Leaving New Orleans
The rattle of his truck tailpipe faded away down the street. Gone. My hand still shook as I fed my son a spoonful of mashed sweet potato. I didn’t like fighting around the baby.
I’d had enough of it, the drinking, the whisky on his breath, the cans piling up in the garbage. Chances were Fergus had gone for a pint at Mick’s. He went for pints at every other Irish pub in New Orleans, making the rounds until he hit the whisky bottle. About six or eight pints and a few drams made his left eye squinty like a pirate without a patch. And I remember the first time he fixed his one-eyed gander on me. I sat in a chair by the stage, listening to him read a few poems aloud. Fergus combed a hand through his thick hair the color of Guinness as he looked down at the page. There he stood before us in the dark pub — a small group of aspiring young poets — reading a poem by Yeats. Little did I know the twinkle in his blue eye that evening would become my first child.
I was twenty-eight. I had plenty of interior painting projects and was also painting a series of oils on canvas, writing poems, fiction, and essays, immersed in the creative energy of a city I loved. I lived in a beautiful historical mansion on one of the prettiest streets near Audubon Park, and made a few friends who were also artists and writers. Yet I felt the arrival of year twenty-nine sneaking up on me, and soon, I’d be thirty. If I hadn’t found the right guy, so what. I’d figure it out. I was ready to have a baby.
Looking back, I can see why I fell for him. Fergus bore a resemblance to the Irish actor Gabriel Byrne, who I’d always had a little bit of a crush on. He spoke in a similar Dublin brogue — the ambling lilt, the upward twist of certain words, the way it rambled through the muddy gravel of vowels and consonants. I laughed at his wry humor and liked his ease in having a good time. Whatever I saw in Fergus, it was with rose-colored glasses so thick I couldn’t see the red flags. As my midwife once said, honey, he’s not dealing with a full deck of cards.
New Orleans lured Irish transplants like Fergus to its delta rife with Irish pubs, like Punchy, a former boxing champion from Kildare, by way of Boston, and Finbar, a Dubliner compadre who, after a bender, often woke up inside a dumpster or next to a woman he didn’t recognize. Fergus arrived in New Orleans after wandering through the states. He booked a flight out of Dublin Airport to New York City and found a room for rent in Brooklyn, and as wanderlust eventually stirred inside him, he ventured to see more of America. So, Fergus packed up his bag, took the train to Chicago, and found work as a bartender. After a few months, he moved on again, hitching rides here and there until he ended up on a Montana farm as a cowhand. He bought a pair of cowboy boots and considered himself Americanized, even becoming a trucker in Houston, Texas, for a spell. But he was born in a small seaside town called Wicklow, about an hour south of Dublin, one of six children. His father was a policeman in Dublin, and his mother worked as a schoolteacher. Fergus’s parents sent him and his siblings off to Catholic boarding school. And I knew something must’ve happened to him as a boy there because as I saw the good in him, I also noticed darkness and pain and made excuses for why drink helped him escape whatever he wanted to forget.
Every full moon, a group of women in my drumming circle got together to set intentions, make wishes, and send prayers to the universe (or divine source, whatever you want to call it) by drumming. We often met in each other’s backyards or gardens, and sometimes parks, drumming in a circle to celebrate the full moon. If you’ve ever drummed, you’d know how the drum beat resonates in your soul, how your hand to drum skin matches a collective heartbeat. If you drum long enough, the sound and rhythm breaks through the barrier between the present and past, life and death, spirit and physical existence. More than a few times I’ve heard chanting during the drumming ceremony, though the women next to me kept their mouths closed. The sound of chanting was so distinct, as if our circle also included the ancestors of each woman. I can only guess we connected with the spirit world by drum. I have no other explanation for this.
One moonlit night, we all met on Magnolia Bridge over Bayou Saint John to drum and dance in a ceremony with a voodoo priestess. This was the same bayou where the famed voodoo priestess of New Orleans, Marie Laveau, performed her rituals back in the 19th century. As the sunset turned pink, we drummed and danced while the priestess invoked the spirit of Erzulie, the voodoo goddess of love. A bouquet of roses placed on the altar amidst the glow of white votive candles, and pink powder sprinkled into a heart-shaped vèvè on the ground. The warm June evening intoxicated us all. As the spirit of Erzulie possessed our priestess, she went around the cirlce, suggestively shaking her hips, flirting with all of us in a state of trance. Amused, we all laughed, until she turned maudlin and began crying theatrically, holding her hands to her heart. That’s Erzulie, we rolled our eyes in response. The priestess soon shook the spirit’s ride off. After more dancing to the beat of our drums, the sunset sank into a red-orange sky, glittering off the bayou water beneath the bridge. As she returned to her consciousness, the priestess conducted a head washing ceremony, dousing our hair with ceremonial champagne, to please Erzulie, who loves the color pink, sweet foods like wedding cake, and anything lavish.
