Out of the Frying Pan - Part 7
With a shimmering silver scarf tied around her head, her violet nail-polish, her wrists full of bangles, Bella was absolutely stunning. Haylene and Marla were mesmerized.
We are still on the road in New Orleans with Haylene and Marla. This is PART 7. Join these two undomesticated women here as they continue to leap out of the frying pan and into the fire, or click here to read PART 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6, and 8
It was early evening in the lounge of the Bourbon Orleans Hotel in the heart of the Big Easy. The atmosphere carried the heady fragrance of maraschino cherries and boiled shrimp. Haylene and Marla were sitting at a table with their new friend, a self-proclaimed mystic from California whom they had just met.
Bella had feathers in her long white hair, dangling dragonfly earrings and lavender eyeshadow. She was offering Tarot readings in the lounge for the hotel guests. At the age of 81, Bella was the real deal — an authentic, original hippie that only the Golden State could have produced. She’d kept the same Cosmic Rainbow life-view since 1969. “At least I’m consistent,” she’d said. “But not all of the time.” And with that shimmering silver scarf tied around her head, her violet nail-polish and her wrists full of bangles, she was absolutely stunning. Haylene and Marla were mesmerized.
The three women hovered their hands over the pile of cards. Haylene drew from the deck the The Page of Wands. “There you go, girl, your personal Spirit Guide is right there in your hand,” said Bella, “This archetype embodies the Unique Individual. She is the Nonconformist, often something of a Bohemian.The Page of Wands never asks anyone for Approval. Now… are you, by any chance, a Mischief-maker, Haylene?”
Haylene rolled her eyes heavenward and gave her shoulders a little shimmy. “I suspect I might be,” she said.
Marla, her young friend, let out a spontaneous bark and adamantly nodded. “Oh, yes, she definitely is.”
Haylene’s second card was The Five of Cups. This reminds you,” said Bella, “that if you have experienced any sort of Significant Loss on the Material Plane, always remember that what truly belongs to you cannot be taken away.”
“Good to know,” said Haylene, “although, I have already kissed Jerome good bye and made my peace with him. I am not going to cry over skimmed milk. I’ve moved on.”
Marla picked up only one card, the Queen of Swords. “Ah, Marla. Marlita, my little sweetheart, the Queen of Swords makes her own Decisions, and she exercises as much Independence as she knows she can handle. This Queen does not Surrender and she can be counted on to see through the superficial and point to the Truth. She especially speaks as a Woman coming into her own Power.”
Marla, was dazzled. She wrote all that down on her paper napkin as fast as she could for future consideration. “I’ll tell you, when I was a kid, we were so poor we couldn’t even afford to pay attention. But I have liberated myself! I have a job now and am doing all right with Haylene’s help. Coming into my own power … I sure do like the sound of that.”
Around nine o’clock, they were in a taxi heading down toward the river. They got out on the corner of Tchoupitoulas and Napoleon Avenue, and elbowed their way through the crowd into Tipitino’s. The music was so loud and frantic, that the very walls were flexing like the cones of a mega JBL, pulsing in and out to the frenzied accordion, upright bass and fiddles. The air in the room was positively equatorial.
“Son of a gun!”said Marla. “These people are dancing like cats on a cook stove in here!” Within two minutes Haylene was doing the Cajun two-step with a sweaty, bearded guy wearing snakeskin boots and a red neckerchief. Men everywhere were drawn to Haylene like bears to honey. She was 42, going on 30, a beautiful platinum blonde in skinny jeans and a tight cropped top. She was laughing her head off trying to learn the steps. Marla, only 21 and a little shy, stood at the crowded bar with Bella, who was old enough to be her great-grandma. They were both bouncing to the zydeco and throwing back rye-whiskey Sazeracs as if it were Kool-Aid.
“I love this stuff,” said Marla. “Don’t you?”
“Well, it beats licking frogs … if you know what I mean,” said Bella with a smile. Marla did not know what licking frogs meant and she didn’t want to know either. “Cheers!” That’s all she said.
They danced with a variety of partners for about two hours – jitterbugs, waltzes, swing dances, two-steps. Bella was hooting, “Laissez les bon temps rouler”, just like in the movies. She was in her element.
