Notes from St. Charles Tavern
If you get to St. Charles Tavern before daybreak, the overnight people are still here. Service workers who showed up after 2 a.m. and hospital staff in scrubs, who just ended their shifts, occupy noisy tables in the middle of the room. Older folks, morning people, who prefer the place after the drinkers pay up and leave, shuffle through the front door and find small tables along the edges. They order coffee and think about food.
Highlights this morning feature some woman who had put away a few drinks and went on about “the singer Jon B.” Her energetic performance inspired three equally well-lubricated adults, who subsequently took a full 20 minutes to, unfortunately, locate Jon B on the jukebox, which hung from a wall directly over my head. Then there was the meeting of two worlds as a pregnant African-American woman explained, for some reason, “the singer Jon B” to two white fogies who, perhaps unknown to her but definitely known to the regulars here who tolerate them every day, are straight-up racists whose daily hateful rants are comically absurd. I watched this interaction with great interest, expecting World War III. The grandpas kept their tongues. These two come every day before dawn, drink coffee, hate and gripe, loudly. At least they don’t stay long.
But never mind that. I am now embarrassed. The waitress, with whom I have chatted many times, asked, cheerfully, if I were going to Jazz Fest. Reluctantly, I said no. Her shoulders dropped as the sound of my explanation confirmed to me my lameness. It was like being on an cheap speakerphone and hearing the ballad of my pathetic existence fed back to me until my brain begged me to stop talking. The waitress is my age, over 50. Today, she wore an official Jazz Fest dress and funky jewelry, had her red hair tied into pigtails and was stoked, because Jazz Fest is here again. Yet I, who did very little in high school but play jazz, sat there as the mud of shame, deep as at the fairgrounds during Jazz Fest after a rain, seeped into my shoes.
Such is life at the Tavern. The world is an unpredictable place. You show up and find out what you’re going to get. On Saint Charles Avenue at 6 a.m., it could be just about anything.
Guy D. Johnson is a writer and marketing communications professional. Previously an animation studio owner, daily newspaper editor, reporter and photographer, volunteer fireman, railroad bridge gang helper, FM radio station underling and cave guide. He has lived on farmland trusted to the sun and rain; atop a wooded hill; beside great rivers; upon an arid, high plateau; and at the subtropical coast of the Gulf of Mexico. For 20 years, he worked and wrote in New Orleans.