The Voyage of Nate Berg - Part Two - by Nate Berg
Yes, this story is direct from Nate Berg himself. You've already seen The Voyage of Nate Berg Part One. Read on and be fascinated at such a tale of debauchery as the villain enters New Orleans driven by thoughts of an old love, just before he heads West, back to the land of Buck City... -n.l.
2. The Dog that Kicks Itself
New Orleans 1995.
Here is where you and I must get into the time machine again. Fall, 1995. I had decided to go on a romantic Amtrak train vacation. You know the kind of journey that I am talking about. Waiting, scenic vistas, costs, expensive cocktails, and yearning. You also know the kind of yearning that I'm talking about. The girl who cuts you the most, cuts the deepest, and the best; above all others. In my case it was Marilyn Bauer. We had a two-year stretch in Fresno 1992-1994 and she had moved away to be with friends in New Orleans. It was my intent to go down there and pluck her away from shallow social ties and tie her up the way it was done by me before. Long drawn out afternoons and evenings in dark bedrooms. Lounging together like lizards in the grass. A whispery little French girl, she had a penchant for prose and bloodletting. Her innocence and naiveté was the perfect foil for my militant charm and fierce ambition. No matter what it was that we were doing, I always wanted more. Intensity and powerful recollection, they always turn to the tragic, dark. Of all the factors though, TIME and TRUST always slay the beast, lest they become the beast themselves. When she doesn't TRUST you, for whatever reason, no matter how much you mean to each other, then twang the harps and sound the sins of Paris, for Romeo & Julietville is where this duo is going.
"All Aboard!!" I get on the train in Los Angeles.
Boxcar Shudders. Game 6, 1995 World Series. Halloween Season. Falling Leaves. The One that Cuts You the Most. The Amtrak train rambles through the West. Game 6. Glavine has pitched a one-hitter into the top of the 9th inning, the Braves lead 1-0 on David Justice's home run, a teary gift to the people of Atlanta, fans he had ripped in the paper the day before Game 6. The reliever, Wohlers, was coming out of the bullpen to finish off the final game and an Atlanta series victory over the Cleveland Indians.
Boxcar Shudders. We go through a long mountain stretch before El Paso. Mountains, tunnels, graffiti carved in lightless places, hobbits and such. Worthless transistor TVs, before the digital age, we missed the last inning. I would wait 50 minutes before closing in on El Paso before learning that Atlanta sealed the deal and my bets would indeed be paid. However it didn't mark a good omen for my trip, for it was something I had invested a healthy heart in.
We pulled into New Orleans at 6pm the next day. I met Marilyn at 9pm, where she said to meet. A silk ribbon around an old tree in the French Quarter one block off of Bourbon, she had given me directions, so specific. I loved it. I didn't really care for New Orleans though. The city constantly smelled of urine, and was full of pickpockets and miscreants. If I could get her alone then all would be well. But I had a sinking feeling as her little apartment started filling up with her friends coming over. It was Halloween Night, I had a self-inflicted bloody cross smeared on my forehead. I do it every year, create a wound splash my own forehead and let it dry. It's cheap, yet effective. She always loved the blood, it was vampire stuff, and here we were, lovers in the city of Lestat. But it was Halloween Night. One problem remained. All of her friends wanted to go to the Rave.
Now, if any of you know me then you are aware that I would rather lose limbs then attend a Rave dance party, especially one that my girl wants to go to; especially when I've been toiling in the minimal capacity of a Amtrak boxcar for three days.
"Marilyn, I just spent 3 days on the train to be alone with you, not to go to a Rave."
"I know, my love, we can be together tomorrow."
"No Marilyn, I will be with you now."
This continued for an hour in the kitchen until she finally said, "I’ll go without you."
"Then please direct me back to the Amtrak."
She rode with me on the municipal bus. My flat-out stubbornness overflowed a container that could no longer contain it: Marilyn was working the waterworks. Her face flushed, her eyes welled up and cascaded streaks down her pretty face mixed in with eye shadow. She sat three seats away from my rapidly deteriorating personality. I would not flinch. I boarded the Amtrak. Bound this time for Chicago and Davenport, Iowa. This was a three-town trip—a three gal trip—you must bear this in mind, although it was Marilyn crying who cut me the most. I sat in the chair content that I showed her what my iron will was capable of. I had destroyed it all for both of us, and I had vowed to never feel sad over this ever. She cried of course, moved back to Fresno, then got married to a guy who beat her near death one day. He put her in the hospital; yet she will never ever go to the Tower District for fear of me.
Well, I didn't cry, I drank 12 boxcar cocktails, tried to provoke fights, stumbled around a bit. By this point the boxcar shudders bothered me very little, in fact I didn't feel them at all.
