The Hurricane
Part One
The twenty-six-year-old salesman for Christ hasn't yet arrived with his eight-foot cross and its digital screen reading "FIND HOPE IN GOD..... IT'S NOT TOO LATE TO BE SAVED.... JESUS IS YOUR FRIEND..." The teenage girls who have come from Metarie, as they do every weekend to scope boys and wreak havoc on the throngs of tourists, are disappointed; Jesus' friend is always the biggest hunk on the scene. He's the only one who doesn't look like he's got either a disease or an out-of-state accent. They will have to content themselves with watching the local freak show -- the hoary ageless men who can be found on Bourbon Street even during the daytime; the legless sax-man with callused stumps; Pete, in his naugahyde-snakeskin jacket, selling nickel bags in front of the major head shop (he never gets caught); the rival gangs of gothic punk kids, with ripped Army greens and kaleidoscopic fragments of dyed hair; and flamboyantly bleach-blonded men, forever young in their nouveau-Berliner fashions, on either end of the strip. The girls are bored. They plan to remain so. They will drink Raspberry Dazzler Daiquiris and wander the street for the rest of the night, apathetic to the local excitement, not bothering to notice the little things that say time is passing. This is Bourbon Street early on a Friday evening.
Look: Just now, the neon signs have begun to dance with phosphorescence. In the dusk, they're mere ghosts, but as the day falls away, their pumping will take on organic proportions. It will be impossible not to notice the messages for "Girls, Girls, Girls" and "Amateur Mud Wrestling" and "Mardi Gras Souvenirs" -- or maybe this five-foot aqua and orange palm tree encircled like a bullseye in a steady beam of hot pink. Risk a step through the fortified wooden doorway. The second floor of this antebellum rowhouse has been knocked out so that it is now one gigantic pastel blue room opening into a concrete courtyard.
A little stage has been erected and from it a five-man cover band serenades the crowd. They are the main attraction tonight, every night. They will play three sets with extended breaks. In uniforms of stonewashed jeans, Mad Dog T-shirts and doo-rags, they look like suburban pirates taking the underaged beginnings of a crowd by storm. Their hoop earrings sparkle in the fluorescent stage lights. Their sweat glistens as if sprayed into all the appropriate curves of their shoulders and cheekbones and pecks. If they weren't on stage their bodies would be exceptionally average -- the alcohol in their bloodstreams has invaded their upper arms and their bellies, sunk like dead weight to their buttocks -- but from the vantage of the dance floor, they inspire belief and mythic awe in the hearts of a handful of fifteen year old virgins.
When the Flash Gordons, as they call themselves, reach "Satisfaction," they can't help but smile as, as if on cue, the first courageous girl of the evening gets her friends to boost her onto the stage to join in on an ad-hoc, out of tune, duet.
In the courtyard the music is distorted by the proximity of windows from two flanking go-go clubs; one blaring the real Rolling Stones, the other beginning its show with its theme song, the name of the club, Cocacabana. A few aluminum tables bearing beer-brand umbrellas are scattered amid the picnic benches and plastic patio chairs that wait for the crowd to need them. In one corner, noticeably taxing the whitewashed and rotting back fence, a young couple has been necking since they arrived. Without them, the courtyard would be empty and the fountain at its heart would gurgle, through its tri-colored spotlights, a much less lonely tune.
At eight, when the two-dollar cover is imposed, this dive becomes more desirable by association. Suddenly, the dance floor is hard for the waitresses to cross. People have begun lining the bar. Coats are piled on chairs. The bartenders have put away the sixteen-ounce cups and pulled out the twelve-ounce throwaways, raising the price from two dollars to three.
