Halloween’s ghosts have risen from the ashes to walk the streets again, visiting friends, relatives – maybe even you.

Their old haunts may look a little different now – what was once a brothel, say, is now Popeye’s Louisiana Kitchen – but ghosts have a knowing sense of direction. They can find their way around.

 I’m in the very last seat in the very last row of United Airlines flight number 509 to New Orleans, which is, from what I understand, a very mystical, spiritual and haunted enclave.  We are 30,000 feet in the air, Hotel Transylvania is streaming free and blood red tomato juice is free too.   Jason and Eddie are both with me in spirit, since Halloween is Eddie’s birthday.  October 31 is nowhere near Jason’s birthday, but it was his raison d’etre. 

While they never met on a mortal plane, Jason and Eddie, maybe, just maybe, they have now met in the afterlife. 

My cabbie speaks in a Louisiana drawl as we pass by roofs patched with bright blue tarps. 

“FEMA came and patched mine up,” he tells me, “Shingles are backordered, there’s a shortage right now.” 

I’m going to New Orleans for spiritual awakening, no, a cleansing, no….a vacation?  It’s Halloween 2021, with time slated to grow increasingly decrepit and absurd. I have some money to spend, albeit not much, but cash is worthless now anyway.  So spend it all baby, in the name of love, pour one out for your grandma, and Philip Seymour Hoffmann too. 

 Harpsichord melodies drift down an alleyway.  The haunted streetcar clangs towards the Quarta’ packed with costumed revelers, though it’s barely past noon. The sidewalks are precarious, as the stones rise up and jut out of the ground.  A jazz band leads a funeral procession towards the cemetery, playing a slow dirge that will morph into a celebratory jam upon departure. 

In the cemetery, one bony skeleton hand rises from a burial mound, reaching up towards the blue sky with a finger pointing upward…

Hurricane Ida blew through a few months ago, but right now, all appears to be calm. 

On St. Charles Avenue, on the haunted streetcar route ironically positioned alongside Popeye’s Louisiana Kitchen, is an old historic hotel-turned-hostel.    $35 a night has apparently afforded me some decent digs, in a room with two bunk beds, and roommates!  There is a 24-hour bar on the first floor and the location is pretty clutch.  I roll in my suitcase a little after 3:00 p.m. on a Friday, and ready to get this weekend off to a happening if not haunted start. 

“Check-in is not until four,” the emo-chic desk girl unenthusiastically informs me. She’s a petite gal rocking a bodycon turtleneck minidress that only someone emo-chic can pull off. 

“It’s alright, I’m very thirsty,” I say while dropping my bags and pointless coat on the floor and take a seat on a barstool.  “Water please!” Outside the sun is beginning to dim, but the temperature is warm and the air is still.   “And a wine too, I guess.” 

To my right sits a boy with a blond ponytail and one skinny blue stone dangling from his ear. He definitely resembles Ryan Dunn. 

“Another can of beer please Lydia,” he reaches across me to grab the brew, looking at me sideways to sum up the new arrival. We shoot the breeze and quench our thirsts until the clock strikes four and I wheel my stuff into a quaint rickety elevator. 

Until time travel is an option, at least we still can travel along the mortal coil, totally fleeting, c’est la vie.  Although, I am quite sure spirits from the other side walk among us. I have had signs from Jason, sure, but Eddie? 

Freshly showered and shaved, I head outside to potentially bum a cig. Also, I’m starving, and a French bistro by the name of Herbsaint is within walking distance.  Maybe I will try frog’s legs.  

“Do you have a cig?” I ask a girl smoking one who’s sitting on the curb.  She shakes her head – negative. 

“Do you know where I can nab some greenery? You know, like, pot?”

Again, she shakes her head no.  Damn. I always refrain from packing weed whenever I fly south. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time…

“Hey!” Shouts a boy with glasses in a trippy-looking psychedelic sweatshirt. Before I know it, Ryan Dunn from the bar (who told me his name is actually Colin) appears from out of nowhere. 

“My wife is asleep!”  the boy in the psychedelic sweatshirt rushes towards me. “I have an extra ticket to Widespread Panic!” He waves it in the air like an acid-tripper on Armistice Day, “Come with us!” 

A girl with really long, wavy hair and a pimply guy slowly chewing gum are waiting at the curb. They all await my response. 

“Um, I don’t know guys,  I was just heading out for something to eat. I just got here…”  I look around; the street right now is actually pretty deserted. What more could just randomly present itself?

