The Best Four Years of Adam Becker - 3. Freshman Year - Chapter 3

I waited down on the corner, in front of Tropical Isle. Brandon from Loyola was not there--I couldn't pick him out of the crowd either. I knew tourists still hadn't returned to the city, at least in the numbers that had flooded in before the storm, but it looked crowded enough to me. Out in front of the bars were Christian picketers, holding up melodramatic signs: "Go to hell fornicators, sodomites, abortionists." "Jesus hates you, sinners." The like.

Two blonde girls, drenched in beads and daiquiris, were making out in front of the "Gays burn in hell!" guy, diligently photographed by a giggling group of male friends, also holding daiquiris. I wondered if they were a pair of lesbians, a couple, or if it was some sort of silly Bourbon Street stunt. They all drunkenly locked arms afterwards, amid the shouted promises of damnation, and scooted down Bourbon in good spirits; I couldn't tell.

Still no sign of Brandon, no text from him on my phone. I felt so exposed on the street corner like that, waiting for a hookup. I debated texting him, debated heading into another bar for cover, but then he texted me: "Need to take a rain check--long story. So sorry."

And I swore, I saw Michaela and Tripp and Jordan starting to come out of the bar—and I ran for it. I didn’t know why I ran for it, because there wasn’t anything especially incriminating. But I ran for it, weaving through the drunken revelers, with surprising dexterity.

And I found myself up on the next block, at the start of the gay part of Bourbon Street, across St. Anne Street. Which was not entirely by accident, but not entirely on purpose either.

It was abruptly darker, abruptly less crowded, and abruptly more uncomfortable. And I was just drunk enough where I, glancing around to make sure I had avoided a possible tail, that one of the gay bars sounded like a good idea.

So, in I went. And I went to the bar, and I sat by myself on one of the stools at the bar in the middle of the downstairs room, and I ordered myself a drink. It dawned on me that I should, in fact, go to talk to someone, maybe flirt, but I was so hopelessly bad at flirting that even drunkenly that didn’t seem like a good idea.
So I watched, instead, watched the two guys across the bar from me do some sort of gay mating dance: a gentle touch on one guy’s arms, a stroke, a laugh, a “would you like to go upstairs and dance?” which even I could tell was code for “let me hold you a little bit tighter.

Someone sat down next to me, a particularly cute someone, with dark brown hair cut short, thin but toned under his polo.

He didn’t look at me, and I didn’t look at him—I mean, I was looking at him, but I was careful to do so only out of the corner of my eye. He was methodical in getting the bartender’s attention, and ordering his drink—a whiskey and coke—and then paying for his drink. But then he didn’t leave.

“It’s crazy how small the crowds are,” he said, to no one in particular, except he wasn’t talking to no one in particular: he was talking to me, though it took me a few seconds to realize that.

I glanced over to him. “Oh?” I said, because what else could I say.

“Compared to before the storm,” he said. He smiled, a little bit shyly, but still with brimming confidence that I knew I definitely wasn’t conveying, especially in my drunken haze. “I mean, the crowds are picking up from last year at least, but you should’ve seen this place in 2005.” He paused. “You’re new. Freshman?”

“Yeah,” I said. “At, um, Loyola.”

“Oh,” he said. “Neighbors. I’m at Tulane Law. I’m Mark.”

“Adam,” I said, and I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to shake his hand, what sort of etiquette was required in a gay bar sort of acquaintanceship. Nothing seemed to be expected of me.

“I went to Loyola for undergrad too,” he said. “My sixth year in the city, if you can imagine that, aside from Katrina semester. All the guys are still in Buddig, right? How do you like it?”

I didn’t know at all what that meant, and I regretted lying about Loyola, because I felt that at any instant I could be exposed as the liar that I was.

“I like it,” I replied.

“Didn’t get a crazy roommate?” he asked. I shook my head. “That’s good. My roommate was this nasty homophone from po-dunk Georgia. I wan’t out at the time, so it didn’t really matter, but it’s awkward when I wanted to slip some guys in the room.”

