My boyfriend is having an affair with the city of New Orleans.

I’ve loved her myself, both during Mardi Gras and after, so I have a fair idea of what’s going on between the two of them.

Last night, he posted his first set of photos on Facebook. I saw them at 3 am when I was waiting for a ride home from work. The pictures show oysters big as testicles, jambalaya, brews, and one film clip of him on a spinning chair getting motorboated by what appears to be a restaurant employee. Standard stuff.

I write in the comments, “Your food pictures still have food in them?!”

From Michigan, his mother reacts to my comment with a laughing emoji. We both know the guy will scarf down two-thirds of his plate before remembering to take a picture. His photos on social media generally consist of artfully arranged plates holding unidentifiable crumbs of food.

Under the motorboating clip, his mother has written, “What the heck is going on there? Be careful, son.”

I know what’s going on. He is on vacation in New Orleans and I am not. Or, the city of New Orleans is having an affair with someone and it’s not me.

 

When I graduated from college, I had my certificate of graduation sent straight to a relative with a permanent address. My boyfriend sold his car, signed over the rental lease on his apartment. We quit our jobs, strapped backpacks onto each other, and learned about Ourselves and our Selves through the world.

Some nights, we’d pretzel our bodies into a single hammock and wake up in the dewy Guatemalan jungle with the young village bull we came to name Benicio el Toro munching on banana leaves next to our ears.

---

   Portland is a pretty white woman who is naked but just wants to talk politics.  

---

Or once, I nearly slid off the rim of Maderas Volcano after swinging on a vine, mid-cry of, “Indiana Jo—.“ Even though it was only the sheer luck of a single mossy branch and quick reflexes I hadn’t known I possessed that saved me from plunging 4,573 feet to certain death, I laughed and laughed and then the two of us laughed together, our faces red and gasping for oxygen in the thin, high-altitude air. Sometimes, now, I live in these memories.

Most of our adult lives were built around travel.

For years, I worked double shifts, taking orders and learning shorthand for how people wanted their food, tucking dirty bills into a box marked “The Next Big Trip”. If you ask me about SoCal, or any of the places we lived in the interim between months-long trips abroad, I would tell you about money, how much I saved there. If you asked about the people, I could tell you about their tipping patterns, or how they dressed for happy hour.

Now, I have three days off work and I’m sitting in my living room, scrolling through Facebook. My partner has three vacation days left, and if the way he’s holding that spiked slushy is any indication, he’s going to suck up every last drop.



In New Orleans you can legally guzzle booze in the open streets. You can do that in Vegas too, but it’s different there.

Vegas is manufactured fun, a paid escort with a plastic body. Vegas will give you a blow job while stealing your wallet and the clothes off your back. New Orleans has a big, dizzying smile that’s missing a few teeth. New Orleans will dance with you, a hip swinging, blunt-toking, bottle-swigging dance, then she’ll straddle you and squeeze you with her thighs and kiss you so sadly, she’ll leave your throat dry and croaking for more. I can’t blame my partner for wanting to spend his vacation there.

Portland is a pretty white woman who is naked but just wants to talk politics.

In Portland, my Anglo/Spanish skin is leaning heavily toward the Anglo side. Sometimes, when the sun peeks from its gray-fleece blanket of sky, I sit on my balcony and roll up my sweatpants and spook myself with the otherworldly glow of my own legs. In Spain, Brazil, or Central America, or even in Russia during the summer, they were the color of café con leche.

In Portland, I am a woman who wears a bathrobe in her off-time. A person who curls up on the couch with her laptop, Fluffy, and shushes her partner when he interrupts her creative flow with his singing.

In Portland, I am a person who has traded restaurant work for a counter/bar job that doesn’t pay enough for quasi-spur-of-the-moment trips to New Orleans, but which also doesn’t leave her feeling like a used sock at the end of the day.

Even though my partner is away, I still sleep on the right side of the bed. My routines are even more solidified now that he’s not around. Like usual, I come home from work at two-thirty in the morning and cook dinner to the muffled backtrack of hollering from across the street where the bars are letting out.

