Day 22

January 21
9:30 pm

Tonight we have physically gone to Adi’s house to pick him up and take him with us, because if we go another night without spending time with him we will positively die. As we walk in we’re talking about the woman who yelled at us about our parking job the other night, and Anne’s like, “She’s from New York. She’s from Long Island. I can tell.” Anne’s from Long Island; she can spot her people a mile away.

Three young men in military-esque haircuts are standing by the door, and there’s a crowd at the bar. Our summer clothes are coming out: today it was almost 80 degrees, and people are running around in shorts and sandals, and you can tell we all feel a little more normal again, like we’ve just landed on solid ground.

I squeeze into the only empty space by the bar. I keep accidentally bumping against the person beside me, and when I finally look over to excuse myself or at least say hi, I realize it’s none other than the woman we were just talking about, the parking fanatic who may or may not be from Long Island. What are the chances, I think. I lean over to Anne and Adi and give them excited nudgy looks. It’s Her! I mouth.

More people are coming, so we find a table by the window, and Anne comes back with our drinks and soon she and Adi are dissecting the Jersey Shore—not the place, but the television show which, as I am sure you’re aware, has gripped our nation with epic intensity. I don’t own or watch TV, more out of laziness than any sense of moral righteousness, but I’m curious about the things that occupy the hearts and brains of my fellow people, and I’ve found over the years that I’ve been able to gauge the depth of a tv show’s effect on our popular imagination by my own level of familiarity with it. And so tonight, when Adi’s like, “I think Snookie’s supposed to get it on with the Situation in the next episode,” not only do I understand that both Snookie and the Situation are actually people, I’m even able to raise my eyebrows and say “Whoa,” and feel quite up on the times.

I see Joanna in my line of vision. I run over to give her a joyous crushing hug, and then I realize she’s sitting next to Suzanne, who’s just moved back home from Portland, and I hug Suzanne too.
“Both of y’all couldn’t take it when you tried to move away,” Joanna says.
“And we moved to such healthy functional places!” I say.
We talk for a second about how we both moved because we thought we needed to get out of New Orleans for a little while, and we both actually probably did, for at least a few months, but ultimately those times away just served to strengthen our ties to New Orleans even more, and now we both know that this is it: we never have to live anywhere else.
“I have to leave for two years,” Joanna says, and the reason is that she’s basically just been accepted to PA school, so I give her another exuberant hug and we’re off, in a flutter of conversation about gross anatomy lab and the operating room and standardized patients, and I’m so amazed and excited, not only because she’s been working so hard over so many years to be able to get to this place, but because we need people like Joanna in healthcare, who are strong and capable and committed not only to their patients but to building a healthcare system that’s responsible and just.

When I get back to our table, Elizabeth and Rahn have arrived, and then I look over and there’s Anjali sitting next to Adi, and we all start telling each other about our days, and Mardi Gras plans, and costumes, and someone suggests Anne should take up knitting. Anjali tells us this totally heartbreaking story about how, when she was ten, she went to India one summer and hand-knit—with the instruction of her grandmother—these tiny, beautiful coin purses for all her friends. “We were ten,” Anjali says. “It was so not cool.” The friends made fun of the little coin purses and never used them, and Anjali never knit again, and I have so much heart-hurt, hearing that story, that I need to squeeze my chest for a second to keep everything intact. Elizabeth, who’s been teaching special ed art classes lately, tells us that her only rule is that nobody makes fun of anybody’s art. “We open up our hearts when we create,” she says. “If somebody shoots you down in the midst of that process, they’re getting you in that raw tender place you’ve just opened up.”

On the way to the bathroom I spot a man shooting pool who is the exact image of Matthew Broderick. He accidentally nudges me with the cue and I look at him for a second because I’m trying to figure out if maybe he even actually is Matthew Broderick. I mean, he looks Exactly like him. But I think the guy’s thinking I’m giving him one of those Do-You-Mind kind of looks, because he did just hit me with the pool cue, and he’s like, “Oh, gosh, I’m so sorry!” and I’m like, “No, I’m sorry!” and he’s like, “No, I’m sorry!” and this goes on for a few cycles, and by the time I actually do walk away and go to the bathroom, I’m still not sure if it was or wasn’t Matthew Broderick. I mean, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t. Almost totally sure. But on the way back from the bathroom I see something even more exciting, which is a flyer announcing tryouts for, can you believe it, a Mardi Gras dance team. Tomorrow night. I am totally there. Being in a Mardi Gras dance team has been my lifelong ambition since I was about five.

I come back to the table and everybody’s talking about Adi’s crush on a certain lady-about-town. “Do you know her?” he asks me.
“I know her, like, from being in the same world at the same time,” I say. “You know, like, we’ve had a couple of random conversations because our friends knew each other.”
Adi sighs. “She’s stunningly beautiful.”
“I know people who know her,” I tell him.
His face brightens.
“We can make it happen,” I say, because I have utter confidence in my beautiful friends’ abilities to attract more beautiful people into their orbits.

Elizabeth and Rahn are getting up to leave, and Rahn asks me the name of my tattoo artist, and I say, “Jessi, at Aart Accent on Rampart Street,” and everybody gives everybody warm loving hugs, even though they all just met.

Anne and I should go too: our drinks are long-gone and I’ve now had two nights with basically no sleep. But then Adi comes back with a few glasses of PBR, and before I realize it I start taking little sips from one, and then, the night really begins. We dive into a cavernous conversation that segues seamlessly between socially responsible disaster relief and outrageous breakup stories, and telling these stories, tonight, is like opening up our very veins. We argue, sometimes our voices get a bit choked up, we fall off our chairs with laughter, we shake our heads in disbelief and disillusion. And even though I am yawning as the hours roll by, I stay because these are stories that we need to tell. We watch the bar empty out, and the PBRs keep arriving and disappearing, and the night gets thin and old, and we keep telling stories about the things that have broken us, and the stories begin, word by word, to make us whole again.