“Same,” I lied, sensing an excuse to not show him my non-existent dorm room at the school I didn’t attend. “My roommate’s homophobic too. Or I get that vibe, at least. He’s from Pass Christian, Mississippi.”
“Those Southern boys,” he replied. “I swear, half of them are getting dick on the side.”

I felt instantly bad for using Tripp as a stand-in for a homophobic roommate, because I did not in fact get any whiff of homophobia from him. Though I certainly could not imagine Tripp getting any amount of dick on the side, as much as I had imagined fancifully in my head the thought of having a torrid, clandestine affair with my freshman roommate. Before I met Tripp.

“Definitely,” I told him.

“Are you here by yourself?” he asked.

“Oh,” I said. “I just stopped in for a drink. My friends and I were down the street.”

Mark smiled. He had a nice smile, very straight, very white teeth. “Came down here for a drunk bus, and ditched the friends with some pretext so you could cruise for cock?”

My own smile, at Mark’s accuracy, betrayed me, because he giggled. “Got it. We’ve all been there.” He leaned in, put his hand on my arm. “You know, drinks here are pretty expensive. And if we’re both going back uptown anyway, we could always have a drink at my place.”
My heart was suddenly pounding, and the smile I knew left my face, not because he wasn’t cute, and not because I wasn’t drunk and that this was, essentially, the best case scenario, but because of how sudden all of this had spilled into my lap.

I did not respond, but Mark was taking the initiative anyway. He grabbed my hand, and tugged at me slightly until I got off the bar stool, and I followed him outside, immediately dropping his hand once we reached the humid air of Bourbon Street.

“I’ll get us a cab,” he said. “Come on.”
I followed him down a side street—Bourbon Street was closed to cars—and a White Fleet car pulled up immediately.

“499 Pine Street,” he said. “Corner of Pine and Dominican, Uptown.”

The car took off, and I realized how bad of an idea it was to get into a cab with a guy I had met five minutes before at a gay bar, but there we were, buzzing uptown, along St. Charles, passing the mansions and passing Loyola and passing Tulane, and then turning onto Pine Street just past Audubon Park.

His house was a real person’s house: a small white cottage with a nicely-trimmed yard, not like any of the places I had seen being on campus. He was a second-year law student, which made him, what, 23, 24? Older than Philip. Much older than me, although in the scheme of life, not that much older than me.

We didn’t make it to a nightcap; he led me back in his room, and we were on each other, like magnets.

“Mm,” he said, as he put his hand on my bulge, which was already considerably hard in anticipation of this sort of event. “I want to suck you off.”

Like so many things, I didn’t actually protest, and he didn’t actually wait for a response; he got down to his knees, and he unzipped my shorts, and yanked them down to my knees. And then I felt his hot mouth engulf my dick, all at once, and oh, God, the pleasure was just so intoxicating.

I grabbed the back of his head, maybe just for leverage, as he pulsed in and out, and I realized that it had only been maybe thirty seconds or so but I felt the pressure rising, like I was about to burst at any minute.

“Stop, stop,” I told him, and he took my dick out of his mouth, just as I came over his face.
I was breathless. Mark showed no emotion, as he wiped his cheek with the back of his hand. “That was,” he said, “fast.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “It felt. It felt so good, and I didn’t know how to stop it.”

His mouth crept back into his nice smile, as he picked himself off the floor. “Got it. You’re young. It happens.” He paused, saw there was cum on his collar, and took off his shirt. He had a nice body—thin, but toned, the fine outlines of abs and ribs. “You’re eighteen, right?”

I nodded.

“Oh, good,” he said, as he unbuckled his pants. “It just hit me that, you know, freshmen, could be seventeen. Age of consent in Louisiana is sixteen anyway, but it’s gross, you know?” He pulled down his pants, and his dick popped out. It was considerable.

I didn’t exactly know what I was supposed to be doing, now that it seemed my biggest role was kind of done, but he sat down on the edge of the bed, and I followed.

