Day 21

January 20
8:30 pm


It’s positively tropical out. Sheets of thick warm wind hurl the leaves down the block; our hair curls in the wet air. Our two weeks of winter have ended. To celebrate, I’m wearing not only flip-flops but also a thin skirt and a tank top. Anne’s still got layers on, though: boots, a wool sweater, the puffy insulated jacket that carried her through the worst of the freeze. We look incongruous together. I wonder which of us is the silly one.

For weeks we’ve been trying to get Adi to come with us and it looks like tonight’s the night. He’s hanging with some people down the block who have to be in bed at a ridiculously early hour, but they may stop in for a second on the way home.

We seep inside; the room’s humid. There’s people and music and a clot of voices but it’s all just noise, oozing lazily around us. We slide into barstools in the corner. Gray air crawls in through the window behind us. Even the wall drips.

The enthusiastic bartender bounces over to us and I order a Smithwicks even though it’s the last thing I want, and when I say something like, “Man, I totally didn’t need to drink beer tonight,” the youngish-looking blond boy beside me says, “Didn’t take a lot to twist your arm,” and I respond that it rarely does. The adorable bartender and his adorable girlfriend are on the other side of him, and we all smile and wave exuberantly at each other.

Anne and I are having an intense conversation about healthy lifestyle choices, which neither of us have been making in abundance lately. We feel all right about it. Sometimes you need to prioritize adventure over balance. At the same time, we’re feeling slow, like the air outside. We need vegetables in our systems, and water, and stillness; our skin’s gritted up with smoke and activity and noise. I make a pledge to sleep more this coming week. Anne’s going to restart her daily exercise routine this Friday.

The Mohawk guy's in the middle of the room, socializing joyously with a whole crew of folks. Applause rings out from the back corner, where a crew of men gathers, intently, around the pool table. Anne sees someone videotaping but I don’t. We plan to ask someone what’s going on, to walk over there, but for now we’re rooted to our seats.

A woman I barely know from my high school days is rocking, woozily, on a chair alone at the far end of the bar. We might’ve been friends back in the day if our moms hadn’t pressured us all to spend time together when her family moved to town. But that, for whatever reason, was the adolescent guarantee of social death in our little world, and so our interactions never made it beyond casual hellos at bars, nods across the dank gropy basements of friends’ parties. She disappeared for a little while during our junior year, and when she came back from wherever it was she’d gone, our moms didn’t want us to hang out with her anymore. “That girl’s trouble,” they said. Which of course meant that then she became interesting, and everyone suddenly knew who she was, and for about fifteen seconds she was the star of citywide gossip scandals ranging from the mundane to the supernatural, until the next big Pregnancy/Drugs/Teenage Vandalism event occurred and she was, largely, forgotten.

But I remember her, in the sad fascinated way I remember all the notorious luminaries of my youth, and when I see her tonight, clutching a wineglass and reeling thickly among strangers, I feel a surge of protective responsibility, the way you’d feel if you got called to bail an estranged second-cousin out of jail. I wonder who’s going to make sure she gets home all right.

Somebody will: this is New Orleans, and ultimately we’re all family, and for better or worse, people here rarely suffer tribulations alone. In my greater than thirty years of living in this city, I have never changed a tire or mourned a relative without friends and strangers standing by, passing wrenches and telling stories till they feel like I’ll be all right on my own. In my best days I like to think that this is how we are, that we stand with our people, whether we even really know them or not, until we see they’re on their slow stumbly way again. And so tonight it’s my turn, and I’m keeping an eye on this girl from afar for a second, while we sit back and drink and our words get lost in the ever-deepening crush of noise around us.

A man and a woman set purses and jackets and hats down at the table behind us and raise the window as high as it can go. In burst the gales and the leaves; it feels like we’re on the high seas. They order bloody marys, and the enthusiastic bartender’s like, “Watch out. They’re gonna be spicy.”

Adi sends us a text that begins with the word “Foiled!”
“I don’t even want to know the rest,” I say, and Anne’s like, “Yeah. The people he’s with don’t want to come to Mimis.”
Imagine that.

“Ladies,” the enthusiastic bartender comes up to us with two small glasses. “The gentleman and lady over here are requesting that you perform a shot with us.”
Yay, we say.
No longer is this a one-drink night. My willpower creeps out the window, on the tail of the mist.
What we are about to do, evidently, has been named a yoga-bomb by the adorable bartender and his girlfriend, who, upon downing her whiskey, shoots a leg into the air and, impossibly, wraps it around the adorable bartender’s neck.
Whoa.
More applause. If I were a gossip writer—and aren’t I, really?—they’d totally make my Top 9 Hottest Couples In New Orleans list.

I’m telling Anne about my patient today, who wanted give me a piece of his snot so I could look at it under the microscope. It’s too much for Anne; she hides her face under the puffy jacket. Across the room I see an older man in a button-down shirt place a protective arm around the girl from my past. Somebody’s looking out for her, I think. I hope he's her neighbor or something, and not a serial killer, but they're acting like they know each other, and anyway at some point you have to trust the world.

We’re thinking about leaving when I feel a hand scrunch on my shoulder, and I look back and it’s Annelies, her hair glinting burgundy in the low light. She scoots in next to us and orders a Hoegaarden, first in Belgian, because she is Belgian, and when the enthusiastic bartender’s like, “What?” she goes, “Ho- garden,” and he nods in recognition, and I feel unaccountably sad for a little moment. Annelies and Anne have met once before, in Washington Square Park during the heady and beautiful wedding of some friends, and they’re both saying “Oh, yeah! People keep telling me I should be friends with you!” They’re gushing about each other’s shoes, and each other’s work, and I’m sitting in the middle of it, soaking it all up. So many lovely people in the world; I love it when they find each other.

Then it’s time to go, and as we leave I say, “Cool, I’m so glad I’m gonna sleep tonight,” but as we know it’s not been a night for discipline, and when I’m heading home I will get a text from a friend that says, “Still up? Wanna get a drink?” and it'll only take me about nine seconds before I send one back that says, “Yes.”