4.

The beauty of being from New Orleans is that each time you return you either know everyone or you think you do. Like all people in all places, New Orleanians are as much symbol as substance. The homeless man with the eye patch. You’ve seen him in your dreams. The black kid with the weed leaf on his baseball cap. You scored from him one night in the late 80’s. The old black woman holding two Maison Blanche shopping bags. Why, she used to be ya’ll’s occasional maid.

And this same gravity works for strangers as well. I might rave to you about a secret bar off Prytania Street where only the locals go, where there’s a buzzer on the door and once upon a time they used to let you cash checks. We’ll enter together, you under my arm, me ready to play the old songs on the juke box and marvel at how the proprietor had dressed the ceilings for the Carnival season. Behind the bar, where once stood Maginnis or Big Brenda or Little Edie or even Miss Bertie herself there would be a stranger, a young dude in a baseball cap, someone I’d never seen before but you had, you went to high school together or you knew him from a restaurant in Austin or something like that.

New Orleans is a city where you will come to know your ineffable destiny if only you pay attention to the symbols.

And again, in a city as small and cloistered as New Orleans, when one wants to find one’s friends at a parley the size of the Jazz Fest and they tell you what side of the immense crowd they can be found, one need only strip to the waist and buy the first of many cans of cheap cold beer and walk the periphery of the masses until you find your friends kicking a hacky sack around, looking salty and drunk and even a bit edgy. What’s the problem you ask. Why, they’re out of weed. And you, the Texas messiah, you have come to their succor, for you come from a place where the ganja is a bit easier to find and a QP is only 200 and that lasts about a month or two. Sure, you brought the weed, an alligator baggie of ditchweed and seeds and stems and even a pack of papers, the biggest size, bedsheets your friends laugh. But those are laughs of great gladness as Feganowitz rolls the biggest number anyone has seen, fat as bacon and the girls are on their feet, the sun is hitting their well-formed bikini breasts so perfectly and the girl with the straw hat, cocoa colored and elegant like you’d expect to find in New Orleans, some Creole beauty that someone wrote a song about in the 70’s, she’ll be there and the sun will come through the holes in her straw hat creating a thousand solar freckles on her pretty face.

And of course they all loved Red Mark. What wasn’t to like? He could hold his hooch and he let others do the talking and when he spoke he was not removing your doubt as to his foolishness and he smoked Marlboro Reds which I didn’t and so he was different and made smoker friends and he didn’t smoke weed so no one had to worry about giving up their share. And he was in love with an American girl and so he was no threat to anyone’s penis. He just drank and smoked and took in the controlled chaos that is the Jazz Fest.

Which is: thirty outdoor stages with crowds ranging from dozens to thousands.

Which is every kind of animal that has ever lived except the cockroach fried or stewed into gumbo or jambalaya.

Which are the aforementioned tubs of icy suds found at nearly every turn.

Which is the untold holiness of the Gospel Tent.

Which are tents of crafts and goods so diverse as to give one ennui of past lives in the markets of Zanzibar.

Which is a panoply of music that seems to cover all ranges and attitudes. Perhaps Scandinavian death metal is in short supply but there is everything else, but mainly jazz and rock and zydeco and blues.

Which is: Red Mark standing about twenty feet away from Sonny Rollins watching as his idol blows. Later he would say it was like meeting Jesus or Stalin or Attila the Hun. A sound that existed in a thousand nights of record spinning, a sound that encapsulated entire mountain ranges of the mind, a sound that reminded you why you were living, why you were alive, a sound that gave you hope for all of humanity if only we could put down our jihad and our pork sandwich and come together under a sun-drenched tent in the insufferable heat with a fan blowing on the crowd and Sonny telling you just what was what and where was where and who was who and why was why and Thank God at last how it could be done, by you, by me, by anyone, the raw potential for greatness that was in each Individual Soul. Sonny had it, Red Mark had it, I had it and if you had been there that day you would have had it too.