Day 14

January 13
9 pm

When we walk in it’s already a little crowded. For maybe the first night ever, the adorable bartender's nowhere to be found, but the enthusiastic one from the other day is here, holding court with a group of precious rugged-looking boys who are wearing fleece and drinking shots of Jameson in the corner.

“I think we came here last time,” says Rosalinda, who is in town from Arizona and whose last and only visit to New Orleans was in the dark crumbling days of November 2005. We probably did come here last time. This bar was a lifeline for so many of us back then.

“It’s warm!” the enthusiastic bartender greets us as we scoop up the last three barstools.
“Hm,” I say. “I wouldn’t necessarily say Warm. It’s better than before, but--”
“You’ll see.” He nods knowingly. “You’ll see. It’s warm in here tonight.”

Haiti’s on our minds this evening. All day long Anne was keeping it together, and then the last patient of the day was from Port-Au-Prince, no news from family or home, and just hearing her tell the story I feel my heart move into the gray shocked zombie territory it occupied for so long after Katrina, and once more I feel, in a physical part of my soul, how as New Orleanians we have been marked indelibly by our experience of deep tragedy, how this is a part of our identities we can’t change or choose. For the rest of our lives it will continue to shape us and we will be bound up, whether we want to be or not, with all people who have suffered collective life-altering devastation; this is just another part of our lives, like work or family, like our daily joys and sorrows.

Maybe it’s because of Haiti, or maybe it’s because New Orleans really has done a good bit of resurrecting since the last time Rosalinda was here, but soon we’re telling Katrina stories and Anne’s talking about the time she and Marianne were in Lafitte’s and a cop, on horseback, came in one door, sauntered around the bar a little bit—still on horseback-- and went out the other door, like everything was normal, like cops ride horses into bars every day. “I didn’t even think about it until days later, how weird that was,” Anne says, and we sigh the deep long sighs of veterans. Oh, that time. Everything so unearthly, we didn’t know what normal was.

Justin zips in behind us and keeps on walking, but we recognize him from the profile and the hat he’s been wearing constantly for the past week, and we wave him over. “What time is it?’ he asks. “I’m supposed to meet Renee and Nicky here.” His eyes dart around the bar. We say we haven’t seen them, and after a bit of cajoling we get Justin to be still for a bit, to squeeze into our little corner of the world and chill for a while.

People and smoke and noises are swirling around us: women with knee-high boots tucked into skinny jeans; the energetic punkish music bouncing out of the speakers. A cute blond girl in an amazing dress is reading a book on the stool next to Anne, and I feel a surge of friendship. “Whatcha reading!” the enthusiastic bartender says. I lean in closer because I want to know too, but I can’t hear what she says.

Renee and Nicky come in and give us warm fluffy hugs, and then Noah arrives, and our little circle in the middle of the room feels like an anchor. Renee tells us about her first day of grad school, which evidently consisted of watching a DVD of Eyes on the Prize, and then Justin’s talking about the amazingly precocious ten-year-old child of one of our friends, who on the drive home from swimming recently, declared: “We need to stop! We need to stop now! I’m tired, I’m hungry, I’m cold, and I need to un-suction-cup my swimsuit from my ass!”

The enthusiastic bartender’s right, I realize. I take off my sweater and then I’m wearing just a tank top, for the first time all winter.

Across the bar the Mohawk guy’s grinning at me and I kind of smile back shyly and then look away. He’s wearing the green shirt again; it still looks a little stiff and shiny, like he’s breaking it in.

I move to the bathroom through the thick swirl of people, and on the way back I run into Maura from the hospital, and we give each other bright eyed hugs, and then I realize she’s sitting next to someone I met at a party a few days ago.
“Y’all know each other?” I ask.
“We’re roommates,” they giggle.
This is life in New Orleans: you start to introduce people to each other, and then you realize they’re, like, cousins.

I settle back into my barstool, surrounded by this crush of people I’m so happy to see, next to Anne and Rosalinda, deep friends of my heart, and Rosalinda and I pick up where we left off, that same conversation we've been having since nine years ago when we first met; we start back in mid-sentence, like no time, really, has gone by.