✍Draft: Water Under The Bridges / October 2026 Draft

 DRAFT ✍

 ~ Fiction ~

Roman à clef, cher!

Created AI-free

by Leonard Earl Johnson

of Lafayette and New Orleans, Louisiana

 www.LEJ.world ✍ 

📖

LEJ's 

Louisiana

a monthly e-column at 

www.LEJ.world

Yours Truly in a Swamp

by  Leonard Earl Johnson

💫💥💫💥💫💥💫💥💫

© 2026, Leonard Earl Johnson,  All Rights Reserved

❤

Best viewed for color contrast on a computer

or phone screen with a black background.

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~ comments permitted after first of the month ~

 

In the Heart of Sleep,  Day Dream on the Beach, 

Oil on canvas, 1986 ~ Francoise Gilot

Yours Truly in a Swamp 

October, 2026

       ✍

💥

 

* * *
WATER UNDER THE BRIDGES

Reprinted with changes from June 2011

by

Leonard Earl Johnson

www.LEJ.world

Louisiana, Land of Dreamy Dreams.  Where we treat the Mississippi River like our odalisque slave. 

This year, The Mighty River has gone giddy with the weather-poets. Leaving our passions leafed out topside, dusty in a draught while our roots flood from Yankee runoff. 

We are aboard the Sunset Limited, Amtrick-ling over the Huey P. Long Bridge at New Orleans.  It is clear from here, only the sturdy old Huey is up in the air enough to be untouchable by the floods.

The train has come from Los Angeles, and points west.  We joined it in Lafayette for a night in Big Swamp City.

At Morgan City, bayous have grown into rivers lapping at bridge pylons within a few feet of our train tracks.

We came to a full stop, then proceeded very slowly.  Flood gates entering the little downtown were closed and water trickled under them as we trickled past. 

Upriver, the Mississippi continues gushing over the Bonnet Carrie Spillway on its way to flood Lake Pontchartrain.

In Acadiana, the Atchafalaya Basin fills with Mississippi River water tumbling out of the Morganza Spillway, above Baton Rouge. It threatens isolated homes, small settlements and towns, on its way under bridges and out to The Sea beyond. 

The conductor says, "You may not be able to come back this way." We bought round-trip tickets anyway.

* * *

Saturday night in New Orleans! 

At the Vincent Mann Gallery, on Royal Street we join a reception for Francoise Gilot.

🍷🍾 

"Going back while the bridges are still up?" L. A. Norma asks us. 

"No one expects any bridges to come down, but no one expected Katrina either!"

Hildegarde and Balthazar are banking on the Sunset running, and the Morgan City bridges holding. "At least till after we pass," Hildegarde says. 

"There is no problem with the Huey P. Long. Huey built it well with Standard Oil's tax money."

We all smiled.

Long leveed taxes on Standard Oil and in an unrelated event ~ one day while Standard Oil was out of town ~ someone murdered Huey in the lobby of the new State Capitol in Baton Rouge that he had also built with their tax money.

We sidled along shaking hands with Francoise Gilot and chatting with her manager and Son, who is the spitting image of his Father, Pablo Picasso.

"Picasso would have done them all in oil," Hildegarde whispers. "With two noses."

Claude Picasso, issue of two famed artists, manages his Mother's estate and sales. 

"And his Mother, Hildegarde says.

"As much as she, still an ingénue mystérieuse at ninety-something, can be managed. 

His life began in the ashes of World War Two, a time fading in memories outside of history lectures and art galleries. 

Francoise was twenty when she and Pablo met. She was having her first exhibition -- in German-occupied Paris! Picasso was already famous, and sixty. 

Claude turns his inherited handsome head to matters other than us.

Francoise Gilot as A Bridge. From the gallery catalog:  ". . . she has been a bridge between the heroic period of the School of Paris and the emergence of New York City as the new world center for contemporary art. While she has lived in New York and La Jolla, California, for many years, I believe that she has found a cultural home in New Orleans . . . I am pleased that the New Orleans Museum of Art possesses several works by Gilot,"  E. John Bullard, Director Emeritus, New Orleans Museum of Art.