Out front, a bouncer pretends there is a protocol of style to who is deemed worthy of passing him, but he dutifully collects two dollars from middle-aged working women and breaks large bills for vacationing ex-jocks and Iowa Baptists on their yearly retreat. Everyone will be allowed to enter, even the two twelve-year-old girls, escaped from their confused and lost parents, if only they could scrape their quarters together and work up the courage to try. The bouncer corrals his line like livestock and admits them with such randomness that there appears to be a logic to his choices. He's perfected the image of prestige and deserves partial credit for the club's success. He points at the Doublemint Twins with hair down to their asses and they squirm to the front of the line, pay, and giggle through. When the wide eyes of a couple, who think they're locals because they found this place without the easy assistance of their pocket-size tour books and have been waiting for fifteen minutes to get in, sink below flabbergasted toward exasperated, the bouncer sighs a demand for respect and nods them in; he ignores their reborn excitement and this excites them more. He is disenchanted with his job; he's been at it long enough that he has become blasé to the illusionary -- it's in the minds of the ill-informed people he attends to -- power it grants him. This isn't Studio 54 or even the Hard Rock Cafe.
Still, when he notices the beautiful girl -- a mulatto goddess in a form-fitting black tank top and a madras print skirt just short enough to be sexy but not so short as to be slutty -- he brushes the crowd apart to let her and her fey friend pass through the velvet rope. He winks away her money and she smiles coyly, pretending that she is surprised.
Inside, she causes a quiet stir. Men unconsciously let their eyes wander away from the women they have been working on and into the courtyard where she drops her coat and whispers something into her friend's ear that makes him cackle with delight. Within minutes, she's made the men restless. She's caused a leery, tight-lipped resentment to fall over the women. The couple necking in the corner has momentarily broken it off so that he can go piss. The mulatto beauty is oblivious to all of it. She reaches through the colorful lights that play in the fountain and cups a small amount of water. Throwing it at her friend, she darts around the courtyard egging him to chase her. Her hair flies behind her like a shiny black halo of silk as she frolics, silly and happy and free.
An almost pretty blond girl makes her way through the crowd and greets them with pecks on the cheeks. She has been waiting for them. They are a trio, a team. The mulatto girl makes the blond feel pretty, she brings false confidence to the insecure wanna-be gay man. Her friends feel desirable because they are with her, and she is kind hearted and never lets on that she knows this.
The boy and the blond sag into patio chairs. They ease quickly into gossip as the beauty disappears to the center of the dance floor.
With bold arches and incredible contortions, she dances; her hair flies like a whirlwind, her fingers like rain, her neck and her breasts, her hips and knees are caught in an unrestrained swirl: a circular sway. Her body moves like she doesn't own it. The music is immaterial, a mere excuse. She releases pure movement, smooth energy transformed by a human wind, the sensual force of life.
After five good minutes of strutting and posturing and arguments over whose turn it is to choose, after a few too many cock-eyed smirks at the few girls in the front row who are satisfactorily blinded by awe, the band jumps into "Play that Funky Music White Boy." They play it straight. They earnestly feel the music. These five white boys know they're masters of funk as they pump out their loud, sloppy cover of the song; its irony is lost on them, proved by their obliviousness.
They are playing the girls in the front row toward the after-hours pick-up horizon, but each has noticed the hottie in the center of the dance floor. Each of them hopes to catch her eye and hold it meaningfully without losing his place in the song; each would happily break his groupie's heart to make a room in his pants for this mulatto beauty. This is what caused the confusion in picking the set ending song. When Jimbo, the bassist, made the right choice and laid into his unsteady funk groove, the rest wished they had thought of it first.
Obviously disliking funk, the dancer shakes her arms out like an athlete after winning the gold and wanders back to the courtyard. She joins her friends in a gleeful banter of inside jokes and incomprehensible silliness. Her laughter haunts the air with its easy lack of inhibition -- it is a laugh no straight man will ever share and all the men know it; each is excluded by the boundaries of his desire.
The band blows off her snub. They weren't that serious anyway; it's better for their image to be sought than to seek. The work it would take to get in her pants is smeared like a tangible smell across her beauty -- she's marked her own territory.
