Last night I dreamed of Helen Hill
I’m walking in New Orleans to Helen Hill and Paul’s house. The house looks a bit like the one in Mid City, but it’s on a corner and I can see, as soon as I get closer up, that the gate is open and that some of the chickens have already run out, though there are still a good number of them inside. They seem not to have realized that the fence was open. Notably through the fence, while I’m in the yard, I see some of the escaped chickens running around: a black and white one, a rooster, and a momma and baby which are both white and are both wearing little pink hats. The momma and baby with the pink hats are running around pretty fast and there’s no way I can catch them.
I’m in the yard in a panic, and I’m yelling for Helen to come help me, because her chickens are running lose and I don’t know how to deal with them. I yell for her a few times and it’s only when Paul comes to the door looking distraught that I remember that Helen is dead, that she died what might be called a long time ago by some people, but it still feels too painfully immediate for me.
Paul lets me in the backdoor and I’m in the kitchen, which looks like their Mid City kitchen exactly, but the left and right side are reversed. All of the cabinets are on the other side of the house. I talk to Paul about the chickens, and apologize for waking him up. I ask him if he’s still working at a community clinic. Paul tells me that it’s Helen’s birthday.
I tell him that I’m so sorry that she died, and that I can never put my head around it.
(Note: Helen and Paul were a bit older than me. When we met I was in my early twenties, still wild and angsty. I didn’t have any older friends that were as warm and friendly, but also into the same kind of far left politics. Also Helen was a working artist, and they were married. I didn’t have any married friends before I met them.
I ended up taking her film classes at the New Orleans film collective. I would see them pretty regularly and come over for visits. On one remarkable occasion, while my friend Thomas was housesitting, we watched Helen’s collection of Eastern European animation. In the end, after the hurricane, everyone got all spread out. It was impossible for me to stay in touch since I hardly knew what I had moved to somewhere absolutely new to me, and hardly knew what I was doing.)
I told Paul that I couldn’t understand it. That I had expected Helen to still be around, to always be around. Then I said that we live in a culture where expressive freedom comes with punishment, and that acting out is accompanied by a terrible justification of the brutality we’re subjected to, at least that’s the story that we’ve been told culturally. (A note: this part I think comes from all of the queer studies books I’ve been reading, and oddly enough is not something that I would have said while conscious, nor does it particularly make sense in regard to HH.)
And that I missed Helen very much and thought that we would have been in touch again soon, since I’d just started visiting New Orleans again. Paul said that he would call her, then he picked up this orange rotary dial phone and left a message on a kind of machine. He told her happy birthday and that I’d come over for a visit.
Then I woke up crying.