The House of the Rising Sun

"There is a house in New Orleans they call the Rising Sun. It has been the ruin of many a poor boy and God I know I’m one"

-Start-

A beam of light cut across the room and into his dreams like a knife. He woke up as beads of sweat formed on his brow. A mattress on the floor dominated the room. The only other furniture was a desk pressed between two closets underneath the sole window. For a moment the young man, half covered by a blue comforter, thought about fighting the inevitable and trying to continue sleeping. But he thought better of it. 

Shrouding himself in the comforter that matched the sheets crumpled up on the white mattress, he opened a door in the wall by the head of the bed. The brilliance of a gorgeous day stunned him for a moment.  The light reflecting off the green foliage of majestic oak trees with a the bright clear blue sky magnified the sun’s radiance. The room got too bright too quickly in the morning. He knew the only way to block out the light was by covering the window. He wasn’t willing to do that. He liked remembering the difference between night and day. It was the one of the only things that reminded him that he was alive. A human in the world despite how dead he felt in his soul.  He stumbled over the high threshold of the door, it had once been a window, and out onto the balcony. 

It was a large rectangle lined with a picket wood fence a little over waist height. The fence was something that you would expect see on the lawns of the neighborhoods of uptown New Orleans, not on the second story of a frat house overlooking Broadway. The fence was painted in Mardi Gras colors. A repeating interval of purple, green and gold.  The balcony was positioned in between his fraternity house and a large brick building. The floor was astro turf which had been laid on top of the black tar. This modification had turned a rather hellish area into a pleasant locale to spend an early morning or evening watching the sun move across the sky. 

The young man was not interested in watching the sun rise over the oak trees and red-tiled roofs of uptown New Orleans. He fell upon a day bed sitting out on the balcony and began to absorb the light and heat from the sun keeping his head buried in the crook of his arm. It didn’t take long before the booze that he had drunk the night before to seep out of his pores. He threw off the comforter from his pale lanky form. The heat from the sun penetrated his very being being seemingly bring a rejuvenating life into him. 

He lay there for an hour, maybe more. Time didn’t really have much meaning to him right now. He had no deadlines or commitments. He was a man in between stages. He had just completed an internship with a prestigious accounting firm and had returned to college with a fat wallet and over a month before his classes began. He originally had planned on spending the time with the girl he loved but she had make it known to him shortly before his return that she was not interested in his affections any longer.  She had found someone better to replace him. 

He lived life now between highs and lows. Now was a low. He wasn’t completely straight from the night before and he wasn‘t sober. He probably hadn’t been completely sober since he got back a couple weeks ago.  He was still a little drunk but he wasn’t drunk enough to forget his pain, to forget the lingering taste of her lips on his. 

He pushed himself up from the day bed and stumbled back into the room over the threshold. He looked around for his pack of cigarettes. They lay on the floor by his bed where he had dropped them the night before.  In all honesty it was only 4 or 5 hours earlier. He wasn't entirely sure how the night had ended but he would find out from one of his friends that evening. Normally someone in his situation would have slept later but the lack of covering on the window made sure he was awake when the sun made it up over the oak trees.   

The young man picked up the hard pack off the ground and grabbed one of the cigarettes noticing the pack was running low. This was not a surprise. He had begun smoking over a pack a day since he had gotten back. He was just glad that he had one to help him start his day. If he hadn’t had one he would have to make the trip down the road to corner store to get a new pack. Addiction causes a funny itch that only the habit can scratch. He had kicked the habit when he had met Nelly but now that she was gone he had slid back into it with a renewed vengeance. He hadn’t always smoked. No one has ever had always smoked except those unfortunate souls who live a life in trailer or small apartment full of smoke. Those individuals had started smoking before they started swiping their parents cigarettes.  

