Drawing Trees

This post was precluded by an introduction.  The theme of this and the next post is how the New Orleans' culture and arts scene provides opportunities for adults to play like kids again and to experience "wonder" and discovery. 

              When I first visited New Orleans I was enchanted with many things, but nothing impressed me more than its trees.  I spent my first morning sitting in a live oak reading Gogol and many hours after that entranced by the flora that uprooted sidewalks and streets and decorated the city in a way that no lights or arts or business ever could.  And then of course, there was the weirdness, the wider range of social norms and creativity that is so prevalent and expressed here.  But rarely is there opportunity for these two affinities to come together.

              It was at a Thursday evening wine tasting that I met Liana.  The wine was free and the store had more than its customary twelve freeloaders lining up at the tables to drink samples and feign cultivated pallets of fine things like wine.  I swirled my glass and sniffed it while I listened to Liana.  She was a sweet older lady with dark-rimmed and foggy glasses and a set of sharp teeth, now purpled with free wine.  She was constantly laughing and smiling.

            “Remember how the Saints won the Superbowl?” she asked me, also twirling her wine to mimic her neighbors.

            “Yes…”

            “Well I fed a whole bunch of them pot cookies the night before.  They ate them before the game.”  She laughed and finished her wine.  “That’s why we won.  My cookies.” 

            She said she was living at an art house on St. Claude  with a tree house and forty-foot aerial slip n’ slide out back, but that there was another art house on Esplanade with its own tree house.  On Saturday, they were hosting a “free market,” where second-hand goods were available for the taking and no money was to exchange hands.

            “Tree house?” I asked.

            Liana had another cup of wine now.  She laughed, “Oh, yes. Fifty feet tall with a big-ass slide.”    

Treehouses have always been gems of my imagination, a magical and natural play place to escape the safe domestic life of a boy indoors.  But treehouses are not just toys.  They began more than a thousand years ago as functional homes.  Some tribes of South Pacific islanders preferred to live in trees and made modest modifications to accommodate them.   Long since they’ve become the stuff of kids: small elevated homes for many generations of boys and girls (and their secret clubs) and the willing projects of their restless fathers eager to build shit in their dusty wood shops.   Ever since I watched Swiss Family Robinson on television, I have had an enduring fantasy of living and playing in a tree house.  Not just a small one-roomer fifteen feet up a magnolia tree, but to be isolated and dangerously elevated in the higher tiers of old wooden giants, hidden in their foliage and swinging from branch to branch, sleeping a hundred feet above my imagined enemies below, which were many.  It is the kind of fantasy that fades with the senescent practicality of young adulthood, but never completely disappears.

When I walked into the backyard of the Art House that Saturday, the fantasy was immediately revived.

            A fifty foot multi-colored tree house was woven in and out of the arms of a golden rain tree.   Ropes hung everywhere and an intricate system of tunnels secret hiding spots and apparatuses ready for reckless climbing was apparent even from a distance.  It was like the play-places at McDonald’s restaurants but bigger, taller, and arboreal.  A friendly young man in green, over-sized sunglasses led me up a set of shaking spiral steel stairs towards the top.  A satellite dish, shaped like a waffle-fry, supported the loading of people onto a slide that had likely been recovered from a fast-food playground after Katrina, when an abundance of these kinds of materials were available to those thrifty enough for the salvaging.  I bent back an open nail that scraped my leg on the way in and slid down to the bottom.  I suppressed the instinct to holler as the slide jumped and dipped several feet.  I climbed out and up and did it again.  The treehouse was constructed in several layers with staircases and tunneled passageways affixed in many places to assist in ascent.   Near the top was a bridge of mesh netting, ropes to swing from, satellite dishes for napping and several holes to climb through on the way up or across.  The creator, local artist Scott Pterodactyl (like the dinosaur), was too impatient to start from the bottom so he began in the middle.   He had even constructed a zipline from the top to the window of his bedroom.  It was no longer there.  His inspiration for the tree house was rooted in the same reasons I now reveled in climbing and swinging through his project: to play and create something that appeals to our child-like wonder, to feel like a kid again in do things that kids do that are still fun but inhibited by the law and adulthood.  It was a project of creation and discovery and hands-on sensory fun.  Here was my opportunity, everyone's opportunity, to climb, jump, shout, swing through a network of colorful tubes and structures without the self-conscious embarrassment of displacing children, the forever rightful patrons of such toys.  