He began jacking himself off, slowly at first, then faster, his eyes trained on me, and I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to join in, so I just wound up standing next to him, feeling incredibly awkward and incredibly uncomfortable, and it lasted maybe two or three minutes until he moaned and came on his stomach.

He smiled at me, as if nothing had happened. “Well, it’s pretty late. Think you can get back to Loyola from here?”

I glanced at the bedroom door, because I only knew roughly where we were, roughly near Audubon Park.

“Two blocks north is St. Charles,” he said. “Turn right. You’ll pass Tulane, and you’ll see the cathedral.”

And, as quickly as I had come, I left.

It had only dawned on me the next morning, when I woke up with a headache in a sun-drenched dorm room, Tripp moaning in hungover agony eight feet away, how reckless I had been. Mere weeks into freshman year. I was behaving recklessly, and I decided that I needed to stop before things went off the rails. No more mixing company. No more sneaking off when there was no easy alibi. Lesson had been learned; too smart for something stupid.

My new-found ban on not meeting eligible men outside of bedrooms did not preclude me from being on ManFind, technically, but I hadn't been logged on anyway since that night, out of shame or fear or some combination of the two. Three weeks. Twenty days, really. I counted each day like a sobriety chip.

It was only during small portions of the day when I thought about it at all--generally when I cranked one, eyes closed, sans-accoutrements. Otherwise, the days had begun to roll, gaining speed, spilling into the next. I'd wake up, I'd go to class. I'd have lunch with Michaela, Jordan, or Tripp, or some combination of the three, and then more class, and then I'd go home and I'd play Battlescar 3 with Erik, Tripp, Charlie, Justin, or whatever combination happened to be loitering in our room. Carve out time here and there to do homework, which seemed like the slenderest priority in my schedule. Wednesdays were Big Cup Night at TJ Quills, Thursdays were keg parties at the Iota Chi house, Friday, Saturday, drunk buses, Sunday football, Monday lapsed back to the beginning again.

It was sensational how busy I felt like I was, considering none of us seemed to do that much, day-to-day.

Case in point: “Do you want to go to Ben and Jerry’s?” Michaela asked, as we came out of our geology lab, a long afternoon of classifying rocks.
I had English 121 in ten minutes. But it was an intriguing prospect. Rocks had soured me on the rest of the afternoon.

“Where’s there a Ben and Jerry’s?” I asked.

“Metairie,” she said. “ I have my dance class at 4, so we won’t be too long. Jordan and I were going to drive over now.”

I'd only ever heard the legend of Michaela's car--a 1991 Chevy Suburban, slate gray, that her family owned on-and-off since. On-and-off because it had been stolen between the years of 1996 and 1999, before being serendipitously returned by the police after its years on the lam. By which time the Birdrocks had already replaced it with another Suburban, so the car was put out to pasture, an auxiliary vehicle for a few years, until bestowed upon Michaela's older brother, and then Michaela herself. The car was named Maxie.

"Like the pad?" I had asked.

"Like the General Hospital character," Jordan smirked.

"It was popular then," Michaela huffed.

Metairie seemed like an awfully long way to drive for ice cream. And an awfully dumb reason to cut class--it was only the beginning of October, true, but I’d maintained a perfect attendance record thus far. But I just shrugged, said, “Sure,” and we headed over to J.L. to get Jordan.

Freshmen weren’t allowed to have cars on campus, but she’d somehow managed to snag a city parking permit for the street. Michaela was amazingly adept at getting what she wanted--hot girl prerogative.

Her car, however, was not the kind of car I’d picture a girl like Michaela in. It was brutish and gigantic, like a battleship, dwarfing over the other cars on the block. But she felt right at home as she hoisted herself into the back seat. I went around to the passenger seat.

"Michaela doesn't like to drive," Jordan explained, as she settled herself into the driver's seat.

"I don't like to drive," Michaela echoed. She had pulled a compact out of her purse, and was fluffing her hair, as if we were going to impress anyone at a suburban Ben and Jerry’s in the middle of the day.

