I anticipated little, always wary of preconceptions culled from media summing up people and places in politically-energized stereotypes. After the bustle of Atlanta's mostly glamorous-appearing airport denizens, I found my way to the gate departing for Shreveport. The twenty or so people I joined in waiting for the boarding call appeared, as a collective, slumped; that's the word that comes to mind. They seemed somber, uncertain and sagging as if from the weight of too many miserable incidences and indecorous moments; too many fatiguing arguments. Weariness and wariness twinned in their gestures, a genuflecting belaboured chortle, a half-smile while faint alarm pitted their eyes, a shift in chair uneasy, at perpetual truce with something mysterious. Their physical impression and their clothing amplified or accentuated the exhaustion with existence etched in those life-shot eyes, the slightly stunned, shell-shocked looks on their faces.
Yet when they spoke to one another, they were unfailingly polite, civil, as if having known each other since children, seen each other daily. The flight staffer who boarded me wished me a good flight and addressed me, remarkably, by my surname (her smile was warmth; her well-wishing genuine). And on the plane, hearing the people beside and around me, I heard the same friendly ease and courtesy when bantering. I wondered if my initial impressions of these people awaiting a flight, people for whom Shreveport must have been home, were misguided; if I mistook humility, whether religiously-inspired or culturally (where the two differ) for emotional timidity, an overall impression of psychological defeat bearing its visible evidence in the physical. I thought them embarrassed of themselves and each other; but their unfailing familiarity with each other and confident civility suggested something altogether different: pride, pride in their humility, if the paradox is allowed.
Emerging from the small plane that had freighted us the hour and forty-five minutes from Atlanta to Shreveport, I scurried through a wending path of corridors before my vision gravitated towards a sign with the word "baggage" along with an arrow pointing towards some escalators. The baggage pick-up area happens in Shreveport's airport to disgorge from its bowels luggage directly in the entrance area of the airport. As I descended the stairs following the escalator, down to the main floor, hunting for my bag, I searched for her amidst a modest cluster of milling travellers, welcoming family and lovers; and didn't see her before feeling her lace her arms around my midsection just as I approached the luggage puker. I turned around, her encircling arms never separating, saw the face, live, in its fresh glory, in a way technology could never in impression and emotional impact replicate. Naturally, we kissed. Not the dizzying kiss you experience when it's the first one, long awaited; but the kiss of a one long-loved returning home. A kiss of relief and of deep affection. Exhausted by lack of sleep and the journey itself, I half-collapsed into her, almost limping in her arms as we made our way outside for cigarette before retrieving my suitcase. My fatigue had vitiated my brain, my senses. Hot light, her presence, a concentrated effort to appear and walk normally--these were all I knew as I felt for the first time in many years Louisiana's air unobstructed by walls. Before my ziggy ashed into pure butt, she'd left to fetch the car while I returned for my bag, which I spotted, isolated by several meters from its kin before and aft; swung it off the conveyor; reentered the world of soggy hot whiteness, and waited for a couple of minutes until she pulled up on the other side of the street. Luggage in trunk, off we went.
Talking about the bristling dynamic between us, now no longer the danger of drying concrete but its solidified purpose, hardened by months of suffering and laughing together over the waves, is not the purpose of this post, though separating her from this soil, its culture, night air that gave sense to words like "sultry," can be achieved only as an abstraction, some empirical-minded segmenting of a whole on the strength of some guiding principle or word or string of them. Mine was, remains for tonight, "impressions of Shreveport"; though I know teasing apart her from the city can exist only as a kind of mental experiment; but I'll give it a go.
(From the moment we arrived home until this afternoon, during her shift, the melt-your-bones, grinding, agonizingly pleasurable sex has not abated, though, whatever my mind could or could not absorb. As I said to her earlier after we both buried ourselves into each other, mashed and smeared into we exchanged on a molecular level, I think we have a viable sex life. I groan and explode and all from a pitch reached after alternating currents of tease and submission, tease and submission, a mutual hunger ritualized in a million ways by us but always, across species and time, the same fundamental dance, the same forms of power interplay. Our transmutation of it, or reversals, or attempts to transcend it, can pervert but never declaim its original energy)
The first few days I was an extremophile, locked in an atmosphere of extreme fatigue or of extreme inebriation, most accurately, a combination of both. Each day from Sunday to this one, Tuesday, has been a process of regaining those senses that process. My receptors have opened, the antennae probe the ground in little pats. The humidity one notices immediately. Louisianans, still part of our species, remark to themselves how remarkable it is. Like people from Saskatoon preen with pride at the extreme cold there, as if sharing in its power by withstanding it, Louisianans take no small pleasure, not in that evil coupling of punishing heat and a humidity to make of the air more water than anything and those living here closer to amphibians than humans--not that: the pleasure lies in believing that few would endure it. Tales of shoes filling with water; sayings endemic to this place ("You can never wear big enough shorts"; i.e, they'll never be billowy enough to evade getting drenched), are at every denizen's ready. My response to this has been one largely of approval. In the absence of sweltering death-heat, during the night when a Gulf breeze respires like the atmosphere's breathing, the humidity soaks through the flora, stews it, flowers boiled for their essence, and produces a palpable taste, one primordial and deeply affecting. Languor overcomes, though not the dry sub-Saharan kind: you're hydrated, you're in a sauna, you're mind unravels those synaptic threads bunched up by repetition of the commercial sort. Images of big-breasted women slinging hamburgers with a wink; lovers meeting over Brand X and by Brand X's influence alone finding their happy evers--these depart, sort of obliterate softly, disperse. With relief I find in their wake not an exhausted affiliation to nothingness, the more than empty empty air when a flock of birds flee without remnant inspiration left; in the dismantling of learned disdain or diffidence, the energy required to create it never lost, now modulated, there reformed, put planets back in me; the eddies of ethanol clouds from within and without; the pulsars and black matter; the thing you always wondered about that made in its own image its image, hinted again, anew, the adrenaline thrill of possibility, one yet wed with fate, the destiny that things can be rather than will. "Azalea," unknown to me by sight, became something to learn; everything did. This, I thought, is what is meant by starting over.
