Day 2

January 1, 2010
9:45 pm

I have yet to really sleep from the New Year’s Eve festivities of the night before. Midafternoon, I’d dropped off my lover and ended up, improbably, at the Golden Lantern bar on Royal Street with David and Aneeta, where we began a search for champagne that has now led us through the dank bars of the Lower Quarter and eventually right back to the Marigny where, 40 hours ago, this same evening was beginning. Time in New Orleans, you see, is not the same as time in other places.

Evidently, if it is New Years’ Day and you are in New Orleans, all you have to do is tell people you’re on a hunt for champagne and champagne will materialize. By now we have accumulated and done away with bottles of it, and a multitude of other friends has joined us, and we’ve eaten our lucky fill of black-eyed peas and cabbage which are also, apparently, free and ubiquitous in New Orleans on New Years’ Day, and 2010 is turning out to be very joyous and prosperous indeed. By the time we reach Mimi's we are actually hungry again and we order tapas and Hoegaardens, and we eat pecan pie out of a bag while we wait for our food to arrive. My friend spent New Years’ Eve falling in love with another friend of mine so we are strategizing as we lick the sticky prefab pie filling off the plastic forks that we are also, inexplicably, carrying around with us, and the night gets darker and deeper and our food still hasn’t arrived but that’s all right, and all is beautiful in the world.

One of the nurses from the hospital arrives and we hug and talk about Prince, and she tells me I look amazing for still basically being out from the night before.

We flirt with the bartender.

A girl from New York City comes over to us and tells us she loves New Orleans. She has had the most magical New Years’ a person could ever experience. “Welcome!” we say. “I think I’m gonna stay here,” she sighs. “How could I possibly go back to New York after this?” We nod, and commiserate. Life is just a little bit tougher in all those other places where magic is harder to come by.

The pie is gone. I’ve switched to Smithwicks, a red ale that is swiftly becoming my new favorite. A nose-ringed guy with a Mohawk gives me a thumbs-up from down the bar.

We admire the bartender’s shirt. “Your food may or may not actually be coming,” he explains. “The cook had a long night last night.”

“That’s cool,” we say.

“If it doesn’t come you won’t have to pay for it.”

We shrug. “Cute hat,” I say.

The nurse from the hospital cozies up to me, bumping up against my shoulder a couple of times. “I hope you come back soon,” she whispers, scratchily, into my neck. “I miss your smile.”

I learn that one of my friends is actually a writer of gay erotica, which she publishes on the internet.

The food comes and we eat it in three bites and it is perfect.

Outside the sky is black and foggy and the moon, once again, is round and orange and down Royal Street the Christmas lights glow like neon, like outer space, like if you kept walking you’d fall right into a tunnel of green and red stars.