A Confluence of Messengers on Parade

“Can you feel that?” the Chief asked, pointing to the sun. It was ninety-five degrees with ninety-five percent humidity.

“That’s my grandfather.”

Like many new New Orleanians, Chief was a transplant. Years earlier he had left the Menominee Indian Reservation, Wisconsin's largest reservation and started working as a carpenter in New Orleans. We drank beer next to a porch he helped build, trying to stay cool while relaxing under his ancestor. His open shirt exhibited a dark smiling crescent sunburned across his collar bone.

“Back home they called me Bullshit. Here I’m the Chief. Why the fuck would I go back home?” His sentiment was commonplace in the backyard of a local Mid-City gathering. While people leave New Orleans at a rapid rate every year since Katrina, many outsiders fill their place and fall in love. Natives accept the newcomers as neighbors and together everyone expresses this love in the best of ways: the parade.

The local Krewe de Palmyra’s Barmuda Triangle parade was hardly advertised. To know about it, your neighbor had to tell you. I didn’t know what to expect when I threw on my most colorful summer clothing and bicycled down Palmyra Street, looking for the onset of a marching party. When I arrived, I found an old augury parked in front of a house, the absurd symbol that helped negotiate my affinity for a new city, the Space-Age Phallus from Krew de Vieux (see last blog entry). The same people responsible for this hyperbolic vulgarity were spiriting a more local celebration through the quieter streets of Mid-City.

On the front lawn the brass band tuned up. I recognized the tenor saxophonist from a gig in Pittsburgh. It was Roger Lewis of the Dirty Dozen Brass Band. When I moved back to Pittsburgh a year ago, DDBB played a free show on the Point, where the Ohio, Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers confluence. The band was shameless in their Big Easy pride, and between songs they sang a clear and simple message, “Come on down to New Or-leans!” I remember dancing and quietly agreeing, that yes, I would think get there sooner or later.

In the backyard was a beer truck and I gathered with all my new neighbors and the Chief and stayed cool by drinking. Some people dressed up with no purpose but to be colorful while a group of older women dressed themselves as cocktail trays and served themselves freely.

When the Phallus began to spearhead the parade, the band followed behind. I danced between my two messengers, feeling reaffirmed in my decision to uproot and move here. I was not only in the right city, but on the right street at the right time.

It was a sweaty ordeal but the march was slow-paced and brief in distance. At Canal Street, the Dancing Man stopped traffic with his moves. If there is a crowd and live public music, the Dancing Man is there, a shirtless kinesthetic madman. At each of the three bars we entered the band led the way. The rest of us shuffled behind them to grab cocktails, use the bathroom and dance around the pool tables. After three songs the band would lead the exit and we would march to the next bar. BaR2D2, who made his debut at Mardi Gras’ inaugural Chew Bacchus Krewe, supplied all beer from a kegerator inside his large robot body.

Marvin the Martian hauling Bar2D2 from his cruiser

After completing the BarMuda Triangle at sunset, the parade returned to its beginning, at the house at the end of Palmyra Street. A buffet of local foods was uncovered and a new band set up on a stage that the owner of the house had built for such events. For the next two hours the band played and the strong continued to dance under a smiling crescent moon.

Only a wooden fence separated us from the clean and beautiful Cypress Grove Cemetery, where many party-goers went to relax and smoke along the elevated vaults. Cypress Grove was built almost two hundred years ago to honor the city's firefighters that perished on duty. But in a city where the deceased are often accompanied to their resting place by marching jazz bands, there is a respectful ease in the relationship between the living and the dead, and there is nothing so solemn that it demands silence. Absolute seriousness is the antithesis of absurdity, and so it is expressed sparingly.

Like many New Orleans nights, it is always possible to outpace the moon and drink all night long, but it is equally acceptable to start early and end early. The band left the stage around ten o'clock and all the day's participants left to deliver their energy elsewhere or retire. I exited the yard with two friends and passed Bar2D2, the phallus, and all the other floats of Palmyra parked outside, and I soon said goodnight, too. I needed rest for the next day's festival.

