but you don't really care for music do you?

It was Wednesday. Wednesday meant “wellness meetings”, the once a week session of sunshine being shoved into our lives whether we could handle it or not. Worse yet there were visitors for this particular wellness meeting. Two young men and a young woman. They had been hanging around for the last couple of weeks and were soon to be leaving no doubt. People like them never stick around for too long.

I had seen them before. Smiling and glad-handing the others who were infected just like I was. They would insist on talking, always talking. Asking everyone how they were doing. We’re dying, that’s how we’re doing. Dying alone at that, so kindly take your crocodile tears and remarks about the heat and the rain back to wherever you came from. You aren’t going to get to me. I’m nobody’s fool and I’m certainly not your fool.

It’s not that I don’t think they can’t help. It’s that I know that they can’t help me. I see how Glori has taken a shine to them. They’ve even got to Mark. Yesterday I walked by them playing cards and laughing. “We got some card players here! Yes sa’, some card playin boys from Chicago!” Mark would exclaim. They would sheepishly grin and spot Glori and Mark 50 cents to keep playing after they cleaned them out. The girl was sitting off to the side of them, fingers pecking at her guitar strings and smiling.

I heard there was a secret chord / that David played and it pleased the Lord

“Hey there Mr. Michael,” Gloria said to me.

“Hi Glori,” is all I could muster as a response I walked into House #4. The House for the people who weren’t going anywhere anytime soon. I needed to lie down. I slept the rest of the day until dinner. After dinner I went back to bed and didn’t wake up until Mr. Nathan woke me up for the wellness meeting the next day.

“Get up sleepy head,” he said, his thick lisp in full effect on the “s” of sleepy. From the first time I heard him speak it was no secret to me how he had ended up here.

The wellness meeting was to run for an hour. A lot of sharing and expressing and talking about our feelings. It was good for some of them I’m sure. Most of us just sat off to the side and didn’t participate and looked out the window. We didn’t have to participate in the activities if we didn’t want to. Doing things you didn’t want to do was contrary to the spirit of wellness meetings. I walked in a little late. Metal chairs shuffled across the floor as my fellow victims cleared a spot for me.

“Hi Mr. Michael, how are we feeling today?” Bonnie asked, her silver hair blending in with her white tunic at the shoulders.

“My back hurts, but other than that I’m grand,” I said with a wry smile.

Bonnie was a mouse of a woman. She was all bones and hard angles. Thin enough to be one of us. Bonnie’s background was in health services. She loved helping people. That’s why she came here once a week to lead us in arts and crafts and finger painting or group bongo sessions. She was soft spoken and inaccessibly polite.

“Well lets get you a pillow for that boney butt of yours,” she said with a smile. “Could someone get a pillow for Mr. Michael?”

Someone did and I wedged it between that boney butt of mine and the hard metal of the chair. “Much better, thanks a million,” I said.

Well your faith was strong but you needed proof / you saw her bathing on the roof / her beauty and her moonlight overthrew you

Bonnie introduced the three of them- the two young men and the one young woman. She said that they would be sitting in on the meeting if that was okay with everyone else and that if anyone had any problems with them being there that they would understand and leave.

“Oh no they can stay,” said Mr. Nathan, shoveling popcorn into his mouth. Grease and butter caked his fingers.

“Shoot, I like them more than I like most of y’all,” said Charles. Charles thought of himself as the elder statesman of all the patients. He certainly had been here a long time, but he didn’t command a lot respect. Even so, with Charles’ blessing, they were allowed to stay.

She really was quite stunning, I have to admit. She walked in behind the two boys, her guitar slung over her soft shoulders. Everything about her seemed soft. Her hair was dyed wonderfully so I would never know its true color. She kept her hair short and tussled; there was white band that rested amongst the soft curls. She had piercing blue eyes, eyes that could save a man if she would let them. She wore a ring in her nose and beads of every color around her neck. A low cut blouse hinted at her breasts. Everywhere she went it was lighter.