After the song, they hoot and raise their fists in zeal over the triumph of having been able to remember enough of an approximation of the ten songs in their repertoire that the audience was able to sing along and even recognize a couple of them before the lyrics announced their names. They drop their guitars, taking care to appear disaffected without hurting the instruments, and strut down the plywood steps of the stage to the stools they have reserved for themselves. Although they don't get free drinks the band has worked out a half price deal with the management. They have the tab taken out of their pay and keep their resentment silent. They appreciate the management's willingness to do anything for them, and, thankfully, the management pretends to like them when babes linger nearby.
As expected, the girls join them at the bar. They are promptly handed apparently free beer, and they giggle because they have nothing to say. But the band does not relax. They are still nervous that their lack of prestige will be uncovered, that one or more of the girls will be more cosmopolitan than she appears and, during a bathroom exchange of notes, the truth about them will spread to the rest of the harem like an April Fool's joke -- of course, they have no reason to worry, these girls wear their clothes like signifiers, they aren't any more what they want to be than the band is -- equally second-rate, both are fully capable of filling each other's dreams.
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Part Two
As the band settles into its awkward, redundant flirtation, a black boy takes the stage. He performs a rap-age minstrel show between sets. He's from the suburbs, and he's not offended by what he's not conscious of. His bit consists of too many hand whoops and tame jokes meant to rile the audience into participatory abandonment of their distress over the lack of real entertainment. Before long, he has solicited a kick line of sorority girls who, with campy and flirtatious hip sashays, croon along with the Cyndi Lauper song that blares over the speaker system.
The dance floor has become a less organized, much less profitable imitation of the cathouse next door. No one really dances when the band's not playing. People bunch up with their friends and jeer at the stage, or leer at the members of the opposite sex nearest them.
The waitresses have begun to make their rounds carrying racks of test tubes full of neon pink and blue shots of sticky sweet rum drinks. They're called Mad Scientists and they are this bar's cute version of the famous, patented Hurricane, which can be purchased, for less money, down the block. At four bucks a pop, these shots go fast; with this place's clientele, the gimmick is enough to turn a profit. The shots are so small that the gimmick is all they need.
By the time the band returns to the stage, the joint is so crowded that dancing is more a state of mind than an activity; it is limited to small intimations of movement. People begin to mingle more. The room sweats with the tension of fever-pitched libidos chastely and secretly aching each other higher. More than one lascivious young man will spend the rest of the evening simply walking back and forth across the packed room, pretending to find his friends while rubbing up against a cornucopia of pert little breasts, soft full bosoms, bra-muzzled 40-Ds, and mega biker tits, surreptitiously grabbing at the ample supply of ass along the way. More than one woman will lean a little closer, grazing her nipples on these men's backs to enjoy the sensation of their almost accidental union.
The Doublemint Twins have carved out enough room to cling to each other, drawing stares of appreciation and misinterpretation.
The Baptists have given up retreating and grown tipsy; they no longer read the loose morals, written into the faces of everyone else in the club, with such contempt. Now their true feelings of jealousy have begun to surface. Now they timidly dip their feet in the lurid taboo waters of this whirlpool, their faces flush as they simultaneously hope they stumble into a faith-tempting situation, and hope they black out before realizing what they have done.
A middle-aged New Orleans business man has brought his grown son out tonight. The businessman is recently divorced. He wants to prove to his boy that he is still a man, to show off the expansive sex drive his wife could not exorcise from him, although she tried -- oh, she tried. Their fat faces share the same expression of overwhelmed glee as they press their small overstated sense of humor on two leather-clad lesbians who don't know how or why they got here.
The band plays the same set they played before, this time better, more relaxed. They have solicited cloaked promises from today's tarts and no longer worry about trying to impress them. They are now free to whale on their instruments, to give a pure and rollicking show fueled not by fake love for their audience, but by the honest narcissism that inspired them to take up rock 'n' roll in the first place.