“Drinks for dinner tonight, girl!” shouts psychedelic boy. “Come on – our Uber’s about to pull up!”

 I didn’t come to New Orleans to be a loner.  What’s the worst that could happen? I trust Ryan Dunn, even though we just met. I mean, he was drinking PBR. When the Uber arrives we all smush into the backseat, except for their gum-chewing friend, who has a scrappy goatee and looks like a billy goat. Apparently, the concert is in the levee district, near the breakwall, and in my head that song that song by Led Zepplin, “When the levee breaks…” starts to play while psychedelic boy rambles on about being from Alabama and how he has to visit the Navy Museum, because his grandfather was in the Navy and all, and…

“Do you want a hit?” Psychedelic Boy, whose name is Jerome, holds out a sheet of that familiar Fruit Stripe gum-wrapper-esque paper, divided into neat little squares.  

Outside, we pass tall concrete warehouses  covered in street art and get on the freeway, heading a bit outside of downtown, along Lake Pontchartrain; it’s cool and it’s dusk.

“Well sure,” I figure this will at least take my mind off my growling stomach for the time being.  A hit of acid for dinner seems reasonable, given the circumstances. Jerome hands me a ticket to the show.  I’m smushed up against Ryan Dunn, I mean, Colin, who has a hint of a Southern drawl. “I’m from Richmond,” he says, really close to my ear. “Virginia.” 

“That’s hot, that’s hot,” I say, and score a stick of gum and a cig from Billy Goat.  A tickle is in the back of my throat, and my palms feel a little itchy. We are being carried down to the breakwall but before the levee breaks.  There is a loosely assembled line of ragtag poncho and parachute pants-clad fans. The sky is bright magenta with big black clouds looming low. I hop in line behind some bros popping open cans of Busch Light and start to down a few with Colin. He’s definitely chill and mild-mannered – a polite Southern gentleman.  I’m wearing jeans painted with images of cigarettes from the goth store and a long sleeve leopard top; it’s kind of chilly along the breakwall.   But before long, the doors to the venue swing open into a big, hockey rink type of situation with various concession stands selling hot pretzels and cups of wine and beer. 

Colin buys us drinks and we settle into bleachers. I assume he came to New Orleans with the psychedelic posse.

“No, uh, I just met them at the hostel,” he says. “We were going to the same concert.” 

“No way,” I say.  This makes me like him more, for some reason. 

Jerome’s standing in the middle of the bleachers tossing back shots of whiskey from a flask stashed in his pants. The show hasn’t started yet but down on the floor (which really does seem to be a defrosted ice rink) hippies are already sitting crossed-legged on the ground and trancing out. I guess tonight is night one of a three-day long show.

“I’m surprised no one is blazing up a blunt,” I observe. “Maybe New Orleans just isn’t 420 friendly.” I look down at the ground, stunned, bemused. 

“No way girl, I can nab weed in two seconds,” Jerome says. “Easy. Come on!”

I tag along with psychedelic Jerome hightailing it outside to a designated smoking area overlooking the edge of the levee, where a distinctly cool wind swoops in.  The acid wasn’t enough to make me trip out fully, just feel silly, but the wine served in giant hurricane glasses makes my knees weak.  We wobble up to a serious-looking smoker, all alone, who has a distinctively Old World air, as if of Creole descent, in a jewel-tone velvet jacket and trilby hat with a feather on the side. 

“What’s your name?” He scopes me up and down. “I dig your style.” 

He has already pulled out a pipe of weed, and passes it to me. Before I know it Jerome fades into the background, and my legs grow weaker and weaker but still I manage to float through the concrete aisles with this smoky wanderer, until we wind up in a concrete doorway between the bathrooms and general concession area. 

“You know, I live right by the Quisby,” He looks super serious, staring into my eyes with determination. “Maybe I could show you around.”

“Yeah, maybe…”  From inside the atrium, jam band melodies play on and on, merging into an abstract jamboree, no beginning, no end. Just a melting blob. Speaking of melting blob, if I wasn’t leaning against the wall I would probably melt into the floor like radioactive ooze. 

“Do you do cocaine, Ann Marie?” He lights up a cigarette, right there inside the arena. 

Well, I would. Why the heck not? I need to perk up, we all know jam band shows last an eternity. 

“Yeah, I mean, sometimes.”  

The quirky stranger pats his lapel, at first casually, then frantically, looks in his cigarette case, in his leather Chelsea boot, then starts patting his lapels again.  Sheesh, I know what that means. I roll my eyes.