I have three days off, so I resolve to utilize the time and space left by my partner’s absence to Do Some Writing.



On the first day, this means staying inside the apartment in my bathrobe. I don’t want to walk the three drizzly blocks to buy a new box of wine, so I drink leftover cooking masala while watching YouTube tutorials on how to dye your hair with Kool-Aid.

Mostly the tutorials say, “Put water in Kool-Aid, and Kool-Aid on hair.” All the girls in the tutorial videos are very young, which makes me feel a bit silly, a woman in her thirties attempting her first DIY food-based hair dye. I start out using finesse, but quickly grow impatient and soon there are black cherry spatter stains all over my sink and toilet. Black cherry looks remarkably like blood.

Jim Jones killed a whole bunch of people with Kool-Aid back in the day. They say he added cyanide but after seeing what Kool-Aid does to porcelain and hair, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was just Kool-Aid.

In a few hours, on the bus, my fellow passengers will randomly start discussing Jim Jones and Kool-Aid. I’ll hear one young black woman say, “They didn’t think they were quacks.” Later on, as the conversation progresses naturally, she’ll say about the current president, “Most tyrants are voted in.”

I ride the TriMet five days a week and I’ve never heard people on the bus discuss Kool-Aid before. I wonder if this is synchronicity, or whether maybe with the current politics, people are becoming more concerned about drinking from the common bowl.



It’s my second day off. I would write, but work has scheduled me to attend a first aid class because they’ve somehow roped me into an assistant manager position, and this is part of my training.

I have had four hours of sleep when I get to the classroom. The first aid instructor is a retired EMT wearing a wrinkled, army-green T-shirt, khaki shorts, and a baseball cap. He introduces himself to the class as Jim or Joe—I’m not awake enough to catch it. Then he opens by describing the expression of death.

“It’s really disturbing,” he says, leaving it to my overachieving imagination to fill in the visual details.

I feel faint, slide lower in my chair. The instructor removes his baseball cap, exposing a naked, asymmetrical patch of skin on one side of his head. He says they shaved his head as part of some life-saving procedure after his body attacked him one day without warning. He looks straight at me when he says, “This stuff can happen to anyone.”

Properly shaken, I focus all my attention on the talking points.

For heart attack, give aspirin to thin the blood. Simple enough. But with stroke victims, aspirin could kill them. Fuck! You gotta recognize the symptoms. The symptoms for stroke sound like most people I know when they’ve been drinking: confusion, slurred speech, difficulty seeing with one or both eyes.

Then the instructor teaches us how to identify the signs of heart failure: shortness of breath, rapid heartbeat, dizziness. I begin experiencing all these things, then have this horrifying premonition that I will faint here in class and wake up on the floor with my classmates pumping on my bare chest.

“You have to rip the shirt off. It doesn’t matter. Man, woman, child, you gotta make those buttons fly.”

The room spins.

He’s talking about CPR now, where to place your hands on the patient’s chest in order to keep the blood pumping. There’s a term for it: the nipple line.

“Of course,” the instructor acknowledges, “nature happens, and the nipple line will change over the years.” He says we are to use our best judgment and position our palms where that line should reasonably be.

In my notebook, I draw out the words The Nipple Line, drawing a sagging smile under each i. The act of doodling serves to center me.

Now that I’m not in immediate danger of passing out, I begin to notice the finer details of my environment. Things like the royal-purple hair of one classmate a few seats up, or the bird-shit-looking stain on the CPR dummy in front of my station, smack dab in the center of the nipple line. I stare at the questionable glob for long minutes, frozen by indecision. Finally, when I think no one is looking, I make a furtive swap, trading out the gross dummy for the more sanitary looking model beside it. A classmate sees and I feel a touch of guilt.

But not enough, because now we are practicing CPR on our dummies. We tilt the plastic heads and blow into the mouth, then lock our fingers over the nipple line and pump hard enough to hear the imaginary ribs snap. The snapping and popping will tell you you’re doing it right, the instructor says, don’t worry about breaking a rib or two, we’re concerned with saving lives.

