"How long are you in town?" she said.
I dreaded the question. I knew I should lie.
"I leave the day after tomorrow."
She frowned.
"That's kinda dumb," she said. "You should stay the week."
"I have to go home and make a living. How can I stay a whole week?"
"Most people just move down," she said.
Bobby laughed. Melissa walked away again. I love people who walk away from me.
"You got a live one there," Bobby said.

 

We walked through the empty VIP section to the back room where the musicians hung out and Bobby rolled a joint. I told him I was tired and he passed me a little bag of cocaine.

 

"Just one line, Cher. It's too early for that shit."

 

Cocaine isn't normal for me. It had been years since I used it to party. When I came out of the bathroom the world felt new. So new that Bobby looked like a total stranger. He was sitting on the couch next to a very tall broad-shouldered black man with braids and a gold tooth that flashed when he laughed. It didn't matter who Bobby was next to, it always looked like a photo-study in contrast. They were smoking another joint. I recognized the guy as the trumpet player fro the Rebirth Brass Band, the funkiest and rawest of the big local second line bands. He wore a New Orleans Saints football jersey with the number One on it.

 

There are some types of celebrities that do not impress me. Trumpet players are not among them. Their power is so raw, so inaccessible, and so profoundly sexual that it makes me nervous to be around them. By trumpet players I do not mean anyone who plays a trumpet, I mean a man who steps forward into the naked light and pours his soul into a clean line of notes that no one has ever played before in the way that he has just played them. Rebirth was one of those. My little life of ineffectual middle class activism, coffee shops, and delusional benders was next to his, the life of the sort of haute-bourgeois professional that I despise. Despise because I know I am, like them, too afraid to take what I want. I wanted more than anything at that moment to be a black man in a football jersey growling at the world with gold teeth and blasting my anger out of my trumpet night after night.

 

That vision engulfed me and I sat down in a plush red armchair and chewed my lip ferociously as I imagined a crowd transfixed beneath me, my legs planted wide on a hardwood stage. The drugs made my heart race and I could feel the blood pounding in my temples. The music from downstairs rumbled up through the floor. My glass brain rattled. I had so many things to say I could not think of one that would interest Bobby and Rebirth. More cracking. Maybe I am here to break it all to pieces, I thought. These people are here to help me. I began yammering at them both, a barrage of obsequious compliments first, to win them over, and then a long inane riff about Miles Davis' be-bop cool, something I knew nothing about but about which, at least at that moment, I held opinions so strong that my conversation partners could not respond. I was sweating by the time I ran out of words.

 

"He's from Chicago," Bobby said. "Here for the party."
"That's all," Rebirth said genially. "The music is here for just that purpose."
Clara came in the room then.
"It's not nice to leave people without telling them where you're going," she said.
She sat down in the narrow space between Bobby and Rebirth.
"Give me that joint," she said.

 

Clara's trick was that she was young and beautiful and pale. She dressed like a society girl, but she was mean, self-serving, and spoke directly. Beautiful contrast. Rebirth even fell for it. He pinched the burning end of the joint between his ample fingernails and Clara sucked at it viciously.

 

"Bobby give me some coke," she said.
"You don't have no manners," Rebirth said.
"They never got me shit," Clara said.
Bobby handed her the bag. When it was in her hand she softened some.
"Anybody want to come to the girls room and do a line with me. It's so depressing alone."
I did. I did because I knew it was a bad idea and it would help me break.
"I'm all good on that shit," Rebirth said.
Bobby waved his hand at her.
"I'll come," I said.
"At lease somebody in here's got manners," Clara said.