A Salute to the Jazz Cat in All of Us
By: Kelsey Aeilts

Different sounds wafted slowly around the streets, heat sweltering and the humidity high as usual. A normal New Orleans day, complete with street performers and side street jazz bands with sonorous sound and finger snapping songs by the greatest cats around. Everyone who was anyone would eventually come to the Orleans, whether it be for the funky jazz or the ever-famous Mardi Gras. The allure of the city of cool cats always pulled people in.

And I was one of them.

The city produced some of the greatest jazz musicians in the world, most of the ones I just happened to covet even more than the tenor saxophone I had sold my old apartment to buy (now that is saying something). New Orleans had so many things that were appealing to me; from the jazzed out cafés to the traditions so intertwined with the magic of music you couldn’t even tell them apart. I came to the city with ideas of fame and riches, that I knew to be impossible to achieve, whirling through my mind as top speed. The sad part was all I owned was the disheveled clothes on my back and the tenor sax in my hand: I had no money to my name, no fall back plan if it didn’t work out, and no job. I was doing pretty well, if I do say so myself, and believe me, I did… How sadly mistaken was the man called Ryan ‘Slick’ Jones.

The first few days I spent in parks playing, earning a few dollars here and there, not finding anywhere I truly felt at home. I didn’t have much, and when I finally figured out that sleeping in parks and on bus stop benches wasn’t the life I had planned, I became crestfallen. Little did I know about where to find a place to stay or where to get a job, I was new to the city and I didn’t know anyone. When I finally found an apartment, right near the café I had applied to and been hired to work at. I talked to the manager of the apartments and she agreed to let me have the apartment, allowing me to wait to put the rent down because of the new job. She told me that she knew the owner of the café I was working at, best friends in fact, and would talk to the owner to see if I was trustworthy: I quickly agreed. Why sleep on a wooden bench when I could simply have my boss talk to the old lady who owned the apartments?

Ruth was quite the contentious old woman, yelling at kids through her windows and making people she didn’t know do things for her. However, I slowly learned that she wasn’t as bad as she seemed, even she had a sense of humor buried underneath her angry exterior. I soon began to have dinner with her, talking late into the night about politics, jazz, and anything else that happened to come up while we talked. She loved to call out her windows while playing Count Basie, yelling ‘Slick’ as loud as she could from her rocking chair. Ruth seemed to get a kick out of me and from what I heard from Jeri, my boss, she had been crestfallen before I had showed up, somewhat depressed and sad as she sat in her rocking chair beneath the mostly empty apartments. I was glad she had improved so greatly since meeting me, happy to see my coming here had such a good effect on her. She was garrulous, talking non-stop to me when I came down the stairs to go to work. Several times I was late because she would hold me there and make me talk with her until I had no idea what the time was. Well, back to my story…

I had finally made something for myself in the city I had dreamed about since I was a little boy: a mind-numbing bliss swept me up and carried me on clouds of purple and baby blue. Many jazz bands came through the café, each leaving me in a plethora of blithe happiness. Working at the café was respite from the outside world, the terrible tragedies that afflicted the society inside and outside of New Orleans without a regard for the lives it effected. I love working at the Cats’ Café, enjoyed the conversations with people I didn’t know and had fun listening to the bands that came in. Finally, one of the bands invited me to play with them. I was ecstatic one moment, worried the next. I became completely unpredictable to the people around me, insuperable to the feelings of others and the things they said about me. Little did I know that only one of the members in the band would affect me.
Her name was Annabelle.
The name she had was but a misnomer to the beautiful flower she really was. She was long, with a dash of Cherokee and Chinese in her. Lush crimson lips, dark chocolate colored irises with flicks of mint, almond shaped eyes, and rich cinnamon hair swept back behind her lightly tanned shoulders, swingin’ down to her hourglass waist.