“Man oh man! I am sweatin’ like a hooker in church,” declared Haylene, fanning herself with a menu. They burst out through the swinging doors, out of breath, and grabbed a taxi back to Bourbon Street, rolling down the windows to cool off in the night breeze. They stopped into The Cat’s Meow, where all three eventually were coaxed onto the stage. They did an impromptu karaoke rendition of Aretha’s Chain of Fools, and really caught the crowd’s attention with their harmonies. And that’s saying something, considering the level of their sobriety.
(double click then single click to sing along)
At midnight, on the way back to their hotel, they decided to stop into one more club for a night cap. The Nola Queen was a small, dimly lit dive in a back alley where blues was spilling out onto the street like liquid pain. On the stage, under blue spotlights, four guys were wringing out a classic rendition of Hoochie Koochie Man..
The Nola Queen looked to be in short supply of people of the female persuasion at the moment. Bella whispered, “Hey, you know… I don’t see many women in here, do you?
Marla said. “Yeah … I think this may be a mistake.”
“The band is awfully good,” said Haylene, “but this crowd looks about as crooked as a barrel of snakes. We’ll just make it a quick one, hear a couple of tunes and get on out.”
They no sooner took seats at the bar when three men, looking optimistic — not in a good way, crowded around them, leaning in, tossing out the lamest pick-up lines the girls had ever heard. “Do you believe in love at first sight? Or should I walk by again? “ “Something’s wrong with my eyes, because I just can’t take them off of you.” “Do I know you? You look a lot like my next girlfriend.”
Two other men, lurking in the shadows, moved in when the first phalanx failed, deciding to try their luck, anyway. “I was feeling a little off today—but you’ve really turned me on!” “Did your license get suspended for driving men crazy?”
The girls agreed that these fellows were just a bit too predatory. “Downright scary,” is how Marla put it. “Their Auras are slightly off,” said Bella. “Mars must be in retrograde.” They finished their drinks and stood up to leave, Marla calculating how long it would take the three of them to get out the door. They made a run for it and arrived back at a well-lit and well-patrolled Bourbon Street corner without being followed or accosted. Haylene was looking behind her, and running the back of her hand across her brow. “I don’t know how y’all are feeling, but I’m plumb tuckered. What do you say we get back to our rooms while the gettin’ is good.”
They got a slow start the next morning with only the lightly inconvenient hangover they deserved. They decided to walk down to the Cafe du Monde on Decatur street for some good strong chicory coffee and a couple of beignets.
“Beignets are just fancy sugar donuts,” Marla told her friends.
Haylene said, “Yeah, but you feel more dignified eating them because, well, you know, they’re French.”
The Cafe du Monde was packed with tourists. It looked like a convention of the AQT ( Americans of Questionable Taste), everyone was dressed in brand new neon-colored athletic shoes, long baggy shorts and bright t-shirts with printed images of voodoo skulls and possums, King Gator and po’boys. There wasn’t an empty table in sight. “Let’s go find us someplace else,” said Marla. “I’m as hungry as all get out.”
Bella spotted a table for four outdoors where only one man was seated. “Wait a minute,” she said. “Follow me.” He was a nice looking guy, in his 60s maybe, wearing jeans and cowboy boots. His Stetson was hanging from the back of his chair. He looked friendly enough.
“Good morning!” said Bella. “Excuse us for asking, but we were wondering if we could share your table? There doesn’t seem to be any other place to sit.”
He politely stood up and smiled. He was slight of build and not that tall. “Please have a seat. I’ll be leaving soon anyway.” But he didn’t leave. He stayed and they talked together for over an hour, all of them ingesting way more coffee and donuts than was called for. His name was Jimmy Swann and he lived in Arizona.
“I’m just out here in Louisiana to visit family for a few days. I‘m originally from California, but I live just southwest of Tucson now.” When his wife died, he’d sold his home and all his possessions and left California on the Greyhound with only a backpack. “I decided to just travel light through the rest of my life,” he said. “I don’t need many material things to be happy these days.”
