of morning delivery and sublime surrender, having birthed love and left alone.  She was woman, too.

With her blonde boy asleep in the other room, ooohh, I loved the depth of hungry mothers.  Why not?  She deserved her legs in the air.  She was woman, too, nearly twice my age, but hungry woman, too.  Her view of Santa Ana, the Cathedral, and the open space of “ever wonder what a mother likes in the night of freedom without a husband.”


The amigo juggler

He was content in his role as their young “caliente amigo” lover, their Hispanic fly with all the hand maneuvers and dexterity that real jugglers posses.  Why not?  Here were a few women who he could serve quietly after their evening meals.  

There was never any pretense of relationships and the unnecessary entrapments of any future together.  No plans were ever discussed.  There were simply house calls on nights when more than another video movie had to do, when flesh rubbing together was a greater delight than any celluloid fiction.

One of them had a child of five, whom he also charmed by teaching the boy hat tricks and how to balance a broom on the nose.  He started the boy on beanbags, and he had the patience with him that his own biological father had never been around to express.  

This boy was a beautiful blonde cherub, who loved his mother like most any boy would adore the only parent he knew, and he seemed happy that mom had a “boyfriend” for the first time in a long while, especially one that could juggle fire.

He also taught the boy to call him “amigo” in Spanish, because this was more definitive of the role he played for the boy’s mom, the “amigo juggler.”
 
Now, the “courtship” between the boy’s mother and the amigo juggler was not one that could be called steady.  Rather, he was more like an “on call” amigo lover.  Generally,
she called him twice a week, and he came over with the natural enthusiasm he had for older women and these clandestine visits that normally began at 10PM.  

He “loved” older women because they were always grateful, and he was there to please them.  He was a real living fantasy, the kind they had only conceived privately when masturbating in their candlelit bubble baths.

Was there emotion?  Yes, he did give himself emotionally, and they responded with equal affection.  There were never any conversations of walks together on Sunday afternoons, of more quality time, and certainly the word “commitment” did not even fathom into their vocabulary.  Pleasure was the modus operandi, and pleasurable company, of course.

They never met for dinner dates at any of the nearby restaurants.  When their appetite for food surfaced, they would call on the Verti Mart, proprietors of after midnight snacks to fill the post-orgasmic cravings of a hundred such lovers in the Lower Quarter.  


Red hours of early morning strangers in a slave quarter

“You have to go.  I don’t like to see daylight with strangers in my bed,” she, a stranger herself, requested.  She was gentle in her petition, but it seemed like an abrupt inconvenience after what had been a most welcoming invitation to share her bed only a few hours before.  

Had they not exchanged tongues across intimate spaces?  Had he not exhausted her orgasm output to a height of begging for &l