The Neon Palm of Madame Melancon by Will Clarke

Author:Will Clarke [Clarke, Will]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Middle Finger Press
Published: 2017-07-09T22:00:00+00:00

25

Turn to Page 5 of Dracula!

May 17, 2010

I drive back to New Orleans, over the I-10 exchange past the Superdome, past that eternal symbol of Katrina’s devastation, and I start to feel this Superdome-level hopelessness sinking in myself. The Xanax is obviously wearing off, and my fucking conscience is now wide awake and screaming, so I can either pull into a bar to shut it up and continue my descent into pathetic drunkenness, or I can turn the corner to Mama’s block, and I can walk into the dark embrace of The House of the Neon Palm. I decide to do the later, and I find Stevo and Daddy in the parlor on the couch watching Christopher Shelley on CNN speak the exact words I crafted for him earlier today.

“I need you to come upstairs with me,” I hold up the letter from Jean Babineaux.

I stop to catch my breath.

“Not right now. The news is on,” Daddy says.

“The news is always on, Daddy,” I say.

“I’ll be right back, Pops.” Stevo pats Daddy’s good leg and follows me into the next room.

“Why are you out of breath?” my brother asks.

I hand Jean Babineaux’s electricity bill to him. The one that’s addressed to me. The one that Jean transcribed from Mama in some manic rush of fortune-telling glee.

He reads it and follows me up the stairs to our parents’ bedroom.

“Bram Stoker?” Stevo asks. “She even own that book?”

“That’s what it says.”

Stevo opens the bedroom door, and we walk in.

Mama and Daddy’s room is as much a library as it is a bedroom. Mama read palms during the day. At night, she read her books. She was obsessed with owning signed copies of great thinkers like Anaïs Nin and Simone De Beauvoir. First editions were a drug for her. The Garden District Book Shop and Octavia Books were her dealers.

Mama’s bibliomania forced Daddy to build her floor-to-ceiling bookshelves out of the cypress wood he had cut down in the swamps. Mama spent the next forty years cramming them full of first edition, signed books by great writers from Camus to Toni Morrison.

She, of course, loved the Russians: Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Nabokov.

Almost as much as she hated T. S. Eliot.

“April is the cruelest month, my foot. He is anti-Semite. Hater of women. Two poems he wrote against my name! The coward would never have inked such things if he truly knew the length of my shadow!”

Mama bought every copy of The Waste Land off the shelves whenever she would go into a bookstore.

“Eliot is burning in hell and so should his words,” she’d say to the sales clerk, and then she’d spit a big loogie on the page that referenced Madame Blavatsky right there in the store. Once she got home, she’d tear the book into fives and set a match to it in the fireplace. When it came to certain writers, she had love affairs and blood grudges—relationships that would have only been normal had she maybe known these long dead authors, and only then if they had betrayed or loved her in some profound or terrible way.

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