The wellness meeting went as they always did. Bonnie spoke softly about different things we do when we feel sad, who we turn to for support, things like that. I propped my head up on my hand and looked at the floor. There were stock answers from the room. Talk to friends, go for a walk, listen to music. Who cares? I closed my eyes but couldn’t sleep.

Baby I’ve been here before / I’ve seen this room and I’ve walked this floor / I used to live alone before I knew you

Bonnie, keenly sensing that she was loosing the room to apathy, decided to incorporate our guests into the discussion.

“So what have you guys gotten out of this experience? Being down here and meeting these people?” Bonnie asked.

More stock answers. “The people are amazing. I’ve never done anything like this before and it’s been really rewarding. Really cool to meet all of you.”

“Yeah, I mean, this has really been eye-opening you know? I’m definitely going to remember this for the rest of my life.”

“Definitely, you guys are all awesome and I feel so blessed that I got to spend some time with all of you.”

I couldn’t help myself. That was too much for me. I lifted my head from my hand. “Look, we’ve done this before. We’ve all been here and groups and people like you come down and we meet you and we like you.”

They smiled at this.

“But,” I continued, “it’s hard for us. We get attached and get to really like you and then you leave us and we’re left here alone. It’s really lonely,” I said, trying to keep my voice from trembling.

“I…” I started but gave up and shook my head. They had been looking at me but now they turned their eyes to the floor. They may have been earnest and well intentioned but that didn’t make it right and I wanted them to know it.

“You just come into our lives and leave,” I said. Shit, I thought. I’m in my 60s, I have AIDS, my friends and family are all gone and the best these kids can come up with is, really cool to meet all of you?

“But we really love having you,” Glori said. Saving them and probably saving me from being the villain. “Mr. Michael is right. But I’ve really enjoyed you guys. Julie, will you sing a song for us?”

“Yes,” Bonnie practically came out of her chair at the prospect of a song. Surely music would clear out the tension that was seeping from my chair into the rest of the room. “Would you mind terribly dear?”

“Sure. I would love to,” she said, strangely unaffected by the storm I had caused. She smiled and the room exhaled. She slung her guitar around her pretty shoulders and rested her guitar on her pretty thighs.

Well there was a time when you let me know / what was really going on below / but now you never show that to me do you

I couldn’t tell you what the first two songs she sung were. She took requests from the room and when the angel sung the room opened up. Slowly people started nodding and bobbing their heads. More and more they tapped their toes and whispered the words they knew. Mr. Nathan, never one to be bashful started singing along with her. People smiled and joined in on the verses they knew. When she finished the room around me clapped and fawned over her.

“See I told you!” Gloria said, slapping Mark on his bicep. “I told you she could sing!”

“That was beautiful,” said Mr. Nathan, popcorn still stuck in his teeth.

“Thanks for singing along with me,” she said as light came pouring from her eyes. “You guys want another one?”

People kicked around ideas for the next song. She sheepishly downplayed Charles’ praise that she was better than anyone on the radio.

“Remember the name,” said Mark. “You’re going to be a star. With those eyes and that voice. You’re going to make it baby girl.”

She smiled and her white wings started to spread.

“Do you guys know Hallelujah?” she asked.

But remember when I moved in you / and the holy dove was moving too / and every breath we drew was hallelujah

She started in on the song, slowly at first, gently toeing the water of her voice. Hinting at more and the room begged for it.

Well maybe there’s a god above

Her voice grew stronger and people closed their eyes and leaned back in their chairs, tossing their heads with the melody.

But all I ever learned from love

She was alone in the room now. The two young men and Bonnie and Charles and Mr. Nathan and Mark and Gloria and everyone else, they were all somewhere else. Their eyes were glassy with memories of the past.

Was how to shoot somebody who outdrew you

Her voice, my God her voice. The veins in her neck strained but she kept going. Impossibly, she kept going. Her voice was all there was.

It’s not a cry that you hear at night

The room was filled with white as her pale wings wrapped around us.

