I descended I-10 from the 698.8 mile long evening onto horrendous, cratered roads in a filthy ghetto. Thanks for the directions, iphone, you really know how to take the scenic route. It seems that some highways really divide places up in a relatively wealth oriented way. I started looking for motels considering I had been banking on a lead from my friend Lauren for a place to crash. Well she never came through, probably didn't even make the call. I resented it for about 4 hours after arriving until I backed my ass into adventure, the way my ass tends to back up into. Dirty, shitty motels were going for about 70-100 bucks! Ain't highway robbery great? My main consideration was the safety of my vehicle, so I cautiously explored Tulane Rd for a while asking around. I was looked at in an inferior way. "We don't have no rooms," translates into, "Are you fucking kidding me trying to get a room right now? Take a long walk off a short pier." Finally one place said I could either have a room at 3 am, but get charged a full day and have to check out at 11, or just get a room at 11 for the next day. I thought, "That's really gross to take a room opening up at 3 am," but instead I said I'd wait and asked if it was safe for me to leave my car there. The desk clerk was kind and said "Sure, but I didn't tell you that." So on that dubious tip, I assembled my bike, and hid my book bag and laptop in the darkness of my car in the well lit garage, and nervously took off riding for the scene.
The city of New Orleans is covered in a fine layer of glass and I was extremely surprised, despite having tuffy strips on the inside of my tires, that I did not get a flat. Beyond glass, I worried that I'd get a pinch flat from hitting one of the surface inconsistencies of the magnificent travelways. Here, riding a cruiser is really the only option for the roads that are to riding as it would be to drag your hand across the craggy edge of a fractured concrete cinder block. I saw a litany of cars bottoming out in gigantic potholes and heard suspensions distending, and alignments losing allegiance to their structures. All for this party.
There is an eye-widening rumble of partygoers that you start to feel as you walk towards Bourbon street. The drunks stumble by like an albatross warning you there is death near. It's exciting! I dismounted my bike, and an inebriated gentlemen of 40 something stuck up a conversation by asking me questions about my bike. He was extremely knowledgeable and claimed to be a local, though actually just a Mardi Gras veteran. He gave me great tips on where to go and where cool local places were, and after a sort of excruciating 20 minute information session, I had to politely exit because I was anxious to become a part of the mob.
I walked in and it was nuts to butts crowded. Boobs. Negotiations for beads. Gays wearing next to nothing in 40 degree weather. Many, many "hand grenades", the most potent drink on Bourbon Street, which I later found out are made with Everclear, were $8 a pop. Goes down like an $8 hooker, which is to say easily, and for $8. I saw a man sexily dressed as Santa Claus walk by, followed by a street dwelling fellow who remarked, "Santa! Can I get a bitch for Christmas? Santa?"
Here is a little survey of the beginning of what I saw.
I absorbed what I could from the street, daring to wade into only one bar, and not being in the proper altered state to stay. There was too much spectacle and after two beers I wanted to find something a little local, good music that the dude had recommended to me. I grabbed my bike, and took a lost tourist ride, collected shards on my tires and found myself in the Marigny neighborhood on Frenchmen Street. I had forgotten what the guy told me about which bar to go to, but by happenstance I walked into a bar called D.B.A. It turned out to be a beer bar with a band that cooked. Great jazz music, cool costumes-it was, I found, a "Not So Superhero" party, and I was wildly under dressed, but they had a slew of beads just laying around for people to take at will, so I took a few rounds. The band smashed the end of their set, the bar seemed to be closing, or the excitement disappeared I think, so I took off back to Bourbon Street where things were still open.
Forgive me for being potentially blurry on some of these recollections. The time was a positive haze of celebration and elevated moods, and there was no 3G coverage. I took plenty of notes in my states, but I had to do my exploration the old fashioned way. Plus I'm trying to dig it out from over a week of recent residue. To the point, upon returning to Bourbon Street I bumped into some strange girl, a perfect pretext to banter in this context, if one was needed at all, since there was plenty of , "Hey, nice tits, wanna make out," going on.
