Frenchmen

The bus waits to be full. People trickle out of the manor, their wedding costumes loose from dance and alcohol. My friends, the handful that I knew at the wedding, pile into the bus ahead of me. Hannah has my arm--I weight it so she'll turn. The other five are already inside, faces framed and lit against the dark street like exotic fish. "I'm going to walk. I'll see you there." She doesn't ask if I'm sure, just salutes the adventure and turns. "Where's Benji?" asks RJ as I unmoor, drift down the street. Before I make the corner the sounds of the reception are swallowed by live oaks, and stiff leaved zoysia grass. Just my boots clip-clop over heaving panels of sidewalk, root-shoved and mud-sucked.

The couple had stood central on a blazing porch. White-painted folding chairs in ripples outward with us in them. Andrew's smile kept slipping toward agony he was so happy. Standing in profile holding hands like that they had made a doorway. Looking through it, we who knew them saw their future, our past. I wasn't much thirsty after that, dancing seemed impossible, so I smoked, rolling cigarettes with idle fascination until they started loading the buses for Frenchmen street.

The reception smoked all my tobacco, so I pick up a pouch of Bugler from Discount Zone. Christ gas is cheap in the South. The tobacco is terrible, so stiff and punky I doubt it'll catch in swamp air, but it does. My eyes are starting to hurt, I can't tell what from. Maybe keeping them open so late yesterday, or the smoking. Maybe spores drifting down from the tiny resurrection ferns that curl off street-spanning oak boughs.

There's a brick patio crescent in front of St. Anna's, with a bench in it, and a street person in the bench, sleeping. A low wall opposite his closed eyes catches unsteady light from a gas lamp. It's etched with rows of names. The font is very small; I'm sure they're all dead.

I turn onto the quiet end of Frenchmen, and the peals build as I near--car horns and trombones, cackles, sound in insurrection. Washington Square to my left is snuffed and chained for the night. A man is sitting on a pad of cardboard with his back to the wrought iron fence. He's far enough to sleep but close enough to need the five dollar bill from my arriving wallet. I cross the last street, and am abruptly amid them all. I gimbal my torso and send my feet to the empty paths between people. I slip past drunk-blank Tulane students. I dodge tourists in their trains of three and more, all smiling pride for their pilgrimage to the famous street, hoping to be convinced they are having a good time. The Spotted Cat has its door open, and as I traverse the spill of sound it takes shape out of the din. A few snare hits draw my eyes through the frame: three in profile watching the drummer, seeing the rhythm that drew my eyes to their faces. With the next step I'm out of the pocket of sound and back in the din.

I find Maison, our after party venue, at the far end of Frenchmen. There are a few picnic tables across the sidewalk from the bouncer, decorated with the discard of ebb vice: plastic cocktail cups, beer bottles, cigarette butts, Hannah, and an older man clinging to her attention. Maison is thundering, so Hannah asks loudly with her eyes and face for my help sloughing him. She rolls for me, but is struggling with a full bottle of wine she's nestled between her breasts to smuggle inside. I could take the bottle? No, "It's safe in my packing peanuts!" she delights.

We step across a wobbly pallet laid at the edge of the curb over a puddle of street juice and make for the night art market.

At the art market gate, we lean for cigarettes before pushing into packed booths. The cars ooze by at night, the street a clumsy parade. A school bus inches up the street blasting Big Freediah bounce music. A young man scampers off out and steps in front of the bus. He starts dancing. His movements are tight and exuberant, visibly exertive, but his face is all performance. He keeps his hips rotated out, his knees bent. Whatever his chest does, his groin is available. Arms cock and extend, head twitches. Women with big butts wake up from the crowded sidewalk, whoop, emerge to shake their asses generally and literally. A few plant their hands on the filthy street and raise their backside before bouncing. The dancer pantomime's shock, crosses himself. He takes a few steps farther in front of the bus and returns to his act. The bus creeps forward. People inside it are shadows. Only the top windows are cracked, leaking faces and raised glasses. Spots of red, blue, and green light whirl on the curved ceiling.

The dancer fatigues. I think he's cheered when he climbs back aboard the bus, but it's hard to pick apart the shrieks and whooping. The bus draws past us. Trailing it, a cowboy. His horse is calm. When he tugs softly at the reins, the horse slows and waits, the bus waits, the next dancer dances. Behind them all, a parade cars. I wonder if the people in them ever get out, or if it's only safari, to view the wildlife at safe remove.

The art market is colorful but tedious. I imagined a museum, but I don't have cash so the whole things is instead a grocery errand with mom. Passing the voodoo jewelry booth I'm obstructed by a pair. He's maybe 50, trim and dashing in his leather cafe racer jacket and t-shirt, skinny jeans. His hand rests at the nape of her neck, driving the double-wide pair of them. Of course she's young.

Six ragamuffins sit at typewriters on overturned milk crates. They are dressed in tattered third-hand clothing, and even if they aren't wearing fingerless gloves they are wearing fingerless gloves. It's busy tonight and their machines cough out recycled lines with a machine shop tattoo. The picture is writer-urchin cosplay, the costume persistent enough to become the identity it recalls.

Back at the picnic table, Hannah's struck up a friend, Ake, from New Jersey. He's young and muscular, but his eyes are wide at the spectacle. His shirt and hat are fresh, probably purchased that morning. With an open box of fried chicken in front of him he's waiting for his friends, like us, and making friends, like us. Hannah is locked in, but Ake's drifting with his attention, an animal out of habitat. I see what he sees, an old black man with saggy clothing and jerky joints using a sheathed sword for a cane.

The old man sees me noticing him, he stops walking and shuffles the objects between hands and pockets so that he can draw his sword to--what, draw some change? Indicate his regency? Another has nothing to show--tattered khaki cargo shorts, a tank top, a face smeared from alcohol--but he makes a performance of his full cup, placing it on top of his cap-hung head and sets to dancing like a bug underneath it. I never see if he get's paid. I'm not sure that's what he wanted.

Frenchmen Street has cooled by two when our group starts walking back to our AirBnB. The pain in my eyes has settled into fatigue and I submit to however many more cigarettes will get me to bed where I might wash the night out of them. After a mile, Hannah notices she's lost her filters. They'll be back where she shucked her shoes, she insists, and that couldn't be more than half an hour back. Behind her on the sidewalk, I take an arms-and-legs-wide stance to block a retreat.

Hannah hated her shoes dancing, and decides to leave them for someone else to find. She perches them atop a stout bollard on a corner. The cheap white things are still spotless after their one night out, sparkling sequins under a streetlamp, an offering. It rained all night.

The next morning I pass the bollard again. One soggy shoe remains. The other is ruined in the street.