Day 16

January 15
7:46 pm

This is what I want tonight’s entry to look like:
We walk in.
We each down a shot of Jameson.
We leave.

But, always, there’s more to the story.

Tonight starts before we even walk in the door. It’s raining, and neither Anne nor I have brought an umbrella, so I squeeze my car into a minuscule spot close to the door, and as we walk out onto the street I say something like, “I’m pretty far away from the curb, huh?” and Anne shrugs sheepishly but knowingly and says, “Well… yes.” I look back and I really am, like, two feet away from the curb, but my car’s so little that it really isn’t poking out into the street that much, and anyway we’re only planning on coming in, drinking one shot of Jameson, and leaving, so I kind of shrug and walk about one step before a woman on her cell phone by the front door yells out, “Oh my God! That is the worst parking job I have ever seen!”
“Yeah, you’re right,” I say. “It is. But---“
“I mean, it’s terrible!” She’s shaking her head repeatedly, mouth open, hands widespread in a what-am-I-gonna-do-with-you gesture. “Really!” She’s still shaking her head.
“Well, yeah, I mean, it is,” I say, “But---“
“Hang on a minute,” she tells us, then starts speaking into the cell phone again. “Ma. Ma! I’m right here. Jeez. Hold on, Ma, these girls just totally messed up the parking. Oh, man.”
“Aw, you’re talking to your mom?” I ask, walking past her toward the door. “That’s awesome. Tell her hi.”
“Ma, they say hi. Oh, whoa. Whoa.” We can still hear her shaking her head and exclaiming, even after the door closes and we are dark and dry, like the bar inside.
“She’s from the North,” Anne says.

There are two empty barstools between the Mohawk guy and a lonely-looking blond dude with a very impressive mustache. After we slide in, the Mohawk guy moves over a space.

Anne and I are both fighting colds and I am convinced that Irish whiskey is exactly what we need. It’s kind of a big occasion, because Anne has never had whiskey before. We ask for two shots of Jameson and the adorable bartender says, “Are you committed to Jameson? May I suggest Tullamore Dew? It’s smoother.” That sounds fine, we say, and the three of us drink together like pals. Next to me, the blond dude is fingering the ends of his mustache.

Anne and I are telling salacious stories of love affairs old and new. We are not talking about Haiti, or post-Katrina New Orleans, or at least we are able to avoid these topics for significant stretches of time, and I am grateful. People in New Orleans are talking a lot about both Katrina and Haiti these days. We’re connected. Our old wounds aren’t as scarred up as we might think. Still and all, as the grandmothers say, I’m happy for gossip and drink, the light feathery clothes of strangers.

Behind us, the Mohawk guy is watching Spiderman on the tv above the door. Eventually he gets up and moves to sit at a table of animated, glittery people. Their conversation sparkles around them, like flecks of silver. I’m totally going to say hi to him tomorrow, I think.

We sip our whiskey slowly. We let the night stretch out. I notice the blond man beside me. If I had a mustache, I think, I’d probably play with it a lot too.
"It's a lot," Anne says, motioning to her glass.
I can see that. "Is it all right?" I ask.
Anne says, "Oh, it's amazing!" which is one of the gazillion reasons I love her so much.

We rib the adorable bartender about his jazzy fashion last night. “Jazzy fashion?” he asks. “What do you mean?”
“That belt buckle,” I say. “Man! It was like a disco ball.”
He grins impishly and pulls up the edges of his t-shirt and Oh My Gosh, he’s wearing it again! “I wear this, like, almost every day,” he tells us. “You’d just never notice because my shirts are always over it.”

Wow! Who knew this whole time we’d been in the midst of such an impressive shiny accessory? I’m reminded of someone I know—you probably know her too; she gets around—who wears a spangly golden corset under her clothes every single day. To work, the grocery, yoga class; there she is, all the time, in an outrageous bustier, moving in and out amongst the rest of us, no one the wiser. Oh, New Orleans. This is a town where you actually can wear a golden bustier to the grocery store and no one bats an eye, but the amazing thing is that beneath that, there’s the whole legion of the rest of us, bringing sparkly-ness to the world in all these other subtle ways, which you have to be a little more observant to notice.

We don’t need to go straight home anymore. We decide we’ll make a stop a Devin’s birthday party, but first we have to go buy some candy at Walgreens because his latest art project, evidently, involves building a chandelier out of Ring Pops. Which, you know, is amazing.

We tell the adorable bartender we’re leaving and he says, “Okey-doke” (“Okey-doke!” says Anne. “Wow, I didn’t know anybody said that anymore!”), and he blows us a little kiss as we ease out the door, and out on the street in the rain Anne says, “You never look back, but I always do.”