The King and Queen of Palmyra (above)

The Dancing Man stops traffic

Big Easy's persuasion

The first time I visited New Orleans I fell asleep going the wrong way on the trolley. I had intended to visit the French Quarter. Instead I woke up at Audubon Park. Out my trolley window appeared a wonderland of fountains, flora and fields. Live Oak trees, made wise and dry by centuries under the sun, were dressed in Spanish Moss that hung from the branches like hair. The old trees lined the perimeter of a lagoon, which was constantly circled by bikers, roller bladers, ducklings, and children, moving in and out of the arboreal shadows, criss-crossing each other with smiles. It was February. It was spring time. It was the beginning of festival season.

It seemed fitting that I spent my first morning in New Orleans sitting on the branch of a 200 year old oak tree reading stories by Gogol, the great Russian absurdist. My favorite story of his has always been “The Nose,” a tale about an aspiring statesman whose nose leaves him in his sleep and goes to town, only to become a more respectable citizen than his owner. The Nose needed only a morning to do it. Gogol used many symbols, but I have always preferred a literal interpretation, the comic image of a man's nasal extremity being separate and autonomous, patrolling the streets of a strange town and gaining the acceptance and celebration of its citizens.

The next night I was drinking Wild Turkey and dancing on Congress Street, watching the Mardi Gras’ precursory Krew de View parade fling its way through the Marigny. The theme was similar to years past: sex and politics. The floats were appropriately satirical and depictive. Men dressed as sperm chasing a fertile egg, an Obama-faced donkey being ridden by a gay soldier in pink pajamas exclaiming “Do ask, Do tale,” and Sarah Palin firing a machine gun from a rotating tea cup. But towards the end emerged the mightiest of floats, a giant thrusting phallus from outer space. It shot steam and expressed a simple message, “Spread the love.” To me, besides being wonderfully crude and cosmic, it seemed like a message from Gogol himself. An absurd extremity floating through a cloud of its own ejaculate, trailing an army of sperm ready to execute its principal message. The space-age penis, separate and seemingly autonomous, was accepted and celebrated by the natives who danced around it. In Russian, nose (hoc) spelled backwards is dream, and I could hardly imagine such a scene to exist outside of that realm, and yet there we all were, a vibrant, dancing community. It was the last informal invitation I would need to move to the absurd city of New Orleans.

The Space-Age float 3 months after Krew de Vieux

* * *

Three months later, I accepted an offer to join a teaching program in New Orleans. I loved Pittsburgh but I was getting bored with its lack of sunshine and color. I loaded my car in early May, when it was still rainy and gray, and left.

After driving 1,000 miles, from Richmond, VA to the Big Easy, I unpacked my bags at my summer apartment and walked down the street to the Bayou St. John and joined a crowd at a local, free music festival, the Mid-City Boogaloo. I had been in the city for fifteen minutes and already I was drinking beer, eating Jamaican plantains and chicken, and sitting on the edge of the bayou while a Zydeco blues rock band jimmied a crowd of several hundred. Next to the stage was a large statue of a swampy Poseidon. He was smiling. His skin was green and his hair was blue. He had likely traveled through the Louisiana bayou to get here, and he obviously liked it here, because his arms were wide open, ready for a hug, a traditionally irritable and vain God letting his greasy hair down and opening his arms to embrace his locals by the water, despite an erratic history together. If my arms were wide enough, I would have hugged him back. Instead, I tipped my beer to him and picked up where I left off, dancing in the streets with my new neighbors.

Welcome

New Orleans is both beautiful and dark, florid and mysterious, but more than anything, it exhibits a beloved affinity for the absurd. It relishes the absurd; it expresses it in dance, food, and endless festivals that are less important in their content than they are in their spirit, which is always convivial and colorful. I have only been here two weeks and I may very well be in love. I am not alone in this quick attraction. Many young people, equipped with public service goals, have moved here and adopted the traditions and absurdities of a city with such inexplicable magnetism that it can only be explained in stories. This blog is an attempted explanation of that attraction, a personal effort to journey into why, after adventuring and rambling for the last four years, I feel like I have finally found a home.

I encourage any and all readers to interact with the blog and share your own stories. Or suggest some colorful local pursuits if you are in the know. I hope you enjoy.

Thanks, Sam