 

I played and napped and played some more before descending back to ground level where I collected some free books and watched the vaudevillian hipster ensemble, Sweet Street Symphony Band, jangle through some old-timey tunes.   The small crowd watched and drank PBRs while collecting free things to stuff in their knapsacks and purses. 

           I later learned more about the house and its reputation: how it had been raided for drug trafficking and shut down for fire codes.  How its parties incite nudity and everyone has to sign a waiver in the case that the treehouse collapses or someone falls off after too many drinks.   It is not a play place that embraces safety, but this only increases my affinity for it.  Because only in New Orleans, relative to the strict enforcement of law and liability in other places in our country, could this toy exist.  
              A couple months later I received a call from a friend who had just moved to New Orleans.  She was living in the Art House.  I went over to visit.  The inside of the house, an old mansion in the Treme, housed fifteen artists of varying commitments to anarchy.  It looked like a cleaner rendition of the house from Fight Club.  Empty shopping carts littered the basement living room.  A glass case of baby pet cockroaches decorated the wall.  The refrigerator was orange and rusted, likely hauled from a supine position next to a dumpster, but its old motor purred and the inside had a few impressive treats created by divers of dumpsters of high-end natural food stores.

            We drank beers at the top of the tree house in the comfort of a yellow connecting-tunnel cube.  Everything seems more peaceful in a tree.  The air is open and the sounds of the nocturnal birds and insects are level while cars and headlights and the general noise of the streets is below you, like there is a layer between, separating the dream from the real life.  It was enough that I wanted to curl up there in the  mesh bridge net and sleep for several nights.  

I left soon after and rode my bike through the city.  I was headed home to sleep, but I was feeling content and childish and a little thirsty for more sensory discoveries, so I turned around again.   I found a 24 hour draw-a-thon in the Bywater where Press Street was encouraging residents to draw all hours of the night.  The scene took place in the Old Ironworks warehouse where several stations were set up to encourage drawing and sketching with various mediums.   The event was advertised to be kid-friendly but when I walked inside a man and woman were laying naked on a bed in the center of the room.   People circled around them, lying on their stomachs and scribbling away at long stretches of butcher paper with charcoal. Every minute someone with a timer called out, “switch” and the naked couple changed positions and then froze.  Another man in army fatigues, heavy boots and a drill sergeant’s brim hat paced around them.  His name was Gary Forbes, and he was also an artist, now impersonating the infamous training officer from Full Metal Jacket.  He folded his hands behind his back and looked downward as he paced, never at the nudes.  He commanded that we draw better.   “If you haven’t caught their essence in the first 10 seconds you failed.”   “Don’t think.  Draw.”  “Sketch the tension, never the bodies.”  I could not meet his demands.  I tried to draw better; I tried to capture their essence; I tried to encapsulate everything adult about the scene, the theater of sexual tension, the intersecting contours, the suggestive crude post-coital laziness, the storied relationship between all men and women and then between this man and woman, but more and more, my drawings looked like trees.  They were elementary and arboreal.  I gave up on the nudes.  I ignored the couple and the sergeant who demanded improvement and commitment.  I drew the images still slipping and sliding in my imagination, old childish fantasies that have endured any adult ones, and had now been given real dimensions in the city of New Orleans by a different set of artists.  I drew houses in trees. 