After the gallery reception, Gilot and Picasso had dinner at Antoine's with gallery founder, Jacob Manguno and a few gallery friends and art collectors. Bob and Marilyn Tarpy of Lafayette were among this number. "I've collected Gilot since 1972," Tarpy said.

"We are all very proud of our work over the past forty years, bringing fine French paintings to Louisiana," Manguno said, "Francoise Gilot is one of the best."

Again, Louisiana shows its ability to rise from gutter, hurricane or flood. Outside, levees groan. Inside, we chatted with the ageing ex- of Pablo Picasso; and their Son, Claude Picasso. 

________
Copyright, 2026, Leonard Earl Johnson, all rights reserved

* * *

Lagniappe du jour

Frank Parsley's icebox magnet of LEJ

The Vincent Mann Gallery

✍Balthazar, Hildegarde, and the Pope / September 2026

 ~ Fiction ~

Roman à clef, cher!

Created AI-free

by Leonard Earl Johnson

of Lafayette and New Orleans, Louisiana

 www.LEJ.world ✍ 

⚓

⚓   ⚓

💜💚💛

 *  ~  *  ~  *  ~  *  ~  *  ~  *  ~  *  ~  *  ~  *  ~  

📖

LEJ's 

Louisiana

a monthly e-column at 

www.LEJ.world

September 2026

Yours Truly in a Swamp

by  Leonard Earl Johnson

💫💥💫💥💫💥💫💥💫

"There were days I read the SHIPPING NEWS, and the INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE; and met Augusto Pinochet in a resort in Ipanema. Now I read from my telephone and practice perpetual urination." ~ Seafarer on the beach, Rio de Janario

 

© 2026, Leonard Earl Johnson,  All Rights Reserved

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Best viewed for color contrast on a computer

or phone screen with a black background.

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Reliquary in a private home, Lafayette, Louisiana

...........❤...........

Balthazar,

 

Hildegarde,

 

and The Pope

by Leonard Earl Johnson

www.LEJ.world 

            

💥

Balthazar stands at the entrance to The Rectory awaiting Hildegarde Bottlebrush. The doors open.  Big walnut and cutglass doors. 

Hildegarde is the Rector's Housekeeper.  She is also the Republican's renowned Green Alligator Briefcase repairwoman.  The Green Alligator Briefcases she repairs are part of a D. C. Beltway designed project promoting the Republican Party's curious notion in Louisiana ~ that Global Warming is not happening.  

 Louisiana? Daily losing estuaries, oyster beds, fishing camps, and whole cities to 'nonexistent' warm tides!  Hildegarde knows this is wrong. 

"But briefcase repairs are a solid income be thee a MAGA believer or not." 

The briefcase is fixed to keep frozen a snowball as visual proof the icecaps are not melting. 

"They have a built-in freezer unit.  Often in need of repair." 

 The Frozen Snowball Project was inspired by the late U. S. Senator James Inhofe (Republican of Oklahoma) to propagate The Party's belief in non- Global Warming and carbon footprint donations. 

❆ 

"When units fail the snowball melts, see. Then the project's mission fails."  

Hildegarde explained this to The Rector, who gave her permission to freelance her repair work at The Rectory, in her own rooms, on her own time.

"Republicans give me a hundred, two hundred. Whatever.  Don't matter.  I just take what they offer.  Nothing to repairing them, but adjusting a screw on the side of the housing unit built for the purpose."

💦🌎💦

  Being of Louisiana's German/French Alsace-Lorraine descent, Hildegarde is most heritably good at fixing things and moderately good at holding her tongue 

~ sometimes.

For example: Impishly tickling inside of her as she addressed The Rector, was a desire to blurt out: "They'd probably give me free wine and an altar boy, too, if I asked."  

It would be funny to say that, but Hildegarde knew it would also torpedo The Rector's permission.  So she didn't.  Such being the state of theology today.  She held her tongue, smiled and remembered the uproar Balthazar caused reading, The Little Boy from Big Mamou, at The Bishop's birthday dinner (THE BISHOP TURNED 74 / January 2023).

"All it takes is time, attention, and a place to work. 

"And a screwdriver!" 

  ꩜ 

She pointed to the screw for The Rector's examination.  He nodded knowingly, secure in mechanics gleaned from nights long ago working at the filling station next door to his seminary dorm.