“Um…Actually wait a second… Where am I?” I just realized I lost Jereme, Colin, and the rest of my posse from the Quisby. It’s not like I don’t know how to take an Uber back to the Quiz but I’d rather hang out with them, if you know what I mean. I don’t want to get snatched by a shifty-eyed stranger, at least not on my first night and not at a jam band show. 

“Will you help me find everybody? I just rolled up with them from the Quiz, I mean I really don’t know them, I think they were someplace over here on the first level…” 

The befuddled hipster who has lost his cocaine walks with me and I point in the general direction of where I was sitting. As if pulled by a magnet, I do find them, Colin with his long blond wavy hair, and the tie-dye clad other kids. Whew. That was close. I snuggle up next to Colin and gradually the European hipster fades into the background. 

“So, like, what’s this song called?” 

I’m realizing Widespread Panic is pretty popular, at least with jam band people. To be honest, jam bands are the only type of bands I don’t listen to, but, we all know I heard my fair share of Phish emanating through my floorboards from my downstairs neighbors 10 years ago. 

“Isn’t this the same song as before?” I am seriously unsure. 

“Uh, yeah.”

I honestly have no idea how long I was gone.  10 minutes? An hour? Who knows. It felt like an eternity. 

“It’s probably been going on about 45 minutes,” Colin continues.

I choke on an ice cube.

“45 minutes?” All of a sudden that’s the funniest thing I’ve ever heard in my life, “The same song?”  I laugh so hard it’s like that time I smoked weed in college and saw a guy riding a bike and got the giggles so bad I almost peed my pants straight through.  “All the songs I listen to are, like, 30 seconds long.  You know, like, The Ramones…”

I get really close to his face when I say, “Monessssss.”

Colin looks down at his PBR can.  Up until now, we had been talking about our jobs and the struggle of survival. You know, being middle aged, thirtysomething. “We can go whenever,” he says. “Back to the Quisby.”

“Yeah for sure!” 

I’m not having a bad time, I’m down for whatever, there’s a party around every turn out here in New Orleans. Jerome, Billy Goat and Wavy Gurl disappeared long ago. Colin and I walk out of the arena and into a gust of wind. “Where are we?” I hold up my phone for a satellite signal, some kind of sign from the stars. “We’re lost! We’re stranded! We’re gonna die.”

We traipse across damp hills, into ditches, until we reach a low fence of some kind. Colin nonchalantly organizes a Lyft back to the hostel. Apparently, Colin is flying back to Richmond tomorrow at 6 AM, so what’s a girl to do? Lean in and give him a kiss! Our blonde manes blow dramatically in the wind, until “Bob,” our bro-y driver, pulls up. 

“Woo!” I flop onto the seat. “Boy is it windy out there.”

Bob, our bro-y driver, is undaunted. 

“Boy Harsher, yeah I love Boy Harsher,” Colin and I have been discussing music with a passion. 

“Me too,” Colin says.  He seems very eclectic in tastes. A trucker hat and dangly earring kind of guy. 

“I have a cord back there if you want,” Bob waves towards the back of the passenger seat.  I plug my phone in and stream Boy Harsher in the dark, through the starry streets, back to the Quiz. Bob drops us at the curb. There’s some guys sitting on the flowerbed and standing around idly smoking. The soft barroom lamp glows from inside, and as we pull our weary bodies through the door, Bob shouts at us, “You broke my cord!” And then he speeds away.  

Down in the cantina on the morning of my last day in New Orleans,  the coffee is hot and the bar has officially run out of just about everything.  The streetcar pauses  in front of the hostel, then starts its procession once again.  I’ve secured tickets to a cemetery crawl. Next to me sits a curly-headed dude with a nautical star neck tattoo. Wait, yes, we chatted here last night. Didn’t we? But about what? Hmmm. 

“Would you like some?” He opens a plastic bag; inside, loose blueberries.  

“Thanks,” I nibble a few in silence. What did I discuss with this man last night? I wonder. 

“So how long have you been here?” I say. 

“Since August,” he says. “I’m here working.” 

“What do you do again?”

“I’m an insurance adjustor,” he says. “Natural disasters.” 