To read more about the treehouse check out these links
1) Partying at the tree house
2) About its creator

Tree House

The Draw-a-thon bed minus two nudes

Tree house

The backyard "free market"  The tree house is hidden in the foliage to the top right of the stage

Satellite dish naps

Sweet Street Symphony Band

The path to the top

Youth and Wonder in the Big Easy: Introduction

I can think of no better explanation of my affinity for teaching children than the simple introspective truth that I am still very much a child.  I love recess; I love banging on things, climbing, and dancing; I maintain a healthy—although begrudgingly compliant—distrust and disdain of rules that remain under-explained by authorities.  But no, I am no longer a child, despite some lingering habits.
  To me, the most admirable quality of children is their unbound sense of wonder and its intersection with play.   Wonder is a beautiful thing.   I like to think it is how we feel when we look at something utterly and unexpectedly new and surprising, and in that first instant of encounter, we are unable to explain what it is, why it is, and our sudden relationship to it.  It is surprise and admiration and captivation.  It is a child discovering hidden seeds in a woody fruit or a hairy insect it never thought existed.  It the visual confirmation that there are, in fact, black swans and they are mean and nasty when you try to pet them.  For an adult, it might be watching the sun at dusk, unable to rationalize or characterize the range of colors that mix and change and sway together to make that one indefinable color that we can never make into a crayon but simply call a sunset.
      Children exhibit this trait more often because less of the world is known to them, and because their imaginations remain less tarnished with the faculty of logic that senescent adults depend on to explain why things are and how they came to be and how we can relate to it in our environment.  How we can reduce its signifying uncertainty and fit this sort-of-new thing into a mental lump of what we already know.

More than that, as we grow older, we simply don’t get to play the same way.  There are obstructions to fun like laws and fitness  And there are people that enforce or recommend those obstructions like policemen and doctors.  There are places designated for adult fun like bars and strip clubs and golf courses, but even those have rules and their appeal is exclusive and for the most part, they operate without much care for abstract and necessary things like wonder.  Instead they become institutions of habit.  Not discovery.   It seems that the best qualities of children wear away, and adults only get to experience them again through the vicarious joy of their own children if they are serious enough to reproduce.  

But New Orleans is different in this regard.  The first impediment to fun for adults is most often the law, and in New Orleans there is a conspicuous sense of its absence, or at the very least, a diminished presence that lacks formidability.  Its festival culture promotes impulse and imagination and play.  It is the kind of spirit that allows us to dance in aquariums, to march to music in the streets without permits after someone died, to occupy public parks without police brutality and intimidation, to adapt spaces and functions of buildings and structures to suit our own pleasures, whether it is a gutted house exhibiting paranormal local theater or a children’s museum hosting several hundred adults dressed in all-white to drink cocktails and play with educational toys until late at night.

There are fewer limits to fun, and because of the accumulation of innovators and artists, as well as the raw beauty of a place that has forever been an absurd confluence of cultures, geography, and creativity, there are ample opportunities to regress "mature" rationale and replace it with wonder and its favorite complementary partner: play. More simply, it is about hands-on discovery. 

Since the time I learned to walk, my favorite things have always been elementary, even infantile.  I like to run and jump and climb.  I like to bang on things.  I like to drink liquids (I used to drink gallons of milk every week)   I like to dance in crowds.  I like to touch stuff that I'm not sure I should touch.  And in New Orleans, where restrictions are minority to opportunity, there are several places that encourage the inner-child, that augment our sense of wonder and say to us, “go ahead and play.”
My next few blogs attempt to instantiate this feeling and idea (and to abstract less) through stories in a serial format to break up the content and length.  They are simply about how adults get to play in the Big Easy. 

            Since I am finally on break and for the first time in months and I have free time, I will attempt to publish two or three or four entries on this topic.