When I returned home, I made my own full moon ritual by planting lavender in a terrcotta pot, conjuring a handwritten wish on a small piece of paper. My wish? A baby. I planted the seed of my wish deep into the soil with my index finger and prayed for a moment. The lavender plant sat on the porch under the full moonlight, absorbing its silvery glow as I slept with my champagne soaked hair wrapped in white cloth. Maybe the spirit of the voodoo goddess Erzulie came home with me from the bayou that night to grant my wish.
I had moved from Los Angeles to New Orleans without knowing one person, and within a week, I had made new friends. The drive across the country along the Interstate 10 freeway in my Toyota sedan took three days total. From Los Angeles to New Orleans, I put the pedal to the metal, especially as I drove from El Paso to Orange, Texas. Young vegetarian girls like me didn’t have any reason to stop in Texas except fill the tank with gas and keep going. All there was to see was tumbleweeds, flat desert, and nothing but the road. During my drive, I sang along to a mixtape of Sade, U2, Seal, Joni Mitchell, and Sting. I’d arranged to stay in a Victorian guest cottage managed by a young married couple. Assuming they were asleep around midnight, I checked into a motel when I reached Lake Charles.
Y’all coulda let us know you were here, my host said the next day as she showed me around the place. The guest quarters were behind their house through the garden. Bees flit and hummed among the roses in the humid floral air. The 18th-century cottage must’ve been a gardening shed once, she explained, with a galley kitchen and bathroom added on after they bought the house on Oak Street. My private door was shaded by an arch of crepe myrtle branches and climbing vines in the mid-morning light, and I knew it was exactly where I belonged.
Everyone I knew in Los Angeles tried to talk me out of moving to New Orleans. But I loved the place from the very moment I arrived a few years before during a week long visit, and knew in my gut it was meant to be. It wasn't just because I fell in love with the lacy wrought-iron balconies of the French Quarter, or the colorful rows of Creole cottages, or the stately French Colonial architecture, and the romance of Queen Anne mansions. I inhaled evening primrose and jasmine, blossoming magnolias, and walked among dreamy oak trees covered in Spanish moss. I loved the feeling I got walking around the city. I could sense the rainstorms coming, felt alive dancing to jazz and brass bands you could hear any day of the week, and the pure unbridled joy I felt just being there. Joy as big as a tuba. You couldn’t talk me out of it.
Fergus didn’t come home for two days until the police escorted him to our front step. Well, escorted is a nicer way of saying thrown to the curb. He went to the casino on a lark after his bar shift at Flanagan’s. As I opened the door, he stumbled in, delirious and reeking of whisky and cigarettes. When he fell face first on the futon, I laughed aloud to the ceiling in utter exasperation, because I was tired of crying. A sorry sight, he was knocked out unconscious. My hardback copy of Angela’s Ashes by Frank Mc Court was on the table next to him. How ironic, I sighed, wanting to take that book with my two hands and hit him on the head with it, but instead, I took his wallet. He stuffed it with six thousand cash in crisp hundred dollar bills — gambling money.
I couldn’t help myself. After months of this agony, I couldn’t forget the argument we had about our last four dollars. Fergus spent it on a pack of cigarettes. It didn’t matter, he drank liquid meals at the bar. I went hungry for a few days until one of my girlfriends delivered a bag of groceries to our porch. My friends didn’t like him or the situation. One tried to convince me to move out and rent my own place, another invited me to dinner and tried to talk sense. But wasn’t it clear? I was alone in having this baby, just as I asked. And for the record, I didn’t plant another wish in that lavender pot for a devoted and loving husband. You have to be very specific when making a wish.
