I’m in Mississippi.

I’m drinking a cup of coffee black and ominous as a tar pit in La Brea, listening to the Stray Cats and watching a sunrise unlike anything I’ve ever seen. A sunrise like bright gold blood welling up under the skin of the sky, everything bent a little to the left of real in the early heat haze.

It’s beautiful here.

Bird and I flew in to New Orleans on Tuesday morning, after a few vertiginous flights (airplanes, the necessary, nauseous evil). My parents picked us up. Seeing as we were already in the heart of the vital, vibrant south, we spent the day in the city, starting with a cemetery tour, and ending with a slosh of drinks in the best damn hole-in-the-wall I’ve ever set foot in (Coop’s Place, in the French Quarter).

I hate cities, as a general rule. Chicago, New York, Detroit, Philadelphia...these places felt unkind to me, full of paranoia and mistrust, all the people surrounded by brick and steel becoming unyielding and hard as their city. I visit with unease, and leave with relief.

I love New Orleans. New Orleans is a dirty place, a dangerous place, and--according to my wife--a pungent place. Tired cops roust tired bums and drunks from park benches outside open-air shops where plumes of beignet-praline-steam mingle with cigar smoke and laughter. It’s a loud place, a place not afraid to shout at you. Walking down Decatur Street, a big black Creole woman drags me into her gallery. “Look, sugar, we got Mucha here, Mucha here. This is Mucha, three for fifteen, your girlfriend, she like dis one: dis one the rollin papers Mucha. Look here, sugar, look here.” Then she answers her cell phone and tells the man on the other end that she was going to kill herself yesterday. Her hand is on my arm. We walk around her shop arm in arm, a promenade of two lovers in a land of Art Nouveau, as she scolds a credit card company man. Her lawyer is her best friend, and he stopped her killing herself yesterday.

Then I’m back on the street with my family, stepping over human shit on the sidewalk and wondering where the saxophone is coming from. Men in top-hats and buffalo bill bone coats laugh toothy, round syllables at us as we go. There’s punks old as their leathers on every corner, pins and hooks and smiles in the corners of their eyes, voodoo ink and Social Distortion on their arms.

Coop’s Place is worth the wait. The best sazerac I’ve ever drunk, the best jambalaya I’ve ever had, actual rabbit and crab with the claw still on. The mint in Bird’s mojito is clean and clear and sweet and sharp, cutting through the spicy smoke pouring from the kitchen crammed in the back of the tiny old bar.

Everyone in Coop’s is laughing. It seems like everyone in New Orleans is laughing: the shopkeeps and beignet ladies, tattoo artists and tour guides, even the dead in the beautiful brick wreckage of their tombs. Even the broken people propped against bare brick walls. Even the ragged dazed with no walls at all.

As we roll away on Interstate 10, the car overheating in the last of the living Louisiana fug, crawling toward the clean heat and salt of Long Beach Mississippi, I can almost hear it: the laughter of New Orleans; the spirit of a city worn old and soulful as a good blues guitar. New Orleans is a city missing strings, a city of cracks and rust. The cracks in the brickwork hum and buzz, the rusty strings of the city today resonate with the empty spaces of the city gone silent, and the music that’s left ringing in my ears as we leave will echo like an old man’s laugh in my soul as long as I live, and live in my mind like the anguished wail of a woman in the night.

- Max
From a Sunny Mississippi Porch