A sarcastic pair of computer geeky guys, with plastic glasses and five o'clock shadows, have pasted themselves to the back wall in order to survey this world they refuse to condescend to interact with. They are trying to find a working human model for the chaos theory. They defensively posit sophistic reasons why this room does and does not fit the theory's foggy guidelines. They don't care about the chaos theory; it's only a starting point for their pedantic imaginations to take flight. Soon they have degenerated into social science, and even this they make up as they go along.
"An equilibrium is always upheld through which everybody gets what he needs," says one. "For example, the two tourists fondling each other near the stage? They will have passionate sex in their hotel room tonight. They'll think it's because they got so much excitement out of being on Bourbon Street, but, actually, it'll be because they decided ahead of time that they would find Bourbon Street exciting. They'll live the mythology because, since they decided ahead of time what it would be like, it was going to be like that whether it really was or not -- like a self-fulfilling prophesy."
"That's stupid," says his friend. "I mean, I agree with your theory -- the mythology is the antitheses of the reality -- but it's so obvious that everybody who comes here notices that right away. It's a perfect scam, a big bad joke. Nobody's going to get what they want, they will all get exactly what they don't want. They don't know what the other people in the room will be like, and, knowing this, they will haphazardly decide what what they want is going to look like. The thing is, when what they want comes along, they'll pass it up because it doesn't look like what they decided it would look like. See? It'll be what they want instead of looking like what they want...."
They will go on like this all night. Too shy to venture away from each other, they entertain themselves by imagining mediocre lives for everyone else in the room. They console themselves with the suspicion that, although they are more obvious about it, they are no less happy than anyone else here.
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Part Three
The mulatto beauty returns to the saturnalia from her respite in the courtyard. She dances again. She dances with her eyes closed. If they were open, she still wouldn't realize what everyone else does -- the sweat stains on her tank-top, like carefully hewn shadings in an ancient watercolor, asking for more careful study of the size and perfect shape of her free-flowing breasts. She wouldn't notice the enticing glow of dew on her naked shoulders and arms.
She dances a spell over the room, and every man who thought he had moved on to more accessible jewels resets his sights on her. The drinks they turned to last time she broke their hearts have done what they were bought to do. Now a chunky man with a crew cut and scruff reaching down to his thick chest hair lumbers toward her.
"You wanna dance?" he asks her, a bit too self-assuredly to really be self-assured.
"I am dancing, goof," she says.
She smiles a smile he interprets as an invitation. He has trained himself to pick up on the small sexual overtones in the everyday music of the female language, and although he is incapable of responding in kind and bringing these teasing conversations to a more explicit head, he knows how to physically force the situation.
He begins to dance -- or flail -- next to her, crowding her slightly. He watches her eyes for cues and, finding none, fishes with his hands for any subtle tinge of acceptance from her body, but she only dances. She erases everything in the room from her senses and drinks in the lightness of her own body. He stands directly in front of her, facing her, attempting to look meaningfully into her deflected eyes. Ineptly mimicking her every movement, he accidentally smacks random strangers on the back, in the groin, in the face.
When she picks up the tempo, he can't keep up. He assumes she is trying to shake him, but she hasn't been aware of him for some time. Hiding his humiliation in disgust, he looks around and rolls his shoulders. He mutters "stupid bitch" in a tough whisper loud enough to be heard as he walks away, but she doesn't hear him and she doesn't notice he is gone. She's dancing.
In the courtyard, the youngest of the teenagers have congregated in a cross-legged circle on the concrete. Others meander around the tables or play musical chairs around the pitchers of beer that have been placed on the uneven ground. The pitchers are continually knocked over, and this is where the real money for the management is tonight. These kids spill their beer before they can drink it and, with their suburban allowances, they can always buy more. They don't know their low limit, but luckily they never leave the courtyard where the open air carries the fumes quickly away. This is their idealized high school cafeteria -- one group plays spin the bottle, another truth or dare. The couple in the corner is now horizontal, an ad for adulthood.
Beauty's friends are bored. They still cherish the scars they received in high school and they recognize the kindergarten around them as a younger incarnation of the cliques that clubbed them. Too selfish to appreciate the shallow grasps at sensuality being made by their fellow kiddie-poolers, the two of them go inside to search for beauty.
