N.O. GHOSTby Jonathan T. Reeves
new orleans was my favorite place to go from about age 17 and
up. we went on a school field trip my senior year to the quarter. they
told us which streets we had to stay between in the french quarter
and gave us four to six hours to do whatever the fuck we wanted.
i remember walking around the entire time and wanting to stay
and walk around more. i loved the energy there. you could feel it
in the air, each moment has so much potential. it was legal to
drink if you were over 18 at that time and you could drink on the
street,so over the next few years i must’ve taken a dozen one to two
day trips to the crescent city. i was frequently contacted by friends
wanting to disappear for a while. in ’98 this older guy named tom
comes to me asking me to go to new orleans with him. he is
recently divorced and in trouble with the law
for cashing some lady’s dead husband’s social security checks,so
he wants to go to new orleans and get a job on an oil rig, but he
is afraid he will get killed in new orleans alone because he has never
been. i quit my job and leave out the next morning. we spend a week
in a hotel just outside of new orleans trying to figure out what to
do. oil rig jobs are slim that time of year and tom needs to make a
lot of money fast. i’m beginning to think i can hang out in the
quarter and be just fine. eventually tom decides to leave with some
dude to join the carnival. he drops most of my stuff off in
storage, leaving me on decatur street by the cool coffee shop where
i played chess that closed down the next year. i had three
bags with me. i had a nice chess set and
>clock, a big ass astrology book that had all the tables
in the back so i could figure out people’s charts, oh yeah
and i had lots of blank charts to fill in, tarot cards, all kinds of
fun stuff. the day i get dropped off i sit at the coffee shop
playing chess until it closes then i wander up the street to a bar
and some really nice beautiful girl invites me inside and buys me
a miller high life champagne of beers in a bottle. there she
introduces me to tim. there seems to be a close friend named tim
wherever i go.we play a couple games of chess eventually and he
realizes i am a pretty smart guy. his buddy realizes it, too and
sez i should come apply for a job because they could use
> >>someone who wasn’t a dumbass to work with. i
eventually leave the bar around dawn or so and go lay down in a
park with an appendage through a strap of each of my bags for a
couple hours and sleep until it is too hot, find my way back to the
coffee shop and play chess until after it is dark again.around
dark this guy named steve shows up. i had met him during mardi gras
the first day me and tom got into town. i was standing by tom’s car
with a bottle of vodka and gave him as big of a swig as he wanted,
we talked for a bit and then he went to work, didn’t see him for
over a week. so he notices that i am carrying three bags, one of
which is a cream colored heavy duty laundry bag, and offers me a
place in his apartment. he trusts that i seem like a responsible
person who wants to get his shit together and will get a job and
pay rent if given half a chance. this is true so i let myself
be led into a nasty scary
neighborhood up some stairs to a tiny little studio apartment with
a bathroom. the room was smaller than my living room. there was
a bed, a mattress on the floor and a couch. steve slept on the mattress. i
slept on the couch. raven and his boy toy michael would
sleep on the bed or fuck on the bed with whatever guy raven had
picked up that night or whatever girl michael had picked up that
night. this was not a place i wanted to live for very long, fuck.
so i get the job that tim told me about and it works out great. i
am having a blast. turns out the job is delivering greasy food and
salads from the bar to strip clubs and other bars in the french
quarter. so i’m going into strip clubs for the first time in my
life by myself (strip clubs were never my thing- i had a friend or
two who would get me to go with them but it always left me
feeling empty and stupid) and not only are these sexy
girls flirting with me and telling me how much cute i am, they are
giving me money. nice work if you can get it. so the people at
work realize i am cool and will work out and start going through all of
the paperwork to get me hired and whatnot. as they are going
through the paperwork i give them my address and pauly gives me a look of deep concern.
he tells me i have to move, that is no place
for a boy like me to live, i’ll get killed walking home, you should
talk to tim because he is looking for a roommate. after a
couple weeks i convince tim to let me
move in with him. he is initially wary because i am so smart and figures from
experience that people as smart as me should be kept at a distance.
once he realized i had a bigger heart than anyone
he’d ever met he began to warm up to me. i get the place and it
is an amazing apartment. the building has been around since the
1700s. one of the only flat roofs in the french quarter. we have
the whole top floor to ourselves, and it is mostly one big room
stretching from one end of the building to the other, like i giant
meeting hall or something, so much light,three balconies, windows
windows, old as fuck, and oh yeah, the ceiling was probably fifteen
feet high. how did i get lucky enough to live here? how did tim get
the place? well, the guy who owned the building was brutally
murdered a week or so before tim moved in. he had been the manager
and owner of the restaurant downstairs. new orleans is notorious
for paying people under the table for work in restaurants. this guy
was notorious for telling people he was going to pay them and
then just firing them and telling them
to go fuck themselves. he was also a woman-hating homosexual.one
of his lovers/employees had gotten boring or whatnot so he decided to get
rid of him by getting him arrested for something. this guy
comes back years later with a vengeance. killed him in his bed,but
not in his sleep. it was an extremely violent death. he used a
knife on him, shot him, eventually suffocated him i believe,and
something else, maybe something with fire? i don’t know, the guy
was tortured for hours before he killed him. so the bloody mattress
is still there when i move in. it is still in his room when i get
there and then maybe the next week tim points it out on the second
floor landing. it stayed there for a couple weeks.
every girl in the building has a few stories
about being fucked with by the ghost. being pushed into walls,
knocked down randomly, struck by objects that should be stationary,
etc. even my friend roxanne, who was born on the exact same
day as me, said she didn’t feel comfortable there. i can’t remember
positively but i think she might have said the ghost pushed
her down the stairs. she was afraid after that and didn’t
come back for a couple months even though she loved the place.
they said it got a lot better after they took out the bloody mattress.
i used to wish i’d stayed there and done something with that place.
lately i’ve been seriously considering returning to the big easy,
at least for the winters and springs. i guess
i’ll see how this hurricane season turns out.
[still haven't been back to n.o.]
Posted by Modus Operandi 
