Post #4: The Last Haunted Pub Crawl Tour in the Quarter
It’s morning, two weeks into the madness, and I’ve been lying in bed for the last hour and a half terror-reading the news on my laptop. Currently, I’m “enjoying” an article that imagines the scenario that we seem to be rapidly heading for, where all the hospitals in every major U.S. city reach over-capacity.
If I’m being honest, none of it sounds good.
At all.
Fortunately, I’m granted a brief reprieve from my terror, as I get an email notification from work. I quickly open my email, praying for a hilarious distraction, only to find my prayers answered.
ATTENTION ALL TOUR GUIDES,
Do not click on that link that I sent you in the last email. DO NOT CLICK ON THE LINK!! IT IS THE WRONG LINK! THE LINK WILL NOT HELP YOU. I’m trying to find the right link to help you, but that one is not it. THINGS ARE HAPPENING VERY FAST, BUT WE WILL STICK TOGETHER AND FIGURE THIS OUT!!
This email is from my boss. It’s a sequel, of sorts, to the last email he sent a half hour ago that read:
ATTENTION ALL TOUR GUIDES,
I have found the link to the site that will help you financially in these hard times. YOU MUST CLICK ON THE LINK AND FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS IMMEDIATELY!! Things are happening very fast but we are all IN THIS TOGETHER!! GO TO THE LINK!
Both emails are addressed to the thirty some-odd tour guides that work for the company, and in this rare moment, I am actually loathing the unwritten rule amongst the guides to never reply-all to any work emails. It is a strictly enforced rule that all guides abide by. Sometimes rookies come in and break the rule, but they are quickly chastised and make sure never to do it again.
Except for Bob. Bob is a senior in age and a toddler in the company’s seniority list, having only worked here five months. But in those five months he has driven each and every guide crazy because he simply refuses to abide by the rule. Whenever the higher-ups send out an email to us he has replied-all every single time. And each time he responds with the same exact word.
OK.
It is a one word, two letter, response that has caused incredible aggravation to the rest of the guide squad, many of whom, myself included, have emailed him ad nauseum to beg him to stop replying-all to work emails, to which he always responds:
OK.
And yet, another work email will come and again we all have to endure a new Bob response of:
OK.
At this point, nobody’s sure if this is just a result of him being clueless of technology or him living out his Edgar Allen Poe fantasy of becoming the raven and driving us all insane with his electronic nevermore.
(That’s the thing about ghost tour guides that you must appreciate. Some are kooky because it’s part of their persona, others because they have a tenuous relationship with reality. The fun is trying to find the truth.)
Anyway, the reason I’m rueing this strict unwritten rule is because I just know that all thirty plus tour guides are having their own little breakdown over this latest contradictory update. We guides are an emotionally fragile sort by nature, but during the pandemic it’s only grown worse. And if we’re talking hilarious distractions here, well I can hardly imagine something better than a lively email thread of panicky tour guides all wondering in their own creative way what the hell we are going to do.
But alas, even in these dark times, the unwritten rule is still honored. Even Bob the Raven is silent. And so I’m forced to simply reread the boss’s email and its sequel over and over, finding it either funnier or more alarming with each new read. I would assume this pair of emails is evidence of the new normal getting to him, except I know this is just kinda how he writes emails, blasting off information in quick sentences that may or may not be in all caps depending on factors that completely escape me. I will say this though, this is the third pair of emails he has sent in the last week where he has tried to help us only to quickly retract what he previously wrote because he had the wrong information, so maybe the new normal is getting to him after all. Personally, I don’t blame him if it is, he’s just a mama bird trying to do his best to calm and assure his frantic and worried little nest of 1099s.
The whole thing is just yet another little reminder of the bizarre world I used to be a part of. One that I very much want to return to, even if in my heart I don’t see that happening any time soon. So instead, I do what I have often done in these last two weeks, think back to my last day at work, to the last haunted pub crawl tour I ever gave.
So with that in mind, let’s go back to that Monday a few weeks ago, the last “normal” day in the quarter before everything changed…
“What about The Dungeon?”
“No, the Dungeon has been closed since yesterday.”
“OK, May Bailey’s?”
“Come on man, if The Dungeon is closed do you really think a place like May’s will be open?”
“Good point… uh, Creole Cookery?”
“I’m already going to Black Penny and I tell the same story there.”