"So glad you're the one with the car then," I told her. The front seat of the Suburban was a bench--vintage like that--in gray cloth. There was a Vera Bradley bag filled with empty Dasani bottles, sitting between me and Jordan.

Jordan cranked on Maxie's wheezing engine. Regina Spektor, full volume, filled the car.

Then she turned her full attention to the road, putting the car into gear and gliding out of the parking space with surprising nimbleness. Then we were soaring, almost, towering high above the street, barely feeling the potholes, as we glided down Broadway.

I had never cut class before. English 121 had started three minutes ago, so I was officially on my way to delinquenthood. There was something freeing about it. I of course realized that cutting one college class, where the professor didn’t even take attendance, was pretty low on the scale of rebellion, but it was a rebellion nonetheless.

"Let's get Tripp!" Michaela announced, rather than suggested. "I’ll text him. Is he back in Sharp?"

"He's in Richardson," I said, checking my watch. "Should be about done with studio though."

"So, drive to Richardson?" Jordan asked.

I nodded; Michaela flipped her phone open, texted quickly, then went back to casually fluffing.

We were on the corner of Broadway and St. Charles. Jordan tore us left, across the neutral ground, into the downtown-bound lane.

"Aggressive," I remarked.

"You have to be aggressive driving this tank," she said. With a smirk, "You couldn't handle it."

There was no way I could handle driving the Suburban, but I certainly wasn't going to admit to that.

We pulled up into Gibson Circle, at the front of campus--the serene entryway to the Academic Quad, under the live oaks. Jordan parked in a metered space without paying--"We'll only be five seconds," she said, forcing the car’s gear into park, apparently against its will.

Jordan and I led the way; Michaela was now fixing her mascara, some fifteen feet behind us.

"I've never been in Richardson," Jordan told me, as we headed down the past path Dinwiddie Hall, towards the architecture building.

"It's nice," I said. "I've only been once. Tripp needed a sandwich at, like, midnight."

"I'm so glad I'm not an architecture major," Jordan said. "Although bio is kicking my ass already." She shook her head. "I took AP Bio and everything--I've done it before, but it's just such a time commitment to learn everything. You know?"

I didn't really know. Undeclared was pretty lackadaisical, all things considered.

"Erik seems to be handling bio pretty well. Doesn't complain."

"Yeah," she said, rolling her eyes. "If I put in the time Erik did, I don't think I'd complain either. Dr. Morris didn't even know his name last week--how sad is that? It's October."

I hadn't put very much thought into Erik's truancy record. He was in our room conspicuously often, playing Battlescar 3, now that I thought about it. But Jordan was a serial complainer--she was an admitted Semitic stereotype in that regard. Erik was the kind of guy who could coast by on his smarts and his poise, maybe. The kind of guy that didn't need to put in long hours in the library to get ahead. I did not float that theory in front of Jordan.

We got to Richardson, and Tripp was sitting on the stoop, eating a slice of Boot pizza, which I'd never seen anyone attempt in the daylight.

"You'll spoil your appetite for Ben and Jerry's," Jordan told him.

"Mm," he grunted, his mouth full. He pointed to his lips, took a few melodramatic bites, then swallowed. "No, I can't go. I have so much shit to do before tomorrow."

"An hour," Michaela suggested, appearing behind us, mirror now closed and returned to her purse. "Just an hour.'

"I wish I could," he said. He took another bite of pizza and, mouth half-full, finished, "I have a review tomorrow, and I'm seriously going to be pulling an all-nighter as it is."

I would've rolled my eyes at that, except Tripp did pull his fair share of all-nighters--two already, and we'd only been in school about six weeks. He was fantastically busy with architecture classes and studio; his shelf in our room had begun to fill up with little rudimentary first year models, which he was immensely proud of.

"We'll bring you back some," Jordan suggested.

Tripp's face cracked into a small smile--relief, almost, at one kernel of decent news in what I could only imagine was a horrific day. "Brownie Batter? Large?"

