Lake Effect by Rich Cohen

Author:Rich Cohen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780307426543
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T05:00:00+00:00

Part Two

In the fall of 1986, I arrived in New Orleans. I had left a gray, sober, Germanic city and all at once found myself in a drunken, weedy greenhouse of a town. New Orleans looks like a capital in the French Antilles, a port backed by swamps. Tulane is in the English quarter of the city, and the houses are ramshackle and Victorian. The leaves cast spiky shadows, and the vines running up the carports glisten in the drenching tropical rain. Each afternoon, I would climb up to the roof of my dorm, where I could look out over the neat greens of campus to the twisting coil of the river, tugboats heading toward the Gulf of Mexico. In the evening, the sun dropped through bands of dust and the sky passed through the colors of a mood ring—placid, agitated, angry.

I fell in with a group of boys from the dorms, prep schoolers from the South with names like Whit and Ricky and Trey, who wore white bucks and backwards baseball caps, who loved Hank Williams Jr. even more than Hank Williams Sr., and who greeted you from a distance, shouting, “All right, son, let’s go drink a couple!” After class, we would wander past the rundown mansions of the Garden District, with open doors offering a quick glimpse of marble and velvet. We talked about music or sports or high school, and I told stories about Jamie, which, late at night, grew into legends. On Saturdays, we walked down flat streets to the levee, the Mississippi River catching and reflecting the midday sun, so muddy the water looked like chocolate, and on the other side the smokestacks and industry of Algiers. We sat on the grass and imagined each other’s hometowns, but I knew these friendships were just a temporary alliance. Whenever I found the chance, I slipped away.

Jamie was still very much at the center of my thoughts. I knew he had gone to Kansas, or so he had said, but I could not really imagine his life there. He did not write in those first weeks, and his mother, when I called, had also not heard from him. Once, in a bar, I met a girl who was visiting from the University of Kansas and, when I asked if she had heard of Jamie Drew, she said, “Drew-licious?” So somehow the nickname had tagged along. Well, that was good news, anyway. He was staking out his legend. Also, I knew some other kids that went to KU and from them there were rumors that Jamie had moved on to serious drugs, or was drunk all the time, or was seen with the worst kind of people in the worst kind of dives. And then there was still that other life that he lived in my mind. I thought of him whenever things went badly for me, when a girl shut me down, say, because in such moments Jamie gave me that special loser’s solace: “Oh, baby, you’ve made a terrible mistake.

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