Big Ol' Blog Post of New Orleans

I don’t know what it’s like to miss New Orleans. I just visited for the first time, another middle aged tourist who doesn’t have the patience to wait the half dozen or so years for the AARP discount cards.

I am guessing the missing might be like the feeling you have after breaking up by phone with someone you shouldn’t have gone out with in the first place. It was doomed from the start, and deep down you knew better. But you couldn’t settle for being friends, and the sex takes over, chemical attraction really, like some goddam junkie, and pretty soon somebody gets hurt, maybe even bodies who didn’t have anything to do with it. And you’re never, ever gonna see that person again, because that’s what you have to do for true freaking love sometimes, just dance with the ghosts.

There’s a mess left all around you, big empty spaces, water marks on your sorry soul. But there are bars, lots of bars and plenty of food and a places left to boozily, woozily wander it off, make some new friends, go where everybody’s got some crazy-ass story so nobody’s gonna judge unless you’re a Level 5 asshole.

It’s not really some Oprah style healing. The is no fucking secret about it, just some spinning before you try and get a new set of bearings, a less wobbly foundation.

That’s missing. That’s the New Orleans I saw, a place that could easily give someone inherently lost and slovenly like a Tip O’Neill nose, a Paul Prudhomme belly and a sometimes dark mood hidden under a goofy parasol.

How could I not get a little crush on a town where the first party I attend is in a double shotgun style house with crawfish boiling and somebody feeding two baby hawks on one of the front porches.

The birds eat ground nutria, some invasive rodent imported to Louisiana for its fur, which turned out to be so orange not even pimps would wear it.

The crawfish, you gotta suck the head, squeeze the tip, a frat boy T-shirt slogan way of eating best done, like a lot of things in New Orleans, after drinking an Abita or three, even if its one of the strawberry flavored ones.

I am at this party as a guest of a group of bloggers from First-Draft, who are much more adept at the bells and whistles and the ways of the Net than silly old me who gets distracted all too often by its naughty bits and music downloads. They actually make friends with like-minded people and meet them in the real world to be do-gooders.

I write from memory and ain’t good with names, but do recall the house being owned by a pleasant couple, the husband of whom looks like he could be Tom Petty’s brother.

Their abode is across the street from a church left vacant by the hurricane. On higher ground (a relative term here under sea level), it survived pretty well. Story goes some cross dressing squatters saved it from a band of roving young gay looters, when told about bad mojo from the spirit of a legendary departed drag queen neighbor if they touched anything on the grounds.

This is a far more entertaining story than my own one that night about family on the West Coast deciding not not to calling me in Chicago about my father being in the hospital for three full days, waiting until the night before I left for my trip as not to worry me.

I’m expecting once one of my folks inevitably passes away, I will not be at the funeral because no one will tell me about it lest I be sad.

By the way, the dad is fine, with scar tissue causing his belly ache successfully removed. My belly is filled with boiled bugs, garlic and potatoes.

Luckily for anyone who somewhere in the universe might have had thoughts about it, I sleep alone. But there is a couple down the hall at the Place d’Arms where the one that probably is a woman makes sex noises most of the night, like a cross between a guinea pig and an asthma attack.

It’s mildly amusing, but for the fact 7:30 a.m. comes early, but not three or four times like the lusty lady apparently did and/or faked, thanks to Viagra I am guessing.

The early to rise thing is the reason for the voyage, volunteering with a nonprofit called Acorn to gut a house. You gotta wear a respirator and a cheap space suit, rubber gloves, regular gloves, thick soled shoes and a head cover, which may or may not have been part of the fun for the loving back at the hotel and would make for a good bank robber outfit.

Working in 80 degree heat though, like the happy couple, you break out in a nice sweat too. And nothing is as sexy as wet finger holes in rubber gloves.

The house was owned by a guy named Roscoe A. Allen, Jr., and I know this because some checks starting with the apt # 911 are among the items sitting along the curb that might be salvaged.

The collection reminds why one should go full metal Buddha and not get too attached to material things. After all, once you go, someone will sift through your possessions and wonder what the hell you were thinking when you bought the Santa Mickey Mouse, the frilly French plates, the Neptune statue.

There’s a wheel chair, too, and a neighbor comes by to say that an elderly couple lived in the house being gutted not more that 30 feet from the canal that spilled its dirty water was owned by an elderly couple. No family is left, he says, but for a daughter in an asylum.

I remember how my own dad stretches truth like Silly Putty, but figure there’s a grain of truth to it. The guy and his wife have a Fema trailer. They recently returned to the area from the Chicago suburb of Olympia Fields.

He and his dog hated snow more than the threat of another hurricane, so they are back much to his daughter’s dismay. Maybe it’s because he remembered that the young woman across the street looks like she could be Vanessa Williams' daughter. Or maybe it’s just the stupid pull of what we call home, come what may.

The man and his wife actually go and buy fried chicken wings for everyone who has been putting a pile of junk on the lawn next to his. It makes you hope there really is a heaven.

The project, though, is more mythological, real Myth of Sisyphus stuff. That’s to say, there are termites partying in the back room walls, so it might have to be a total tear down.

There seems to be no rhyme or reason to how things are being done, anyway. All this time later, there’s no grand plan in place, no one sending eager groups of youngsters to help in some orderly fashion, block by block, house by vacant house.

There are tour buses, though. But I’m a voyeur, too, and, like I said, you don’t judge in New Orleans. You got ghosts of your own to deal with, like the baby faced fat guy you see at the oldest bar in the States, Lafite’s. Go-cup in hand, he’s a dead ringer for a long lost friend you know you ain’t ever gonna see again but in some weird dream brought on by gumbo or a burrito. He gets lost in the crowd, another big white boy, a chubby Casper in the chocolate city ambling down sidewalks where Mardi Gras beads lie buried under cracked pavement.

