Let the Good Times Roll

Posted on by
Old Gregg enlists the help of his old man, the Hitcher, to reunite with his beloved Howard. When Howard goes missing on their trip to New Orleans for Mardi Gras, Vince once again has to save Howard in every way possible.

Category:

Characters: , ,

Pairing: ,

Genre:

Rating:

Warning: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Status:

Length: words

Chapter 2

Contents

Chapter 2

Howard did a double take when he saw Vince with a head of shiny golden hair.

“You’ve stopped dying your hair?” Howard asked in surprise.

“This ain’t my real color! My real color is well mousey. I looked like a golden retriever after a mud bath.”

“I always thought you looked nice with yellow hair,” observed Howard, “like a dandelion.”

“That’s not a good look, is it, Howard? Not much call for dandelion people at the clubs. No one wants a weed,” Vince explained, “P. Diddy don’t want to be seen with crabgrass, does he?”

“Then why are you dyeing yourhair yellow if you don’t want to look like a dandelion?”

“I ain’t finished yet, am I? I still got to add the green and purple highlights.”

Howard tried to imagine what Vince intended to do. Howard prided himself on his quick and virile mind but he was baffled as to how Vince thought purple and green highlights would look good. Howard had known Vince as a scrawny, knock-kneed little boy wearing rock shirts long enough to be dresses. No matter how Vince tried to transform himself, the same guileless blue eyes dominated his noisy face. All the accessories were superfluous. How could anyone look at anything but those bush baby eyes?

“For Mardi Gras! They’re the official colors. I’m going to look amazin’! It’ll be genius. I’ll be the king of New Orleans!”

“New Orleans is the cradle of jazz. We’re going to walk the streets whereLouis Armstrong was raised, where King Oliver played the houses of ill repute. We’ll be able to ride the riverboats that served as floating conservatories for some of the greatest jazz musicians who ever lived…”

“And they got swamp tours where you can hold a baby alligator!” Vince added with an enthusiastic clap of his hands. “And I’m having’ my tits out for anyone who asks until I can make a whole outfit of beads. Imagine that!”

Howard shook his head as his now blond friend pulled up his purple blouse to flash his nipples at an imaginary man on an imaginary balcony.

“Stop fussing with Stationery Village and help me with my hair,” Vince implored, his big blue eyes looking ethereal under his golden fringe.

Howard pulled off the white latex gloves that he wore to dust StationeryVillage, and put on the purple latex gloves he wore to help Vince dyehis hair.

xxx

Vince stroked the baby alligator between its eyes. He couldn’t understand the alligators at all. Their accents were as bad as the humans’. After getting tutored in school by Howard Moon, Vince thought he’d never have trouble understanding anyone ever again. If he could understand Howard’s Northern accent well enough to learn algebra, he should be able to understand anything.

He watched enough American telly, he thought he’d be fine in the States. He wasn’t prepared for a southern accent that didn’t sound like Scarlett O’Hara’s. The local accent was thicker than Nutella on a cold day. If you tried to smear their tour guide’s accent on bread, your bread would get well ripped up.

Howard explained the motto ‘Laissez les bons temps rouler’, or ‘Let the good times roll’, derived from the uncertainty of life in early colonial life. No one expected to live very long anyway so they were always having it large in the Big Easy. Vince liked that New Orleans was dark and depressing, but in a fun way, like Howard. No matter how much Howard banged on about the city being to blame for the birth of jazz, Vince still loved New Orleans. He’d been off his tits for days, waking up and drinking a Bloody Mary in order to face another day of eating and drinking. Of all the jazzers Howard loved, Louis Armstrong was one of the more tolerable. His songs weren’t all depressing and they mostly had words. During the day, Howard dragged him to museums and on educational tours (today it was the swamp tour!) and at night they wandered from bar to bar – seeing all the different bands. Howard wouldn’t let them split up because he was afraid of getting stabbed up and thrown in the river, so they took turns picking bands to listen to.

There were parades every day and Vince had enough beads to reinvent his entire wardrobe and he hadn’t shown his tits to anyone.  Yet.

