Free City of Refuge by Tom Piazza

lead them in “There’s a Hole in the Bottom of the Sea,” or “The Green Grass Grows All Around,” or “John Jacob Jingle-heimer Schmidt.” Sometimes the other members of the Combustibles would drop in and help out. He had a way of bobbing his head when he spoke to people and looking up at their face from underneath; he would come up to someone as if he had a great secret and, looking around, put his hand to their ear, draw near and whisper “I’m going to get another beer.” Back when Craig was still new in town he had interviewed Doug for Gumbo , and Doug had said, “Man, sometimes I feel like I’m just a hologram, like I’m here because there’s all this great music and food. Like all I want to do is just express that stuff, you know?” Craig loved the image—a person who was entirely a function of the community around him. Craig and Doug were warm neighborhood friends, not late-night secret sharers, but Doug represented to Craig a lot of things he thought he might have liked to be had the road curved differently and he had been a musician instead of an editor.
    As the time approached for the party, Doug left to go out to Metairie and pick up two sacks of crawfish. The guests started arriving around six p.m., setting down presents inside on the picnic table and beer and wine on the kitchen counter where Alice was still chopping ingredients for salsa. Mike and Jane brought over the birthday cake. Craig’s best friend Bobby and his girlfriend Jen arrived. The two ad sales reps from Gumbo came together. Arthur Borofsky, Gumbo ’s publisher, arrived, with a large and elaborately wrapped gift. The guests made their way out into the backyard under the big tree, Christmas lights were strung up over the big wooden table, and around the fence several hooked strings of lights in the shape of red chili peppers. Scott, the managing editor, arrived; Chris and Lisa from down the block with their daughter Bonnie and their five-year-old Nick, Fred and Tanya with Walker and Justine and Jenny. Craig had hooked up the speakers in the backyard and had his iTunes run of Huey Piano Smith and the Clowns doing all their New Orleans hits like “Rockin’ Pneumonia” and “Don’t You Know, Jockamo” and “Well, I’ll Be John Brown,” which the kids loved because of all the funny voices the singers used. Eventually the house and yard were filled with forty adults, maybe more, and at least twenty-five kids, half of them prekindergarten. Some of the men gathered around the television in the living room to watch that night’s preseason Saints game against Baltimore.
    Craig ran around attending to details, small emergencies, transport of food and emptying of garbage bags. Few things made him happier than this, having his friends in his house, with the music he loved playing and his children happy with other children, Derek standing in the kitchen joking with Chris. The men were wearing Hawaiian shirts or other relaxed clothes, and shorts, and the children drew with crayons and Magic Markers on big sheets of butcher paper on the picnic table in the dining room. Later they would clear it off for the birthday cake and all of that. “You got me rockin’ when Iought to be rollin’,” Craig sang along with The Clowns, icing down a six-pack of beer someone had brought. “Don’t you just know it?…” Ben, the cook from Siesta Restaurant, leaned over and whispered a quick joke in Craig’s ear, and he was gone before Craig could straighten up and answer.
    When he was able to take a break, Craig stepped outside and found Bobby, Jen and Doug, standing in a cluster. Doug had put on giant rubber Halloween monster feet. (Someone pointed at them and said, “Where’d you get those?” And Bobby said, “Those are his own feet.”)
    “So are we going to see Rickles in Biloxi or what?” Craig opened with. The comedian was coming to one of the Gulf Coast casinos in late September, and Craig was going to use his Gumbo credentials to