"Woah there," I said, throwing my hands up, smile on my face. "Not made of money, bud."

Erik would have made a joke about my family’s largesse--though it was always worth noting little of that trickled down to me at this point--but Tripp received gluttonously large checks from Miss Julia and Junior.

"Fine, a medium," he amended. "Thanks, you guys."

We piled back into the Suburban, Jordan still driving, and took off for the suburbs. The last time I'd been in a car, other than a cab, had been my mom's rental in August. And I hadn't crossed out of Orleans Parish since that last trip to Target with her.

The city started to fall apart as we headed further up Claiborne Avenue, uptown lakeside of Tulane. We couldn't have gone more than a mile away from campus, but everything started looking endemically rough: destroyed houses, water marks on the sides of the still-empty buildings. It'd been, by this point, fourteen months since the storm, and looked like it had blown through yesterday. Just a mile away from our relative oasis in Uptown.

"It's on Vets," Michaela said from the backseat. She had finished with her grooming regimen; she was now leaning on the back of the front seat, hands slung around each of our headrests for balance. "Turn right.'

"I know," Jordan said, putting the turn signal on, ready to turn onto Hamilton Street, in what looked like a terrifying neighborhood. "Don't back seat drive."

Michaela didn't move; she just turned to me, like a tour guide, and said: "This is Hollygrove. Where Lil' Wayne's from."

That was not at all reassuring.

Michaela settled back into the back seat, and we moved continually onward, past the broken homes. The Katrina scars ran deep still, in Hollygrove. There was one house lived in, or at least occupied, and it didn't look that much different from the rest of them, except for a shallow breath of life; two small black boys sat on the stoop, staring at us, the only car passing down Hamilton Street, blasting Regina Spektor out the open windows.

When we came for my second Tulane tour--there was one before the storm, and one after; my parents insisted I go back to make sure I didn't have to canoe to class--my dad and I had conducted our own driving tour of the Lower Ninth Ward, which kept being thwarted by houses in the middle of the road, to the chagrin of our GPS. That was the end of January, right after Tulane had reopened post-storm. There were blue tarps on every house, hardly any people still; the city was only just beginning to spring to life. And by the city, I meant the Quarter, the CBD, Uptown, Tulane. I hadn't thought there was anything else, at least anything that mattered. And when I came back in August, it was fine--the city was emptier than it had been, until the conventions started up again in the spring, but it was fine. I'd thought it was fine: the drunk buses, the bars, the beautiful lawns of the Academic Quad, Newcomb Quad, Monroe Quad. It was fine, until you ventured in a little deeper.

"You forget it's not all like Uptown," I noted. Jordan and Michaela said nothing in response.

We turned at a sleazy-looking bar called Club Gemini--open for business, despite the state of the building and the neighborhood--onto Earhart Expressway, which shot us out into the suburbs, towards Veterans Highway.

It was an awfully long drive for ice cream. Thirty minutes, by the time we pulled into the empty parking lot, but it still beat English 121. The shopping center was on one of those depressing suburban strips, which would have been decaying even without hurricanes. The grim drone of ceaseless cars, the gray buildings, the cracked asphalt.

Inside the store, we could've been anywhere: Metairie, Hamlet, Vanuatu. We ordered our ice cream, we sat at a table on the sidewalk. It was still hot--not as gruesome as it had been a few weeks before, but still hot enough to enjoy ice cream outside.

“This is the life,” Jordan said. “Beats English 121?”

“Definitely,” I said. “I haven’t left the Tulane bubble since August.”

Michaela was tossing a chunk of ice cream cone at a pigeon, who wandered tentatively over to it, then snatched it up and flew away.

Jordan stared at her blankly and, in disbelieving monotone: “Oh my God, what are you doing?”

Michaela smiled; she hadn’t realized we were watching her. “You don’t feed the birds?”

“Pigeons,” Jordan corrected. “Rats with wings.”

