I lurched sedately over to a table, humming ‘The Great Filling Station Hold-up’ quietly and inaccurately, and reminding myself that it was only about twenty after nine. If I wanted to meet up with the others without being the evening’s comedy drunk, I needed to slow down. I needed to have not had about the last four drinks, in fact, but that would have involved tangling with the space-time continuum to a degree I felt unequal to. Slowing down would have to suffice.
It was as I was just starting the next drink that the evening took an interesting turn. Someone said something to me at fairly close range, and when I looked up to have another stab at comprehending it, I saw that it was the woman from the bar.
“Wuh?” I said, in the debonair way that I have. She was standing behind the table’s other chair, and looked diffident but not very. The main thing she looked was good-natured, in a wary and toughened way. Her hair was fairly blonde and she was dressed in a pale blue dress and a dark blue denim jacket.
“I said – is that chair free?”
I considered my standard response, when I’m trying to be amusing, of asking in a soulful voice if any of us are truly free. I didn’t feel up to it. I wasn’t quite drunk enough, and I knew in my heart of hearts that it simply wasn’t funny. Also, I was nervous. Women don’t come up to me in bars and request the pleasure of sitting at my table. It’s not something I’d had much practice with. In the end I settled for straightforwardness.
“Yes,” I said. “And you may feel absolutely free to use it.”
The woman smiled, sat down, and started talking. Her name, I discovered rapidly, was Rita-May. She’d lived in New Orleans for fifteen years, after moving there from some godforsaken hole called Houma, out in the Louisiana sticks. She worked in one of the stores further down Decatur near the Square, selling Cajun spice sets and cookbooks to tourists, which was a reasonable job and paid okay but wasn’t very exciting. She had been married once and it had ended four years ago, amidst general apathy. She had no children, and considered it no great loss.
This information was laid out with remarkable economy and a satisfying lack of topic drift or extraneous detail. I then sat affably drinking my drink while she efficiently elicited a smaller quantity of similar information from me. I was thirty-two, she discovered, and unmarried. I owned a very small software company in London, England, and lived with a dozy cat named Spike. I was enjoying New Orleans’s fine cuisine but had as yet no strong views on particular venues – with the exception of the muffelettas in the French Bar, which I liked inordinately, and the po-boys at Mama Sam’s, which I thought were overrated.
After an hour and three more Margaritas our knees were resting companionably against each other, and by eleven-thirty my arm was laid across the back of her chair and she was settled comfortably against it. Maybe the fact that all the dull crap had been got out of the way so quickly was what made her easy to spend time with. Either way. I was having fun.
Rita-May seemed unperturbed by the vehemence of my feelings about vampires, and pleasingly willing to consider the possibility that it was all a load of toss. I was about to raise my hand to get more drinks when I noticed that the bar staff had all gone home, leaving a hand-written sign on the bar which said LOOK, WILL YOU TWO JUST FUCK OFF.
They hadn’t really, but the well had obviously run dry. For a few moments I bent my not inconsiderable intelligence towards solving this problem, but all that came back was a row of question marks. Then suddenly I found myself out on the street, with no recollection of having even stood up. Rita-May’s arm was wrapped around my back, and she was dragging me down Decatur towards the Square.
“It’s this way,” she said, giggling, and I asked her what the hell I had agreed to. It transpired that we were going to precisely the bar on Bourbon where I’d been due to meet people an hour and a half ago. I mused excitedly on this coincidence, until Rita-May got me to understand that we were going there because I’d suggested it.
“Want to buy some drugs?” Rita-May asked, and I turned to peer at her.
“I don’t know,” she said. “What have you got?” This confused me until I realized that a third party had asked the original question, and was indeed still standing in front of us. A thin black guy with elsewhere eyes.
“Dope, grass, coke, horse . . .” the man reeled off, in a bored monotone. As Rita-May negotiated for a bag of spliffs I tried to see where he was hiding the horse, until I realized I was being a moron. I turned away and opened my mouth and eyes wide to stretch my face. I sensed I was in a bit of a state, and that the night was as yet young.