⚔ ✠ ⚔

Balthazar was at The Rectory presenting Hildegarde with yet another crippled briefcase.  A delivery he was doing as a favor for the two Red Warrior Women aboard his train from 

New Orleans. The two Red Women remained down on Rue Jefferson, near the Rosa Parks train station. They setup a table on the sidewalk outside Rêve Coffee Roasters, where they displayed a frozen snowball removed from a working Alligator Briefcase.

Inside the coffee shop, The Rector finishes his coffee, drops his cup in the dirty dish basket, and steps outside to examine the evidence.  

"You know," he says to Dillard, while holding the cube up to the sun, "The Pope has warned us not to ignore Global Warming. To do so being an affront to God's admonition to be good stewards of The Earth."

Prompted by fading faith, Balthazar observes after The Rector leaves, "The Pope should be careful Trump don't fly a drone through his bedroom window."

Hildegarde shudders at the thought. She believes strongly what she believes, with no concern about Trump's or The Pope's infallibility.  Or, for that matter, the pessimistic humanism Balthazar has taken to espousing. 

Too much time reading too much Schopenhauer, she thinks. 

Hildegarde asks, "What profits the person who scuttles their own ship-of-state just to steal their own brass?"

By their tribalism Cajuns are isolated from outside influences. These folks are bonded by their sense of place, and a deep seeded belief that it is morally permissible to lift gold, e-coins or banknotes from any outlander splashing through the Swamp  ~

be they Washington politicians, Texas oil men, The Pope, or Schopenhauer himself.

✞  ☨ ✞

Balthazar crosses the parking lot and enters The Cathedral, where he drops five dollars in a slot that lights an electric candle for the prayer of his choice.                                                       On the electric switchbox he places a little orange Voodoo Doll, two chicken wishbones and a dried spray of Spanish moss.

Live flaming candles are outlawed in Lafayette Parish churches.

 After he exits The Cathedral, a custodian watching from the shadows removes the Voodoo Doll and switches off the electric candle.

                  

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Coming next month

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⭐Continuation of the Red Women Warriors Series⭐

            

         * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

© Leonard Earl Johnson 

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~   ~   ~

 LEJ's Louisiana, Yours Truly in a Swamp

is a monthly e-column @ www.LEJ.world,

Hosted by GOOGLE BLOGGER,
and historically at

Les Amis de Marigny, New Orleans

publication of the

Faubourg Marigny Improvement Association

It is written by Leonard Earl Johnson

of Lafayette and New Orleans, Louisiana

 www.LEJ.world

 

Readers comments accepted after publication on the First of the month

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Your Comments and Corrections

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© 2026, Leonard Earl Johnson, All Rights Reserved 

✍Remember? The First Christmas After Katrina / August 2026

   

       

💥

⚓

⚓

⚓ ⚓

August 2026 

~ Fiction ~

Roman à clef, cher

by Leonard Earl Johnson 

of Lafayette and New Orleans, Louisiana

 www.LEJ.world ✍

© 2026, Leonard Earl Johnson, All Rights Reserved 

Your comments and corrections

are welcome

click here

LEJ's Louisiana, 

Yours Truly in a Swamp

a monthly e-column 

by

Leonard Earl Johnson

of Lafayette and New Orleans, Louisiana

* * *

 LEJ  2005                   Photo credit: Frank Parsley

REMEMBER

THE FIRST CHIRSTMAS AFTER KATRINA 

(Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans on August 29, 2005.)

🌴🎄🌴

by Leonard Earl Johnson

 ~ www.LEJ.world 

📖

💜 💚

💛

© 2026, Leonard Earl Johnson, All Rights Reserved.

Originally published in 2005 in a slightly different version

𐦓  𐦓  𐦓

The month was December.  

The bar was on Saint Charles Avenue in Uptown New Orleans. It recently reopened after The Storm, and has tried since Thanksgiving to coax Yuletide spirit from our flood weary City.  

Their effort has been great, but the task has been greater.  

The water is gone, but so are most of the customers. 

In time the bar will fill again. But not this warm Saturday, December 17, 2005 ~ nearly four months since Hurricane Katrina took hold of New Orleans like a mother cat shaking her cubs by the scruff.

