I’m headed to New Orleans tomorrow for a conference. This is the first time that I’ve been there since 2001.

I took a boyfriend with me when I visited then. Not the boyfriend who is now the husband,  nor even the boyfriend who preceded the husband. The boyfriend who I took to New Orleans was the one who I am firmly convinced is a deeply closeted homosexual. He is also now someone else’s wife, god help her. God help her not because he is deeply closeted but because he is emotionally unavailable. And an ass. An enormous ass. An enormous, self-absorbed ass. His behavior in New Orleans revealed all of that to me and ended our relationship for the first time (first, because I am sometimes a slow learner); but he is a story for another time.

That 2001 visit, during the Christmas season, was my first real visit since 1994, if I’m not mistaken on the year.  Like now, the occasion for the 1994 visit was a conference, although the conference then was rather small, focusing on borderlands and Native American History, which was my specialty at the time. This was the type of small conference with no concurrent sessions.

A small conference like that would have been the perfect sort to network and make valuable connections and so forth, had I had the wit or mentoring to have taught me to do that sort of thing. I had neither. Indeed, I was there on my own dime and not at the urging of my adviser, who had not alerted me to this conference, and, had he known about it, would not have advised me to attend because he, too, was an ass. An enormous ass. An enormous, sexually harassing ass who had me trapped and gave me unethically bad advice.

Of course, I’m not sure that, even had I the wit or mentoring, that I was actually at a place in my life at that point to have networked and made valuable connections and so forth. I do know that this was the first time that I had been to New Orleans as an adult.

I had lived in Gretna for a couple of years at age 3 or 4, and then in Metairie from age 5 to 9, which seems like a long time in elementary school, being half of my life. Then, our parents disposed of us at our grandparents’ house there for ever longer summer visits, unfair to both us kids and the grandparents, until we all — kids and grandparents — could no longer stand one another for the familiarity. Then, we had the odd holiday visit here and there over the years. So, it wasn’t as if New Orleans was unfamiliar, but in the company of parents and grandparents, it isn’t quite the same. I was always the child, dragged about and fussed at. Furthermore, in 1994, I had only just recently allowed myself to actually become an adult in more than just years. I was, as they used to say, a late bloomer.

I can’t remember if I had learned of the conference from H or if I had learned of it and told him about it. Whatever the case, we both decided that we wanted to go and that we would share a hotel room to cut costs. I had hoped that he, being a former resident of New Orleans and something of a party animal, would show me some of its nightlife, this being my first trip to New Orleans, on my own, as an adult. He, partly in his casual way of humiliating me and partly in his not thinking about me at all, had instead made a date with an old girlfriend.

The relationship between H and I, in the broadest sense, was pretty fucked-up because we as individuals were fucked-up. H’s brand of being fucked-up meant that he abused people who cared about him and my brand of being fucked-up meant that I cared about people who abused me.  My brand of being fucked-up was also tied to an enforced naivete and immaturity, and much of knowing him had brought that to its end. My brand of fucked-up, in other words, had its limits, and he was reaching them.

The weather that weekend was fine. Crystal blue November, not too warm nor too cool, with the sun warm but the shade taking the edge off the hotter hours of the day. We left the first session, headed to lunch. I wanted a muffaletta from Central Grocery.

“I don’t want to wander around looking for a place to eat,” H moaned. I knew that moan. I hadn’t given him anything to moan about, but he was going to moan and then attack me for some reason or another.

“I know where I’m going,” I said.

“Well, I don’t have time to wander around looking for somewhere,” he replied.

“It’s just around the corner here,” I said.

“Look, you don’t know where you are going, I’m just going to go to the archive,” he said. He wanted to get rid of me anyway, that was clear. “I’ll see you at the session later.” He wouldn’t.

I was actually relieved. No one was more surprised about that than I was. This guy, one for whom I professed undying love for nearly two years, whose crumbs of attention I gladly accepted in spite of whatever insult or threat would come right after, who had at one time had seemed like the most exciting person I had ever met, whose attention I thought would somehow make me special, had finally struck me as a life-sucking, time-consuming bore. Not just in this moment, but empirically. He was boring. Mean and boring. I was relieved he was gone because he would ruin the fun I knew that was about to have. He always did. If, for one second, I had a moment of joy, he had to stomp on it and insult me. It took me almost another year to fully disentangle myself from him, but it began in the moment when I thought, “thank god he’s gone because he would ruin my day with his bullshit.”

I went to Central Grocery. I had a muffaletta for lunch, sitting on the riverside, watching the ferries. Then, I didn’t go back to the conference. The idea of spending such a glorious day in a darkened ballroom seemed such a waste, even if I had paid for the admittance. I walked all around the French Quarter, just looking to see. I’m sure I had a little swagger in my step. Those shoes always made me have one, but I felt it. I looked in shops, and danced to music, and sat in the sun. I may have returned for a  final session, but I don’t really remember.

I went to the hotel to change into less conferencey clothes, feeling fine. H was there, in a grump because his cologne bottle had broken and he smelled like a brothel. I tried not to laugh. He tried to get me to go hit on some National Guard guys staying in the hotel, all the while also insulting the National Guard guys.. He was always trying to get me to be promiscuous with men I didn’t want to sleep with, never with any success. Then he would insult me for being a prude. He went to his date, stinking to high heaven. I went back to the Quarter, to Preservation Jazz Hall, a pass through Pat O’Brien’s, and to more modern jazz and blues, and to all the things I had heard about and never seen. My goodness: go-cups! Who knew! I had a fine old time.

The next day, I did the same. As I wandered about, I had a revelation. At that point in my life, I did not really have that great of an interest in being a great historian. I mean, I did want to be a historian, but I’m not sure that I understood deeply anything about what that meant and I’m not sure that I could have articulated anything that I ask my students to consider today.  I had a sense that I was headed in the right direction professionally, but my ambivalence about an academic life had been growing in proportion to the amount of abuse I had encountered within it. If I could have discovered public history or museum studies or even archives at that point, I think I would be somewhere else today.

What I did understand in that moment of revelation, however, was that  I wanted to live a life that interested me. I hadn’t, to that point. In fact, I had lived a shamefully dull and sheltered life. Instead, I wanted to go different places and feel what I felt that day while wandering around New Orleans. I did not want to feel what I felt when I went back to Houston. I did not want to feel small, and stupid, like I was hiding in the past or in my studies, that, truth be told, were not really interesting me at that point. I did not want people in my life like H, who may have been interesting at one time in his life, which was my initial attraction to him, but who was now a ball of bitter, hateful, boring, blah.

I remember that thought, like a clear bell, walking down the street in the French Quarter. I want to live a life that interests me.