Gunpoint

     Because Abby and Mary Elizabeth had been best friends for over 30 years, mutual friends and acquaintances would inevitably ask how they met, as if they were some old married couple.  The reply was always the same for both women, “At gunpoint.”

     Around the time of her 29^th birthday, Abby had been in New Orleans just over a year.  She was renting the downstairs unit of a two-story duplex in the Garden District on Jena Street, one block off St. Charles Avenue, across the street from Sacred Heart Girls Academy.  Every weekday morning, as she sat on her front porch with her coffee, Abby, herself a product of a Texas public school education, would watch, fascinated, as parents dropped their 12 and 13-year-old daughters off at the school’s side door.  All decked out in their catholic school uniforms, plaid skirt, white short-sleeve blouse, white knee socks, and saddle shoes, the girls would stand at the curb waving good-bye to their parents until they turned the corner onto St. Charles.  As soon as the parental units disappeared around the corner, they would roll up their skirts at the waistband, roll down their knee socks, unbutton the two top buttons of their white shirts, loosen their hair out of their ponytails or braids, pull a tube of red lipstick out of their backpack, paint their lips, light a cigarette, and shoot Abby the bird if she happened to catch their eye.  “You little bitches,” whispered Abby under her breath, but she well remembered that pre-teen longing to be grown-up and sexy, even if she wasn’t at all sure at the time what sexy meant.  Abby found these little girls’ “dressing up” peculiar, and a little pathetic, because they attended an all-girl academy.  Who the heck were they trying to impress?  The nuns?  Abigail Harris had gone to co-ed public schools where she had been perfecting her feminine wiles on real boys since the first grade.  So with a raised eyebrow of superiority, Abby blew her own cigarette smoke and shot the bird right back at the little hussies.

     Just steps from her front door, Abby was able to catch the St. Charles Avenue streetcar downtown to the architecture firm where she worked as an administrative assistant.  The firm was loaded with young, talented architects and designers, and New Orleans was their oyster.  They all worked hard and played even harder and Abby was having a ball being part of their set.  She decided it was time to throw her first party since arriving in New Orleans and she figured why not give herself a birthday party.  So invitations went out for:

Abby Harris’s First Annual 29^th Birthday Bash

Saturday, from 8:00 pm until we throw you out

Bring your own booze (I’m not kidding!)

Gifts are not required (but don’t be a cheap ass)

      It was truly a hot August night and the party destined to rock on until the wee hours.  The little shot-gun style duplex was pulsing with wall to wall people, and as Abby surveyed the crowd around midnight, she realized she only actually knew half of them.  But that was how it went in New Orleans…word gets out about a party and people just show up.  If you lived in the French Quarter, random musicians might wander in and start jamming.  Abby noticed the sous chef from Commander’s who lived next door had made himself at home in her tiny kitchen and, clearly offended by her chips and dip offering, was cooking something wonderful on her seldom (okay, never) used stove.  It was around this time she spotted one of the firm’s young geniuses coming through the front door with what Abby’s daddy would have described as a “tall drink of water” on his arm.

      Mary Elizabeth Gilbeau was 5’9” in her stocking feet, but with her mass of long, dark curls pinned up high on her head and wearing high heels she easily topped out at 6-foot.  Slender and leggy, she was completely overdressed for the casual house party, decked out in a Norma Kamali designer dress and strappy stilettos.  She and her date had spent the earlier evening at a shee-shee art gallery opening on Magazine Street when her date suggested they check out a party at his co-worker’s house uptown.  Mary Elizabeth lived and worked in Lafayette, but kept a small apartment in the French Quarter where she spent most weekends.   The reason for the Quarter apartment was two-fold.  Mary Elizabeth enjoyed the Quarter lifestyle and she could carry on with the older man with whom she was currently involved without her parents knowing.  The young architect she was out with this particular night was actually her cousin’s boyfriend.  She had bumped into him at the French Market that morning and he invited her to the gallery opening.  Mostly he wanted to bend her ear about her cousin and their rocky relationship issues.  Mary Elizabeth didn’t care, she just wanted to show off her New York designer dress to New Orleans’ uptowners.