The City is silent.

Now and then a lone vehicle scurries down some darkened street towards destinations not obvious to onlookers ~ had there been onlookers. 

Military convoys make up the only traffic moving regularly on this or any other street.  Followed by armies of Spanish-speaking civilians, hired by FEMA to rake and push the massive debris mounds ever closer to the curb. 

🚦Neither stop lights 🚦

nor street lights blinked a bright red and green

After Katrina   /   Coleen Perilloux Landry

Everywhere houses lay splayed open like huge fish with their innards spilling out for the world to see.

Occasionally a cascade of generator powered lights pour over some brave heart's intact gallery. They cast faint shadows on refrigerators sitting along the curb wrapped in industrial strength tape and that sickeningly sweet smell of a Mafia funeral.

Inside the bar, blue snowflakes hang from rafters, along with toy gray helicopters lifting little plastic refugees from little blue-tarped roofs.  The bartender sports a red baseball cap with cotton pasted around the bill.  A tiny silver bell dangles from its peek.

A great effort, indeed! But the bell rings hollow and the bartender looks like some Papa Noel rescuing the hopeless with promises of gifts not always delivered.

I have come to this bar to meet an old friend just arrived aboard Amtrak's train, #58, the City of New Orleans.  A Special run of this famed train from Chicago ~ that broad-shouldered behemoth at the other end of the rail line.  

He rode down on this unique consist to show support for Arlo Guthrie's Friends Benefit Tour for Louisiana Musicians. The Amtrak special stopped for fundraiser concerts ~ "Out on the south bound odyssey... all the way to New Orleans."

Tonight, my friend and I are planning on making our donations at the tour's last stop, at Tipitina's on the corner of Tchoupitoulas and Napoleon Avenue. 

💜💚💛

* * *

I opened the French doors and spotted my friend at the far end of the bar. He was overdressed, and clearly over served.  He wore a camel hair topcoat, a gray wool suit, a white cotton shirt and a red silk tie.  A fast-paced Chicago uniform, in a flooded New Orleans parade not too fast in the best of times.  These are not the best of times.

A mural behind the bar twinkled with tiny blue lights sprinkled over a snowy hillock of white deer nibbling mistletoe berries dotted among the evergreen pines.  The mistletoe berries are represented by tiny red lights.

🍒

"Mistletoe is poison," my friend is telling the bartender, in his booming Chicago voice, "and its berries are white!"

A brewery representative from Saint Louis, Missouri was also behind the bar.  He was wearing a sport coat that looked to be sewn together from Anheuser-Busch labels.  He is passing out samples of Red Wolf Beer.  My friend takes one and lifts it in my direction.  I move down the bar and accept the brew.

"Must be a Santa after all," my friend booms to the largely empty room.

From a green felt-covered table, an elderly couple often seen here before The Storm, looks up and smiles.  No one is dealing.  Their cards lay face up.  We tip our beer towards them. They are wearing evening clothes and his gold studs, set with diamonds, flash back at the mural. She is ash blonde, well-painted, and wearing a red sequined gown.  She unzips the gentleman's tuxedo.

My friend and I both say in stage whisper that she is an expensive date.

The man laughs and asks, "How better to spend my FEMA money?"   She slaps him playfully.

"Where is the vice-squad?" my friend asks in a real whisper. 

The bartender sits down two more Red Wolfs and says, "In diapers with Senator Vitter, at the Canal Street Brothel?"  We all laugh like Americans at the sexual peccadilloes of our betters. 

My friend is hanging his observations with the heavy tinsel of Chicago bluntness, "Christmas in New Orleans is not like going over the river and through the woods to grandmother's house, is it?"

"It's a good system," I say.  

"We, not Chicago, are 'The City That Works'!" 

He snorts, hearing Chicago's famous motto laid up against New Orleans' famous work ethic.

"What's wrong with cops protecting brothel patrons?" I ask.

My Chicago friend smiles, "And people in evening clothes entertaining themselves without restraint?  

"What's wrong, my ageing hippie friend," he says clinking our bottles, "is that it cuts into everybody's profit margins."

We both look at the elderly couple and laugh.  My friend mutters, "Maybe not free, but a lot less than the cops charge." 

