DR07 - Dixie City Jam (50 page)

This is what it could become, I thought. All we had to do was
stop believing in ourselves and let the charlatans and the manipulators
convince us they have the answers that we don't. They aren't fashioned
from anvil and chain in a devil's forge, either. Judas Iscariot was us;
there was no metaphysical mystery to Will Buchalter and his sister and
the Calucci brothers. Their souls had the wingspan of moths; they
functioned because we allowed them to and gave them sanction; they
stopped functioning when that sanction was denied.

'What's wrong, Dave?' Alafair said from across the table.

'Nothing, little guy. Everything seemed too quiet for a
minute.'

'Then let's go hear the band at Preservation Hall,' she said.

'I think that's a fine idea,' I said, and rubbed the silky
smooth top of her head.

One beautiful evening that spring we went to the New Orleans
Jazz and Heritage Festival at the Fairgrounds. The Fat Man was up on
the stage with his band, his sequined sports coat painted with a
lavender glow, sweat streaking his walrus face like lines of clear
plastic, his pudgy hands and ringed sausage fingers pounding on the
piano keys. People began dancing in the infield, jitterbugging like
kids out of the 1940s, doing the bop, the dirty boogie, the twist, the
shag, arms and legs akimbo, full of fun and erotic innocence.

Everyone was there for it—Clete and Martina, Batist,
Lucinda
and Zoot (who wore his Marine Corps Reserve uniform), Pearly Blue and
her ex-con pals from the Work the Steps or Die, Motherfucker group, Ben
Motley, Hippo Bimstine and his family, black and white people, visitors
from Europe, Japanese businessmen, zydeco and Dixieland musicians,
granola hippies, Bourbon Street strippers, cross-dressers, French
Quarter hookers, coon-ass bikers, Jimmie Ryan and Count Carbonna, the
meltdowns, religious crazoids with placards warning of apocalyptic
destruction, even Brother Oswald Flat and his wife, who strolled about
the grounds, sharing a bag of pork rinds. The music rose into the sky
until it seemed to fuse with the gentle and pervasive light spreading
far beyond the racetrack, over oak-lined streets, paintless wood houses
with galleries and green window shutters, elevated highways, the
Superdome, the streetcars and palm-dotted neutral ground of Canal, the
scrolled iron balconies, colonnades, and brick chimneys in the Quarter,
Jackson Square and the spires of St. Louis Cathedral, the Café
du
Monde, the wide mud-churned sweep of the Mississippi, the shining
vastness of the wetlands to the south, and eventually the Gulf of
Mexico, where later the moon would rise like an enormous pearl that had
been dipped in a glass of burgundy.

It's funny what can happen when you lay bare the heart and
join the Earth's old dance through the heavens.

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