He and I

He and I are walking towards the river on Clouet Street on our way to Mass. It is quarter to eight on a Sunday morning. We are smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee as we walk. It’s been quite a while since either of us have been to church, but for a reason that’s not quite clear to me I’ve had an itching to go since moving back to New Orleans about two months ago.

He asks me if I’m planning to receive the Eucharist. I grin, thinking about a conversation at dusk a few nights earlier. He and I sit in a circle in the grass. I listen to him explain what transubstantiation means to a group of young people, mostly transplants, who are drinking together after our pickup soccer game. New folks show up here each week. Standing in a larger, less intimate circle, we share our names and pronouns before we play.

I hesitate to respond to his question because I haven’t decided yet. Transubstantiation refers to the transformation of bread and wine into flesh and blood that he and I are allegedly about to witness after we turn right onto Dauphine Street. For years now, any time I’ve been to Mass, as the congregation rises methodologically to consume the flesh of their God, I remain seated in the pew. I’ve been taught it is gravely wrong to receive the Eucharist in a state of mortal sin.

When it’s time for me to choose, I make the decision that feels easiest. Watching him approach the altar from my seat in the back of the church, the other Mass-goers return to the pews around me. I watch them notice me. I think to myself: is my refusal to participate a protest against the sacrament and the religious commitments that are attached to it, or is it instead an affirmation of its legitimacy, and an admission of guilt before God?

—

He and I are waking up together for Mass in my bed on Montegut Street. Montegut follows the downriver border of the train yard in the Upper 9th.

Almost eight years prior, I wake up directly on other side of the same train yard in a small warehouse that’s been vacated after a fire. I’ve just done acid for the first time. A boy with a Honda Civic but no gas money lingers as we watch police hand a citation to two men stealing metal scraps from the train yard. It’s time to get out of here. I convince him to drive me to Denver, saying I’ll pay for gas. We’re both exhausted, but it’s okay because I know of a place we can crash in Baton Rouge.

A few days before waking up in the abandoned warehouse, I wake up in the common room outside my high school love interest’s dorm room in Athens, Georgia. She and I met at a Catholic apologetics camp that our parents sent us to. I’ve snuck into her building to sleep on a couch after she never shows up to let me in. The next morning I get my things from her room without saying a word and walk several miles to the highway circling Athens. I hold my thumb out for an hour or so, the other hand fingering a rosary I keep in the waist pouch of my pack. A young woman pulls over. Her passenger seat is covered with junk, but she tells me I can sit in the back. I climb in next to her two year old son. She drops me off two exits later. Not long after, a man pulls over and offers me pizza. It turns out he’s my last ride’s wife. We’re headed in the same direction, so I ask if I can tag along. We arrive at his house. I play baseball with their kid. After learning I’m headed to New Orleans, they give me the number of their friend in Baton Rouge. They say he’d love to put me up for the night.

I eventually make it out of Athens and into Atlanta after getting a ride from a pastor and his sidekick. We take a small detour, stopping to fill a minivan with nearly expired bread from from a factory and drop it off at their church for distribution. By evening I arrive at the house of a man who lets strangers sleep on his couch. We go out together. When we get home, he tells me I don’t have to sleep on the couch if I don’t want to.

Arriving in Baton Rouge, my Denver-bound friend and I pull the Honda Civic off I-10. I meet him sitting on his front porch on Christian Street. He is smoking a cigarette. He feeds me and my friend quinoa. He takes us to an old industrial structure that looks out over the river. I fall asleep watching Linklater’s Waking Life. I am not sure if what I’m seeing is the movie’s unusual animation or afterglow from the night before. I am pretty sure that I’ve made a new friend.

—

He and I are sitting together on my porch steps after midnight, just a few hours before we wake up for Mass. The train engines are still running in the yard across the street. We’ve just finished watching Paris, Texas. The shot of Travis’ face as he watches Jane embrace their son in a Houston hotel room makes me weep, viscerally. I’m wiping tears off my face as I clumsily roll a cigarette.

My tears drape a veil of intimacy over the porch. Protected by the veil, I tell him I’ve been thinking about starting therapy. It’s an idea I have during a phone call with another lover while sitting on an abandoned barge which appears on the levy behind the abandoned Naval base after Hurricane Ida. They and I speak for 90 minutes. The phone call ends after they tell me it’s for the best that we never speak again.

He and I chat about therapy for a bit, but what’s really on my mind is a different phone call. This one is with the lover I’m closest with. She and I haven’t lived in the same place since Covid began. Sometimes I tell myself she and I will have children together. I ask her if she sees herself living with me when I’m done with my job commitment in New Orleans. She tells me it’s much too far in the future to know how she’ll feel about it then.

I can’t stop thinking about the scene in Paris, Texas when Travis and Jane are attempting to communicate about their failed relationship through the one-way mirror in the peep show establishment, or conversation-brothel of sorts, that Jane works in. Travis knows Jane can’t see him through the mirror, so he turns around and looks at nothing in order to be able to communicate with her. When it’s her turn, she does the same.

I think about Travis telling his son that his own father looked at his wife but didn’t see her, he just saw an idea. He told people that she was from Paris. It was a big joke. Be he started telling everyone all the time, finally it wasn’t a joke anymore. He started believing it.

—

A few hours before he and I are sitting down to watch Paris, Texas, we’re sitting on a picnic blanket at the Fly, where Audubon Park meets the river, all the way on the other side of town. I tell him my roommate and his girlfriend are joining us in a bit. He tells me he thought this was going to be a date.

He and I first sleep together when I show up at his house two years after meeting him on my way to Denver. I’ve just dropped out of school because I’m having a really hard time getting over a breakup with my first boyfriend, who lives on the same block as I do in Carrboro. I’m living in my Honda Civic, and after it breaks down in Newnan, Georgia and I spend 4 days sleeping in the mechanic’s parking lot, I finally make it to Baton Rouge with less than $100.

On our second visit, he and I get to know each other better. He tells me about his decade-long stint as a train-hopping street kid, about the cheap apartments on Leeway in Baton Rouge where he used to shoot heroin, about friend he got clean with and the child they had together, about that child dying from SIDS. He tells me the work he’s doing now in Baton Rouge — lobbying and drafting legislation to make Narcan accessible for overdose prevention. At 28, he’s preparing to start a pre-med undergrad at LSU.

Weeks later, I’m back down in New Orleans, living in a tent on a whacky property right on the other side of the Industrial Canal. He and I meet at the waterfront in the Quarter. He tells me he loves me. I don’t know how to respond.

—

When he and I arrive at the church for Mass, we leave our mugs to the right of the stairs before we go in. They are there waiting for us when we get out.

We head to Flora for our second cup of coffee. On our way, we take a quick detour to the corner of Port and Architect. For the first time, I see the narrow, 3-story house with skinny balconies where I’ve heard my dad and his brother used to live. He notices the vines growing up the side of the brick wall.

Outside at Flora, he and I talk about Mass, we talk about the movie. We try not to talk about our relationship any more — it feels like we’ve spent too much time picking it apart in the last few weeks.

In my head, I’m still unpacking my decision not to receive the Eucharist. I think it’s clear to me that I’m acknowledging my own state of mortal sin, but it’s not clear what part of my story I attribute the sin to.

Am I a sinner because I can’t count the number of lovers I’ve had in the past year on one hand? Am I a sinner because I’m failing to communicate to the people I’m intimate with about the insecurities I have about our relationship, about how I’m afraid they might just be an idea in my head, or how I might just be an idea in theirs? Or am I sinner simply because it is he and I?