I’d paid my own way through culinary school when I was twenty-one. I didn’t go to college like most do after high school. I worked day shifts to attend the evening classes. I became well skilled in classic French cuisine and graduated with a diploma two years later. I enjoyed cooking, especially pastry and desserts, and New Orleans was a gourmand’s heaven. Since I completed a few painting jobs and one big project for a local coffee house, I went on a grocery shopping splurge.
Of course, it’s easy to throw together a store-bought meal. I could have picked up a container of roasted corn soup from the freezer section at Langenstein’s with a few other pre-prepared dishes. This was back in the nineties when we didn’t have food delivery apps. You ordered food to-go or made it yourself. Making groceries, that’s the New Orleanian phrase for grocery shopping.
I got produce from the farmers’ market and created a splendid gourmet meal from scratch. A zucchini and goat cheese quiche with handmade “pâte brisée” crust. A fresh salad, chilled gazpacho soup, and a Chambord raspberry tart with lemon curd. I’d forgotten about the joy of creating a meal like this. It became a lazy habit, eating at restaurants or picking up food, because there were many tempting choices in New Orleans.
I didn’t hear Fergus come through the front door. We lived in a Creole shotgun with the kitchen in the back. Shotgun houses are built with one room leading to another, eliminating the hallway altogether. Due to the design, one could stand at the front door and shoot a gun straight through without hitting anything. The dining table was set for one with my grandma’s crystal. I made it special, adding a cloth napkin and formal silverware. Well, I didn’t know when he was coming home (or if he was at all), and I was having fun cooking for myself. I took a deep breath and set another place for him at the table.
What’s all this, he muttered between mouthfuls. Did ye win the lottery or something? Let me tell you, babe, we aren’t fine people; we aren’t. So you cooked this up yerself, or did you actually decide to make it look like you could cook an’ buy it?
Eyes fixed on my plate, I sliced into the quiche and noticed how perfect it was. It had cooled out on the counter for a few hours and it set well, filled with green zucchini slices and pillowy goat cheese. My silence congealed into bitterness.
Ah, ay see. Yer not talking to me. Am I speaking to Miss High an’ Mighty? So ye think yer too special for me, ay see. Too grand. Well, I don’t believe you coulda made this anyway, so why don’t you admit you bought this fine meal? Or wassit wi’ me gambling money you took?
I held my tongue and cooled my fuse with a sip of seltzer from the crystal glass. The baby kicked and stretched in my growing belly. I couldn’t look at him across the table. My blood rose like mercury.
Ya know, babe, I don’t think ye feckin get me at all. All yer cryin’ about nuttin and all yer fancy dreams bout bein’ an artist, ya ain’t that babe, ya ain’t that.
A flash of light blinded my eyes as I felt myself lift the entire table in slow motion. I hurled its entirety at him with a big crash as dishes and crystal glasses went flying, china plates breaking, silverware clattering, shards of ceramic and glass scattered on the floor. The table cracked into wooden pieces next to him as he sat awestruck, dripping with food and drink and broken plates, minus the raspberry tart left on the kitchen counter.
August in New Orleans was the worst of the sweltering heat. The month locals left on vacation, and freshman students found lodging before their school semester began. Thunderstorms and rain were daily occurrences. Dark, ominous clouds swirled in the sky. I decided it was time.
Why didn’t you pay the electricity bill? I asked as he dragged another hit off his cigarette — don’t smoke inside around the baby — Och, woman, shut yer gob am not smoking around the baby — the utility bills are overdue, Fergus, you’re lying about going to work — Och shut yer gob woman! — I know you’re lying, going off to drink in the pubs instead of work — Settle down, yer nuttin’ special, havin’ a baby doesn’t make ye any different from any udder woman, yer not the only mother on earth! — Oh, well, just because you’re Irish doesn’t make you fucking William fucking Butler fucking Yeats, I lashed. He bellowed some more insults, grabbed his keys and clomped across the wooden floor until the creaky screen door slammed shut behind him.
I’d have to leave. Now. Was I going to leave now? Panic struck in my chest and welled in my throat. I knew what I had to do. I couldn’t do this anymore.
Besides, he wasn’t at the hospital when I gave birth. Of course. He’d gone off to have a pint at The Kerry to celebrate, then Mick’s, then Ryan’s, then to have another pint at O’Flaherty’s, and wherever else he fucking went to get sloppy drunk while I pushed our baby out into the world. In the cab ride over from our house to the hospital, I knew it was just my baby and me, and I’d be doing this alone.
