I remember a December, unseasonably warm-it might have been June. Sometime in the late sixties. Cataclysms everywhere: social, racial, personal. The whole period's kind of a blur. Not a good time for me, as they say.
I'd been thrown out of yet another apartment, spent the night in a covered bus stop having intermittent, elliptical conversations, and at eight, when it opened, was standing outside the K amp;B at St. Charles and Napoleon waiting to buy a pint of bourbon. Someone else was there before me, a neatly dressed businessman type in his Lincoln with the windows up and radio on. He asked for two pint bottles of vodka, and at the register, for just a moment, our eyes met in silent kinship: two men buying liquor at eight in the morning.
I walked along St. Charles sipping from the bottle, watching cars surge forward a half-block, a block, before they fetched up at a dead stop behind traffic. Hydrogen sulfide burned on the air like a fuse. I turned off to the right, lakeside, into stands of massive old houses painted white, light blue and peach. Palms, hibiscus, yucca trees and rubber plants sat in terra-cotta pots on galleries, balconies, patios. Rooms behind windows were sparsely furnished with antique sofas, paintings in ornate frames, chairs and tables adrift on rafts of tapestrylike carpet, chandeliers clear and bright as springwater. An area where a black man had best keep moving.
By ten-thirty or so, bottle long depleted, I was heading back down town towards Louisiana. A young man stood outside Gladstone's hosing off the parking lot and street. In better days I'd stop at the lounge there for a drink whenever I was in the neighborhood. Louis Armstrong used to meet fans and friends at the Gladstone when he came back to town.
Getting close to noon. Lunchtime. Between St. Charles and Claiborne I walked by at least a dozen corner grocery stores, bars and one-room cafes, all of them giving off the meaty, rich smell of frying shrimp that's so much a part of this city. I had no place to go, and I was hungry. But what I wanted most of all was another drink.
There was a period back then when I lived for over a year on something like $400. Rent for a small apartment, a kitchenette and one room, maybe even a tiny bedroom, was $75. I'd pay a month'srent and move in. Wouldn't be able to make the second month, but they wouldn't throw me out till the third-then I'd move on. At first, each new place was a step down the social scale. Later on they seemed more like steps down the evolutionary scale.
I'll never forget the last one. I rang the front bell, and up from the stairwell of the basement where she lived rose a storklike woman, flanked by three dogs, whose skin had peeled away in patches, leaving narrow dark septums around white flesh.
The apartment's floor was warped. Linoleum in spots had fused with the floor's wood; missing boards held in place windows (themselves missing panes) beyond which hung screens orange with rust, screens so brittle that pieces broke away when I touched them. The hot-water heater squatted in a comer behind the couch. Pipes in the wall drummed furiously whenever anyone flushed a toilet or ran water. But it was all I could afford, so I took it. I paid, moved in my two paper bags stuffed with clothes and books, drank a celebratory six-pack and fell asleep. About three that morning I awoke to a languid, warm breeze through which stars shone brightly and a light rain fell, and went out.
And that was it, I never went back there. The next time I awoke it was in a hospital with this guy's face six inches from my own saying, "Hey, bud, you in there?"
Don thought I never knew how bad it got, but I did. Drinkers always know. We've just turned ourselves into experts at not noticing. All those years, almost every night, I'd wake at two or three in the morning, heart pounding, to the call of sirens across the city. A mass of vines swinging in the wind would make a hunchback, human-shaped shadow on the wall, or rain in the trees would sound like the feet of a thousand small living things coming towards me in the dark outside. Naked and sick, I would stand at the window, promising myself the whole thing wasn't going to start up again, thinking I won't, knowing I would.
One of those nights, one of those mornings, at a bar on Magazine-it's been a long siege-a guy next to me is talking. For how long, I can't remember. Can't remember much at this point, just these few moments. But he seems to be in the middle of something.
So I just moved up the street, he says, took that whole crowd with me, mothers, sons and all. I tell you, those were the days. Never will be another time like it. That old horn's bell crinkled up something fierce from all them times I'd bang it 'gainst the floor to get those boys' attention, but then whenever I'd lift it up, point those few first notes at the sky, it was like all of a sudden the whole city was holding its breath, listening. And pretty soon they'd start coming down from uptown, and from over by the river, from all over. Didn't need to put up signs. Those first notes were all it took.
To this day I don't know how much of the encounter I imagined. I had had, by that time, more than a few conversations with people who weren't there. Maybe it was only some local musician telling me about his life and, playing novelist even then, picking at the pieces of his story, arranging and rearranging them, I came up with this guy claiming to be Buddy Bolden. Maybe it was all just a hallucination. Or one of the dreams that ripped me from sleep at three in the morning.
I remember how light gleamed and swam in the bottles behind the bar as I turned to him. I've always wondered, I told him. When they earned you off to the madhouse. People said it was because you threw a baby out of an upstairs window.
You know well as I do, young man, people be likely to say anything. 'Sides, it was one of them skinny close-built houses down on Jackson. Woman in the next house, she saw what was happening and jus' put her arms out and caught that baby.
You miss it? I said.
The music?
I nodded.
Everything done changed now, son. Tell you the truth, most days I miss the barbering more.
Then he was gone.
I walked down Claiborne, past the smell of yet more frying shrimp, to Loyola and then to the library, where I spent the afternoon reading Borges and watching people board and dismount buses outside.
Fleeing reality?
You better believe it. Feeling its hot breath on my neck.
I remember how intense, how alive, things became as the sun sank low. Tables, chairs, corners of shelves, roofs across the street-all trembled, faintly luminous, as though fragments of sunlight, reluctant to let go, still clung to them. Lambent.
But it was not only the visual world that came so strangely into focus. Moments before the library closed, I heard a reference librarian's voice as she spoke into her phone half a building away: "Here's the information you requested, sir. He died in Concord, at 7:05 A.M., May 21st, 1952. That's right, 7:05. You're welcome."
Out, then, into the waiting, impatient street.