“You take all four children,” I said, “or it’s no deal. Otherwise I’ll take all four and have you pay alimony and child support.” I knew how David’s conscience worked. He couldn’t bear the idea of living away from his sons. He agreed. I promised not to ask him for any alimony. He bought me a new yellow Volkswagen and gave me two thousand dollars. The plan was that he would get a divorce in Chicago on the grounds of desertion. Which was fine with me. I wanted only to get the hell away.

“Away” meant New Orleans, which I had enjoyed during my ten days there. New Orleans was southern but without any of the dreary Baptist unforgivingness hanging over it. I found a small apartment in the French Quarter, and took a job as a chambermaid in a place on Chartres Street. I didn’t mind the work and it felt good to be alone. I suppose I should say that I missed my kids, but I didn’t, at least not much. I sometimes wondered if they missed me. In later years I neglected to ask.

Ziggy Watkins, my fourth husband, was a musician, a clarinet player. I say “was”; I suppose he still is. I met him one night at Pat O’Brien’s, where he was playing. He was large, like I mean 280lbs large. Also a drinker, rum and coke his speciality, though he didn’t really need the coke, unless it was cocaine, for which he also had a powerful taste. Ziggy used to describe himself as a “happy cat”, which he was when he wasn’t drunk, which was most every evening. I see I forgot to mention that Ziggy was black. A white woman marrying a black man in those days still carried a certain shock factor. We’d been together maybe six weeks, when he said he wanted to marry me.

“Know it, sweet baby,” he told me, “We good together. Let’s make it a permanent deal.”

Ziggy was part of the inner circle of musicians in New Orleans. He taught me a lot of things, too, about music and drugs and blacks and New Orleans. He could be very seductive.

Only after we married did I learn that Ziggy, when fully tanked up, didn’t mind hitting women. I also learned that faithfulness to one woman was not an idea with any interest for him. Our marriage lasted less than eight months, when we had what Ziggy called a black divorce. “You cuts out the middleman,” Ziggy explained. In other words, no lawyers. A black divorce is when a husband closes the door and never returns. The only difference in my case is that the black divorce occurred when a white woman, me, closed the door and never returned. I never mentioned my marriage to Ziggy to anyone, and until now nobody knows anything about it. Of all my marriages, it was the most stupid. I can’t even explain it to myself.

With the help of fifteen hundred dollars from David I left New Orleans for Las Vegas. A terrible place, but lots of work available. I was able to get a job first at a dry cleaner, then not long after I found a better one working the buffet at Caesar’s Palace, refilling and cleaning up the food on display after the attacks upon it by depressed gamblers, gluttons and assorted freeloaders. I began playing a little blackjack myself in other casinos, and found I wasn’t too bad at it, some nights taking home a couple hundred bucks or so.

Las Vegas is, as someone I met at Caesar’s once told me, a mecca for losers. They come from all over. Everyone seemed to have a story of nearly hitting it rich, nearly scoring big, coming this close to a swell life. But you didn’t have to look too closely to see that they were all sad cases, flops, suckers. Every one was running away from something or other. I suppose I was too, though I couldn’t have told you exactly what it was.

Lloyd Blakely was a member of the hotel worker’s union—a handyman of sorts. He did twenty years in the Air Force as an enlisted man, where he worked with flight simulators. He had been retired for the past ten years. He was black. Do you suppose that black men know when white women have been with black men? Since my relationship with Ziggy, I sensed black men coming on to me more than in the past. Not that Lloyd did. He was a large gentle man—one of nature’s teddy bears. But whenever he was in the buffet area of Caesar’s, he would stop to talk with me, until one day he asked me if I would care to have dinner with him.