Yes, it was 1959 as I walked in today’s, the now’s, heat and steam bath….
I stand outside of Houston. A family of blacks pick me up, but say I must ride in their wobbling U-Haul. I do. They laugh back at me from their car as I try to balance. The heat hits. The fumes hit. They take me well east of Houston on old US 90.
Two ex-cons stop. They drive east to New Orleans. They talk their way out of cop trouble when we are stopped in a Cajun swamp by “the law.”
I walk in New Orleans’ hazy sunrise. Night and dawn are gone. One boarding house, no luck. The next, sure, a bed, as long as I’ll work in the coffee shop and refer men to the upstairs whore with her black and white porn flicks on a rickety projector. I get the bed and sleep all day before work.
The coffee house has a wall and on it, “Down is up!”
I stay a week, fall in and out of infatuation with dark-eyed and dark-haired Cajun girls – nursing students – out of the western swamps.
Just a week, time to ramble, and in two days I am by Lake Superior, as a guy pulls his Caddy over and says, “Drive me up to Duluth, Minnesota.” I do.
Yes, “Down is up!”
