By Louis Bourgeois
Rats and Rain
Outside the window, several white boys from the H.U.D. projects stood around the drainage duct at the curb of the street. The silver water was viscous as it came down on the bare backed boys with no shoes. I wanted to be outside with them, I wanted to be outside with them as the rain poured in streams into the drain. My grandmother Olga was watching The Price is Right, or something else just as stupid on her beat up black and white twelve inch television set. I asked her if I could go out, she responded with an emphatic No, explaining that those boys would break my bones up at the very least or perhaps murder me out right; no telling with them, she said. I told her I would run if they tried to get me and she used her strongest weapon, her weapon of choice, and began crying at the mere notion that I could be killed so close to home. I sat at the wobbly Formica top kitchen table and played Black Jack by myself as she slowly fell asleep in front of the T.V.
Twenty minutes later she was snoring loudly and I slipped out the green front door of the duplex. The rain was still coming down hard. It was around noon and under the alcove of the duplex I took off my shirt and shoes and piled them next to some nameless and miserable plant that Olga had tried and tried to nurture back to life with sad results.
I crossed the street in the intense downpour. It was as if they were waiting for me, as if they had been waiting a long time, but, really, there was no way for them to know that I’d been trying to get out and join them for almost an hour. Instantly, one of the bigger boys grabbed me by the shoulder and said, If you want to hang out with us you have to go down there and tell us what you see. We’ll hang onto your legs and promise not to let go. I knew that I was just an instrument for their amusement, some experiment for them to observe, watching a child crawl to his death just to see what it looks like, but I didn’t care, I was lonely, my parents were recently divorced and I was an only child. Alright, I said, just don’t let go.
I crawled through the drainage slit and the boy who spoke to me held me by the ankles as I descended under the street. The water was flowing very fast but surprisingly it was only knee deep. The boy let go just as I was fully underground and I fell head first into the rushing water and the gray concrete under it. Luckily, I knew how to fall in almost any situation as I’d been playing street football ever since I could remember and had taken on much worse falls than this one. I’d only skinned my palms a bit when I fell into the gutter. I stood up almost as soon as I fell and the light from the drainage opening was at least three feet above my head, but I could still see the surface of the street and even the bottom half of Olga’s duplex across from me. Of course, I wasn’t surprised at all that I couldn’t see any of the boys who had fled just as soon as they’d dropped me. These were the same boys who tried to all but kill me every evening as I walked from Our Lady of Lord’s to Olga’s to stay with her after school until my mother got off from work in the late evening.
Standing under the street in the rain and in the sewage water, I realized this was some kind of test, some right of passage, to become a member of the Society of Misspent Youth at the housing project, but I couldn’t seem to get adequately frightened by the situation which by now was rather grave and dangerous and there was a good chance that I might not get out of it alive. I couldn’t at all pull myself out of the duct because it was too high up to get the right leverage. The boys undoubtedly wanted me to drown outright or save myself without any help. The rain was now falling heavier than it had been when I first came from across the street. Bloated sewer rats passed by in the quick flowing water. One or two of them tried to jump on my legs to save themselves, but I easily kicked them away. Foot-long fish of dubious worth flowed by, some dead, others still quite alive and flowing against the stream for some reason. They were not the kind of fish that I caught with my dad on the weekends at our fishing camp on Lake Ponchartrain. These were “city fish” that only the truly poor would attempt to eat, mostly shad and carp. The rain stopped suddenly and even some crystal white sun shone through the drainage opening. The water began to go down drastically like someone pulling the plug on a bathroom tub and now barely covered the tops of my feet. I bellowed and bellowed from beneath the ground for what seemed like hours until finally two old arms reached down and helped me scuttle out. It was Olga.
Her deep tears still haunt my very blood.
