Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans?

I do.

It’s been mighty quiet at Rarebit Fiend Headquarters, but that’s mostly because I’ve been busy wrapping up the semester and plunging straight into teaching a summer creative writing course while trying to write one novel and revise another! But I haven’t forgotten you, dear reader. Here’s a piece that I started working on toward the end of April that got away from me for the aforementioned reasons.

Not long ago I took one train down to Union Station in Chicago to catch another—the fabled City of New Orleans. Twenty hours later we were flying alongside the south shore of Lake Pontchartrain, hurtling toward the New Orleans Poetry Festival and a re-encounter with my past. When I got out of the train the sultry air took me in its grip, and I was overwhelmed with what I took for nostalgia. Only upon leaving (by air) three days later did I realize that something more meaningful and healing had taken place: an amputated part of myself was whole again.

In the summer of 1993, having graduated from college, my vague expectation was to join the majority of my classmates, many of whom were scions of New York media types, and move to New York City where I would try to become a writer. Instead, my then-girlfriend persuaded me to join her in New Orleans, where she would be studying law at Tulane. “You can always move to New York later,” the T-G told me, “but this is your only chance to live in New Orleans.” Persuaded by this entirely specious logic, I followed her down there and spent the next three years writing a novel (unsuccessfully), applying to MFA programs in fiction (unsuccessfully), working shit jobs for bad restaurants and morally dubious law firms (all too successfully), and breaking up and getting back together again with the T-G. In the summer of 1996 she graduated, and since we were in one of our back-together phases and we both romanticized the West, we got into her VW and drove to Helena, Montana, where we broke up again and I began the next phase of my not-quite-adult life.

Easily summarized. But the experience behind that summary got trapped in amber, and in certain oft-repeated anecdotes, and it was only when I stepped out of the train into the sultry air of New Orleans that I began to reconnect with who I was in those days, and what the city meant to me, and what it still means.

On Esplanade Avenue.

The day after my arrival was dreamlike as I wandered the city, searching for the places I had lived, recovering fragments of the past. New Orleans is a feast for the senses, unlike any other American city I know, transcendent and decayed, spiritual and carnal in a manner that reminds me of certain Western writers’ responses to India (thinking especially of Geoff Dyer’s novel Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi and the marvelous Bombay chapter of Patrick O’Brian’s H.M.S. Surprise). I found the first place easily enough, on Esplanade Avenue on the edge of the French Quarter: a so-called “garden studio” under the yellow house pictured above, down the alley, just before you hit the depraved gravel of the parking lot. In any other city I would have been in the basement, but New Orleans is below sea level and doesn’t do basements. That didn’t stop the place from being dim and dingy, with a grungy checkerboard linoleum floor and a red light bulb like they used to have in photographers’ darkrooms to illuminate the tiny space in which bedroom and kitchen and living room were all the same room. I remember the furnishings: a futon that convinced neither as a couch nor as a bed, a barber’s chair (where did that come from?) in which I’d watch a 9-inch television which only picked up the public TV station, and the fiberboard desk I’d had in college. There I’d sit, door open to the alley if it wasn’t too hot, and hack away at the novel I was trying to write, swigging occasionally from a bottle of Jim Beam because I thought that’s what writers were supposed to drink. At night, drunks would piss on the (closed) door or leave puddles of vomit for me to pick my way around on my way to one of my many shitty jobs. The phone, a heavy landline model, squatted in the center of the floor, and sometimes I crouched over it talking to the former T-G. One golden afternoon she showed up at my door, and the next thing I knew we had moved in together uptown.

Outside the site of the former Quarter Scene, a 24-hour restaurant where I was a waiter. A very bad waiter.

Leaving Esplanade behind I walked into the Quarter, pausing at the site of the all-night restaurant I used to work at, most often from midnight to 8 AM. The Quarter Scene was owned by a couple of older gay men, Ed and Tommy, who’d sit at a table smoking Benson & Hedges all day and half the night making wry remarks about the hangdog twinks who worked for them. I remember on one occasion taking a stab at scrawling the specials on the blackboard that hung over the main dining room and being taking to task for my illegibility: “None of these young men can write,” Tommy drawled. Around one in the morning they’d disappear upstairs and it would just be me, Steve the salad-prep guy, and the unhappy cook banging fretfully around his mostly idle kitchen. Cops and strippers were the main clientele in the small hours, but 3 to 5 AM was the dead time when the place sat completely empty. The speakers in the ceiling were tuned to a fuzzy AM station that always seemed to be playing Fats Domino. I’d stand in the doorway smoking one of Steve’s cigarettes, watching the drunks reel by and listening to “Blueberry Hill,” waiting for something to happen. Nothing ever did.