     Her date introduced Mary Elizabeth to their hostess after navigating her through the crowded two front rooms of the shotgun to the kitchen.   Mary Elizabeth found herself shaking hands with a vivacious, auburn-haired Texan with an open smile and crystal blue eyes.  At 5’5”, Abby was as curvy as Mary Elizabeth was slim, and after pumping her hand like a politician, Abby directed them to the backyard where the bar was set up, then swam back into the crowd to greet her other guests.  Mary Elizabeth and her date would not meet up with Abby again until they were leaving the party.  In fact, Mary Elizabeth, her date and a writer from Boston named Bob (who said he was in New Orleans doing book research, heard about the party and just showed up, and was forever after that night known simply as “Bob-the-writer”) were the last people to leave Abby’s house.  As a good hostess, Abby walked with the three out to their parked cars on the street, making polite conversation, while Mary Elizabeth and Bob-the-writer finished off their cigarettes.  As the four of them stood between the two cars leaning up against the hoods, two young men walked past them down the middle of Jena Street, headed towards Saint Charles.  No one really took note of the two men, as it was not at all unusual for people to be walking around uptown at 4:00 in the morning, or to be walking the middle of the street.  To this day, Abby has no real idea why people in New Orleans walk in the middle of the street late at night, as opposed to the sidewalk, but she assumed it was the poor condition of the sidewalks or to avoid muggers jumping out from hedges or carriageways.  Anyhow, they gave the passing men friendly nods and the men nodded in return, and they returned to their conversation.  One minute later, the two young men reappeared next to them sporting a sawed-off shotgun and a very large knife, which they proceeded to wave at them, demanding watches and wallets.  Abby handed over her brand new Swatch watch, trying not to let the men see her eyes wander to the front door of her apartment that was standing wide open.  Bob-the-writer patted the back of his pants to show he wasn’t carrying a wallet and he wore no watch, and poor Genius Architect, shakily, handed over his wallet, and Cartier wristwatch.  Then they came to Mary Elizabeth and her enormous purse.  “Give me your purse,” growled the man with the shotgun.  “No”, said Mary Elizabeth, clutching her purse closer to her side and glaring at the mugger.  WHAT!  Abby’s head snapped around like Scooby-Doo as she glared at Mary Elizabeth.  “Did this crazy bitch just say, NO,” thought Polly, “She’s going to get us all killed.  If they don’t shoot her, I will grab that God damn gun and shoot her myself!”  But, Mary Elizabeth stood her ground.  Unbeknownst to the others, while they were getting the shakedown, Mary Elizabeth was slithering out of her diamond bracelet, and diamond and emerald rings, shoving them deep into the bottom of her purse.  She also had a small revolver at the bottom of that ridiculously large bag…a gift from her daddy.  Her stalling paid off and the two men took off running, without her bag, disappearing just as quickly as they had appeared.  The four victims stood stunned into silence for a full minute before Abby snapped out of it and ran back into the house to call the police.  The police arrived, surprisingly, very quickly, explaining they had been chasing the two fleet-footed thieves all over the Garden District where they were holding up other late-night partiers, hit and run style, staying just minutes ahead of the cops.  They each gave the police their statements and went their separate ways, Abby refusing to even say goodbye to Mary Elizabeth.  “God help her if I ever see that bitch again,” she thought as she locked her front door.

      Two days later, as Abby was standing in her kitchen washing dishes, she heard what sounded like a twig snap outside her kitchen window.  She immediately broke out in a cold sweat, grabbed the phone and called her chef neighbor to come over and investigate all around the yard of the house while she stood behind him holding a 7-iron from a set of golf clubs one of her exes had left behind.  Her neighbor found no one and no evidence of an intruder, and assured her that she was just having a delayed reaction to the hold-up and was freaking out a little.  “A little!” huffed Abby, this was a major meltdown the likes of which she had never experienced, and all she could think was how much she wanted to wring Mary Elizabeth’s neck.

     Abby’s anxiety and nervousness stayed with her all throughout the week.  She would rush home to her duplex every evening after work, making sure she was locked in tight before the sun went down, jumping at every little sound both inside and outside of the house.  Saturday morning, one week after the party, Abby, still in her pajamas, was all settled in with her coffee watching cartoons, when a sudden, frantic knocking on her front door startled her so much she fell off the sofa.  Crawling across the hardwood floor towards the front door she shouted, “Just a minute, while I finish cleaning my gun!”.  “Who is it”, she said in a super low voice through the keyhole once at the door.  “It’s Mary Elizabeth”, came the answer from the other side, “are you as freaked out about that hold-up as I am?”  Abby pulled herself up, unlocked the three deadbolts she had installed on the door, and threw it open to reveal Mary Elizabeth standing on her porch.  With her hair down, in a t-shirt and jeans, she looked less like a New York sophisticate and more like a crazy Cajun on a mission.  She pulled a bottle of vodka out of her, now infamous, huge purse, “Cher, I hope you have some Bloody Mary mix,” she said as she swept into the room.  Abby was too stunned to stop her.   Her mouth hanging open staring aghast at the wild woman standing in her living room, she knew right then and there she was looking at her new best friend.