She asked me who I was with, and I, as it is increasingly common for me to mention, and interesting to elaborate on as I progress further into the adventure, told her I'm alone on a cross country trip, and asked if I could hang out with them. Sure! So off I went with my new friend Lindsey and her friends Bernie (Bernadette), and Lana into a Playplace ball pit of gaudy reflections and boozy breath.
We went to a club I remember having previously floundered through in search of conversation. All I found the first time was copious "WOOOO!"s and an MC on stage who shouted over the music, "We are not CLOSING, we are not CLOSING!" Going back in, I noted that Lindsey did not have any beads. She gave some mumbling, embarrassed answer. Fortunately I had acquired a multitude of beads at DBA, so I offered some to her-at cost, of course. This was, to me, a quintissential Mardi Gras moment. She felt embarrassed for NOT having flashed anyone for beads. The episode broke down some kind of wall between us because after she flashed me and I gave her the beads, it was a matter of seconds before we were tasting each other's breath. Animalistic.
Here, as notes, I've got events lined up as getting a hand grenade, drinking some red bull and vodka, which I know belonged to Bernie and/or Lana, and having some Harpoon IPA that Lindsey had tucked into her jacket. She was scoring a lot of points with me, and quickly, and vice verse, and it quickly moved beyond the initial interaction into a more common interest based relationship, if you can actually believe it. And allow me to mention here that, though I have been moderately to heavily intoxicated at many stages in this trip, I have kept rigorous notes and have also efficiently and reliably reproduced memories of events that would potentially be obscured by drinking.
The night bubbled forth, and out of the frothy joy, regulatory practices began their routine exercises. A row of horse-mounted policemen methodically parted the crowds to the sidewalks. Some of the cops really seemed to take particular, poker-faced joy in the occasion. One Nola mountie had his horse just a few inches from the back of an oblivious girl's head. The horse licked its nostrils and snorted as any horse would in the chilly, smelly, rummy air, and the girl went on with her conversation with herself or whoever. I was personally struggling to produce my phone in order to take video for the hilarious thing I knew was about to happen, yet I failed. The wall of horses began to proceed and my favorite horse had its tongue hanging out like Michael Jordan about to dunk, except about to dunk for about a minute and a half. I guess it looked more like a blithering horse idiot than an iconic athlete. Regardless, as it was piloted forward, it just laid its pink taste flap out on this girl's hair. She noticed, finally, that it was time to perhaps get moving, panicked, found her head between the necks of two horses, suddenly seeing large black boots in stirrups, and ran screaming in the proper direction, buttonhooking to the sidewalk. I informed her that the horse had licked her head. She did not like that. I laughed and mourned for the lost video opportunity.
The horse-comprised people plow performed its function and officers began alerting us that we need to get off the street, and that our only alternative to going home was to enter a club. We took the advice of the law, and found some pathetic, vacuous space. At this point, we were hanging out with another guy named Sergio, a giant Ukranian party animal that seemed, in his manner of speech to have tissue paper stuck in his nasal cavity, smoke permanently in his lungs and that dry morning voice one gets after being all used up, dehydrated, asking for a glass of water. He made threats to party harder than anyone, which, I think, were meant to spur competition with his own personal "bests" of benders stretching beyond a full circadian rhythm. Here in this empty club starting to let the scattered dawn in, we had a sidelined drink while drug induced dancers continued to roll on.
The morning seemed to come on like a vampire sucking all the party out of Bourbon Street. We left the last place while the frontloader engulfed the trash on the street and turned it into giant, sparkling, muddy piles as lost souls made phone calls to missing persons. We went back to where the girls were crashing. A last drink was had sometime around 9:30 or 10 am before we all fell asleep together in the same room laughing and still swimming.
So much trash.
The next day was here when we went to bed, but Lana and Bernie had some fire in them to get up and go do certain things in particular places. They were annoying to listen to considering Lindsey and I were trying to fucking sleep! I don't blame them, and they got the same treatment from me later in the evening when I came in on a mission to rally the girls to party! The valuable time alone with Lindsey was really the last we'd get for the duration of the bachanal. All the people going in and out of the one bedroom we were in made me feel like a freshman in college.