“Which story?”
“Yellow fever.”
“Can’t you just tell ‘em a different story?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know, the Axe Man?”
“I don’t know that one.”
“You don’t know the Axe Man?!”
“I mean I know the story but I’ve never performed it before, I don’t do 5-in-1, you know that. So I don’t know the story, you know?”
“Yeah, I know. There’s always Pirate’s Alley Cafe.”
“You sure it’s open?”
“Of course it is, it’s always open.”
“Okay, well that’s one.”
“ What about Turtle Bay?”
“Tiny says that’s closed too.”
“Really? Hey Tiny, is that true about Turtle Bay?”
“Is what true?”
“Is it closed.”
“Yep. Turtle Bay’s closed and boarded up. Just like Cornet.”
“No shit.”
“No shit.”
That‘s a conversation between me and the company’s admin, and my back up guide, Tiny (who, in case you were wondering is not tiny, it’s one of those ironic nicknames). The way it worked was that if we got twenty one people to sign up for a pub crawl we would split up the group and Tiny would get a tour. That looked to be very unlikely at the moment, however, as the French Quarter seemed to be dying right in front of our eyes. Only hours ago we got the news that the mayor was shutting down all the restaurants and bars in the city at midnight, a move so unprecedented it bordered on unfathomable. It seemed most businesses decided to pack up things early and get the hell out of town. So much so that I was struggling to even come up with four bars to visit on the upcoming tour that was only minutes away from launching.
“Golden Lantern?”
“That’s like on the other side of the quarter, it would take most of the tour just to get there!”
“OK, Ok, relax, I’m just thinking out loud here.”
What I remember most about that moment was just how surreal it all felt. There we were, us tour guides going about our business like we did everyday, standing outside the voodoo shop trying to seduce passersby into taking a tour, except now all around us were various employees and owners of the quarter hustling about, locking their doors, closing the shutters, and boarding up windows. We couldn’t help but take in this distressing sight, because there was very little foot traffic to keep us busy. Plus, of what few tourists did come walking by, most didn’t even look up or acknowledge us when we pitched our business to them. Instead, they just kept shuffling forward with their head tilted down and their shoulders dramatically slumped, as if they were literally overwhelmed with what their vacation had become and might just crumble to the ground at any moment from the weight of the day.
“How many people do I have so far?”
“Six.”
I remember the weather too, which seemed perfectly suited for such an ill-fated day. Overcast dark skies. I also remember that directly above the quarter the clouds were a standard tone of grey, but as the sky stretched out they turned black and ominous, as if a bad storm was heading for us in every direction. But frankly I’m dubious of my memory here, and so should you be, because It’s just a little too perfect, metaphorically speaking, and just a little too impossible, meteorologically speaking. This leads me to believe that one of the side effects of a global pandemic is that it turns all of us into unreliable narrators.
“Six people?”
“Yep. They’ll be out in a minute, they’re in Finns now, drinking away their sadness, probably.”
“Fantastic, bet they’ll tip great.”
“No doubt. Also, it’s 5:28. You got two minutes. You know where you’re gonna go yet?”
“No, but I’ll figure it out.”
“Just gonna wing it, eh?”
“Sure, why not.”
“Well just end at Pirate’s Alley Cafe.”
“And you’re sure they’re open?”
“Of course they’re open, PIrate’s Alley Cafe is always open!”
Two minutes later, I found all six of my group waiting for me at the launching spot across the street in front of the souvenir store. This mildly surprised me. Usually I had to go and drag at least one person on my tour out of the bar and force them to go on a bar crawl with me. But not on that day. On that day my whole group was waiting for me quietly, almost solemnly, at the spot.
“Who’s ready for a motherfuckin’ haunted pub crawl?!”
I don’t usually use profanity so early on my pub crawl tours, but I sensed at the moment I needed to do something to wake these poor bastards up.
But my first attempt at entertaining only goes so-so, as I received a half-hearted cheer at best from my group.
That’s OK, I told myself, they’re still unsure about everything. This will be a process.
I continued with my introduction while scanning my group. I found that my six were made up of three different couples, two of which appeared to be romantically involved, the other a pair of female collegian spring breakers who, to use a phrase that they would use numerous times during the tour, looked ‘shook’ at the spring break the world had offered them. Of the two romantic couples, one appeared middle aged, the other in their mid-to-late twenties. All six wore a sort of blank expression on their face, as if they were having trouble processing how to act in the current climate.
