Every year I attend the national AWP conference. AWP stands for associated writing programs, an umbrella organization for writers, teachers and publishers across the country. For five days everyone comes together for scholarly presentations and panel discussions with such titles as ‘Judy Blume: the Challenges and Pleasures of Writing About Teenage Girls’ or ‘To Censor or Not to Censor: the F-word in the Classroom’. So, picture it: a couple thousand writers taking over convention centers in Kentucky, Baltimore, Toronto, and—this year—New Orleans.
I flew in late Tuesday night and took a cab to the hotel, smack dab in the middle of the French Quarter. I was sharing a room with Lott, my friend and fellow teacher, who'd arrived that morning. “Hurry up,” he said as I walked in. He was in front of the mirror, fixing the barely perceptible Mohawk in his perfect hair. “We’re going to the Dragon’s Den and after that—“
“It’s nearly midnight,” I told him, flopping down with the AWP schedule of events. “We’ve got to be up at seven to make ‘Non-Gender Specific Pronouns in Erotic Poetry’.”
Lott turned and looked at me. “We’re in New Orleans,” he said, heavy on the Orleans.
“We’re at AWP,” I corrected. “Remember? Professional development?”
“But you don’t even write poetry! Let alone erotic poetry, I mean, when was the last time you got laid, anyhow?”
Okay, so I work a lot. I know that everybody works a lot, but I work a lot in the way that any psychologist—had I the time to see a psychologist—might call an “avoidance mechanism.” As in, I’m fairly screwed up but I don’t have the time to do anything about said screwed-up-ed-ness because I’m too busy at work. “Ain’t nothing a little fun won’t cure!” Dan says—Dan is the guy I have dinner with occasionally but it won’t go any further than that ‘cause I’m too busy at work—and I say, “Fun isn’t part of my five year plan.”
Lott sat on the edge of my bed with a very serious face. The kind of face one might wear during an alcoholic's intervention (me, I don’t drink much. Half a glass of wine and I’m out to lunch). “Megan,” he said. “You need to have some fun.”
“No, Lott,” I said. “I need to go to bed.”
I attended seven panels Day One of AWP: eight to ten, ten to eleven thirty, noon to one-thirty, one thirty to three, three to five, five to seven and seven-thirty to nine.
“You’re in New Orleans and you spend thirteen hours in a conference hall?” Lott said that night. He was preparing to go out. I was in bed, preparing for tomorrow’s retrospective on Women Writers of the late 1800’s.
The next night, when I got back to the hotel, there was a voicemail message from Randy, the chair of the fiction department where I teach. “Megan,” it said. “I order you to get out of that room. Get yourself dolled up—we’re going dancing.” I pushed delete and practiced my lie in front of the mirror: “Why no, I never got that message!” I said, in my best Oh my officer am I speeding? voice. The truth is, I’m afraid to dance in public. I hadn’t admitted that to myself, though. To myself, I said: “You’ve got to be bright eyed for tomorrow’s panel on Finnegan’s Wake.”
I spent day three of AWP in similar dorkishness, and would’ve done the same day four had I not got a phone call at three o’clock in the morning.
“Get your ass up and get in a cab,” Lott yelled—more like slurred. Yell-slurred—over the music. “And get a pen, I’m giving you an address.”
“Do you know what time it is?” I said.
“We're at the Funky Butt,” he said, and I hung up.
He called right back. “I’m not stopping ‘til you come,” he said. “I’ve had four shots of Jameson so there’s no way you can talk me out of it, I’m totally unreasonable right now.”
To this day, I can’t tell you why I went, why I hauled out of bed and asked the concierge for directions. But I can tell you that decision utterly changed my life.
I stepped out of the hotel and was shocked to see the streets so alive—I thought I’d be alone in the dark like Chicago at that hour, but this was the French Quarter and there were people everywhere, laughing and drinking, walking with arms locked and greeting complete strangers like they’d known each other all their lives. “Here honey, you need some of this!” said a bead-draped redhead, handing me a styrofoam cup filled with some kind of fruity daiquiri. I’d very soon learn that if I walked into one of the numerous, open-all-night liquor booths on every cobblestone corner, I could refill that stryofoam cup for a dollar. I stood there in front of my hotel, drinking that daquiri like it was juice and watching the crowd pulse around me. It was then that I heard music—
START MUSIC (Low Down Brass Band playing some New Orleans funk)
(read on top of music) —now, there was music coming from everywhere, the bars and stores and second-story balcony windows—but this was different. This was coming from the next street, right around the corner, and I followed the sound. The strange thing was, it was moving. I rounded the corner and could hear that I’d just missed it so I rounded the next corner, and the next, all the corners of cobblestone streets set like a labyrinth and all the while the music was getting louder until finally—there. A marching band. A full marching band at three o’clock in the morning. They were all suited up, complete with duck-bill hats and feathered plumes, spats on the boots, and a hundred buttons. There’s trumpets and drums and trombones and clarinets with Dixieland-style sound, thirty people strong all step-marching and moving their instruments in rhthym. There was a crowd of people following behind them, everybody dancing and trying to copy the coreographed marching movements. I could feel the daquiri icy in my head, and it was so late, maybe I was still sleeping, maybe I was dreaming and you can do anything in a dream, right? What the hell, I thought—and I did it. I joined. “I don’t remember the last time I danced!” I yelled to the guy next to me who was wearing a giant foam carrot on his head. “That’s the saddest thing I ever heard!” he yelled, and then we laughed, and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d laughed, either. I suddenly felt this rush—the rush of the repressed, we’ll call it—and I ran around the band, passed them on the sidewalk and shimmied into the street in front of them. I marched high, my knees coming up level to my stomach, and tossed an imaginary baton in the air.