Of the city itself in its infrastructural and commercial sense, there's nothing to recommend or detract from it in relation to other North American cities its size: tar and signs; a profusion of fast-food and ice-cream shops; boutique areas and Walmart warrens; overpasses, interstate stretches, a bridge linking Shreveport to Bossier; a downtown core chiseled from rectangular, low-slung buildings of oft-cream facades and bland curlicues of sculpture. The element salient from other places floats up and down or stays stilled at the river as boats converted into casinos. Riverboats, I guess. A loop of road chords the city with two main thoroughfares piercing it, parallel to each other. Within twenty minutes, she tells me, one can be from any one point of the city to another, an estimate I imagine fair. The real gem resides in the somehow unobtrusive trees softening spaces between structures. Not overcrowding; not bullying; merely passive well-wishers to the lazy gait of people walking their bicycles or sauntering across a street, the heat they're feeling visible in long-suffering brows busheled in the middle, whatever the colour of the person in a city equally divided in population by facetious distinctions like "black" and "white". The boardwalk in Bossier offers a pleasing pedestrian retreat from the tatters of metal or their more refined versions (cars) creating a heat island in a city in no need of help when it comes to sufficient warmth, according to both the barometer and the way people interact with one another. The boardwalk stretches along the Red River, a cubed outgrowth of geometric, shop-lined alleys from a span of it perhaps a mile long. We entered only one shop while there, a frozen yogurt fix-it-yourself dig that, were I ten, would have been my second home.
Tattoo shops must do brisk trade here. Body art is immensely popular even with people whose skin colour differs as little from the sepia ink of the tattoo as my left hand to my right. The young, mostly. The older people tend to have considerable physical heft, beige and white clothing, tuck in their shirts, squint a great deal, and walk with an air of authority. Trotting through a Walmart, surreal for the inexplicable post-apocalyptic impression it left, is a lesson in tattoo art, a living museum of those pliers of dye on flesh, each a statement of sorts, codes of this culture. Gather a few of these heavily ink-entombed folk together and their colours seem to blend, limbs ceasing to be discrete parts of a single person, bodies blending into one shuffling mass of blue hues whose awkward gait defies human anatomy and its usual motor function. Almost to my surprise, the beleaguering midday heat that nearly liquifies me doesn't cause those tats to streak like Tammy Faye's mascara in her heyday.
The library where I spend much of my day while she works nestles in a treed lot adjacent to her workplace. Four columns of computers, eight units deep, centre its floorspace, flanked by seven or eights rows of book, dvd and video shelves on either side. Ending the library, are large windows in five section, each providing a pleasing view of the ever-present, almost emblematic shrubs, bushes and trees that in this short time here have marked in me indelibly Shreveport's natural character, parallel to the character of its people. I always occupy the same four-seated tasteful wooden table abutting one of the windows. Of the library, not much more is to be said—everything is about everything all the time; one opts for selectivity in lieu of inchoate existence—save that, from my casual perusal, the material stocked represents an admixture of the standard small-scale canonized western tomes and a regional emphases (in this case, all things Louisianan: Christian, historical along the Mason-Dixon Line line, etiquette, haiku about Elvis).
A brief word of poverty-indicators: there are an inordinate amount of payday loan shops; and gasoline cannot be pumped without payment of first.
Freshly arrived, the people's "character" beyond universal features eludes me still; I'm uncomfortable in putting mortar to the bricks yet; but this is a first impression:
As resigned and phlegmatic to their place as the knots in a tree or the roots upon which its existence suckles, the people never appear dour, but it's an illusion of sorts. A sardonic, languishing smile, far more Mona Lisa's than her own, inform their expression, their attitudes, inspiring in me a calm, fatal in the most pedantically technical sense. At the risk of presumptuousness, I feel, or they make me feel, no barrier between their innermost selves and my own, often, even in the midst of a curt rebuff at some inquiry; and they seem to want nothing out of you, to seek no gain or advantage. Interacting with them resembles the relationship you have with an ex-spouse: the marriage is over and has expunged the worst or best or your instincts, those hungriest for some salvific security; and what remains, what made the marriage the reason for itself, is to have in this ritual of purification a lifelong friend whose direst needs effortlessly prove your own; whose happiness gladdens you without an overcasting self-interest.
Trilling birdsong suspends the declining flux of light, pinning with pitch the earth, renders it an orbitless sphere, poised in equality for a moment with the sun. Timelessness intervenes, expands, secretes infinity. The break from motion and from change freights me to the epiphanic understanding of Louisiana's inimitable charm: here, all is elemental, nothing with insensate haste moves to a Nowhere when Everywhere is always. Immutability pervades every blade of grass or stranger's smile, and is this land's aura. And it is hers, too, this favoured child of eternity. In her, I see the stamp of her soil; and as it, she is loyal to Forever and speaks with the only subsequent authority that ever mattered: endurance. She is why I am here, why I breathe still.
The single most impacting impression I have of Shreveport, the one that summarizes with a laxness of imagination I admit, and a truth even more fiercely asserted; the reason my fondness for this city surpasses any determining experience in it, slept with me last night, and will tonight and all the tonights the two of us could have in this life. She defines the place she lives and, loving me, has come to define mine, inseparable from her own.
Thank you, Brandi, for the limitless gift of your smile and shared life.
Sempre, Serviam.
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