He’d started smoking back when he was a pledge. It was part of his pledge pack to have cigarettes. He needed to always have a pack of cigarettes in case one of the brothers requested one. At first he had bought Camel No. 9s so that he didn’t run through them. The pink pack menthol cigarettes were not a favorite with his future fraternity brothers. His pledge class caught onto his trick and eventually they all had cigarettes that no one wanted to smoke unless it was 2 in the morning and they couldn’t really tell the difference between a 115lb girl and a 180lb girl. That put an end to the charade and they all had to have cigarettes that the brothers would smoke: Parliament Lights, Camel lights and Marlboro lights. These are the cigarette of choice for someone who is only in a smoking fad. 

When he started running through cigarettes like water he started to smoke them. It was easy to do in New Orleans when you could smoke in the bars. Eventually he learned that they helped to calm him before a pledge line up. They helped calm his nerves for what was to come. That was before he learned how efficient a shared bottle of whiskey was. He smoked Marlboro 27s now, a cigarette full of flavor and nicotine that gave reds a run for their money. Same kick without the chemical aftertaste he thought. They probably would have made him sick back when he first started smoking. 

He got up from the day bed and took a seat on one of the chairs that lined the wall of the house in the shade of the fraternity's house red-tile roof. It was late April and the weather had already begun to get oppressively hot. 

New Orleans has the distinct honor of being a major US city below sea level. His first time driving down Tchoupotulis towards downtown shocked him by seeing the towering super structure of a freighter above him. It reminded him of how the city had been under water only a year before. That first trip down Tchopetoulous was three years ago. 

Being shaped like a bowl New Orleans traps heat and humidity and there isn’t much chance for a breeze. The air hangs damp and heavy driving you into an air conditioned structure or back into the bottle you climbed out of.  Up off the ground there was a little bit of a breeze and the young man sat there shirtless not thinking about much as he lit his cigarette and began to take slow purposeful drags of it. 

The sound of the dancing leaves in the tree tops wasn’t enough to drown out the crackle and pop of the burning tobacco in his cigarette. It was one of the things he really enjoyed- hearing the cigarette burn as the smoke was drawn swirling into his lungs delivering the effect that was needed. He smoked the cigarette down to the filter quickly. He flicked the extinguished butt over the rail to join the hundreds of others down below the balcony. With his first itch satisfied for the day the youth stood up and walked back over the threshold into the room. He sat down at the desk and reached for a box pushed up against the window. He opened it up and took out a bag of marijuana and rolling papers. He took a couple small nuggets out of the bag and dropped them into a shot glass that was also on the powder smeared glass desk top. Using a pair of scissors that were  on the table he cut the nuggets up into little tiny bits. The crystal encrusted dark green leaves leaving residue on the glass and on the scissors. 

With a precise and calculated action he took a paper and folded it up at an angle- the nexus at the lower right. His friend had showed him that trick with rolling papers. It allowed you a roll a cone that could hold more pot than just rolling it straight across using the original fold of the paper.  He dumped the cut up pot onto the newly creased paper. Grabbing a business card, incidentally one he had collected on his internship, he cut a narrow strip off of it. He rolled it up tightly to use as a filter. He put all the parts together and slowly began to roll. The slight shaking of his hands making it a more difficult process than it should have been. This shaking was no concern to him. Once he sparked up the joint his shakes would be gone and his appetite would return. He’d be able to get a meal in sometime during the middle of the afternoon and that would fuel him through the night.  He was putting the finishing touches on the joint, crisping the outside with his lighter, when he heard a knock on the door. 

“Well you’re just on time”  Said the young man without turning towards the door. 

The door opened and another young man entered the room. It was Martin, one of the young man’s pledge brothers. Martin knew that the young man was in the habit of rolling up a joint at this time of the day and made it a habit to stop in at the time if he could. 

“You know it is bad form to smoke alone.  I’m doing you a favor” Said the young man as he entered the room and sat on the bed directly behind the individual sitting at the desk.  Martin was always reminding the young man that he was doing him favors. 

The new individual was pretty similar looking to the youth at the desk but in most ways they couldn’t be any more different. They were both around six foot tall with a lean muscular build and short cropped brown hair.  It seemed to be the mold for individuals in their fraternity except for a few outliers. The young man at the desk was a northerner by birth. He’d gotten into the school with brains and luck. He’d worked most of his life for what he had and still felt like he was spoiled. The newcomer hadn’t worked an honest day of labor in his life and felt he was entitled to everything. Everything he had ever had was given to him by his big shot of a lawyer father. He had grown up in Miami in the lap of luxury. He expected the world and for it to be given to him.  

