This Is This

…So crooned Louis Armstrong and lamented Pete Fountain through a clarinet with a tone as sweet and sad as a losing army coming home in smaller numbers.

Reading Confederacy Of Dunces yesterday stirred me up considerable. I could picture the streets, hear the accents and smell the food.

New Orleanians love their city. It’s kind of like people from Liverpool, where Scousers bang on about their city. It’s almost embarrassing, but it’s very endearing. “Ok, dude. Jesus.”

Nothing is shocking and maybe that’s a combination of heat and humour. My friend Mike, after an unusual absence of two weeks, appeared back in my circle of friends with the news that his dad had died.

“Jesus, Mike,” I said, “I’m sorry. What happened?”

“He got stung man,” he said, like he knew I’d be surprised. “Stung by a bee.”

“A bee?! Was he allergic or something?”

“No, he got stung plenty. I don’t know what happened.”

“Fuck. That’s fucked up. A bee shouldn’t do that. Just one bee?”

“Yep. But it was big. This bee was hiding under our house.”

His eyes twinkled as we both silently conjured up the black comedy of a huge insect lurking in wait under the porch to orphan him.

It’s hard to judge people there. Our percussionist in the band was a really nice guy, and one day up at a house in the north part of town by Lake Pontchartrain we got a warning from with a guy with a megaphone hanging outside his car, barking at us to get inside our houses. A couple of minutes later a sprayer truck lumbered past, dispersing a mist across the street the way it did every couple of weeks.

“Well, we better get in while they are spraying.”

“Mosquito control?”

“Yep. We got mosquitoes up here be goin’ down to the French Quarter, biting all the niggers and faggots and coming back up here giving us all that Aids shit.”

And until then he seemed like a nice guy.

I have been to New Orleans a couple of times to visit before I stayed there for three months, but that must have been fifteen years ago. It was a holiday romance I guess which was never left to run its course. I was working for a radio station between summer and autumn terms of university and it offered a contrast and escape from Manchester.

It was a turbulent time and emotional time personally. I was in a working (and paying) band, I rode out Hurricane Andrew, I had just broken up with a girl I’d been with for seven years and looking back I may have transferred my rebounding affections to the place in the bourbon glow and the way the light hit the city off the river.

I know what it means to miss New Orleans.

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