We were well past Jackson Mississippi before I passed out and fell asleep, cursing the burned out ghettos and inhabitants of the South all the way into troubled darkness.
New Orleans 2005
I already told you of the dreaded association that I hold in my heart for the piss-smelling ghettopolis of New Orleans, Louisiana. 1995. The love of my life, anger, paying the world with flame. Party City or not, I thought it impossible to walk those streets without a body count.
It was however my own grand stubbornness that drove ten years of thorns in my own heart and senses. That night ten years ago, New Orleans and me.
On the way back to California, way into the future, we would have to drive through New Orleans. Roger suggested now that we hit Bourbon Street, get drunk like sailors, test the emotional impact of the city, conquer it like barbarians, raise the bar.
Conjure up some voodoo? You betcha. I agreed.
Two drinks, not a tear in my eye. Sometimes a General has been out to war so long, he has forgotten what he was fighting the war for in the first place. He is still waving his guns at his own citizens long after the war. I tried to get myself to cry; not happening. Yet every forced recollection of Marilyn hurt. No feelings, yet it hurt. Rave music pumped out of a dance floor nightclub, I went to talk to the beauties, shopping the Kirsten Dunst look-a-like dancing to the Usher remix under the strobe. I was trying to have fun.
Snapshots of her dancing in my head, my knees buckled.
I limped over to the bar; it all hurt. But only when I forced myself to think about it, or when my mind innocently returned to that night in the fall of 1995 when I last saw Marilyn. I try not to think about it. To punish the world and those in it is a way to surgically alter the beast from being the victim of himself, who ruined it all. One tremendous romance killed, and the beast shields himself from the pain by casting out his pain in an extroverted manner. I have cried once since that night in 1995 ("Karma & The Deaf Lady's Daughter" another story) but I will cry again, when I rest my head in her lap, and let her know that every cruel thing I ever did to anyone: every headbutt, pepper spray, every buried bloody weapon that was never found, every career ruined was done in honor of her, every person that I held back or well intentioned dream that I walked over was a testament to that night in New Orleans, when I was impatient, and my poison will walked out.
I died that night in 1995 and became a steamroller, a magnificent criminal steamroller, unwilling to listen to anything but the affirmation of my own will. After I tell her of this and beg forgiveness and cry, I don't know what I’ll do, for the first time in my life. I imagine I will scratch my head, as if I woke from a sinner's dream that started when I boarded the Amtrak bound for Chicago out of New Orleans, whereupon my heart was cleft and the Devil crept in. I know someone who knows where she lives in Fresno. She is a larger woman now, apparently 80 pounds heavier then the 109 slender waif that visits me late at night sometimes. She whispers the things that will keep our ghosts around for just a little longer, moaning in conjunction like our memories with the western wind off the Pacific bound for a black hole, tied to a tree off Bourbon Street; a stitch in time that sealed itself up for almost 10 years. I never want those nights to end, I read her letters, there are many. I have the photos. I have the scars on my arms, and a fading scar on my neck from where she attached herself to feed.
She was my one, my only. Every other after, though enjoyable, was insignificant. Even taken down to satisfy her broken voice doubling over my own sad mantra. "Please Marilyn, I can't take them all."
"Yes, my love, but you can try."
Here I was now in the good company of my friend Roger, broke from Harrah's Casino in downtown New Orleans. My ten-year moral eclipse is prone to theft so again I search for unlocked cars. Bingo, a Humvee off Bourbon, a side street where the gay clubs begin on the south side of the strip. You know the place. There are hundreds of people milling around, drinking, sauntering, boogying. Beads galore clatter around the necks of tourists. In the backseat of this hummer is a six-foot long padded case on casters, very heavy. I can smell the valuable nature of this prize, I run off down the street with this predatory conquest. Roger gives me a disapproving look. I'm cackling among the night lights. I unzip her. It’s an antique 70’s refurbished Yamaha keyboard, ivory, weighted keys that I had liberated from captivity, easily in the 2000 USD range of value.
Roger saw me in the middle of the street, bathed in moonlight, surrounded by partygoers. I grinned a crooked toothy peeling of the mouth. Lunatic. To the casual person in the street I would look like a musician panting as I was dragging my instrument to the club for a gig. But Roger saw the truth. Lunatic in the moonlight, flanked on both sides by elegant French lattice balconies. Partygoers poured around me like I was but a rock in their river. Marilyn's memory saw me too as I begged her to stay a little longer, after all, this was her piano that I was hauling up Bourbon Street on my back. This was for her.