They both looked at me to break the tie. I didn’t find feeding pigeons nearly as objectionable as Jordan did, but I wouldn’t feed them some of my ice cream cone. Limited commodity, and who knew when we’d make it back out to Ben and Jerry’s again.

I articulated my point.

“See this is the difference between Texans and coastal people,” Michaela told us, shaking her beautiful head, her fluffed hair knocking back and forth like a whip. “We’re friendly.”

“To pigeons,” Jordan clarified. “Yes, Texans are more friendly to pigeons. That I’ll give you.” She went back to her Vermonster.

“Vermonster,” I said, with a smile, reading the side of the cup. “That’s fun.”

Jordan erupted in laughter, threw back her head, cackling. I’d seen Jordan giggle, roll her eyes, smile, but I’d never seen such a gut laughter pour out of her like that. Over something that even I didn’t think was especially funny.

“I don’t know why I found that so funny,” she breathed, when she finally came-to enough to speak. “Vermonster! God!” She cracked up again, burying her face in her fist--and that inspired Michaela to start cracking up too.

“I’m not laughing at you,” she said, pointing to me, her voice strained. “I’m laughing at her.”

I didn’t understand why anyone was laughing. I gave them a narrow smile for moral support, but otherwise just waited for them to dial back down.

“You two are fun off campus,” I told them. And there was a certain looseness in the air--ditching class, shirking responsibilities, enjoying some ice cream. In high school, getting ice cream or going to the movies or grabbing a burger was all we did. A world pre-alcohol, as foreign as that seemed to me by this point. Grant Prendergast and Sarah Bernard and me, all of us hanging out, and even at the time it felt so ordinary, so lame. For whatever reason, the Metairie Ben and Jerry’s felt different to me.

“We’re fun everywhere, Adam,” Michaela told me. “Admit it--you’re glad you ditched class.”

I didn’t know why she was so accusatory. I’d never said I wanted to go to class. Given the choice of an impromptu social outing and sitting in a hot room discussing Paradise Lost, there was really no comparison. I was going to have to play hooky more often.

“Yeah, this is fun,” I said. “And now that I know you have a car...”

“She’s not the prettiest, but she’s my baby girl,” Michaela said, proudly. “My brother was so pissed that I took it, but whatever, his fifth year of a psych major at Southern Miss is not exactly endearing him to my parents right now.”

Trevor Birdrock was quite a character, at least as presented in Michaela’s stories. The Birdrocks seemed quite well-off, crappy Suburban aside--her dad was in oil, her mother collected museum board seats--but Trevor was the one they collectively enjoyed shitting all over. Loved, of course, but still the black sheep, banished to a Mississippi public school and de-Suburbaned.

“He has a new girlfriend,” Jordan told me, as if Trevor was part of her family instead of Michaela’s. “Sondra.”

“That’s with the elongated ‘O’ of the trailer park,” Michaela added. “She has blue hair and looks like she doesn’t believe in showers. Naomi is going to love that.”

Naomi Birdrock, Michaela’s mother, had grown up in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, home of Dollywood. I’d never met her, though I’d heard her on speakerphone once; she had a nasally Southern accent, an accent several rungs down the social ladder from Julia Callender’s glossy drawl, but in pictures she was every bit as well-appointed. Not unattractive, but oddly plain for having such a knockout daughter. She was a strange concoction: a hippie socialite, a dilettante artist with her husband’s credit card, a wafer-thin liberal with traditionalist views on hair color and hygiene. A driving force behind Michaela’s dance major, although what on earth was anyone going to do with that other than marry rich.

“Sondra,” I repeated. “Yeah, David and Catherine would probably die if I brought home someone with blue hair. Let alone the shower thing.”

“I know,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s probably a good match though. Trevor doesn’t really believe in showers either.”

Jordan giggled at that. She was feeling especially silly today--I was into it.

“Phil and Rita wouldn’t care,” Jordan said, “as long as he’s a member of the tribe.”

“Does that mean there’s no chance for us?” I asked, hand over heart, mock hurt.

