Chapter 1

Using a thick black rubber cane, Ira Silver stood on a stepladder reaching for a long strand of pink pearls caught in a thicket of branches just below the empty window box on the front of his three-story home on St. Charles Avenue. Swatting at what he thought was another mosquito, Ira felt an overgrown elephant ear tickling the crook of his knee.
It was unusually warm for Ash Wednesday, the air thick and moist. Ira’s cheeks were flushed and large drops of sweat cascaded down the side of his pocked forehead. Brownish grey spaghetti strands covering the large bald spot on the crown of his head fused with the dirt that fell from the limbs of the oak tree as he scowered the branches for more beads.
At the bottom of the ladder, six large trash bags were crammed with stuffed animals, plastic Chinese trinkets and hundreds of strands of cheap beads. Ira used to sell the beads back to the thrift store on Freret Street, but they stopped paying for them years ago. Instead the bags will sit in his front foyer for a week or two until Krispy Kreme has their donation day and Ira drags them to Metairie for a few dozen glazed donuts.
Ira had had quite the collection of ladders when his kids were around, but these days he has little use for them. This one was left in front of his house, lying against the black wrought iron fence, right where some inebriated father had left it on Fat Tuesday, awaiting irreverence by one of New Orleans’ finest. After picking the remaining beads out of the trees, Ira will roll the ladder down to Clement Hardware on Magazine Street, the only store in town that buys them back.
Ira was at the tail end of his latest gout flare up, which was the reason for the cane. After pestering strangers on the neutral ground for leftover burgers, wieners and beer during the first weekend of Mardi Gras parades, Ira had the all-too-familiar feeling of smoldering charcoal crystallizing in the bones around his left ankle. He had woken Sunday night still drunk, begging Charlie to roll him in a little red wagon down to Touro Hospital on Prytania Street. Touro during Carnival was an unpleasant place to be; six hours of degradation, dealing with miscreants and drunks, before Ira was finally allowed to see a doctor, only to be told that he was not sufficiently impaired as to receive free medical care.
Ira took it easy the rest of the week, only leaving his house in the mornings and when parades were over to empty the fishing net that he had fastened to a lawn chair with a sign that said “Hit Me.” When Ira’s parents lived there—and to a lesser extent when Lin and the kids were around—friends and friends of friends used to congregate on the front lawn and use the bathrooms, but it had been years since he had opened his home to those ne’er-do-wells. Besides, the last of his friends had stopped coming when Ira quit providing toilet paper and soap in the bathrooms.
With Mardi Gras over and the pain in his foot subsiding, Ira got back to his regular routine. He finished his clean up, took a cold shower, walked nine blocks to the Best Western next door to Superior Grill for the fresh pot of CC’s coffee brewing in the lobby. The police officer that had guarded the door and checked for wristbands the past week was long gone so Ira enjoyed his coffee without harassment. He liked this hotel in particular because they always had little packets of half and half and the pink sweetener that he craved. Most other places only had that disgusting powder non-dairy creamer and sugar packets, and he couldn’t stand either of those.
The only pain commensurate with the gout was the feeling that Ira got when he didn’t inject his brain with a shot of caffeine in the morning. With the Best Western guarded all week by that resident cop, Ira found himself at the New Orleans Hamburger and Seafood Company drinking Fanta and Barq’s root beer out of a thirty-two ounce Styrofoam cup every morning. With turnover in the service industry sector at inscrutable rates, no one ever questioned Ira’s intentions, even though he was there every day drinking out of the same cup.
With the Best Western back to its normal schedule on Ash Wednesday, Ira waded through a throng of tourists rolling overstuffed suitcases through the lobby, greeted the front desk manager, and spied two pieces of king cake in a plain white cardboard box on the counter next to a coffee urn. It was almost sacrilegious to eat king cake after Mardi Gras, but cream cheese filling was Ira’s favorite, so he took one piece and folded it into a plain white napkin and ate the other.
Ira was disappointed to find eight-ounce coffee cups on the counter instead of the usual twelve-ounce, but the coffee was hot, and he wasn’t paying three dollars a cup like people do at the CC’s on Magazine Street. With the smaller cup, though, Ira had to stay around longer than usual so he could refill twice before leaving. He hated walking with two cups of coffee because he always ended up wearing half a cup on his shirtsleeve, so Ira stood against the wall and chatted with strangers drinking coffee before leaving town.
Bob and Lisa, a middle-aged couple from Des Moines, were arguing about his cell phone, lost in the fracas on Bourbon Street the night before. Lisa wore dark sunglasses and a purple cowboy hat, and spoke like a TV news anchor, while Bob continued on about the conundrum of losing all his contacts. Stan the man in the cheap grey suit and black wingtips, droned on about the difficulties of getting a decent night sleep on Fat Tuesday. Three girls in sorority sweatshirts giggled and gossiped about the boys they met on Spring Break.
