December 2019

A bright December afternoon, a nail-biting match-up, and a tile on the barroom floor is marking more than a mere memory.
​
By Layth Sihan 
photos by Ellis Anderson

Saints Vs. 49ers - December 8

“They can only do it on overcast days,” Ellis, my editor, tells me.  According to her, the  art gallery across from Harry’s Corner bar shows Saints games outside on a big-screen TV.  They throw a party and everyone sits on chairs in this French Quarter side street and watches the game that way. 

The irony that for this to take place overcast weather is required is not lost on me.  In Harry's, a row of tables is situated under the windows in the front of the bar. Those seats are great for watching street action, and today, the windows are wide open. It’s November, but the temp can’t be cooler than 65, and the sun is out. In my immediate future there is a football game to watch and a few beers to line up, but with my eyes resting on a patch of sunlight on a cracked and rutted Chartres Street, something approaching pessimism finds me.

Sometimes life’s logic mimics the logic of a combination lock. Two turns to the right, two turns to the left, one half turn back to the right to unlock the damn thing, but it could just as well have been some other way, some other random configuration of turns required to get the thing to open. The things that happen to us, and the things that are required of us, can often feel downright arbitrary.

​And we ask ourselves why things are the way they are, and we wish we could change the things that make no sense at all to us. We get stuck inside the way things are. The sound of the football game on over the bar enters my ears, and it pulls my eyes from sunny Chartres Street to the action taking place inside the Dome. 

When I’d arrived, I’d met Ellis and Larry, her husband, sitting at the bar. Larry and I chat. “What are you supposed to do at a bar at 11:30?” he says to me, somewhat rhetorically and somewhat seriously, and I tell him he has options, and I laugh at my own joke a little more than he does. He lets his eyes wander over the bottles stacked behind the bar, and he says, “I was thinking a Bloody Mary, but it’s probably a good idea to drink beer.”

Larry asks me what kind of beer I like. For an occasion like this, I tell him I usually go with High Life. He tells me he was at a place somewhere in Tennessee that served craft beer. He says none of the names of the beers described the beers, and I laugh because I know he’s right. In fact, I’d had the same thought myself the night before as I sipped an IPA with a name like Grumpy Debutante. The beer didn’t taste anything like a grumpy debutante. Could anything, really? A part of me thought it was ridiculous that it was named something like that, but another part of me delighted in the oddity.

The bartender puts a High Life in front of each of us, and we grab a table.

Bryan and Eileen, tourists from Scotland, sit at one of the open windows taking in sunny Chartres Street and the Sunday Quarter crowd. This is their second visit to New Orleans in two years. They love the city, and they love Harry’s. They make it clear they appreciate the banter they encounter at Harry’s as one of the reasons. I’m charmed to see the place through their eyes.

It’s an old neighborhood bar, Harry’s Corner. Lots of the folks in here go way back, and you can feel the familiarity they have with each other and with the place itself. The inside jokes, the conversations, even the looks that they share are abundant, but unless you move among the Harry’s crowd, you wouldn’t know if any of it meant anything.

But it’s clear there’s years of banter, as Bryan and Eileen would put it, that fill in the gaps, that fill in the silences, that keeps everyone with their heads up, waiting for their cue to be heard, to laugh, or maybe to continue just being a part of the crowd with a wink at a stranger or a friend. But unless you know where to look and know why it matters, you probably wouldn’t notice or hear the banter as anything special. I’ve walked by Harry’s hundreds of times without really taking a look at the crowd or really listening to what was said or who was saying it, but if you pop your head in for a minute, Harry’s starts to make sense.

​As halftime nears Bryan and Eillen leave, and the crowd quiets some after the Saints fail to score as the clock runs out. The conversations move outdoors. People smoke, take in the weather. Alex and Kirsten join Ellis, Larry and me. They are friends I invited to come along. Kirsten asks me what my piece is about. I tell her it’s about post-modernism. I’m not sure if I mean it or not, but then Alex ushers her off to the row of arcade games in the back before I have to decide.

After the game starts up again, a woman holding a glass of red wine snakes through the crowd that’s filtered back in. She starts up a “Who Dat!” chant, and the Harry’s crowd joins her. Afterwards, she returns to her table by the window where her friends are sharing an order from Domino’s. Someone tells her she did a great job.

​Behind their table are the arcade games that Alex and Kirsten had played earlier. I hadn’t really noticed the arcade games even though I had glanced at them. There aren’t many places on this continent that are as old and rife with past meaning as the French Quarter. And there aren’t many places this old, rife with this much meaning, where people watch football games, play video games, drink beers, and, just generally, hang out.

Ellis pulls me aside to introduce me to Kelly. He points to the floor. “I was standing on this tile when the Saints won the Super Bowl,” he says.

His wife picks up the welcome mat, and she shows me the exact tile. That Kelly remembers the exact place he was standing nearly 10 years ago, and that he and his wife take such pride in it, is a moment of eccentricity that perfectly sums up Harry’s attitude and why the people who love it love it. The city’s only Super Bowl championship, a profound moment in New Orleans cultural history, for them is tied up with Harry’s in a way that can never really be unwound. Kelly wasn’t just in the French Quarter when the Saints won the Super Bowl. He was at Harry’s, and he wasn’t just at Harry’s. He was standing right there.

There are not many places in my life to which I can claim a connection as specific as that. Most of us make approximations about things, especially things from the past. It’s hard to remember the specifics, and maybe that’s what is so meaningful about having a place like Harry’s in your life, the way Kelly does. In lots of ways, Harry’s, its crowd, its banter, its literal floor tiles, has done a lot of his remembering for him. When things don’t make sense, he can come to Harry’s and join in on the banter, the shorthand, because even though it may not make sense to everyone, it makes perfect sense to him.

As the fourth quarter arrives, and the score tightens, the Harry’s crowd tenses up. With a minute left, the Saints score a touchdown to pull ahead, but it is a bittersweet moment. The outcome, it is clear, will come down to who has the ball last. It is one of those bleak moments that can happen in the final two minutes of football games where a score seems to push victory away rather than draw it nearer. By merit of scoring, the Saints put themselves at a disadvantage.

With possession again, the 49ers drive down the field and set up for a field goal, and as time expires take a two-point lead and the victory. It’s over, but the game could have gone any number of ways. That we didn’t wind up with the ball last feels arbitrary, meaningless, random.

“See you in the playoffs,” someone shouts at the TV. 

They’re right. The truth is this loss doesn’t mean much for the Saints with their 10-3 record, clinched playoff spot, and one of the best teams they’ve had in years. The Saints fans are fans of a defeated team today, but the logic of the universe or perhaps maybe just the logic of football, however convoluted and bleak it can be, means they’ll have another chance to make things right.

The crowd now subdued begins to slip out of Harry’s and into the sunlight again. Even though, the sun is still in the sky, it is a little bit cooler out than it was when the game began. It feels a little more like December - or December in New Orleans, anyway.  

Final Score:  Saints - 46/49ers - 48