Wacky Mayor Ray Nagin to the contrary, in the tourist parts of town at least, there is plenty of vanilla to be found. The French Quarter may be for the visitors, but that doesn’t mean it’s all Disney.

With the right guide, you get to its fringes and outskirts, beyond the Bourbon Street shtick.

Lucky for me I meet such later that night at another house party, a shindig hosted by a woman who makes beaded bustiers for a parade I think they call Krewe da Rue, but am not sure an too lazy right now to double check. I do know it’s not the St. Pat’s one, where they throw cabbages in lieu of beads.

I learn this from a my new buddies, Derrick and Maitri, a couple transplanted from Wisconsin, one by way of India and Kuwait. 5 points if you correctly guess which is from where.

That’s no more exotic than the transgender couple, one of whom is a bright scientist and a pretty good cook. Brighter than me whose brilliant Abita fueled revelation is that transsexuals turn out lesbian because they have no interest in penises whatsoever. Me, I am quite attached to mine, much to my detriment.

Anyway, who really knows how people become fast friends, much let a kindred cross dressed couple.

And my new buddies and me did the bonding the old fashioned way, meaning we didn’t even know each other by screen name (and as far as I have been told each were wearing the undergarments considered appropriate for our chromosomes.) I do know there is a picture now of me and D floating around the WWW of me and D labeled “When Harry Met Sally,” and rumors of a Sundance Film deal for a flick about the three of us.

But so what? Lonely bachelors with bald heads and attempted goatees need friends, too.

I think this all had to do with the hearty Midwestern thing about drinking and shooting the shit, swapping stories. And I was in a place where a famous old bar which played a role in the birth of jazz was called Storyville.

Which means I wound up heading out in a old baby blue Cadillac with Dairy State plates to a place called The Three Legged Dog.

There’s a blown up photo hanging above the bar of a deceased patron who once lived above the drinkery. He once showed up with his head bashed in and told all that the hammer mark was the result of sleeping with a woman and being caught by his girlfriend.

The bartender, too, is wounded, and on the wagon. His broken knuckle happened on during a blackout when he got mad and put his fist through a wall and was allowing patrons to bust beer bottles on a back wall. He’s off the fried food now, too, and working out.

Pub two, at Burgundy and Toulouse, is Fahy’s, where wait staff winds down after feeding overstuffed travelers. I return here the next afternoon to see that dogs come to New Orleans bars, too.

Maitri is there by now and gives us permission to hop more. So we head down to see the tourists on Bourbon, past the strip clubs and gay bars and a place called The Dungeon to Molly’s, which has a button cute lady bartender who doesn’t suffer foolish underage drinkers who come in thinking that just being out past 3 a.m. entitles one to buy booze.

Derrick’s daddy was a ship’s captain on the Great Lakes and me I am South Side of Chicago by birth if not disposition, so occasional nights like this for two Irishmen are part of the genetic code, an imprint to be enjoyed sometimes as long as they don’t venture into Eugene O’Neill territory.

My new buddy kindly makes sure I get back to my hotel and calls his wife to check on her. I get into my room around 5, my friends Allison and Tony asleep in the other bed long ago.

Oddly, at 9 a.m. they are both feeling out of sorts. I think it has something to do with spongy carpeting, no windows, icy air conditioning and lack of alcohol.

Thanks to ibuprofen and Tums, I am in reasonably good shape, good enough to sit in the back of a minivan for a tour of ravaged places.

I am sleepy, but a dream state is the best way to see this Dali landscape, big swaths of city with few occupied residents, little sign of recovery, white trailers, an occasional car still stuck in a side of a house like a metal dog locked in perpetual heat.

Lakewood, The Ninth, St. Bernard’s. Nice places, no places. Bandaged levees. Trailers. And would you eat at a place called the Chicken Box, which brags it tastes like your mamma’s?

Fittingly, it is both April Fools’ Day and Palm Sunday.

In case you can’t do the math, this is folly and we’re still waiting for Jesus to return. Redemption is slow, so almost two years isn’t that long, unless it’s your house you’re talking about, eh? Just like a war you can ignore unless it’s your kid or spouse over there.

Nothing seems to smell funny anymore, though, at least literally.

I am beyond getting mad, but am up for wandering back to Fahy’s later that afternoon.

I am fitting in all to well here, listening to stories, telling my own, a little bit nuts, a little less ambitious than I should be, quite possibly corrupt in one way or another or at least, one who has given into a temptation or two at one time or another, more fallen angel than a Michael, which means I can’t run for public office, but do vote.

Repent fucking sinners, a T-shirt haging in yet another bar I visit warns.

By that point, though, I am alternating water with beer. And by the time I am at a place called 13 its about 5 waters to one beer, thanks to a waitress who keeps filling the free beverage.

My friends stories are for them to tell you. And this is approaching 2,500 words, well past my attention span.

So let’s close with my last two places I visited.

Derrick took me to a place called Half Moon on St. Mary, not far from where he and the Mrs. live. They filmed part of the docu-pic “Ray” here, but on this night a man wearing a neck brace is being carted off on a stretcher by paramedics. He appears to be talking on a Blackberry. A couple who fancy themselves cheerleaders seem to be reenacting a stunt that may have put the dude in the meat wagon. No one is saying. There are $1 bottles of High Life to be had.

Next day, all that water has me all fresh and hydrated like a daisy. Final meal in town is lunch at Lil Dizzy’s on Esplanade.

It’s soul food, home cooking. Some white customers ask the black owner about when W visited during one of his scant stops to the drowned town. The owner tells him about the dog and pony show that is a presidential visit (much less one from this Nero).

“It’s the only money he’s spent down here,” quipped one of the customers.

If only he hadn’t given up the sauce.