That’s when I saw the street the concierge had told me to take, so I walked backwards and waved goodbye at the drummatser. He smiled, and I turned back around and skipped off down my street.
They followed me. The entire band and the growing crowd behind them followed me around another corner, and again. And again, and of course I wasn’t really leading them, of course I was just walking the same route they were taking … but when you’re drunk—laughy, silly, happily drunk—you can believe the fantastic. You can say, this music is following me! and for a moment, your life is magic.
I got to the Funky Butt, a wild, second-floor jazz club over a jam-packed cigar bar, waved goodbye to my band—
STOP MUSIC
—and ran up the stairs to find Lott. He was dancing in a huge crowd, and I rushed over to tell him my news.
“I led a marching band!” I yelled.
“I lit my pants on fire!” he yelled back, and put a shot in my hands. And then another, and another and dancing all night long, me and Lott and a million people I’d never met but somehow knew. Randy was there, too, smoking cigars and spinning pretty girls around in circles. He dipped me low to the ground and, when I was down there, inches from the floor he asked: “having fun?” he asked. Fun, FUN—who knew! I didn’t, not me, not this girl, who this girl was I had suddenly become? One thing’s for sure—she was waaaaay more interesting than the one at the erotic poetry seminar.
There was a click in my brain just then: seminar. Seminar. Fuck, what time is it? Didn’t I have a job, what was I—“I have to go!” I yelled at Lott.
“No, stay! We’ll get breakfast! We’ll have mimosas!” he yelled back, but I was already running down the stairs, out the door and—
START MUSIC
There they were. They were waiting for me: the trombones. The clarinets. The drums and the dancing crowd. “You look like you need this,” said a bead-draped brunette, handing me another Styrofoam cup.
“Wow,” said Lott, appearing at my elbow. “You really do have your own band!” He grabbed my hand and we walked into the street, tossing our batons as we went.
STOP MUSIC
I don’t remember the rest of that trip. I don’t remember the flight back to Chicago, the cab ride home to Humboldt Park. I do remember my blaring alarm clock at six a.m. The meeting at eight, the stack of student papers on my desk that needed to be read, the emails to deal with, the bills, the worrying, stressing, running late. I was running late. I showered quickly and ran down the front stairs with my hair still wet. I searched for my car keys, hoping I didn’t forget anything, coffee, I forgot coffee, I needed coffee and I threw open the front—
START MUSIC—STOP MUSIC
And shut it just as fast. It can’t be, I thought, and opened the door
START MUSIC—STOP MUSIC
And shut it. I’m hallucinating, I said aloud, and opened the door again.
START MUSIC AND CONTINUE
There, on the lawn—my tiny square of Humboldt Boulevard three-flat lawn was the marching band from New Orleans. Same duck-billed hats, same spats, same dancing crowd behind them. Their music blended in with the West Side noise—the traffic and yelling and little kids screaming and seriously, had I lost my mind? Had I killed too many brain cells with those fruity Louisiana daiquiris? Panicked, I shut the door.
STOP MUSIC
And peeked at them through the eyehole. They waited patiently, instruments at the ready—1 1000, 2 1000, 3 1000 and I cracked the door juuuust a little bit—
START MUSIC—STOP MUSIC
And slammed it hard. FUCK! I ran back upstairs to my apartment, through my apartment, out the back door and down the back stairs. I thought, I can give them the shake, just gotta be fast enough, gotta get out the door and—
START MUSIC AND CONTINUE
BASTARDS, there they were! That fucking band, all lined up in unison and playing something decidedly chipper. I was in no condition to handle anything chipper! I was in no condition to handle ANYTHING. I stood before them, watching the clarinets swing back and forth. “Okay,” I told them. “I give up … let’s go have some fun.”
They followed me everywhere I went that day. And every day since.
They’re there—in the produce section at the Jewel. Near the free-weights at the Y. Pumping gas at the Citgo. They stand in a line at the back of my classroom, and whenever I make a joke the drummer does a BA-BA-BAM. When I get on the el to go home, they’re there, playing Dixieland for the commuters. When Dan comes over for dinner, they play—something slow. Romantic … they’re rooting for me …. They’ve become a part of how I do things. How I live my life … like, I’ll be running late but it doesn’t matter, I HAVE to stop and hear some music. Even now—up here on this stage, I can see them in the back, by the bar. They want me to loosen up a little. Shake my shoulders, give a little shimmie. We’ll leave here tonight—you’re all welcome to come—and I’ll lead everyone down the street—Wabansia to Elston and Ashland from there. We’ll pick up a crowd as we go, and all of us will dance in the street.