“Hmmm…I suppose so.  Lets go outside and spark this up.” 

Before he got up he put his I-Pod into a player on the desk and set it to a classic rock playlist. He thought to himself that you can say what you want about Martin and his tendencies; he had pretty good taste in music. The first song that came on was “Tumbling Dice” by the Stones and it began as the two stepped out onto the balcony and took seats against the wall in the dwindling shade. After 1’oclock in the afternoon the sun would reach it apex and all shade on the balcony on the would cease to exist until after 5’oclock when the sun would set behind the brick building next to the frat house. It wasn’t 1 o’clock yet and the two still had ample shade to lounge in. 

The young man hadn’t always smoked weed on a daily basis. He could count the number of times he had smoked in high school on a single hand. He had always looked down on the “pot heads” in his high school as losers and deadbeats. They weren’t going anywhere in life and he attributed their affection for Mary Jane as the cause for that. Now he was a full fledged “pot head”. There wasn’t really a moment of the day that he wasn’t high-not that you would ever know it. 

When he came to college he was surprised at how prevalent the use of marijuana was. It seemed like everyone smoked it. He soon learned that smoking weed is a long standing Jewish tradition. According to a teacher he once had there was pretty good chance that Jesus himself had liked to partake. Marijuana was apparently the reason the Roman’s were so desperate to hold onto Israel and that area of the Middle East. That was where the silk and pot flowed through.

The young man had joined a traditionally Jewish fraternity. Not because he was Jewish, but because he was a northerner, modern, and open-minded. The non-Jewish frats were full of small mind southern boys who liked to spout off racist and anti-Semitic bullshit. He could have joined a frat full of other gentiles but he would have had to endure years of listening to privileged southerners b***h about problems their fathers helped create and continued to perpetuate. So he had joined the frat full of athletic, smart Jewish kids.  He didn’t regret his choice in fraternities though he might secretly regret joining one. 

Smoking weed was an expensive habit. You either needed a rich father or you had to be in the game. The young man was in the game. He had a contact in California who would mail weight to abandoned houses. The young man would have one of his brothers or customers wait there for the mail man. The young man never told his people but he always secretly watched the scene from afar. He was looking for cops or anything suspicious. He would know if they got the package, he was always ready for someone to try and rip him off but no-one ever did. He had a little bit of a reputation as being crazy. 

The young man was methodical in his process. He was extremely careful and only texted directions to the collecting individual from a burn phone and only contacted his connect with a burn phone.  He never had enough weight mailed that would put him in jail. It raised his costs, making it less lucrative, but it lowered his risk. You got caught when you got greedy. Even if the feds got wise to him they had bigger fish to fry. He made enough to put some more cash in his pocket and he could smoke as much primo cali weed as he wanted. He was the first person to get Blue Dream before they bred it out and killed the strain. The first batch was just that, a dream, and it sold out in less than a day. He could have charge 80 an eighth for it but he wasn’t greedy. He just wanted to move it and lower his exposure.  

The two sat in silence as the young man lit the joint and took a deep inhale. He passed the joint to his pledge brother as he slowly exhaled. 

“The pledges suck” the young man said to Martin as the other young man pursed his lips and took a drag of the joint. 

“They always do” The other individual said without exhaling.

“We had a lineup last night. It went out on the listserve but only like 10 brother showed up. I ended up having to run it myself. The process now is a joke” 

“What did you do?” asked Martin, finally exhaling and passing the joint back to the young man.

“Just the usual. Push-ups, sit-ups, wall-sits, a little crab boil. Nothing crazy” 

“Well we live in post-Pi days. You just can’t get away with the s**t you used to. “

“Ain’t that the truth” The young man said before he took another drag off the joint. The sound of Credence Clearwater Revival‘s “Proud Mary” came from the bedroom drowning out the sound of the light traffic below on Broadway. 