Then he plays the Bee Gees song “Stayin’ Alive” because if we match our chest compressions to the ’70s disco beat, we’ll be within the standard heart range of about 100 beats per minute. The instructor walks around inspecting and when he sees someone really going for it, he cheers them on loudly, “That’s good CPR!”

After lunch, he goes into lecture mode. He talks about how the medical standards will change to match the needs of the times.

There has been a major spike in death by overdose, he says, thanks to a drug called Fentanyl, which is fifty times stronger than heroin. Because of Fentanyl, legislation is being pushed to sell a life-saving drug called Narcan over the counter.

What the instructor doesn’t tell the class but that I know from reading is that Fentanyl is a pharmaceutically manufactured and legally prescribed drug.

This makes me wonder about the FDA, why things like marijuana are still illegal on the federal level, and yet things like Kool-Aid is called food and Fentanyl, a drug fifty times stronger than heroin, is legally manufactured and actively prescribed.

The instructor also says that tourniquets are back in. He says they can still cause blood clots and death but they’re back on the standard because with all the mass shootings, first responders need to act quickly to stop all the blood.

This is important stuff; I should be taking notes. Instead, I flip to a new page and draw a cartoon of the planet Earth. My Earth has stick-figure knees, a big, imperfect circle of a head between them, and a speech bubble that says, “Dude, I got the spins.”

The instructor shows how to give CPR to a baby, using only two fingers instead of the palms.

I look down at my Black Cherry Kool-Aid hair, feeling faint again.

A text comes in from my boyfriend: “Love you boo.” It’s the first time he’s said that since arriving in NOLA two days ago, and I imagine he’s well sloshed, but I text back quickly, “Love U 2, boo,” because now sudden death is on my mind.

 

I return home around my usual breakfast time in the mid-afternoon. I should change back into my bathrobe and do some writing, but I feel like celebrating even though all I really accomplished was making it there and back and not fainting in class.

I go to the little neighborhood corner store for some wine.

The man who runs the store is a kind gentleman who keeps magnum bottles of champagne cool in the refrigerator. I suspect he does this just for me, since when I first moved to the neighborhood three years ago and started buying magnum bottles of champagne in his store, they were warm on the shelf.

The man always smiles and initiates polite conversation about the weather.

“Weather is so-so,” he will say.

I will say, “Right? It’s rain, then sun.”

He will say, “Yeah.”

English isn’t his first language. He has that genuine kind of smile that I recognize from people around the world who have experienced pain and I think he has a lot better stories to talk about than the weather. Still, I always leave his little world feeling cheerful.



Crossing the street with my bottle of wine, I wave at the vintage store lady, even though the sun is glaring on the window and I can’t see her inside.

The woman is generally scowling when I notice her at the bar next door. She and her crew like to set up in the smoking lounge like territorial alley cats and pointedly ignore incoming smokers. Once though, when I was drunk enough to have left my purse outside without realizing it, she walked by my table and set it down in front of me without saying a word.

Inside her store, she’s like the village bard, full of stories about the neighborhood and its past.

For instance, the apartment complex that just went up across the way took the place of a long-standing steak restaurant where all the older gay men used to hang out.

“I miss that place,” she said once, shooting eye-daggers at the shiny new building.

I have my own reasons for disliking the new complex: At four stories, it is now on eye-level with my apartment, which means I’m now forced to be an exhibitionist when I go out on my balcony to sunbathe in the nude.

Inside the vintage store, on the wall over the register is a framed foldout from an old Good Housekeeping magazine. The foldout shows illustrations of a woman in bell bottoms performing various stages of a squat routine. The caption says, seriously, “How to get a Flatter Bottom.”

Last time I was in there, I pointed it out, laughing, and the woman said, “I know, right? Nowadays bubble-butts are all the rage.” She then added, “Of course, the woman is blonde, and white.”



I really should do some writing, or at least stay home so that I can do some writing tomorrow. But I am amped up from having escaped dying in first aid class and the sun seems to have decided to stay out.

