Point and Shoot, Florida (YU)--Heap and Brenda lived on the Mississippi River side of Magazine, next to the Audubon Park Zoo.

You could hear the freighters steaming up the river sounding their foghorns and the gibbons, brachiating, in the zoo. Also, at feeding time, the seals, barking. The occasional lion roar.

The gibbon has a rudimentary call system, a precursor of human speech, if not a language. Heap was later to name a character Hylobates Lar, after the Malay gibbon.

Lar is a crossword puzzle word, like orts.

When Walter Anderson rode his bicycle over from Ocean Springs to talk to Nash Roberts about hurricanes--he had ridden several out, on Horn Island, including, most recently, Betsy--he camped out on the levee at the foot of Broadway, a few blocks from Brew and Brenda's apartment.

The hurricane had torn up the aviary at the zoo, and the exotic birds had escaped. So when Anderson woke up in the morning there were birds peeping out of the bushes at him like in an Henri Rousseau painting.

I guess Heap and Brenda could hear exotic birds, too.

Across Magazine Street, between Magazine and St. Charles Avenue, were old, expensive homes. It was a nice neighborhood to walk, or ride a bike through, going to the Tulane campus.

The river side of Magazine was more low-rent. Behind Heap and Brenda was a colored man who drove a horse-drawn cart in the French Quarter. He kept the horse in a barn beside his house. He kept chickens. So when Heap woke up he could hear a rooster crowing, smell bacon frying, smell fresh horse shit--it was like living in the country.

Audubon Park was a bus terminus. You could get anywhere in the city for a quarter.

When you went over there, there were pickaninnies asking for carfare, to get home. They had come to swim in the municipal swimming pool.

Heap called the pool Monkey Island, because it was full of pickaninnies, who reminded him of a monkey colony in a zoo. Cutting up. They did everything but jack off and hurl feces at spectators.

Surely a pool full of black youngsters isn't different from a pool full of white youngsters.

Yes. It is.

The first thing Heap did when they got settled was sell their sporty little Corvair and buy two ten-speed bicycles.

If they wanted to go someplace that was too far to walk, or ride a bicycle, they took the bus.

They would ride their bikes out to Lake Pontchartrain, to eat seafood, Friday nights, so not much was too far.

Not having to own a car made Heap feel rich.

In fact, they were rich.

They had enough money to pay rent, eat well, buy books and records, new, go to see a movie or a concert or a play, and drink.

They had a yellow enamel French-drip coffee pot and drank chicory coffee from the Café du Monde.

Later, Heap was to buy a Schwinn Cycletruck, and do his grocery shopping, once a week, on it. Also, if they went on a picnic, he could carry his charcoal grill, a cooler, and so forth, in the basket of the bike.