Martin stared intently across the balcony at the brick building across the way. The look on his clearly indicated he was thinking about something. 

“Remember when we were pledges and we had to dig that hole in a backyard with our bare hands?”

“Not particularly. Remember that was the night I blacked out and got the s**t boiled out of me” coughed the man as smoked bellowed from his mouth. 

“Oh yeah...” Martin replied. “Well it was cold, 30 or 40, and they were spraying us with a hose as we did it as they were boiling us. I can’t even imagine doing that to these pledges now. We would be in jail so fast.”

“Yeah…” The young man replied. “It really isn’t the same. I remember showing up to the dorm completely covered from head to toe in hazing materials. S**t…remember George had to bring that lawn mower around to class for over a month and no one said anything” 

“Beauty of a southern school” Martin replied. 

“I didn’t believe it” The youth replied. The joint sitting idle in his hand slowly burning down. Martin tapped him on his arm and he passed it to him. 

“Everyone said I would get hazed but I just thought it was a joke. I didn’t realize that we would go through what we did. I mean looking back at it I don’t know how I put up with it” 

“It’s a process” Martin replied. Exhaling and passing the joint back to the young man. 

“You’re right. It builds up slowly and before you know you’re doing things that are prohibited to do to prisoners of war in the Geneva Convention and you’re happy to do it.” 

“Not just happy to do it. You pay to do it” Martin replied

“All to join the house….”  the young man said exhaling and passing the joint back to Martin. 

“But I’d do it again for the privilege. This s**t has made my college experience” 

“Agreed” said Martin as he took a last few puffs off the nearly extinguished joint.

“Well I have to get to class” Martin said as he stood up and offered dabs to the seated young man. The young man smiled to himself and gave him dabs as he watched him walk over the threshold and into the house. The shaking was gone and the young man felt human again. He lit up a cigarette and slowly smoked it thinking about pledging. Pledging was the best time of his life that he would never want to do again. It sucked immensely but it taught him things about himself that he would have never known. He was much stronger a person than he had ever imagined. He never gave in, he cracked once, went a little crazy but it was a bipolar crack. After getting boiled he felt like he was on top of the world. The pain must have caused a release of too many endorphins and he had run around like a psycho before he came down.  While he was working the crazy busy season hours of a public accountant he had constantly been saying in his head, “this sucks but it ain’t pledgin” 

The young man finished his cigarette and realized he was hungry. The sun had crossed the threshold in the sky and the shade was rapidly diminishing. The sun was no longer shining through the window into his room. He got up from his chair and went into his room. He closed the door behind him, jumped onto the bed, fished out his phone and ordered a sandwich from his favorite deli. The p’ boy he ordered was large enough to be his lunch and dinner. He was going to drink enough tonight to make up any lack of calorie intake for the day. 

It didn’t take long for the food to be delivered. The young man walked down the star case lined with composites of years gone by. He had never been in a composite. In recent years the frat hadn’t been able to get their s**t together to get one done. It was sad but in all probability he would never be able to come back and look for his youthful face on the wall and point it out to his friends or wife proving that once upon the time he had been a young desperado living a life most can never imagine in a city like New Orleans. 

He hit the bottom of the stair cases and almost fell flat on his face as his flip flops stuck to the floor. 

“F*****g pledges can’t even mop the floor” he said out loud to no one. Since the crack down on Greek life there was no fear of God in the pledges. They knew there was a line that they couldn’t cross. Back when he was a pledge that line didn’t exist. That was before another fraternity had literally scalded two of their pledges with boiling hot water.  He knew in his bones that it was good. That no one should have to go through what he did, at the same time he felt bad for them because chances are they would probably never face as great a personal challenge in their life until they faces something really serious like the death of a parent or cancer. They had been robbed of a crucible of manhood by an overzealous administration.  They would enter the process as boys and leave as boys, not as confident men. 

He walked to the door, his feet sticking with every step, paid the delivery boy, and  went back up to his room. He ate half of the sandwich, put the rest in the fridge, and fell asleep as he drifted into a pot and food induced coma. 