From the Quarter I walked to Poyrdras Street in the heart of the CBD (Central Business District), and sat for a while on the steps of the Hancock Whitney Building, the place I passed many a lunch hour while working as a court runner for an evil law firm across the street. I caught the St. Charles Streetcar uptown. It was never an especially practical form of transportation, but I am a tourist at heart and I used to love the way the motor sighed noisily to a stop, sounding very much like a woman murmuring uh-huh uh-huh, after the car had been idling for a while. I got off at Carrollton and wandered up and down Oak and Maple Streets, looking for the house whose second story the T-G and I had occupied for half a year. Houses with second stories are actually kind of rare in New Orleans, if you’re not in the Garden District or some other wealthy neighborhood), but I couldn’t find the place, though I remembered it being kitty-corner to a bar (but of what New Orleans residence is this not true?) We were living there in May 1995, when a deluge of rain that went on for hours flooded the streets and drowned everyone’s cars. I stood on the porch watching folks canoe by, while the people at the bar handed out free drinks as fast as they could pour them. But the house eluded me. I couldn’t remember the address, though I remembered perfectly the large single room we’d shared, with the magnolia tree thrusting its vulgarly scented blossoms against the window, and the little gas fireplace, and all the fights.

In ways I was unable to appreciate at the time, New Orleans saved my life. My mother died on the day of the winter solstice in 1991; eighteen months later, when I followed the T-G to New Orleans, I was nearly rigid with unprocessed grief. In lieu of a personality, I had the naked flame of my ambition to be a writer—my talent for words was the thing Mom had seemed to appreciate about me most, probably because it reminded her of her own, mostly thwarted, talent. The T-G, charismatic and deeply unhappy, dragged me down South to attend to her own thwartedness. Sporadically I broke away. There’s a whole half-written memoir I’ll get back to someday about how I flirted with joining the Marines through the long, hot summer of 1994, when my writing dreams had collapsed and I could imagine no other way to free myself from the T-G, and more to the point from myself. It was an ascetic twist on the sensuality of New Orleans, which called to me to live more completely in my body and my spirit, a call I couldn’t then answer. Returning to the city in 2024, I heard the call clearly as if for the first time.

The last stop on my nostalgia tour was a ferry ride away in Algiers Point, a quiet residential neighborhood across the river from the city proper, which I recommend to any visitor who wants to escape from tourists and see how New Orleanians live. Stalking through the humid afternoon I felt increasingly bewildered and upset, as though my younger self were catching up with me, even as the location of the last place I’d lived proved elusive. What I remembered was bleak: an apartment on the second floor of a yellow house with a balcony that offered a view only of the blank green wall of the levee on one side and the blank brick wall of a warehouse on the other. Strolling pleasant residential streets lined with small, one-story houses in carnival colors, I wondered if I hadn’t somehow hallucinated the place. Were my memories only visualizations of what it had felt like to live in that house, with the raging T-G drawing near the end of her law school career, on the precipice of what must inevitably follow: becoming a lawyer? With me having failed to join the Marines, or to have written a novel, or to be admitted to the Iowa Writers Workshop or any other place that would have me as a writer?

The no-longer yellow house.

Belleville Street: that sounded familiar. I followed it the wrong way, then the right one, and came to the end and the house of my memory. It’s white now, but it does indeed front brick on one side and the high green slope of the levee on the other, with the sluggish Mississippi and the lights of New Orleans proper only visible, maybe from the balcony where I could no longer go. Once the T-G had locked me out while I smoking a cigarette there, and I’d had to shimmy down the drainpipe to get back inside. On the other side of that door was the bed where we’d lain rigid with rage next to each other, and the kitchen where we’d lived for a month on cheap cuts of steak, and the little office where I pored over the wreckage of my novel and wondered if I shouldn’t try writing poems again. In 2024 I saw a young guy wearing glasses sitting on the balcony with a laptop; there I am, I said to myself. He must have wondered what was up with the middle-aged guy taking photo after photo of his undistinguished rented house. Then I climbed the levee and breathed in the rich fermented air of the city, and let go of something. I felt what I had hoped to feel moving to New Orleans thirty years before. I felt free.

One way.

I’d move back in a heartbeat. I know how to do it, now. I’d live in Algiers Point or uptown and go hear jazz on Frenchman Street and while away the afternoons in no-name bars. I’d eat like a king and smoke a cigarette now and then and spend as much time as I could with visual artists and musicians. I’d feel held like a hand in its glove by the fabulous atmosphere of the place, one mind one spirit one body. I’d give in gracefully to aging in a city where liveliness and decay are inseparable. I’d follow every second-line I came across. I’d take the place for granted, like I’ve taken every place, but when visitors came to town I’d look up suddenly and nod and say, Oh yes, it’s a magical place, isn’t it? It always was.