Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, new edition: Collected Stories by Cookie Mueller

Author:Cookie Mueller [Mueller, Cookie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781635901665
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2022-03-23T00:00:00+00:00

The Stone of New Orleans—1983

I was so wildly miserable I was projectile vomiting at the very thought of facing another morning. I couldn't be at home for more than twenty minutes at a stretch; there were too many reminders. I couldn't eat; food tasted like rubber. I lost thirty pounds; I was skeletal. I couldn't sleep. My eyes, the proverbial mirror pools of the soul, were as mired as a peat bog. Beneath the mascaraed lashes were bags and dark circles. My crow's-feet looked like road maps. I was in pain. I was learning firsthand that one can actually die from a broken heart. What poets have always warned us about is true.

I wanted distraction every minute. I hung out at Danceteria and the Roxy every night till the wee hours. During the day I went anywhere I was led. One day I went to the blooming Japanese cherry orchard in the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, but I found no solace in flowers. Another day I took a ride up the Hudson to FDR's house and the Vanderbilt mansion, but seeing those bedrooms where power couples used to copulate were reminders of someone else's past connubial bliss, which only made me feel more alone.

Jackie Curtis cheered me up a little on the phone every other day, with his rush of one-liners and his personal remedies for a broken heart. He was married eight times, he should know.

None of this helped. No nightclubs or day trips or phone calls could assuage the pain. What I needed was to leave town for a while.

I decided to hop a train to New Orleans. Nan Goldin suggested the Jazz Festival would brighten my spirits, so, with Nan and her cameras and Max with his bottle of calamine lotion for his Hyde Park poison ivy infestation, I got on the 2:30 P.M. Silver Crescent heading south to New Orleans. I had my little stash of white powders in pyramid papers. In times of past crises, powders had been the only recourse.

The train was packed with a contingent of Elsie Brown fans and family. Elsie Brown was a jazz singer, little known outside of Atlanta, who had died in New York City, probably before her time. Her body was in a coffin in the luggage car of the train. By accident or coincidence, we were on the funeral train, the only white people riding.

The funeral people were bound for Atlanta for the consecrated burial of Elsie. They were all partying, even Earl Brown, the beloved husband. The family and friends were clustered around Earl in the club car with bottles of California's Inglenook Navalle Vin Rosé supplied by Amtrak. Earl wasn't crying, in fact, he was jubilant in his strange clear plastic shower cap, playing poker and slapping his knee. I couldn't help but notice that most of them were wearing these odd shower caps at all times of the day and night, even though there weren't any shower accommodations on the train. (I noticed this more and more on every black person at every stop as we got deeper and deeper into the South.

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