Thrown-away Child

opportunity arose. But never could he quite make it through the shadows cast down around him by that single day. He could not forget, he could only remember.
    He drank anything he could get his hands on. When he was still too young to walk into liquor stores under his own steam, he would buy vanilla extract or rubbing alcohol or camphor oil or hair tonic. In those days, be was partial to Vitalis. He preferred drinking alone, even when he was running with the gangs, and so the times he would share in a case of stolen beer were few. Once he reached his majority he could buy whatever he wanted, of course, providing he was on the outside; providing he had the money, or reasonable access to an unguarded purse or wallet.
    On the inside, he drank mushroom tea when the screws ran out of whisky to sell to the inmates. Most cons drank the tea at one time or another, and also some of the screws. Some prisoners shot silver into their veins. But Perry would not associate with them, certainly not after what he had seen in Harlem.
    Two cups of mushroom tea and most men would see beautiful, sunny things above all else. They might become a little weepy over these pleasing mushroom visions, but the suffering of their present and the waste of their past seemed to belong to somebody else, at least for a while.
    Like all the other tea drinkers, Perry had seen beautifully imagined things. But no matter how much he drank, he could not escape the destruction of his personal history. There was one day in particular that was inescapable—its memory stronger than prison bars, stronger than booze, stronger than mushroom tea.
    Even now, the memory was sure to come, and Perry knew he was helpless against it. The guilt of memory was not his to bear, that he also knew. Had he not once whispered to Clete, “Guilt and persecution and innocence, it’s all the same thing for the luckless”?
    But now Clete was gone—gone so terribly. Perry knew the police had to be hunting for him. Which was why he had come to this place: a rotted shed, where he could hide himself in a dank-smelling patch of secret shade.
    In flight from the levee, he had had the presence of mind to buy cigarettes and a quart bottle of whisky. And now he would smoke and drink until the safety of darkness. He listened to his booming heart, and considered the next move in his sorry-ass life.
    The shed was a lean-to at the rear of Nikki’s Dockside Club on Chartres Street between Piety and Desire. It was made of corrugated steel, twisted and discoloured from a fire that rushed through Nikki’s some years back. As a matter of fact, it was the same year Perry had been serving his first burglary stretch.
    In a manner of speaking, Nikki’s was likewise incarcerated. The club had lost its customers, and so the owner closed up and had all the doors and windows covered with iron bars. Everybody assumed the place was torched for insurance money.
    In the fortunate years, Nikki’s was virtually the neighborhood parlor, always full of stevedores who worked the bustling Governor Nicholls Street Wharf. Sometimes there was entertainment, and sometimes it was good. A piano player, a zydeco band, a pickup jazz combo...
    Sometimes a pretty girl named Rose, who pinned a gardenia in her hair and sang dreamy songs while men bought Coca-Colas for her little boy, Perry.
    Nikki’s was a friendly and unassuming place, as natural to its humble surroundings as the sweet smell of fresh-cooked praline candy cooling on window ledges. Nobody in the neighborhood had reason to believe they stood in the way of progress.
    But then one day—that was all the time it seemed to take—the Governor Nicholls Street Wharf was not what it used to be. Cargo containers and huge semi-trucks decimated the manpower needs of the waterfront, resulting mainly in two things: bigger profits for investors in the moneyed parts of town, and a crime wave for the immediate and newly impoverished neighborhood. Nikki’s, for instance, was robbed about once a week toward the end of its life.
    Residential blocks fanning off from the wharf were wounded, dying or altogether deceased. Working men in denim and khakis used to crowd these blocks, swinging lunch buckets on their way back and forth from the docks. Their jobs had left them with thick rough hands and fingers as big around as rail spikes. Such hands were not needed in the new low-wage computer jobs, which was about all anybody could get in the way of a job. And so these men had