Upon getting up, I had to retrieve my car. I prayed that it was still there with all of its contents, the essentials of everything I own for living, still intact. I felt relieved when I found it safe and sound, but strangely felt bad that I wasn't going to stay in the super sketchy motel where I parked. I lacked the know-how of the effective way to navigate the city, and my ersatz brain was not receiving 3G coverage since the sheer volume of extra humans in the city debilitated the magnificent AT&T network. I drove around like a jerk looking for parking near to the apartment on Esplanade and Bourbon, but the traffic I encountered seemed like something out of a news report. In retrospect I understand that road closures were regularly happening due to various scheduled and impromptu parades. The roads in the French Quarter are probably only conducive to parades because they are conducive to little else. Very large holes materialized in front of me and I nearly bottomed my car out five or six times before finding parking. I resolved not to use my car again until I left if I could help it.
When we finally got moving, we got two blocks down for a beer run and got the worst beer I've ever had, Abita Jockamo IPA. It tasted like the process of drying something out and bad breath, a crusty pukish aftertaste.
Left to ourselves, we took a meandering stroll down Decatur and tried to find food at Cafe Du Monde, only to find cafe au lait and beignets, short of substantive for our ends. What we ended up with was a tourist trap, but so be it, we were hungry. We ate with no music and bad decor. It looked like somehow the upstairs had flooded, and little had been done to mask this disaster. The food was OK, but what was best was leaving.
I spent most of the day talking Lindsey up about DBA and what a great time I had there, so she accepted my persistent suggestion and we went. A different band was there, playing some stock favorites, including a rendition of "When The Saints Go Marching" that was undeniably a New Orleans version with everybody still reveling in the Superbowl Victory, the chorus and improvisation turned into a rhythm-backed chant of "Who dat? Who dat? Who dat say dey gonna beat dem Saints," flowing back into the massive overload of everyone on stage playing towards the finale. It embossed itself into my head; another memory that defined this segment of the trip.
We returned to the apartment to wake the dead and get them out of the damned indoors, but the process dragged and turned laborious. Friends of Bernie joined up and we sat around for a time drinking and getting to know one another, but having already been out in the city-wide party, I felt like sitting around indoors did not at the moment provide me with the satisfaction I seeked. I tried to gently nudge, then played politics and softly urged the new gentlemen to apply pressure, and then began outwardly voicing my discontent with their continued failure to assemble and roll the fuck out. I exercised a good deal of patience here as this process consumed nearly two hours. The hour approached 2am by the time we walked to Bourbon Street, and not back to the Marigny, since we had to go meet Sergio, who in my mind, was funny and great, but hanging out with him often felt like taking on the burden of unpredictability. Fights, vomit, boredom, drug induced delusion, or sublime hilarity-any or all of these could emerge with Sergio in the posse.
We went to some place where there were a lot of sistas workin' it on stage, and quite a bit too much ntsss, ntsss for my tastes, but I wasn't trying to rock the boat, I had not yet paid anybody for lodging so I was down to just chill. I had a giant 32 oz beer there that I replenished with a few Miller lites that were living in my pocket, and I stood around watching the others dance, bemoaning the choice that was made for me. To make things a little more interesting, some chick with great moral scruples approached me to sell me some shots of barely alcoholic syrup, which I accepted since I needed to mix things up somehow. Also she was wearing no shirt and the front of her torso was painted from under her pudge up over her breasts. Her time was monopolized by a larger gentleman who, I suppose, couldn't get a sniff of anyone else, and spent into her attention a great deal of money since she danced only with him when she wasn't selling other people test tubes of crazy juice. I took pictures but it was dark, and the image is better as imagined or remembered. But here it is anyway.
*Great Job Prospects, Has Lots of Skills*
The best thing that happened there, apart from leaving, was that this guy got socked in the nose and started bleeding all over himself and left the club escorted. This alone didn't make my highlight reel, but the video here that documents what he did right after this is what makes the moment golden.
