The street is filled with muffled bass and drums coming out of the bar. I’m sitting on a wooden cable spool near the blue wall, a beer cup in my hand.

“You should come tomorrow. I’ll play with Corey Henry and his band for a part of the night.”

“I’ll try to be there.”

“Have you seen Rebirth at the Maple Leaf?”

“A couple of times. I loved it.”

“You bet your ass you loved it. What about Galactic?”

“I missed them yesterday because Trombone Shorty was playing at the House of Blues at the same time. Had to make a choice.”

“I feel you, man, so much to see.”

An Impala with gigantic chrome wheels drives past us on Turcaud Avenue, hitting potholes with clunking noises.

“What is it like, playing here?”

“Not bad. Got to push some oldies and the crowd is nice. Lots of locals, that’s always good.”

“Tourists don’t venture around.”

“They stay in the Quarter or the Marigny. The Seventh is not clean enough for most out of towners. That’s bad for business but good for music. We don’t need to play the same shit over and over again, we’re free to go with the flow and what we really like, you know what I’m saying.”

“Do you do this often?”

“It depends. In summer I mostly play on the street. It’s getting harder playing gigs in bars like this one.”

“Why is that?”

“New people move in houses they bought for pennies after the hurricane, and they don’t like the noise so much, so they have the bars reducing the venues. And the bars have no other choice but to comply.”

A group of girls in their twenties come out of the bar whooing and clapping in their hands. The musician waves and blows kisses at them. He’s met with even more whoos.

One of the girls walks towards us and starts dancing again, raising her arms over her head and slowly twisting her body.

“Where you coming from, baby?” the musician asks.

“California. Are you the guitar player from earlier?”

“That would be me.”

“Do you want to join us later?”

“Maybe another night.”

The girl smiles at him and winks at me, putting her pearl necklace around my neck and going back with her friends. We burst into laughs.

“I ain’t into that shit nomore, man. Fooling around. I don’t want my boy to have the wrong image of me.”

“Does he play an instrument too?”

“Louis? Sure he does. He’s been drumming in a brass band since he was five.”

“That’s early.”

“It’s part of us. My father taught me you can make your life a little easier with music. He used to play his guitar on the porch — he never got to play very well but we didn’t mind. Me and my brother, we just listened to him singing those old cotton picker tunes and it was enough. He slided his knife on the strings, man, I can still hear the sound.”

“Was he Creole?”

“He was. From Saint Domingue. His family settled near Montegut after the civil war, harvesting crawfish and selling it to white people in the city.”

A police car drives by at slow pace and disappears at a street corner. The musician hides his joint behind a beer crate.

“I got arrested last year for smoking a blunt. Them motherfuckers kept me a full day before releasing me on bail. Gave me no water and no food and my wallet was empty when they gave it back to me.”

“You’d think the situation would have improved since the hurricane.”

“On the surface, yeah. There’s less crime and less corruption. But underneath it’s all the same. They just put an extra layer over it so that the rest of the country doesn’t see how it really is.”

The man makes a helpless gesture.

“Does your childhood house still exist today?” I ask.

“It’s been a while since I went there. Katrina destroyed half of it. Took the roof and part of a wall, so it’s probably overgrown with trees and plants. I wanted to take my kid there recently but figured out it wasn’t safe enough. The parish has changed so much, you wouldn’t believe it. Now it’s a bunch of white people living in trailers or derelict houses. It’s a shame because Terrebonne’s oysters are still the best.”

“It must have been nice living there.”

“It was. At one side you had the bayou, at the other you had cane fields. I used to crack the cane sticks and munch them to get the sugar out. Those were good years, even though we were poor as fuck. I miss that house.”

“Is that when you started playing?”

“I think so. I learned by watching my daddy.”

“Why blues?”

“I don’t — it was all I knew at the time. I like all styles, but blues is more true to the roots. It’s dirtier and simpler. Jazz can be too uptight sometimes and funk is too jumpy for me. I prefer simplicity, you know what I’m saying?”

“Blues comes from deep inside.”

“Yeah. It’s something you feel. You don’t look for it, it just finds you. And it hits you in the guts. That’s how blues works.”

“Did you get to perform in public?”

“I did. I used the cash for school books and music paper.”

“How did it happen?”

“I had the habit of hanging out with friends outside a grocery store in Thibodeaux. We hustled people for ice creams and pop. There was this guy who always spared a little money with us — a white dude, biker type, with an old-ass Telecaster in his back. I don’t exactly remember how, but we got to talk together and we ended up playing guitar in an empty parking lot by the river. The guy was Joe Richardson.”

“Joe Richardson?”

“I didn’t know who he was back then. He later got a little more famous by working with Alan Wilder on that Recoil album.”

“That’s some crazy stuff.”

“I know, right? So he invited me for a few gigs in southern Louisiana and there I went. Started in a fishermen saloon on Interstate 20, by the railroad. I mainly played for hookers at first. It was fun. I was still underage, scared of getting busted by the cops, drinking and driving — living the life.”

“Hell of a story.”

“I wanted to save the money to help my dad fix the house because there was mold in the rooms and he wasn’t breathing so well. I spent it in booze and presents for girls instead. What can I say?”

“You were young.”

“I guess. The hurricane would have smashed it anyway. The best thing is that my father didn’t get to see it happen. He died in Baton Rouge just a week before the storm hit the coast.”

I order a po-boy to the waitress in shorts and bras.

“His death helped me with my music. That’s the thing with blues. You have to be miserable to be good at it. Each tone has to be a cry. It has to be heavy and raw, and tense too. But now at every single note I play, I see the old house with my father on the porch and I regret having let them fall to pieces like that.”

The musician keeps silent, looking at the cheering crowd pressing on the sidewalk, lined under the bar’s neon sign.

“That’s the drawback of music,” he says.

“It can make you happy and sad at the same time.”

“Ain’t everything worth it supposed to do that?”

The newly asphalted streets cool down in the starless night. The air is thickened with spilled beer and charbroiled chicken smell. The barbecue smoke mixes with spices and sweat as the parties go on and on across the city, kept alive by the joys and sorrows of forgotten people.