They find her mildly flirting with a blond man in designer retail.
"Let's go!" shouts a friend and, brimming with camp, he laboriously removes his Stussy cap and wipes his brow with a cheap handkerchief.
She effortlessly shifts her attention as if she hadn't been listening to the blond in the first place. "Right now? I'm dancing," she says.
Innocent and lost in his own carnal wind, her would-be wooer thinks he must have lost before he began. He sulks off to order another Tequila Sunrise and scope for second choices.
"This place is boring." the friend says.
"Do you want to go?" she asks the third.
"I don't know. Louis is bored," she responds. Looking around, she notices the rapt attention being given their conversation and, a capitalist at heart, she knows she wants to stay. "I could stick around for a little longer, I guess.".
"Why don't you dance?"
The girlfriend joins her for a short time as Louis rolls his eyes and returns to the courtyard. He resigns himself to his lot; he knows there is nowhere more exciting to go anyway. His distress was mock, and he quickly settles into his favorite occupation -- imagining what those around him imagine him to be -- is he rich, is he straight, does he know famous people? Does he shop in Paris and Milan? Or does he mail order? His imagination will do for tonight. He knows in his heart that this is the only playground for certain excitement, anyway.
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Part Four
The band takes its second break at midnight. The night is more than half over, and the club has drawn all the people it can expect. The management knows it will make money. It now wonders whether any fights will break out, whether anything will be broken. They know it will be a wild one. It always is.
A couple near the stage has begun groping; her bra is lost and torn under uncountable feet, a belly button can be seen, a bulge.
On the stage, the same chorus of sorority girls who serenaded the room through the last intermission now sits on the backs of some lucky Joes who are too drunk to appreciate their good fortune. They are too drunk to do anything but smile, like jackasses, benignly. The girls are drunk, too. They stumble and sway and hold each other like inexperienced ice skaters introducing themselves fearfully to a new kind of fun. The men, on their hands and knees like head-butting bumper cars, carry them kinetically nowhere. Both parties are lost to the leather and whips their good clean fun brings to mind.
The minstrel MC, imagining himself the ringmaster of some bondage circus, is in heaven. He smiles shyly, like only a rich kid can, as the girls grope haphazardly at him for support. His pitch remains steady, perfect, throughout his lip synch of "Summertime." The whole room joins in on the chorus and the drunken harmonies grow so raucous that for a brief moment, the tiny room rises dangerously close to a premature climax.
But this is all mild stuff. The management has sized up the temper of the room. They have decided it is manageable. They're going home. The bouncer is put in charge, and he uses this opportunity to dream of cashing in on all the faux-favors he extended tonight to the pretty girls who snaked through the front door. He begins with the youngest; it doesn't matter.
The crowd is at the state of drunk where its collective liver is super-saturated; there is no more need for the band. Eardrums buzz with the immediate din of sloshing beer in the stomach. People are confused by the sounds in their heads. Except for those few involved in the orgy on stage, entertainment has been forgotten.
The Doublemint Twins spin like mystic bimbos to their own soul music. The divorcee, his lesbian heartthrobs long gone, drools over them. His tie, a hand-painted putting green complete with a lonely golfer in knickers at flag number nine, has found its way up over his forehead, a bandnna that brands him middle-aged, out of touch and untouchable. His son smiles through his discomfort. He wishes he could apologize and lead his father home, strap him to his Laz-E-Boy and lock the door forever. He is humiliated and he will never see his father in the same mythic light again. By morning he may remember that he once respected the man, but he'll never again know why. He is depressed and not even drunk. The twins, meanwhile, have taken a patronizing interest in their elder; the tie is now loose around the taller girl's neck. Her sister's arms tease his neck as she playfully runs her fingers along his bald pate as if it were a table top and she marking time. She laughs at him and he joins her. She hopes the spittle running down his chin doesn't fly too close to her fake silk shirt. He buys the girls drinks and they smile and giggle for a few moments longer before casually walking off with his pathetic tie. He's too drunk to notice they're gone. He doesn't stop blabbering about the fun they will have together once he's sent his son home until much later, when the cool air outside winds him sober to the sound of that same son's heartbroken whine.
