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    Louisiana Rain
    Louisiana Rain
    Louisiana Rain
    Ebook175 pages3 hours

    Louisiana Rain

    By TJ Seitz

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Story about a spontanious road trip to New Orleans during the early 1990's.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTJ Seitz
    Release dateOct 14, 2012
    ISBN9781301838561
    Louisiana Rain
    Author

    TJ Seitz

    On the surface Mr. Seitz appears to be a quintessential middle aged male. TJ is married to his HS sweetheart and lives with his family in a suburban split level house located on the outskirts of Rochester, NY. Seitz has spend the majority of his professional career working as an information technology specialist in the fields of education, criminal justice/law enforcement and procurement. While working full time, TJ also attended college part time (and sometimes full time). To keep himself (relatively speaking) sane he majored and minored in non-technology subjects, earning a BA in English with a writing concentration from Saint John Fisher College and a MA in Social Policy from Empire State College. As an undergraduate student TJ attended writing classes taught by George Saunders and Judith Kitchen (though neither teacher would probably remember him). Distractions like kicking virtual wasp’s nests on BITNET Listservs (predecessors to social networking sites like Facebook), soliciting donations for a Panty Alter fund and hanging out with a heavily medicated professional drummer named Dirtbag interfered with TJ’s ability to write anything particularly noteworthy for either class. He also attended a workshop at the Omega Institute mentored by Marge Piercy and Ira Wood. In reality the stable full time jobs have been serving as functional fronts for TJ’s secret life as a writer. They provided him with money to pay his bills and experiential material to write about. The down side of working and going to college was that he did not have a lot of time to devote to writing and publishing. Adding a problematic first marriage, babies, a divorce, a few bouts with unemployment and colon cancer to the mix did not help much either. TJ is currently working on several writing projects/ideas and recently took a graduate writing class proctored by James Whorton. Mr. Seitz's essays and letters have been printed in both local and national publications. His poetry has been published both in the United States and England.

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      Book preview

      Louisiana Rain - TJ Seitz

      Louisiana Rain

      T.J. Seitz

      Copyright 2012 by T.J. Seitz

      Smashwords Edition

      Introduction

      This story is a creative combination of recent, distant and imagined memory.

      I believe that recent memory relies heavily on details to sustain itself and that distant memory is generated by embracing the spirit of pervious experiences. Imagined memories are created within the gray regions that exist somewhere between the past and present.

      I began writing this story when I was a stereotypical undergraduate English major. I had long hair, a black leather jacket and a worthless chip on my shoulder. Despite my poetic aspirations I was essentially clueless when it came to expressing my thoughts effectively in writing.

      What I wrote was ordinary or incomplete. It usually read like a contract or computer manual. I failed to understand that I also needed to develop those ideas; bringing them to life by creating an enchanted connection between the reader and the words I wrote.

      After finishing an initial draft for a creative writing class, I lost track of the work during the next decade because life got in the way. Marriage, kids, jobs, grad school and a divorce distracted me from pursuing many of my interests.

      Eventually the crazy making ceased and balance returned, allowing me to remember forgotten parts of myself with the benefit of hindsight and temperance. I began re-reading novels from my dusty bookshelves and writing prose again with a different perspective.

      I recalled the piece after reading a magazine article about the aftereffects of Hurricane Katrina but could not find it in any of my files. I attempted to rewrite the essay from memory then impulsively contacted an old girlfriend from college, whom I happened to share an electronic version with, after finding her old e-mail address in a paperback copy of Still Life with Woodpecker.

      Nikki never forgot or threw anything away, including our unresolved relationship, which I ended abruptly soon after meeting my now ex-wife.

      It had been several years since I had slept with a woman so I was looking for any opportunity to get laid. She was currently living in Boston with her two daughters. My employer has an office on Bedford Street. I attend company meetings there every other month or so.

      We met at her place, talked some, had dinner with her kids before sending them off to friend’s house for the night then fucked each other’s brains out; quickly crocheting the loose ends we left behind in college, before she gave me a photocopy of my story.

      While lying in bed together, she informed me that she recently broke off a long term relationship with the father of her youngest child. I asked her who the father of her older girl was. She answered my question frankly and told me that I was the father.

      But that’s another story.

      It was interesting to see how the two versions of the same story differed. The language was more flowing and expressive in the rewritten version because my writing style had matured but I had obviously forgotten a lot of the details over the years that were in my original account. I needed to think about and re-remember what happened.