I call my friend Kat just to see what she’s up to and maybe grab some food. Within the hour, in true get-up-and-do-it Kat fashion, she’s over at my place. Kat’s starving, but first she needs to send off a few work emails. Kat is a sales marketer for newly-required technology for weed growers, or something that I don’t exactly grasp.

Years ago in Florida, Kat, three other girlfriends, and I spent the night in jail after a bicycle cop arrested us for open container and a marijuana joint while we were parked outside a nightclub. I remember that another one of my friends was just getting into social activism. She was the youngest of us all and rather naive. She made a comment like, “I don’t feel like we’re in America anymore.” The rest of us told her to shut up, but it was too late. The cop called for backup and we got patted down, handcuffed, and tossed into the paddy wagon.

On the way to jail, while we were handcuffed in the back, the police actually—I kid you not—played the song “I’m Proud to be an American” over the speakers.



When I met Kat twelve or so years ago, we were both interns at Disney World. Back then, the security guards at our dorm complex called us “Trouble and trouble,” and we both vied for the one with the capital T. Even though we’ve both calmed down a little since then, my head barely brushes her armpit when I’m wearing heels, and she is a loud-ass, smoking blonde Leo so sometimes I overcompensate to resist the role of “sidekick.”

At my favorite Indian restaurant, I order two entrees to her one. The previous owner’s daughter really improved the place. Before, when Kat and I wanted to catch up, we tended to rule out this traditional family restaurant with the best Indian food in town. They never used to play music and furnishings were sparse, so our tales of hookups and parties gone weird and the state of our bank accounts landed loudly for all to hear. Now, there is a pleasant, if low, tang of sitar tunes in the background, and the tables are full.

The daughter times out the courses, starting with my usual spinach Saag Aloo.

We talk about work, and how I am trying to find more gender-neutral ways of addressing groups of people I don’t know, outside of the go-to, “guys.”

I tell Kat about first aid class even though she used to be a lifeguard at Disney World and knows it well. Still, it’s been ten-plus years since then, so she can’t know about the Narcan and the tourniquets and why they’re back in the standard because of the overdoses and the shootings. Also, I’ve realized that I tend to take conversations dark.

---

  And she said something I’ve remembered since: “In Portland, you can have anything you want, all you have to do is ask.”  

---

Kat tells me about her promotion and the contracts she’s landed for her marijuana software and I can’t help but think that she is a model of American gumption, turning a jail-issue jumpsuit into a business suit and so forth.

I ask Kat if she wants another drink, but don’t push the issue when she says she needs sleep.

We both know that if asked again, she’d forget about her fancy sales job and 6 am conference calls and do a shot, which would lead into another shot and then, we might stay up all night with strangers and blow and might think it’s a great idea to go skinny dipping, and ride the whole thirty-five minutes (because our new friend’s driving fast) out to the river where we decide it’s too cold for skinny dipping and drive back, getting out once to smoke a bowl on a grassy patch of hill where joggers in pink baseball caps are just starting their morning run. We’re fond of each other’s company like that.

We tip well, and the daughter says, “Thanks, guys,” as we leave.



I’m at the bar next to my apartment.

Kat has gone home and I should do the same. But I don’t. There’s a good band playing downstairs, according to Calyx, the bartender.

I owe Calyx. When we first moved to the neighborhood a few years ago, my partner brought her and another bartender over to our apartment for post-close drinks. We skipped the introductions and wound up talking story into the dawn like we’d been pirates together in another life. It was that shift-change time of day where the leaves turn rose-gold in the rising sun and the dark high-fives the light in passing.

And she said something I’ve remembered since: “In Portland, you can have anything you want, all you have to do is ask.”

Now Calyx is a cynical, cigarette-smoking bartender who has perfected her bar stare to intimidate would-be troublemakers into sheepish deference, who uses copious amounts of hair product and is not a starry-eyed new-age type. But she said it like that, like a sage or a genie, “Anything you want.”

And just then, as if to prove her point, the boys came out with a jumbo bottle of champagne and a tray of deviled eggs.

I saw a billboard recently on Burnside street where the bus lets me out for work. It says, “You can’t call yourself a feminist if you eat eggs.”

