It’ll be hot today. A real burner. But somehow, I went back. Sometimes a dog or a wolf or a coyote just has to bark. Like this… one night the cold/wet sat down on us like a blanket left out on the line, fog, and solid mist, and when it’s like that you can hear things afar off and your own breathing and you can see it too. And deep in the night the train whistle. The train must have passed through the four nearest towns about twenty minutes apart and the coyotes yell back because they have to. They don’t know what a train is or a train whistle crying in the night, or that some machine is hauling something from here to there, but they yell back because it’s part of who they are. And a coyote just has to yell back even if she don’t know why and maybe that’s you too.

This is the whistle.

It was ’99, I think. I was put up for three days in a hotel on Poydras Street in the New Orleans business district. It was a new-old hotel. New as a hotel but revitalized from an old telephone building maybe a hundred years old. Someone somewhere had figured out it was best not to lose the old, beautiful building so instead of asking stupid questions like “what does ‘historical’ really mean?” so they could knock it down and put up an ugly office building, they decided to make it into a beautiful new-old hotel and that’s where I was put up for three days.

There was a porter on my floor named Charles, and Charles adopted me I guess. He called me “Mr. Michael,” and he brought me bottles of water and wine too that his wife had made and sent with sandwiches, and not always for tips. Sometimes I would offer to tip and he’d wave me off.

“Nah, Mr. Michael. She sent the sandwiches because she wants me fat so the girls don’t like me. But they still do.”

It rained for the first two days, and I’ve only seen rain like that in two other places. In Portland once for five days, and it was the rain that came down in a solid sheet like you’re standing behind a waterfall. And another time, the jungle, it would start from nothing and it was like someone turned the faucet on, standing on the damp ground. In seconds it is a roiling river up almost to the knee. Slipping in the mud and can’t see because the rain is so thick. Everything damp, even the socks I’d tied to my pack to dry so my feet wouldn’t rot. Just as suddenly it would stop, and the sun was out, and the humidity would try to kill you. It rained like that in New Orleans for two days.

I was writing on the bed because there wasn’t a desk in the room. This wasn’t a big room like in a modern hotel. Smaller and you couldn’t open the window. I wrote on the bed in a notepad with a pencil, and when I took breaks, I walked around the hotel and talked with Charles who was tasked with my floor but he would walk with me and show me the hotel. We sat out back under a portico from the rain and smoked and talked about his wife’s wine. There were bars nearby and jazz, but it never stopped raining for the two days.

This was pre-Katrina so the storm hadn’t come yet and changed the city forever.

On the third day, the rain stopped, and I couldn’t wait to get out of the hotel. This was my first stay in New Orleans and I had to see the Quarter at least once. I saw it many times after that, and wrote other books there, but this was my first time. Charles told me the St. Charles Streetcar went right by the hotel, but I’d be better off in a taxi which wouldn’t cost much since the Quarter was only a half mile away.

“Are you the Saint Charles?”

“Sometimes, Mr. Michael, but not often enough.”

I wrote another book in New Orleans once, and in it I included this memory, which came from this first trip to New Orleans:

“The scents of iris, hibiscus, and roses mingle in the air along with the other smells of New Orleans—mold, old beer, rum, tequila, and whatever else is perpetually spilled on the streets. Piss mostly, and all these fluids dry up and bake in the sun every day, only occasionally polished and shined to a sticky luster by rainstorms or the weak civic attempts to keep the city swept and presentable. The pleasant part of the fragrance wafting in… comes from flowers planted in pots—spread along the balcony that runs the length of the apartment complex as it fronts Dauphine Street—and from the magnolia trees and honeysuckle and cat’s claw vines that are ubiquitous in the Big Easy.”

The taxi driver who knew Charles took me to a bar in the Quarter. I don’t remember where it was, but it was late afternoon and there were only a few people in the place. Ceiling fans spun lazily, and there were twelve or so of them and they were connected by belts so that all of them were being powered by a chain and pulley system. Every fifteen or twenty minutes the bartender would pull on the chain that would lift a weight and the fans spun slowly but didn’t move much air.

There was peril in the bar, but a different kind, but I’ll write about that another time. Outside again after a few drinks, it was just starting to get dark. Dusk really, and I went into something of a shopping mall built along the riverside in an old warehouse building. Another revitalized part of history that makes sense when you aren’t addicted to knocking things down. Inside and upstairs and then I pushed out onto a boardwalk-like area along the river. I sat on a bench.

To my left, down a ways, there was a family at a table, and the children ran around in spurts and the boy had a big lollipop they’d gotten from a shop inside. I was looking at the family and then looked up and a man was standing ten yards from me looking at me. He was sizing me up. Dressed in a running suit and looking like trouble.

He’s trying to figure if he can take me, I thought.

I was amazed. I’m not a small man, and this guy was measuring me, fists clenched, trying to decide. I watched him try to decide. Finally, he spun around and disappeared up the boardwalk to my right.

Not five minutes later, he came running by. Chased by another man, smaller than me. The small man tackled the runner, who spilled into the table with the family and knocked the boy over and the table too. The tackler pulled out handcuffs and a badge and he cuffed the runner and dragged him off.

The guy decided to pass me by and tried to fight a cop.

What is the point to all of this? There isn’t one. Sometimes, when it seems like everyone wants to erase history, a remembering dog just has to bark.

***

Michael Bunker is a local columnist for BrownwoodNews.com whose columns appear periodically on the website.