I wanted to be alone. I craved it. There were many days I thought about leaving and starting over without him. But everything in the house, all the furniture, was mine. Dishes, mine, cookware, mine. Why should I leave? The truth was, I wanted him to go. But even when I said to his face, if you don’t like me, why don’t you leave, he didn’t. Was it some guilt thing from his Irish Catholic upbringing? I was pregnant with his child, yet all that Catholic guilt didn’t force him to propose. Fuck it. I wouldn’t marry him anyway, thank god.
I had one package of diapers left, powdered formula, and baby bottles in the diaper bag. I went into my closet and pulled a bunch of floral sundresses off their hangers. I stuffed my suitcase with as many things as I could — baby clothes, baby books, tiny socks, my son’s fluffy white chenille blanket. I worked myself up into a frenzy. There was no time to think about leaving behind my piano, diaries, books, photographs, paintings. I just had to go.
As I drove to the train station, one of the windshield wipers went sideways off the dash. The thrum of rain beat down on my burgundy Volvo wagon until it drowned out my tears. I’d left the window cracked open in the back seat for my son as the air conditioning didn’t work. Leave it to Swedish engineering and have the air conditioner go out in sweltering Southern heat. My baby, fascinated by the rain, giggled at the downpour as warm rain drenched the side of his window. I leaned over to check him at the crosswalk. He was a little damp from the rain but seemed oblivious. I pulled off the road and sobbed, not for leaving my son’s father, but for all of the disappointment, for all of it, just all of it. The heavy rainfall muted my sobs as if it washed it all away or was crying with me. I felt gutted. No going back.
I sat in the train observation deck, rocking my son in his baby carrier, feeling sad as I watched New Orleans fade into the distance. I had moved from Los Angeles on a whim, and now I was leaving New Orleans on a train back to California, not for the thrill of adventure, but to raise my son near family.
My grandma, Nana, was expecting our arrival at Union Station. We’d have to start over, my son and I, and create a new life. My aunt Denise called me “the cat with nine lives,” because I was good at it, landing on my two feet.
At some point through the endless stretch of Texas, I woke to check my son’s diaper. In the dim light of our sleeper car window, I gazed into the indigo landscape as it blurred by. I was glad my son wasn’t fussy, but you get used to waking up to feed. I thought about what I left behind and why.
I didn’t want to raise my son with an alcoholic father in a city where bars stay open twenty-four seven, that I knew. Even if he moved out, I couldn’t be sure he would leave me alone. I wanted to believe he cared about me, but he didn’t show a hint of any affection. I knew I should’ve left before, should’ve ended it without telling him I was pregnant, gone back to Los Angeles, but isn’t that the thing? Fergus would stick in my mind even if I left. He was my son’s father.
It irked me when he said nothing matters (his motto) because everything matters, and it did matter for a few months until I became pregnant. Then the shouting, the disregard, the fighting about things like who was to spend our last collective four dollars and on what. I had a few painting jobs fall through, and as my pregnancy advanced, I couldn’t bartend in a smoky bar all night.
We both landed a job refinishing wood floors in a French Quarter vacation rental, and other odd jobs before we moved from my Uptown apartment — a Victorian mansion split into two rentals off the main house — into a squalid ramshackle shotgun at the edge of the Mississippi. It’s not as fancy as your high-born mansion living, Fergus explained in his brusque manner, but we could afford it. The place was owned by one of his Irish friends from Mick’s Pub. As with the usual slummy termite-eaten shacks, it had rats and flying roaches (also called palmetto bugs) and next door neighbors who tossed dirty diaper pails out on the concrete between our houses. We had one window unit for cooling the place, as if the ceiling fans helped much. A broken window in the entry room let mosquitoes in. It was a palace, all right.
I knew I could have renewed my lease, broken it off with Fergus, made a plan. But I was twenty-nine and not ready to do all that. This was my first baby. Fergus slipped a Claddagh ring on my finger (dipped in a pint of Guinness) and made a promise to stand by me no matter what. I knew I was pregnant then, even though I hadn’t missed my monthly cycle yet.
I thought about what happened on Saint Patrick’s Day, which was also my due date, as if I’d planned to give birth to this Irishman’s baby on the biggest drinking holiday in America aside from Octoberfest. Around nine at night, I got away from the crowd and walked several streets around the outskirts of the parade route.