After finally tipping the group's scales to leave, we tried to go to a few different places that closed in our faces. We ended up at a gay club. All of us knew it was a gay club except Sergio. There was flirting and people were going up to the Ukranian bear and speaking to him and he acted mysteriously tolerant. I think if he knew we were at a gay club, he may have made a thing out of it, but instead, he acted normally, which was also outrageously, but not out of line. A guy approached him and Serge just sent him off by pointing in a direction away from him. It smacked of diva behavior and delighted everyone else around him. Then he took off his shirt. Really. It was as if he really knew where he was and was actually gay, but he was so fucked up that he had no clue what kinda place this was. This guy, man. Later when we went to the worst deli in the world, (and I think a lot of the food I had tasted terrible because the water in New Orleans is just disgusting) Sergio tried to sell me on punching him in the face while we waited to order. I refused upwards of ten times and then he called me a really good guy and insisted on buying the six pack of Brooklyn Lager I was about to get.
Classic Sergio!
I was the first to be ready to go when tomorrow came, even though we were up until it was time to go to work on Monday morning. Something like three pm is when everybody got up. The first order of business was food. These people are my friends now, but what a fucking production it was. Not even clear leadership was enough for these girls. I swear if nobody pushed them or called them, they might just sit around and starve talking about it. We finally got a recommendation on where to go for Cajun food and we walked to the Royal House. It was good enough. I didn't love it. I had the fried crawfish and preferred calimari, but maybe that's because I had in my mind that I was eating swamp critters. Somehow I enjoyed gator better, and thought less about it when I previously had it in Florida. We ordered tons of stuff and shared so we all got a sense of the food, except poor Lindsey who doesn't eat meat, but she got a decent salad, so it wasn't a total fail. I picked up the check to say thanks to the ladies for being so gracious as to allow me to be their guest in the place they had rented.
We all left dinner knowing what THAT tasted like and consensus was easily made to go to Cafe du Monde, you know, because it's one of those things you just have to do. So we ambled down the streets popping into this store or that store, and I watched the girls snap photos of themselves with plastic penises that had white gel that emerged when you squeezed hard enough. I thought to myself, "That isn't really how it works. This is a teachable moment," but said nothing, they know how it works. I guess it's often what isn't in the picture itself that regales the proper thousand words.
So I'm wearing my neon green hoodie. It's a wardrobe staple, and I figured I needed a pedicab hoodie with me on my trip. I can say it's done me a great service. It's often something to spark a conversation about. "You're from Boston," "Did you pedicab," and "hard to miss you in that thing," are frequent openers people feed me. I feel like it's almost as frequently asked of me while wearing it as, "So are you a student," was while I was pedicabbing. We finally arrive at Cafe du Monde and start figuring out where to sit. I recommend indoors because it's a little chilly. We have some really Cajun kinda guy serving us, I order a cafe au lait and watch them pour about a tablespoon of coffee into a cup otherwise completely filled with milk, and realize that it's not going to be enough coffee, so I order a coffee black also. The four of us are having conversation and I get tapped on the back, hearing a familiar voice go, "Boston Pedicaaab?" I turn around and Sam King is there, at Cafe du Monde, and picked me out because of the neon color. I had facebook messaged her about coming to New Orleans and got nothing back, but here she was. I didn't have to say much, she was pouring out all kinds of stories and circumstances of being since the Saints had advanced to the Superbowl. Some things to the effect of 'I've been a half hour late for work like everyday, people have called me and I haven't gotten back to them in weeks, time has disappeared." It was Lundi Gras. Still 36 hours from the conclusion of the biggest party I've ever experienced, and for Sam, a resident of New Orleans, she looked like she had come unglued from reality. I say this with great respect for her, because Sam is someone I call a friend, despite our differences, but she was in the middle of a haze. I'd never seen her like that before, confused, excited, aware, and a little bit scared of what might happen in the next day and a half. She poured out a great deal of information for a visitor like me and took off into the mobscene of displaced chairs, half eaten beignets, and fractals of confectioners sugar. Cafe du Monde talks itself up as a place where mystical encounters happen, as stated by posters framed on the wall, but for it's bragging, being there felt like wearing some kind of magical, ethereal cloth. Or maybe it was just my neon green Boston Pedicab hoodie.