      Melding the two pieces into a third wholly new story relied on different kinds of memory to succeed.

      Memory can play tricks on you, especially when it’s not recorded or documented constantly. Imagined memory thrives on vagueness and will gradually replace factual details with fabricated ones as long as they don’t conflict with the feelings associated with a person’s distant memory. Feelings are subjective and can change with time thus allowing everything experienced to blend together and get mixed up, allowing an individual to perceive truth and fantasy as one in the same.

      The classic example of a couple breaking up is a great way to articulate the differences between recent, distant and imagined memory.  Immediately after a pair goes their separate ways each experiences the raw details and freshly hurt feelings of their separation. The emotions and particulars, be they positive, negative, unbiased or discriminating, are right there in their faces to acknowledge, deny, sort through, embrace and experience. Recent memory is usually pretty easy for a person to describe, ponder and relate to in a much more personal, tangible manner.  Recent memory is vivid and driven by instinct and the moment. What we remember can be or is broken down into obvious facts that we organize in our heads to share with ourselves and others. Doing so helps with coping so that we can do things like blame, feel justified or just prepare ourselves to eventually accept or take responsibility for our part in what happened. 

      Over time though, people naturally become detached from their experiences and generally move on with their lives, distant and imagined memory merge and become active.

      The spirit of an experience eventually takes over, unconsciously replacing specific details with impressions that sustain a transparent vagueness blurring the line between fact and feeling (imagined memory). 

      Distant and imagined memories are more powerful than recent memory in the long run. However they both depend on recent memory initially to set their foundations so that over time as the connection between past and present fades and the end results overshadows or overpowers the truth.

      Imagined memory selectively censors and/or edits the truth while distant memory sustains the results.

      Distant memory’s source of existence is created similar to a habit by thinking about something over and over again inadvertently fabricating things like obsessions or in a positive sense helping a person truly realize their weaknesses, taking responsibility for their choices through authentic contemplation over time.  

      As years blend together, distant memory can fuel denial or ignorance, masking the true nature of what actually happened. Misleading someone into believe in a fantasy such as that love does or did still exists..  

      The timeless battle between idealistic and realistic takes place amongst the three memories. They can cause someone to become sentimental and reminisce or romanticize too much about their lost love creating a fantasy relationship and associated feelings in their head over an extended period of time that never existed yet is still feels real none the less (because many of the specific details became lost or forgotten…..(I believe that aporia is a Latin word for a forgotten memory)….from their memory over time after they moved on).

      They can also work in the opposite direction through anger, wrongfully making a relationship out to be much worse than it really was overall by allowing a person to obsess over all the bad parts, exaggerating or elaborating them more to wrongly represent the whole experience as bad when in reality it just ran it course. 

      The Trip Down

      I think it was late-February and snowing out. I was off from work for a week and fed up with everything in Rochester, New York. I wanted to do something besides sleep in, play video games or get drunk.

      I lived with a rag tag group of Bohemians. We had very little in common with each other but since everyone was basically respectful conflicts were minimal.

      The house matriarch only demanded civility and privacy from tenants, beyond that all rules or decisions were determined by majority vote. Tracy didn’t give a shit if we were in our rooms getting stoned and staring at the ceiling all day or robbing a bank in another state, all she wanted was our monthly share of the rent and utility bills.

      The arrangement worked well for about three years

      The woman whom I loosely considered my girlfriend at the time lived in Connecticut. The relationship had not yet congealed into any sort of real commitment beyond conjugal visits between college semesters, midnight phone calls and lots of letter writing.

      I had also been spending a lot of time hanging out with a seventeen year old punker girl who was easily four or five years younger than me. We met at a mutual friend’s New Year’s Eve Party and slept together that same night after getting drunk. It turned out that she was still a senior in a suburban Catholic High School and her parents were oblivious to the double life she lived.

      She liked that I had a car and would take her to trendy boutiques along Monroe Avenue Saturday afternoons. I liked having sex with her.

      I didn’t coordinate my vacation with either person. Both young women had plans so I was free to do something alone.

      With little or no thought I spontaneously decided to take a trip. I took a quick shower then removed all the money I had stashed in my bedroom nightstand and put it in my wallet.

      No one was home. I departed soon after taping a handwritten note to the refrigerator door that informed my roommates I was going to Daytona Beach for a few days. I changed my mind though before leaving the New York and started heading towards New Orleans.