He promised not to drink a drop during the Saint Paddy’s parade festivities that afternoon, as he parked my Volvo wagon somewhere on Ursulines Street near Decatur, around the corner from Molly’s. But as we walked into the pub, he handed my bank card over to the bartender, opened up a tab, quaffed a cold pint, and went off into a parade crowd, forgetting me and everything he convinced me of that morning. I should have known better. I was hungry, down to the last twenty in my purse. I shouldn’t have gone out to the French Quarter during the Saint Patrick’s Day parades. What was I even thinking?
I put all of my earnings in the bank from painting houses for nine months. I’d made a plan to take time off after the baby was born. We didn’t have online banking yet, or at least I didn’t, nor did I have a cell phone. I didn’t even know if I was having a boy or a girl, though I did pick out a boy’s name and was still undecided on a girl’s. But it was my decision to have this child, and with that, I promised to be a good mother. My watermelon-sized belly had a dark line down the middle from where it met my solar plexus to my navel, but beyond that, I couldn’t see my own feet.
The bartender said he saw Fergus go out to see the parades with another pint. Bewildered, I spent that late afternoon waddling around the streets in search of him. I peeked inside pub doors in the French Quarter all the way to the border of the Faubourg Marigny. My feet swollen after walking for hours, an ache pulled from my lower back to my cervix. I was going to give birth right there on the steamy street littered with rotting crawfish shells, bright green plastic beaded necklaces, busted open cabbage heads tossed from parade floats, splatters of vomit and sticky puddles of Hurricanes and beer.
One of our poet friends saw me on the street. She asked where the hell was Fergus. I explained he’d ditched me at Molly’s Pub on another drinking binge. Her eyes widened. You look like you’re about to pop, girl! Let’s get something to eat. As we went somewhere to share a basket of garlic fries and a sandwich, we saw Fergus staggering down the sidewalk. His eyes rolled around in his head like marbles, unable to hold his six-foot-three body upright. He was like a Hasbro Weeble, wobbling but not falling down. He tried to explain himself, answering questions with questions, not remembering where he moved my car or that he promised not to drink.
I was about to give birth. My son’s father drank his weight in Guinness and whisky. He lost my car, my keys, and my bank card. I’d have to call a cab to the hospital and go myself. I’ll skip to the part where I planted my left fist into his right eye socket and gave him a big black shiner.
The train pulled into Union Station. I zipped my suitcase shut, changed my son’s onesie and socks, and snuggled him into his carrier. As I stepped off the platform, bag in one hand and baby in the other, I noticed leaving New Orleans made me feel stronger. On the train ride to Los Angeles, I thought about all that happened, rewinding scenarios with my son’s father in an attempt to recalibrate for all that lay ahead: single motherhood.
Twenty-one years and some later, what comes from the darkest corners of this memory is gratitude. I was young and romantic and impulsive, so desperately wanting to be loved. I didn’t know what love was, but isn’t that how we are in our youth?
As I spent the next few months back in the city I grew up in, with its maze of freeways and multitude of suburbs, I had to relearn my way around — not Riverbend, Uptown, the Quarter, but Westside, Downtown, the Valley. I got lost a few times while driving streets I had known for years. It was a time of relearning, forgiving, reinventing.
My new role as a mother made me into a new person. It wasn’t all about me and what I thought I needed or wanted. It was about my boy. The shallow curvature of my inner perspective widened, as did the capacity of my heart. There was real love. It wasn’t the me who dreamed opaquely about what love should be, and when it didn’t take shape the way I insisted, I threw tables and chairs, broke glasses and dishes, and gave a black eye to the flawed man who had his own pain and suffering. I was too busy being angry at him (and at myself), but didn’t I see the gift? The wish I made on a full moon night. The light in the eyes of a dark-haired poet. It was there, flesh and blood. My child.
I noticed more. My self-awareness expanded. I watched the hazy morning light burn away into the blue. I listened into the hum of traffic as the breath of another day. My son’s shiny eyes and gleeful squeals of delight filled me with such happiness. As he grew, his first steps in those little red Vans, holding my grandma’s hand, his jubilant smile as he came down the yellow slide at the park on the beach. Those happy happy days. I noticed how the darkest places in my memory became the brightest light.