"New Orleans no longer has its hold on me, my love. Please stay a little longer this time." No matter what ritual she has me perform to block out the pain, she is always gone by morning. But I'm alright with New Orleans now, it’s off the hook.
2. The Dog that Kicks Itself
New Orleans 1995.
Here is where you and I must get into the time machine again. Fall, 1995. I had decided to go on a romantic Amtrak train vacation. You know the kind of journey that I am talking about. Waiting, scenic vistas, costs, expensive cocktails, and yearning. You also know the kind of yearning that I'm talking about. The girl who cuts you the most, cuts the deepest, and the best; above all others. In my case it was Marilyn Bauer. We had a two-year stretch in Fresno 1992-1994 and she had moved away to be with friends in New Orleans. It was my intent to go down there and pluck her away from shallow social ties and tie her up the way it was done by me before. Long drawn out afternoons and evenings in dark bedrooms. Lounging together like lizards in the grass. A whispery little French girl, she had a penchant for prose and bloodletting. Her innocence and naiveté was the perfect foil for my militant charm and fierce ambition. No matter what it was that we were doing, I always wanted more. Intensity and powerful recollection, they always turn to the tragic, dark. Of all the factors though, TIME and TRUST always slay the beast, lest they become the beast themselves. When she doesn't TRUST you, for whatever reason, no matter how much you mean to each other, then twang the harps and sound the sins of Paris, for Romeo & Julietville is where this duo is going.
"All Aboard!!" I get on the train in Los Angeles.
Boxcar Shudders. Game 6, 1995 World Series. Halloween Season. Falling Leaves. The One that Cuts You the Most. The Amtrak train rambles through the West. Game 6. Glavine has pitched a one-hitter into the top of the 9th inning, the Braves lead 1-0 on David Justice's home run, a teary gift to the people of Atlanta, fans he had ripped in the paper the day before Game 6. The reliever, Wohlers, was coming out of the bullpen to finish off the final game and an Atlanta series victory over the Cleveland Indians.
Boxcar Shudders. We go through a long mountain stretch before El Paso. Mountains, tunnels, graffiti carved in lightless places, hobbits and such. Worthless transistor TVs, before the digital age, we missed the last inning. I would wait 50 minutes before closing in on El Paso before learning that Atlanta sealed the deal and my bets would indeed be paid. However it didn't mark a good omen for my trip, for it was something I had invested a healthy heart in.
We pulled into New Orleans at 6pm the next day. I met Marilyn at 9pm, where she said to meet. A silk ribbon around an old tree in the French Quarter one block off of Bourbon, she had given me directions, so specific. I loved it. I didn't really care for New Orleans though. The city constantly smelled of urine, and was full of pickpockets and miscreants. If I could get her alone then all would be well. But I had a sinking feeling as her little apartment started filling up with her friends coming over. It was Halloween Night, I had a self-inflicted bloody cross smeared on my forehead. I do it every year, create a wound splash my own forehead and let it dry. It's cheap, yet effective. She always loved the blood, it was vampire stuff, and here we were, lovers in the city of Lestat. But it was Halloween Night. One problem remained. All of her friends wanted to go to the Rave.
Now, if any of you know me then you are aware that I would rather lose limbs then attend a Rave dance party, especially one that my girl wants to go to; especially when I've been toiling in the minimal capacity of a Amtrak boxcar for three days.
"Marilyn, I just spent 3 days on the train to be alone with you, not to go to a Rave."
"I know, my love, we can be together tomorrow."
"No Marilyn, I will be with you now."
This continued for an hour in the kitchen until she finally said, "I’ll go without you."
"Then please direct me back to the Amtrak."
She rode with me on the municipal bus. My flat-out stubbornness overflowed a container that could no longer contain it: Marilyn was working the waterworks. Her face flushed, her eyes welled up and cascaded streaks down her pretty face mixed in with eye shadow. She sat three seats away from my rapidly deteriorating personality. I would not flinch. I boarded the Amtrak. Bound this time for Chicago and Davenport, Iowa. This was a three-town trip—a three gal trip—you must bear this in mind, although it was Marilyn crying who cut me the most. I sat in the chair content that I showed her what my iron will was capable of. I had destroyed it all for both of us, and I had vowed to never feel sad over this ever. She cried of course, moved back to Fresno, then got married to a guy who beat her near death one day. He put her in the hospital; yet she will never ever go to the Tower District for fear of me.
Well, I didn't cry, I drank 12 boxcar cocktails, tried to provoke fights, stumbled around a bit. By this point the boxcar shudders bothered me very little, in fact I didn't feel them at all.
We were well past Jackson Mississippi before I passed out and fell asleep, cursing the burned out ghettos and inhabitants of the South all the way into troubled darkness.