Who engages in whimsy on the eve of a pandemic? What is the proper protocol?
It became obvious right then and there I would have to guide my group not only through the haunted graveyard that was the quarter, but also through the turbulent times of the present.
Challenge accepted.
“Ok guys, so Cornet, the normal place I start out is closed, but it’s a great story so what I’m gonna do is have y’all go back into Finn’s get more drinks there, and then walk with me over to Cornet and I’ll tell the story outside. Sound good?”
“But we just came from there,” the middle aged lady with the red sunflower hat said with the slightest of huffs. “You want us to go back into the same bar and get more drinks?”
“…yes, I’m afraid so.” Just winging it. “Today is a bit of an odd day, as I’m sure y’all know, but I promise if you just bear with me, we’re gonna have a great time. Now, let’s go get some motherfucking drinks!” I pumped a fist as I said this, receiving a small bump up of energy from the group as I did.
Progress.
Ten minutes later, my group of six now held their new-yet-familiar boozy drinks as we headed out of Finns and toward our first stop. At this point, after only spending ten minutes with them, I was already quite confident I knew all six types on my tour.
You all might not know this, but everyone, and I mean everyone, falls into a type on a ghost tour. Seriously. And the longer you’re a guide the more apparent this is, and the easier it is to identify what kind of type each person is. There’s the guy with the drinking problem, the uncomfortable dad, the overenthusiastic mom, the girl with a boyfriend with a drinking problem… etc.
On this tour, the type that I identified the quickest was that middle-aged woman with the red sunflower hat who slightly bristled at me during the introduction. I now knew her to be what we called the “expert tourist”. The one who had visited the city numerous times in the past and taken a lot of other tours. This was easy to pick up on because she would continually tap her husband on the shoulder and point something out that involved one of her previous trips here.
Dead giveaway there.
This type was always a bit of a handful because they were so eager to “help” the guide by throwing out their own bits of information, but they almost always tipped well at the end, a point of pride to them.
The young, but slightly silver-haired, man with the sullen look on his face was a standard “boyfriend dragged here against his will” who always starts off acting cynical and annoyed by the whole tour, but by the end usually comes around and shakes the guide’s hand and says something like, “I have to admit, I actually had fun tonight.” while slipping them a fiver.
And the two spring breakers were definitely your standard odd couple. With the bubbly, long-haired dirty blonde being the fist-pumping extrovert who wants to enjoy as many adventures as she can while on vacation, while her smaller, mousy curly-haired friend being more of the “I also want to have a good time, but within reason, and let’s just make sure we are being safe” type. It’s a symbiotic relationship where they both help put each other in check.
All in all, it was a pretty ordinary group. Nothing I hadn’t seen a million times before.
Except for the fact that, again, they seemed overwhelmed by everything going on, so that their personalities sort of just quietly dribbled out, instead of blasting out like a firehouse like they usually do during a pub crawl. They were half-thawed, if you will. The “expert tourist” was the exception here, she seemed to be doing a 180 from the rest of the group, just babbling on twice as fast as she probably normally would have, not letting a moment of silence go by as if she thought her non-stop speaking of the great past of the city would let her forget the troubles of the now.
“Oh look honey, that’s preservation hall. The oldest jazz hall in America. Isn’t that right sir? Sir, isn’t that the oldest?”
“Yes it is.”
“Me and Natalie went there for her birthday five years ago, remember honey? The music was fantastic. Such culture in every note. Remember how I told you that honey?”
“Yes dear, I remember.”
The distance between Cornet and our launching point was no more than two hundred feet, and in that space stood two other bars, Johnny White’s and The Boondock Saint, one right after the other, (at this moment I do not know why I didn’t take my group to one of these places to get the first round of drinks) neither which were closed at the time, their doors and windows brazenly open to the public. Again, I would take this with a grain of salt, but I very much recall both bars being loud and vocal and holding diametrically opposed viewpoints, with one bar filled with those terrified of what damage this virus would do to the population, the other scornful of this giant hoax that had been thrusted upon them.
“We’re all doomed!”
“It’s all a big lie!”
“Formation!” I shouted at my group once we reached the outside of our first stop.