Jordan grinned. “Oh, that ship sailed a long time ago, Becker.” She leaned back, cuddled up with her Vermonster. “Of course, how many blue-haired, non-showering Jews are there out there anyway? I don’t mean to play into the nebbish stereotypes, but let’s be real for a second.”

“Someday,” Michaela said, tossing another piece of waffle cone at a new pigeon, “you’ll find your blue-haired Jewish dreamboat.”

“My big brother did bleach his hair,” she said. “Ari. Only for an afternoon. My mom dragged him to her salon to have them dye it back. A Jew fro really does not look good in anything but brown.”

“Wait,” I said. “Your brother’s name is Ari?”

She looked at me for a second, quizzically, then shrugged. “Yeah, we’re that Jewish.”

“Ari,” I repeated, “Fleischer.”

She narrowed her eyes, looked back to Michaela, to see if she was missing anything obvious. Michaela shrugged, went back to her birds.

“Ari Fleischer was Bush’s old press secretary,” I said. “Your brother didn’t hang around D.C. about four years ago, did he?”

“When he was sixteen?” she said. “Probably. You know, he could’ve snuck down on the Acela on Thursdays when he said he was going to taxidermy club.”

“Double life!” I told her.

“Ooh, ahh,” Jordan agreed.

“I think we glossed over freaking taxidermy club,” Michaela said, hands held at full stop on either side of her body, disgusted scowl on her face. “I’m sorry, like, stuffing dead animals? That is the creepiest thing I’ve ever heard.”

Jordan smirked. “No pigeons. Don’t worry.”

We were running a little late for Michaela’s dance class, but she didn’t seem all that concerned. We piled back in the Suburban, Jordan driving again, and got back on the expressway.

We were almost back to campus, on Broad Place and Pine, when it happened. Etched into my memory, each second.

The light had turned green on Broad Place, and Jordan inched forward through the intersection. Across the intersection, this brown Lincoln, a tank of twenty-year-old American engineering, was charging towards us in slow motion, through the red light. Jordan slammed on the brakes and then, powerless, we all watched as the Lincoln continued to slink right at us, at no more than five miles per hour.

It was the iceberg scene from Titanic--the Lincoln wasn’t stopping, just slowing, slowing, and then finally dug into the side of the Suburban. Waiting. Michaela leaned forward, wrapped her hand around my headrest, and stared over my shoulder out the window.

Then: barely a jolt, but the tell-tale sound of crunching metal, Dasani bottles spilling out of the Vera Bradley bag.

“Shit,” Jordan said, throwing the car back into gear and pulling over on the side of Broad Place. The brown Lincoln pulled over to the other corner, on Pine.

I got out of the car first, to survey the damage. There was a big dent in the front fender, but it wasn't as bad as I was thinking. Car looked drivable, at least, although the dent was right over the wheel well. I knew absolutely nothing about cars, except how to drive one.

“Shit,” I said.

Jordan and Michaela had climbed out of the car, started surveying the damage too. Poor Maxie.

“I’m so sorry,” Jordan said. She was breathing heavily, starting to tear up. “I’m so, so sorry.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Michaela said. “They came right at us.” She winced, shook out her right hand a little bit. “I think I bent my thumb back on the armrest.”

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said. Grin on her face, she added, “Just shouldn’t have been bracing for impact with a thumb, right?” She gave me a makeshift thumbs up.

I grinned a bit at that. Michaela was awfully nonchalant about the whole thing. I would be chaos if my car had been hit--even her car, my heart was still racing. Jordan was the only one really unraveling; silent tears were rolling down her cheeks, she was chewing on her nails like they were corn.

“I’m so sorry,” she said again.

“It’s fine,” Michaela said. “Let me go talk to them.” She leaned back into the car to get her insurance and registration, then turned back to us. “Oh, and I was driving. Jordan was in the front seat.”

Jordan nodded.

“Hey,” I said. “How’d I get shoved off to the back seat?”