1) Treehouses  (coming very soon)
2) The Music Box
3) Dancing in the Streets
4) Cool shit and lights

A pictorial preview: 

Open-bar Children's Museum during white-linen night

The backyard treehouse of NOLA Arthouse on Esplanade

The Music Box

Celebration of the Oaks

Occupy Autum in NOLA

        

            A few days after New Yorkers began to march and occupy Wall Street fall arrived in New Orleans. The first day of fall here feels much like the first day of spring in a colder, more northern city.  Hibernation from seasonal oppression ends, and the local population emerges into the urban wilderness, ready to stretch their limbs and shake the dormancy from their desires, evoking a sort of Dionysian spirit of impulse and action, quick passions and senselessness.  On that first day of autumn in New Orleans, crime went down but the colors extended their range, and strange characters of the city started to appear in greater frequency, all image and without message.  I rode my bike through the Quarter after work and celebrated by drinking a bloody mary and watching Mem Shannon play blues in the French Market.   Somewhere an impromptu parade began and ended.  On Bourbon Street wildness began, the early onset of an absurdism that is everlasting but glimmers best in the dusk: silver men lying prostate in the street with balloon dildos, a police officer showboating by walking his horse backward, strippers and perverts watching the pedestrians for bait, bachelorettes drinking their first hand grenades and taking pictures under the bright lights, letting it all go one last time before tying the knot that forever forbids this kind of behavior without approval.

            It felt like more people were on the streets.  And so there was more energy in the air.   The parking lot at City Park was full and the usual unsavory characters that lingered below the overpass on Claiborne had multiplied.   Beer bottles and empty tin pans of chicken wings littered the mural'ed columns that support the Route 10 overpass.  Homeless men and half-dressed hookers walked in the shade between them.  I filled my car with gas and then filled my nose with heavy nasal swallows of fried chicken and po-boys from Manchu.  I stopped and waited while the car in front picked up a middle-aged white hooker in a black bikini top.  She crushed her cigarette on the sidewalk and got in with a smile.

            That night I sat in a residential dining room with thirty other young men, women, and children.  I had gone to services for a Jewish Holiday for the first time in five years.  The service was Orthodox and a wall separated the men from the women.  After, the rabbi invited us all to dinner.  It was Rosh Hashanah and the first day of the Jewish New Year, number 5772 on the calendar   We ate apples and honey and pomegranates and the rabbi wished we all have as many good deeds inside us as the pomegranate has seeds.  He requested that we go around the room and declare our optimism for the new year in the form of a wish.  The guests wished for better economic prosperity for our country, for world peace, global sensitivity, compassion, opportunity.  I wished that everyone might have one good meal, but kept my true wish private, a more selfish wish that I drag with me everywhere—to experience novelty every day.   When everyone was done, a seven year old named Shalom stood on his chair and made the final wish, “All of the above.” 

*                                  *                      *         

            I arrived on my bicycle at Tulane and Broad a few minutes past noon.   The protestors were already gathered on the strip of lawn that led to the courthouse stairs.  Behind the courthouse was the Orleans Parish Prison.  The cops and correctional officers stood together and talked next to the news vans, whose radio towers spired to the top of the entrance of the jail.  There, the following words were inscribed permanently in capital letters, “THIS IS A GOVERNMENT OF LAW, NOT OF MEN.” 

            On the opposite corner the Gypsy Mermaid had parked her “art car,” a large colorful van decorated in blue murals, pink artifacts, and glitter.  She had painted the price of her services on the front of the van by the door.  Twenty dollars for a complete prognostication of your future.  Ten for a tarot card reading.  Below the prices: “Take donations in gas and repairs.”  Her hood was open and a stout young black man was leaning in,  hooking jumper cables to her battery.

            I locked my bicycle to a street sign on the corner and made my way into the crowd     At the center a core of activists attempted to inspire the crowd to chant, “The people united/will never be defeated.”  They accused the protestors  in the back of not participating.  I stood there quietly.   There was no central message to OccupyNOLA.   In some ways, that was part of its draw; political messages are exclusive, inaccessible to those who are angry but can't specify why.  Instead we shared a common dissatisfaction, a spirited disagreement with the direction of our ship.  Our numbers were the message.  But as an absurdist, I am serious about very few things. And I  cannot say anything seriously if it’s in the form of a chant.  I was glad to just be there, angry and happy and quiet. 

            I took notes in an old pocket notebook I found in a drawer of my bedroom.  I began writing in the first open space next to notes about things from years ago, a description of Mount Cardigan from its peak, an anonymous Boston phone number, and the name of a church where a friend was buried two years ago. 

