The contract

Darcy left New Orleans before The Thing but has recently moved back. She is a friend and ex-roommate of my ex- underage quasi-paramour. Since she returned, we have hung out a few times and a friendship seems to be developing. She is a writer who is trying to figure out how to balance the writing with making a living. This is a dilemma I am familiar with. We have made a contract that we each will write at least 300 words a day for at least five days a week for a month. If either of us breaks the contract, we will have to apply for a job at Hooters. This is a particularly harrowing possibility for me, because I have no doubt that the Hooters recruiter would laugh my middle-aged ass out of the room.

Lucky for me, I am a writer of creative non-fiction. By definition, that makes me at least a little bit of a narcissist, and for a narcissist it is easy to write 300 words a day about yourself and your ever-so-interesting thoughts. By the end of this sentence I will be almost to 200 words.

Darcy and I made this contract at the Saturn Bar. I like Darcy an awful lot, and I like the Saturn Bar an awful lot, too. Lately I have been having more positive New Orleans experiences and have found myself second-guessing my decision to leave.

But every day I also find a reason to get the hell out of here. Today I was tired of my mopey-ass roommate and my too-familiar neighborhood, so I went to work on my paper at a coffee shop across town on Frenchman Street. It so happens that the ex-underaged-paramour used to work at this coffee shop. When I got hungry, I walked down to Decatur Street in the Quarter to have lunch at Coop’s Place, a bar that also serves very good food. I had red beans with fried chicken and a cup of gumbo, and it was scrumptious. Sitting next to me were two drunk middle aged construction workers who glommed on to me. They were both the type who used to be be good looking before they became middle-aged drunks. They were having an endlessly repetitive conversation that they’d obviously had on many previous drunken afternoons:

Drunk 1 (the smarter, more talkative drunk): I’m just saying, I love my daughters, man. Fuck everyone else. I got two daughters in Chicago, they’re both in the National Honor Society. They’re smart, you know? I guess I did something right.

Drunk 2 (the more belligerent, coon-ass drunk): Man, shut up. I’m tired of listening to you.

Drunk 1: Fuck you, man. I love my daughters.

Drunk 2: Shut up or I’m gonna hit you.

Drunk 1: Yeah, go head and hit me. Yeah right. See what I got to put up with. I gotta live with this motherfucker and work with him. He can’t do shit without me, I gotta watch him all the time. You’re laughing, yeah, fuck you. I’m sick of this town, man. People down here are stupid. I miss my daughters in Chicago. I’m gonna call my daughters. (He then gets out his cell phone but can’t seem to figure out how to dial it, leaving us all to wonder how his daughters would feel about getting a Sunday afternoon drunken phone call from dad.)

They were almost charming in their drunken fucked up doofus way, but they were also a New Orleans stereotype of Sunday afternoon drunks. I’m not picking on them for being drunk on this particular Sunday afternoon, but it seemed apparent that they were drunk on most Sunday afternoons and other afternoons as well The bar was full of regular Sunday afternoon drunks and the kind of New Orleans characters who essentially live in bars. It was a relief, it felt clean, to walk out of there and get away.