The beer rep hands us two more Red Wolfs.  He wants to finish and leave.  My friend asks him, "Shouldn't you call this stuff Red Riding Hood?"  None of us are sure what he means by this, but we all laugh the laugh required of our station.

The beer distributor gives us two full six packs of Red Wolf and smiles, "Please take them, I need to find one of those scarce airplane seats out."

The bartender says, "Allow me to put that on ice for you."

I get up to go to the restroom as my Chicago friend yanks a hanging blue snowflake from its tether. He bellows at the bartender, "What fathead told you to hang blue snowflakes in this swamp-flooded city?"  The bartender is startled and blurts back, "The fatheads in Chicago who own this bar!"  Of course he does not know he is talking to fathead number one.

The Saint Louis beer man smiles weakly and moves towards the French doors.  Through the glass we see a waiting limousine with rental license plates.  The man in the tuxedo falls from his chair. The woman in red helps him to his feet and they stumble outside balancing themselves by holding on to articles of each other's clothing.  They lunge into the limo and motion for the beer man to join them.  He shrugs and climbs in.

Coming out of the restroom I drop a quarter into a slot machine.  The last of my FEMA money whirls away.  I do not care.  It is Christmas and my friend is in Town to wine and dine us for three fat ~ if somewhat shipwrecked ~ days.  

We have known each other since the Fabled Sixties in Carbondale, where Guthrie's special train stopped to play at Southern Illinois University.  He likes having, as he puts it, "A writer bum for a friend."  I like having a rich one.

In a wastebasket beside the slot machines, I spot seven paper teddy bear tree ornaments. Each with the name across its brown belly of someone lost to Hurricane Katrina.  I pick up one and read the name out loud, "Senegal Breaux."  I gather them all and stuff them in my shirt pocket. 

Back at the bar I sip my beer in silence. The bartender smarting from my friend's harsh words, punches up Linda Ronstadt singing Blue Bayou, on the jukebox.  He pushes a remote-control button next to the cash register and a lone gray helicopter opens its bomb bay doors and sends red and green glitter drifting down into our beers.

We stand to leave, and my friend tells the bartender to keep the remaining Red Wolfs.  He gives him a two-hundred dollar tip and his business card.  "Tell those fatheads in Chicago to jump in Lake Michigan, New Orleans is in a swamp not a snowy wonderland!"

Outside, my friend stares at the empty curb.  "Where the Hell's my driver?"  

I say, "Forget it, let's walk."

He slips out of his topcoat and hands it to a bewildered Mexican in  

blue jeans and a t-shirt that reads:

FEMA

Find Every Mexican Available

We walk towards Tip's silently passing mounds of rubble.  My friend accepts a paper teddy bear and holds it up to ambient Christmas light.

"Ah, Christ, what am I supposed to do about this?"  Then he hands it to a pair of passing National Guardsmen.

He turns back to me and says, "Let's distribute them like handbills."

It seems all those in Town tonight are headed to Tipitina's. 

We start singing, "We three kings from Orient are..."  Someone passing asks, "Where is your other king?"  We hand them the teddy bear named Senegal Breaux, and keep on our way, "Bearing gifts we travel so far..."

 Copyright, 2026, Leonard Earl Johnson, All Rights Reserved

~ www.LEJ.world 

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Your comments and corrections

are welcome

click here

  💧

~Lagniappe du Jour~

✯ ⭐ ✯

Pre Amtrak livery

Riding on the City of New Orleans,
Arlo Guthrie

🔊🎥🕪

✯ ⭐ ✯

     

✯ ⭐ ✯

When Veronica played her harmonicaLeonard Earl Johnson

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 LEJ's Louisiana, Yours Truly in a Swamp

is a monthly e-column @ www.LEJ.world,

Hosted by GOOGLE BLOGGER,
and historically at

Les Amis de Marigny, New Orleans

publication of the

Faubourg Marigny Improvement Association

It is written by Leonard Earl Johnson

of Lafayette and New Orleans, Louisiana

 www.LEJ.world

 

Your Comments and Corrections

are welcome

Readers comments accepted after publication on the First of the month

🗣😷

© 2026, Leonard Earl Johnson, All Rights Reserved