Oh that’s right, the fly-on-the-wall insurance adjustor with the laptop handling hurricane-related property damage.   I’m sure he’s seen everything, this is such an interesting hostel. Just yesterday a sixty-something fresh off a train from Chicago was breathlessly telling me his story – I think he had COPD. I was having a Red Bull at the time with an artist guy named Pete who lives in a condo across the street. I met up with Pete at French Truck for coffee, and he gave me one of his dioramas, and then tried to make out with me, but I turned him down.  Also, there are not one, but two, men staying at the hostel with eye patch situations. Being Halloween weekend, I made a serious faux pas by mistaking one’s for a costume, and wound up crying and banging my fist on the bar and declaring that “I was an asshole” when he pulled up the eye patch to show me what was underneath. But the man totally forgave me and called me an empath. 

 “Want to come to a cemetery crawl?” 

The stranger looks pensive, then says,

 “Yes, actually, I would.”

He gives me his number.   I text him the “Haunted Tours” link to the tickets, so he can buy one. 

“I’m taking the bus to the cemetery,” I say. “I’m just trying to figure out the schedule.”

“Oh, I’ve got my truck,” says the mysterious adjustor. 

“Oh, ok. Cool.”  We nibble more blueberries in each other’s company. 

“I just have some work to finish up in my room, but let’s meet back down here – in 30 minutes and we’ll go?”

“Sure.”

And he moseys away in a very soft looking, very lived in navy polo and board shorts and is carried upstairs in the clanging elevator.  Hmmm. I don’t even know his name. I sip some juice, calmly admire the news on the TV, because I don’t have to deal with reality anymore, I’m free, on cloud nine actually, population: one.  

“This is Harold,” he answers the phone with a flat tone. 

“Oh, hey, it’s Ann Marie from downstairs,” I reply. We have an entire hour before the cemetery crawl and I am simply relieved at not having to stress about finding out his name anymore.

“I’m just finishing up some work up here, be down in a minute,” he says. 

“Oh, take your time.” I say. “I’m just having some coffee.”

I decide that I have time to take a fashion risk and head up to my room to get my vintage funeral veil with the spider web pin that I bought for this trip. I wore it out in the Quarter on Halloween night when I went out with my roommate, Clarissa from Alaska, flirted with a sousaphone player at an old mansion and did some dirty dancing at the club with a guy in a Saints jersey (I think I even kissed him). 

Down he clangs in the calamitous elevator. Harry’s a tall guy with large muscular calves and a lumberjack/surfer physique, plus curly/wavy hair that’s shaved underneath and long enough for a man bun. He’s a casual kind-of guy, a guy of few words.

Harry and I exit the Quisby and hit the block, strolling down a spray-painted back alley towards his towering silver truck. Walking next to Harry, I feel like a kitten slinking alongside a proud lion.  He has the kind of stature that makes a girl feel safe in alleys, or wherever. 

“Cemetery Gates…” I sing Pantera, badly.  “Do you like Pantera?”

“Oh, yeah,” says Harry, and plugs in his phone and begins to stream “Cemetery Gates” and then “A Tout la Monde” by Megadeth.  Phew, for a minute there I thought Harry might be a System of the Down kind of guy (which I WOULD be willing to overlook). 

“We can stop at that art store if you want,”  we have been driving around in circles and performing u-turns around various medians that seem to be a thing here in New Orleans and lend themselves to a certain traffic pattern. 

“Oh that’s back by the Quiz,” he is talking about the voodoo store on St. Charles I mentioned. I picked up a perfume called La Buena Suerte which contains pieces of a macaw’s nest and is supposed to be lucky. So far, it’s working. New Orleans is definitely a city for the horny and the lustful. 

“We can check out City Park, it’s supposed to be kind of cool,” he says. I’m looking out the window, chill as a clam and simply taking in the fresh sunny day with a fresh sunny guy. 

From the street, at first City Park looks ordinary. We park in a big empty lot and drift down a hill and over a curved bridge that connects a pond, no, a stream, no….it’s the bayou!  A legit bayou flows through City Park for miles, covered by picturesque slime.  Bubbles froth up, neon chartreuse, and huge willow trees drip feathery moss that ever-so-delicately touches the surface.  We are inside a painting, no mushrooms needed, and as I lean over the bridge rail to examine the slime, Harry and I both spot a cute little turtle baby paddling through!  Turtle baby swims towards a big turtle momma, and then a turtle poppa, and a ton of other little turtles show up, camouflaged at first by the bright green slime. 

“It’s a turtle party, ain’t nothin’ but a turtle party,” I dance downhill to get closer to the bog. No, the swamp.  The bayou! 