It was only as we were lighting one of the joints five minutes later that it occurred to me to be nervous about meeting a gentleman who was a heroin dealer. Luckily he’d gone by then, and my attention span was insufficient to let me worry about it for long. Rita-May seemed very relaxed about the whole deal, and as she was a local presumably it was okay.
We hung a right at Jackson Square and walked across towards Bourbon, sucking on the joint and slowly carooming from one side of the sidewalk to the other. Rita-May’s arm was still around my back, and one of mine was over her shoulders. It occurred to me that sooner or later I was going to have to ask myself what the hell I thought I was doing, but I didn’t feel up to it just yet.
I wasn’t really prepared for the idea that people from the convention would still be at the bar when we eventually arrived. By then it felt as if we had been walking for at least ten days, though not in any bad way. The joint had hit us both pretty hard, and my head felt as if it had been lovingly crafted out of warm brown smoke. Bourbon Street was still at full pitch, and we slowly made our way down it, weaving between half-dressed male couples, lean local blacks and pastel-clad pear-shaped tourists from Des Moines. A stringy blonde popped up from nowhere at one point, waggling a rose in my face and asking “Is she ready?” in a keening, nobody’s-home kind of voice. I was still juggling responses to this when I noticed that Rita-May had bought the rose herself. She broke off all but the first four inches of stem in a businesslike way, and stuck the flower behind her ear.
Fair enough, I thought, admiring this behaviour in a way that I found difficult to define.
I couldn’t actually remember, now we were in the area, whether it was the Absinthe Bar we were looking for, the Old Absinthe Bar, or the Original Old Absinthe Bar. I hope you can understand my confusion. In the end we made the decision on the basis of the bar from which the most acceptable music was pounding, and lurched into the sweaty gloom. Most of the crowd inside applauded immediately, but I suspect this was for the blues band rather than for us. I was very thirsty by then, partly because someone appeared to have put enough blotting paper in my mouth to leech all the moisture out of it, and I felt incapable of doing or saying anything until I was less arid. Luckily Rita-May sensed this, and immediately cut through the crowd to the bar.
I stood and waited patiently for her return, inclining slightly and variably from the vertical plane like some advanced form of children’s top. “Ah ha,” I was saying to myself. “Ah ha.” I have no idea why.
When someone shouted my name, I experienced little more than a vague feeling of well-being. “They know me here,” I muttered, nodding proudly to myself. Then I saw that Dave Trindle was standing on the other side of the room and waving his arm at me, a grin of outstanding stupidity on his face. My first thought was that he should sit down before someone in the band shot him. My second was a hope that he would continue standing, for the same reason. He was part, I saw, of a motley collection of second-rate shareware authors ranged around a table in the corner, a veritable rogues’ gallery of dweebs and losers. My heart sank, with all hands, two cats and a mint copy of the Gutenberg Bible on deck.
“Are they the people?”
On hearing Rita-May’s voice I turned thankfully, immediately feeling much better. She was standing close behind, a large drink in each hand and an affectionate half-smile on her face. I realized suddenly that I found her very attractive, and that
she was nice, too. I looked at her for a moment longer, and then leant forward to kiss her softly on the cheek, just to the side of the mouth.
She smiled, pleased, and we came together for another kiss, again not quite on the mouth. I experienced a moment of peace, and then suddenly I was very drunk again.
“Yes and no,” I said. “They’re from the convention. But they’re not the people I wanted to see.”
“They’re still waving at you.”
“Christ.”
“Come on. It’ll be fun.”
I found it hard to share her optimism, but followed Rita-May through the throng.
It turned out that the people I’d arranged to meet up with had been there, but I was told that they had left in the face of my continued failure to arrive. I judged it more likely that they’d gone because of the extraordinary collection of berks they had accidentally acquired on the way to the bar, but refrained from saying so.