            A man in a green hat handed me a slip of paper, a behavioral guide of what to do if apprehended by the New Orleans Police Department. 

            “If you are arrested—REMAIN CALM!”

            I briefed through the bullet points and slid the paper into my pocket.  Someone took the megaphone and yelled “Let’s GO!”   We stepped off the grass and into the street.

     
                  Tulane Avenue was sordid in its appearance north of Claiborne Avenue.  The Dixie Brewery loomed over all of it like a vapid lighthouse of its surrounding vacancies—its dome a lingering relic of that old, undying thirst.  The brewery had long been a national success, an icon of New Orleans post-prohibition alcoholism.  But Katrina despoiled the factory and they took their business to Wisconsin, still brewing the Dixie brand, still touting the New Orleans label.  Around it, isolated instances of Title IX houses sprinkled Tulane Avenue, surrounded by empty dirt lots that were once filled with houses.  The city enacted eminent domain and those houses were removed as whole to make way for the new VA hospital, an allegedly auspicious promise for the land, now marked by a few wandering construction workers, dusty weeds, and a set of lonely metal cranes. 

            The chants continued.  A group of gutterpunks carried signs promoting anarchy (Flor de Lis + Anarchy = Love). “1…2…3….4…We declare class war!”  A homeless man stood next to a cop car on Claiborne and yelled at us, “Go home, just go home!” 

            Someone brought horns and drums and began to play Bob Marley songs in the center of the march.   I could no longer hear the chants, only the brass notes ringing out semi-relevant songs of protest.  The people around the band danced and the politics became less important than our sense of place.  This was New Orleans and it seemed at any moment we all might put down the cardboard signs, pick up beers, and say “Fuck It!”  We would second-line instead.   The boundary seemed thin.   

            There were no arrests.  Instead the police stopped traffic and assisted the march on route.  All the officers wore sunglasses and rode motorcycles.  They looked disinterested, if not dispassionate, as if nothing short of heavy crime could ever garner an immediate emotion.  They escorted us to Lafayette Square where protestors climbed the statue of the old American warhawk, Henry Clay, and surrounded him with flags, angry signs, and a megaphone.  Henry Clay himself stands on top of a pillar like it was a platform.  His hand is open and his mouth is closed as if he had just finished speaking, like he’s just offered an idea, a possible solution, a compromise.  He seems to be saying, “So what do you think?  What next?”

              The megaphone rotated between speakers.  Their messages were scattered

            “Fire the police chief!”    “Fire the mayor!”  “End police brutality!”  “1…2..3..4..Let’s declare class war!”  “Eliminate classwarfare!”   “Forgive student loans!  Crush Fannie Mae!”  “Dissolve the Federal Reserve!  Print more money!”    People began to leave.

            The only common thread left was anger and disappointment.  It had seemed so easy to walk together in a predetermined direction, but when we arrived, the effort to agree on a definition, to centralize the elasticity of our collective discontent, our desire for something better, seemed confused and implausible.  Those standing under the shadow of Clay would stay and sleep in tents outside City Hall at Duncan Plaza for the next few weeks while the rest of us would sleep in beds.  Were we not angry enough to abandon our routines?  Too comfortable?  Not dedicated to real changes?  What changes were we going to make in our own lives? Or were we overheated?   I walked away unsure, leaving behind the civilly disobedient warhawks and their one megaphone, still yelling different things at a high volume into a dissipating crowd. 

            It took forty minutes to walk back to the jail to get my bike.  The intersection and the lawn were empty except for the usual traffic.  A truck drove by with its back open.  Inmates in orange jumpsuits sat precariously at its edge, their legs dangling over the black pavement of Broad Street as the truck pulled into a quiet jail. The courthouse steps were busy with suits, but the television crews were gone.  So was the Gypsy Mermaid.   A half-blind woman tried to cross Broad but her cane got caught in a cardboard sign left in the street.  She picked it up and slammed it onto the curb.  She turned back to the street and scowled and a young black man helped her cross over to the other side.  I picked up the sign and read it.  “We are the 99%.”

