As we drove down Carrollton Ave. towards the Riverbend I felt as though something were ripping away, a vestige of my past or present not able perhaps to assimilate into this transdimensional event of returning; a sound almost audible as though a piece of metal were being smashed and reformed. But then I realized that it was actually a portion of the exhaust system underneath the car that had just given way, hooked on the pavement beneath us, and been torn off.
From the ages of 17 to 21 this city was my home. In many, many ways this was my coming of age city. My associations of this place, especially the portion of the city where I lived, studied, partied, matured--the Garden District in Uptown, Tulane University campus specifically, across St. Charles Avenue from Audobon Park. This is the place I came to start new after the years of playing high school student and son in little Ellensburg, WA. This is the place I came to explore the new stage of my life, my transition from pupae to adulthood. This is the place I came to have my eyes opened and my consciousness retrained. I have no doubt but that anyone reading this who really knows me is thinking, "uh-huh, all a dat in the city that care forgot...that explains a lot about that boy...!"
And certainly it does. This is the city where I worked from eleven at night to seven in the morning five days a week for the last twelve months that I spent here, the twelve months beginning in May of 1985, the last month of my junior year at Tulane. Yep, the graveyard shift in the city of necropoli, bayou ghosts, and 24 hour liquor sales. Hell this city today seems something like a casino, has that feel--where else in this country can you still smoke inside of establishments? Where else but casinos in any state and New Orleans. Mm-hmm, that's right. And me manning the New Orleans Crisis Line for forty hours a week, yes, the only human on the end of the Night Gallery line from somewhere out there in the sticky, sulfurous night direct lined through my ear into my cerebral cortex.
Used to bike up Claiborne Ave. up to the Superdome, hang a left on Canal St. to the United Way building. Upon arrival I'd push a buzzer and stand back so that the volunteer on shift could see who was on the sidewalk below, wave, come down, turn off the alarm, let me in. They'd brief me on what was going on that night, who was killing themselves, trying to, in trouble, fucked up beyond belief, etc. Ongoing crises that needed attending to. Then I'd let them out, lock the door, set the alarm, go on up to the desk, ready myself for the psychic onslaught.
A million people roughly. That's how many people lived in the greater Nawlins area at that time. Just me. That's how many people were in that building fielding the cries for help that oozed from the metropolis around me. I was the only person paid to answer the phone, the rest were volunteers. I got into this because as a Resident Advisor at Tulane my junior year one of our mandates was to do some volunteer action, I chose Crisis Line from the list and was trained to do 4 or 8 hour shifts every week or two. Approaching the end of my junior year Michael Higgins, the director, asked my if I'd consider doing the graveyard shift in a paid way because he and the other two paid daytime people/administrators had to do them when they couldn't get enough volunteers and because they could work it out to use Workstudy money from the university that had been granted to me to offset the costs of paying me.
I guess there were around 10 calls each night on average, and, frankly, 3-5 were either hang ups or just quick info calls, people looking to find a resource of some kind, and I'd hook them up with that, or, in the case of the hang ups it was typical to just speak into the phone for a half minute or more saying things like, "Hello, are you feeling down tonight? Did you want to speak to someone? Would you prefer to speak with a woman? (I could give them a number for a sexual abuse line, for example, if it were a woman who had been raped and was in no way interested in talking to a man). After fishing for more than breathing on the other end I'd say something like, "You can call back anytime," or, "there'll be a woman here to talk to at such and such a time tomorrow."
And the calls that came in varied from the regulars like Greg, a schizophrenic twenty/thirty year old who called usually every night or two. "Hey, Peter," that's what he'd say, cuz my nom de phone was Peter-clever, huh, like the reverse of the Spanish class name, right? Then Greg would talk about things like how his landlord, in the apartment above him, would follow him around his apartment from upstairs--so, like, if Greg went into his own bathroom, his landlord would walk into his, following Greg. Or if Greg walked into the kitchen, so would his landlord. And this bothered him tremendously. Or one time he was telling me about his dad coming over and talking and what not and I didn't understand the gravity of things, like, "So why is this a problem for you, Greg?" and Greg says, "My dad died two years ago, man."
One time Greg told me about being on the edge of the bayou and he's burning trash in a barrel and then he comes to awareness of hundreds of sets of little, red eyes surrounding him just outside of firelight range. They start moving in for him, he says, and they're nutria, the little guinea pig like critters that people throw into their red beans and gumbo in the back country around here, and they're coming for him. He throws bricks at them, kills some, the rest keep coming, he runs, barely escapes. Yes, Greg was indeed, if I didn't mention this already, or if you haven't guessed, a paranoid schizophrenic. And he didn't always want to take his medication. I always attempted to convince him that he should, saying things to him like, "Well, Greg, I understand what you're saying to me, however you are schizophrenic, right? And you are off of your medication, yeah?"
The worst were the straight out I'm-gonna-kill-myself calls. I'd work the call sheet plan, 1) Tune in; 2) Establish a rapport; 3) Explore; 4) Options; 5) Make a plan. Things like assessing both the lethality and probability of the suicide attempters plan. For example, has a loaded gun in hand and already wrote the goodbye note and gave away his favorite dog-high probability and high lethality. Gonna take pills, tried three times before, no note-low lethality and medium to low probability.
It was not uncommon for me to scan the obituaries in the Times-Picayune for people that I believed that I had talked to the night before. Like the doctor who also had a J.D. and was taking the correct amount of the correct drug and was really smart and could not be talked out of anything. I mean most people, 30%, called cuz they were depressed and lonely (I circled LONELINESS on the Call Sheet) and just needed to talk and be directed to form a plan to call a family member or friend or get a counselor. But not this guy, he had it all intellectualiized out, Nietzche-ized--not lonely, just existentially fucked. And there's me, checking his info about the pills and body weight and what not in the PDR-III (Physicians Desk Referenced third edition revised) and finding that he was not guessing or lying, he was in fact breathing slower, his voice trailing off, talking of the taste of mint coming into his mouth, and finally I couldn't get him to respond, and finally the call ended. I looked for him in the paper, didn't find any match. Don't really know.
Lots like that. This was back in the day, as they say, back in the day before caller ID. All I really had access to to save anyone, to pull them back towards the light, was just my own mind, my own voice, some resources on the desk, my own lifeline to my own God/s.
My time in New Orleans came to a natural and expected end when I received my Bachelor's Degree in May of 1986. My time working the line, riding home at seven each morning, seeing the sun come up over this leafy, dripping city, came to an end and it became my time to move away from this experiment in the Twilight Zone and on to some place where the rays of the sun could penetrate beneath the foliage of the over arching and ever present Live Oaks that covered this city that care forgot.
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