SOMETIMES, HOSIE, DESPITE your advice, despite my own understanding that this, memory, is the sole enduring life I have, I wish I could forget.
At some level, of course, forgetting is what the drinking was all about, along with other holes in my life. And forgetting (I know now) is the sea into which my son David set sail.
Looking back at what I've written thus far, these many twists and turns of chronology, I wonder if, in some strange way, forgetting may not be what I've been about here as well. Putting things down to discharge them. Working to tuck memories safely away in the folds and trouser cuffs of time.
Moments ago I pulled out a legal pad and, reading back through these two hundred-some pages, tried to plot out, tried to untangle and write down sequentially, the sequence of events.
Let's see: I'd already been stomped by those kids out on Derbigny when Zeke showed up, right? And dinner with Deborah, attending her play, was that before or after Papa and I encountered the great white hopes (definitely lowercase) out Gentilly way? Just where does my first meeting Deborah fit into all this? Or finding the body in that tract house on Old Metairie Road?
All a kind of temporal plaid.
Memory's always more poet than reporter.
Proust at the barricades.
Or Faulkner struggling with the screenplay for The Big Sleep. He can't figure out what order all this is supposed to have happened in and in desperation finally calls up Chandler himself. When I wrote that, Chandler tells him, only God and I knew what I meant-and now I've forgotten.
Maybe I don't have that right Maybe that's not Faulkner and Chandler at all, but the director calling up Faulkner once the script's been done: how the hell am I supposed to shoot this? Or for that matter someone, an editor, a reader, one of Faulkner's hunting buddies, trying to figure out Tlw Sound and the Fury.
Memory's never been much of a timekeeper. Always whispers, "Trust me." Never one, though, to show up when needed, keep its room clean, do laundry, bathe on a regular basis.
But lord (as granddaddy Chappelle might have said if he'd ever thought much about such things, sitting on his back porch outside Forrest City with a jelly glass of bourbon, plug of tobacco, and the knothole he spit through, with swanns of lightning bugs and three generations of children swooping around, himself quite a storyteller), lord what stories it tells.