BURNING HOUSE PRESS

Sailing in the Caribbean changed me, it’s true.

I hold the memories delicately in my fingers wherever I go.

. . .

March 29, 2024, in New Orleans, Louisiana: things at the tattoo shop hadn’t panned out. Business was mind-numbingly slow, and the owner of the shop I was working at decided to let everyone go and use the shop as his own private studio.

I felt relieved, more than anything. I have a deep love for tattooing, but I didn’t feel that working at a shop was what I needed at that moment in time. It was a time in which I was deeply avoidant of anything that could lock me down. I had a gnawing need to move with agility. Any direction, any time. I was shirking structure, seeking something beyond it. I knew I was looking for something, but I didn’t know what it was. I was only sure that I hadn’t found it, yet. In the meantime: my world was wide open.

That day, I collected the last of my things from the tattoo shop. I finished the illustrations I had been working on for some friends’ puppet show. I cut my hair. I drew on long-winged eyeliner, stood in front of the mirror in my room, and looked myself in the eyes. I said: “I want something to happen.”

I had alcoholic Monster energy in my fridge that I’d been keeping for an auspicious moment. The Beast Unleashed – Mean Green. I took it.

I went out.

Someone who was just a distant friend at the time was organizing a punk show in a local liquor store parking lot. It was my understanding that the store loved it when punks put on shows there: it was great for business. I love a punk show, I especially love a punk show in a weird location, so I have to go. The friend I’d made plans to go with canceled last minute. Her ex was there, staring daggers into my back. Talking to my friend Vex, they said, “It seems you’re doing a lot of Closure Things.” I agreed.

Some friends I knew to varying degrees, including my roommates at the time, were putting on a renegade show afterwards. Freak rave with noise interludes. The location, given by hotline, was in a large abandoned lot in a weird part of town- this dead nowhere zone nestled between an overpass and a mostly-abandoned residential neighborhood that had been plagued by strings of misfortune.

I pulled up a dark dirt road in my silver Subaru Legacy and parked. A brightly-painted Ford Ranger pulled up nearby. Two figures hopped out. One, Guinevere, a friend, the writer of the puppet show I had been making illustrations for. Two, Lucian, someone from out of town, who I had met briefly a few days before.

“Oh hey, we were just talking about you,” Guinevere called out.

I was surprised: “Talking shit, I hope!”

We wandered into the weeds, then deeper down a scraggly tunnel of bushes and small trees, the path lined with occasional glow sticks. On the other side of the tunnel: a decaying corrugated metal warehouse.

The spot and surrounding neighborhood had been scoped out long before the event, but the day of the show a huge overturned bus had suddenly appeared in the middle of the building. It seemed like the abandoned warehouse was also someone’s chop shop for scrapping stolen vehicles. Music and visual gear was set up atop the engineless bus. We all climbed on and around the looted vehicle, spun on a freely rotating wheel aloft, jumped through windows above to windows below.

After a while, the novelty wore off, and the undertone of conflict between various coupled friends was becoming ever-more perceptible, so I made my escape to a fire pit outside.

Monster finally cracked open, I found myself talking to Lucian from out of town. We talked a long time about travel, brutalist architecture, and other things that slip my mind now. He said he’d just bought a boat in Martinique, an island in the Caribbean I had never heard of. He didn’t live anywhere. New Orleans was only a stopover on the way to his new boat, bought sight unseen with a broken motor. He seemed confident he could fix it. I believed him. I thought, how cool, I’m sure he’ll have a great time.

Just then, a strange man with a can of beer swayed over to the fire. He was wearing black and white vertically striped pants and looked like oogle beetlejuice. I had never seen this man before in my life. He interrupted the conversation I was having with L. “Excuse me…excuse me, can I just ask you something?” He was looking at me.

“Can I just ask you… what do you see in this guy?” He pointed at Lucian.

He must think I’m dating him or something, I thought. He had no idea this was the first time I’d ever had a real conversation with Lucian, who was pretty much a stranger to me. I thought, the only way to get out of this is to say something funny.

I said, “It’s because he has a boat.”

Oogle beetlejuice laughed. “Oh, so you’re a boat digger, huh?” He thought for a moment. “I guess being a boat digger is more honorable than being a gold digger, since you still have to be on the boat.” We laughed.

At some point oogle beetlejuice made his exit, and it was then that Lucian invited me to sail with him on his boat as crew. He was going to sail in the Caribbean — indeterminate end.

For a long time, I felt like I’d been doing nothing but closing doors. I was unemployed, my life before me was virtually vacant. No plans. I had been waiting for something to happen. I wanted something to happen. Was this it?
I didn’t know anything about sailing. I’d never been on a sailboat before, never had an opportunity. But I’d wanted to. I’d wanted it the way one wants an improbable dream: You just want. Your wanting creates a shape. And you think, it’s impossible, and it sinks down. The dream was so deep in my subconscious I could barely feel it rising to the surface.

I said, “Maybe.”

I remember him walking away from the fire, into the darkness, waving noncommittally. I wondered if I’d ever see him again.

I would.

I went to sea with him and it changed me. Four months later, I returned to New Orleans.

. . .

The strangest thing about traveling for a long time is the return. Your descent back into your old life and old patterns feels like a direct confrontation with your past self. All of the choices you’ve made in your life up until your departure seem tinged with sharper edges, yet you feel removed from it. Strangely objective, an outsider in your own life.

You find yourself in your own room — but it feels like it belongs to a person that no longer exists. It is jarring, suddenly to feel a vast gap between you and your older self, a gap you didn’t expect to exist. Around you, people and places loosely gather in similar structure. Most act like everything is the same. You have an urge to explain, to properly convey your experience but words fall flat. How can you explain that you feel your insides have re-arranged themselves? Inside of you is filled with glittering metals that you will walk around with, always now.

. . .