My name's Raleigh Epps and I smoke drugs.
There aren't a lot of black girls named Mary. When I tell you that she was a Voodoo priestess, a Mambo, even a Voodoo queen, you're going to think I'm making her up and that I'm unoriginal; that I'm romanticizing some story about Marie Laveau. I'm not though. She's a real girl. I swear it. She's the reason I'm living here in LA. She wants me dead. She'll kill me if I ever set foot in Now Orleans again, I'm fairly certain.
I wish I could tell you an Indiana Jones tale where Yours Truly steals some magnificent Voodoo artifact, Baron Samedi's cane or something, but all I did was cheat on her; broke her little Voodoo heart. I'm kind of an ass.
I'd had sex twice before I'd gotten to New Orleans. I wasn't old enough for the whole Hippie/Free-Love thing and too old to be part of the sexually-desensitized generation that realized oral sex is the best kind of recreation by the time they hit middle school. And, yeah, I'm a little bitter about that.
It's not just the victim-of-circumstance thing. My parents are high class and prudish. They're also stellar when it comes to parenting. They were loving, firm when I needed it and held on just tight enough when I tried to spread my wings. When I say I had a good childhood, that's no fucking lie. Because they were so damn good, a lot of their sensibilities rubbed off on me. Thus, I was fairly prudish when I left home without even knowing it. To compound the problem, when I did have sex for the first time, it wasn't very good. I won't tell you that story but it was with a married woman in Boston and I felt dirty afterwards; not dirty enough to refuse a second time when she offered, but enough to make me wonder what all the hype was about.
I met Mary on my first night in New Orleans. I was on my own and more than a little high. Within a half hour of arriving in the French Quarter, I scored a half ounce of weed from tall, European-looking dude, rolled myself a joint in the bathroom of an old slave auction-house-turned-bar and smoked it. It was powerful shit, laced with something, and the buzz had me worried for long stretches of the night.
I passed a magic shop for tourists advertising a free gris-gris bag with every tarot card reading. I had zero interest in fortune telling at the time, but I'd bought an alarming amount of kitschy, tourist nick-knacks and thought one of these gris-gris bags sounded handy. The poison-laden smoke told me that by getting my fortune told I would somehow be beating the system.
Still in a cloud, I walked in and demanded the fat college kid behind the counter tell me my future. Not looking up from his computer, he pointed to a bead curtain. I stared at him for a moment, at the beads for another.
Pushing the curtain aside in a clacking, rattling mass, I stepped through into a world of candlelight and incense and magic-gone-airborne, though I didn't know exactly what that felt like at the time. I realized, as I dropped into a padded, throne of a chair, that a single woman populated this strange, behind-the-bead-curtain world.
Insanely beautiful.
I couldn't guess how tall she might be, but her legs seemed to go on forever, draped over the arm of her chair and flowing down the side of the chair like a waterfall. Her waist seemed thin, but only in comparison, set between her hips and breasts. If mammoth or gargantuan or were pretty words, I'd use them in relation to her chest, but they imply something bestial. Her's were both large and delicate; pillows, ocean waves, entire cloudscapes- a perverse imagining brought to life.
I couldn't take in her face, not all at once. Even now I can't think of it as a whole. There was too much perfection there, too many details to let the eye pull back its focus: white, straight teeth, made all the whiter set against her milk chocolate skin and slightly darker lips, her eyes light green, almost grey, hard and deep and soft all at the same time like worked jade, cheeks round with a perpetual smile, nose perky but not pointy- cute.
All right, all right. You get it, she's luscious. Damn.
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