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decades after Vachal and over 5,000 miles away, was Cuban expatriate Guillermo Cabrera Infante.  I’ve only read one of his novels, Three Trapped Tigers , but it was invigorating enough that I was thrilled to recently come across an engaging and provocative interview published in The Paris Review a couple of years ago.  All of the New Orleans bookshops are unified in tucking away their literary journals, no matter the caliber, in the nethermost regions, such as under a back table for the cat’s curling-up quarters or strewn across an upper floor next to cartons of National Geographic back issues.  Doesn’t this suggest a mutually unspoken allowance for these journals to go away by any means necessary?  Let’s call it what it is, an unwritten sign indicating, Barring A Purchase, Kindly Get Rid Of These.  With that being the case, it was little trouble to divest the bookshop next to Miss Dora’s place of a couple of The Paris Review issues, including the one featuring the Cabrera Infante piece.  He’s lived in London for almost 20 years, in exile from his home country of Cuba, perfectly typifying a life in between, though in his characteristically punning way, he might’ve instead said in bedouin were the phrase to have come up in The Interview.  However it’s expressed, he physically inhabited Havana, now he does the same in London, and his memory and mind bridges the gap.  In a general sense of the same plucky way that Miss Dora lives with the strange ease of a captivating deficiency of civility, Cabrera Infante writes with mischievous arrested restraint, both of them contrary but satisfying by their mutual rituals of imposition.  Not standing on ceremony courses through them.  They can’t help it.

Day 8

    In the same way that I met Hannah, in which the digressive soul of the streets was disrupted by a seemingly routine fare that quickly charmed my limited soul, The Pelican entered the picture and blew it open in opposite fashion.  I‘d heard of The Pelican from a few beaten male fares, they told stories better not remembered about having the misfortune of randomly and roughly being taken into custody at the 8th District French Quarter Station, expecting to leave with lighter wallets, but horrified at being worked over by an officer in a shabby animal costume. These perps (the idea apparently was that anyone without the means to buy his civilian status back was an automatic perp) were not booked, only taken in to serve as a break in boredom for the rest of the evening shift who cheered on the seabird pugilist.  Who would believe the adamant charges of battery by bird made by a victim picked up under the guise of public drunkenness?  The costume gave the officer anonymity from his nightmarish beatings.
    More recently, I‘d also been told rumors from fares about the 5th District cop who literally pistol-whipped out the teeth of neighborhood men, collected them, and then, referring to his nickname Half and Half, wrote ½ as a teeth mosaic in the dirt of empty lots by their sidewalks to remind the residents of his brutality.  A civil servant who wore his ethics the way buildings wear rain.  No anonymity by costume sought in this case, because in the 5th they do what they please.  I hoped never to come in contact with either of these cops, but soon the two of them reached congruence when, after dropping off an illustrious foreign gentleman named Mr. Baygim Dalreshtav, my next fare at Burgundy and Kerlerec Streets announced himself immediately (as baleful as the previous customer was courteous) with, Drive, asshole, I need 2613 Dauphine, but I see what you’re up to.  Next time I catch you out here, you’re gonna owe me a cut, you stupid fake motherfucker.  Don’t think you can avoid me.  I’m the fucking Pelican, okay, and you don’t pay up, then I get my licks in and you start losing teeth.  For now, my car battery’s dead, so you’re gonna haul ass to Dauphine and you’re gonna wait for me