 

Sources include Louisiana Weekly, http://theneworleansblightblog.wordpress.com/, and the Times-Picayne  

Halloween in August

        Halloween has long been my favorite holiday for the same reasons that Catch 22 is my favorite book and New Orleans my new favorite city.  There are reasons behind each bias, but it's the outright evocative sensation of absurdism in each that I love, bringing forth colors, nonsense, caricatures, and superficial disguises, everyone coming together while spiriting the burgeoning creativity of children, who have no self-concious issues when asked to use their imagination or to pretend to be a princess or a monster.  Children relish this kind of play.  And so do I.

      I did not ask to teach first grade, and yet I love it.  I love it because I am still six years old in many ways.  I still like recess.  I still like to make loud and unnecessary noises.  I still think farting is simultaneously gross and funny.  And I struggle with the same things, like organization, time management, and sitting still.  In the first week at my new school a the first-grader asked me, "What are you going to wear for Hallooween?"  It was the beginning of August.  I laughed.  The kid had no sense of time and distance.  Just impatient anticipation.  "You'll have to wait for Halloween," I said.  "But I just can't!" he screamed and whined and then collapsed on the ground.  He really could not wait.

         A week later my roommates said, "Let's have a Halloween party."  Our friend had been a Gameboy when he was in first-grade and wanted an excuse to recreate the costume.  But we are adults.  We are supposed to wait for the real thing.  We didn't.  It became a 1st grade Halloween party.  Dress up as you did in 1st grade, or as you wish you had if your parents or contemporary trends hadn't limited you.  Or just dress up.  Just no sexy nurses, unless that's what you were into as a child.

    I could go on, but I thought it would be more fun to try this a different way.   Like a first-grader.  At my school the first-graders blog.  What if a first-grader wrote this blog?  To answer that question, while maintaining the crude integrity of the blog's content, I have authored an attempt below.

To decode first-grade writing, you have to know a few things.
1) Some 5 year-olds don't spell whole words, but instead write only the letter of the first sound they hear.  Sometimes they'll add the last sound as they develop.
I like to drink beer =  I  l  t  d  br. 

2) Little b and little d are often written backwards and are therefore confused.  And C and K are interchangeable because they make the same sound.
I like to drink beer = I lic t brinc deer.  OR .... I  l  t  bc  d.

3) In CVC words (consonant-vowel-consonant), the vowel is often dropped.
The cat is sad =  The ct is sd.  OR  I like to drink beer =  I lc t  drnc br

 The prose below is very advanced for a six-year old, but hell, I am (arguably) advanced for a six-year old (in spirit).   Decode and enjoy!

 

 

A Shotgun Duel

Mr. Gameboy judges the Disney Princess Dance-off

Our Parade

The Ride Home

The Death of Gameboy.  Will he upgrade and rise again?

A Marriage: In and Out of Towners

Marriage - noun the act or an instance of blending or joining, especially opposite or contrasting elements (dictionary.com)

It was another hot summer Saturday in New Orleans and Catie and I were trying to stay cool in the heart of New Orleans' tourism hub, Jackson Square. We drank cocktails at the corner bar and waited for the church clock to strike three.   The Square was filled with the usual clout, tourists and artists, fortune tellers, white tubas and gold trombones, homeless men and women, everyone sharing the bond of sweat on a hot Saturday afternoon, trying to make a dollar off the other.   The city lives off tourists.  Less than half a million people live in the city, but more than eight million people visited it last year to spend their money and spin their cameras.  The city depends on them, and as much as a local might try to avoid walking the same streets, it is inevitable that our paths cross and that we sometimes walk the same line, sometimes in the same spirit, trying to get the best of a given night downtown.

