Georgia

A trickle of sweat dripped down my eyebrow and ran to the end of my nose.  It tickled and I swatted at it lazily with my hand.  I was somewhere on Dauphine and Dumaine in a little square holding a vat of Gin infused with a tiny sprig of mint.  This vat was called a Mint Julep, but I had drunk better-tasting drinks in my day.  At least it had ice and was cold in my hands.  Through the alcohol fumes I could hear the wavy mirage of a street performer playing Georgia.  I wandered closer, trying to stay in the shade.

I stood next to a tree just in front of some chairs laid out in the square.  Sun-burned tourists sat listening to the music in the chairs, shading their faces with squares of papers or maps.  I was barely able to stand under the influence of the alcohol mirages and moist heat, but at least I didn't have the sun beating directly on me.  The general direction of my thoughts were to make it three blocks south to Decatur and the Central Grocer.  As I leaned against the tree, trying to keep it upright so that I could stand, the wavy lines in the world stirred in tune with the music.

He was playing it wrong, I knew that much.  The best version is by Ray Charles from during the '50s.  It's the one I hear when people say they like the song.  This version that permeates the heat and humidity pressing close like a hot bath is the lounge version with an uptempo beat.  The musician plays Georgia as if he's playing a happy version of I Left My Heart (in San Francisco).

I wipe another bead of sweat that's collected on my nose and wander off out of the distance of that terrible rendition of a great song and head toward the Mississippi.  Like all things in life for me, I don't know if that is South or North or East or West.  It is just over there, in what I think is a straight line.  But the line weaves and waves down Dumaine past Bourbon, Royal, and that other street that I forget the name.  I call it the "stinking street" because it smells like a sewer.  The reason, I'm guessing, that it smells like a sewer overflowing is because there actually is a sewer in there somewhere overflowing.

Chartres, that's what it is when I see the sign.  I speak french, and I still don't know how they pronounce it here.  I understand what the words loosely mean in the original, but creole is a pidgin language and one who speaks fluent French or English will recognise the words but not the meanings.  It should be "SHAR-tre" but instead it is something like "CHAR-ters".

The heat is unbearable and I stop in a small bit of shade near a house corner.  The shade doesn't help, really.  The heat sits inside you, soaking there in moist waves of stamina-sapping lumps.  I want to fill the inside of me where the heat sits heavily with rolls of bread and meat from a mufalletta.

O muffullata
Round bread and square meat
Lots o'ther stuff
I will eat you as soon as I find you

However, turning  left on Decatur because I feel like I must, I walk (or rather, stumble) past it in a blur just as I have the ten other times I tried to find it.  I know I've gone too far because I see the tourist trap that is Cafe du Monde.  I dump my watery mint julep and stand in line to get a cafe au lait.  I sit down at a table and wave for a cup of coffee.  It arrives and I contemplate the sin of drinking hot coffee in the height of August heat in the deep south at 100% humidity.  The coffee is damn, damn good.  No sweet beignets for me, I need mufalleta in me.  I need to buy one whole mufollettea and eat pieces of it over the course of several days.

How the fuck do you spell moffolattah?  I don't know, as my head barely keeps level with the horizon, above me.  New Orleans folks like to brag how they are below sea level.  How does that help?  Why is that good?  The very next year Katrina would strike and their folly is revealed.  By then, I would be far away, safe and sober but remembering the taste of coffee, gin and moff, I mean MUFF..  ah... let... uh...