This evening I recall going to a beer store where Lindsey and I picked out fantastical beers from an impressive stock. The store clerk, who was knowledgeable in beer, tried to describe to me and sell me on the Jockamo IPA as something that it wasn't, a "sledgehammer of hoppiness" and instantly discredited himself, in my humble. We then returned to the apartment where we met with the aforementioned gentlemen. We chilled for a while as I resisted peer pressure to try ecstasy for the first time, drinking my heavy beers. So I think at some point we left the girls because they wanted to go somewhere lame and the the guys and I wandered around and decided on Pat O'Briens and got a signature hurricane. Oh yeah, we tried to go to this strip club that I got passes for, but my passes weren't valid this evening, and they were charging ridiculous amounts for entry, so we left a little disappointed, but nobody moreso than me, since it was the first attempt I ever made to enter a strip club, and left the premesis still having never actually been inside of one. It may be my last bastion of purity.
I want to say I am missing a few drinks in the course of things, but there is also no real knowing how much residual alcohol was in my system from the beginning of any given portion of this extended episode. BUT FOR SOME REASON I found it to be a good idea to purchase another hand grenade. By this point, I had acquired a red Captain Morgan Pirate hat, so you know I'm feeling good if I no longer care about how stupid I look, but now I'm laying into this hand grenade before we go to a beer bar. Granted, the idea of going to a beer bar had yet to be suggested, but how can a guy with a hat like that say no to anything? We sat down at Beerfest, and it was fairly empty for what was going on out in the streets. I developed a rapport with the bartender and tipped her well on my Chimay White. Not that well, I thought, but apparently besting the curve by a healthy enough percentage to comp me my next Chimay White. Well that was it. There was no more flirting to be done. It needed to be naptime. Hand grenade+Chimay+Chimay=naptime. You can start from zero, that equation cannot be disproved.
*No Longer Gives A Fuck*
I've reconstructed that I went to meet the girls to obtain a set of keys to the apartment so I could crash out for a little. It's somewhere in the 3 or 4 am vicinity right here. The disappointment of all this is that I was given such excellent information on where to go and what to see from 6 am to 10 am for Mardi Gras itself, bands marching through neighborhoods to wake the world up before flooding the day with partying, dance rituals uptown, and literally, the gayest parade of Mardi Gras. All stuff that would have been nearly logistically impossible to accomplish with others, or even in the timeframe given. I knew all this, I relayed all this to the girls, I got them excited about the idea of it all, and told them to make sure I was awake for this. One moment I'm getting a free Chimay White, the next I'm waking up at 10 am in extreme disappointment that everyone is up and hanging out and they let me sleep through all of that cool stuff! And suddenly some guy named Craig is hanging out in the apartment while I'm just sleeping. My temporary girlfriend had picked this fella up at the place where you purchase hand grenades. I had previously passed him as he tended the door checking ID's, and I commented on his military jacket, asked if he served, and he hadn't, but his father had. I was glad that was the end of it because it was a conversation I wasn't entirely prepared to knowledgeably handle. So when I saw him in the apartment, I recognized him in that sifting through the congealed grime of blurry memories-what was your name again way. Craig. I was kinda wigging out because I had no idea about what was going on, why he was here, but I let myself get over it pretty quickly once we all left. It was Mardi Gras, we had to go outside.
I was advised to get a costume for Mardi Gras by Serge, a fellow pedicabber in Fort Lauderdale, but I didn't really get a chance to make it happen. My solution was to safety pin a CVS beach towel around my waist. It was warm enough outside to do so. No pockets except for the ones in my track jacket, I kept my iPhone and money clip and other important items in the inside pockets, that later in the evening, I discovered had holes in the bottom of them. Large holes. I cannot believe through all that, I didn't lose anything important, or anything at all, except for, perhaps, some dignity and brain cells, but I have trillions of those.
