Red Wine Moan Jeri Cain Rossi Manic D Press 138 pp. Available from Powell's Books

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"Leaving New Orleans" and "Lorelei", the second and third stories in this slim volume, both take place in bars. In the first, the protagonist, a hung-over and broke young painter, "featured in Art Forum before the age of twenty-two", decides he must leave the city as soon as his dishwashing shift finishes up. "Sadly he was coming to the realization that the great experiment, the exile to the poet's city of New Orleans, was a failure. He'd squandered the sales of his paintings on drinks instead of canvas, and the madcap characters of the city that used to amuse and delight and inspire him had transformed into decaying, slurring, documentary cases."

He packs one bag, locks his door, and heads out, only stopping at his favorite dive for a single good-bye drink. "He was leaving this Hades on the Mississippi, this shantytown on the River Styx. Mark Twain hadn't warned him about the ever downward spiraling Decatur Street rings of hell. One more drink for the road, and just enough money to get a ticket anywhere, nowhere." First, he runs into an unpublished writer friend who stands him the first drink; the next round is bought by a stripper who wanders in, the next by another painter friend...and the story grows in characters and color, as the protagonist drinks and drinks, encounters an old flame, watches a parade. At the end of the story, the young man passes out at the bar, his head on an atlas of the world, his foot on his forgotten suitcase.

In "Lorelei", a young man, while consuming a large number of Stingers, tangles himself up with an aged former dancer and loses his girlfriend of one month. In case we didn't already get the connection to the Lorelei of Germanic folklore, who lured men to their destruction on the Rhine, this siren has mermaids tattooed on her breasts. At the beginning of the story she's a nuisance, "seventy pushing twenty, sitting at the bar, wobbling at the bar, bothering customers, interrupting their conversations." But she saunters over to the nameless protagonist of the story, bums a cigarette, shows him a photograph of herself as a strip tease dancer, in a bikini, "one fine beautiful leg kicked up and bent seductively", retrieves a dollar bill thrown onto the floor by going into a backbend and picking it up with her mouth, and the spell is cast.

Rather later in the raucous evening that follows, he's discovered with Lorelei in his lap by his girlfriend, who "looks confused and astonished and finally sad and leaves". But all illusions must fade sooner or later; in this case it's 5:30 in the morning, when the "timeless beauty" is discovered passed out on the toilet in the ladies' room, looking "sixty not sixteen." With the snapshot of his siren in his back pocket, the newly homeless young man stumbles out into the dawn to his car.

If only all the short stories in the book held together this well. The remainder of the stories in this collection have plenty of solid moments and funny writing, droll incidents or dead-on description, but the overall effect feels dull and occasionally mean-spirited. Rossi often doesn't bother to name her characters as she sends them to their misadventures. An unfaithful family man accidentally drowns himself and the rest of his family in "Be Careful What You Wish For". A thirteen-year-old girl experiences her first period the night that the death-row inmate she's been trading banal letters with is executed in "Sissy Loves Roy". In "Sluricane", three New Orleans artists prepare to ride out a killer hurricane drinking and talking with a broken-down sailor, but their only epiphany is a near miss, just like the storm turns out to be. "The Last Dance Is For You" might be a love story gone amuck or a Tijuana tourist horror story: a pregnant young woman is dumped by her unfaithful, soon-to-be-published writer boyfriend in a seedy bar and then wanders, drunk and reckless, into a strip club, where the story leaves her on the verge of a gang rape.

The blocked, aging protagonist of "The Secret Life of the Dying", called "the famous American writer", wanders in a reverie as she accompanies a youthful fan who resembles a lost love in and out of various student haunts in London. Sometimes she converses with her long-dead muse, who stops by her table to tell her "I'm sorry my ways hurt you. I loved you the best way I could...I wasn't capable of giving more because I didn't possess it." She doesn't converse with her fan, but merely receives his adulation: "Kind lady, your words have deeply inspired my existence and today to finally meet you...I am a lucky, lucky man. I must go home and write a sonnet to you." Perhaps writers fantasize about such adulation, but do their readers ever truly provide it? Is Rossi trying to imagine herself some thirty years in the future?

And then there is the title novella, "Red Wine Moan". It chronicles the one-sided obsession of the narrator, Iris, a writer in her late 30s, with Jack, a "wild teenage art boy living in the Ninth Ward on Desire Street." As much a portrait of hipster life in New Orleans as it is of the relationship, the novella is broken up into numbered sections, some as short as a single line of "7": "There ain't no joy like a Ninth Ward Boy -- barroom graffiti". Iris's literary inspiration is Charles Bukowski, and Jack her "whore muse". Appropriately, the novella contains a ton of drinking, some drug use and a lot of kinky sex. The lovers drink bottle after bottle of cheap red wine and wander around New Orleans in a love/alcohol haze. "What an odd couple we made, but that was what made it legendary. We'd walk arm in arm down Decatur Street, and the gutter punk angels threw blessings at us as we passed by, as if we were luminous beings. We were on fire." Iris is finishing her novel, Monsters of Love. It's never clear what Jack is up to; he's a charming drifter, a beautiful lost soul in a city full of them. The novella jumps around from Iris and Jack's incandescent encounters to Iris's stormy upbringing (her father was a womanizer who attempted suicide several times before he succeeded, her mother abusive, angry, frustrated), attempting to link Iris's current behavior to her rough past.

Jack interrupts the idyll by behaving badly (chatting up other women, acting distant and cruel) and then leaves. Iris is devastated -- so devastated that she picks up several other handsome young hipster boys, mostly teenagers, in a series of alcohol-fueled sexual encounters. Iris's book is published and she goes to Europe for a book tour, where she beds a poet in Barcelona and concludes, "The truth is locked deep inside of me: I'm lonely for Jack even in the arms of a stunningly beautiful boy." The day she returns from Europe, Jack returns, but leaves after one night. It becomes apparent that the affair is over when Jack turns up at a party with his new paramour, "a doe-eyed girl with chartreuse hair". Drunk on homemade absinthe, Iris has a dark night of the soul, tears up her apartment a bit, smashes a bottle and considers the broken end of it: "I had only me now, and I could die alone tonight if I wanted to. It was up to me. I crumpled to the floor of the balcony and passed out."

It takes nearly 100 pages to spin out this slim story. Not that love isn't the fuel of great writing, but there's something belabored in this telling. It spends a lot of ink on Jack's physical beauty and the fact that Iris considers him her muse, without providing enough interaction (aside from sex) to flesh out the love story. Why is Iris blindsided by Jack's desertion? Rather than a chronicle of a great love, it's more a chronicle of alcohol abuse and self-pity.

So much for in vino veritas. You rather wish that Iris would sober up and play with somebody her own age. I hope that Rossi turns her considerable talents to more substantial fare; she's a clever writer with a supple grasp of language and a fantastic knack for description. I'd very much like to see what she produces next.

-- Cristen Brooks has edited numerous books for publication, and currently works for print management software provider PrintCafe when not practicing her karate.

San Francisco-based Manic D Press publishes critically acclaimed titles of cutting edge fiction, poetry, and comix, by emerging and established writers and artists. Authors have included Justin Chin, Jeffrey McDaniel and Marci Blackman, who won the ALA 2000 GLBT Book Award for Fiction for her Manic D novel Po Man's Child.