The conventioneers were drunk, in a we’ve-had-two-beers-and-hey-aren’t-we-bohemian sort of way, which I personally find offensive. Quite early on I realized that the only way of escaping the encounter with my sanity intact was pretending that they weren’t there and talking to Rita-May instead. This wasn’t allowed, apparently. I kept being asked my opinion on things so toe-curlingly dull that I can’t bring myself to even remember them, and endured fifteen minutes of Davey wank-face telling me about some GUI junk he was developing. Luckily Rita-May entered the spirit of the event, and we managed to keep passing each other messages on how dreadful a time we were having. With that and a regular supply of drinks, we coped.
After about an hour we hit upon a new form of diversion, and while apparently listening avidly to the row of life-ectomy survivors in front of us, started – tentatively at first, then more deliciously – to stroke each other’s hands under the table. The conventioneers were now all well over the limit, some of them having had as many as four beers, and were chattering nineteen to the dozen. So engrossed were they that after a while I felt able to turn my head towards Rita-May, look in her eyes, and say something.
“I like you.”
I hadn’t planned it that way. I’d intended something much more grown-up and crass. But as it came out I realized that it was true and that it communicated what I wanted to say with remarkable economy.
She smiled, skin dimpling at the corners of her mouth, wisps of her hair backlit into golden. “I like you too,” she said, and squeezed my hand.
Wow, I thought foggily. How weird. You think you’ve got the measure of life, and then it throws you what I believe is known as a “curve-ball”. It just went to show. “It just goes to show,” I said, aloud. She probably didn’t understand, but smiled again anyway.
The next thing that I noticed was that I was standing with my back against a wall, and that there wasn’t any ground beneath my feet. Then that it was cold. Then that it was quiet.
“Yo, he’s alive,” someone said, and the world started to organize itself. I was lying on the floor of the bar, and my face was wet.
I tried to sit upright, but couldn’t. The owner of the voice, a cheery black man who had served me earlier, grabbed my shoulder and helped. It was him, I discovered, who’d thrown water over me. About a gallon. It hadn’t worked, so he’d checked my pulse to make sure I wasn’t dead, and then just cleared up around me. Apart from him and a depressed-looking guy with a mop, the bar was completely empty.
“Where’s Rita?” I asked, eventually. I had to repeat the question in order to make it audible.
The man grinned down at me. “Now I wouldn’t know that, would I?” he said. “Most particularly ‘cos I don’t know who Rita is.”
‘What about the others?’ I managed. The barman gestured eloquently around the empty bar. As my eyes followed his hand, I saw the clock. It was a little after five a.m.
I stood up, shakily thanked him for his good offices on my behalf, and walked very slowly out into the street.
I don’t remember getting back to the hotel, but I guess I must have done. That, at any rate, was where I found myself at ten the next morning, after a few hours of molten sleep. As I stood pasty-faced and stricken under the harsh light of the bathroom, I waited in horror while wave after wave of The Fear washed over me. I’d passed out. Obviously. Though uncommon with me, it’s not unknown. The conventioneers, ratfinks that they were, had pissed off and left me there, doubtless sniggering into their beards. Fair enough. I’d have done the same for them.
But what had happened to Rita-May?
While I endured an appalling ten minutes on the toilet, a soothing fifteen minutes under the shower, and a despairing, tearful battle with my trousers, I tried to work this out. On the one hand, I couldn’t blame her for abandoning an unconscious tourist. But when I thought back to before the point where blackness and The Fear took over, I thought we’d been getting on very well. She didn’t seem the type to abandon anyone.
When I was more or less dressed I hauled myself onto the bed and sat on the edge. I needed coffee, and needed it very urgently. I also had to smoke about seventy cigarettes, but seemed to have lost my packet. The way forward was clear. I had to leave the hotel room and sort these things out. But for that I needed shoes.
So where were they?
They weren’t on the floor, or in the bathroom. They weren’t out on the balcony, where the light hurt my eyes so badly that I retreated back into the gloom with a yelp. I shuffled around the room again, even getting down onto my hands and knees to look under the bed. They weren’t there. They weren’t even in the bed.