The sound of music woke him up. He looked at his cell phone and saw that it was 7 o’clock. It was time to start drinking. But first, time to smoke a cigarette and a small bowl. He grabbed his piece from its spot on his desk and walked out onto the balcony over the threshold. The oppressive heat had started to slip away to the heavens.  He walked out onto the balcony and sat down. He lit up a cigarette and smoked it absent mindedly as he packed his bowl. A loud knocking on his door grabbed his attention. 

“Come In” he shouted with the cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. His hands to occupied with their task to take it from his mouth. He looked up to see two of his housemates walking out onto his balcony. 

“Aw man you’re about to spark up? Mind if we get in?” Said the first one out onto the balcony. He was of a similar cut as Martin an the young man though a little thicker. The individual behind him was one of the outliers in the fraternity. He was shorter and more rotund with thinning back hair already showing bald spots. 

The young man knew the questions were a formality. It amused him how much his housemates and his friends knew his schedule, how they knew when to stop by.  There is a saying “a friend in need is a friend indeed but a friend with weed is better”. It didn’t really bother him. Truth be told it was probably better for him. He smoked less and he earned some credit with them- though he doubted that any of them would ever honor it. It was just a difference between his people and their people. If something isn’t stated as costing something they don’t consider it as costing anything. They never feel obligated to repay something unless you clearly stated that they were going to owe you. They weren’t all like that but he knew a lot that were.  Stereotypes don’t come from nowhere.

He lived in a house with 6 Jewish guys. Everyone around campus thought he was Jewish. Truth be told he even looked a little Jewish. He had some Russian blood in him so there was a good chance that they had some Jewish blood in them if they fled the motherland. His housemates jokingly called him “Dances with Jews”. Although he had been raised catholic the young man had lost religion when he gained critical reasoning. He did respect his Jewish friends’ commitment to tradition and family expectations, though, and would be right beside them if anyone ever said something derogatory about them because of their religion.  His friends and fraternity members joked that he had just joined the fraternity as a long con so he could just haze some Jews. He had really joined the fraternity for the people and they knew that. 

The three of them bullshitted for awhile. Talking about everything and nothing. They finished up the bowl and enjoyed the clear cool night air. Soon it was time to get ready to go out. His two housemate retreated to their rooms to get ready as the young man ate the second half of his po’ boy. He washed it down with two beers. He heard the showering running as he was finishing his dinner and when it turned off he went to the bathroom to take his turn. The shower was refreshing and washed him clear of the previous night transgressions and the sweat of the day. If only the shower could really wash away his sins, if only it could really wipe away everything he had done. He wasn’t the boy he had been when he came to school here. He was different and he knew it. 

In a lot of ways he was better. He had more confidence and was better at social interactions. He maintained a good GPA and had a job lined up for when he graduated but there was a dark side to him. He played it off with his humor and gregarious ways but there was an existential angst that threatened to consume him. He hated the things that he was expected to do, how on a dime he was supposed to fight some tooth and nail over some transgression to some younger fraternity brother that probably deserved to get his a*s kicked. How he was expected to traumatize and torture an entire group of young men in pursuit of something he knew they would never achieve. How he was a criminal and he didn’t think he was really committing any crimes. 

He hated the house he lived in with its stained carpets, dirty tiled bathroom floors, grimy shower curtains and holes punched in the walls. His living arrangements were basically one step above camping although he was pretty sure just like a tent a really good wind would probably take the house down. He hated the very concept of the fraternity sometimes. It was a house divided. There were old timers like him who struggled to keep it what it had been when they joined. But he was jaded. The younger members had no real loyalty. No real commitment. They didn’t understand what the fraternity was supposed to be. The young man hoped he could overcome this with the new class. Their pledge master was basically MIA and he had inherited the task of turning twenty something individuals into one pledge class that would be loyal and support an organization he didn’t even really believe in anymore.  If you don’t earn the privilege  you have no real respect for the organization. That was the problem was with the new members. They didn’t earn membership like he had so they took it for granted. It didn’t mean as much to them as it did to him. 