The band has forgotten about the time. Billy, the drummer, reaps the benefits of a through-the-jeans massage, the effects of which are mostly imagined, but still thoroughly enjoyable. Except Jimbo, the others stick their tongues down their girl's throats and whisper raunchy nothings in their ears. The girls are prone to giggles and seductive never-never finger wags. Jimbo pouts. He's bored with his girl because she's bored with him. He watches Billy, pretending not to notice the excitement in his pants. Jimbo wishes he were him.
Lucy, Jimbo's match, wishes she were somewhere else. She surveys the crowd: the bare breasts and spots of vomit on the stage (the mules have been packed out the door so they can pass out in peace); the tourists nearby, enraptured in love, caressing each other's ass cheeks, kissing each other's eyeballs. Lucy wishes she were them. She notices two timid boys clinging to the back wall -- they look kind, they look like they are too afraid of sex to take advantage of it. She toys with the idea of talking with them and glances at Jimbo; she doesn't want to cause a scene, so she lets the dream go. A light-skinned black girl dances by herself, gracefully, entrancingly, near the back of the room. She seems free, Lucy thinks -- comfortable, relaxed, either free from need or fulfilling it all by herself. Plastered to the front window, the hands and noses of two awe-struck twelve-year-old girls, unable to take their eyes away from the maelstrom they dream of one day joining, form the fragmented outlines of two punctured hearts in the glass. Lucy is relieved when the MC begins to sarcastically deride the band for extending their break past its time.
The band knows he is a rat and can see he's pissed off, having finally realized the sorority girls were much less interested in him than in teasing the crowd. He could get them fired in a second; because he's black, he's a real kiss ass. They disconnect themselves from their groupies and take the stage in slow motion. They notice how thin the crowd has grown. It is nearly one o'clock and by all rights they should be allowed to pack up and take their tarts home before things cool down. They begin their set with furrowed brows and speed through it, mercifully leaving the solos out.
Jimbo especially hates this gig. He knows that when the management leaves (always early), the black boy and the bouncer unite in bitterness toward the band. "It's not our fault they never get laid," he thinks. He scowls out at the audience knowing it is wholeheartedly ignoring him. He would begin kicking heads in the front row if only the bouncer would stop staring at him.
When the tourists decide to take their party home, the boy who proposed the theory of contagious joy asks his friend for ten dollars. The friend refuses to give him the benefit of the doubt. As they follow the tourists out the door, they silently decide to bicker for hours over the hypothetical proofs they know can be created to back up their original conceits. By morning, they'll think they've learned something.
The Baptists have formed a hand-held loop, like a breathing paper chain. They exit singing, in the round, of the "joy, joy, joy, joy down in their hearts" and the simple minded smiles on their faces testify to the truth of this heavenly emotion. They've got the "peace that passes understanding down in their hearts." They have some trouble getting through the doorway because none can bear to let go of a hand and set the spirit free. They are forced to squeeze through two at a time, a chaste mockery of lust.
There is a mass exodus of teenagers rushing home to make curfew. They leave a lingering wish for longer nights in their wake.
The Doublemint Twins stumble off to try their luck at The Dungeon.
The hulk and the naive blond drink the last dregs of their beers as they compare notes and prop up each other's egos with reminders that they, at least, had the balls to reach for their dreams, still dancing and dancing and dancing with the whole floor to herself.
Lucy gazes at her morosely. Her awe was fleeting; it too quickly turned to bitterness, envy and spite. She turns to her friends and, noticing a hint of impatience, pounces. "These guys are a waste of time." she says. "They don't know their dicks from their guitar. Let's go."
"Just because you're not getting any doesn't mean you have to try to fuck it up for us," says the girl who gave the hand job.