Howard had been paranoid when he’d won the all expenses paid trip to New Orleans and Vince had to talk him in to going. Howard kept wondering how he’d been entered into the contest in the first place; but Vince frequently handed out Howard’s information in order to get free gifts, so it didn’t seem strange to Vince at all. They finally agreed that if they saw anyone following them when they arrived in New Orleans, they would run to security and beg for asylum. So far, so good. The only people following them were drunk girls and a few drunk guys. Even Howard could have pulled if he tried (with the girls or the guys. One guy kept calling him PapaBear). The girls liked his accent and thought his mustache was well British. Vince kept his mouth shut and let the girls imagine there was a place in the world where Howard was fashionable.

At the end of every night, they stumbled back to their hotel room on Decatur Street and passed out in their respective beds alone. Since moving in together over Naboo’s shop, they had taken to spending more of their evenings apart. Howard spent his evenings at boring jazz clubs or with his boring jazz friends while Vince went out to interesting places and had fun. It was nice to hang out with Howard again like in the old days.

Vince begrudgingly handed over the baby alligator to Howard. Howard gently stroked the gator between the eyes as Vince had done.

“Does he like this?” Howard asked.

“Dunno. His accent is well thick. He’s from the bayou all right.”

Howard laughed and passed the alligator to the next passenger. Vince noticed a sad look in Howard’s eyes and rubbed his shoulder against his friend’s.

“Makes you miss the zoo, eh?”

Howard puffed himself up, “What? Of course not. The zoo was rubbish. We barely had any real animals…”

“But it wasn’t always like that.”

The air went out of Howard, “No. It used to be something special. I wish you could have seen it when Tommy was there.”

Vince rested his head on Howard’s shoulder as the tour guide answered questions about alligators in his inscrutable accent. Maybe it was because he was feeling sentimental or maybe it was because he was in a strange land but instead of pushing him away, Howard rested his cheek on Vince’s head.

xxx

Howard was dancing with a girl. Vince was dancing with five girls but that wasn’t anything new. Girls loved dancing with Vince, but Howard? Howard was dancing with a real, live, beautiful girl. The music was too loud for him to ruin it with his jazzy nonsense and the girl was gazing up at him like he was some kind of Prince Charming.

Howard was going to pull.

Vince wasn’t the slightest bit surprised when Howard pulled him outside to talk about having some ‘private time’ with his ‘young lady friend’.

Howard’s eyes kept shifting between Vince and his girl, like he was afraid she’d vanish if he looked away too long.

“This is a dangerous city, yeah? I don’t want you wandering the streets alone. Maybe you could stay in the lobby…”

“I’m not hanging out in the lobby while you’re shagging some bird in our room…”

“She’s not ‘some bird’, she’s a lovely and interesting…”

“What’s her name?”

“Eileen? Irene? It was loud in there but the point is…”

“You’ve got two hours. In two hours, I will be sat on the couch in the lobby waitin’ for you to come get me. You wait too long and I’m coming up.”

Howard agreed with some reticence and headed off with the new love of his life, whatever-her-name-was. He called out daddish warnings over his shoulder to Vince about not talking to strangers and keeping his wallet pinned to his clothing as his female companion laughed and called him sweet.

Vince wanted to be happy for Howard. He decided to drink Hurricanes until he was happy.

xxx

Two girls escorted Vince back to his hotel. He wasn’t actually blind but he could see where there term ‘blind drunk’ came from. The girls seemed a bit disappointed when he told them they weren’t going upstairs and his hotel room was occupied. After a few warning glares from the desk clerk, Vince did his best to sit up and look proper.

He didn’t recall passing out but the clerk was standing over him and gently suggesting he return to his room. His tone was kind but his eyes were flint so Vince staggered to the elevator. The heaving movement was almost too much to bear and he crawled to his room on his hands and knees. After knocking loudly and allowing time for frantic dressing, he pushed the door open. Howard’s bed was rumpled but empty, as was the shower. Vince called him on his cell phone and heard the muffled ring coming from the safe. It took him a few times to open the safe because Howard had used Vince’s birthday as the code.

Eventually, Vince remembered his real birthday was written on his passport. After taking a moment to cringe at his real age, he opened the safe and found Howard’s cell phone and wallet.

Vince called down to the front desk and was assured that while Howard had come in with a young lady and appeared’highly intoxicated’, he did not leave. Vince checked under the bed and in the closet just to be sure.

Then he called the police.