They were entirely absent, which was a disaster. I hate shoes, because they’re boring, and consequently I own very few pairs. Apart from some elderly flip-flops which were left in the suitcase from a previous trip, the ones I’d been wearing were the only pair I had with me. I made another exhausting search, conducting as much of it as possible without leaving the bed, with no success. Instead of just getting to a café and sorting out my immediate needs, I was going to have to put on the flip-flops and go find a fucking shoe store. Once there I would have to spend money which I’d rather commit to American-priced CDs and good food on a pair of fucking shoes. As a punishment from God for drunkenness this felt a bit harsh, and for a few minutes the walls of the hotel room rang with rasped profanities.
Eventually I hauled myself over to the suitcase and bad-temperedly dug through the archaeological layers of socks and shirts until I found something shoe-shaped. The flip-flop was, of course, right at the bottom of the case. I tugged irritably at it, unmindful of the damage I was doing to my carefully stacked shorts and ties. Up came two pairs of trousers I hadn’t worn yet-one of which I’d forgotten I’d brought – along with a shirt, and then finally I had the flip-flop in my hand.
Except it wasn’t a flip-flop. It was one of my shoes.
Luckily I was standing near the end of the bed, because my legs gave way. I sat down suddenly, staring at the shoe in my hand. It wasn’t hard to recognise. It was a black lace-up, in reasonably good condition but wearing on the outside of the heel. As I turned it over slowly in my hands like some holy relic, I realized that it even smelled slightly of Margaritas. Salt had dried on the toe, where I’d spilt a mouthful laughing at something Rita-May had said in Jimmy Buffet’s.
Still holding it in one hand, I reached tentatively into the bowels of my suitcase, rootling through the lower layers until I found the other one. It was underneath the towel I’d packed right at the bottom, on the reasoning that I was unlikely to need it because all hotels had towels. I pulled the shoe out, and stared at it.
Without a doubt, it was the other shoe. There was something inside. I carefully pulled it out, aware of little more than a rushing sound in my ears.
It was a red rose, attached to about four inches of stem.
The first thing that strikes you about the Café du Monde is that it isn’t quite what you’re expecting. It isn’t nestled right in the heart of the old town, on Royal or Dauphin, but squats
on Decatur opposite the Square. And it isn’t some dinky little café, but a large awning-covered space where rows of tables are intermittently served by waiters of spectacular moroseness. On subsequent visits, however, you come to realize that the café au lait really is good and that the beignets are the best in New Orleans; that the café is about as bijou as it can be given that it’s open twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year; and that anyone wandering through New Orleans is going to pass the Decatur corner of Jackson Square at some point, so it is actually pretty central.
Midday found me sitting at one of the tables at the edge, so I wasn’t surrounded by other people and had a good view of the street. I was on my second coffee and third orange juice. My ashtray had been emptied twice already, and I had an order of beignet inside me. The only reason I hadn’t had more was that I was saving myself for a muffeletta. I’d tell you what they are but this isn’t a travel guide. Go and find out for yourself.
And, of course, I was wearing my shoes. I’d sat in the hotel for another ten minutes, until I’d completely stopped shaking. Then I’d shuffled straight to Café du Monde. I had a book with me, but I wasn’t reading it. I was watching people as they passed, and trying to get my head in order. I couldn’t remember what had happened, so the best I could do was try to find an explanation that worked, and stick with it. Unfortunately, that explanation was eluding me. I simply couldn’t come up with a good reason for my shoes being in my suitcase, under stuff that I hadn’t disturbed since leaving Roanoke.
About nine months before, at a convention in England, I rather over-indulged an interest in recreational pharmaceuticals in the dissolute company of an old college friend. I woke the next morning to find myself in my hotel bed, but dressed in different clothes to those I’d been wearing the night before. Patient reconstruction led me to believe that I could just about recall getting up in the small hours, showering, getting dressed – and then climbing back into bed. Odd behaviour, to be sure, but there were enough hints and shadows of memory for me to convince myself that was what I had done.
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