"May the New Year Bless and Keep You"

* * *

Between Christmas Eve and Epiphany, New Orleans' temperatures touched the seventies and the thirties.

Sunny days on the levee were so charming you wanted to kiss the water and wave to tourists on the Natchez. Cold days sent us scurrying out to City Park, delighted by the Museum of Art's "Raised to the Trade," an exhibition of the artisans (mostly free men of color) who created New Orleans' famed architectural details (closes January 12).

On the weekends huge cruise ships lay upriver spewing smoke sailors dub "efficiency haze" over the Riverfront Hilton. "The Vomitation Floatation," L. A. Norma calls these ships. "Why does their strange sickness end at shore's edge? I mean, why is it not invading hotel kitchens and such places?"

Perhaps it does, and goes noticed only as the-bug-going-round that most of us don't get. A travel writer friend said the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta says not to worry. That worries the hell out of me.

* * *

"Noonan nonsense," L. A. Norma said one cold morning. She held the WALL STREET JOURNAL at arms length and read aloud: "I think it is an insufficiently commented-upon irony that cigarette prohibition and the public shaming it entails is the work of modern liberals."

"Give me a break, woman," Norma snorted. "How many snotty little Repugnicans have refused to give me a match for my cigarette?"

"Hundreds, tens, over one? I asked.

"Who knows?" she said with a wave of her hand, "but both smoking guilt and non-smoking guilt can not be laid at the feet of Liberals."

"I don't know," I said pouring coffee, "their influence is everywhere these days but the voting booth . . ." Norma lit an unfiltered Camel with a match she provided for herself and finished my sentence, " . . . foreign policy, and the economy."

* * *

The pitfall of Christmas-depression trapped and released me. War clouds blocked the Sun, and gloom (black was the fashion color, for Christ's sake!) darkened this Season of Light. Three days a week, for the last twelve years, I have been the information man inside the marbled booth at the New Orleans Shopping Centre. The job has been eliminated. My former supervisor (already departed) left behind a Christmas present of a quilted wool shirt wrapped in pretty paper. The shirt is dark and warm. Not black, but not green and red by a light year.

* * *

On the levee the skies are blue, and the lady on my left is stretched out under blankets, reading her book in the Sun. She admired my new shirt. I like it, too, and did not offer it to her. The older man who had been sitting by her side left to see about going to "Rotterdam, not Amsterdam," leaving her alone to move her blankets to follow the Sun.

The Sun felt wonderful. I drank orange juice and ate from a huge bag of salt-free peanuts bought at the A. & P. In my shirt pocket I felt the warmth of the tin tube holding a ten-dollar cigar, arrived in that day's mail from my Son in distant, cold Illinois.

One day at Croissant d'Or Patisserie we ran into Roy Blount, Jr. (He has a Crown assignment for a walking-around New Orleans book). Also, a very tall black photographer told us he was from Cuba, now lives in Faubourg Marigny, and did not want to give his name. And Joshua Clark, the very blond publisher of French Quarter Fiction, gave us a copy of the book. If that isn't a "walking-around New Orleans" day, add this: pasted on the USA TODAY box, in front of the Patisserie, was a poster printed in Fabled Sixties style. It showed gray-to-black tombstones with heavy black over-words saying, "War Keeps Kids off the Street."

The past shall be my tomorrow, and I am too old for it.

* * *

My job ended for good with hugs and going away gifts, at six p.m., Christmas Eve. Corporate America is nothing if not ironic. At seven I met an editor from distant college days and his wife, for Sazeracs at the Sazerac Room, and a walk through the Fairmont's Christmas tunnel. Wow! We walked into the empty Blue Room, sat on the bandstand, and told stories of forgotten WWL radio broadcasts.

I left my bicycle in their room and we walked to a Reveillon Dinner at the Hunt Room at Hotel Monteleone. Afterwards, we drank cocktails named Gennifer's Luscious Lips, at Gennifer Flowers' Kelsto Club, across from staid old Antoine's. We listened to tales from Finis Shelnutt, Gennifer's husband-bartender, and watched Midnight Mass from Saint Louis Cathedral (our supposed destination), on their luscious TV. By the way, Gennifer's Luscious Lips are made from Southern Comfort, yet another libation birthed in New Orleans.

We got to the Cathedral as the Celebrants were exiting. (Great timing, or what?) We went in only hoping to see decorations and graves, and ended up shaking hands with His Excellency Archbishop Alfred C. Hughes, the spiritual leader of Our Fair Swamp. My old friend and I (former, unmolested altar boys) said meekly, "Hello Father" (writers are not always good on their feet).

Next stop, the flashy Parade Disco overlooking rue Bourbon, for a sip from chalices proffered by half naked young white men. Then, on to hear Johnny Gordon at the piano bar at Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop. We hailed a taxi while hanging on the corner street lamp, singing "You came a long way from Saint Louis . . ."

I got home at five a.m.

Late Christmas afternoon my friends awoke to find in their room a variation of a childhood dream, my bicycle under the hall light. At home, earlier, I found a message that a new job at the Rhino Art Gallery was mine.

The season's fashion statement may have been black leather jackets, but it was a holiday full of good food, music, friends and frequent visits from the elfin Mr. Booze.

Though I may no longer believe, a Christmas Eve meeting between friends and the silk-duded leader of the flock-in-celebration is no small event. Inferring the Holy Man recoiled at our touch is probably wrong. Ours was not a bumping in the night, but a purposeful approach as we stood atop the grave of Marigny himself, before the Crèche of the great Saint Louis Cathedral of New Orleans.

"He just mistook you for the Governor," Norma said.

May the coming year be no worse than the old one, and (just in case) may Ralph Brennan's Bacco continue their ten-cent martinis.