My group stared back at me in bewilderment over this command and I realized I had forgotten to explain in my intro the very important rule of formation, where my group needed to form a thin line at the curb of the sidewalk during every story, so that other passersby could walk behind them unbothered. But as I looked around the desolate streets around us I realized maybe that rule wasn’t so important anymore so I just moved on to my story.
Everything is going out the window.
“I like to start out my tours by clearing up a common misconception about the city of New Orleans. Most people seem to think that New Orleans is a city entirely below sea-level, like a big ol’ bowl. How many of y’all been told that from either your friends or relatives. ”
Reluctantly the entire group raised their hands.
“Well, I’m hear to tell you your friends and relatives are stupid people.”
Like clockwork, that got a laugh. Not a great big laugh, but more of a surprised I didn’t know you were gonna go there and I’m a little shocked but also entertained, titter. That worked for me. If I had a big group on a normal day, and we were in that cozy wooden room inside on the second floor, I guarantee that joke would have gotten a cacophony of belly laughs. Not that the joke was that funny, mind you, it’s just that the bar for humor on ghost tours was so low that any well delivered joke, corny or not, generally received big responses from the group. But I had a small group on a very odd day, so I would just accept my titter happily.
“Most of the city is below sea level, but not all of it-”
“Isn’t the French Quarter the highest elevated spot in the city at like 12 feet?”
“…yes, I was just about to say that.”
Over the years I had slowly crafted the first story of my tour so that it was a well-oiled machine of shocks, jokes, and fascinatingly dark history. And of course, with a ghostly ending. It was a lively preview of what my group was in for, and I made sure to highlight my polished story-telling, humor and ability to lead a group. All components necessary for a quality pub crawl.
“The great fire of 1788 destroyed over half the colony of New Orleans, incinerating the very flammable cypress wood that the colony settlers had foolishly used to build their homes.”
Because I had to establish so much in that first story, it was one of the longer ones of the tour. Not only did I have to establish my own dominant persona, but I had to get all the history out. The two great fires. The termite problem. The cypress wood fiasco. And of course, the cowardly husband who left his child upstairs during the fire as he fled out the front door, only to return later, finding his courage too late, going back into the house, going up the stairs, only to find his wife, his child’s mother, had done what he could not, and already safely removed the child out to the street. But by then it was too late, and his flesh and bones were consumed by the flames. Which was why to this day, he was known to haunt that back room upstairs, the backroom I would normally be regaling the story to my group in, if the world hadn’t changed.
But instead I told my story on the street outside, and as I reached the part of the poor ghost of the cowardly husband still haunting this establishment, my eyes went up to the gallery (for you non-guides out there, that’s a balcony with posts coming down to the sidewalk) where to my great surprise I found the cowardly husband standing there, flakes of his torched body fluttering off him in the breeze, sadly staring out down Bourbon Street, now practically empty and silent at a time of day and a time of year where it should be anything but. A few in my group followed my gaze up to the gallery, but didn’t seem to notice anything odd.
With the first story completed, we continued our way down St. Peter Street toward The Black Penny, a beer bar that hung out at the very edge of the quarter.
Just past Bourbon Street the residential section of the French Quarter began, and my group became enamored with the aged creole cottages and double shotgun houses, painted in bright, lively colors, that we passed by.
At a certain point, we came across a resident resting on a porch swing on his front porch, staring out into the abyss, wearing a face of shell shock. I couldn’t help but give a dirty smile here. The residents of the quarter had always been at war with the tour guides. To (most of) them, we were nothing more than yet another obnoxious stain on their otherwise sacred land. Transplants guiding tourists through their city’s history of pain and misfortune. In my time, I had heard many loudly wish that we, along with the rest of the Bourbon crowd, would just disappear and leave them in peace.
Well buddy, it looks like y’all finally got your wish. We’re out of here. The vacuum of Covid is sucking us all up and spitting us back to our homes. So enjoy your peace and your quiet. And don’t worry about that trickle of mind-numbing fear racing down your spine, that’s just a sign of the times…
“Are we going to The Lalaurie mansion on this tour?” The expert tourist asked.
“No, that’s only on the ghost tour. This is the haunted Pub Crawl Tour, there can be no overlap between tours.”
“Of course, of course,” she replied, knowingly.
To my delight, we reached the Black Penny and found it was still open. To my chagrin, I also found the scorned lover waiting for us too. Her stretched out, scarred neck bobbing up and down like a vertical accordion. I tried my best to ignore her and quickly recommended some of my favorite beers to the group before we all went inside.