I have been separated from sleep by mere minutes when a Tecate was thrust upon me. Outside, there is a band playing on the street corner and someone has passed out next to them. There are lines for the port-o-johns that line the tree populated median of Esplanade Ave. Parades pass in multiple directions, collide, enter and exit bars, gain musicians, lose them just as quickly to entropy. Gender has been obliterated. The idea of a person being a stranger has ceased to exist in lieu of others being people you just haven't met. Girls aren't the only ones getting beads. Standing around in the middle of the street drinking is a perfectly acceptable way to spend your entire day. Families are present, children are in costumes. As I spill this into words, it still astonishes me that no elaboration is really required, these are the situations that one breezes by on this day.
Can you spot the stroller?
And so with big days such as Mardi Gras and New Year's Eve, and the 4th of July, the ameteurs are out, and I think their inexperience is rubbing off on me. I took a shot of Jameson and like a total a-hole, couldn't get it down. Part of it went down the wrong pipe and I coughed it back into the plastic cup I attempted to relive it of. The force of the reversal splashed it into my eyes, through my nose/throat interchange, and even hurt my ears, somehow, but not really. What a rookie. It was funny for everyone else, but I didn't fully recover for about an hour and a half.
To be honest with you here, I've got relatively few notes on what happened after a few of these photos...I know that maybe 30 minutes to an hour into being outside, we met the dirtiest girl I've ever seen. Beautiful girl, but perhaps rejecting a strict past, or simply no longer caring for her hygiene, but her hands were covered in what I suspect to be weeks of accumulated dirt. Her name was Casey, and she was very sweet, and kind of joined up with our crew. At some point she and I splintered from everyone else and went back to the apartment for a brief respite, and then left again to meet her friends, who I imagine had designated a place to meet. She was traveling around places in a van with two others, Debi and Julian. Julian was not a fan of mine, no sir, perhaps it was the mohawk, the towel, or that Casey had picked up a drifter (ha, ha, get the irony here?) but he was way more interested in surfing the internet at some place we were at. Casey told me to take down Debi's and Julian's numbers to get in touch with them later, since she had no phone. When I left them, it was the last I saw of them.
Casey, Craig, and myself. Can you see how dirty her one hand is, resting on her leg?
Casey and Lindsey. How about now?
I was alone now, and kind of glad for it. The girls had been weighing me down in my ability to explore and seek adventure, and I feel like perhaps, I was not entirely their style either in the way they preferred to proceed with things. Our independence from each other was mutually beneficial, I think. I kinda got the message from Julian to bugger off, so I did, and headed back to the Marigny to see what was up over there. This one bar was kind of my post up. I can't tell you the name of it, but when I walked in, I made friends with a couple straight away, and a marching band just filtered in and started drumming away. It rocked everyone's socks off, and when the band concluded I popped in to the house to raise the dead, once again. "You're missing Mardi Gras," I exclaimed to the sleeping girls. They bargained for more minutes, but it was akin to Senate proceedings, and I was a Republican-they were going to have to concede. They got up, but were intent on lumbering around, so I went back out to that bar to socialize. I was later thanked by Lana for my persistence.
Meals came few and far between all the activity, so when I struck conversation with a circle of folks off for some grub, I politely tagged along with them, as that was cool. It wasn't anything fancy, but I craved the same grilled cheese the next day, and couldn't locate the establishment again. I shared a single chair with a girl who had a boyfriend and kissed me on the cheek for being sweet. We all paid into the check and as the eight of them shuffled out, I was called out on my towel by two girls at the table behind us. It seemed like an opportune time to start conversation and I sat with them to have a drink and keep them company, because I felt like I could hang out with anyone, and on this day, I was largely correct. We all seemed to get along, so going out somewhere else was in the cards. It was very crowded on Frenchman Street, so I was led to a new place that was even further off the beaten path. The stumbly, craggy walk over empty streets was long, but we finally ended up at a place that some biking beauty had previously mentioned to me in our concurrent cycling path as the place to be. Mimi's, maybe? Names...Names and specificity went out the window in some of these hours, and I am disappointed in myself, but perhaps not as much as my father is in this documentation of money being evacuated from my bank account in the name of a jolly good time.