Michaela smiled; Jordan tossed me poison.

We watched her go over to the elderly couple that had emerged from the brown Lincoln: an old black woman in a brown dress, her husband who was wearing sunglasses and carrying a white cane.

“Did we just get hit by a blind guy?” I giggled.

Jordan was still not having any of the humor.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s just kind of funny.”

Jordan was full-on crying by this point, so I just hugged her, and she buried her face in my shoulder. “Ohh,” she wailed.

“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s just an accident.”

I was not used to seeing Jordan unglued. She barely drank, even; she was a beacon of steadiness, even as the rest of us zoomed downward on weekend nights. It was unnerving, her like this, her crying into my shoulder. I squeezed her a little tighter. “Don’t worry,” I said again. I was not very good at comforting a despondent woman, I realized. “It’s just an accident.”

A white Lexus pulled up, lowered the window.

“Are y’all okay?” asked the blonde woman in the driver’s seat. “Do you need us to call the police?”

“We’re calling now,” I called back. “Thanks, though. We’ll be okay.”

The woman motioned to Jordan. “Is she okay?”

Jordan still had her face buried in my shoulder, showed no intention of emerging.

“Yeah, she’s just a little shaken up.”

The woman drove off.

Michaela came back over to us, fanning herself with her registration. “Cops are on the way.”

“Good,” I said.

“So, we got hit by an elderly blind man,” she said, her mouth curving upwards, daring to find it as funny as I did. “I mean, his wife was driving, but still.”

I was trying to stifle laughter at that. She was too. Jordan was still softly sobbing into my polo, which made for a weird whirlwind of emotions going off between the three of us.

“Don’t worry, Jordan,” Michaela said again. “It wasn’t your fault. They ran a red light.”

Jordan was unresponsive.

Another car pulled up--brown-haired man in an Audi. “Do you need help?”

“We’re fine,” Michaela shouted back. “thanks, though.”

Jordan freed herself from my shoulder, dabbed her eyes with the back of her hands. “I’m sorry--I’m okay. I just…” She didn’t finish; her lip was quivering, but at least she stopped crying.

“Here,” Michaela said, going back into the passenger seat. She came out with Tripp’s half-melted Brownie Batter, medium. “This’ll make you feel better. It’ll be milk by the time we get back to campus anyway.”

Jordan didn’t object; she took the ice cream and a spoon and sat down on the curb.

We had two more cars come and stop to ask us if we needed anything--cars were pulling over on Claiborne to ask the brown Lincoln the same thing, as the old black couple sat on the curb across the street from us, the woman fanning herself with a magazine.

“Do you notice,” Jordan said from the curb, after a silver BMW stopped to offer help; she was in much better spirits, post-Brownie Batter, “that every white person is coming up to ask us if we’re okay, and every black person is going up to them to ask them if they’re okay?”

I hadn’t thought of that, but it was conspicuously true. I was more focused on the fact that people were stopping at all. In D.C. they would just honk and flip you off for tying up traffic. People were nice in the South, genuinely helpful. Maybe also a little racist.

Michaela shrugged. “So the city’s racist. Where the hell do you think we are?”

“No, no,” Jordan said. “I just think it’s funny.”

“How can you not be a little racist here,” Michaela said, “when people are the way they are?”

When people are the way they are. I didn’t know if she meant white people, out in the suburbs or the leafy confines of Uptown or Lakeview, or black people, who committed just about every crime I’d seen reported in the last two months. Maybe both, two races locked in for the long haul of failed understandings. New Orleans was a paradox--a city with no rules, a rigid city.

A car from the New Orleans Police Department had arrived.

“Yes, the three of us,” Michaela told the officer, after some minor hammering out of what our version of the truth would be. “I was driving.”

Another white lady in a green Acura rolled down her window, asked if there was anything she could do to help. Across the street, a black family in a Taurus rolled down their windows for the elderly couple.

“Crazy,” Jordan whispered to me. “They might feed pigeons down here but it’s still the fucking South.”