It’s not somebody who has seen the light

She was taking them with her. Her white wings drying their wet eyes and lifting them up with her. She was going to take them all with her great pale wings and pretty hair and soft shoulders. They were all leaving me on the sound of her voice.

It’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah

And I watched them go. Flying overhead, shrouded in angel wings and light. And I, I just put my head down on the table and started to cry.

Hallelujah

Working Title: NOLA

We were coming up from the bayou, but it felt more like we were coming back from the edge of the world. Three weeks earlier we had followed the twists and turns of Mississippi from St. Louis downstream to New Orleans. The closer we got to the Gulf the deeper the road beneath our Lexus sunk. It was a slow and exhilarating decline as water encroached on the shoulders of the road and funneled us down to the sea. Now we were resurfacing and I was having a hard time finding my breath.

I told people that I was going to down to volunteer, to re-paint houses, put roofs on wind blasted shacks, and see what was still there. I was a chivalrous product of Jesuit education. I was a man for others. Or that’s what I told people at least. Secretly, I had intended to make New Orleans the salvation of my summer. A cure-all for not finding work, the failing health of my grandfather, and the deep rut I had worked myself into. I would give back to New Orleans, New Orleans would give back to me.

And to my surprise, it worked. My roommate and I would arrive on work sites early in day when the heat was a slightly less oppressive. I would sweat out my troubles under the low hanging Louisiana sun and smile with my fellow volunteers during the day. We would come back to the bunk house in the evenings a jockey for the first shower. There would be big pots of jambalaya for dinner at the house or we could go out and inhale shrimp po’ boys or gumbo. During the weekends we would bar hop on Frenchman Street; beckoned into the next bar by a wailing trumpet or the raspy wail of heartbroken singer. Groups of volunteers would come and go. A group of fifteen would be replaced by a group seven by the end of the week. Days turned into weeks and we went from the wide-eyed newcomers to the elder statesmen of bunkhouse.

During that time I got to know New Orleans. I would stumble through the French Quarter, my drunken feet catching on the cobblestones. At the waterfront I would admire the same river that ran through my city some seven hundred miles to the north. I worked in the Ninth Ward and tried on a daily basis to decode what had been hit by a catastrophe of Mother Nature and what had just been ravaged by poverty.

One afternoon after work we went to the lower Ninth. Shielded behind a new levee were a dozen ultra modern, eco-friendly houses on stilts courtesy of Brad Pitt. Beat up Chevys and Cadillacs were parked underneath the six figure homes. The same poor people who lived in the lower Ninth before Katrina won a lottery and got to move back to where their houses once stood.

The Brad Pitt Houses overlooked both the river that crippled their city and the graveyard that Katrina left behind in the lower Ninth. While one side of the street gleamed with the generosity of a celebrity the other side told another story. Occasionally I could see brick and mortar of a foundation to a home that was no longer there. More often the scene was that of a broken sidewalk leading up to nothing but tall grass. Katrina had struck down the homes and now Mother Nature was growing up, over, and through the rubble she had left behind.

We drove slowly, squaring block after block of tall grass and loose brick. No one spoke. I couldn’t bring myself to take a picture. We all said we were going to come back another time, but none of us did. This too, was New Orleans, and this too I learned to love.

And so I smiled. I met new people. I did good work, explored, drank, and ate. I was happy again. New Orleans saved my summer and maybe more, it was exactly what I needed it to be. So it was no surprise that as we sped northward towards St. Louis my stomach churned. I was leaving an answer, a solution to a problem I didn’t really understand.

As we plunged back towards real life I felt like I had to bear the same carry-on luggage of melancholy that came with me on my flight back from my semester in Spain and my move from my home in Colorado to Ohio as a high school student. I was leaving something real and good, to place that only had questions. Senior year, graduation, real life, worry all built up like dangerous clouds in the north. The horizon sucked me back towards my life, and from the passenger seat there was no brake pedal in reach.