“Whoa,” I step into a hole hidden by grass and tumble downhill in my shiny black PVC goth pants and surely my g-string is exposed as well. “Whoops, I’m clumsy.”

Harry is unfazed by a clumsy girl in a black veil and PVC, and we continue our bayou exploration.  Frogs jump around, and the turtles swim, but other than them, nobody one else is around; we’re alone in swamp paradise. 

Sun beams off the tall swampgrass as we creep across rocks and closer to the edge of the bayou. My gossamer veil gets tangled up in branches. We balance on a log beneath the shade of a gigantic willow tree.  Harold leads the way across the log, then turns back and offers me his hand. I stop and look at it for a second, and then clasp it with my own. 

 “Oh my God,” Harold says. 

My eyes trail over to where Harold is looking.  There, basking in the sun on a log at the edge of the swamp, is a small alligator! A baby gator in repose, eyelids seemingly half-closed, a serene smile across its lips. 

“The City of New Orleans was founded in 1718 by Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, and if that name wasn’t intense enough, the man was covered head to toe – with tattoos – of snakes.” 

Our goth posse oohs and ahhs.  “Now, you’re going to want to stick to the sides, “ Drew, our modelesque punk rock guide, leads the way down the rising sidewalk slabs and across a busy intersection into Metairie Cemetery.   In New Orleans, you need a key and tour guide license to get into cemeteries. 

“Now,” he turns as we cross, lowering his small round shades dramatically. “We will see skeletal remains.”  

I look over at Harold and he doesn’t seem fazed.

 “And please, don’t take any,” Drew says. “Someone in the last group thought she could take somebody’s bones home with her.” 

Suddenly, Harold turns and runs away, back towards his truck.

“Hey, where are you going?” I shout after him as he yanks up his shorts. 

“Work emergency!” 

And so I turn back to the tour and we drift into the stony crypt.  In New Orleans most are buried above ground in family tombs, and until now I’ve come to understand this is because the city is below sea level and coffins were prone to rising up out of the ground. 

But Drew begins, “Now, you really want to know why in New Orleans the dead aren’t buried underground? Follow me…”

 We creep past rock-filled, or bone- filled squares, some with elaborate tombs with padlocked doors, others just open to the elements like a garden..of bones.   Drew points out a human vertebrae. Someone snaps of photo. 

“New Orleans began as a French colony, and we are all about the fleur de lis – But it was lost to the Spanish Empire in 1763 following France’s defeat in the Seven Years’ War,” Drew says.  “And you think anyone here gave a hoot about listening to the Spanish king? But they brought with them nouveau European burial practices.  Now, the City of New Orleans is a proud city, and a stubborn city, and when these nouveau European burial practices became all the rage abroad, well, we were only too keen to want to join in. And we still carry on those burial practices today. ” 

We walk down a path that resembles a city street.  Tombs look like houses with little doors and little windows.  Ancient, rusty street signs mark our way. I get a text from Harold stating he is coming back so I give him our location. Soon enough, I see him trotting across the cemetery. 

“I forgot I had an appointment,” he says.

“When you die, you are placed into the tomb for a year and a day,” Drew says. “Due to the heat, basically you are cremated, but no one is exactly sure until you are removed. Then, your bones and whatever is left are smashed up by the local bonegrinder, and you are scattered on top of the bones of your family, meant to save space and also span generations.” 

“You’re going to have to fill me in,” Harold leans down and says in my ear in what I perceive to be a flirty tone.  Hmmm. 

After a little over an hour and with the sun beating down, Drew concludes that many tombs have fallen into disrepair, with some not having any living relatives to tend to them and others the victims of vandalism. “You can keep track of tombs that need repair though the local organization Save Our Cemeteries (www.saveourcemeteries.org).” 

With that, Harold and I embark on our own private excursion. 

We reach a giant obelisk-shaped monument, at least a few stories high. 

“Whoever is buried here must’ve been a big deal,” I say. “Or at least compensating for something.”

It turns out to be Jefferson Davis’ original resting place. He was exhumed and moved to Richmond, VA.

We roam up to a pyramid shaped tomb made of pristine marble.

 Harold pulls the steel trap-door aside.  “Eeek,” I say.  Inside the tomb are three rows of drawers and it looks like a dresser, just instead of underwear and socks, it contains …remains.  

Afterwards, we goto a Louisianian – Asian fusion place called Mofo that Drew recommended. We sit outside on a patio and it’s just the two of us here. 