Once inside, my group ooh-ed and aww-ed at the interior of the place, with its old wooden interior it appeared to be one of the oldest buildings in the quarter. Of course, I knew the Black Penny was only a couple years old and the owners paid good money to have the inside look as ancient and haunted as possible, but no way was I going to reveal that to my group now, not when they finally found something to distract themselves with.
Instead, I walked to the bar with my group and ordered a beer. Now, technically tour guides weren’t supposed to drink on the job, but the pub crawl was a bit of an exception because the group generally wanted to see their guide join in on the fun. But that’s not really why I ordered a beer now, I just needed a drink.
I ordered a Purple Haze before canceling that and asking for a Bud light. I took a swig and caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror behind the bar. I couldn’t help but admire myself.
Good for you Randy.
Even in the current crisis, it was comforting to know that a positive side effect of heartbreak was that it could be a motivator to eat better, jog, do lots of push ups, bicep curls, and only drink water-like beer. And in that moment, staring at my reflection I could see all that hard work paying off. I looked trim, and my biceps looked great poking out of my tight black shirt. So what if the world might be coming to an end, at least I looked good.
Good for you Randy, good for you.
“I love this place!” I heard the bubbly spring breaker tell the bartender, “how late are you guys open? I definitely want to come back here later tonight!”
“Normally around 4 am, but tonight, twelve. Everything closes tonight at twelve. You know, because of everything going on.”
“Oh right,” she responded as the smile retreated back inside her.
Seeing this, I realized she really had forgotten about everything going on in the world at the moment. I knew there could’ve been a whole slew of reasons for her not remembering, including her having one too many drinks, but I chose to believe it was my adept storytelling ability that made her forget.
I watched as my group of six paid for their beers and sat at one of the round tables. I didn’t like this. I didn’t want them all talking to one another, sharing scare articles they read online on their phones. No, I needed to get them back into the world of the past, back to where death was nothing but a plot point to a great story.
“Come on guys! Grab your beers and follow me!” I cried as I led them back out to the scorned lover with the stretched neck.
Outside Black Penny, I used every trick I knew to bring my group into the world of the tragic scorned lover of the quarter. A poor woman of the mid-1800s who time and again had been promised marriage by her man, only to find time and again he had a new excuse for why they must wait. Until finally, after years and years of this, she had enough, and hatched a plan where she got good and drunk before breaking into her man’s home and hanging herself in his courtyard.
As I reached this part, I pointed down the road, in the direction of her lover’s mansion where she ended her life, and there I found the scorn woman again, her elongated, scarred neck bobbing more than ever, as she disappeared down Rampart Street, leaving the quarter. I had no idea where she was going, but I had a strong feeling she wouldn’t be back anytime soon.
As I built to the story’s climax, I could feel all six in my group inching forward toward me, waiting with bated breath for what happened next. I had them eating out of the palm of my hand. Damn did that feel good. The entire iteration of the second story was divine, except of course, when I got to the part about yellow fever. I hadn’t even thought of it, as I had told that story countless times and each time I included the fact that this took place during a yellow fever outbreak that took thousands of lives with it, piles and piles of corpses lined the sidewalk, pus spewing out of their orifices.
Usually this would be one of the gory highlights of the tour, but on this day, it only brought my group back to reality, as they recalled the current outbreak facing them now.
Stupid, I cursed myself.
I warned my group after I had concluded the story that the next stop was a bit of a walk, which was my little way of saying I wasn’t sure where we were going next, before taking them up Rampart Street, the buffer road between the quarter and the real world. I had thought maybe seeing a bustling main city street might be a bit better for their psyche than more empty quarter streets, but that plan backfired when I found Rampart to be just as barren of cars and people as the quarter itself.
I quickened my pace and brought us back into the coziness of the quarter, turning right on St. Anne. Here, I found another tour group, even smaller than mine, coming toward us. The tour guide, a big man with a top hat and cape (both black, naturally), and I exchange a glance and headnod. I didn’t know him personally but he looked familiar. But to me what was most striking was the look upon his face. It was the kind of look one rarely sees on a tour guide while they are on the job, it was the look of the lost. That look of being uncertain of where to go and what to do. I realized it was more than likely that his look mirrored my own in this moment. One of the few requirements of being a guide was to be knowledgeable, yet here we were, dragging our paid customers around wondering what the hell we were supposed to do and if we were ever going to be able to do it again.