He had started drinking heavily as a pledge. Some people took pills or smoked before a line up. He drank. It might make the line up terrible for him because he would do stupid things, but he never remembered them. He would wake up the next morning in his bed, in a bush, or in some random location. He might be covered in refuse or he might be next to an attractive girl. He would take between 6 and 8 shots before going and just roll with it. He was lucky he never did anything too stupid as we was doing this 4 to 6 times a week.  Some how he had pulled out an A- average the semester he was pledging. He always believed his teachers knew what he was going through and took it easy on him. It was pretty evident he was going through hell. 

The pledging stopped but the drinking didn’t. He drank more and partied more every year. There was this maniac idea that you had to always top the night before. That every night should be a peak. That every night was going to be that night you looked back on and said, “remember that one night when…”  It was insanity but that’s how they lived; boys in young men’s body with no fear of god, the law, or death. They thought they were invincible and untouchable, and surprisingly history proved they were. Yes there were hiccups along the way; people were arrested, people went to the hospital, and they were sued and investigated time and time again, but it all just made for a better story. Something to laugh at at the bar the next night before the flood of alcohol carried you into the oblivion. 

 

No one he knew personally had died because of the lifestyle but he saw people destroyed by it.  Women ruined, bodies broken, blood spilled, young lives destroyed and it was all just to live on the rise. To ride the wave of youth before it crashed against the beach of reality. They lived in a little bubble trying to forget that outside there was a real world with real problems. They occupied themselves with petty little things that kept them distracted. The rivers of alcohol flowing freely throughout the city didn’t hurt. He wished that the river could wash away the transgressions he had committed, but some things, once done, cannot be undone. You didn’t last as long as he did living the way he did without becoming something that you hoped your mother wouldn’t see when you went home for the breaks. 

Sometimes he wished he could go back in time and just have gone to his local state university instead. Maybe things would have turned out differently. There he would have been more normal people; there would have been more blue collared people like him. The struggle of pretending to be part of the upper class had worn him down and made him do things that he normally wouldn’t have. The people he went to school were part of the class that doesn’t see people, they saw things to use, things to manipulate and play with. It was too late though, he needed to keep the charade going for a little while longer despite how much he hated it. 

He finished his shower and killed a few more beers before he walked down and out of the house alone. The one thing he loved about New Orleans was though it was a city you could still see the stars . He walked down the street looking for constellations he recognized from his days as a boy scout so many years ago. He seemed to float over the cracked and jagged New Orleans side walks. The green median separating the two sides of the street contained the street lamps that lit his way. He walked into the bar, he was early as usual, there wasn’t much of a crowd. His friend was bar tending so he started off the night doing shots.  Whiskey drinks followed and the night began to flow into oblivion  as people congregated at the watering hole and the drinks flowed freely sweeping away inhibitions, hopes, worries and time. 

 

He woke up to the burning sensation of sunlight on his face. The room was bright and full of sunlight streaming in from the uncovered window in the middle of the room. He couldn’t remember what happened the night before but people would soon be by to fill him in on it. His hands hurt and he had no idea why. There was bruising and scrapes around his knuckles like he had been in a fight. “Oh well” he thought to himself, “if it had been that bad I would be waking up in central lock up and not at home”. For all he knew he had just fallen down. He shook it off, he’d find out soon enough what happened. It was time to start another day and he looked around the room for his cigarettes as he wrapped his comforter around himself and opened the door to the balcony. 

Reviews

[Rebecca]

Ideas: it might flow better if it's written in first person. starts off really slow and doesn't hook me. It has poetry, that can be rewritten and be more poetic.
heartbreak in the story: metaphorize his pain, you can describe it as mountain weight.
nothing in it really hooked me,but i sensed poetry and the dialogue was really good. could add more super-honest dialogue that using ganja can make happen. I sensed a depressed heartbroken narrator, and there was strong imagery of him throwing his cigarette over a bridge along with other peoples ones: shows a sense of eternal family that other people can empathise with him. rewrite this and say the same thing in a different way.