New Orleans, Lousiana
Our city's heavy and overheated tonight, like a fat woman sitting on her front porch steps under a Mexican sun, squinting her eyes into little pinto beans. The streets are full of a whole lot of nothing and the the buildings along side of it sit there grinning and open, like an unbuttoned blouse. My feet have got this crazy feeling tonight, jitterbugging all up and down the street swish-swishing. My hands are grabbing. Little steamshovel mouths.
I got my hair swept back like a Nepalese landscape; bleak and dry and gray and there's a bottle in my hand. I know I'm drunk. And I know that if the world doesn't stop spinning, then I'm gonna lose twenty-five bucks worth of steak and bourbon on the street.
As I come stumbling down a French Quarter side street, I hear lonely little saxophone notes coming from a doorway of one of the buildings; blue glass bottle sounds, slumming beside me with their hands in their pockets. The notes burrow through the air and are as sad as dying cowboys on painted horses.
I move towards the sound.
There's this black guy leaning against the wall of one of the buildings with a saxophone drooping out of his mouth like some kind of elephant trunk, garbled with ivory keys. His fingers creep up and down its whalebone ribs and he's got these black sunglasses over his eyes and apple-pie cheeks. He holds one last note, deep and trembling.
And then he looks up at me and smiles all big and bold.
There's a saxophone case at his feet with a couple crumpled dollar bills lying in it like tumbleweed children and he smiles at me so obligingly that I can't help but toss a five dollar bill at his feet. His teeth are unshelled peanuts, carved white against the black of his skin and the night.
“Some sad stuff there,” I say.
He just keeps smiling and then wraps his lips around the saxophone reed and starts playing again, this time a swinging jazz number, wild and irreverent. It makes my toes click and my hips swivel and my fingers ratchet. It turns me into a street organ wound up by cold monkey hands. I empty the bottle into my mouth and let my feet dance me around the black guy with his saxophone. He's got blue corn chip cheeks that inflate and light up and the whole world is pupating right before my eyes, turning into wet, damp little monarch butterflies that are painted up like Indian braves before war on buffalo swept plains.
He ends the song and looks up smiling even bigger than before.
I'm smiling too and I drop another bill into the saxophone case.
“Jeez, man. You're gonna clean me out if you keep playin' like that.”
He lets out a jumble of laughing notes; deep, tar baby notes.
I keep smiling.
“Say, buddy. What do you call yourself?”
He shrugs.
He stands there with his back all curved and his hubcap face all shined up and he holds up a finger as he sticks the sax back in his mouth.
Again, he starts playing. He starts playing a bunch of notes that squeak around like plumber's wrenches and that chip away at the warmth of the air. In fact, he turns all the air so cold with his song that I can almost feel my hands chapping over with ice, turning all hard and frozen. I look over at him funny and rub my arms.
“Hey buddy, you can stop. I'm outta cash.”
He just keeps on playing.
The night becomes even darker and stiff and thin, like a policeman's billy club and I have to stamp my feet to keep from turning into a fudgsicle. I feel like a frozen TV dinner. And the notes are stripping away my clothes. Skinning and raping me.
I try to move away, but my joints don't have no more oil.
They creak.
“Godssakes, stop! Stop you bastard!”
The words are frosty and sharp as they fall out of my mouth. The black guy finishes his song and then he looks up at me. He's not smiling anymore. Pocket-change flakes are falling. Falling right in the middle of the French Quarter. Right in the middle of this city, steaming like engines with broken radiators. It's as if all the stove-belly warmth has been sucked out of the world and all that's left is this black guy, as cold and glass as an old fashioned Coca Cola bottle.
My limbs loosen up as the last note fades out of the air.
I start to back away with goose bumps pickling my skin.
He walks out into the street towards me a little and starts playing the same song he was when I stumbled across him. The song that knocks on the doors of all the black-shawl buildings. Now it's so my joints can move just fine, but are still as wooden as Tinker Toys.
The heat returns to the empty street.
I turn and run and my footsteps plink around feebly, like Kansas rain against rusted tin mailboxes out in the middle of nowheres.
Spooky Negro bastard!
Pretty much jinxed me straight out of ten years of my life.
When I look back over my shoulder, the music's still playing, but there ain't no black guy.
The sky is wet and green and sticky with an early summer storm, mashed into cow cud and I can feel the city breathing hot breath on me as I run away as fast as I can from that crazy blue bayou saxophone.