      This was a bygone era before smart phones, text messaging and wireless internet access. My only communication or connection back to the world I was about to leave was a sloppily written message fastened to a Frigidaire with a broken kitty cat magnet amongst old grocery lists, Chinese takeout menus, a few business cards and scraps of paper inscribed with unlabeled phone numbers. It was quite possible that my absence would go unnoticed.

      I left town with about two hundred and fifty dollars in cash, a Kodak automatic 35mm camera (with a single roll of film) and an American Express credit card in my pocket. I didn’t bother packing any extra clothes or a toothbrush because I usually kept a duffle bag filled with those things in my car just in case I ever needed them.

      Looking back, the whole experience felt like a plot taken right out of an Elmore Leonard novel.

      I didn’t use a map. I just followed signs from one big city to the next driving Westward first, then South. Playing a game I called, "Connect the Big City Dots;" starting with Cleveland, to Columbus in Ohio, then over to Indianapolis, Indiana and down to Louisville, Kentucky. From Louisville I kept going southward though Kentucky to Nashville then over to Memphis, Tennessee where I decided to stop and rent a hotel room for the evening.

      The car stereo was my sole companion as I drove south. Satellite radio hadn’t been invented yet so my listening choices were very limited.

      I remember hearing Sinead O’Connor’s song Nothing Compares to You, on all the radio stations and playing the two tapes (The Eagles Greatest Hits and Frank Zappa’s Apostrophe) I had in my car repeatedly. AM stations with ‘Talk Radio’ formats were also an option but most sane people can only tolerate so much Rush Limbaugh before they start shouting at the radio and are overcome by the urge to change the station.

      Throughout the first leg of my trip I only stopped for gas, two or three piss breaks and one forty-five minute catnap at a random rest stop somewhere near Seymour, Indiana.

      After twenty-two hours of tiresome, tedious driving, eating just a box of Hostess HoHo’s and drinking a twelve pack of Diet Coke that I bought at a 7-Eleven after filling the car’s gas tank in Rochester, I decided I should stop driving. I was in Memphis, Tennessee.

      My body was exhausted, despite my racing mind. I needed to find a room with a bed, clean toilet and shower. I pulled off the highway and checked into a Marriot hotel.

      After I was settled into my room I thought I’d unwind some and take a walk around the hotel neighborhood. I needed to move around after driving for so long and calm my mind so that I could get some sleep. I then got the stupid idea in my thick skull that I wanted to find Elvis’ Graceland and began looking through the maps I found of the city in the Frommmer’s travel book I kept in my car’s glove box.

      I should have just gone to bed. I walked what felt like ten miles, around the area where I thought the mansion was supposed to be. I even walked out the city limits into Germantown, not realizing how far off course I was. I must have looked like an idiot looking at my book, the street signs and building addresses in my John Lennon sunglasses, faded black Hard Rock Café t-shirt, ripped jeans and sandals.

      I was so stubborn about finding the place that when I returned to the hotel I got back into my car and started driving deeper into city, looking impatiently for the Landmark. I was clueless on just how big the Memphis area actually was.

      I was only interested in getting a quick snapshot of the estate’s gate for a friend who liked Elvis Presley; to prove to them that I had actually been there, but couldn’t find it! I was so frustrated with the whole situation from the lack of sleep and sore feet that I eventually gave up as the sun began to set. On the way back to the hotel I ordered a ‘Cheese Burger Extra Value Meal’ at a nearby McDonalds drive thru.

      Because of my experience I have come to disregard everything I’ve heard about the musician’s mansion over the years, good and bad. I think all the rumors were made up to lure people into the area to spend their money. Graceland to me was, and still is, only a legend, not a real place.

      I have no memory of what the room looked like beyond the TV being located to the southwest of the bed. By the time I got back to the room my mind was in a serious fog. I was more concerned with eating the food I bought and lying down than the rooms layout. At that point I just wanted a safe place to sleep and take a crap.

      I sat on the bed and ate my food. After devouring my cheap dinner consisting two smashed florescent orange-ish yellow sandwiches, a medium sized French fry and Coke, I laid down and started flipping through TV stations with the remote control. It only took me a few minutes on my back to pass out from exhaustion. I fell asleep fully dressed with my head propped up on several pillows, the remote in my hand and the TV tuned in on HBO, the movie Major League.

      I woke up early the next day and showered. Before checking out I grabbed a banana, raisin bagel, two donuts and three cans of warm cola from the continental breakfast table in the room next to the main desk. I was back on the road heading for New Orleans by 5:00AM.

      When I stopped for gas in Mississippi it was easy to tell I was an outsider.

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