These girls were Ali and Hannah, and I, in a towel was receiving the whole of their attention. We lounged in this place for 30 minutes, Ali and I talked seriously about life ambitions and the way you inspire young minds, as she was a teacher, and the impulse of inspiration, the meanings of these things, and their relationship to improvisation. I told her it was too bad I was leaving tomorrow. She deflected that statement saying, "What a line!" It's sad because I am often aware of how people view me, and in this, my sincerity tends to get overlooked, or frequently laughed off as another joke I spout. I wanted to hang out with her the following day, but she didn't answer or return my call.
We three left to return to Frenchmen Street for some music, and stepped into a starry, blue club with a band ripping away. The ladies were losing steam, even though it had become Ali's birthday, and I think Hannah tired of the conversational attention I was giving to Ali, and not her, and started to steer the operation home. They unceremoniously left. I unceremoniously stayed for a while, listening, pondering, knowing it was time to see what was cooking in the old apartment.
When I got back, they were kinda surprised to see me, but it felt natural for me to have gone off and returned. It's somewhere between midnight and three am, one can never be sure. I think I'll side on the earlier considering when I returned, a beer run was in order. How else should a Mardi Gras night terminate but with ludicrous amounts of Abita Turbodog.
We sat outside in our little wrought iron, gate protected world as errant shouts and noises of last hurrahs freely flowed into the enclosing. A neighbor came home with his boyfriend. Now I'm not sure if he was drunk or just dying to not be sober, but as his boyfriend either lagged behind or had progressed ahead, he pleaded for a beer, he was DYING for one, and begged us not to tell his boyfriend, he'd be so mad.
Craig spent a great deal of this evening trying too hard to, I guess, compete with me for Lindsey. I mean it didn't seem like I was going to be much competition, some freak with a mohawk wearing a towel. In the course of conversation he said something to the effect of "I get what she sees in you" or whatever. I don't know, it just seemed like a good piece of fodder for me to spend the rest of the night cockblocking. But it was easier done than even said, dear Craig didn't have a chance anyhow. Through sleepy senses, burning out to Neil Young at 5:30 in the morning, I could ascertain that Lindsey was just fine sleeping on the couch, and didn't want to head to bed with him. He went alone, and I slept at ease in a dreamy moral victory.
This was before Craig and I became actual friends. The girls got up the next day and wanted to go on a tour of the Ninth Ward, and they took off hastily to make the tour on time. It was the fastest I ever saw them organize. They left the apartment with Craig, Sergio, and myself still hanging out. This was going to be a big blog day for me, in fact I think I posted the Superbowl entry on this day, so I was anxious to depart to a cafe. Sergio was sort of awake first, gurgling out, "I was sa-possta check out of my khotel at wuna clock. Shiit." He started to get up and move, and blew out the bathroom in such a way that he HAD to have been on some fucked up drugs for that odor to be from a human. Jesus, the whole house. He received a phone call from his friend asking him where he was. Fifteen minutes before he left the apartment, he told his friend, "I'm leaving right now." He then rummaged around through the stink-filled bedroom for his camera. He had a talent for stating the obvious, like when the camera fell through the crack between the bed and the wall to the back corner, he moaned, "That is the worst place for that camera to go. It was just between the bed and the wall and it just fell back there. Uuuuccgh. It's hard to get."
Concerned for my stuff and still wary of this stranger Craig, I tried to angle our way out of the house and engineer a parting of ways. He asked to use my iPhone to check his facebook three different times, asked for Lindsey's number and tested the borders of our acquaintence by asking me to swing by his work to pick up his pay. Previously having mentioned I was going to go get coffee, he suggested lunch at a place uptown followed by a coffee shop, and though it wasn't that great a sushi joint, I was glad I went along with his whims because it did show me another side of New Orleans that I hadn't seen, and took me into areas of the French Quarter that I had not yet found. All filed away to give it another go next year, with perhaps, some more direction or efficiency, and certainly more variety. There's still something to be said for complete oblivion and the freewheeling discovery that comes with it. The excursion gave us an opportunity to talk more and figure out that we were actually pretty cool with eachother.