But I wasn’t in the French Quarter to visit.  Catie and I had better plans. When the limousine pulled into the square, I finished my bloody mary, put my jacket over my shoulder, and waded through a crowd of men and women wearing cameras around their necks.  The sun was hot and the skies were clear and the day had the special air of shared festivities, the kind of afternoon that everyone enjoys the same, no matter where you're from.  We entered the religious gem of downtown New Orleans, into a place I had only visited before with a camera and shorts, like a tourist—the St. Louis Cathedral.   It was a great day for a big-ass wedding.

“Let us proclaim the mystery of faith!”  The priest rang out.  I readied myself for some spiritual answers, but it was a Catholic service, and by the end I felt good and confused and particularly guiltless in that clean sort of way that seculars feel when reminded of why they aren’t more religious.  The hall itself was grand, the ceiling clean and celestial, and the wedding beautiful in the way that all weddings are beautiful, the formal intersection of two unlikely souls coming together for something longer than a moment.  Men wore white linen suits and a few hundred guests took communion while the rest of us waited, thinking of opens bars ahead.  After two hours, the organ played the exit music, and we all filed out into the sun.

A five piece band waited for us and began to play.  Tourists gathered.   They were confused.  They thought the event was for them, a show, something that happens at fifteen minutes past the hour and costs a dollar in a bucket.   They mixed themselves in with the guests and took pictures.  We all danced together, the in and out of towners, the tourists with bad baseball caps and cameras and the wedding guests in linen waving white handkerchiefs and scarves.  Everyone danced until the bride and groom came out and then we began to parade. The tourists, now realizing that this was not for them, parted and stood on the sidewalk as we filed past them.  A man in a fanny pack turned to his wife, shook his head and said, “Only in New Orleans.” Then he snapped a picture.

We all followed the music through the Square and across Decatur Street,  forming a thin but deep procession until we could no longer see the band and its horns but could hear it leading us to the river.            

At the banks of the Mississippi the band put away their horns and the Natchez Steamboat blew its copper whistle to welcome us.  The river has a long celebrated history of steamboats, and New Orleans has long been a home of riverboat gambling and races organized to test the superiority of newer models against older. The Natchez is the ninth of its namesake, the first being built in 1823 in NYC but operated in New Orleans.  It is said that the current Natchez has never lost a race on the river, but it’s been years since it competed.  Now it is a daily host to evening cruises of dinner and dancing.  But it was owned by the groom’s family and so for the night the boat was ours.  

It was raining and cloudy and most people stayed inside, but I sat on the deck and drank scotch and talked with those willing to get wet.  The older guests weren't visitors or out-of-towners, but longtime residents.   It is merit enough to have lived here since before the storm, but it is a rarity to meet true natives, folks born and raised in the Crescent City who didn't leave after Katrina.  I talked with an older lady who always held a cigarette in her hand, permanently smoking or ashing or drinking or talking, and she declared her roots with an untouchable pride, knowing her badge of honor was rare and exclusive.  We talked about schools. 

 “What do you here?” she asked.

            “I teach.”

            “Where?” 

            “Here.”

            “In the city?”

            “Yes.”

            “Good for you.”  She dragged from her cigarette.

            “Why is that?”

            “New Orleans kids are rough.”

            “I’ve taught in tough schools before, Boston and Pittsburgh.  It’s similar down here.”

            She leaned forward.  Her cigarette still smoking.  “Black people aren’t the same here as they are up North.”    She leaned back and finished smoking.  I left for more scotch and to watch the great wheel turn as the boat blew its whistle.  We left the dock heading south then west on the great Mississippi River.

Old and new factories perched on the river banks like a timeline, a history of abandonment and resurgence, abandonment and resurgence.   Houses, factories, buildings--artifacts of an earlier culture and tradition--when old and unused are not torn down or removed, but neglected and left alone until they are so colorless and vapid that they stand out as much as everything new and modern around them. It is never understood, not to me, whether they remain up because there isn't the collective energy and resources to take them down, or in the hopes that they may one day be revived. Nothing expresses this dynamic better than the Mississippi and the industrial contrasts that adorn its always-changing banklines.  I drank beer and took pictures under the light rain.  When I was feeling tight enough, I went inside for roast beef and bad pop music. 