“So, yeah, I ended up at Caballo Loco Ranch. It’s a large camping community — a bunch of really nice people live there, folks who appreciate natural landscape and a frugal way of life. Some are nomads and some stay all year round. It is a great place to live out there on the Sonoran desert. I feel like I am exactly where I want to be.”
Jimmy Swann didn’t come across as a “ladies’ man”, by any means, and he probably hadn’t spent much time with women since his wife died, but he seemed to be enjoying their animated conversation and learning who they were and how they connected. By the time they got up from the table, all four of them were jittering from the overdose of caffeine and sugar and had, no doubt, gained five pounds.
˜˜˜˜˜
The afternoon sun found the four of them sitting in the back of a swamp boat with a handful of other tourists. They had been laughing and talking all morning and were now going out into the bayou to quietly observe the wild life. Jimmy Swann, who had invited himself along, had Bella hanging on his arm. She flirted with him like a sixteen-year-old, and said she would like to stop over in Tucson on her way home from California. He just smiled.
The boat wound lazily through the murky water. The cypress trees were festooned with Spanish moss, which Jimmy said wasn’t moss at all and not Spanish. “It’s a bromeliad named Spanish moss because it looks like the beard of early Spanish explorers,” he explained. The air was hot and thick, steamy as a bathhouse on Venus. Their hair was drooping, their damp shirts clung to their backs.
Little snowy egrets were standing on fallen logs. Great blue herons waded in the shallows, stalking their suppers. The pelicans looked like small pterodactyls gliding over the tops of the trees, while flocks of spoonbills dozed on low branches. The cormorants stood with their wings outstretched, as if to dry them, and turtles were everywhere! Large red-eared sliders stuck their reptilian beaks out of the water, as if to inquire, “You got any small frogs or slugs on you?”
The captain pointed out a pair of nutrias on the west bank. “Eeuuw. That looks like a big old rat,” said Marla. “Aquatic rodent,” said Jimmy. “Smaller than a beaver, bigger than a muskrat.” A couple of alligators slipped into the water from the shore as they passed, which made everyone shiver more than once.
“I’m takin’ off this damned life vest,” whispered Haylene. “This little plastic doohickey is restricting my breathing and its wrinkling up my linen shirt.” And, as fate would have it, she’d no sooner unbuckled the vest and let it fall, than the captain gunned the motor and made a sudden sharp left turn to avoid a large floating log.
Haylene, who’d been standing, was thrown off the back of the boat into the slimy water. She screeched and flailed her arms like a wind mill. The captain slowed the boat and was turning it around when Jimmy Swann leapt into the water to rescue her. She threw her arms around his neck in a panic, and nearly drowned them both, but he managed to calm her down and get her back into the boat safely. Jimmy and Haylene spent the duration of the tour wrapped in large beach towels, picking water weeds and leaves out of each others’ hair. It may have been the most exciting thing that’d happened to Jimmy in a long while and it was probably a story he’d share over and over with friends until he was dead.
Marla, shaking her head, said, “Tsk! Y’all sure do know how to get yourself into trouble.”
Bella said, “Thanks to the Divine Cosmic Spirit that brought Jimmy Swann into Haylene’s life this morning. The Stars must be perfectly aligned! We never know what Mystical, Magical Guardian Angel will be called forth by Providence to bring us Love, Light, and Laughter.”
Haylene took it in stride. All she said was “Will somebody please get me a beer.”
• Thanks to my good friend and neighbor, Bella, for letting me write a caricature of her for this story. She is a good sport! Yes, she dresses like that. Yes, she reads Tarot, and, yes, she does speak in capital letters. A beautiful woman.
• Thanks to James Ron for allowing his character, Jimmy Swann to wander into my story. I hope I did him justice. To read more about this good-natured man’s adventures at Caballo Loco Ranch, I invite you begin Jimmy Swann Part 1 HERE.
Excellent description of these three and the new guy!
Let the good times roll! That last bar of the evening was probably a bad idea but I loved the pick-up lines. Bella is great. I hope we'll be seeing more of her. I especially liked how you worked Jimmy Swann into the mix. You did a wonderful job of keeping him true to the character that James Ron has developed. What a great collection of personalities!