After not getting a hold of Ali from the previous evening, I waited an unreasonable 50 minutes for overpriced Thai takeout, returned the keys to the girls, kissed Lindsey goodbye, and left New Orleans at around 9:30 at night with leftover Thai and leftover sushi for sustenance on ten new hours of road.
I-10 is boring. I-10 is straight. I-10 goes through the bayou. Then through some kind of deciduous region where there are a lot of deer. I wonder if they are smarter than Northeastern deer because they seemed to stand on the side of the highway rather than run out into the middle of it, but I suppose when you vapidly see your brother or mother explode when a high speed stream of light arrives at their location, you may decide that exploding is not a good thing, perhaps even connecting the explosion to the continued absence of your brother or mother.
Leaving so late was a bad idea, but it gave me resolve to make it to Texas before I pulled over to rest. All along the highway, I was wondering where a rest stop was, and I refused to sleep anywhere that wasn't officially a rest stop, for fear of having a Terry Schiavo incident. I popped off the road near Iowa, LA, feeling confused while approaching seeing signs coaxing motorists to come to beautiful Iowa, thinking, "this is pretty far south to have a sign hailing Iowa as an interesting destination," but coming close to high speed nod-offs, I pulled off. Driving solo here was intimidating. Only truckers were really around, and anywhere I considered sleeping was filled with tractor trailers and I felt like I didn't want to test the hospitality of truckstop folk, after all, it is a lifestyle I've been warned about and only know of from movies and stories. So I tried to nab a hotel room at the two places around there, and after realizing they wouldn't bargain with me, and that $80 was way too much for what I needed that I could just as easily get in my car, it was clear that the next stop had to be across the state line. Caffeine.
When I finally crossed into Texas, thank the sweet bees, there was a rest stop. I parked right in front of the giant 25 foot high star that looked like it had fallen out of the sky and gotten stuck on one point, slightly askew. On a sub-40 degree night, I wrapped myself up in clothing, winter jackets, and blankets, and took a few shivering hours to recharge before finishing the New Orleans to Austin leg. Welcome to Texas.
Statistics:
698.8 miles from Orlando to New Orleans
$130 on dinner for four at "The Royal House"
$250 to chill in the crib
$8 for a hand grenade
$40 spent on parking
2:56 am, the time I witnessed for the first time, a woman flashing her breasts for beads. A-niiice-a
42 remembered, documented drinks in New Orleans
1/2 bagel
X number of times I showed girls my bare ass
22 hours or thereabouts for the longest stretch of consciousness while partying.
Drinks from...
Day 41/42/43
225 32 oz Miller Lite @Bourbon Street
226 20 oz Bud
227 Nola Hopitoulas IPA @DBA
228 Abita Amber
229 Grenade?
230 Red Bull and Vodka
231 ???
232 Harpoon IPA
233 Abita Amber
Pass Out
234 Abita IPA (worst beer of trip) @ apt
235 Abita Amber
236 Nola Hopitulous IPA @ DBA
237 Racer 5 IPA
238 Stone Pale Ale (to go!)
239 32 oz Bud
240 Candy shots from painted breast girl
241 Miller Lite (from my pocket)
242 Miller Lite "
243 Bud can @gay bar
Pass Out
244 Brooklyn Lager @apt
245 Brooklyn Lager
246 Heineken @ Royal House
247 Snakedog IPA @apt
248 Reaper Ale Sleighor Double IPA
249 Hurricane @Pat O'Brien's
250 Brooklyn Lager @Bourbon St
251 Hand Grenade @Tropical Isle
252 Chimay White @Beerfest
253 Chimay White
Pass Out
254 Tecate
255 Abita Turbodog
256 Jameson shot coughed out into my eyes
257 24 oz PBR
258 PBR bottle
259 N'Awlins Golden Ale
260 Miller High Life
261 Abita somthing
262 Sierra Nevada
263 Miller High Life
264 Abita Turbodog
265 Abita Turbodog
266 Abita Turbodog
Day 44
267 Kirin Ichiban with lunch
First messings with Texas coming up.
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