"They're kids. Come on." She picks up her plastic transparent purse and turns to the other, less decided girls. "They're so cocky! They don't think you're sexy. They think they're sexy."
The others say nothing, but they think about what she's said. They suspect she's right. They weigh the factors in their minds -- will these musicians make them feel anything more than dead on their feet at the cash registers of their retail jobs tomorrow?
One of the girls checks the time, 1:30. "I could go home," she thinks. Then she says it and it is immediately decided.
"God. Come on then, let's put these beers in go-cups," says Lucy.
Although the girl who gave the hand job knows she will not fight her friends' decision, she stares at Billy, obliviously whacking a cymbal. She tells herself to remember the look and feel of him for future addition to her scrapbook of phantom lovers.
"You guys are a bunch of buzz kills, shit," she tells the others as she follows them out the door.
A moment later, she pops her head back in and hisses at Billy. He snaps his head toward her in agitation and it takes him a moment to realize the implications of her situation. When he does, he loses his rhythm. The beat disintegrates into random noise as Billy tries to communicate in sign language augmented by pointed grimaces meant to show mystification, betraying anger. She yells, "We're going," and the rest of the band figures out what's gone wrong. They join in the sign language and the melody begins to slow down and distort. By the time she puts her hand to her ear like a phone and disappears, the song has crash landed in the middle of the stage. Billy is so shocked that she wants him to call her that he doesn't realize she never gave him her number.
Jimbo smiles to himself. When, later, everyone blames Billy for driving the pussy away, Jimbo will smile and smile. Jimbo believes in equality. He believes in solidarity. He believes that no one should have anything he doesn't have.
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Part Five
The song having stopped, the band looks around. The bouncer and the black boy are bored. They play quarters at the bar. There's no one left but the mulatto goddess and her two friends. She still wants to dance, regardless of the music.
And how she dances.
The band has no problem pumping one more song into the near empty room. It seems to them to pulse with more life than it has all evening. Free from distractions, they cherish the excuse to watch her, to study her with eyes they normally reserve for the sticky-sweet photos in nudie-rags. They jump once more into "Satisfaction," and as they play, they contemplate the meaning of the word. They don't think about what they're doing. They don't watch their fingers or silently count the beat. They simply play and stare out at the graceful girl.
The bouncer and the MC stop bouncing coins. They unconsciously sway their heads, and both make a mental note that the song is better than normal. It sounds fresh and slightly sad, the frenetic roiling despair of the Stones original has been transformed into something new -- a lethargic, rapturous sound that has New Orleans in its blood stream. The bouncer and the MC let their attention drift toward the stage. They both half expect to see a different band, a better band, a band that loves music and puts all that love to concerted use trying to draw its essence from dead wood. And they do see another band, but they don't know it.
The mulatto beauty is finally dragged off the floor by her friends. She doesn't mind. Exhausted and clean, she's had enough. She follows lightly, putting an arm over each of their shoulders and squeezes in the warmth they share.
The music abruptly clanks to an end, and the band stares at her back. Each of them wonders what would have happened if he had found the courage to be a little more honest with himself, a little less selfish, more willing to risk humiliation and acknowledge that he wants something more out of his life -- that he wants something like what this woman seemed to have, or, if he doesn't want what she has, at least he wants her. They will dream of her, not the groupies tonight.
"You all ain't done," says the bouncer and, although he doesn't mean to be a dick about it, he secretly wants to hear more of the Bayou Blues he never knew these guys carried like hidden tattoos in their cookie-cutter, mall-bought instruments.
"Come on," grumbles Billy. "Nobody's left."
The MC jumps in, giddy at the opportunity. "You all got another half hour before close. Whatta we say when some chump shows up for a night cap? Sorry Charley, the band's off tryin'a get they willies wet?"
"Let's hear it, boys. Who knows, I might even dance for you."
