praise for
plenty enough suck to go around
“Dark, funny, generous and jarring—occasionally tragic but never sentimental.”
—Paul Tough, author of Whatever It Takes
“Wagner writes with honesty and humor.”
—Annie Choi, author of Happy Birthday or Whatever
“Imagine if Jack Kerouac had lived through the flood and wrote you a long, personal letter from the wreckage.”
—Jonathan Goldstein, author of Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bible! and host of CBC and PRI’s radio show WireTap
“I love it…. Floods, fires, hoboes, guns, murder, crawfish, gardens, disappointed moms, boyfriend trouble, videogame restorers, and quite a few flat tires—it’s all here.”
—Pete Jordan, author of Dishwasher
“Cheryl Wagner is at home on the death-defying tightrope between wise and wise-ass. Her voice is ironic and plaintive, surefooted and panicky, the combination that provides the thrills and elevates her memoir to a work of art, unsparing of everything, including itself.”
—Jack Pendarvis, author of Awesome
plenty enough suck to go around
a memoir of floods, fires, parades, and plywood
CHERYL WAGNER
CITADEL PRESS
Kensington Publishing Corp.
For all the fine examples—Molly Respess Springfield, Helen Hill,
Elizabeth Wagner, and Alice Kennedy
contents
Prologue
1. Cast Out
2. Expedition Pants and Hobnail Milk Glasses
3. What the Fuck?
4. What the Fuck? Still
5. See Ya, Wouldn’t Want to Be Ya
6. Happy Cheese Town Far, Far Away
7. Pit Bull Jesus
8. Backyard Glider
9. Plenty Enough Suck to Go Around
10. Perfectly Simple Solutions
11. You Don’t Have to Ask, Do You?
12. Real Progress
13. Ka-Chunk
14. Citizen Loser
15. A Monster Moonwalking
16. In Bloom
17. Disaster Season
18. Fall Again
19. Tumbleset
20. Yellow Flowers, Yellow Letter
21. Adieu
22. The Happy Dutch
23. Birth of a Buzzkill
24. A Bullet Ant on the Sting Pain Scale
25. More About a Neighborhood Than You Ever Cared to Know
Acknowledgments
prologue
That’s a great idea! You should really do that! I don’t remember ever consciously deciding that That’s a great idea! was a fine or even sound organizing principle for my life. By the time my boyfriend, Jake, and I were frantically boarding up our back wall and windows to evacuate for Hurricane Katrina, however, that’s how I had been living—mostly in New Orleans—since I was seventeen.
Truth be told, I have spent all of my adult life surrounded by people working on what most Americans would consider to be, at best, time-wasting, esoteric projects. Compiling a discography of every known existing recording of wax cylinder minstrel songs? Great! Building a digital urn for yourself on the Internet? Long overdue! Having a tea party with your pet pig as the guest of honor? What can I bring? Do I want to see a short movie about your tween Arkansas cousin’s love of Eminem? Who wouldn’t? On a quest to wash dishes in all fifty states? Well, move on in!
In my shortish time on this planet, I have gotten out of bed in the morning and tripped over many snoring bands and outfitted my basset hounds as spacemen for numerous French Quarter dog parades. It seems over the years I have become something of a professional enthusiast, which is weird because I’m also kind of cynical and grumpy. Mostly, this just makes me a typical New Orleanian of a sort.
New Orleans exists for many reasons. And over time it has evolved into the place where Southerners send their laidback people who can’t or won’t get with the program—their artists, gay relatives, eternal optimists, funny hat wearers, weirdos, and intellectuals. I guess I’m one of the above, and I have a sneaking suspicion that most Southerners do not want me or my friends back in their towns. Many of us are in New Orleans for a reason: to escape the fundamentalist Other South but still get to live near where we’re from.
We’re mostly seventeen to sixty, a few older or younger. We collect records, books, fine and trash musical instruments, old video games, pieces of wrought iron, and other ephemera. We go out to clubs, backyards, urban bayous, balconies, heavy metal haunted houses, bowling alleys, and street corners to hear bands play. Some of us travel for years and suddenly reappear; some never leave; some try to leave repeatedly and always boomerang back. Some of us secretly feel we’re “too smart to be rich” but then whine about our finances later. Others are trustafarians. Still others are bartenders or coffee servers or AV guys. There are teachers and carpenters and librarians and white-or pink-collar administrators of this or that who work forty-plus hours a week but consider this other life, their That’s a great idea! life, their real lives. The other life is just what they do to put food in their dog’s bowl.
Some are fun junkies, plain and simple. Others are great and not-so-great musicians, makers of sublime or total bullshit art, college or post-college radio geeks, Quarter Rats, T-shirt makers, people who go teach English abroad, gay and straight, history buffs, hippies and hipsters and none of the above, poets, electronic hobbyists who build drum machines, Goths and post-Goths and retro-Goths, Francophiles, Japanophiles, music fans of every stripe, potheads, abstainers, crawfish-addicted or vegan, winners and losers, gourmands, experimental filmmakers, brass band and Mardi Gras Indian superfans, Buddhists, poets, guys with beards obsessed with Tibet, bike people, tattoo artists, and folks who just like to sit reading paperbacks on their front porch.
Whenever
