“I’m a survivor,” the man in the crumpled leather jacket said. The skin stretching down his aquiline nose, along his cheeks, was a tan sandy beach creased with diesel black. He sat leeched to the wall in the corner of The Spotted Cat Bar on Frenchmen Street, a road angling off the boxy French Quarter like the handle of the Big Dipper. “Been through Katrina and ‘bout four other canes,” he announced, stretching his long legs. He pressed his head against the wall. “Ain’t no thing like a hurricane.” He giggled. His nostalgic mien married an odd, chilling smirk. “Ain’t no thing.”

The couple from Kansas that sat next to the man—a thin redhead with a mass of clef notes for hair and her husband, who wore a starchy white collared shirt—smiled at him uncomfortably. He continued to snicker, the couple glanced at one another, their faces looked as though they had inhaled the air at Jefferson Parish days after the floodwaters drained. The man’s laughing fit continued and he did not notice as the Midwesterners scurried to the far corner of the bar. When he finished his chuckle, he pinched one end of his oily moustache and tilted his dark felt cowboy hat off his brow.

“Where’d they go?”

A pile of patrons rushed for the abandoned, shoddy rattan bench. “Are these seats taken?” a pig-tailed blonde with a bass-drum-behind asked the self-proclaimed survivor.

“They’re all yours,” he gestured. She squeezed in along with her boyfriend and smiled at the man. “But I ain’t talkin’ no mo’ ‘bout hurricanes. Cause I been through four.”

“That’s fine,” the girl said. A wide, frightened smile spread and marked her face with insincere dimples.

“And when they came and tried to git me from Katrina, which I was in, I said to ‘em bin here two weeks ready,” indicating this with the thumb, pointer, and middle finger of his left hand “and gotsa ‘nuff wine and beans and batteries to be right.”

He glanced up at the band on stage. They waited for the drummer to assemble his kit. The couple glanced at each other, gulped at the man, and nodded.

He sucked his teeth and shook his head. “Too many of them still,” he said, pointing at two young black horn players.

The trumpeter buzzed his lips, ejecting little droplets of spittle. The saxophonist licked the smooth wooden reed until it was as moist as the bottom of a Café Du Monde bag, drenched with the oils of fried beignets.

“I play here on Tuesday nights,” the survivor lied, and then began mumbling something beneath the whimper of the saxophone.

The drummer tapped the snare and the keyboarder typed a few notes that merged with the clinking beer bottles that the bartender (the one with the pale legs that were just visible between the hem of her floral dress and black Converse) dragged out through the front door. The smokers crowding the doorway extinguished their cigarettes and flooded in like water, forming to the shape of the room. The bass leaned against the wall.

In walked a hairy financier in a pink and white checkered shirt, his nose bright like a fire truck; a long pasty drunk woman with short blonde hair, wearing a cropped leather coat that reached no further than her lowest rib; an elderly black man sporting a doo-rag and one snaggletooth in a gummy mouth; his girlfriend, a teapot-shaped woman with a silver wig; and a man with his own fully corked bottle of Korbel.

Suddenly the music erupted and the new arrivals swirled and hot-stepped to the five-piece band. The sax and trumpet engaged in a heated dialogue. The trumpet—a stunning golden moon eclipsed by the dark cavity that sunk into the lunar metal like a black hole—shrieked like a goose clenched at the throat. The saxophone politely moaned. If the horns were the andouille sausage and crawfish of this jazzy jambalaya, then the keyboard was the spice tickling the nodules of the tongue. The cymbals crashed and clinked like the pots and pans in a Cajun kitchen, while the snare drum rattled like the streetcar palpitating its way down St. Charles Avenue. Like the Grimm Reaper, the bass player hovered over the others, tearing at the heavy strings as though he were chipping away at the brick and mortar of the crypts to unite the newest intern with their ancestral remains.

The painting on the wall, above the sickle arm of the bass, hung like an eerie harbinger of jazz music—a trio in an old wooden saloon playing their bones out, literally, for only transparent suits draped over their skinless, jazz-worked skeletons. The painting made it seem as though jazz was endangered like Ninth Ward residents. Though that fallacy was extinguished once the music began.

The tall woman in the crop-top leather coat spun with her fourth partner of the night, knocking the metal tip bucket off its perch with her bony uncoordinated hips. Ex-Presidents exploded from the pail like confetti, invigorated by the etouffee of syncopation they had never heard.

The one-toothed man and his silver-haired lady smothered against one another. He was the rice on her gumbo.

In the background the bottle of Korbel exploded, the champagne slid down the green bottle like meat juice running through the bread of a slathered po’ boy.

The rest of the crowd percolated along the wall, except the one man in the crumpled leather coat; he just kept mumbling about all the bad times. The jazz cried out about the hard times too, but sprinkled the crowd with something sweet like the powdered sugar coating mucky Decatur Street.