Calyx has been dealing with depression. She tells me this as she makes my Hot Toddy after I ask what’s been going down.

“Oh, just work and staving off depression,” she says, even though there’s a poster on the wall of her big hair in profile, advertising the comedy show she organizes and performs in. The show is called You Don’t Know Me, and it’s true, we don’t know each other outside the bar and that one time on my balcony and the fact that she always steps out from behind the bar to give me a hug.

My face generally lands in Calyx’s boobs and our hugs sometimes inadvertently feel like motorboating, so our greetings have evolved into high fives instead.

But here’s the thing. Since I spoke with Calyx in that rose-gold dawn, I’ve started asking for more—of the city, of myself, of my ambitions. I’ve learned how to ask: through honest reflection, by making to-do lists and checking them off, one by one. I asked by joining writing groups, by pushing myself into uncomfortable scenarios, hearing my voice wobble even as it continued to ask. The answers came in jobs unexpectedly lost and different ones gained. I got rejection letters, enough to wallpaper my bathroom, a lot of nos, some yeses. I’ve continued to ask, and sometimes the asking means I must sacrifice a vacation and stay home while others go. Sometimes the answer is found in a T.S. Eliot line, “We shall not cease from exploration.” Sometimes the answer whispers you don’t always have to travel to explore.

I go downstairs to check out the band and tell Calyx I’ll report back, even though we both know it probably won’t be tonight.



I look around for the bartenders I know like family. It’s only been a month since I started going out less, but they are nowhere in sight. Come to think of it, even the door guy was new.

I compliment a woman younger than me on her jacket, knowing full well that the old proverb says, “Compliment someone on their fashion and you are responsible for their well-being all night.”

Later, she will slur a little when she tells me she has lost her friends. I’ll imagine the first aid instructor from class saying, “Stroke! Call 911.” I’ll call her a Lyft, instead.

Calyx is right about the band being lit. It’s a battle of the bands, actually. Two of Portland’s finest funk bands, duking it out with instruments. I sit on a stool against the back wall, trying to see if I recognize anyone in the crowd. I don’t. Everyone is smiling though. Someone up in the front row keeps spilling their drink. Every time a drop spills, the lights from the stage briefly catch the falling liquid in a dazzling, ephemeral flash like sun on diamond.

It occurs to me that it doesn’t matter how many brass bands are playing in New Orleans, because here, in this space, there are two. And here, in this moment, the two bands are playing together and the notes that they make may never be heard this way again. I am alive now, and I am in this space, in this moment, hearing these two bands make impossible sounds. And even if my speech is slurred like someone having a stroke, I can still move my legs.

I leave my jacket on the bar stool and step up to the floor. The vibrations grab me like a bestie with her hands out.

Once, in Spain, I saw a man stomp the flamenco so wildly, the sweat flung from his body, I felt it on my face like rain.

Tomorrow, with my head pulsating like Morse code, I’ll text my boyfriend, “Excited for all the good things and grateful for you.”

Later, some guy will high-five me, saying, “Damn, you really brought the vibes.”

Tomorrow, with the vibes still reverberating through my cells, I’ll ignore the hammering in my head and write until my wrist feels like it may drop off, and even then, I will not be able to stop.

But tonight, my feet start shuffling all over the puddled floor. My hips plunge into the offbeat. I notice vaguely how the characters around me adjust their movements to match my strange rhythm. I am no longer a white girl alone at the bar, but part of a swirling, grinding, many-tentacled organism with one massive, beating heart. The music picks up to match our speed, our hips and arms and legs respond.

At a hundred-plus pumps a minute, I can hear the first aid instructor cheering, “That’s good CPR!”



Photo credit: k_tjaaa via Flickr, CC BY 2.0. 

Vix Gutierrez grew up living and learning in more than twenty countries. She has a B.A. in journalism from Northern Arizona University and recently attended Disquiet International in Lisbon. Today Vix lives in Portland, where she loves to participate in workshops, readings, and literary events. Her work has appeared in The Timberline Review, NAILED, Thru magazine, and on loose scraps of paper here and there.