After forty years of marriage—to the same woman—I’m thinking of that night back in 1968, just a week or so before we tied ourselves together for the duration, when Mike and Jerry and I closed the Pastime Tavern and decided we needed more carousing. Tallahassee is dead enough at night as it is but, after 2 AM, it resembles nothing so much as a morgue with muted, 24 hour lighting. The hell with this, we decide, and hop in my car to drive west on Route 90 to New Orleans. Since my car is a two-seat Triumph Spitfire, it is fortunate that we have been unintentionally preparing for this crusade in the Pastime for the last five hours. Mike straddles the hump in the middle of the small passenger compartment and I hope that I can shift through the gears without rendering him a functional eunuch.

Before long we are cruising senselessly through the darkness on the two-lane blacktop toward the Big Easy. However far down the road it is, however many hundreds of miles, it is too many for three guys in a two-seater, the engine noise rattling our brains, the wind roaring in the convertible top, the beer high fading with each passing telephone pole. And me, at the wheel, struggling to focus and not kill us all. I’m about to get married, I think to myself, gripping the steering wheel like it is my sole attachment to reality.

Somewhere along the way I hit the wall and realize that—this is as far as I can go—we’ve got to pull over for awhile. Nobody’s arguing with this and Jerry lets Mike out to find some ground on which to sleep. It is pitch black and we’re in the middle of nowhere. We’re all sound asleep in minutes, Jerry and me in the Triumph, Mike somewhere off on the ground to the right of the car. In a couple of hours that seem, when we are jolted awake, like a couple of minutes, just before dawn as the darkness is fading into a dewy gray, a blast from a freight train whistle pierces our consciousness like a blade, especially Mike’s who, it turns out, has been sleeping about four feet from the track. His normal demeanor is loose wired and, with this shock to his system, he is near frenzied to the point of disorientation. He stumbles toward the car with eyes like streaked saucers, his long hair like a mop that has dried and stiffened out into all directions at once.

Several hours later we’re in New Orleans, drinking cheap red wine to wash down the beignets. Mike’s dark brown beard is now sprinkled with confectioner’s sugar and we are taking in the French Quarter, tired, dirty, unkempt pseudo-hippies on an adventure in the place where it all happens. We play some chess at a corner café. We wander down to the river because I have decided that we cannot possibly leave town without having beat our feet on the Mississippi mud. We swill some noodle soup at a Chinese restaurant and then go looking for the cemetery where all the corpses are buried above ground because of the high water table. The streets are narrow and doorway alcoves right at the edge of the sidewalk are gated entries into private homes. Mike gets sick and steps into one of these entry alcoves, puking up his red wine and Chinese noodles, just when the resident attempts to exit his home. Mike politely stops heaving long enough to politely guide the poor man around the mess now spewed into his alcove [“Watch out for the puke, sir.”], then, as the resident scurries away as fast as he can go, Mike finishes what he’d started.

We find the cemetery, where stone tombs, crypts, vaults and ostentatious sepulchers are lined up in grids like stock in a granite warehouse, monuments to a well-heeled but ultimately vain desire of the local gentry to obtain dry and lasting immortality. Some guy and a girl are having sex next to a hard, gray vault, perhaps moved by their proximity to eternity.

By mid-afternoon we find my brown Triumph where we had left it parked on a side street. It is Jerry’s turn to ride the hump on the return trip which, because it is still daylight and we’re broke, sober and hungry, doesn’t take as long as the drive the night before. By dusk we’re pulling into Tallahassee, back to Florida and back to earth. I drop them off at the Pastime Tavern. Okay, I’ve had my little fling, I’m thinking. In a week I’m going to be married. Putting the top down while stopped at a red light, trying to bring myself fully back to normal, it occurs to me that maybe I’d better get a job somewhere.

Comments:

Ah memories. New Orleans used to be my favorite city but it is not very safe anymore on Bourbon street.

comment by troutbend on July 15, 2008 11:46 AM ()

You're absolutely right!

reply by looserobes on July 15, 2008 11:50 AM ()