With his caffeine fix sufficiently fulfilled, Ira thought he would head toward home to work on the summer edition of The New Orleans Jewish Monthly. After twenty-three years of publishing, he was perfectly aware that most of his clients had left for the gulf beaches, but Ira would be remiss if he didn’t make a few sales calls and work on an article or two before the weekend. There hadn’t been a new advertiser in the paper since the fall, and Ira blamed the lack of interest on the Internet and the average person’s inability to sustain a succinct thought for the duration of a thousand-word newspaper article.
With sales being so slow, Ira had been relying more and more on the Crescent City Trade card. Ever since he stopped printing monthly, right around the economic collapse of 2009, most of his current advertisers refused to part with cash for an ad, but they had been more willing to barter. Ira loved that trade card; there were over a dozen restaurants in the uptown area that took it, but a couple of them didn’t let him use it anymore. They said he didn’t tip enough, and tipping was mandatory on the trade card. But it wouldn’t be a tip if he had to pay, would it? That was why the pizza guy didn’t come anymore. Ira would order Pepperoni’s Pizza at least twice a week, but the last time the delivery guy told him they wouldn’t deliver for free anymore. They stopped answering his calls. They must have had caller I.D.
Ira didn’t have caller I.D. He had foregone most modern amenities, usually due to the exorbitant costs, and caller I.D. on a landline was no exception. Ira preferred his unlimited local and long distance plan that cost nineteen dollars per month, and included an Earthlink dial-up Internet connection. Paying for Internet bothered Ira more than anything because he used to get free hi-speed wi-fi before his neighbor’s started blocking with passwords. Whenever he had a large file to download, he had to beg a neighbor for their password, but invariably they would change it within a week or two.
Before leaving the Best Western, Ira grabbed a copy of the Times Picayune off the front desk. The desk clerk had already returned from church and wore the ash mark in the center of his forehead for proof. Ira nodded at the man, but he couldn’t help but stare at the grey thumbprint that signaled his devotion to Jesus Christ. It was one of those not-so-subtle reminders that he was a Jew in a Christian city.
Reading the daily newspaper used to be ritual for Ira, but now he only gets to do it on Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays because some out of town conglomerate decided that New Orleans was no longer worthy of daily news. He loved the crossword puzzles and the funnies, and although they doubled them up in the three papers, it just wasn’t the same. It used to be that every day between nine and ten, Ira could find a nice spot in the park or on his recliner and do his puzzles. Now he didn’t really know what to do with himself in the mornings.
On the walk back, Ira passed his house and headed for the Jewish Community Center. Mother and Father had kept their JCC membership all these years. They thought Ira worked out at the gym and they wanted him to keep in shape, still hoping that he would make the acquaintance of another woman, this time a Jewish one. But the last time Ira hit the weight room, his muscles were so deficient that he was unable to get through any exercise without writhing in an inexorable pain. On occasion, Ira might go for a swim in the lap pool or use the sauna, but more often than not, he used the gym for the hot showers or to watch TV.
Heating and cooling a five thousand square foot house was very expensive. When Lin and the boys were there and they shared the house with Mother and Father, Entergy had cost nearly six hundred dollars per month during the summer. So the last few years, Ira had been turning off the hot water heater to save on electricity. It worked out great. Last month, the Entergy bill was forty-seven dollars. It was better in the summer because cold showers were nice, but during the winter, Ira took his hot showers over at the JCC.
Ira had already taken his cold shower that morning, but he wanted to catch up on the stock market and read the newspaper. In the men’s locker room, the black leather couch was empty and the TV was showing highlights of the latest sporting event. He had no taste for sports, so he commandeered the remote control and turned on CNBC to watch the ticker scroll the latest stock quotes across the screen. The gym was bustling with middle aged Jews working off the beer and king cake from the past few weeks. Grabbing a pencil from his locker, Ira returned to the couch, spread the newspaper across the empty seat and started in on the day’s crossword puzzle.
Ira knew most of the people that worked out at the gym. Most of the men he could tell you their penis size, if that was something you cared to know. Over the hour and thirty minutes that he sat there with the stock ticker streaming through his peripheral vision, he struck up five or six banal conversations, most of which included some kind of Mardi Gras story. Jonathan Frankel, who sold advertising for the weekly rag, The Gambit, asked Ira if he was going to the grand opening party for Square Root on Saturday night. He assured him that he was even though this was the first he was hearing about it. Sometimes he got invitations to these events, but when he didn’t, he just showed up, claimed his invitation got lost in the mail and flashed his business card. More often than not, it got him in the door.
With lunchtime approaching, Ira decided it was time to get his day started. He figured Charlie would have woken up by then, and he had something very important to discuss with her. As he exited the side entrance of the JCC, he heard the glug and whine of the streetcar approaching the intersection of Jefferson and St. Charles. He limp ran to the next stop where the conductor held the door an extra few seconds so that Ira could board. He swiped his RTA card and paid the forty-cent disability fare before finding an empty seat next to a large black woman who was wearing curlers and a shower cap and staring out the window.