Read Online Errata by Michael Allen Zell - Free Book Online Page B

Orleans apartment (no appliances, rotting floorboards, flickering electricity) was situated in, considering that it was filled with unaccountable characters (the New Orleans version of Havana’s so-called social scum), yet on a key street in the supposed showcase of the city.  The hotel operators, pre-existing and newcomers, expected a boom from the stream of World’s Fair attendees, so they’d been buying up cheap rundown buildings, evicting the tenants, and making minor cosmetic upgrades to give the appearance of justification for higher short-term rates.  Many landlords were doing the same.  A seedy and violent stretch of North Peters Street (up until a year back, so dangerous and rundown that rent for Hannah’s entire third floor loft was a pay-only-in-cash pittance), was transformed the week Hannah was out of town for a photo shoot in Los Angeles.  She returned to find relative quiet, no mayhem, and the entrance’s iron gate wrapped in a chain and padlocked.  The word on the street was that, as the river stretch of derelict metal wharf buildings, sturdy brick warehouses, and everything otherwise, were being torn down or arsoned to prepare for the fair, the street creatures were gradually shifted to the block in which Hannah lived.  This had been happening prior to her moving in and was why the influx of low-level pimps, dealers, hookers, hustlers, thieves, junkies, and the like saturated and flourished, they’d been pushed out of other areas and heard that the 200 block of North Peters was the anything goes zone.  It was very much that for the year she lived there, the chaos building up for what in actuality was no more than a ploy by the feds for a surprise large-scale bust with buses, a New Orleans Night of the Three P’s that luckily happened when Hannah was away.  In spite of all of the near-river cleansing, fair attendance was low and housing costs avaricious, so rentals and hotels in the Quarter topped out at barely above half-occupied.  Even with the ground shift of these changes and seeing the Quarter transformed into a modern cordiality machine to attract tourists, Hannah and I enjoyed a wonderful time at the fair, surrounded mostly by locals. 

    Before she clammed up, Hannah said, My first New Orleans apartment and the whole as-is system of real estate seems indicative of the city at large.  You can pay pennies for a neglected room, feel like you’re in the center of the universe, but at some point it’ll disappear along with everything you own, only you don’t know when.  All you can do is live in the moment and hope for a little joy before the padlock clicks in place.  In any case, there’s always another room.  In this city nothing ever changes.  At least that used to be the case, before the smell of money came around. 
    I thought that I saw a flicker of Hannah’s soul a few times that night, but I may have been confused.  My power and mystery, limited as it is, comes from unrevealing, refraining from speaking to cover myself up (although I opened up to her that night), but Hannah verbalises to do the same.  I suspect that she reinvents herself with every conversation, creates a lark of truth to prevent the appearance of a doleful life, but I’m dogged by the bald possibility that rather than having an eye for deception, Hannah is an enigma of honesty, peddling an immense innate doctrine of consistency renounced, caprice embraced, and facts disposable, this coexisting alongside a refreshingly incautious utopian philosophy of genuine openness and candor personified.  Each a perceptible reflection of the other.  It’s easier to believe that and keep distance from the mocking pain of knowledge, conceding that in her pale squinting eyes, I’m ferociously commonplace, a charitable toleration, worthy only of polite neglect.

Day 18

    My dreams have fallen into a rotation rhythm lately.  The situation unspools in its usual fashion, then there are the Eve/Hannah dreams of both