Jimbo thinks the bouncer has seen into his head and discovered the hidden confusion he feels over dancing, and his distorted and unstable comprehension of everything related to the mulatto girl. He seethes in anger. "Why do you have to fuck with me, man?" But all he gets in return is a sharp flick of the eyes from the keyboardist, and this makes him madder. He mutters, "I'll kill the motherfucker," and, although he would jump at an opportunity to pound on anyone here, he is pissed at no one but himself -- of the members of the band, he is least desirable. Infuriating.
The bouncer's voice edges toward a threat. "I'm serious, boys."
They stop complaining. They know he would take great joy in blowing every hint of attitude they give him into a balloon of disrespect well worth the management's popping them onto the street. Jimbo starts in on the pulsing first notes of "Another One Bites the Dust," his spiteful muttering subsiding to a migraine coda in his temple.
Halfway through the song, the bounder throws a wet towel at the stage. It lashes the singer across the forehead, dislodging his baby blue bandanna. "What's this Fisher Price music? What happened to that sound?"
"What sound?"
"That sound you had going... you know, 'I can't get no-o-o-o sat-is-fac-tion...'" He searches the five mystified faces.
The MC knows what's happened. He knows the difference between music and noise. He once briefly visited music. He once felt its forward thrust of uniqueness push through a melody trying to crawl flat through his lips. He was fourteen years old. He tried, for a long time, to understand it, and he knows the futility of this -- it can't be held, it can only be let out. He'll never have the stuff to recreate that moment of pure blind emotion he felt when he was not yet fifteen; he's too self conscious. He tries too hard. Having recognized what it felt like, every further attempt was dishonest, an imitation of himself. The Flash Gordons have some slim hope, he thinks; they don't realize what they've got.
But the bouncer won't ask. He's already decided that the band is comprised of bigger fools than he thought and, confusing them even more, tells them to go the hell home.
Bursting with foggy thoughts of how this bar is a generally terrible place and how tonight, especially, they've been dicked over by what was on offer, the band sullenly packs up. They want to out the door, on the street, free to kick trash cans and push little kids. They want to be safely away where they can pick the evening's teeth and piece together a less random pattern to the gusts of devastation that dog them. Here, they are lauded with constant rain and lightning; here, there is no shelter.
Now that the multi-colored mix of substances shellacking the floor has had time to gel, it grabs at the feet of the five men who walk toward the exit. They hold their shoulders stiff and their instruments with bent arms. They attempt to appear unblown, but it doesn't matter.
Two men, one black and one white, sit at the bar playing quarters. They don't look up to wave or smile see you later, tomorrow, or have a good night. They don't hear the door bounce shut.
The neon sign has been switched off. The bouncer locks the front door. Nothing is left inside but an empty stage; some watered down booze.
Hidden in the corner of the courtyard's brick wall, the two lovers fuck like the shadows of small branches, swinging in the wind.
The tourists have returned to their hotels. The teenagers have slipped home to the disappointing sounds of snoring parents. The last vestiges of excitement have been chased from the street and the sleeping derelicts smile and hoard the extra space in their dreams. Only the locals know where to escape to at this hour; they have run uptown or to someone's house to wait for morning. The street is silent, empty except for the blurry outline of a cross with a digital display across which words like "SALVATION" run quickly out of sight, taking the evening with them.
By morning, the band will have forgotten their minor heartaches; they'll apply balm and themselves minister to their dick aches; tonight's trouble with the management will become blurred with the trouble they will have with other managements, in other establishments, night after night until they fizzle out and pack up their demos and go home to smaller dreams.
The mulatto goddess will be replaced by tomorrow with a chipped-china princess, some different person's ideal of beauty, whose friends will also wake up depressed and wishing that they were her, or please, God, not themselves. And as like the mulatto goddess, this princess too will one day wonder what it is that has piled so high in front of the door to the dance floor inside her.
The bar will be here tomorrow, like its clientele, blemished and ugly in the morning light. It's barely visible now in the descending fog that envelops Bourbon Street, hides its distinctive features, unites it with the rest of the city. Listen, you can hear it sighing as it blacks out, exhausted, unable to wonder what has happened to it.
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