Crescent City Love

Twenty-some years after that first, fateful trip to the Crescent City, I found myself once again wandering the French Quarter. I was in college, an older, returning student listlessly toying with a degree that I wouldn’t finish for another twenty-odd years hence.

The roommate of one of the guys I hung out with lived in a suburb of New Orleans and invited the group to crash on his parents’ floor for the weekend. Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles series was all the rage then (the Tom Cruise years), and it was something of a pilgrimage for college kids close enough for a road trip. We wandered around, checked out occult shops, and ate very bad tourist trap food. New Orleans still held an allure, but I could tell we weren’t doing it right.

As day elided into night, things improved. I remember a bar with a pool table in one of those wide open to the street kind of spaces. We played game after game until deciding it was time to wander once again.

Live music spilled out of nightclubs as we passed. I don’t think we ever left Bourbon Street, at least not on purpose. The guys wanted to take me to Pat O’Brien’s for a Hurricane. I wrinkled my proto-hipster nose at the idea, but we went anyway. We were fortunate enough to end up out on the patio. I don’t remember if the fountain was flaming or not, but a New Orleans patio at night was another formative experience.

It must have been in the early months of the spring semester. Damp and cold (for New Orleans, anyway), with lights strung through the branches of the trees. Reflections of those lights and the candles on the tables sparkled on wet leaves and moss-fringed bricks. The hurricanes were as sweet and silly as I figured they would be, but it was a rite of passage and we enjoyed them immensely. Mossy, plant-filled courtyards with fountains were added to the aesthetic. A roving photographer captured our group, my Lestat wannabees smoldering for all they were worth.

Our group giggled and weaved its way down to Cafe du Monde to cap off the evening. Yet more amazement. No walls at all, the most welcome hot coffee and sugary fried-pillow beignets in the middle of the night, with the darkened, empty streets of the Quarter all around. Maybe not the perfect reunion, but the love was definitely still strong. I would be back.