Free Moth by James Sallis Page A

campaign posters (Dr. Betty Brown, School Board, Third Ward: Your Children Need Her) and long-out-of-date showbills (Catch Some Soul at Fat Eddie’s).
    I asked at Canal and Royal, again at Carondelet and Poydras, around Jackson Square, along Decatur, Esplanade and into the Faubourg Marigny. When New Orleans’s founding Creoles overflowed the Quarter, they spilled into the Marigny—years before Irish, British and other Anglo settlers began moving into the regions above Canal. When I first came to New Orleans, the Quarter itself was crumbling and everything below Esplanade was strictly no-man’s-land. Then, gradually, those buildings were reclaimed; and in recent years the Marigny’s become a cozy residential area where alternative bookstores, lesbian theaters, small clubs and flea markets thrive.
    One small corner bookstore there has, packed in with Baldwin, Kathy Acker, Virginia Woolf, Gore Vidal and a wall of books on sexuality, what must be the definitive collection of a genre few know exists: lesbian private-eye novels. I counted once, and there were fourteen different titles; whenever I’m in the Marigny I drop by to check for new ones. This time when I stepped in off the sidewalk a face turned up to me and its owner carefully set back on a shelf the book he’d been paging through.
    “Lew,” he said.
    It was Richard Garces. “What are you doing here?” seemed a pretty stupid question, but I asked it anyway.
    “I live here. Buy you a drink?”
    “Why not?”
    We walked down to Snug Harbor and settled in at a table by the window. Women in cotton dresses and army boots went by. Men with ponytails and expensive Italian suitcoats worn over ragged T-shirts and jeans. Richard and I decided on two Heinekens.
    “I’ve been down here almost since it started,” he told me. “Had a store myself for a while, sold prints and original photographs, a lot of it friends’ work. Paid someone else to run it, of course. I still do a turn now and again at the Theater Marigny, and I work weekends on the AIDS hot line.”
    “A pillar of the community.”
    “ My community, yes. Actually I am.”
    A middle-aged couple came in and stopped by our table to say hello to Richard before moving on to a table of their own. It was obvious from their ease with one another that they’d been together a long time. Both were black, introduced by Garces as Jonesy and Rainer (not René: he spelled it). A youngish woman came and peered into the window, hands curved around her eyes like binoculars, before stomping away. She wore a taffeta party dress, Eisenhower jacket and old high-top black basketball shoes.
    “I had no idea you were gay, Lew,” Richard said. “Not often I miss the call, after all these years.”
    “You still haven’t missed it.”
    “Oh?”
    “Oh.”
    “Hear that a lot.”
    “I bet.”
    “And you’re not even going to tell me some of your best friends are gay?”
    “No, but just between the two of us, one or two of them are black.”
    He laughed, and finished off his beer. “Well, I’m sorry to hear that. The first thing, I mean. And I have to tell you, there’s a certain sense of loss involved here. You want another beer?”
    Our waiter glided new bottles soundlessly into the shadow of former ones. Richard leaned across the table and poured anew into my glass.
    “I guess you’re sure about that,” he said.
    “For the moment, anyhow.”
    “So: what? You’re just down here slumming? Looking for Fiesta Ware to complete your set, maybe? Soaking up local color for a new book?”
    “Something like that.”
    “Yeah, well.” He drank most of his beer at a gulp. “So now I just say good to see you and go home alone, huh?”
    “Way things are.”
    He killed it. “Okay. That’s cool.” He extended his hand across the table and we shook. “Take care, Lew.”
    “And you.”
    After he was gone I asked for coffee, got something that had been sitting on the back burner since about 1964 and drank it anyway.