John Sinclair

On The Road #18

(Aboard the Starlight Limited, California, July 26, 2006) — I didn’t even intend to visit New Orleans on this trip. I had a pre-paid fragment of an airline ticket from Newark to New Orleans left over from my round trip passage from New Orleans to Amsterdam which had been altered to allow me to attend the ComFest in Columbus OH, and I had meant to take the train from Baltimore to New York for $50, cash in my ticket to NOLA, get into Louis Armstrong International Airport at 9:30 am, catch a bus into town and hop on the City of New Orleans train for Memphis at 1:45 pm the same day.

But everything changed when I got word in Amsterdam that my daughter Celia was having a hard time in New Orleans and faced eviction from her apartment in Treme. Without wanting to violate the confidentiality issue by going into a lot of personal details, let it suffice to say that the repercussions from the Flood damage in the Crescent City and the shock of learning that her long-time friend and employer, the great documentary filmmaker Stevenson Palfi, had blown his brains out just before Christmas, combined to send her over the edge.

When I went down to spend the Christmas holidays and then Mardi Gras with Celia at her Treme apartment across St. Philip Street from Louis Armstrong Park, she was still in a state of shock and hadn’t quite assimilated what Stevenson had done to put an end to his own misery. I left New Orleans after Ash Wednesday to return to Amsterdam, and the next day Celia jumped in her car and drove to Detroit to stay briefly with her mother and sister. She drove back to New Orleans—that’s about 1200 miles each way—and started to lose her grip, ending up in a mental ward in a hospital in Lake Charles, which had the closest available psychiatric ward that could take patients from New Orleans, way across the state of Louisiana.

Celia’s mother, the great photographer (and my first wife) Leni Sinclair, raced in her car down to Lake Charles and stayed in a tent in a park outside of town for a couple of weeks until she could see to her daughter’s release from the mental ward. Then she drove Celia back to Detroit to try to get her some professional help. Celia stayed less than four days, rented a car and drove herself back to New Orleans.