As we passed by another gallery, I spotted a boy dressed in forgotten clothes dangling in agony from one of the romeo spikes. I watched him push himself out of the spikes, and then carefully climb down the pole.
“So do you really believe in ghosts?” the mousy spring breaker asked me a few blocks further down.
“Not usually,” I replied.
“What does that mean?”
“That means today is a very, very odd day.”
We ended up at Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop, the last bar at the far end of Bourbon, and the oldest in the city, simply because that was the first bar I came to that was open whose story I knew. Technically I was breaking one of the rules here, as The Blacksmith Shop was the main bar break of the ordinary ghost story, definitely some overlapping here, but considering the quarter was shutting down in a couple of hours, I figured it would be worth the risk.
Once we arrived, we found a news crew hanging out outside, with a reporter next to his cameraman prepping for his upcoming report. As I walked by, I reached out and gave him a fist bump. I don’t know why I did this, but my group took it as a power move, which I figured might have helped me with tips at the end.
I gave a quick intro to Lafitte’s, recommending the obnoxiously sweet voodoo daiquiri to my group, before sending them inside.
“Will it fuck us up?”
My mind suddenly spiraled back to the hundreds of customers on my tour, walking into Lafitte’s stoically at bar break, and returning to me minutes later with a pronounced stagger and a cup of the purple stuff in their hands.
“Yes, yes it will.”
Ten minutes later we were half a block away from Lafitte’s, all six in my group standing on the curb in front of me, cups of their own purple drink in their hand. Right next to me stood Lafitte himself, nodding to my group as I recounted his many exploits. His confident pose told me everything I needed to know. The others might flee from this madness, but the dreaded pirate wasn’t going anywhere.
And then suddenly, mid-story, police cars came careening down the corner and swarmed the oldest bar in the city.
I watched my group as they turned and stared at the police cars. Shuddering as officers jumped out of their vehicles and started demanding the patrons vacate immediately. I watched the dread pirate Lafitte leave my side, racing down to the police, exclaiming that Lafitte was a pirate who backed down from no one.
His cries fell on deaf ears.
“I thought the bars were staying open til midnight?” the dragged-along boyfriend asked as we watched the police shut the bar down.
I had no answer for him, so I simply finished up my story as best I could.
We walked away from the cops and the news crew and the miserable buccaneer, and headed back to Jackson Square to finish the loop. Pirate’s Alley Cafe. It’s always open.
“It’s closed,” the expert tourist pointed out as we reached the midway point of the alley only to find closed green shutter doors greeting us.
“So it is,” I concurred, trying to play it as cool as possible.
I pressed up against the wrought iron fence of the alley, that separated it from the courtyard of the St. Louis Cathedral, the oldest Catholic Cathedral in the US, and began my story with no further explanation.
I painted the picture of the duelers of old, those of both sword and pistol, who had come to the divine courtyard a hundred and fifty years ago to work out their differences, knowing that should they perish, they would automatically go to heaven because they had died on holy ground.
I become a dueler myself, wielding a sword, slashing and gashing my opponent, I become a shooter, aiming for the chest, dead center, to ensure I get a hit. I spoke of the late nights here in the alleyway, where folks swear they could still hear the clanging of steel on steel, of pistols ringing out in the night air.
“Ooh,” the dirty blonde spring breaker exclaimed, “I bet tonight of all nights would be the best chance to come and hear the ghosts duel!”
“Not a chance in hell,” one of the duelers said behind me, “if you think we’re sticking around in this mess, you’re nuts.”
I ended the tour with my typical plea for tips, which turn out to be quite generous. An odd thought hit me then, that those musicians that played while the Titanic was sinking should have had tip jars out, they probably would have made a fortune that night.
“You’re one hell of a guide,” a dueler told me through the fence, tipping his hat to me, “I hope you return one day. I hope we all return one day.”
I watched as my group of six dispersed down the different paths of the alleyway. When they were gone, I stuffed my tips into my pocket, and then wondered what to do next. Above me, that patch of grey clouds that were hovering directly above had disappeared, replaced with the black and ominous ones.
That’s the way I remember it, anyway.
Up next: A Fine, Bitter, Day at the Park
