This article originally appeared in the Winter issue of Etude: The Journal of Literary Nonfiction. A much expanded version of this story was incorporated into my final project for my graduate program.
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The psychic is already on his second glass of cheap red wine, and he’s been in the bar only ten minutes.
Phillip is in his late thirties, slight of stature, intense
in disposition and nearly bald. He sits stoically, cloaked in the gloom of
murky bar air at the head of the table, regarding his fellow ghost-hunter Kalila,
her dark, straight hair bobbing as she dances along to the routine of four
muscular young men, a Village People tribute group.
The costumed performers, on break from a show at a competing club down the street, are in the throes of an impromptu performance of the disco hit “Y.M.C.A.” here in Jimani Lounge, an Italian bar at Chartres and Iberville, in New Orleans’ French Quarter. Kalila seems especially enchanted by the cop character, a friendly African-American man in an incredibly tight tee shirt.
Phillip is hitting the red hard. He’d much rather be ogling the beefcake, but he’s already picking up strong psychic impressions from the floor above, and the wine, he explains, “smoothes out the edges.” He’s more forthcoming when pressed: wine drowns out the telepathic barrage of voices and impressions constantly battering at his consciousness. His daily intake is in the neighborhood of fifteen glasses. Phillip makes a point of never beginning a supernatural investigation without first bellying up.
Instead of watching the high kicks, Phillip has busied himself unscrewing the top of a plastic salt shaker. He neatly dumps the contents into a small plastic baggie he has produced from somewhere on his person. Phillip twists the baggie tightly closed and pockets it, as if squirreling away an ounce of cocaine.
“Do you believe in coincidence?” Phillip drawls at me, in an accent that reveals his backwoods Oklahoma origins. “I don’t,” he states flatly. We’re here tonight to investigate the site of the gay bar that occupied the space one floor above us in the 1970s, and Village People look-alikes “randomly” showing up feels like fate. Or prescience.
Just a quarter-hour ago, Phillip left his night job at Marie
Laveau’s House of Voodoo, a French Quarter occult supply shop catering mostly
to tourists. Phillip is one of the store’s in-house psychic readers, advising
vacationing secretaries and sloshed frat boys how to get laid or get loved.
The Jimani, pronounced like “Gemini” but misspelled to incorporate the given name of its founder, Jimmy Massacci, Sr., occupies the first floor of a building whose second story once housed the UpStairs Lounge, the gay club. The UpStairs had been a gathering place for the Quarter’s nascent gay scene, even hosting homosexual-inclusive church services, until a Sunday evening in June of 1973, when someone lit an incendiary device, lobbed it into the stairwell leading up to the club and locked the street-side door from the outside.
Twenty-nine people, mostly homosexual men, died in the flames that night, while another three victims succumbed in the following days. The destruction of the UpStairs was the most deadly fire in the city’s history, and an event that quickly evolved into a rallying point for gay rights in the Crescent City. The arsonist-murderer was never caught.
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