          The sun went down quietly and when the steamboat returned to the French Quarter it was night time.  We drank a last round, exited the boat, ready for a rare night out in the French Quarter, a place we rarely visit in the evenings because of its saturation of tourists and faux-authentic establishments.  A young man from the wedding, William, swiped a few wine bottles from the bar and joined us.  He emptied pulled out plastic cups and filled them up and led us across Jackson Square, around St. Louis Cathedral, and into an Absinthe bar where a lady with a pirate hat served us.  It was busy with visitors, families strolling by on ghost tours, a middle-aged couple from Denver who showed us pictures of the wedding we had been in earlier, and a small bachelorette party completing some kind of internet treasure hunt checklist.

          I wanted to flirt, but I was shy.  William, who was gay and unafraid of women, gathered them and filled their cups with wine.  

          "Why are you dressed up?" one of them asked. Her name was Joy.

          "For a wedding earlier."  I said. 

          "The one with the parade?"  

           I nodded. 

           "You were in it?"

          "Yep."

           Joy looked at her checklist.  

          "It says here I need a kiss from a local."  I didn't tell her that in New Orleans, you aren't really a local unless you were here before the storm.  For tourists, spending time with any kind of resident is credible enough to authenticate the experience, so when she put her cheek out, I kissed it. 

          The wine was gone and William was thirsty and restless.  We followed him through the Quarter, our party now complete with bachelorettes, a Denver couple, and other tag-alongs who seemed to sense some excitement in our group.   We stopped at the Goldmine Saloon, a black hole of a club, and drank flat beers and danced on the floor even though it was empty.  The floor was dirty and there was broken glass piled in the corner.  I danced with the bachelorettes and thanked whatever fates divine over French Quarter nights for delivering such a blessing from out of town.  The more I drank, the less local I felt.  I was reduced to base desires and depravity, intermingling with out-of-towners, trying to pose as a local guide of good times, all while wearing my finest clothes.  The only place to go now was Bourbon Street, the electric cesspool of fine dining, piss and liquor, a street designed to simultaneously entertain and contain the millions that come to the city with the intention of pushing the limits of bad habits in a way you can't anywhere else in America.  After midnight, the bright lights, the strippers in doorways, the women carrying two foot-tall cocktails, the large wooden crosses of religious men shouting about doom and sin through mega-speakers, all appear blurry, whether you have been drinking or not.   The streets smell like urine and all the tourists' lips are cherry red from drinking too many daiquiris.   I fumbled along, following William, leading a pack of tourists, my own local identity dissipating in a cloud of beer and desire, until I realized I was just another stumbling out-of-towner on Bourbon.  Joy followed beside me.  She still had the checklist in her hand, still crossing things off as she walked. Still determined to win the hunt.  We found another loud bar one block off Bourbon.

        When we tried to enter the bride-to-be could not find her wallet.  She had left it in the black hole.  I offered to walk them back but before I knew it they had waved down a cab in the direction of Bourbon and were gone.   The fates had robbed me.  I sat at the bar and sulked in my drink.   The wife from Denver sat next to me and told me her life story.  The bar was loud and I couldn't hear her.  After half an hour, I turned to her and said, "I'll be honest, I haven't heard a thing you have said." 

       "Oh, I am sorry.  Sometimes I speak too low."  She started her story again, in the same inaudible whisper.  I closed my tab and left. 

On the corner I ran into the devil.  He was down and out and wanted a dollar.  He had kids at home, he said.   I pulled my camera from my pocket.  I took his picture and gave him my last dollar.

“How are you tonight?” he asked.

“I’m tired.”

            “There’s a lot of good drunk women on Bourbon tonight.”

            I nodded.   It was late and I could seem them down the street, stumbling under the electric lights of piano bars and daiquiri shops, not yet giving up their night even though they couldn't walk straight, ripe with short memories and moral hangovers.  My tie was stained with wine and sweat.  I straightened it, said goodnight to the devil and flagged down a taxi headed in the other direction.