1977
Rats
The over-the-counter sleeping pill overdose failed to kill me; I stayed up four days and four nights. I was attempting to stay out of the hospital and was trying hard not to fall asleep, that is, I was trying hard not to die. I was playing out my death at the sweet age of twenty-three very badly. Four days I spent four days walking all over Baton Rouge and all over campus. I took forty-seven over the counter sleeping pills, but I’d lost the courage to take them all at once and instead took three at a time at intervals of five minutes until all three boxes of the sleeping tablets were empty of their silver trays and the result was that I didn’t die but kind of hallucinated for a little while. My hallucinations never really got to the point of becoming visual, they were in the skin, they were felt, not truly seen. By dawn of the first day, I’d developed the worse case of dry mouth on record; I had to drink no less than a gallon of water every half hour or so; I had to, I felt quite certain I would die if I couldn’t get enough to drink; I felt if I didn’t get enough water I would die a luke-warm death, which I wanted to avoid at all costs because I still saw myself as some kind of revolutionary who needed to leave the world in hot flames of crystal.
But why did I want to leave the world forever and forever in the first place? Perhaps there was no reason at all, just sensations and morbid internal images that led me to the conclusion that I should no longer exist, here on earth. Perhaps I was tired of being an overgrown undergraduate at this Pig and Cow University. I was tired of not really writing and having an overwhelming desire to write. Perhaps I was being overworked as an Honor’s English student and I was burned out on trying to be the best the school had to offer. Perhaps it was as simple as having grown weary of being an out and out one armed cripple, of not being able to play the guitar, or swim good, or be a surgeon if I wanted to be a surgeon. A few hours before I took the pills, my paternal uncle visited me in my dorm and right off he began insulting me by going on and on about a younger cousin of mine who had just enlisted in the army to kill brown skinned people in Arabia. This cousin whom I could have easily ripped apart when I had two arms was now my uncle’s favorite nephew. I had been his favorite before my accident. This was the uncle for whom I would swim five miles, jog ten miles and fast for a week during lent just to show him I could do it because I was stronger and greater than everyone else. Although he stayed with me for most of the two months when I was in the hospital, it was now clear he didn’t understand me and was really ashamed of me, of my onearmedness, my crippledness.
We drank vodka and smoked some of his excellent weed while he insulted me by telling me how great my cousin Chris was for being a soldier in the U.S. Army and went on and on about his time in Vietnam, about ancient jungle villages he helped blow to bits with the very bombers he helped guide to these village targets. Then all of a sudden he left. He left me in this terrible confusion that started with the booze, insults, and weed. That’s when I decided to die, but no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t do it, just couldn’t die. Seems like I have no luck at all in the dying department. On the fourth day of this will-less mesmerizing misery trying to beat off the sleeping tablet death, and after drinking what must have been a hundred gallons of water, I almost pissed myself to death if nothing else. For four days I didn’t shit or eat, just walked, drank water, and pissed. Then suddenly I found myself in a friend’s stolen car and drove all the way back to where I was raised on Bayou Sauvage in New Orleans East. I was driving along highway 90 through the heartland of the New Orleans’s marsh prairies and as the sun was coming up on that fetid summer day my throat burned from being stripped raw from the godless and nameless chemicals in the sleeping tablets, and my stomach now caught on that it hadn’t eaten a thing in like five days and rebelled against me for being so abused.
All along the terrible harsh June highway, a creosote and fiberglass sun shown hard and bright on the bodies of large, dead, bloated nutrias, each of them inscribed with my name and my family’s name and with my hunger, this hunger that would have shamed Jesus Christ Superstar many many times over.
1993
Louis Bourgeois was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. He is primarily a poet, but he has published translations, fiction, memoirs, poetry and interviews in over two hundred magazines and journals in North America, Europe and Asia. He graduated from Louisiana State University with a BA in English and was the first graduate of The University of Mississippi’s MFA program in Creative Writing. He is the Executive Director of VOX PRESS, as well as the Program Director for the Mississippi Prison Writes Initiative.