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The UpStairs Lounge: Dead Men Do Tell Tales

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.

Continue reading "The UpStairs Lounge" at Etude.

Little Writers

Yesterday while I was cleaning the kitchen, my wife was in the next room watching the 1994 film version of Little Women. In one scene, the narrator and protagonist, Jo March, as played by Winona Ryder, has moved from Massachusetts to New York City, and wants to describe to her family back home what her new friend Professor Bhaer is like. Because the story unfolds during Reconstruction, Jo is limited in her writing efforts to… wait for it… pen and paper.

Allowing my mind to wander as I scrubbed the pan from the morning’s bacon, I conjectured how differently such a scene might unfold if it took place this year. Jo wouldn’t be limited to writing about the prof, to help her family gain an appreciation of his personality; she’d have multiple technological means to support her. Not only could our 2009 Jo chat with Marm March and the girls on the phone, she could upload a short video about her pal, or refer them to the man’s profiles on MySpace or Facebook or LinkedIn. Or heck, Friendster if the good professor is old skool. If Jo wanted to effect a meeting, of sorts, Second Life would be waiting. And of course, Jo could always blog about her buddy.

Two writers I know personally, both of whom I respect and admire, each recently penned an essay gently denouncing social media and networking for writers. Blogs are too easy, too informal, and frankly, full of crap, argues one essay. Twitter’s seductive micro-blogging format saps artistic creativity, argues the other. And so I, the official Luddite of my family, find myself cast as a reluctant Don Quixote championing the virtues of such tech applications, my windmill the common gripe that real writers write real essays, real books, with, I don’t know, a quill pen or something.

So what’s my point, aside from needlessly needling my colleagues?

A Ghost Story

This article appeared in the Summer 2008 issue of Etude: The Journal of Literary Nonfiction.  This is part of the capstone project of my graduate degree, and a portion of the book proposal I'm preparing.

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“Are you male, or female?” the psychic asks. She seems to be addressing the empty air.

Her arms outstretched, Martina Baker holds a pair of L-shaped copper dowsing rods, one in each hand, pointed directly at the massive gravestone, as if she’s about to fire off a couple rounds, six-shooter style, at an already-vanquished opponent. Cylindrical handles allow the rods to pivot freely. “Um, cross for male, open for female,” Martina adds, as if an afterthought.

A clock loudly tolls the hour. Abruptly, the rods swivel away from one another. Female. Whoa. Did those rods just move by themselves? Martina, motionless in the bright sunshine, appears to be holding her clenched fists perfectly still.

“Interesting!” says my wife, Jennifer. After a few more questions delivered to granite marker, Martina moves along to quiz another headstone. Another ghost.

The decrepit monuments, most bearing birth dates in the 1800s, list crazily in the sunlight, the result of northwest soil turning to pudding each winter when the rains come, then resettling as solid earth once more in the summer, over and over, for lifetimes.

In this hushed, poetic setting, the outgoing Martina stands out, with her readiness to laugh, her thick, straw-colored hair and her wide, movie star sunglasses. Even down to her lipstick choice, Martina favors an all-black ensemble, her dark pants and shirt offset by the several colorful bracelets that slip up her forearms toward her elbows as she aims the dowsing rods. Martina’s husband Todd, who, like his wife, is in his late thirties or early forties, is the co-founder and only other member of the Pacific Paranormal Research Society. He stands behind her, camera at the ready, his long, curly brown hair checked by a Pacific Paranormal Research Society ball cap, the front of which reads “Ghost Hunters are Deadicated.” My eyes drift from the hat to Todd’s matching tee shirt: “Back off, man! I’m a ghost hunter!”

Martina and Todd Baker have met us here on this hot July day, in a Victorian-era cemetery in Eugene, Oregon, to help me determine if the memorial park is haunted. I’m trying to answer that question for a pre-Halloween story in a local magazine. My editor wants me to get to the bottom of the ghost stories that have surrounded Eugene Pioneer Cemetery for decades.

Continue Reading "A Ghost Story" at Etude.