New Year, New Orleans (an excerpt from “The Other Guy Won”)
This is an excerpt from my essay “The Other Guy Won.” Though based on events from my ordinary life, I want it to read like an adventure tale, its anxious female narrator finding power in a world she is compelled to build from an amalgam of fragments—past and future, personal and political, fantastic and real.
On the very last morning of 2016, Sam and I took our first flight together, from Brooklyn to New Orleans. That night, we ate oysters on Bourbon Street at a place called Desire, then walked hand in hand through the Seventh Ward to hear music at a club that had just opened on an otherwise dismal stretch of houses and vacant lots. It was called Po’ Boys and the headlining act was two women in ghost-lace dresses who played violins and crooned folk songs. A drummer coated in tattoos and piercings inserted fragments of skull-thumping noise between their haunting feminine harmonies.
At midnight everyone moved outside to set off fireworks in the parking lot. I was afraid to light the Roman candle a new friend offered me but stood behind Sam as his flew with a whizzz and a popp and lots of smoke and light. It was 2017!
We kissed deeply, absorbed in the happy crowd of old and young bodies and haircuts and clothes and shining eyes, buzzing brains that pretended a fake future, professed a love of nature amid the chaos of the city, long limbs that told how fucked-up and beautiful we could be at once.
We were both innocent and grimy; it had rained that night and, as we would learn in the week that followed, New Orleans seems to have a way, even in winter, of always coating you in its weather.
For seven days, as we wandered that haunted, pulsing, breathing city, our new president-elect was absent from the conversations we had with each other and all the kind and crazy people we met. For seven nights and mornings, we rested in an old house that sighed with the changing weather. Our New Orleans bed felt like a magic carpet, like Sam and I were floating, swimming, gathering strength for the year ahead. I stared up at the ceiling fan and talked about Beirut and my family there, and Sam talked about wanting to go to Tehran to see his family, as he never had. I imagined we would go to those faraway places together, but I never said it. The fan whirred and groaned.
New Orleans was like a rainbow-colored shooting star that fizzled into the grayness of winter. Brooklyn that January felt dead like a cemetery, gray like a tombstone.