From Bloomsday to Dresden

* * *

"Or trade it for something by James Lee Burke," L. A. Norma said to a young woman named K. O. We were standing in New Orleans' railway station on Loyola Avenue, awaiting the call of our train to Jackson, Mississippi. Norma exhaled a plume of Camel cigarette smoke toward the woman. A security guard started towards us with a yellow plastic bucket. Norma went on, "The Best thing about Bloomsday is that none climb too far out on any limb of understanding it." The security guard asked Norma to put her cigarette in the yellow bucket. It contained sand, and around its outside said, "HOMELAND SECURITY", in red Magic Marker printing.

We were on our way to the exhibition, "The Glory of Baroque Dresden", in Jackson. K. O. and her boyfriend, O. K., were on their way home to Memphis. We had met the night before, at O'Flaherty's annual celebration of Joyce's obtuse novel. The bar had been crowded -- this year being the Centennial Bloomsday -- and the two strangers sat at our table. She sported purple hair, one gold nose ring, and two glass chandelier earrings made of tiny red and green crystal crosses. Her fellow traveler was similarly colored and pierced, with six gold earrings in his right ear and one in the other. They shared a secreted bottle of Courvoisier and told us how they had come to Town a few days earlier to read "two short poems" they had written for Bloomsday. Mercifully, they got drunk on the train down and lost them both.

"The City of New Orleans, An adventure in slow motion," O. K. said.

We boarded. The train slipped out, passed the Superdome, rocked over marsh and swamp, then climbed up the old continental shelf and pulled into Jackson, on time, where a quick transaction between Conductor and Station Master secured a private room and extended our tickets on to Memphis. We did this so we could further ride and laugh with our new friends and their old liquor. We ordered iced-water, and tipped the porter to not tell anyone we were smoking Norma's cigarettes in our cozy little cabin. At ten o'clock, we reached Memphis. O. K. and K. O. gladly dropped us at the Sheraton-Peabody, on Union Avenue, in well-behaved downtown Memphis.

"Queen of The Mississippi, corporate headquarters of Elvis Presley, Sun Records, Harrah.s Casino, Cornerstone Cellars , and the world famous Peabody Marching Ducks," Norma recited the list walking over deep carpeting to elevators leading up to our rooms. There we slept a few hours before catching a cab and the six-fifty back to Jackson. The hotel's kitchen was closed when we arrived and closed when we left. Same for the ducks. They would not appear until the civilized hour of eleven. We could not wait.

Our train arrived. We climbed back into bed after leaving a wakeup call for Jackson, where we again arrived on time, but this time too tired for the glory of either Jackson or Dresden. We ate lunch in the dinning car, paid the Conductor to continue use of the sleeper, and watched Jackson slip away behind us. After lunch, we returned to our rooms and slept the rest of the way back to New Orleans tended over by, "The sons of Pullman porters, the sons of engineers . . . aboard their father's magic carpet made of steel . . . "

Next morning Norma called early. "The New Orleans Museum of Art is running a Hotard tourist bus up to Jackson for the sole purpose of the Dresden Exhibition," she said. For the reasonably packaged price of eighty-nine dollars we could get two meals, the bus ride and the exhibition.

"That's less than our bar bill on The City of New Orleans!" she exclaimed. I agreed, leaning my forehead on the desk next to the telephone.