Free City of Refuge by Tom Piazza Page B

cheerfully.
    “Hurry up,” she said. “This band is giving me a headache.”
    They didn’t talk about much personal that first night; just music they had seen at the Fairgrounds, checking each other out. Craig gleaned a few things about Bobby and the woman, whose name was Jen. Bobby had grown up in New Orleans in Mid-City, went to Catholic school and then Loyola, wrote articles about music here and there. Jen came back half an hour later and insisted on leaving.
    “You here for the week?” Bobby asked Craig. “Come by—we’re having a crawfish boil tomorrow. It’s by Coliseum Square. You got wheels? You know where that is?”
    “I can find it.”
    “You know where Race Street is?”
    “I can find it.”
    Shaking his head, Bobby wrote down the address and phonenumber on a napkin. “Call me when you get lost and I’ll talk you in. It’ll be the house with the Sugar Boy records playing.”
    “You know about Sugar Boy?” Craig said.
    Bobby frowned, affronted. “My uncle had a bar on Rampart Street…” he began.
    “Oh fuck, here we go,” Jen said. “Don’t get him started on Uncle Snake. Come on; let’s go home and screw.”
    Smiling and shrugging at Craig, Bobby let Jen drag him away.
    The next night, Craig found his way to Bobby’s backyard, full of people standing around laughing and talking under Christmas lights strung from tree to tree. Jen walked immediately up to him and said, “I’m glad you lost the loafers. Bobby’s inside slicing something in the kitchen. I don’t cook because I don’t want to be a slave to some fat fuck who spends his days in an office and then expects me to be his whore when he gets home. You got a problem with that?”
    “I could make it my problem,” Craig answered.
    “Rumble!” she yelled, turning only one or two heads. “The kitchen door is over there.” She left his side, heading for a group of people in the far corner of the yard. That night Craig met half a dozen of the people who were still his closest friends, including Doug. Through Bobby, Craig had been able to step into the aquifer of New Orleans life—not just the music and streets and restaurants, but the home life—Bobby’s mom, who lived in Mid-City just off of Orleans Avenue near City Park, loved to cook big Italian meals and invite Bobby’s friends. Craig spent his first New Orleans Thanksgiving at Bobby’s mom’s house.
    They had shared half a house in Mid-City themselves for a year before Craig went back to Ann Arbor to finish grad school; later, Bobby’s house became the place where Craig and Alice would stay on trips down. Bobby pieced together a living writing about music for small local publications, Wavelength and OffBeat and Cultural Vistas . Craig always told his friend that he should try and expandto write for national magazines, but Bobby didn’t seem particularly interested; he was a creature of New Orleans, bred and born. There had been a moment after they had known each other for a couple of years when Craig raised the question one too many times, and Bobby’s reaction let him know that he shouldn’t bring it up again. Behind the exchange lurked the fact that Bobby was a native New Orleanian and Craig, no matter how much he loved the city, was not. He let it drop and never picked it up again.
    They went with Jen and Alice to Oktoberfest at Deutsches Haus on Galvez Street and ate knockwurst and sauerkraut and laughed for hours, danced the chicken dance to the oom-pah band. Alice and Jen, slightly cool to one another at first, discovered that they shared a guilty taste for Neil Diamond, and one night Craig and Bobby listened in horror as their partners sang the entire lyric to “Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show” outside the Maple Leaf. They danced to Snooks Eaglin or the Radiators at Tipitina’s, went to second lines on Sundays in Central City. Alice had always loved it, and Craig knew he would marry her and have children with her. She was, he thought, like him;