“I”m from Alaska,” Harold tells me.  “But I have a place in Montana. Just a little cabin.”

“Really? That’s cool. Are there any bears?”

“My friend has a pet bear,” Harold says. “He raised him since he was a cub.”

“Cute!”

“But I haven’t been back home in years,” he continues, “I’ve been working 18 months straight.  California wildfires, floods in Texas… haven’t even taken a personal day.” 

“Wow,” I raise my chopsticks for another hit of spicy shrimp n’ rice.   “Does it ever get lonely, being on the road?”

“Yes, sometimes.” 

The sun is still insanely bright as Harold and I drive away.  We walk side-by-side down shady streets, Harold casting a tall shadow over me as we meander weatherbeaten avenues.  A garbage can is tipped over next to railroad tracks that we walk down until I discover a bunch of dried-up oyster shells.  I pick some up and dust them off for a souvenir. 

There is a black BMW totally smashed up parked at the curb, broken glass all over the sidewalk that we step around. 

“How’s the crime up in New York?” asks Harold.

“Um, interesting question,” I say, “I guess there are a lot of shootings, it’s grown exponentially.  Not really sure why. I think they let a lot of people out of jail during the pandemic.”

“Hm,” says Harold.  

We go back to City Park and snag beignets from Cafe du Monde and find a homeless kids’ hideaway to possibly tuck into for the night:

Herons chill on grassy dirt clods along the swamp perimeter. After casually strolling for a little while, Harold and I climb in his truck and head back to the Quiz. 

We sit in a booth at the first-floor cantina, each with a mezcal-and-pineapple, as Harold adds to some insurance spreadsheets on his laptop. It is my last night in New Orleans. My flight back to Buffalo departs at 7:00 a.m., so I figure I’ll have to go to bed soon in order to maximize my beauty sleep. I’m not really planning to hang out with Harold late, and haven’t been trying to impress him at all. Before long, I throw on my Planet Hollywood sweatshirt I scored at a trailer park yard sale, and we stroll down to a po’  boy shop called something like Fat n’ Po’ on lower Magazine; I’m not that hungry but I nibble Harold’s fries with Middle Eastern hot sauce, anyway.  

“Are you Eskimo, then, being from Alaska and all?”

“No, Tlingit,” he says. “I’m from the south side.”

Back at the Quiz the elevator clangs to a start and rises to the third floor. Slowly, ever so slowly. 

“I will walk you to your room,” I say.

“Give me a hug,” suddenly Harold has me wrapped up in a grizzly bear hug, “A real hug.”  So I hug him back. And then, he kisses me.  We keep pressing the button to the second floor, no, the third floor, then back down to the second floor, and on and on a few times until we finally land on the third floor and slowly walk to Harold’s room.

“Ya, ya, ya,” Harold’s German roommate with the goatee is jabbering on the phone, until he sees me getting cozy in Harold’s lower bunk. There’s a long pause.  “I will go downstairs and have a drink,” he declares, and leaves the room. 

Harold doesn’t seem to have much by way of possessions, for someone who’s been basically living here for months.   I have way more clothes scattered on my bed and all over my room from just a few days (which reminds me, I still have to pack up a few things…)

“I thought you were going to get frisky at the cemetery,” he says, and then Harold and I start making out on his bed! 

“Pull these down,” he motions towards the waistband of my black PVCs. 

No way, I’m thinking, Is this really about to go down – in the final hours of my trip? 

“I can’t,” I move his hand away. “Truth is, I have my period.  Sorry.”

But one thing leads to another, as they seem to do in New Orleans. What ensues next is a fully in-depth, erotic and steamy shower scene.  I creep back down to the second floor with my hair wet and tangled for a few hour’s sleep before I fly back home to reality. 

Five a.m. and it’s still dark outside. I whisper “goodbye” to Clarissa and Tabitha, my other roommate, a librarian from Omaha.  As I roll my suitcase past the cantina, the waxed n’ tanned up-and-coming lawyer kid is perched at the bar

“Are you waking up or did you not go to sleep yet?” I ask him. 

“Haven’t gone to sleep yet!” he says, all perked up on Adderall, maybe, and it sucks to have to leave this life behind. New Orleans – instead of poker chips, it’s friendships. You win some, you lose some.  And what happens in New Orleans, stays in New Orleans.  Or does it? 

And with that, I say goodbye for now with a tip of the hat, a humble kiss on the hand, and Harold snoozing it up on the third floor.

TO BE CONTINUED