Day 4

January 3, 2010
5:48 PM

Aneeta and I have barely made it, rolling in under the crook of evening after a long day of tramping through the Bywater drinking bloody marys and rhapsodizing about sex, writing, and the Saints. Our day began at ten, with the legendary $2.50 bloodys at the Bywater Barbeque (significantly more spectacular than the food, in case you were wondering), where we watched a romance bloom, underneath our very noses, between an apathetic-looking girl with blond dreadlocks, and the magenta-headed barmaid whose dress, scarf, ponytail holder, socks, apron, and sweatshirt all matched her hair. Since then we have eaten more decadent and cholesterol-containing food than someone from Oregon would eat in a week; we have watched the Saints lose, spectacularly but with style; and we have sampled bloody marys in at least 6 Bywater establishments. By the time we walk into Mimis it feels like three in the morning; it probably actually is three in the morning in some round gray corner of my soul.

By now we have accumulated an awestruck 25-year-old Ohioan whose only previous trip to New Orleans consisted of Bourbon Street. “I’m moving here,” the Ohioan declares, after we have set him down upon this latest barstool, after we have fed him spicy green beans laced with vodka while watching the owners and regulars of Bud Rip’s douse a decrepit Christmas tree with lighter fluid and burn it down to the ground, right smack dab in the middle of Burgundy Street, cars and sleds and clattering 2-story bicycles swerving madly out of the way. (“It’s so the Saints have a chance of winning the damn Superbowl,” the bartender, Emily, explained to us. “Ever since we put up that tree in the bar, they been losin’. We gotta get it outta here before the playoffs.” Everyone in the bar nodded in solemn agreement. If there’s anything you don’t need to explain to a New Orleanian, it’s football spirituality.)

Now, daylight is seeping out of Mimis, under the windowsills and into the thin Marigny night, and there are seven of us, maybe, in the bar, and the blue candles huddle against the taps. Maudlin ‘80s music crouches in the corners.

An impossibly tall bespectacled man breezes in carrying an enormous heart-shaped banner for the 6’t’9 parade, which he hangs upon a window.

In walks the Mohawk guy, and I feel a bizarre surge of relieved tenderness.

I am running out of steam but you can tell the Ohioan wants it to be a long night. “Where we going next, guys?” he asks.

But my day, that day that’s been playing on and on, all these hours in that three-in-the-morning corner of my soul, is already turning gray and slipping out. It’s running away, you can see it, under the windows and doorjambs, like all the rest of the gritty air.