New Orleans 2005
I already told you of the dreaded association that I hold in my heart for the piss-smelling ghettopolis of New Orleans, Louisiana. 1995. The love of my life, anger, paying the world with flame. Party City or not, I thought it impossible to walk those streets without a body count.
It was however my own grand stubbornness that drove ten years of thorns in my own heart and senses. That night ten years ago, New Orleans and me.
On the way back to California, way into the future, we would have to drive through New Orleans. Roger suggested now that we hit Bourbon Street, get drunk like sailors, test the emotional impact of the city, conquer it like barbarians, raise the bar.
Conjure up some voodoo? You betcha. I agreed.
Two drinks, not a tear in my eye. Sometimes a General has been out to war so long, he has forgotten what he was fighting the war for in the first place. He is still waving his guns at his own citizens long after the war. I tried to get myself to cry; not happening. Yet every forced recollection of Marilyn hurt. No feelings, yet it hurt. Rave music pumped out of a dance floor nightclub, I went to talk to the beauties, shopping the Kirsten Dunst look-a-like dancing to the Usher remix under the strobe. I was trying to have fun.
Snapshots of her dancing in my head, my knees buckled.
I limped over to the bar; it all hurt. But only when I forced myself to think about it, or when my mind innocently returned to that night in the fall of 1995 when I last saw Marilyn. I try not to think about it. To punish the world and those in it is a way to surgically alter the beast from being the victim of himself, who ruined it all. One tremendous romance killed, and the beast shields himself from the pain by casting out his pain in an extroverted manner. I have cried once since that night in 1995 ("Karma & The Deaf Lady's Daughter" another story) but I will cry again, when I rest my head in her lap, and let her know that every cruel thing I ever did to anyone: every headbutt, pepper spray, every buried bloody weapon that was never found, every career ruined was done in honor of her, every person that I held back or well intentioned dream that I walked over was a testament to that night in New Orleans, when I was impatient, and my poison will walked out.
I died that night in 1995 and became a steamroller, a magnificent criminal steamroller, unwilling to listen to anything but the affirmation of my own will. After I tell her of this and beg forgiveness and cry, I don't know what I’ll do, for the first time in my life. I imagine I will scratch my head, as if I woke from a sinner's dream that started when I boarded the Amtrak bound for Chicago out of New Orleans, whereupon my heart was cleft and the Devil crept in. I know someone who knows where she lives in Fresno. She is a larger woman now, apparently 80 pounds heavier then the 109 slender waif that visits me late at night sometimes. She whispers the things that will keep our ghosts around for just a little longer, moaning in conjunction like our memories with the western wind off the Pacific bound for a black hole, tied to a tree off Bourbon Street; a stitch in time that sealed itself up for almost 10 years. I never want those nights to end, I read her letters, there are many. I have the photos. I have the scars on my arms, and a fading scar on my neck from where she attached herself to feed.
She was my one, my only. Every other after, though enjoyable, was insignificant. Even taken down to satisfy her broken voice doubling over my own sad mantra. "Please Marilyn, I can't take them all."
"Yes, my love, but you can try."
Here I was now in the good company of my friend Roger, broke from Harrah's Casino in downtown New Orleans. My ten-year moral eclipse is prone to theft so again I search for unlocked cars. Bingo, a Humvee off Bourbon, a side street where the gay clubs begin on the south side of the strip. You know the place. There are hundreds of people milling around, drinking, sauntering, boogying. Beads galore clatter around the necks of tourists. In the backseat of this hummer is a six-foot long padded case on casters, very heavy. I can smell the valuable nature of this prize, I run off down the street with this predatory conquest. Roger gives me a disapproving look. I'm cackling among the night lights. I unzip her. It’s an antique 70’s refurbished Yamaha keyboard, ivory, weighted keys that I had liberated from captivity, easily in the 2000 USD range of value.
Roger saw me in the middle of the street, bathed in moonlight, surrounded by partygoers. I grinned a crooked toothy peeling of the mouth. Lunatic. To the casual person in the street I would look like a musician panting as I was dragging my instrument to the club for a gig. But Roger saw the truth. Lunatic in the moonlight, flanked on both sides by elegant French lattice balconies. Partygoers poured around me like I was but a rock in their river. Marilyn's memory saw me too as I begged her to stay a little longer, after all, this was her piano that I was hauling up Bourbon Street on my back. This was for her.
"New Orleans no longer has its hold on me, my love. Please stay a little longer this time." No matter what ritual she has me perform to block out the pain, she is always gone by morning. But I'm alright with New Orleans now, it’s off the hook.
This entry was posted by N.L. Belardes, on
Thursday, September 01, 2005.
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