We arrived at a jazz club, Snug Harbor, where a gospel choir was finishing their ecstatic set in the back room.  Ernesto pulled up to the bar alone, speaking to no one and immediately nursing a glass of Chartreuse.  I ran into the bathroom and let a surge of bloody, fibrous diarrhea blast across what had been snow white porcelain.  There were pieces of lentils from that afternoon’s lunch with Matilda, each lentil now encased in what could looked like guts and little pieces of flesh, what very well could have been the lining of my colon.  This was my fourteenth trip to the bathroom that day.  I came out, out-of-breath and weak, but still determined to make the best of the night, the achievement of having actually driven through New Orleans to find this jazz club in the French Quarter, even finding a great parking spot right outside.  Matilda appeared with a glass of whiskey.  “Here.  Drink this slowly.  It will help your stomach.  And in a few minutes you can go up and play.  Ernesto talked to the owner.”

“What?”

“You’ll go up and play,” Ernesto answered for her, turning from the bar and motioning to the stage in the back room.

“Play?  Play here?”

“Yeah.  Play whatever.  I don’t know…”  He looked at me, suddenly puzzled.  “You don’t want to?  This is Snug Harbor, man!  The people who have played here…”

“Okay,” I sighed, feeling faint.

“They just finished, actually,” said the owner from behind the bar, pointing to the back room.  He looked big and intimidating, but also warm, with a white beard like Santa Claus.  “Go on up.” 

Not unlike one of the girls in the piano lab back in Augusta, Georgia, I followed his command automatically, nudging through the dispersing crowd and climbing onto the stage, sitting before a shiny but smudged Yamaha grand.  I emptied my pockets and adjusted the bench, and had only played the first note of the first movement of Copland’s Four Piano Blues when an arm shot across my line of sight, startling me and sending my hands off the keyboard like it was a hot stove.  “Sorry,” said the pianist from the last act, a cigarette hanging from his mouth.  “Just let me clear up my shit.”  He grabbed his music — I hadn’t even noticed it — and jumped offstage.

Of all of the pianos I had played in America 88x50, this piano in Snug Harbor, with just a slightly lighter action and just a slightly brighter sound, worked more perfectly for my music than any other instrument yet.  The accents I played sounded just bright enough, the runs unhurried, the phrases perfectly shaped.  I was immersed totally in this piano.  First Copland, then some Griffes, then Ginastera, then Adams, then the Barber Nocturne I’d recently committed to memory, and then I made it up as I went along, improvising, and after about an hour I stepped down.  No one clapped, but there were people scattered throughout the room who had been listening.

“Sounded wonderful!” said Matilda.

The owner handed me a stack of CDs — “on the house” — and we started talking like old friends.  Suddenly his face distorted into something a bit horrified, a bit disappointed.  I wound around to find Ernesto on all fours behind me, his back arched like a cat, heaving milky white vomit laced with brown strands of food onto the floor that poured from his mouth like a faucet and splattered in all directions.  He was gasping for air, but when he tried to exhale only more vomit came out.

“All right.  It’s okay,” said the owner calmly. “It’s my fault.  I fucked him up.” 

I was on my feet, backing away, nodding numbly at what the owner said as a man knocked against me from behind, rushing to Ernesto and handing Matilda a plastic water cup.  “Go to the bathroom and finish up,” the man said, kneeling.  Matilda handed the cup to Ernesto.  He promptly spat in it before throwing up again.  ”Go to the bathroom and finish up,” repeated the man.

“I can’t fucking move, man!” he howled. 

Here was one of New Orleans’s most respected classical musicians at his worst, and there I was, like a child, almost completely unable to process the sight.  He had been so intense behind the organ at that morning’s Easter service, so bewildering, and now he seemed — well — only human.  “I’m fucking puking on the fucking floor, man,” he cried.  “Leave me the fuck alone!”  A bartender tossed a paper bag from behind the bar in Ernesto’s direction and it landed just in front of his face on top of the steaming puddle of vomit.

Matilda and I propped him on his feet and dragged him across the floor toward the door.  “Great meeting you!” I called to the owner.  ”Thank you!  It was amazing!”  We hoisted Ernesto into the car, Matilda squeezed again into the backseat, and I tore away from Snug Harbor, begging for the fastest directions back to their apartment.  I had to go to the bathroom again. 

The streets were barely wide enough for my car and was traffic ahead.  ”Oh, they’re shooting a movie!” said Matilda from the backseat.  I felt a spasm in my bowels, my stomach gurgling, pushing downward.  I was sweating.  This could get much, much worse.  Then it did.

“I’m gonna’ puke again,” moaned Ernesto, leaning against his door.

“NO!”  On impulse, I reached across his body and swung the door open and he went tumbling sideways before I caught him.

“Nevermind.  I’m okay,” he said breathlessly.  My heart was convulsing.  I could not let this man throw up in my car, which already smelled like gasoline, medicine, and beer [a six pack of bottles had exploded in the heat].  The pressure building in my colon, it felt like I might let it go right here in the traffic.  I bit the insides of my cheeks, closing Ernesto’s door as traffic began moving again.  Oblivious, Matilda admired the movie shoot and continued explaining points of interest.  “Oh God!” Ernesto interrupted again.

“It’s happening now?!” I shouted in a panic.

“Yes!

I screeched the car again on the cobblestones and once more flung the door open, reaching across his body.  Cars skidded and squealed behind us, nearly piling up against my back bumper, and horns began honking as I hurled his body outward and suspended it over the pavement, holding him up by the back of his suit jacket.  But again, nothing happened.  “I’m okay, I’m okay,” he repeated.  I could have killed him.  “There’s not much left to come up now, anyway.”   

Back to careening through the city, I thought maybe I could distract everyone, including myself, with some small talk.  “Did the French Quarter see much damage from Katrina?”  We bounced recklessly through a bustling Bourbon Street crosswalk.

“No, of course not,” drawled Ernesto, his head steaming up the passenger window he was leaning on.  “This all stayed safe.  They flooded out the people they wanted to, flooded them right out of the city.  Turned off the levee pumps at the places they wanted…” he slurred.  “Everyone knows it, just no one says it.” 

I pulled in front of their apartment and began our goodbyes.  Just then, two boys appeared — we all saw them — looking sort of like fraternity brothers, piling into the cab of a black truck across the street.  Both of them were laughing, drunk, and pushing each other, and then one of their pants fell down to his legs, exposing a tiny penis in the middle of a brown bush of pubic hair, and then they disappeared into the truck, punching and grabbing each other playfully as they went.  

The scene was anything but romantic, and yet still Ernesto was incensed enough by it to be threatening once more to throw up again.  “Fuck, man!  Jesus fuck!  See what I’m talking about?  The city’s going to fucking shit!  Why the fuck did I have to see that fucking sh—” 

I opened the door and pushed him out of the car, for real this time.