Nonfiction by Nathan Thomas
The Preservation Jazz Hall is smaller than what I expected. It’s sandwiched between two brick buildings in the French Quarter. A kid with an orange t-shirt and an overbite scans our tickets and we’re off—down a narrow hallway towards a room filled with people. We slide into the back and stand by the wall because there aren’t any seats left. People chatter. The walls are green and peeling and cluttered with memorabilia: local legends I’m too ignorant to recognize, smiling men with trombones and tubas.
“Where we going after this?” I think out loud. Eric looks up from his phone. His beard and beanie make his eyes look like an alligator’s poking up over dark lake water.
“Jacob has some kind of plan. Him and Angie are still on their cocktail tour.”
I wince at the word cocktail. I’m still suffering the consequences of letting I’m gonna relapse on Bourbon Street turn from a joke to a prophecy. My brain is running like an old Dell with bad internet, stutters and freezes abound.
“I hope we get to hear a clarinet,” Tyler says. Out of all of us he sticks out the worst in New Orleans. I look inbred enough that most folks assume I’m from Lafayette. Eric blends with the hipster transplants that sit by the park and sell poems to tourists, passing time until they overdose, the chic way. Tyler, however, has a blended accent of rural gay and pretentious southern. It’s vaguely British. When we walked through the rougher parts of town, I occasionally caught the wolves salivating as he passed, their eyes trained on his back pocket, where he keeps his wallet.
“I’m sure we will, Tyler, I’m sure we will,” Eric says. After a few minutes of idling a little woman with jet black hair walks in from the end of the room. She gives a spiel about rules I don’t pay mind to, because while she’s talking, the folks that’ll be playing file in behind her. They’ve got a real primitive set up. A couple of chairs, a drum set, and an old brown piano that sits in the corner like an old woman in a nursing home who, she assures you, was pretty once. The folks carrying instruments take the chairs, the other two take the drums and the piano.
One of the guys in the chairs, an older dude in a grey suit with Weezer glasses, stands up and gives a wave.
“Thank you for joining us tonight here at Preservation Hall,” he says. His voice is high, Cajun. I try to pay attention but I start to drift away as he’s talking. I look past him and at the wall. There are beautiful paintings. Grace would be all over them…
I stop myself. No need to taint my vacation thinking about at-home problems. Ex-girlfriends, neglected homework, and debt all got one thing in common: they aren’t real until the trip is over. The band starts playing and it’s beautiful. The girl on the keys gives the horns something beautiful to walk over. The show is like none other that I’ve been to. Everybody listens. Polite and silent. Nobody is drunk. I feel sophisticated. The music hits me and I start to daydream.
The past drifts through my mind like picture cells on a film roll. The band plays a Louis Armstrong number. I’m running with my little brother through the cornfield Dad grew in our backyard, when we lived in Kansas. The pictures in my head are golden and dingy. A blue sky, cloudless, and under it the grass bleached green. Then we’re back at Fort Monroe, and I’m sitting on a tree limb over a cannon, the voices of my friends off-screen as they call out, Come out, come out, wherever you are!. Then suddenly I’m in Northern Virginia and I’m trapped. We drive across the border into Arlington and I’m eleven, then sixteen, then twenty-three. Years dissipate in front of me before I can stop them.
The music stops and I’m back in New Orleans. It’s just a trip. A distraction, before we go back, and I’m where I’ve been for the past twelve years. Something about that feels miserable. Weezer Glasses stands back up and clears his throat.
“We got somethin’ real special for y’all today. We recently lost a friend of ours, and, well… we’re glad you’ll be here when we send him off.”
There’s music outside the room. It drifts in from the street, slowly at first, until it’s filling the room around us. A man in a red and white uniform bursts from the hallway with a trombone, and behind him there’s a marching band. A little boy in a gray hoodie plays a trumpet and people dance past him with pictures of a stranger I don’t know. He’s Black with one gold tooth, and in every photo holding drum sticks.
The music is beautiful. After a few minutes the band we were there to see joins in. They aren’t playing the same kind of music, like they were before. It’s still Jazz, but it also isn’t. It’s funeral music. Grief filtered through horns and trumpets and drums and keys and the strangest part is that I’m crying, now. The drummer is crying too. He tries to play but stops intermittently to sob. I’m crying for a man I haven’t met and so is a room full of strangers. I can see the back of Eric’s glasses have streaks on the lenses too. I watch the drummer and I know how his body feels: – how every cell in it hurts but there’s a show to do, so you keep playing, and I think back to the funerals I’ve seen at home, and the people I know that have passed, when I had to do my own show, do my own keeping on.
The performance ends and people clap. The grief stops and the band plays their next song. Jazz—the same kind they started with.
It doesn’t sound the same.
