We had voted to drive straight through. (Nobody else had liked Texas much either, apparently.) We could always pull off at a motel in the night, we figured, if no one was up to driving. Carynne had mapped us a route that clipped through a corner of New Mexico, 969 miles to be exact from […]
Here’s what I remember about us leaving Texas: a brutal sun sent light and heat through us like arrows and the black top of the parking lot almost audibly sizzled while we loaded up. My sneakers felt tacky on the bottom and made me do this little marching band step from one foot to the […]
Of all the parts of the country I’d been in, Texas was the strangest-feeling yet. We were due to stay three nights in a motel on the edge of Austin, the first night to sleep off the drive, the second night after the Spring Weekend concert at University of Texas, and the third night after […]
After Bart and I ate, we sat around in the mostly-empty restaurant in no hurry to leave. Late night patrons still laughed loud at the bar in the back and waitstaff drifted back and forth with new bunches of fresh flowers for the tables and full salt shakers. Now that I was full, and probably […]
Bourbon Street was the same as last night, with people wandering through the bright neon-lit humidity looking as much at each other as at the store fronts and bars. Music poured out of every doorway and was sort of soothing after a while, the booming bass of one place fading into the cajun wheedle of […]
We each did a pretty good job of avoiding the other after that. At one point all of us were sitting around sharing beer and stronger substances with the openings bands (you guessed it, like everyone else we’d met in New Orleans, they were ultra-friendly) and having a wide-ranging group conversation, but that didn’t really […]
Our Kevin clapped me on the shoulder as I went one way and he went the other. I came around the back of the stage to the stairs that led up to the backstage kitchenette, and stopped short. Ziggy was sitting on the steps, his hands hanging between his knees and his lower lip hidden […]
We waited around a bit more, but Ziggy didn’t reappear at the hotel. Bart wrote a note and left it on the bed with the name and address of the club just in case, and we took a cab up there. Tipitina’s was like an oversized honky tonk, rustic wood, minimally fancy lights; you could […]
In the morning I woke up in Bart’s room–actually it wasn’t morning, it was just past noon, and Bart was elsewhere and Chris was blow drying his hair in the bathroom. My body felt as hot and wrinkly as the clothes I had slept in. In fact, I had slept with my card key in […]
I lay for a long time on top of the bedspread with my clothes on, thinking, thinking. I couldn’t even remember half of what we had just said, which was unusual. Usually I could play back a traumatic exchange like a movie. In fact, I was usually helpless to stop the endless replays. But it […]