The Only Minor Shakespearean Sex Comedy to Come Out of Hurricane Katrina.
Chapter One: A Letter to Young Jack
I.
Jack,
I’m writing to you early Saturday morning the day after the 81st anniversary of D-Day. It is hopefully the first day of the rest of my life, as they say. I’ve got blowback insomnia like a motherfucker and figured I’d put it to good use. Alcohol fucks up your GABA/Glutamate balance and makes it impossible to sleep well for the first week after quitting. The Frazzle is a bitch. Keep that in mind.
You might as well put this playlist on and start reading: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1uC2acCgYmJqlNUzArDGw3?si=3dfc78793a5c4efc
This is as much a letter to you as it is to clarify things for myself. I know your mother from a Sunday night Catholic drinking group that used to meet at Philips on Maple Street in New Orleans. I knew your dad from there as well. This was in 2005, a few years before you were born and a few months before The Storm.
I’d bop in, drink, show off my completely useless knowledge of philosophy and theology, hit on girls - the usual activities of a twenty something cishet who’d gone to Loyola New Orleans, the funkiest of the four Loyola Sisters.
We’d all been brought together by my spiritual older brother, the Maestro of People, Arthur Laughlin. He’s still on his bike to this day. Arthur and I went to Loyola together in 1997–98. He took my 18 year old Fort Worth, TX yokel self under his wing. Ish. I’m the most independent man on the fucking planet, so I wasn’t going to be his lackey. But I’ve always been a younger dog to some older brother. Only children are an interesting bunch. As you well know.
I had no fucking plan when I went to Loyola New Orleans. I more or less wanted to be Jim Morrison. This was pretty much my life strategy— get paid for being good looking and loud. It still kind of is. I come from some proud, narcisstic people. It’s a flavor of being, like black licorice. We’re not for everybody. Shit be’s that way sometimes.
Beyond being Jim Morrison, I had no fucking clue. When I asked my dad for advice, he basically told me “Don’t be an English major.”
ARMAC was an English teacher with an undergrad from University of Dallas, that pretentious Conservative Catholic university that has blighted North Texas with its Truth and Beauty nonsense for decades. (Don’t hit me in the face, Serena. I respect you to my bones and this doesn’t apply to you and your people.) My father and his brother both went to UD in the early sixties. Have you seen that Bob Dylan movie with Timothy Chalamet? Same shit. But in Irving, TX. It makes no sense to me either.
He then went to the University of Detroit during the middle of the 1960s, as the world was heating up. He studied with Joyce Carol Oates and a slew of Jesuit priests who were tripping balls on the revolution of Vatican II. The Jesuits turned my father from a fairly typical, staid Catholic boy who grew up in Mississippi during Jim Crow into a ferocious liberal tiger of a man who would as soon fuck you as fight you. Starting in 1966, he futzed around the US, drinking and teaching English, like some ronin armed only with a fountain pen and a pipe. On March 1st, 1972, he quit drinking and went to AA. He then moved to Fort Worth and started a lifelong career as a Catholic School English teacher. This letter is as much for his ghost as it is for you and me.
By the time I went to Loyola, ARMAC was so burned out on English lit he could have been served as barbeque meat in South Dallas. Ergo the “Don’t be an English major.” I walked in as a declared History major when I stepped foot on the Loyola campus the end of August 1997 .
II.
